Rute Bianca’s autobiography Quem? arrives in the reader’s hands like a confession whispered after a lifetime of storms. It is not a book that hides behind stylistic flourishes or careful literary embroidery. Instead, Bianca writes with the urgency of someone who has lived intensely and who now feels compelled to lay her story bare. She writes as a woman shaped by resistance, using that word with the weight of personal history. Resistance marks every chapter of her life, because for her growing up was never simply growing up. It was surviving a cultural, religious, and social dictatorship that tolerated no deviation from a rigid gender model. She calls herself a child of April, a reference to the Portuguese revolution that promised freedom, although many of those promises never reached the lives of people like her.
In Quem? Bianca recounts the adventures and misadventures that made her who she is, never pretending that the path was tidy or dignified. She admits that her life may appeal to some and repel others, but she insists that it is hers. She writes from the perspective of someone who tried to be happy and, in many moments, succeeded with a joyful intensity that still echoes through her memories. Yet she also writes as a woman aging in a world that once felt endlessly vibrant. The contrast between her youth, full of motion and appetite, and her present life, shaped by routine and quiet, fills her with a bittersweet understanding. She goes to the sea, walks, shops for groceries, takes care of her mother, reads, and savors the awareness that life is precious precisely because it ends. She knows she cannot be young in this era, nor would she want to be. Her youth belonged to a different world, one she remembers as warmer and richer in human feeling.
