There was just one thing: she didn’t like to talk about what she did. In fact, it seemed that this was a rather common trait, and perhaps it is so in any war: the young freedom fighters preferred not to discuss their armed exploits. They were such monumental events that they belied description later. No one basked in his or her accomplishments, I was the one who shot him, or I did this or that. What they were doing was so serious; they were so young and inexperienced that taking part in a war of life or death made them appear nearly reverent before their task.
The young couple’s life was now completely different from what it had been before, during their years at the university. It was a life lived in isolation, bouncing from safe house to safe house, a life spent on the move so as not to provoke the suspicions of neighbors. Their friends were limited to their comrades, their activities to the work of revolution: constant reading, studying, and discussion around Marxist texts and the situation in Brazil. They produced fliers and newspapers, to be distributed on the front doors of factories and other strategic locations. They underwent training, and laid plans for the requisition of cars and arms for their operations: expropriations of bank reserves to finance the revolution—which, as mentioned, was no dinner party and thus required considerable resources. They carried out kidnappings to secure the release of their imprisoned comrades and to ensure their revolutionary message was read across radio and television stations.
Every now and then, they went to the movies and had a beer to relax.
Described this way, it might seem that this was a barren, unhappy, and miserable life. But it wasn’t. In all of this there was a higher calling, the participation in something much greater than the individuals involved, a collective project whose generosity and objective, however utopic it may have been, had the power to reach far and wide and create in everyone a sense of belonging and extraordinary achievement. As never before or indeed thereafter, it was a moment in time whose importance clearly transcended the daily lives of each of the group’s individual members. Perhaps only those who’ve had the privilege to live such unique moments, when history appears to acquire its full meaning, are capable of understanding why and how an individual in such a situation, despite and against everything, becomes something greater, more fulfilled, more content.
Lígia, like her comrades, kept her utopic views intact. At times she perhaps even dreamed a bit too much: she would compose songs while she waited for a comrade she was to meet, wrote poems on the eve of important operations, brought her guitar to each safe house where she went to live.
And on the headboard of the bed where she slept, wherever she was, she always scrawled out a quote from Che: Hay que endurecerse, pero sin perder la ternura jamás.
On one afternoon while scattering fliers around Rio’s city center from the top of an office building on Avenida Rio Branco, she unwittingly grabbed several pieces of paper with lyrics she had written as she grabbed a handful of fliers from her satchel, and tossed the lot out the enormous glass window. Poetry and fliers denouncing the political situation in the country rained down on those walking along the avenue that afternoon. Later, she returned to the site to see if she could recover some of the papers with her poems from the sidewalk. No such luck. The pamphlets and poems had been trampled by passersby and were now covered in mud, torn to pieces. Lost.
Time passed quickly, and not in the revolutionaries’ favor. The dictatorship was growing stronger by the day, the net was closing in around them. Each day, more of their comrades found themselves in military prisons, where they were tortured, killed, or disappeared. Photos of Lígia and Francisco circulated throughout the city on wanted posters, declaring them terrorists.
The photo of Lígia was an old one, but she nonetheless found herself obliged to cut her long hair and wear fake glasses to gain some anonymity.
It was one of the saddest days of her life when she found herself before the mirror cutting her own hair, lock by lock; her beloved hair, which she had always treated with such care. Tears fell, soaking the wavy tendrils that also fell one by one, just as her comrades had fallen, one by one—imprisoned, murdered, tortured, disappeared. They became more isolated by the day, they were losing the war that had begun with so much hope and so much belief in mankind’s ability to create good in the world.
It seemed increasingly impossible to reverse the path they’d taken.
One afternoon a few days later, Lígia and Chico went to gather information for an assault on a bank in the Madureira neighborhood. The couple opened an account at the bank, their pretext for visiting the locale to examine it up close. Later, Lígia had a meeting with another comrade, next to a newspaper stand outside the Jardim Botânico. She said goodbye to Chico with a strong, lingering hug—that’s how it was in those days: each time they separated, they couldn’t be sure they would see each other again.
It was a radiant, sunny afternoon, and she decided to walk along the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, basking in the limitless exuberance of Rio’s natural surroundings. She began to think about just how incomprehensible it was, the capacity beauty had to veil the injustice and cruelty that reigned only a few short steps away.
Lígia was also happy at that moment because it looked as if she would be able to visit Maria Flor in the coming days. She had been unable to see her daughter for months; her mother, the child’s grandmother, was under constant police surveillance, and it was difficult for the two of them to leave Brasília without their noticing it. It would be a complicated operation, but it was worth the risk and Lígia couldn’t wait to see her little girl. She opened her wallet and took out the last photo her mother had sent of her daughter, pursing her lips into a pucker as she blew her mother a kiss.
As soon as she stepped off the bus near the arranged meeting spot, Lígia felt a twinge. She had a strong intuition that something was wrong. The sharp jab of imminent danger landed an icy chill in the pit of her stomach. She took a few steps to get her bearings and decided to cross the street, without stopping, without looking around her, straight ahead, stiff.
Too late: she had been spotted.
Without turning her head, she saw some fuzzy shadows moving toward her out of her periphery. She tried to run between the cars, but an ice-cream vendor—an undercover cop—took out his gun and fired; she dropped to the ground, shot in the back. Cars slammed on the brakes and horns honked in alarm as Lígia was surrounded and pulled to her feet by four, five men, who put her in a car whose driver stepped on the gas, wheels screeching against the asphalt.
Everything happened so quickly that the passersby barely had time to see, much less understand what was happening before their eyes.
In the spot where Lígia fell, a blood stain soon turned black against the scalding pavement. After their initial shock, the cars resumed their impatient forward march. People on the sidewalk had instinctively come to a halt when they realized what was happening, but just as instinctively cleared the area quickly as could be. The city lived in a panic, and no one was looking to mess with the dictatorship’s agents of repression.
The bullet had pierced Lígia’s ribs. Unfortunately—and how—it did not kill her on impact.
Thrown across the cold hard floor of a tiny cell—in a brief respite from the torture, between the dark, red haze that enveloped her thoughts, which now zinged chaotically around her head, intermittent flashes lacking logic or reason—Lígia could see the tattoo of Christ on the back of Old Man Damasceno. The image had always disturbed her; she didn’t like to look at it, but her brothers would spend all day asking the old man, always kind and ready to please, to lift his shirt to show them the disturbing face, but she did not look, she couldn’t, as if she found the whole thing obscene. At that moment, she realized that the horror she felt when faced with the tattooed Christ had, in some way, been a premonition of what awaited her. But if she had such a tattoo of her own at that moment, she would have needed it to cover not only her back, but her legs, her breasts, her buttocks, her head, her vagina, her anus,
all the places throughout her body that her torturers found to provoke cruel and heinous suffering. Like Old Man Damasceno, it would make no difference, no matter how many Christs were tattooed across her body.
She couldn’t be sure how long she had been there, whether it had been hours, days, or years.
Again, she found Old Man Damasceno before her, he who had raised her. His fat fingers, his skin as dark as unlit charcoal cupped over the tiny white hand of a child, her hand, the contrast such that it made her skin shimmer. He tried positioning her childish little finger on the exact point where she was to press down on the string of his guitar. But soon, another image crosses her mind. A barefoot Damasceno tossing her into the air to immediately pull her back to safety as he taught her capoeira, saying: “If you want, you can be good at this, my girl. But you have to learn to control every inch of your body.”
Every inch of her body.
She had learned a great deal from Old Man Damasceno, much more than her brothers.
But what good had it done her?
It was just like in the story of Chico’s that made everyone laugh. It had been at the burial of one of the resistance’s leading intellectuals, an erudite man. Another comrade—a pragmatic fellow opposed to all the petit-bourgeois intellectuals who, according to him, were a scourge upon the movement—commented: “You see? He read Capital in its entirety, he read the complete works of Lenin, all of Engels, all of Mao, he knew everything, he’d read everything, but what good did it do him? He’s dead anyway.”
He’d read everything, learned everything, but what good did it do him? He died anyway.
Lígia’s swollen lips tried to form a wry smile.
She was unable to open her eyes; all she could see were dark red blurs and shadowy figures, but in her mind’s mirror, she could make out a vision of herself. In the vision in the mirror, she was fifteen years old and trying on her dress for her debutante ball; her grandfather made sure her coming out took place in São Paulo, in a gala celebration that occupied the ballroom of the Paulistano, the most exclusive club in the city.
Yes, it’s true, her debut was at the Paulistano—it didn’t get much more petit-bourgeois than that. She was fifteen and reading Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon by Jorge Amado and Wind, Sand and Stars, by Antoine de Saint-Éxupery.
What sort of world was it that she found herself in at that moment?
Between the blood clots that had formed in her eyes, she could see the little body of her Maria Flor, walking toward her with arms outstretched.
No, no. Not that. She couldn’t think about her daughter, she would be unable to hold out if she thought of her, she wouldn’t be able to do it.
She focused on her white debutante dress. It was an elegant white dress made of organza and crepe, with extraordinary straps made from the golden lace that had belonged to her mother. She saw her grandfather’s smiling face, her grandfather who thankfully was dead, he would have been unable to see her this way. His only granddaughter, ever since she was a little girl he had given her dozens of the most beautiful dresses to ever leave the shop of Umberto and Leda Rancieri. She always wore the latest collection of haute couture creations that they insisted on sending her. She was the best dressed of her friends no matter where she went, including political rallies and marches. Her nom-de-guerre was Chanela, given to her by a comrade in honor of the famous Coco Chanel.
The biting pain returned and she no longer needed to force herself to concentrate on anything. At least the pain brought her this much relief: it made thinking impossible.
Lígia died three days after being captured, after undergoing all manner of torture in the military police barracks on the Rua Barão de Mesquita in Rio de Janeiro.
Neither her capture nor death were officially acknowledged.
Her body remains unfound to this day. She is among the four hundred thirty-four Brazilians suspected to have been killed or disappeared during the military dictatorship.
MARIA FLOR
(1968- )
Blue like carbon paper, pink like infant clothing, purple like the cloak they threw over Jesus’s shoulders: Maria Flor had dyed her hair all the colors of the rainbow, hair she always kept neatly trimmed to reveal the butterfly tattoo on her neck, opposite the tiny, dark triangular birthmark whose tip leaned ever so slightly to the left. These days, her hair was fern-green. She had two belly button piercings that made it quite plain which generation she belonged to, the generation living at the end of the century and the millennium, the generation of boys and girls who were born in the midst of the disturbing variety of infinite choices that modern life presented, who had been born into an avalanche of information and possibilities, but also of violence, poverty, calamity, traffic jams, new diseases, obsessions, stress, and the savagery of a world of haves and have-nots.
What a life!
What a life Maria Flor has!
Getting from her apartment in Flamengo to her studio in Santa Teresa can take her thirty minutes or two hours, depending on the day of the week, the time of day, and the whims of the traffic. If she’s having a good day, she won’t be mugged the way she has been some eight times while waiting at stoplights. Every one of her friends, in one way or another, has already been victim of some form of violence amid rising unemployment and urban poverty. To live in a big city in Brazil at the end of the millennium is to live in the eye of the hurricane. You feel oppressed and impotent in the face of so much misfortune, and your dreams become filled with the desire to move to another city, another country, or, if possible, another planet.
From the closed window of her car, she watches the young thief strolling down the sidewalk, the penknife in his hand concealed by the long sleeve of the shirt that is two sizes too big for him. During the unbearable summer, this is the official uniform of such thieves: an extra-large shirt, the sleeve pulled down to cover the hand that holds a weapon or drugs. She can still remember the first time she was mugged, the time she saw the filthy little boy rolled up in the shirt three sizes too big, his nose running, and how, before he drew close, she had naively asked, “What are you doing in a long-sleeved shirt, kid? It’s hot out!”
Hey, kid! What are you doing?
She raises her eyes to the horizon to glimpse the sunset, dyed red on account of the pollution; the rays of light hit the billions of billions of billions of dirty particulates that, refracted, take on this fiery red tone that frightens her because it’s so out of place, an unhealthy color that doesn’t belong to the sun.
But Maria Flor is pregnant, and ought to think positive thoughts, and that she will. In Rio, this isn’t so hard. It’s enough to look around in any direction to distract yourself and allow the city’s indestructible natural beauty to work its magic.
Maria Flor is good at distracting herself.
I mean, she is and she isn’t. At some moments she is, at other moments, she isn’t. It must be like that for everyone, she thinks. But she makes a mental note that this is a matter to discuss with Joaquim, her live-in psychiatrist, when he makes the next of his private visits to her home.
She manages to distract herself from big problems all too well.
The small ones, not so much.
But she’s already had several worries that have weighed her down in the past, and which now are nothing but ghosts of their former selves.
One, for example, was her weight. A plump girl since childhood, for many years she felt she needed to spend her life counting calories, until one day she decided to view the issue from a new angle and convince herself that it made no sense to spend her life taking pills and going on diets to be accepted socially. She thinks back to this turnabout in her life with a certain pride. She remembers how she began to go after data about the multi-million dollar weight-loss industry and take note of how marketing did its best to try to convince her that there was something wrong with her body. What sort of oppressive system had they created at the expense of the overweight? she asked herself at the time. Why is the only acceptable body ty
pe for a woman a thin body? If I believe that my body can also be attractive and powerful even if it’s a bit rounder and fleshier, I can be as desirable as one of these walking collections of skin and bones. If you don’t feel well in your body, you won’t feel well anywhere: this was her new maxim and certainly had much to do, later, with her future success in her profession.
Another worry of hers was money: like many young people of her generation, she thought money was certainly important in life, but contrary to many of them, she believed that the way you earned it also made a difference. She felt uneasy around her friends who measured their worth by the size of their bankbooks. Her great ambition was to do something she enjoyed and achieve a quality of life that she considered high. She wanted to live without stress, calmly enjoying whatever came her way, to live and let live. In other words, if things continued as they were in Brazil, she really would have to convince Joaquim to move countries after the child was born.
This country!
She considered herself incapable of understanding what was happening before her eyes and her disillusionment was so immense that she had trouble believing that Brazilians might come to have some sort of better and more just life.
On three occasions she had experienced the joy of belonging to a group that shared a cause and a collective will to change things, and on three occasions she looked on as everything stayed the same or grew even worse. The first was the era of mobilization for direct elections; she had just returned to Brazil with her father as a teenager, and she thought the most important thing one could do was bang on pans and participate in the enormous protests where she carried posters that read “Direct Elections Now!” in large bubble letters. The second was when the Worker’s Party nearly won the presidential elections and she and her grandmother—yes, the great dame of education Rosa Alfonsina—handed out fliers with the photo of a smiling candidate Lula, during the remarkable campaign when it still made some sense to urge the people “Don’t be afraid to be happy!” The third was the impeachment of president Fernando Collor de Mello, when she painted her face green and yellow and felt, at last, that the country had changed, that to finally remove a president for corruption meant the people had had enough, that they would never again accept anything like that.
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