Someone's found dead in Porto, Portugal, his head cut off. A reporter from Lisbon is on the case.

He is meant to talk to some professor, but he ends up meeting a very peculiar lawyer. They talk. The lawyer talks. Then the reporter asks:

- What do you believe in?
- Why?
- Because it seems like you don't believe in anything.
- I might believe in something you'd find meaningless.
- For instance?
- For instance a poem: "Everything I've known, You'll write to me about it, with letters, and so I, shall tell you all the past, as well".
- Hoelderlin, "If From The Remote". Let's say there are people who wait for letters from the past. Do you think it is something to believe in?
- Maybe, but I'd like to understand better.
- Simple, says the lawyer: Letters from the past that would explain a time of our life we never understood, letters that would give us an explanation, letters to let us get the point of so many years gone by, of what we did not seize on time.
One day we'll open these letters and will understand perfectly well a unique, fundamental thing that could happen only once, a unique, fundamental story that the gods offered us only once, which we didn't notice, just because we were arrogant idiots.

- Why, the lawyer goes on, "que faites-vous des anciennes amours?" It's from a poem by Louise Colet, that so goes on: "les chassez-vous comme des ombres vaines? Ils ont e'te', ces fantomes glaces, coeur contre coeur, une part de vous meme". *

 

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* Translated from From Antonio Tabucchi's The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro, 1997