It was easy to see at first glance that Lígia was a determined person with her own inner light. Old Man Damasceno had certainly noticed it. He was filled with tenderness for the girl and was like a grandfather to her, always only too pleased to do everything she wished. It was he who taught her how to play guitar, master capoeira, and view spirits as a natural part of the world.
But one day he opened the little girl’s tiny hand to look at the lines crossing her palm. He’d done it without thinking, almost joking, something the old man never did because he never read the palms of children and never read the palms of those he considered family, and Rosa’s family was his family. But you tell me why people suddenly decide to do things they’ve never done before! It’ll take you a lifetime to figure it out.
The fact is, the old man opened up Lígia’s tiny hand and almost instantly closed it again, the small white hand between his fat fingers, and the smile that had begun to dance in his eyes, as it always had at the girl’s side, departed for some faraway place.
Lígia asked him: “So, what do you see? What’s my future?”
“Nothing, girl, I’m getting too old for that stuff! I can’t see a thing anymore. I think I need to get me some glasses.”
What is certain, though, is that after that he never, ever read anyone’s palm again.
This had been before the family’s move to Brasília. Until the old man died at somewhere around the age of 100 (no one knew his age for certain), Lígia always returned to spend school vacations in the old house, with the old man, his old guitar, and his stories.
Lígia had been twelve when the family moved to Brasília. She grew up watching as the city grew with her—and not just any city, but the most beautiful and modern city that had ever existed, the magic city on the savanna—and she grew up believing that anything was possible. It was possible to transform the country into a land with justice for all, it was possible to make men brothers to each other, it was possible to end poverty.
At the age of eighteen, she took her entrance exam for architecture school at the Universidade de Brasília, which had just been founded in the nation’s new capital. It was 1963, three years after Juscelino had left office and exactly one year before the military coup that would depose President João Goulart.
At that time, Lígia didn’t formally belong to any political group. She merely got together with friends to read about and discuss Marxism. They’d read The Communist Manifesto, The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, The Eighteenth Brumaire, and had just begun to read Capital. They were young and enthusiastic at the possibilities opened to them by a knowledge that brought with it the need to understand the world and change it.
Soon afterward, in the tense days of early April 1964, a wave of arrests swept through the country, taking with it union leaders, students, professors, and workers. Radio stations, under heavy censorship, spent the day playing solemn classical music, spreading across the airwaves the funereal certainty that something very grave and very terrible was taking place. Troops were on alert in their barracks and no one went out at night; the cities declared curfews, everything was still. Then came the depressing period of the deposition of senators and deputies, visits from the secret police, and the first wave of Brazilians forced to go into exile.
It was the first time that the entire country, from north to south, had experienced the same atmosphere of repression and fear, the stifling air of a military dictatorship.
Lígia and her friends were perplexed by the events unfolding before them.
Since life always has the power to resume its course, no matter how improbably, things eventually seemed to return to a tenuous norm little by little. Classes resumed at the university and the students once again began to organize politically, and there was a rebirth of political parties and movements opposed to the military regime.
Suddenly it was as if the country was undergoing a flourishing and unexpected cultural explosion. Those were the years when the military dictatorship, preoccupied with destroying Brazil’s political and economic life, instituted a sort of informal ceasefire, leaving some meager space at the margins that led to a burst of creativity. The result was cultural guerrilla-warfare, and those in film, theater, music, and literature harbored the illusion of living in a free country and began to make some serious noise.
At the university, Lígia was part of a musical group where she sang and played guitar. She had a husky, thick voice, and she both composed music and wrote lyrics. She participated in protest concerts organized by students throughout the entire country. Wearing a black shirt and long black pants, her hair straightened thanks to nighttime hairnets, her great big eyes shining brighter than headlights, her voice amplified truths so obvious and yet so denied, and she would sing for an audience as full of youthfulness as she was, as full of life as she was, as utopic as she was:
“Earth belongs to man, not to God, not to the Devil.”
Chico Mata first saw Lígia in the university auditorium, just before a student rally was about to begin. She was leaning over to speak with someone sitting in one of the chairs of the packed auditorium; he was trying to bring a bit of order to the space, which was bursting with students, and tapped her on the shoulder with the intent to ask her to take her seat, as their companheiros were about to begin. When Lígia swung her head around to look at him, her hair long, her face framed by bangs that covered her forehead, he found himself before the largest, brightest eyes he’d ever seen. He was caught with his mouth literally agape at the size of those extraordinary eyes.
Lígia’s eyes truly were that—extraordinary. There were some who thought them too exaggerated, bringing imbalance to the face of the doll-like young woman, who was petite in every other aspect. But there were those, like Francisco, or Chico, as his friends called him, who considered her eyes the most astounding and luminous they had ever seen on this earth.
But at that time, if someone had asked her what she most liked about her own body, Lígia would have said her hair, not her eyes. Her hair was the focus of her vanity, her private obsession. Ever since she’d been a teenager, she’d collected recipes for homemade creams and hair treatments, and spent her time trying the most varied combinations of eggs and olive oil, tea baths, and all sorts of other things. At night, she would brush her hair religiously before twisting it up around her head, tucking it under a hairnet—only then would she go to sleep.
Oh, that hair! It often caused her to enter a rather special sort of trance. When she went to the cities of Minas on a student tour to see the region’s Baroque art, what most fascinated her about the works of the sculptor Aleijadinho was the wavy hair of his prophets, the curls he made fall with a curiously natural exuberance, delicately framing the severe expressions of the sculpted creatures. Lígia spent hours trying to reproduce the same waves with her own silky black hair.
It was also on account of these prophets and their hair that she never forgot the ruins of a tiny chapel she found in a little village, its few houses nearly all as abandoned as the chapel itself, where the family had stopped once when they left Brasília on vacation. The little village didn’t even have a name, as they were told by an elderly man at the roadside tire stand, but it was known as Capela. They hadn’t planned on stopping there, but were forced to due to some car troubles. While her father and the man from the tire stand fixed up the car, Lígia set out with her brothers to explore the locale.
They’d discovered the tiny chapel on the top of a small slope, its walls lined with shelves holding tiny statuettes of saints carved from blue-green soapstone, their white hair falling to their feet in waves. Lígia stood there for a good long while, completely quiet, admiring the statuettes. Oh, she could hardly resist taking one of those saints home with her! The chapel was practically abandoned, and it left the impression that other tiny statues had been taken from it as well; there were several empty spots along the wall, like ancient wounds, but Lígia—understand it if you can—didn’t have the courage to go through with that petty but profane theft. For some reason she couldn’t explain, though, she would always be flooded with emotion whenever she recalled those tiny images of the saints, and would regret lacking the courage to take one with her, since it no doubt wasn’t long before the tiny chapel would be completely vandalized.
Chico Mata was also an architecture student. He came from the backlands of the southern state of Sergipe, the son of poor farmers, and had only made it to college out of great determination. A spindly boy, his skin tanned dark by the scalding Northeast sun, he was a backlander of few words and gentle manners. He’d invited Lígia to be part of a study group focused on the works of Lenin and Che Guevara, and that’s how the two began their relationship and their political activism.
Lígia liked Chico’s quiet and reserved manner, his quick and expansive intelligence. She liked his legs with their knotty forests of curly hair. And his broad chest, where she could lay her head and dream.
Soon after graduation, they were both hired by the university as graduate teaching assistants and moved into one of the modest apartments on campus. Less than a year later, in 1968, Lígia became pregnant. The sight of her petite figure with its protruding belly was guaranteed in all the political marches, on all the outings to spray-paint messages of resistance on city walls and façades, in the distribution of pamphlets, in running from tear gas, police horses, and billy clubs.
Maria Flor was born under a full moon, and her birth coincided with the arrival of the country’s darkest moment, AI-5—the Fifth Institution Act—ushering in a fiercer repression, the end of the cultural ceasefire, and the determination of the generals to eliminate any form of opposition to the dictatorship.
In their modest apartment on the university campus, the Beatles’s White Album played until it almost split in two.
The posters and the graffiti seemed to age prematurely: “Forbidden to Forbid,” “The Earth is Blue,” “May a Thousand Flowers Bloom.” Faces everywhere carried tense and somber expressions. From one moment to the next it became clear that the revolution could not be launched from the universities. The military dictatorship had adopted a harder line, the party was over, and the promise of tomorrow was no longer the same; it was and for years would remain overshadowed as the resistance was driven underground and a bloody fight to the death began between the status quo and utopia, between the injustice that was, and the thousand of possibilities yet to be discovered.
Between the military’s professional killing machine and the improved tactics of the resistance.
Lígia rocked her newborn daughter to sleep with the same songs everyone was singing, still believing that the risk of danger, like all things on this earth, ought to be greeted with open arms:
“We need to remain alert and strong / We don’t have time to fear death or wrong . . . / At every corner, danger lurks. All is divine, oh so fine. Watch out!”
Like thousands of young students, however, Lígia and Francisco saw no other option than to join the armed opposition to the dictatorship. The open war on students and left-leaning groups declared by AI-5 had escalated. In response, these groups became increasingly radical. Chico and Lígia, wanted by the Brasília police and unable to move through the city because they were far too recognizable, saw themselves forced to leave. They decided to flee to Rio de Janeiro.
It was painful to leave Maria Flor with her grandmother, but there was no other alternative at that point. Fugitives, subject to having their house invaded at any moment and being arrested without the possibility of leniency or appeals, there was no way they could bring a child who had just taken her first steps.
A revolution is no dinner party.
No.
A revolution most certainly isn’t a dinner party—soon Chico and Lígia would know exactly what this meant.
In Rio, they underwent training in the armed resistance. It was, let’s be frank, pretty amateur training; no one there was a professional soldier, they were just kids with the absolute and boundless conviction that they were doing exactly what they ought to be doing and that, if they opened the way forward, the Brazilian people—that group of their countrymen who, despite being nameless and faceless, had nonetheless assumed mythical proportions in the young revolutionaries’ minds—would soon rise up to follow them. The starving Brazilian people, exploited right down to the bone—people without jobs, land, school, or futures—that Brazilian people would certainly follow them. It was only a question of showing them the way.
To her surprise, Lígia discovered that she had excellent aim and nerves of steel. She could make decisions quickly and was capable of confronting the police as though she’d spent her entire life doing nothing else. At times, in the midst of a special set of circumstances, moments beyond the typical unfurling of each day, we suddenly discover that we are capable of things we never even dreamed. The same Lígia who just a few years earlier hadn’t dared to take a small, blue-green, soapstone statue from a crumbling chapel was the same woman who now robbed banks and expropriated property without hesitation.
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.