One of my oldest memories is of my sister Patrícia’s birthday party. It was the early 1980s, and we were all dressed up around a table with a big cake decorated with colorful whipped cream. Festooned with balloons, the small house was packed with people. It was incredible; it seemed like another world, another life, another potential way of living. More than forty years later, I returned to that smell of new clothes and the brightness of that day when I saw a photograph of a child’s sixth birthday party taken
