Maria and Ana go to the meeting where Edivânia who used to be a union leader speaks about conditions at the iron ore mine where they work and then they go to another meeting about conditions at the factory that processes the iron where Jorge works. They print pamphlets for the meetings on a mimeograph at night in the local school which Diana who is a teacher gives them access to. The pamphlet has a list of the names of the workers who have died at the factory and the names of the workers who have died in the mine. It is also true that wages have not increased in six years while profit and productivity have doubled though they do not write this. It is also true that there are military police on the factory floor and even a room where they take people. They do not write this either. Maria knows how to work a mimeograph. Maria and Ana sit in the school together at night. They hope there are no boots outside, no knock on the door. The mimeograph makes this sound: plec plec plec. They hold a meeting in the room of their house. Edivânia who used to be a union leader is speaking. Dust in the air. Sweat on their foreheads. When the police come the first time Maria and Ana say they do not know what the police are talking about. It was a birthday party, see here are the leftover brigadeiros, would you like one senhor? When the police come the second time, they are gone and so is Edivânia and so is the blue beetle car.

A communist who arrived recently to the forest says to Clitemnestra killer of kings –

The truth is that everyone is gone. All of our comrades are in prison or exile or dead. When I joined the revolution there were a hundred of us in a room and now there are ten. The new leader is a twenty-three-year-old boy who cannot grow a moustache. Young, like you. No one else is left. Even before Marighella died. The urban guerrilla is tired. In prison or the torturer’s basement. In the cities they are disarming. The unions are dead. The fight is here. Without the support of the masses there will never be liberation or a liberated zone. And the fight of Brazil has always been the fight of the masses against the powerful, in Canudos, in Contestado, of the slaves against slave masters to create quilombos, in Canudos, in Contestado

What do you think your daughter will say of us

I think she will imagine –

When she talks about us

What will you tell her?

My daughter?

Yes

Well I will say

I think she will imagine that we are fighters, heroes

Martyrs

No, I think she will imagine that we are set in our ways, conservative and too stubborn

They will think we are not beautiful with our wrinkles and our white hair

Yes she will, she will think that we are beautiful

Beauty will not matter

Yes it will

She will think that we did not do enough

She will continue our fight

She will write and speak about us

No

Yes

Or tell reshapen stories

Clitemnestra killer of kings I must tell you now why I am running. Something happened to me, it was two months before we met. For years I had been in the same working cell in Recife. With my friend Paulinho, he was also younger than me. We were working together since the beginning. Sixty-four to sixty-nine. When we started we thought that it might all be over soon and by the end we thought these are the worst years the heaviest years, years like hands and feet of lead. I had just finished studying at the university, I was studying history but by that time I did not care about the diploma. Even before the coup I did not care about the diploma; I was a communist, a revolutionary, I thought my father was a liberal for believing that elections could change anything, I believed that the duty of every good revolutionary was to make revolution. The library was for revolution and revolutionary knowledge. The classroom was for revolutionary teaching! The campus was for revolutionary organising! I was not a big reader but my mother had said to me, Read Marx, read José Martí, Rosa Luxembourg, and so I did read, because it was a revolutionary thing, do you understand? It must have happened to you when you were recruited – you had to read the books. So I read the books. I had been reading them already, books from all over, books from Europe, novels from Russia. [...]

[...] My brothers did not dream of leaving and neither did my father although maybe my mother did. We used to go to meetings in the small town and everybody knew I was the policeman’s daughter with the policemen brothers and so I had to be twice as militant twice as always ready to show them that I was a revolutionary. So I read all the books. I said train me, give me a gun, I’ll do anything. I was afraid of nothing but also I was always afraid of my father and my brothers and sometimes I could not sleep in the nights (I still do not sleep always in the nights). When I left I wrote my family a letter saying forget my name, do not look for me, I have no regrets, and this is the life that I have chosen because I believe that the people should own the fruits of their labour, that the factory worker should not toil for the capitalist to profit, that the Brazilian gold and iron and coffee and sugar and wood from the forest and oil must not be extracted for the profit of the North American imperialists and the landowners in their pockets when there are children without shoes without food or art or books, I believe that no one should be poor, I believe that no one should be unfree or unloved or shackled, I believe you know I believe in the armed struggle. If they are armed then are we to lie on the floor? Like kittens. Let ourselves be shot in the face. [...]

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.