English Version | Time Machine

If we traveled in the time machine imagined by George Orwell, it would be as if we had left a closed society, somewhere between 1788 and 1933, and landed in 1975. A short distance in time, to be sure, but how many differences in civilization! I lived in that society for 30 years, at a time when, as well as being outdated, it was worn out and, after 1945 (the year I was born) it had lost its best men - António Ferro, Duarte Pacheco and half a dozen others - and was surviving on conformism. As early as 1915, Fernando Pessoa wrote that the great characteristic of the Portuguese is conformism; Eduardo Lourenço, 50 years later, concluded that Salazar had institutionalized this conformism. To guarantee this, an omnipresent censorship censored everything that could agitate him, or that came from the outside world. For people like me, from the middle bourgeoisie upwards, who wanted to know what was happening "out there", there was no political repression, because we had no political activity and because we were supposedly the beneficiaries of the rigid class system. But we were also walled in culturally and were always on the hunt for what little information we could get past a barrier of restrictions on the arts, literature, and contemporary social life.

The music - rock and pop - played without restriction and was the most real contact with Xanadu. We could listen to it and dance to it - properly secluded, under the gaze of an adult watching out for any embarrassment. We subscribed to Interview, Rolling Stone, Salut les Copains, Cannard Enchainé, and other magazines à la page, as well as Time, Newsweek, and Le Monde, which sometimes mysteriously disappeared in the post. This way we knew at least a little about the intellectual developments that were taking place elsewhere without restrictions. Cinema was censored; some films simply weren't shown, such as A Clockwork Orange (Marcelo Caetano was said to have been shocked by the sex and violence), Last Tango in Paris, or Pasolini's The Decameron and Canterbury Tales. Others were cut from scenes considered immoral. The mother of a friend of mine was on the Censorship Commission for the cinema and he told me that they timed kisses on the mouth - more than 10 seconds, cut! Foreign books were also scarce, but as we didn't know they existed, we didn't notice. Anyone who knew about them could order them from the Buchholz bookstore and they would import them. My friend's mother belonged to the upper class and lived in tune with the Roman Catholic-apostolic values that controlled the whole of society. You couldn't check into a hotel if the couple didn't show proof of being married. You couldn't offend morals and good manners, in a very broad sense of the term. However, it wasn't only the state apparatus and the Church that ensured decency; influential families did so militantly. At Maristas, where I studied, I lost many friends because my parents were separated, a bad example.

In a recently published book, Three Dictatorships in Western Europe, Isabel do Carmo gives a detailed portrait, with testimonies of daily life under the Estado Novo. I learned about the life of hunger and material deprivation of the lower classes, an environment that didn't reach us. We knew that poor people and workers were earning a living wage - the better-off houses even had their "poor man" of choice, who went there every month to collect his crumbs - but the needy didn't circulate among us, because segregation was even urban. They lived in shacks, in working-class neighborhoods near the industries, in the fields far from our vacation homes. Some went on to fourth grade and a few went on to high school, but never to university. As only university graduates did military service as officers, there was a severe shortage of graduates for the colonial war, which later proved fatal for the regime. The colonial war, the "defense of the overseas provinces against Moscow-backed terrorists", which began in 1961, represented a heavy and sometimes fatal burden for everyone - "nobility", bourgeoisie, and people. Compulsory military service, which lasted between two and four years, took hundreds of thousands of young men off to war, ruining their careers (for those who had them) and imposing a violent life on them in an Africa they didn't recognize as their own. I did three years and six months of service but, as I came first in the conscription, I didn't go abroad. However, cases like mine were guaranteed to be called up a year later to command a company in a theater of war. I was saved from this penalty by April 25, the year I was due to report in the fall. As soon as my passport was returned to me at the end of my service in 1973, I rushed off to London, where for a week I watched banned films and browsed bookshops and exhibitions, to catch up and get a taste of the European civilization of which we were not a part.

I had already lived in London before the army. I was studying economics at ISCEF but my father, who was an Anglophile, decided to send me to the London School of Economics in 1968. When I arrived in London, at the height of the flower power, it was as if I had landed on another planet. The streets were full of colorful and lively people - so different from the grey people with their heads down who only went from home to work in Lisbon - the deliciously inconsequential conversations, the free and uncomplicated sexuality, the shows on the streets and in the halls - I even saw Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones! -the certainty that the world was moving towards an era of "peace and love" with no clouds on the horizon. Conservative England, which still prevailed, let the madness of youth run wild, it was scandalized, but it didn't think of repressing it. I went off to become an economist and came back as an advertising and fashion photographer. My father, who was also an Anglophile in his respect for other people's decisions, after a period of heartbreak gave me the "letters" (credit documents) for a well-equipped studio, which I paid for as I became one of the four most sought-after advertising photographers. When the army caught up with me, I was married with a daughter and had to divide my workload with endless hours at the Army Cartographic Service, already thinking about what I would be like when I was called up to Africa.

There was talk of regime change and despair that it would be impossible. No option seemed viable. It wouldn't be the professional military, who were specially indoctrinated and the main beneficiaries of the war, who would do anything. And the civilian opposition movements, allowed in sporadically in occasional elections, had no real chance of changing anything. The Communist Party, promoted to bogeyman status by the Estado Novo, we knew had no strength, and that its "conquest of power at the head of the working class" was a myth that only they believed in - and neither were we interested in replacing the Salazar dictatorship with a dictatorship of the opposite direction. All we had to do was get as far away as possible from the day-to-day life of those "years of lead" and create a bubble where compulsory morality didn't enter. When I separated from my wife a few months after leaving the army, I rented an isolated house in Guincho with two partners. Without the telephone or the Internet, which hadn't been invented yet, we had fun listening to rock and roll, having dinner parties, and sunbathing. It's all in a novel I later wrote, Vista da Praia. The constant visitors who came to spread out in that paradise gave us information about what was going on in the country - scandals, intrigues, the official discourse that didn't allow for contradiction. On the night of April 24-25, I was in the lab making enlargements for an exhibition at the Quadrante Gallery in May, women without clothes and shame looking at the camera: "That's who I am and I have nothing to hide." My inspiration came from Man Ray, Jean-Loup Sieff, Ralph Gibson, Helmut Newton, and the photographers who appeared in the French magazine Photo. It was supposed to be a shocking exhibition, with women taking on their bodies in everyday settings. Quadrante had an avant-garde reputation and Artur Rosa and his wife, who ran it, thought it would be a (good) scandal. But April 25 came and the exhibition went completely unnoticed in the enthusiasm of a new world. There was a more serious lack of recognition: Alberto Seixas Santos' extraordinary film, Brandos Costumes, a noir and implacable critique of the petty conformism of the Estado Novo, came out in 1975 and no one was interested in immersing themselves in an anguish that no longer existed.

On the 25th, I went out into the street. As I thought all the photographers were going to do the same, I decided to shoot everything in Super 8 with a top-of-the-range Braun Nizo I'd just bought. I was in Rato and Chiado. The movement and joy were overwhelming. Thousands of people, from I don't know where, suddenly came out onto the street, laughing and strolling, enchanted by the spring air. Their eyes were wide with uncontrollable curiosity, dangerously close to the tanks and armored vehicles, not wanting to miss a detail - because it was clear that they were watching history unfold in real-time, live and color. When I had the films developed, the machine had a fault and they were all overexposed, white. Revolutions are always followed by a period of anarchy, which can be violent. This was the case in 1789 (France), 1910 (Portugal), 1917 (Russia), and many others that I can't think of right now. This happens because a long-standing order is undone. After all, people have different ideas of what the new situation should be, and because there is a contest between the new forces for power. In the year following April 25, no one worked in this country and everyone had their dream of what the new order should be. This revolution was original in several respects: the military wanted a democracy, not a military dictatorship, and left power voluntarily when civilian institutions were installed. Those responsible for the "old days" were left alone. There were many struggles, not very violent because of our mild manners, and Álvaro Cunhal, following the Leninist playbook, came close to taking power (as the CPs had done in the Eastern countries after 1945), but finally common sense prevailed and, from the First Constitutional Government, in July 1976, we entered the peripeties characteristic of Western parliamentary democracy.

Once the political revolution had taken place, space opened up for the cultural revolution: the birth of movements and the emergence of artists and cultural agitators with a Portuguese identity who finally brought our cultural and daily life closer to the model we had aspired to before 1974. The man who discreetly provoked, encouraged, and led this movement was called Manuel Reis. From a minimal nightspot, the Frágil, where all the actors in this new show met, from António Mega Ferreira to António Variações, including artists, filmmakers, actors, writers, stylists, ministers, dilettantes, a Portuguese identity emerged which, although subsidiary to what was happening "out there", brought that "out there" in our colors. The biography of this promoter of everything is about to be written - I, who knew him very well, won't do it. They called him the "king of the night", a reductive title because he worked hard during the day. The Time Machine has made its outward journey in a decade. There will be no return trip.

Originally published in The Memories Issue, from April 2024. Full stories and credits are in the print version.