Skip to content
Lost Letters Room

A reconstructed life · The Atlas

A drowned man's confession, and a child's plea

“A Maré Que Não Voltou”✦Portugal✦1967–1968✦2 fragments

Peniche, 1967: a fisherman staged his own death by the sea so his wife could be a widow the town would help. A hidden confession and an innocent's plea survive him — the shape of a sacrifice, reconstructed from what the tide left behind.

Follow this life on the Atlas
  1. 01

    The hidden confession

    Hidden among a drowned man's papers, Peniche · Autumn, 1967

    Deolinda,

    If you're reading this, then someone found it who shouldn't have. Burn it.

    I did what a man in my reckoning could still give: the house is yours, and the pension too, and the sea takes the debt down with me.

    I ask only one thing — be the sea's widow, not mine. Let you not know.

    Aníbal

  2. 02

    The innocent's plea

    A plea kept by no one who believed it, Nazaré · Winter, 1968

    To whoever will hear me,

    I swear before all who hear me that, on the day Aníbal was lost, I was at the Nazaré fish market, and there are twenty men who saw me.

    I never laid a hand on him. My misfortune is to have quarrelled with a dead man.

    Casimiro Lopes