Carla Mühlhaus - Partida ao cais

Beth, a woman who prefers to be a mermaid, wants a new past. It's not enough to rewrite Ariel's story; it's urgent to rewrite her own history. She no longer wants to be the murdered girl, the Black Dahlia, the one who attracted so much attention in US newspapers at the beginning of the 20th century. Beth wants her past back, her death too.

It falls to the narrator of this novel, a writer based in Venice and hidden in the century-old Café Florian, to accept this order amidst mourning, a flood, and a pause in her marriage. No one can say no to a gothic mermaid with only one breast, a scar on the other, and a solid, pale sadness on her face. Together, in an artistic stitching together of scars, the two continue their search for transformation, metamorphosis, and wonder. Departure to the Quay is a surrealist journey, a trip made in a flooded Venice, a swamp-Venice, where the woman's body can be whatever its owner wants it to be, and not what surrealist artists like Max Ernst and André Breton wanted, obsessed with the figure of the femme-enfant.