For many young people of the 1970s, the Carnation Revolution represented the ideal of change at hand. «The only tangible revolution», says Marco Ferrari today, who wrote an extraordinary book about that freedom hangover To the revolution on the Two Horses, now republished by Laterza, enriched by the sequel 50 years later («in memory of Antonio Tabucchi», the most Portuguese of Italian writers). Same protagonists with a few more aches and pains and the desire to overcome melancholy. Marco Ferrari was among those boys who arrived in Lisbon after the coup of 25 April 1974 to celebrate the end of a very long dictatorship. A fifty-year period that contains the x-ray of a generation.
Is it the parable of a defeat?
«I wouldn’t say so. Since then, very notable strides have been made in society. Also thanks to those years of struggle, many managed to study, to move up in social class, I myself was the son of a worker.”
What symbol did April 25th embody?
«A romantic dream. Our generation had clashed with the police during the demonstrations, but this revolution with carnations in the barrels of the rifles overturned everything, put the soldiers on the other side, made them liberators. It was a rebellion born within the Armed Forces. He represented a myth for us.”
The captains who led it were young graduates.
«They were kids working in the colonies who got tired of the African humidity. The year before in Chile there had been Pinochet’s coup, but now suddenly a glimpse of freedom opened in Portugal. And it happened in a forgotten country, in the oldest dictatorship in Europe.”
In the sequel the legendary Two Horses is reduced to a carcass used for drug dealing.
«Fifty years is an infinite distance, but that car found by chance, a yellow Citroën now without wheels, with broken windows and a rusty bodywork is still a symbol of freedom, can start again. Getting it back in motion means giving life back to a dream.”
You arrived in Lisbon almost right after the coup, how did you do it?
«I was a young reporter, I was lucky enough to be friends with a Portuguese exile who helped me. I took a ship from Genoa to Barcelona and then hitchhiked to Madrid and from there a night train to Lisbon. On April 25th he threw open the doors to the exiles who returned after decades from distant countries: socialists, communists, boys who had left to escape compulsory military service and the war in the colonies.”
Political dissidents were also freed.
«Many after years of imprisonment and torture. Some wrote little testimony books that they distributed around. They felt the need to make known what they had suffered.”
What was Lisbon like in those hours, truly a city in celebration?
«The printers churned out newspapers in the morning and afternoon. There was music everywhere, we spent the evenings happily chatting for hours. And films that had been censored until then were shown in the gardens, such as Rome, an open city. A Portuguese TV director, a certain Ruis, had bought the film in Rome Battleship Potemkin and then he had cut it to hide it in the suitcase. Finally he put it back together with a crazy montage, and it was that version that she projected at her home on Lisbon evenings, on the fourth floor of an elegant building.”
Did going to Lisbon become a trend for young left-wingers?
«Political tourism to see the revolution began the following year, in 1975. Groups of the extra-parliamentary left organized photographic tours».
What was the impact? Portugal was emerging from 48 years of dictatorship.
«It was a country more oriented towards the Atlantic than Europe, mostly agricultural, backward. I remember a farmer chasing Dario Lanzardo with his pitchfork as he was trying to photograph the field workers. Salazar himself, a failed former seminarian, was of peasant origin. He was a very closed guy, he dominated an empire without ever travelling. He only left Portugal seven times. One of these took the plane but was forced to return to the car because she was ill. Another time a ship to go to Madeira but he vomited all the time. On his São Bento estate he had tomato gardens and two hundred chickens.”
In the book “The incredible story of António Salazar” he tells his tragicomic end.
«He was in bad shape due to a bad fall and no one had the courage to tell him that he had been replaced by Marcelo Caetano. The director of News Diary he had a false copy of the newspaper printed every day so as not to upset him. It was the last great farce staged for him.”
#Marco #Ferrari #time #dream #Lisbon
– 2024-04-20 14:13:46
