Remember? You know what happens next. You’ve heard the story. In September 1974, Laura the famous revolutionary the infamous eldest daughter of the exiled governor of Pernambuco State, was taken into police custody to a building in the Zona Sul de São Paulo where she was tortured until she could not speak. The revolutionary student with the small moustache was disappeared by the military police and they never found his body despite the solidarity campaigns in London and in Berlin. There would be no more strikes or meetings and the union leaders were killed in so-called suicides or arrested and tortured or like Edivânia they were put on blacklists so that they had to move from state to state to find work taking new names everywhere they went not underground but alone so that they would not go hungry. And the communists in the forest were killed by government soldiers. The commander told them to fight. Every single one but the six who were imprisoned and the two who escaped 1000 kilometres through the forest. The commander with the grandsons in Salvador was killed and his son was killed. The commander who was 2m tall and had studied in Prague and whose parents had been born enslaved was killed and his body was hung from a helicopter and flown over the forest. [...]

Those were the darkest years, heavy like lead. The movement disarmed. The demands changed; amnesty, elections, democracy. And five years later, in 1979, the amnesty came, and the torturers were forgiven and all the people who had been communists were forgiven. And Laura the famous revolutionary went home, back to Recife, back to Sônia and Olga and Lúcia and Lamis and Lygia and the rest of her life. And she did not know if Clitemnestra killer of kings had been killed or disappeared or if she was alive. And she did not know how to find her because she did not know her real name. And it was a grief the size of the earth, as big as a life.