With disgust and poorly concealed contempt, people decided that she was expending her energies on an absolutely useless task, the greatest sin that anyone could commit. After a while she managed to win the help of some young people who were both unemployed and ignorant of what a theatre was all about. Dona Esmeralda used to say by way of explanation that it was like film without a projector'. When she held out the illusory possibility that the young people might one day try their skill on the stage – which was still half buried in the overflowing sewer – she managed to persuade them to hitch up their skirts, roll up their trouser legs, and slog around in the muck, chasing the rats with sticks and lugging out all the rotting stage sets.

After six months she had made so much headway that she had reclaimed both the stage and the hall with its rickety red plastic seats, and she was finally able to get the electrical wiring to function as well. It was a big moment when she turned on the lights for the first time. Two thirty-year-old spotlights simultaneously exploded with powerful blasts. But for Dona Esmeralda they were like saluting rockets. Now she could at last see her theatre. And what she saw convinced her that she was right, although nobody else had any idea what was in her mind.

Six months more and she had gathered around her a group of similarly inclined people, and she had written a play about a halakawuma who was constantly giving the King bad advice. It was a play that took more than seven hours to perform. Dona Esmeralda built the sets, sewed the costumes, directed the actors, and played those parts herself which she had not been able to find anyone else to fill.

On a December evening the theatre was to be re-inaugurated. She had sent invitations to the President and the Minister of Culture, who was not entirely pleased that Dona Esmeralda had refused the good advice of the Ministry's many bureaucrats about how the theatre might best be run.