Letter from Lisbon
BANDEIRA, PEDRO
'WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO US?' Letter from Lisbon By Pedro Bandeira Lisbon When I SPEAK of my generation in Portugal-if there is any sense in speaking of a generation- I am thinking of those too...
...For them any time is good, any means proper...
...Those of us who fear their intolerance, their habit of seeing things in black and white, their inhuman simplicity, and who know that were they to achieve power all this would turn into a supposedly virtuous ruthlessness...
...We leaders of the student unions succeeded in laying bare the hypocrisy and violence of the Salazar regime, yet at the same time we prevented the situation from deteriorating into a free-for-all of meaningless demagogy...
...In 1962, to the surprise of most serious people here-and especially to the surprise of the traditional anti-Salazar opposition-University of Lisbon students walked out on strike for four long months in protest against the dictatorship...
...A dictatorship, however, will not allow itself to be struck twice from the same quarter...
...At first many of us did not believe these stories...
...If they are architects, they never win bids for national or municipal works...
...The accused were praised, and it was argued that their confessions had been obtained by torture...
...Yesterday I spoke with Sartre...
...We were not in the majority at the outset...
...En route they told him they were going to kill him...
...The first group of our friends who had gone to fight came back, not saying anything...
...nevertheless feel helpless...
...From time to time we see him in the newsreels, next to the official dignitaries, distributing good conduct medals to workers who refuse to honor picket lines...
...The very fact that the regime tolerates our existence' that we lead almost normal lives, is proof to our Communist friends that we are opportunists...
...As often happens, the opposition "establishment" has acquired the very characteristics of the regime...
...I had seen them earlier in the cloister of the old palace...
...In 1963, none of us was surprised if a friend asked to borrow a passport without any explanation...
...Thus, again friendships are broken...
...But in March 1962 fear finally changed sides...
...I said, "Good luck, old boy," and he answered...
...Actually, their silence said enough...
...our numbers grew in direct relationship to the successive blunders of the dictatorship as it showed its true face...
...A general hunger strike, 1,500 imprisoned, 80 expelled from the university-all these events created an air of excitement and enthusiasm...
...Signed] Caligula...
...Confused because their lies did not work anymore, they panicked and made one mistake after another...
...There Rui Soeiro, a devout Catholic, refused to declare that he was a Communist-a confession the police try to extract from all prisoners to justify every sort of outrage and violence-so they placed him in total darkness for eight days...
...Their first mistake was invading the university buildings with combat troops: The sight of machine guns and two dozen wounded gave our movement its most powerful impetus...
...We were reduced to fighting small, inglorious battles which had already been lost...
...They leave because they are about to be imprisoned, or be cause they do not want any part of that sordid little war in Angola that Salazar has arranged for us to protect the coffee and cotton barons-or, as the regime puts it, the missionary glory of the medieval Christians who went to the coast of Africa 500 years ago to deal in gold, slaves and black pepper...
...its latest encounter, of course, came in the campaign that ended this past November 7 when 130 hand-picked Salazar men were "elected" to the new National Assembly...
...We try to fight them firmly yet without rancor: Hate is its own best ally, and the biggest ally of the regime, but it is hard to avoid it when one is caught between two evils that are both nourished by hate...
...I stayed out in the sunshine, looking up, not knowing what to do...
...He barely recalls waking up in a cell with two others, Jorge and Manuel...
...Facing the judges, surrounded by plain-clothes men, they looked at us with an encouraging if forced cheerfulness...
...the society's own evils are mirrored in the opposition...
...But before too long we began to realize that the exodus was not working out too well...
...all names of unofficial persons whom he mentions have also been changed for their protection...
...Pedro Costa, 27, doctorate in history with the highest honors...
...The people who bring them up, mostly their families, seem to be begging our pardon for speaking of the land of the dead...
...Incompetence in Portugal is widespread because jobs are obtained through personal influence and political reliability...
...They were the first major revolt against the regime's oppression by the middle and upper classes...
...The article was translated for us from the Portuguese by Natalie Gerardi...
...They knew how worthless the whole procedure was, and what their decisions would be...
...After a few anxious days, a telegram would usually arrive: "Paris is the capital of France...
...We began to feel invulnerable as night after night we met around different tables without sleeping, and set up a convoy of cars to move our mimeograph machine and tons of paper in and out of dozens of houses all over Lisbon to escape the secret police, or the risk of exposure, or any other unpleasant surprise...
...indeed, it has become a reflection of the regime and its faults...
...in boats, with or without help, some of the best men of my generation crossed the border forever, knowing that if they were caught they would have to spend 14 years in jail as deserters (if they were not simply shot down, like Alvaro Mateus, who was killed at sunrise on a Spanish road...
...That was all...
...The fraud of Portuguese society poisons the democratic resistance...
...the Minister of Education had either resigned or been dismissed...
...It is one of the small rituals of exile...
...They look at us as though we are betraying them, they protest, they accuse us of not doing everything possible...
...He believed them and remembers reflecting that dying was less painful than he thought it would be...
...And when we see our exiled friends we hear only recriminations, and the constant question: "When are you going to do something...
...Most of us, I suppose, simply hope things will change, and there is also the shame of being a deserter...
...On the third day in the interrogation chamber, except for a few brief lucid intervals, Rui lost all track of what was happening, He saw toads crawling up the walls and thought his hands were covered with spiders...
...It is not surprising that London, Paris, Rome, Sao Paulo, Brasilia and the United States are flooded with this new type of voluntary exile-the cultured young emigrants, third generation Portuguese, who join those who were 20 years old in 1945 and suffered the great postwar disillusionment...
...equally impatient and rejecting exile...
...The reunions that we had awaited for so many months, that we had anticipated dozens, hundreds of times, turn into hopeless battles which leave us all defeated...
...Doctors can only be persuaded to venture this task as a personal favor, for the prisons are far from the city, the bureaucratic formalities demanding, and no one wants to become a martyr for such a small gesture of friendship, which is often quickly forgotten anyway...
...Other circumstances also helped mature us...
...In Portugal, this was the only immediate path left for someone who could not live with injustice, for someone who needed to devote all his time and effort to fighting it...
...Then we heard stories of napalm bombings of villages in the interior, and of the civilian population being tortured...
...one victory after another...
...Finally, there are those who stay-those who are not prisoners, who do not take the exile route, and who do not become officials in the Portuguese Communist party...
...The inspector invariably lied and told him, among other things, that his father had been taken prisoner...
...They remain forgotten in prisons, or they leave for what we all know will be a long exile as casually as they used to depart for short vacations...
...They leave for London and Paris, Rome and Geneva...
...In his student years, a leader and political prisoner...
...And the consequences of that situation are not auspicious...
...Other times he imagined he was all alone in his house, his whole family dead, and he wanted to flee...
...But sooner or later hopes fade...
...So I sat in court that day thinking, this trial too will be over...
...He wrote a self-critical book which made him acceptable to the establishment...
...And we too made some mistakes, such as calling an examination strike that no one heeded, which left us isolated at a time when vacations were coming up...
...Rui does not remember much that happened immediately after that...
...Signed] Joao...
...By the time the strike was over, the University rector, 50 professors and Although this article was written in Portugal, it actually was mailed to THE NEW LEADER from France...
...When they arrive, they display a vague interest in what is going on, but it does not go very deep...
...Though his work declines steadily year after year, the official circles of the opposition insist that saying or writing anything optimistic is the same as collaborating with the dictatorship...
...Four men put him in a car and took him to Aljube prison, an 18th-century fortress...
...They signaled to me from a window, then Rui shouted something, but a policeman pushed him away...
...Hopes also fade as a result of the factional and personal fights within the resistance itself...
...I have taught myself not to think about this very much...
...Then we are forced to disillusion them: There were only 2,000 people at that demonstration...
...If they have a political past, they cannot hold government jobs or work for the large number of private companies that take such political records into account...
...The day of the trial more than 30 men and women sat on the defendant's bench in Lisbon's Boa-Hora Courthouse-built as a palace in the 17th Century...
...Then we could relax again...
...The inspector usually came at dawn and after meals, when Rui's resistance was at lowest ebb...
...I realize that in the United States such guideposts must seem a bit odd, but they have unique significance to young people struggling to win the freedom of democracy in a country that has been suffering the oppression of one man for 37 years...
...Daily mimeographed notices also reported on the effectiveness of our actions...
...I hope I haven't been a bother for you...
...If we insisted they tell us what had happened, they refused brusquely and asked us to drop the subject...
...From there he would be on his own...
...Three months later he was called to the inspector's office and informed that he would be tried for crimes against the security of the state...
...Friends, in fact, disappear suddenly in Portugal...
...The three judges and the prosecutor listened impassively...
...Our lives are not their lives...
...and their telling him he had been out cold for 20 hours...
...The courtroom was crammed with anxious people and more police...
...From time to time the inspector who was in charge of the questioning appeared and asked him if he was ready to confess...
...We missed the clear-cut issues of the 1962 strikes...
...And so on...
...It had overcome even "the fear of being afraid," he said, "which is exactly what fear wants...
...Rui spent the next six days on his feet in the interrogation chamber, an empty room where guards took turns day and night at keeping him from sleeping, sitting down or lying on the floor...
...They say that we, the lucky ones who stayed, are cold bloodedly adapting ourselves to conditions at home...
...we would dine out and celebrate merrily for as long as two weeks...
...The older exiles have become assimilated by now...
...Nothing more could be added...
...For the Communists come to despise us, and we feel forced to fight them...
...We ranged in age from 18 to 22, but we grew up in a hurry because actions like these are not wrought without some suffering...
...profession, friends, everything that normally matters to a man-seem to believe that the magnitude of their sacrifice assures their always being right about everything...
...Ten years later he is still promising...
...For him, and for many others like him, right is measured by the amount of suffering each one accepts, nothing else...
...He decided to try to faint, and, with enormous effort, paced back and forth across the room for hours on end...
...They return because it is cheap, and they speak the language...
...Devoting part or all of our time to political activity, we met after 1962 at clandestine meetings, or while working at one of the two or three publications not controlled by the regime...
...We had only to recall what had happened with many others: Pedro Rodrigues, Francisco Ventura, Antonio Figueiredo and the rest who disappeared into the prisons of the regime, in Caxias and Peniche-after the defense lawyers and witnesses recited some truths, sincerely but impotently...
...We experienced the inestimable privilege of speaking out, of making a break with the years and years of half-truths, years of clinging fear that conquers and corrupts, years of humiliations both great and small...
...We ourselves do not really know...
...They ask us how we can stand it...
...This is particularly true of those who did not have strong family ties and saw themselves as courageous -the party of the persecuted always attracts a certain type of individual...
...Shortly afterward, the news would get around that our friend Joao might cable from Paris, or Pedro from London...
...He was not allowed to take them off...
...their vision of what is going on in Portugal is warped by the wishful thinking that time and distance allow...
...Pedro left Lisbon one December morning, the day before he was supposed to be shipped to Angola...
...Today, head of a large company...
...The guards beat him while he was in this state, and when they were not beating him they hurled insults at him...
...He shook hands with me hastily...
...Economic reprisals are no less effective for being bloodless, and the regime unfailingly separates out the rebels...
...Your order being shipped...
...Pressures were brought to prevent him from working in either of the two research centers...
...we met in court, jail, or exile...
...If the man standing in front of you has been beaten unconscious dozens of times, has lost five years of his life in a dark cell, has no wife, children or friends, has lived under 10 false names in as many years and been able to go into the street only at night or at dawn-what can you say to him...
...If they are doctors, they cannot be on the staffs of the civil hospitals...
...If they are journalists, there are only two or three precarious, heavily censored publications where they can work for petty wages...
...The night of the sixth day, 135 hours after he had entered the chamber, he passed out on the floor...
...As I pulled out I could see him in the rear-view mirror of my car, in jeopardy now, his suitcase on the sidewalk, hurriedly putting on the dark glasses he was not used to wearing, in the naive belief that they would help disguise him...
...Next, they solemnly pledged in the press to accede to our demands, but privately did an about-face that resulted in the resignation of an intermediary, the rector...
...Teresa and Jorge, Filipe and Rui, all of them will turn up in the newspaper one morning at breakfast, and I shall read with a strange detachment that some more of my friends have been legally deprived of life for a few years...
...They came for him one morning at 7 A.M...
...Thus submissive personalities are sought after, self-effacing people capable of remaining in a peaceful obscurity which they consider glorious...
...Signed] Simone deserts Beauvoir...
...Then they imprisoned the most popular student leaders and swore to break up the movement, but this merely redoubled its determination...
...At times like these we reminisce about our friends in prison-how it was to laugh together or drink beer, or how some liked American films from the '30s, or skindiving...
...He had paid 10,000 escudos to someone who promised to get him to Madrid...
...For example, from the time the rebellion in Angola started, the prospect of three-and-a-half years of mandatory military service after graduation, to fight a war we opposed, placed us in a permanently uncomfortable situation...
...Many other friends...
...He teaches the most backward students in a third-rate private school and translates political books...
...If they are professors, they cannot teach in the university or in state-subsidized schools...
...The strikes were thus both a symbol of the past and an intimation of things to come...
...Only later did he learn that he had been in this solitary confinement for eight days, because he soon lost his sense of time and began having hallucinations...
...He was not allowed to teach in the university or secondary schools...
...Letters started arriving by a thousand routes asking for money, for news, complaining of being forgotten, of being isolated, of being treated as outcasts scattered here and there...
...The same submission and servility are required of those who want to move ahead in it, because the leaders argue it is necessary to meet a common front with a common front...
...What has happened to us...
...My generation's first real political experience came with the 1962 university strikes...
...That clandestine newspaper came out only once and was not read by many...
...So it went for four months...
...In cars...
...We carefully explained what was going on to those who had voted for us, and we left the final decisions up to them...
...We met with the Minister of State, who received us shouting that he would not negotiate with rebels, then practically begged us to call off the strike . University officials who had been disdainfully deciding our fate lost their self-control in public, resorting to insults and open force...
...But eventually it was no longer a matter of believing or not believing...
...The established opposition and the regime are but two sides of the same coin...
...wagons, on foot...
...When the Angola slaughter started we began to see photographs of Portuguese soldiers smiling in innocent pride, showing off the heads of prisoners impaled on wooden stakes...
...The problem is that those who join the party-leaving behind their family...
...Once the school term was over in July 1963, a new law caught us in a net so fine that we had to search out other bases for our activities...
...It may be hard for anyone who has not lived in a totalitarian society to understand how much it meant to us to think and act truthfully for a little while, but now we find it impossible to live any other way...
...At the time we considered this good news, though our feelings were to change...
...When this ferment began, student unions were legal...
...WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO US?' Letter from Lisbon By Pedro Bandeira Lisbon When I SPEAK of my generation in Portugal-if there is any sense in speaking of a generation- I am thinking of those too young to have taken part in the 1958 Presidential elections when the late General Humberto Delgado offered the first serious opposition to the dictatorship of Premier Antonio de Oliveira Salazar...
...In all fairness, though...
...We mention them occasionally because they are suffering and spent...
...We imagine what they must be like now, and what they will do-and this is nothing more than imagining the impossible...
...the younger ones are trying to adjust to their new surroundings...
...If they are economists, the banks and big companies close their doors to them...
...The afternoon of the fifth day of interrogation (the 13th of imprisonment), he began to fear that he would give in...
...We did too...
...Later I testified for the defense...
...One minute he threatened him, the next he tried to cajole him...
...Originality is feared because there lies the germ of disorder...
...Many of us gave up our previous career plans: It seemed a bit indecent to want to paint, write, build bridges or heal the sick when the suffering of our friends and our country had become so real and pressing...
...These relatives come to us hoping we know a doctor-perhaps a father or an uncle of one of us-who would obtain police permission to visit their sons and daughters in prison...
...Antonio despise Sousa, 28, lawyer...
...Pedro was a bit uneasy and counted on night, speed and a bit of luck, for although the passport had his picture in it, he was 5'7" and green-eyed, while Henrique was just over 6' and brown-eyed...
...We would gather on the university staircases to present the facts and to argue in favor of or against this or that decision, this or that move...
...I waited my turn in a dark, crowded corridor with five or six policemen and friends and family of the accused who were also there to testify...
...This petition was a failure...
...One cannot reply to tortures with arguments...
...Pedro Bandeira is the pseudonym of a young Portuguese writer who is currently visiting Paris...
...The case of my friend Rui Soeiro, a student leader whom the regime decided to break, is typical...
...Critics on the Left called him the greatest hope of contemporary Portuguese fiction when they read his first book...
...What is worse, allover Europe now young Portuguese between the ages of 20 and 30 open their morning papers hoping for the great news of the end of the regime...
...If they are lawyers, they never manage to become associated with the larger businesses...
...Pedro had cut himself shaving and his face was bleeding the morning I dropped him at his rendezvous point...
...This, though, was the beginning of true courage...
...he would have to continue the trip with the passport Henrique gave him...
...that was not the whole story...
...To refuse to compromise means to choose the worst form of exile-internal exile...
...We stood up against all the resources of the regime, ranging from the usual accusations of forbidden ties with international Communism to pure and simple armed force...
...especially they ask us why we stand it...
...Generally, the conversations ended with the inspector and the guard beating Rui Soeiro...
...Three years as secretary to the head of a corporation made his absorption complete...
...The opposition demands the same political fidelity and the same veneration for its myth-personalities that the regime does...
...And so great is the suffering the Communist party members must endure that membership in itself is sufficient proof of total dedication to bringing down the regime...
...who had given us his word that we would be heard...
...Fear is going to possess everything," an older friend had once told me, "fear is going to possess heroes...
...He has published five impeccably socialist-realist novels...
...joined the Portuguese Communist party...
...One night they rounded up 1,500 students and put them in jail, only to find the next morning that they had to set them free...
...The testimonies were brief: Yes, we knew the defendants...
...Oh, yes, very good people, intelligent, honest, dedicated...
...Often, therefore, even those who have stayed come to feel they can no longer take it...
...They fade as, each day, one imagines the fall of the regime, or tries to find signs of its decline, or invents rumors and hangs on to the reports of those few bits and pieces of resistance to the dictatorship in the courts and prisons...
...Perhaps the best way to conclude this report on the effect of present-day Portuguese society on my generation, is to offer three representative biographies: Joao Penha, 30, writer...
...All deviations are combatted, for uniformity is the guarantee of the per-durability of the system...
...I should stress that Rui Soeiro was not alone-I have only talked about him because he is a friend...
...On the third day in the chamber, too, his feet and legs began to swell and his shoes became unbearably painful...
...We meet them when they return to Portugal on vacation, and they seem to us vulgar tourists-eating in good restaurants, basking in the sun so highly touted in the Salazar regime's advertising...
...one builds a career on servility and submission, with one professional, ideological and personal compromise after another...
...On the eighth day, the guards suddenly flung open the door of his cell and led him to an interrogation chamber...
...Their lives can only be described as mediocre...
...How could one lead the life that was expected of a young man from a good family when there was always the thought of a friend who had been killed, jailed, or forced to flee, to nag at one's conscience...
...Good people...
...Today, the following remark has become routine at political trials: "Before 1962 I wasn't active in politics, but after...
...This instilled in us a somewhat exaggerated, romantic confidence in our strength...
Vol. 48 • November 1965 • No. 23
