The years have passed, my dear Manuel Valadares. I am forty-eight years old now and sometimes I miss you so much I feel like I am still a child. I imagine that at any moment you’ll appear with trading cards and marbles. It was you who taught me what tenderness is, my dear Portuga. Today I am the one who tries to hand out marbles and trading cards, because life without tenderness isn’t very special. Sometimes I am happy in my tenderness, and sometimes I think I’m kidding myself, which is more common.
Back then. Back in our time, I didn’t know that many years earlier, an idiot prince had knelt before an altar and asked the saints, his eyes full of tears:
‘Why do they tell little children so much so young?’
The truth, my dear Portuga, is that they told me things way too soon.
Farewell!