Sombras Brancas

A writer that doesn’t write.
At the age of 71, José Cardoso Pires suffers a stroke, losing the capacity to relate with the world. Albeit being a writer, he doesn’t recognise the words and can’t even articulate them well. Surrounded by translucid shadows with whom he can’t communicate with, he contemplates, apathetic, his family and friends’ distress.
By his side, remains Edite, his wife. Looking after him in his real life, reaching her hand out as if to guide him through his own mind’s labyrinth. Places, situations, and characters combined with real life, fiction and memory, in a bright world with almost no shadows.
At the right hemisphere of his brain, coming from the imagination lobe, surreal characters emerge and send him mysterious signs so that Cardoso Pires may find his way back. At the other hemisphere, the left one, the reality lobe, where his family, friends, doctors, and hospital staff are hoping to be recognised, try to bring him back to reality.
Everybody seems to challenge the famous author to write a book that tells this adventure, the last and most definitive story of his career, of his involuntary journey to the clear shadows’ territory. This book exists and is called “De Profundis, Slow Waltz” by José Cardoso Pires. On his return to the living minds, after facing death, the writer stated: “Such a thing of coming back from the void, is something that dazzles and transcends”.