In Europe (99 page)

‘In March 1975 the right-wing elements made a final attempt to get back into power, under Spínola. When that failed, he fled to Spain. The next month, on the first anniversary of the revolution, elections were held. The communists didn't do too well, Mário Soares’ social democrats won, but the group of officers around Otelo de Carvalho didn't want to abide by that. Finally, in November 1975, we carried out a second coup under General Antonio Eanes, threw the radicals out of the government and organized new elections. After that, the political situation gradually
calmed down. But it wasn't easy, organising a coup against your old comrades …

‘Now we're a quarter of a century further along. We lost Africa, and now we belong to an expanded Europe. In 1986 Portugal suddenly became a full member of the European Community, and all the other European countries thought that was wonderful. But still, it was a big mistake. We should have arranged things here at home first. Our country was too far behind, it had no chance against the other member states. What did we have to offer? Only the beaches and the sun, only a growing tourist industry. Why would anyone set up operations here when they can have the most modern of everything in North-Western Europe or northern Italy? Why grow oranges here when inexpensive fruit from Spain is already flooding our local markets? We can't deal with that economic onslaught, and it's only getting worse.

‘We should have created a transitional phase to allow Portugal to reach a more or less equal level with the rest of Europe, before becoming a full member of the EEC. And, what's more, the government should have held a referendum, before making that decision. But Mário Soares had a political reason for having us join up so quickly: the democracy had to be safeguarded, and he felt that could only happen under the EEC. I think he was wrong. That democracy was something we had already appropriated for ourselves, during the Carnation Revolution of 1974 and the November Movement of 1975.

‘For the members of the European club, Portugal is totally uninteresting. All they want, following their political logic, is hegemony over the entire Iberian Peninsula. They don't see any blank spots or cracks in that picture. For centuries, the Spanish tried to conquer our poor little plot of land, and now they are easily succeeding through the European Union, with the money they use to buy up everything, with the meat and vegetables that are flooding our villages. Things will get better for us, I don't doubt that. But we will lose our identity. That was at the core of the Carnation Revolution: our democracy and our identity. Now we're handing that back to Europe.

‘And what about my father-in-law? It was inevitable, our clash, sometimes you have to make choices, it was about democracy, about freedom for everyone. He also realised that there was no sense in staying angry
with me, but he suffered. In 1974 he was Caetano's crown prince; if there hadn't been a revolution he would have been Portugal's next strongman. And suddenly there we were in the spotlights, standing on his stage, playing a role that was meant for him …

‘It was always our custom for the whole family to eat together every Sunday afternoon. Meanwhile I became a cabinet minister, deputy prime minister, ambassador, presidential adviser, and he remained bitter. Those remarks at the table all the time, I couldn't take it any more and I stopped going. For twenty years I ate alone on Sunday afternoon. My wife and my daughter went, I wanted them to, family ties are important.

‘And now here I am, sitting beside his bed, holding his hand.’

Some people claim that Portugal is an island, that you can't get there without getting your feet wet, that all those stories about dusty border roads to Spain are simply fables. The weather map on Spanish TV shows Portugal in blue, almost all sea, barely any land. And indeed: I find myself cruising down the quietest four-lane motorway I have ever seen, not a car in sight between me and the horizon, I sail across the mountains. The two Iberian countries live back to back. In Lisbon, for the first time since Odessa, I hear people talking about going ‘to Europe’.

On the ferry across the Tagus, the evening rush hour floats to the far shore. For twenty minutes, commuters sit on the top deck: civil servants, office girls, workers, nurses, poor, wealthy, young, old, white, brown, all with bags on their laps and their eyes on the horizon. The sky above the river is red from the evening sun. I see the contours of the impressive suspension bridge, ships in the haze, the ocean in the distance. The passengers are silent, but everywhere the electronics twitter like an aviary. A black businessman is playing tunes on his telephone, a young boy wearing a baseball hat is fighting space invaders in the palm of his hand, the black girl across from me is playing with a discman, her beautiful mother stares dreamily at the water.

The Lisbon of this top deck seems almost American. Nowhere else in Europe have I seen the Third World so naturally present as it is here. The
retornados
, the flood of emigrants from the former colonies, have been
taken in by the Portuguese with the fatigued tolerance of a family that already had so many mouths to feed. And most of them have got by, even the non-whites. Today, over two decades later, they are so much a part of Lisbon that it seems as though they have lived here for ten generations, proud and self-aware, for if there is anything that stimulates integration it is the solidarity of the poor. Once at quayside the crowd scatters away, rushing for buses and cars. In the twilight, great clouds of smoke hang around the little stands that sell roasted chestnuts.

That evening I have dinner with a friend from Lisbon, in a crowded and aromatic establishment. ‘We still walk around with the inheritance of our isolation,’ he feels. ‘To a certain extent, Spain actually participated in the European adventure, it accepted American aid and modernised in the 1950s. But Portugal under Salazar turned its back on all that. Agriculture here was almost medieval, everything revolved around the colonies. When they revolted, that also meant the end of the Portuguese economy.’

He cites statistics: fifteen per cent of all Portuguese citizens are still illiterate; in some villages it's as high as forty per cent; since the opening of the borders with the EU, the country's agriculture has almost collapsed; in rural areas, the standard of living is half that of the European average; the villages continue to empty out; almost one out of every three families lives beneath the poverty level. There are nearly as many Portuguese people living in and around Paris as there are in all of Porto.

Later that evening we stroll through the narrow streets. The rain patters down; this is a place that makes you melancholy. Every once in a while a staggering black man appears from the darkness, reeling from the alcohol, drugs or misery. The sea is everywhere.

I dedicate a large part of the next day to Lisbon's loveliest tourist attraction: tram line 28. The driver picks his way like a jockey through the old town, rattles his throttle, clenches the silver brake handle as we descend steeply, then kicks in the groaning electric motor again, back uphill. We creak around a corner into an alleyway, stamp like an elephant past cobblers and tailors, the bells ring, the manometers tremble, the pumps rattle, but we make it through every era.

Lisbon is possessed of a great, dilapidated beauty, the same beauty as some Eastern European capitals, but without the intense buffing-up that has taken place there in the last decade. ‘An entire country, embalmed
like a mummy for forty years! That was Salazar's achievement!’ Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote twelve years ago, during a visit to this city. ‘Salazar was, in his own way, a utopian. His ideal was a world where nothing moved, a state of total hypnosis.’

During that visit, Enzensberger also took a ride on line 28. Back in 1987 he saw the trams still in their original condition, with little folding gates at the entrance, plush on the seats and all the patents from 1889–1916 stamped on plates in a nickel frame. Today I see buttons, electric sliding doors and leatherette. Along line 15 the supertram glides through the streets like a black and red snake; the old trams have been sold to American amusement parks. Line 28, too, is undergoing a metamorphosis, from a means of transport to a tourist attraction. In the local papers, the panic is rising. There is talk of the danger of landslides in this already hard-struck city, due to the construction of a new subway line, right under the old town. ‘Dozens of old buildings may collapse any moment into a pile of rubble and dust!’
O Independente
writes. The mummy is finally beginning to stir.

In Lisbon there are almost no traces of the turbulent 1970s, of those days when Portugal seized and held the attention of all Europe. Democratic deeds of heroism are not commemorated with pompous blocks of stone. At Largo do Carmo, a lovely old square, a simple round paving stone is the only thing commemorating the historic scene that took place here in 1974: Caetano's surrender to the rebel tanks and the cheering crowd.

I try to meet with a few of the protagonists. The left-wing revolutionary hero Otelo de Carvalho cannot be reached. He runs a trading office these days, acquaintances tell me, and is probably in Angola at the moment. I'm able, however, to make an appointment with Fernando Rosas, currently professor of modern history, in those days a student and a favourite prey for the secret police. ‘I was fairly active in a Maoist cell, the MAPP,’ he tells me. ‘On two occasions I spent more than a year in jail, in 1971 they tortured me three times by making me go a week without sleep, and after that I went into hiding.’ I mention the fact that Western Europe's last three dictatorships all collapsed around 1975. He has an explanation for this: ‘Besides all their differences, the Spanish, Greek and Portuguese dictatorships had one thing in common: they were
all pronouncedly autocratic, they tried to survive without foreign “infection”, either economic or political. By the mid-1970s that had simply become impossible. The world became too intertwined.’

On 25 April, 1974, friends woke him in the middle of the night: come listen to the radio, there's something going on. ‘Everyone knew the army was up to something. But no one knew when it was going to happen, or how, or by whom. So, for us, those first few hours were very tense: was this going to be an extreme right-wing coup, or a more progressive one? It was only around 11 a.m. that we started to realise who was who, the crowds began cheering for the rebel soldiers, the government troops stopped taking orders from their officers, after years of waiting it was no longer a matter of thinking, but of doing. And so, finally, we all ended up at Largo do Carmo.’ Was Rosas actually there, at that historic moment when the defeated Caetano handed over the reins? ‘No, of course not,’ he says, ‘I had to go, there were resolutions to write, standpoints to establish, meetings to attend!’

To the north-east of Lisbon lies the province of Ribatejo. First you take the highway along the Tagus, then the traffic squeezes across an old bridge, and after that the road runs through endless forests of cork oak before coming to a huge plain with low sheds, the old walled haciendas of the former landowners, villages spread out around a petrol station, fields full of tomato plants. Beside the road lies a crumpled truck, atop the TV aerials the storks have built their nests, crop-dusters roar across the horizon.

I am on my way to Couço, a two-hour drive from Lisbon, one of the many villages where farmers seized the estates in summer 1975 and began their own cooperatives. Many of those little local revolutions were never recorded, but the course of events in Couço was excellently documented by the Italian photographer Fausto Giaconne. His pictorial report begins in spring 1975, after Spínola's aborted coup, when the four local landowners fled to Brazil. On Saturday, 30 August, 1975, the general council of Couço met in the village cinema to start the actual expropriation. The next day, hundreds of poor farming families headed for the abandoned estates on tractors and gaily decorated hay wagons. They took with them hampers of wine, bread and home-made cheese, and banners
waved along the dusty roads with slogans like ‘Only when the land belongs to those who work it will we have true socialism!’ and ‘Down with the exploitation of people by people!’ Giaconne's photographs show carts full of men and women singing, glowing faces and dancing children. Between 8 a.m. and midnight, 8,000 hectares of land were seized by one huge rolling people's celebration. Sol Posto, the home of one of the local landowners, was broken into: in the photos we see farmers’ wives admiring in amazement the softness of the beds, the pillows and the tablecloth. Nothing was to be taken, the army sealed off the house. It was, if Giaconne's pictures are anything to go by, the village feast of the century.

‘Look, that's me,’ says Joaquim Canejo, pointing to a photo that shows him talking to two women wearing traditional high hats. Now he is a quarter of a century older, he is missing one of his little fingers, and he and his son are sitting down to a huge plate of sausages and chops. Later he will go back to work behind the bar run by his son at the cooperative. Politically speaking, the red Portuguese revolution ended with the defeat of the left-wing radicals in November 1975, but most of the farming cooperatives were only dismantled in the course of the early 1980s. Today, father and son are the only ones left from the feast of 1975. Together they run the big hall at the edge of the village which bears the sign ‘
Conquista do Povo – Cooperativa de Consumo dos Trabalhadores do Couço
’ (The People's Conquest – Consumption Cooperative of the Workers of Couço). Inside are long shelves full of Becel margarine, Fitness grain breakfast cereal, Servitas cheese, Huggies Nappies, Seven-Up Light, Nuts bars, Mars bars, Heineken beer and everything else that capitalism has to offer.