But he starts helping them out by giving them money and housing them when they are running from the law. The journalist reads the political writings of the assistant which he knows he can’t publish because of Portuguese censorship. He has a beautiful girlfriend and a male friend who makes fake passports. He hires a young man as an assistant who is assisting anti-fascist forces in Spain and trying to recruit Portuguese to fight. Kind of accidentally he starts to get politically active in a big way. He writes about art and literature and seems so disconnected from the political winds that a couple of friends, one a priest, tell him “stop living in another world go out and see what’s happening all around you.” At night he tells his wife’s photo about his day and asks her opinion about things. His wife died a few years ago and he regrets that they never had children. Pereira, our main character, is a journalist having his mid-life crisis. A kosher meat shop the main character frequents is vandalized by fascist thugs. Fascism under Franco of Spain is creeping into neighboring Portugal as well under its dictator Salazar. It’s 1938, the time of the Spanish Civil War.
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