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.
Follow this life on the Atlas- 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