We are lost in an absurd world,” Pato says. “The dream of a cruel drunken god.”
She straightens with her shoulder pushed away, back to the lucid, instinctively dialectical communist. She recovers as if someone poured cold water on her face.
“The gods are dead,” she says, flat and dry. “We are here to make humanity aware of that historical truth.”
“I’m afraid humanity has other things on its mind.”
She is thinking.
“I wasn’t trained for this,” she finally concludes.
“For defeat, you mean?”
“For the doubt.”
“Oh.”
“To discuss the doubt.”
“Oh.”
“A communist only discusses certainties. That’s why I read books and listened to wise men and women until I thought everything was resolved forever: Marxism as a solution, the class struggle. That’s why I was so amazed by those who seemed not to see it as clearly as I did.”
“You’re speaking in the past tense, Comrade Patricia.”
“Because I believed that the borders between what was evil and what was righteous, between the bourgeois control of democracy and the dictatorship of the worker and peasant masses, were perfectly clear.”