A reconstructed life · The Atlas
The railwayman whose log never trembled
“À Tabela”✦Portugal✦1972–1988✦2 fragments
For thirty-nine years a station factor kept the log of a small halt on the Tua line without a missing day — including the night his wife died while he held the freight the regulation minutes. The most terrible document in the archive is the one written in a steady hand.
- 01
The dispatch, in his own words
A father's letter after the morning train, kept in Porto · Autumn, 1972
Graça,
Your train left at 18:07, to the minute. I gave it the flag myself — if the line must take you, let it take you from my hand, and correctly.
Write by the morning mail and it reaches me on the 15:10; I catch the bag it rides in, so in a manner of speaking your letters will come to me the way you went: through these same hands.
The garden is well. Study. Mind the city's clocks; they are not to be trusted like ours.
Your father
- 02
The last page of the log
The last page of a station log, Brunheda · Summer, 1988
Halt of Brunheda — 30 June 1988
05:50, signals set for the morning mixed. 06:12, mailbag taken on the fly. 15:10, passenger service, two down, one up, doctor's visit noted. 18:42, last service passed, on time.
18:50, lamps out. Log closed by the undersigned, who entered his first movement in this book's grandfather on 3 March 1949 and has nothing to report.
Nothing to report, in thirty-nine years, except everything. The halt is left in good order. The garden is watered.
B. Taveira, factor
This life passed through real places. Leave one of your own near it.
Leave a letter near here