He talked without stopping for all those years; my mother listened with resignation and never with more than half an ear to what he said, and yet I think it was his beautiful voice that had once made her fall in love with him. They had eleven children; I was the eighth, and seven of us grew up and outlived both our parents. My father, Zeca Antonio, came originally to the city from one of the remote western provinces, and he always talked about how he would one day take his family back there. He met my mother, Graça, almost as soon as he arrived in the city. She was born here, and she was enchanted by all his words. They built their shabby hut in the bairro that had sprung up in connection with the construction of the new airport. Neither of them could read or write, and of us children, only one of my sisters and I ever learned to handle spelling and words.

It wasn't until later, after the young revolutionaries had come to the city and Dom Joaquim's equestrian statues were toppled from their pedestals, that people became truly incensed. As if they saw for the first time the centuries-old injustices to which they had been subjected; and they assumed that the liberation, the freedom that the young revolutionaries talked about, meant the freedom not to work. When they realised that freedom meant they would have to work just as hard, but now they would also have to think for themselves and plan the work that had to be carried out, there were many people who deep in their souls felt thoroughly bewildered. Several years after the whites had disappeared back across the sea, I often heard my father complain about the actions of the young revolutionaries just as quietly as he had once criticised the conditions of the colonial period. And in all seriousness he would express longings for the good old days, when there was law and order and the whites still decided what thoughts needed to be thought. It was a confusing time, when we suddenly had to stop saying patrão and call everyone camarada instead. It was a time when everything was supposed to change, but everything stayed the same, only in a different way.