The author Fátima Murta narrates an event she experienced in 1966 in Portugal, when she was only eight years old. It involved a sexagenarian man, a porter at a company, who slept and ate at Dona Natália's house of paste. For days on end, this man gained the child's trust by telling her stories of his travels around the world and presenting himself as a friend of the girl's father.
The man gradually introduced sexual topics, until he attempted to rape the child. The girl managed to escape and reported him to her mother. The man was arrested and taken to jail, where he was beaten. Her mother forced her to go to bed as punishment, minimizing what had happened.
The case reached court, but the judge could not pass any sentence because the crime had not been consummated. It was simply the word of a child against that of an adult, in a time when nothing was questioned. The author reflects that the police should have let her meet the man at a prearranged location, with patrols following at a distance, so that he could be caught in the act. A single touch, a finger, would have been enough to prove the crime.
The author describes how the trauma marked her deeply, preventing her for years from accusing or reporting anyone. She saw him again when she was twelve or thirteen, but could not point the finger at him. As an adult, she recalls a phrase she read on the walls of the Sorbonne in May '68: "When the finger points to the fight, the idiot looks at the finger."
