Ray Bradbury
R is for Rocket (1962)
A bibliografia de Ray Bradbury é composta essencialmente de contos, pequenos textos publicados um pouco por todo o lado, em número superior a quatro centenas. Algumas das suas novelas, como The Martian Chronicles ou Dandelion Wine, são, elas próprias, a reutilização de textos previamente existentes, inseridos e adaptados a um formato mais longo. Assim, exceptuando as onze novelas, os restantes títulos da sua autoria são, na grande maioria, antologias de contos, incluindo por vezes um par de textos inéditos, pelo que é frequente encontrar nelas alguns contos já aparecidos em livros anteriores – como aqui acontece com “The Long Rain” ou “The Fog Horn”, por exemplo. R is for Rocket é uma dessas colectâneas e contém 17 contos datados entre 1943 e 1956. O excerto abaixo foi retirado de “The Strawberry Window”.
His wife moved, a slight turn of her head.
Bob," she said at last, "I want to go home!"
"Carrie!"
"This isn't home," she said. He saw that her eyes were wet and brimming. "Carrie, hold on awhile!"
"I've got no fingernails from holding on now!"
As if she still moved in her sleep, she opened her bureau drawers and took out layers of handkerchiefs, shirts, underclothing, and put it all on top of the bureau, not seeing it, letting her fingers touch and bring it out and put it down. The routine was long familiar now. She would talk and put things out and stand quietly awhile, and then later put all the things away and come, dry-faced, back to bed and dreams. He was afraid that some night she would empty every drawer and reach for the few ancient suitcases against the wall.
"Bob. . ." Her voice was not bitter, but soft, featureless, and as uncolored as the moonlight that showed what she was doing. "So many nights for six months I've talked this way, I'm ashamed. You work hard building houses in town. A man who works so hard shouldn't have to listen to a wife gone sad on him. But there's nothing to do but talk it out. It's the little things I miss most of all. I don't know—silly things. Our front-porch swing. The wicker rocking chair, summer nights. Looking at the people walk or ride by those evenings, back in Ohio. Our black upright piano, out of tune. My Swedish cut glass. Our parlor furniture—oh, it was like a herd of elephants, I know, and all of it old. And the Chinese hanging crystals that hit when the wind blew. And talking to neighbors there on the front porch, July nights. All those crazy, silly things . . . they're not important. But it seems those are things that come to mind around three in the morning. I'm sorry."
"Don't be," he said. "Mars is a far place. It smells funny, looks funny, and feels funny. I think to myself nights too. We came from a nice town."
"It was green," she said. "In the spring and summer. And yellow and red in the fall. And ours was a nice house; my, it was old, eighty-ninety years or so. Used to hear the house talking at night, whispering away. All the dry wood, the banisters, the front porch, the sills. Wherever you touched, it talked to you. Every room a different way. And when you had the whole house talking, it was a family around you in the dark, putting you to sleep. No other house, the kind they build nowadays, can be the same A lot of people have got to go through and live in a house to make it mellow down all over. This place here, now, this hut, it doesn't know I'm in it, doesn't care if I live or die. It makes a noise like tin, and tin's cold. It's got no pores for the years to sink in. It's got no cellar for you to put things away for next year and the year after that. It's got no attic where you keep things from last year and all the other years before you were born. If we only had a little bit up here that was familiar, Bob, then we could make room for all that's strange. But when everything, every single thing is strange, then it takes forever to make things familiar."
He nodded in the dark. "There's nothing you say that I haven't thought."
Li anteriormente:
Crónicas Marcianas (1950)
O Homem Ilustrado (1951)
Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
