Then another voice emerges, and on the shadow of the night falls another shadow come from who knows where, what can he be thinking of, he’s not talking about the eight-hour day or about the forty-escudo minimum wage, that’s what we came here to discuss, but no one has the heart to interrupt him, They have always done their best to strip us of our dignity, and everyone knows who he means by they, they are the guards, the PIDE, the latifundio and its owners Alberto or Dagoberto, the dragon and the captain, gnawing hunger and broken bones, anxiety and hernias, They have always done their best to strip us of our dignity, but it can’t go on, it must stop, listen to what happened to me and to my father, now dead, it was a secret between us, but I can stay silent no longer, if my story doesn’t convince you, then we are lost, there’s nothing more to be done, once, many years ago, it was a dark night just like tonight, my father went with me and I with him to pick acorns, because there was nothing to eat at home, and I was already a young man and thinking about getting married, we had a bag with us, just an ordinary bag, and we went together to keep each other company, not because of the heavy load, and when the bag was nearly full, the guards appeared, I’m sure the same thing has happened to many of you here tonight, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, picking up acorns from the ground isn’t stealing, and even if it was, hunger is a good enough reason to steal, he who steals out of hunger will find forgiveness in heaven, I know that isn’t quite how the saying goes, but it should, and if I’m a thief because I stole some acorns, then so is the owner of the acorns, who neither made the earth nor planted the tree nor tended it, anyway, the guards arrived and said, well, there’s no point repeating what they said, I can’t even remember, but they called us every name under the sun, how have we put up all these years with being called such names, and when my father begged them for the love of God to let us take the acorns we had picked, they started laughing and said we could keep the acorns, but on one condition, and do you know what that was, they wanted us to fight each other and to let them watch, and my father said he wasn’t going to fight with his own son, and I said the same, that I wouldn’t fight with my father, but they said, in that case, we would be taken to the barracks, where we would have to pay a fine and possibly get a beating too, just to teach us some manners, and then my father said, all right, we would fight, but please, comrades, don’t think ill of that poor old man, now dead, and God forgive me if, in telling you this story, I’m dragging him from his grave, but we were starving, you see, anyway, my father pretended to give me a shove, and I pretended he had pushed me over, we wanted to see if we could fool them, but they said that if we didn’t fight properly, with a real intent to hurt each other, they would arrest us, I don’t have words to describe what happened next, my father became desperate, I saw it in his eyes, and he hit me and really hurt me, but not because he had hit me that hard, and I responded in kind, and a minute later, we were rolling around on the ground, and the guards were laughing like mad things, and, once, I touched my father’s face and it felt wet, but not with sweat, and I was filled with rage, and I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him as if he were my worst enemy, and he, underneath me, kept punching me on the chest, God, what a state to be in, and still the guards were laughing, it was a dark night like tonight and so cold that it ate into your bones, all around lay the countryside, and
