A rural calm sometimes visits the city. There are times in sunny Lisbon, especially at midday in summer, when the countryside invades us like a wind. And we sleep peacefully right here, on the Rua dos Douradores.

How refreshing for the soul to see a hush fall, beneath a high, steady sun, over these carts full of straw, these half-built crates, and these unhurried pedestrians who suddenly seem to be walking in a village! I myself, alone in the office and looking at them through the window, am transported: I’m in a quiet little town in the country, or stagnating in an unknown hamlet, and because I feel other, I’m happy.

I know: if I raise my eyes, I’ll be confronted by the dingy row of buildings opposite, by the grimy windows of all the downtown offices, by the incongruous windows of the upper floors where people still live, and by the eternal laundry hanging in the sun between the gables at the top, among flowerpots and plants. I know this, but the golden light shining on everything is so soft, and the calm air surrounding me so devoid of sense, that even what I see is no reason to renounce my make-believe village, my rural small town whose commerce is sheer tranquillity.

I know, I know… It is indeed time for lunch, or for resting, or for doing nothing. Everything is going smoothly on the surface of life. Even I am sleeping, although my body is leaning over the balcony as over the rail of a ship sailing past an unfamiliar landscape. Even I have put my mind to rest, as if I were in the country. And suddenly something else looms before me, surrounds me, commands me: I see, behind the small town’s midday, all of life in all of the small town; I see the grand stupid happiness of its domestic life, the grand stupid happiness of life in the fields, the grand stupid happiness of peaceful squalor. I see it because I see it. But I didn’t see it and I wake up. I look around, smiling, and the first thing I do is shake off the dust from my unfortunately dark suit, whose sleeves had been leaning on the balcony rail which no one has ever cleaned, unaware that one day, if only for a moment, it would have to serve as a deck rail (where there could logically be no dust) of a ship on an infinite sightseeing cruise.