In Europe (98 page)

Some thirty years after the war, three of the four big Southern European countries were still living under taciturn, oppressive, fascist dictatorships. Strikingly enough, all those regimes came to an end almost simultaneously: in April 1974, during the Carnation Revolution, a group of Portuguese officers seized power from Salazar's successor Marcelo Caetano;
three months later the Greek regime collapsed, isolated and exhausted after a student revolt and a Turkish invasion of Cyprus, and in November 1975 Franco breathed his last, after having held Spain in a stranglehold for almost forty years.

The palace guide leads us from one room to the next full of gold leaf, tapestries and pompous furniture. Look, there is the dining room where no table companion ever dared bring up the country's problems: they spoke only in terms of ‘traitors’ and ‘ingrates’. On the wall is a still life of hams, lobsters and slaughtered stags. The little cinema is still there, with Franco's seat right in the middle. The table where the council of ministers met. The enormous television, almost the only window on the world the dictator had in his final years.

In her memoirs, published in 1980, his sister Pilar wrote: ‘Of course he paid no rent for El Pardo, and his expenses were paid by the national treasury. But I know for a fact that he never let the state pay for his clothing. He paid for his own underwear himself.’

And, oh, there is his bedroom, light green in neo-imperial style, with two cute little brown reading lamps, one for him and one for his doña Carmen. The room still has the same carpet, the one that was drenched in blood on those November nights in 1975 as the life slowly flowed out of him. Next to it is his red marble bathroom; of course, we are free to view everything, even the bathtub, even the little white toilet. The only thing it brings to mind is: so this is where it began, that unparalleled theatre of medical technology, that deathbed of the old Spain.

Franco addressed a crowd for the last time on 1 October, 1975. It was hard for him to speak, because he had trouble breathing. Two weeks later he had his first heart attack, and more followed. On 24 October, the gastric haemorrhages began. The Spanish radio began playing mournful music. Franco developed pneumonia, followed by more internal bleeding. An emergency operation was carried out in the palace. Kidney problems. Some Spanish papers began running daily maps of Franco's body, as though it were a war zone, with arrows pointing to vital organs and other positions under siege. On 5 November, two thirds of his stomach was removed. In the days that followed he was hooked up to all manner of life-support equipment, probably only for the sake of winning enough time for the reappointment of his vassal Rodriguez Valcaral to a few
important government posts. The press offered capital sums for photographs of the dying dictator; his thirty-two physicians refused categorically, but his son-in-law took one snapshot after the other. ‘How difficult it is to die,’ was the only thing Franco himself could whisper. Another haemorrhage, another operation. It was only on 20 November, after thirty-five days of struggling against death, that the dictator's coterie allowed him to depart in peace. In Barcelona, ‘the champagne corks flew through the autumn air,’ Manuel Vázquez Montalbán wrote, ‘but no one heard a thing. Barcelona, after all, was a city that had learned good manners. Silent in both joy and sadness.’

After Franco's death, the prognoses for Spain were exceptionally pessimistic: the experts were almost unanimous in their predictions of old hatreds and new violence flaring up. Yet they had been deceived by the regime's outward appearance. Most countries pretend to be more modern than they are, but here it was precisely the opposite. Alongside and despite Spain's primitive system of government – Franco himself, for example, knew nothing at all about economic politics – the country had also witnessed the gradual rise of a modern trade and industry, backed by a great deal of foreign funding and led by technocrats with little affinity with the regime. In 1959 they convinced Franco of the need to abandon his old tenets. A sizeable package of reform measures was launched, including the Stabilisation and Liberalisation Act to free up trade and investments. Industrialisation was stimulated and the influx of foreign companies was encouraged. During the 1960s alone, Spanish industrial production tripled, and the economy grew faster than anywhere else in Europe.

In the course of this change to a more or less democratic Spain, leading roles were played by two unlikely figures: the new prime minister, Adolfo Suárez, and the young King Juan Carlos, who Franco had already appointed as his successor in 1969. In a carefully planned coup, Suárez succeeded in ridding himself of the last members of the regime and forcing through a democratic constitution. It was an exceedingly delicate and dangerous operation, for the threat of a new civil war dangled continually over the country. The German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger therefore rightly picked Suárez as one of his ‘heroes of the retreat’.

Behind the scenes, King Juan Carlos, grandson of King Alfons XIII, had
been carefully manoeuvred into place to play a modest role within the dictatorship; when it came down to it, however, and at precisely the right moment, he stood his ground. When pistol-toting Colonel Antonio Tejero tried to take the Spanish parliament hostage in 1981, Juan Carlos blocked his moves with a few fast manoeuvres of his own. In the appointments he made, he consistently chose innovators and democrats. And then, after this bloodless royal revolution, he withdrew into the lee of the parliamentary monarchy.

Even while Franco was still alive, Franco's Spain had ceased to exist. His popular support was extremely limited: in the country's first free elections he received barely two per cent of the vote. Suárez was quickly forgotten. After all, as Enzensberger wrote, he remained a turncoat in the eyes of his former comrades. And, for the democrats he had helped into power, he would always remain one of Franco's lackeys. ‘The hero of the retreat can be sure of only one thing: the ingratitude of the fatherland.’

‘I'M TELLING YOU MY STORY AT A STRANGE MOMENT. MY FATHER
-in-law recently took a bad fall, in a shop, one of those silly accidents that can finish off the elderly, and now he's in hospital. He may recover, but it could also go badly, I don't know. We're standing vigil by his bed, the phone is always within arm's reach, you probably know how it is, those strange days full of memories.

‘I was born in Mafra, in central Portugal. My father was a clerk, my mother worked as a switchboard operator at the post office. Like all red-blooded Portuguese boys, I ended up in the army after secondary school and spent six years in our former colony of Mozambique. That was in the 1960s. I worked at the commander's office, and that's where I met my wife. She was Governor Almeida's daughter, and also his private secretary. I often helped out as an interpreter, and that's how we got to know each other.

‘When the colonial wars began I was sent to Angola as an infantry captain: ambushes, skirmishes, hopeless. In Mozambique I had simply done my job as a professional military man, I hadn't thought about it much. But in Angola that all changed. My comrades and I ended up in the filthiest situations, and we realised more and more that this was not going to solve the problem of the Angolan rebellion. We, the young officers, had endless conversations, and we always arrived at the same conclusion: colonialism was a misguided system, and also completely outdated. We were being asked to buck the tide of history. Portugal would never, ever win this war.

‘It's no coincidence that the Carnation Revolution was largely started by officers of that same generation. We had all attended the same classes,
gone to the same boarding schools, carried on the same discussions. The conspiracy itself was put together within a few months, but only after ten years of thinking and talking.

‘In 1970 I was sent back to Portugal, as a major on the general staff. Salazar died that same year, but he had appointed his protégé and ally Marcel Caetano as prime minister in 1968. Our country was as poor as could be. Child mortality was four times as high as in France, a third of all Portuguese people couldn't read or write. Some villages were inhabited only by children and old people: millions of people had emigrated to Brazil or the United States. So, if only for economic reasons, the burden of the colonial war was too much for the country to bear. I saw it happening right before my eyes. I was involved in the logistics, I had to draw up the budgets for the purchase of arms and munitions. I did it precisely according to the norms, but I noticed that it was becoming more difficult all the time. For example, we had to order eleven million units of meat for the troops. The government could only come up with two million. We needed so many rifles, and so much ammunition. We received only a tenth of it. It was as though the leaders in Lisbon were telling the soldiers: “Go throw stones, try saving yourself that way!”

‘So the army was the seedbed for the Portuguese revolution, from the moment when the military top brass was forced to admit boys from the lower and middle classes to officer rank. I went through that process myself; it started with my dissatisfaction as a commissioned officer, and I ended up as a revolutionary. We were, after all, confronted each day with the mistakes and stupidities of the regime in Lisbon and with the cruelty of that senseless war in Angola. That was the background of our Captains’ Movement. It was the only way we could save our lives, and save our country as well.

‘In February 1974, General António de Spínola, the army's real rising star, published a book in which he called for an end to be put to the war as quickly as possible. One month later the Caetano government stripped him of all his functions. It just so happened that we were all in Portugal around that time. That was an exceptionally favourable coincidence, and it established the moment for our revolution. In March 1974 we drafted our political programme. Then we decided to carry out the coup, Otelo de Carvalho, Vasco Lourenço and myself. The date we chose
was 25 April, in the same week that the red carnations began blooming in the fields. That is how the Carnation Revolution was born.

‘Organising a military coup is extremely complicated. We started by setting up the Armed Forces Movement, the MFA. We held big meetings, and all the army units sent representatives. My job was to maintain contacts with the air force and the navy. The most I could get out of them was their promise not to intervene. We were quite skilled at the art of maintaining secrecy, but the government must have noticed something, it had to, there were too many people involved. But then, what could they do? If they had arrested all of us, they would have had no one left to send to war.

‘Alongside that, I had a major personal problem: my father-in-law. At that same moment, as chance would have it, Almeida was chief of the general staff. And I, Vítor Alves, had to start a revolution against him. It was an extremely painful situation. My father-in-law was crazy about me, he only had daughters and from the moment I showed up in the family I was an unexpected joy for him, his favourite, a son. Our relationship had always been intense. But back then, in 1974, Almeida was the last person I could talk to about what I was doing. His daughter, my wife, also took part in the rebellion, she knew that something was on its way, all the major meetings were held at our house … Yes, indeed … Brutus …

‘Finally, the moment arrived. On 23 April a man was sitting on a park bench behind the statue of the Marquis de Pombal, discreetly handing out envelopes to a few passers-by. All the instructions for the next day were in there, the entire scenario: troop movements, positions, everything down to the minute. That night, of course, I didn't sleep a wink. At precisely 12.25 a.m., Radio Renaissance played the forbidden song ‘Grandola’. That was the signal we had agreed on for the rebellion. All over Portugal, MFA units came into action. By 3 a.m. they had occupied the radio and television stations, the airports and the centre of Lisbon. My job was to neutralise the army top brass, and that all went very well, exactly according to plan. Prime Minister Caetano fled to the police barracks in the Largo do Carmo, that evening he surrendered, and by the end of the day it was all over.

‘My father-in-law was treated well, I saw to that, no one harmed a
hair on his head. But still, that coup – I must be frank – placed a great burden on our relationship. He kept saying: why didn't you tell me? But if I had fold him I would have placed him in an impossible position. He would either have had to turn us all in, have his daughter's husband arrested, or be a traitor to his own government.

‘Spínola became the head of our provisional government, we officers stayed in the background, we wanted the international community to see that respectable people had seized power here. The only unexpected thing was the reaction in the streets: we had never expected our coup to generate such a massive explosion of joy and sympathy. And, at the same time, that was a problem for us. It was a bottle of champagne that was suddenly uncorked, and drops flew everywhere; hundreds of political groups began popping up. Within two months our own MFA was deeply divided. One group ganged together around Spínola. That was the most conservative movement, they attempted a couple of coups and then disappeared from the scene. Then you had the Otelists, left-wing radicals around security chief General Otelo de Carvalho. That was the group we belonged to, socialists and social democrats. And there was a big communist group around Vasco Gonçalves.

‘A number of things turned out well. Peace came to Africa: Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Angola became independent. But Portugal itself looked like it was gradually disintegrating. That first year – I had been appointed deputy prime minister – we put most of our effort into breathing new life into the country's locked economic and social life. And the army had to be reorganised and agricultural reforms carried out. At the same time, all kinds of people were coming back from Africa, some of them relieved, others angry and disappointed, and that didn't make the political situation any easier.