The Bottle Cap
He is seventy-eight years old, and the state would like him to prove that the war happened to him.
The form asks Joaquim Pataco for eleven documents. One of them requires a certificate confirming that the village he was born in used to exist. Another requires a service record that an archive in Lisbon has looked for and cannot find - which means that the three worst years of his life have not, technically, been filed.
He was born in Pan ias, outside Braga, in a house his father built in the evenings, the fourth of nine children in a family that lost exactly one and went on saying her name at the table every night for sixty years. At nine he was ill, and there was an egg for him and no egg for the others, and nobody discussed it. At eleven they put him behind the counter of a green wooden kiosk at a fork in the road, where he discovered something about a bottle cap, a floor, and the fact that nobody was watching it.
Then the letter came, and he went to Africa for three years, and came back, and built a life out of what he had noticed.
The Bottle Cap is a novel about a small worthless object that outlives the thing it was made for. About the difference between the person at the counter and the machine behind it. About a family, a coin, a clock that gained eleven minutes a day, and eight hundred years of paperwork that a village survives by ignoring.
For readers of quiet, dry, unsentimental fiction - where the humour lives in the observation, and the tenderness is reserved for people, never for institutions.
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