This short essay intends to study some novels that recreate the past, shifting the omniscient focus to a private sphere that substantially modifies the official knowledge of events and transforms them into something dependent on a partial and unfocused look. It is always translucent mirrors that reflect reality, mirrors that return images transfigured by private (familiar) focusing. In the two novels by Dulce Maria Cardoso that we set out to analyse, we come across this obliquity, which translates the existence of weird masks, since they do not completely hide the face, but allow a glimpse of small gaps that reveal it to us. O Retorno, published in 2011, is an exemplary account of a teenager whose family is obliged to leave Angola shortly before independence. A similar phenomenon takes place in the novel Eliete (2018), where a female narrator, married, with two teenage daughters, recalls past and present times, in a constant overlap forcing the narrator to tie up loose ends, to create universes that are mutually involved.