In Conversation: Joaquim Brandeiro on Endings

Joaquim Brandeiro's story The Landlady's Radio appeared in Borrowed Rooms, our winter issue. We met him in Porto in June, in a café by the river that opens at six in the morning for the fishermen and closes at two in the afternoon for everyone else. The conversation has been edited and shortened.

You worked on a hotel night desk for twelve years. How much of that is in your fiction?

All of it, I think, although not always in the way people expect. I did not write about the guests very much. What I took from the job was a sense of time. When you work nights, the day has a completely different shape. There is a long quiet middle, from about two until five, when nothing happens and everything is possible. Most of my stories take place in that stretch.

Your stories often end with someone alone in a kitchen at night.

People have pointed that out. I did not notice until my second collection. I think it is because a kitchen at night is the most honest room in a house. Nobody is cooking for anyone. Nobody is performing. You go there because you cannot sleep, and whatever you are thinking about comes with you.

You write in Portuguese and English. Which comes first?

Portuguese, always, and then I translate myself into English. That is not quite the right word. I rewrite. The English version is usually shorter and a little more direct, and sometimes it admits things the Portuguese was hiding. I have gone back and changed the Portuguese after finishing the English more than once.

You have said that you write the ending first.

Yes. I have the last line, or the last image, before I have anything else. For The Landlady's Radio it was the image of a man standing in his own kitchen at three in the morning, listening for the tide times. I did not know who he was or why he was listening. The story was the process of finding out.

Is that a comfortable way to work?

Not at all. It means I spend months trying to deserve an ending I already have. Sometimes I never do, and the story goes in a drawer. But when it works, the ending feels inevitable, because it was the first thing that existed. Everything else was built to arrive there.

What are you working on now?

A longer piece, set on the ferries. I took the last boat across the river three nights a week for eleven years and I have been trying to write about it for almost as long. Part of it appeared here in August as Night Ferry. The rest is still in the drawer.