Vovô Lipo would be the leftwing governor of the State of Pernambuco three times. As history books say, in 1962 he was elected by a coalition of rural sugar cane workers, urban workers and the leftwing bourgeoise of which he was himself a member. Vovô Lipo’s great promise was land reform and literacy. Workers, who were at that point tenants of the sugar cane landowners, wanted to own their own land. They wanted to work their own land. After five hundred years of serfdom and slavery and early deaths and beatings and eating dirt to try to die (approximately: generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation) they wanted their own land. No masters and no slaves. And they wanted education. More than half of Pernambuco was illiterate. There were fires over the sugar cane fields.

When Vovô Lipo became the new governor of the State of Pernambuco he was strong in his body; thick limbed and thick furrow-browed and thirty-nine years old. For two years, he governed with his sleeves rolled up and, for the first time in the history of the state, union leaders stepped into the governor’s palace. Feet on the marble. The landowners called him a communist.

Vovô Lipo was not killed in prison. He fled for Paris, where he lived apart from his wife and his daughters for fifteen years. Vovô Lipo came back to Recife after the amnesty in 1979, which protected him from prosecution just as it protected the generals and the torturers. And, when state elections resumed in 1986, Vovô Lipo was elected governor of the state of Pernambuco for the second time. Sugar cane land. He rolled his sleeves up. He was a hero. His hair was grey. His wife slept in another room. The sugar mills had been industrialised, machines raked the earth. The unions weren’t asking for land reform anymore. It was true now that everyone could vote, although not everyone was literate. 1994 he was re-elected again.

There were many history books about Vovô Lipo and some statues of him and one street named after him. And although none of his daughters ever ran for elected office, of his nieces two became leftwing politicians at state level, and one a senator; significantly, none of them were communists either.

The house was on the hill. With one wall on the Rua do Bomfim and another wall on the parallel street. It was perhaps a century old and the veranda and the balustrades were crumbling. Woodworms had eaten the roof and it was about to cave in. Only a couple drunk on the hope and energy and optimism of democracy and sureness that things could only get better would have bought a house like that. A couple who had faced no tragedy that did not make them stronger, no grief they could not overcome. Forgiveness the size of the earth. Laura had seen the house, had spoken about it in the slow manner that she had, You should paint it blue like the sea and the sky, she had said. It looks like work, Lúcia had said and Lygia had agreed. Lamis thought they were crazy – they could have had an apartment with air conditioning and a garage for parking. But Miguel was an engineer and over two or three years he planned to rebuild it. And every wall would be painted white and every shutter, every beam, every wooden part of it would be painted blue. A house the colour of the sky that was always as blue and as bright as the sun could make it.

It was the year that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, the year he wrote his sonnets, and the year Shakespeare returned to London after he had fled the plague which killed over 20,000 people. It was the year that an English sailor called James Lancaster left the court of Queen Elizabeth of England not knowing he would return a year later, sunburnt and seaworn and bringing with him the richest, largest haul Queen Elizabeth of England would ever see. Gold and rubber and rubies and wood. Billions in today’s money. Taken from a port on the northeast coast of a Portuguese colony in the new world. A port called Recife adjacent to a bustling and wealthy settlement called Olinda.

[...]

Shakespeare was writing in the time of empire and theft and genocide and slavery and this was when the world we know was built – and therefore you must understand its machinations and its magic.

Sônia there are things I regret, that I think about at night. Can I tell you? Yes? We were at a congress, in the South at a university in the Southeast. There were three hundred or four hundred of us there. It was right before the amnesty, right when we were thinking Meu Deus we have finally done it. We are this close to democracy. I was just out of – prison. The dictatorship is this close to finished – and we have finished it. We were asking for amnesty. You know the slogan. We were asking for amnesty. Ampla. Geral. Irrestrita. We were asking for amnesty. Recíproca. We were discussing this three hundred or four hundred of us at the meeting. Many students and I was there because I had been in the South during that time, it was before the amnesty before I came home to you Sônia. And there was one man who made a presentation. He was so anxious to speak in front of us you could see it in his hands. He had to wait several hours because the meeting was all day and for hours he was there he was so anxious to speak in front of us. He had dark skin. He was older, he was shaking in his hands as he waited to speak. He wore a brown suit, a white shirt although no one else was wearing smart clothes. And then he said to us, I am from the movement of people in prison. Not political prisoners. Common prisoners. They torture us there too, they beat us, they abuse us, they starve us, they make us work, they kill us in there too. There are thousands of us. I speak on behalf of the common prisoners to ask that we are included also in the amnesty. That was what he said. That was what he asked of us. And Sônia we voted no. We voted no because common prisoners were in prison for common reasons, not political reasons, and this was a political amnesty, that would complicate things and we wanted to keep things simple because we were this close to democracy and oh his hands were shaking when he spoke

Sônia there are things I regret