that Lula could live with her for a while and she could keep an eye on him. In fact, he lived with her for three years.
When he did come out of the worst of his depression, he reacted. He took out a different girl every weekend. It was a phase that lasted three years. But he also became more serious with one, Miriam Cordeiro, who was working as a nurse in a clinic. Lula had gotten to know her from regularly taking twin girls, the children of the brother-in-law of his sister Maria, to the clinic for treatment.2 He took her out, the relationship became sexual, and when she was three months pregnant, she told Maria and Lula that she was expecting a baby. Lula was delighted.
The baby girl was born healthy and named Lurian—a combination of the names of her parents—but Lula soon broke up with her mother because he had met someone else. Miriam tried to cut off all contact between her child and Lula. In a dirty political trick in 1989, when Lula was running for the presidency the first time against Fernando Collor, Miriam was paid to go on television to say that Lula had wanted her to have an abortion. Lula's family says that this was rubbish.3
It was while he was still with Miriam that he first heard about the woman who was to become his second wife, Marisa Leticia Casa. Coming back late, up to midnight, after seeing Miriam, he would often take a taxi home. He got to know an elderly cab driver who told him how his son had been killed in a fight in the square. His daughter-in-law was pretty and was bringing up their little boy with his help.
Then, by chance, Lula met Marisa at his union office, where she had come in to get a form witnessed. Lula liked to talk to people when he was doing his social assistance duties—it was one of his skills as a union organizer—and he had given instructions to colleagues that he would personally attend to any good-looking widows who came in. As he drew her out in conversation, he realized that she was the daughter-in-law of the taxi driver.4
Very quickly, he fell in love with Marisa, who was working as a school secretary in São Bernardo. Lula's determination was shown when he persuaded Marisa to send away a former boyfriend—a Volkswagen worker—who then stalked them for a while. Lula insisted on staying put at her house early one evening, when the former boyfriend was due to visit her, until she told the man it was all over between them. She warned Lula that she would not live with him until they married. So, after knowing each other for only five months in a whirlwind romance, Lula and Marisa had a civil wedding. Lula became the adoptive father of her three-year-old boy, Marcos.
Marisa was popular with Lula's family. She was the eleventh child in a family of twelve, of Italian ancestry. She had been working since the age of nine as a nanny and a packer in a candy factory, before getting her position in a school.5
Although the couple were happy, Marisa's former in-laws were not. They felt they had lost both a grandson and a daughter. It was not until more than a year later that the couples were reconciled, when Lula and Marisa invited them to be padrinhos, or godparents, of their first son together, Fábio. It was an example, in family terms, of a talent for accommodation that Lula would demonstrate in wider fields.
His marriage to Marisa in 1974 provided real stability in his personal life, and they went on to have three children together. It also coincided with significant advances in his status and reputation in his union.
Lula had managed to recruit three hundred workers at Villares into the metalworkers' union, but he had needed some persuading to let his name go onto the slate of the controlling faction for the union elections in 1972. The man who did the persuading was Paulo Vidal, who effectively ran the union. He asked Lula to stand for election as a first secretary in the so-called Green Slate. It won with more than 70 percent of the vote, and Lula became a full-time union official, responsible for a new social security department. He took various courses and he remained shy of public speaking; his favorite paper remained the sporting Gazeta Esportiva.6
Vidal was a controversial figure. He was egocentric and a good orator. He was conservative in his political attitudes, and accused perhaps unfairly of fingering some communists to the dictatorship's police. When ten Ford workers came to see Lula in late 1973, suggesting they go on strike, Vidal discouraged them, warning that they could be caught by the dictatorship's National Security Law, and even tortured. But in union circles he was regarded as more progressive, organizing the first national metalworkers' congress in 1974 and seeking to modernize the union.
Shortly after that, the factory in which Vidal had worked moved, making him ineligible to preside over a union based in the municipality of São Bernardo. Vidal therefore put forward Lula as candidate for president in the 1975 elections, with himself as secretary. This controlling faction was challenged by a leftist slate, supported by the illegal and persecuted Brazilian Communist Party (PCB).
Lula had various indirect contacts with the communists, but only one formal meeting with one of its leaders, Emilio Maria de Bonfante, whom he talked to on a bench in the square in front of the mother church of São Bernardo. He strongly disliked the atmosphere of subterfuge and paranoia in which the communists worked, telling his brother Frei Chico frankly that he would not be a party to secret meetings. He wanted to act in the open.
He also learned that what he liked about the union was the sense of solidarity with workers, not its bureaucratic technicalities. Shortly before the 1975 elections, Vidal had called a massive rally, threatening a loss of medical benefits to those who failed to turn up; many assumed that they were going to be called out on strike, but Vidal made what Lula called a “Vaseline” speech and handed over the chair to one of the union's lawyers. It was another example of Vidal's lack of courage, consistency, and empathy. Nonetheless, the slate including Lula as president and Vidal as secretary was elected with 92 percent of the vote. Lula suspected that Vidal was hoping to continue to pull the strings in the union.7
Lula took up his post on Saturday, 19 April 1975, at a big ceremony. There were ten thousand people present—workers; Paulo Egydio Martins, the governor of São Paulo; Dona Lindu; and Marisa, who was pregnant with their first baby, Fábio. Lula was very nervous when he spoke, using a text written for him with terms he would not normally employ. But his balanced approach, reflecting Catholic social teaching, gave a clear insight into the thinking of a man who was still not thirty years old and had been given sudden responsibility.
He argued that the moment through which Brazilians were living was “one of the blackest for the individual and collective destinies of the human being.” On one side, in the Soviet bloc, the people were crushed by the state, enslaved by Marxist ideology, and restricted in their freedom to think and demonstrate. But on the other, in the West, the people were enslaved by the economic power of capitalism, exploited by other men, deprived of the dignity of labor, affected by greed, and joined to mad production rhythms. Implicitly he rejected both the capitalist model being pursued by the military regime and any communist alternative to which the regime's divided revolutionary opponents adhered.
By the end of the year, however, Lula himself was faced with one of his blackest moments. In October, as president of the São Bernardo metalworkers, he had gone to a world Toyota congress in Tokyo. It was his first international outing, and he did not enjoy it. He had little money, knew no one, and disliked Japanese food. While in Japan, he was telephoned by a lawyer for the metalworkers' federation, who told him that his brother Frei Chico had been imprisoned on 4 October. Frei Chico, who was by then a member of the PCB, had been elected vice president of the metalworkers of Santo André only the week before. He had been eating lunch at a bar near his home with one of Lula's predecessors as president of the São Bernardo union when he was picked up by members of the feared DOI-Codi, a military intelligence outfit in São Paulo.8
This arrest was part of a much bigger anticommunist sweep throughout Brazil but carried out with particular viciousness in São Paulo, which was a center for the most ruthless security thugs who were only partly under the control of the military presidents. A major scandal erupted over
