Questão 24416

(Ufrgs 2005)

It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but I did not believe there would ever be future. I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go, and then see what happened to me when I got there. As it turned out, I ¹nearly did not make it. Little by little, I saw my money dwindle to zero; I lost my apartment; I wound up living in the streets. If not for a girl named Kitty Wu, I probably ²would have starved to death. ³I had met her by chance only a short time before, but ⁴eventually I came to see that chance as a form of readiness a way of saving myself through the minds of others. That was the first part. From then on, strange things happened to me. I took the job with the old man in the wheelchair. I found out who my father was. I walked across the desert from Utah to California. That was a long time ago, of course, but I remeber them as the beginning of my life.

AUSTER, Paul. Moon Palace. Chatham, Kent: Faber & Faber, 1989. p. 1.

The form WOULD HAVE STARVED (ref. 2) indicates a