The figures of April

On 31 January 1948, the political police arrested the entire central committee of the Movement of Democratic Unity (MUD) and brought it to the Aljube. Mário Soares, aged 23, was put in the same cell as his father, João Lopes Soares, who had been in prison since the revolt of 10 April 1947.⁴ A year later he was arrested again, and it was here, on 22 February 1949, that he married Maria Barroso — by proxy, because he was in prison. One of the witnesses, Manuel Mendes, was also in custody.²

Maria Barroso knew what the dictatorship’s prisons were like: her father, an Army officer, had been arrested and deported for conspiring against the Military Dictatorship.¹ Soares would be arrested twelve times, deported to São Tomé in 1968 and forced into exile in France from 1970.³ In 1961 he spent six months between the Aljube and Caxias, and at the beginning of 1962, imprisoned here once more, he wrote her a poem.⁴² He only returned from exile after 25 April — with her, on the train that arrived at Santa Apolónia on 28 April 1974.⁴

Álvaro Cunhal knew this prison too: he was brought here the first time he was arrested, in 1937, aged 23.⁵⁶ In 1941, by then free, he was a study supervisor at the Colégio Moderno, at the invitation of Soares’s father, and spent time with the family and with the son, who would become his political adversary.⁵

In May 1950, Álvaro Cunhal and Sofia Ferreira sat here in the dock of the Plenary Court.⁸ They had been arrested together thirteen months earlier, in a clandestine house in Luso where they passed themselves off as a couple; the third prisoner, Militão Ribeiro, had died in prison in January, on hunger strike.⁷ Cunhal had spent all that time incommunicado, in a cell with no natural light where the electric light was never switched off, and he prepared his defence in that isolation.⁵ On 2 May, at the very start of the trial, he called it “a new form of torture”, said that Sofia and Militão had also refused to answer the police, and ended with an accusation: “if anyone is to be tried for such crimes, then let the fascists sit in the dock” (se alguém deve ser julgado por tais crimes, então que se sentem os fascistas no banco dos réus).⁸

Sofia Ferreira, who had spent six months in isolation, five of them without a single book or newspaper, was sentenced on 9 May to three years in prison.⁹ Cunhal remained in prison for eleven years in a row, eight of them in isolation. In the Lisbon Penitentiary he translated Shakespeare’s King Lear, until he was taken to Peniche, from where he escaped in 1960; the drawings he made in prison were later published as a book, Desenhos da Prisão (Prison Drawings).⁵

Mário Soares also knew the door of this court: on 15 February 1949 he was arrested on his way here, where the central committee of the MUD Juvenil (Youth Movement of Democratic Unity) was to be tried.⁴

Maria Barroso completed the Dramatic Art course at the National Conservatory in 1943, with the highest mark of her year, and the following year made her debut on this stage, with the company of Amélia Rey Colaço and Robles Monteiro, which had run the National Theatre since 1929.²¹⁰ Amélia Rey Colaço cast her as Maria de Noronha in Frei Luís de Sousa, alongside Palmira Bastos; in 1947 she played the lead in José Régio’s Benilde ou a Virgem Mãe (Benilde, or the Virgin Mother), and then Adela in García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba.¹¹²

Off stage, she recited the poets of the opposition at recitals all over the country, and the political police called her in for questioning several times.¹² In 1948, around the time of the third arrest of Mário Soares, whom she had met at the Faculty of Letters, an order arrived “coming from the police and the Ministry of Education”: she could no longer work at the D. Maria II. “It was heartbreaking. I felt it was an injustice,” she told her biographer Leonor Xavier. Amélia Rey Colaço saw it as a blow that struck at the heart of the theatre.¹¹

She acted again in other theatres — she did Sophocles’ Antigone in 1965 — and in 1966 the regime banned Cocteau’s monologue The Human Voice, which she had taken to the São Luiz Theatre: it was the last time she acted on stage. In 1959 she had also been refused a licence to teach in private schools; she went on to run the Colégio Moderno, founded by her father-in-law, for decades.¹²

Salgueiro Maia’s column arrived here at around 12:30 on 25 April 1974, after climbing up from the Rossio along Rua do Carmo.¹² It was along that way, between the Rossio and the Chiado, that Celeste Caeiro gave a soldier a carnation that morning.¹³ The day, hour by hour, is told in the route The first day; here, what matters is the man. He was 29, the son of a railwayman whose job took him, as a child, from Coruche to Tomar, Pombal and Leiria. He served two tours of duty in the colonial war, in Mozambique and in Guinea, where in May 1973, with his company already in Bissau waiting to go home, he was sent to relieve the besieged garrison of Guidaje. In 1969 he had enrolled at the Higher Institute of Social Sciences and Overseas Policy: “he wanted to understand the reason for what he was doing”, writes Carlos de Matos Gomes.¹⁴

In front of the barracks, with the President of the Council (head of government) inside and the crowd all around, he chose to “run the risk of parleying, of negotiating, of exposing himself” rather than attack. He received Marcelo Caetano’s surrender, witnessed the handover of power to General Spínola and made sure that the defeated left safely. He won, sums up the Commemorative Commission for the 50th Anniversary, “without causing a single death, without provoking combat, respecting the defeated”.¹⁴

He did not accept political office after 25 April.¹⁵ On 11 March and on 25 November 1975, his weight lay more in what he did not do than in what he did; in November 1976 he was taken out of the Cavalry Practical School and put on bureaucratic duties and, in March 1977, sent to the Azores. He died in 1992, aged 47.¹⁴

Maria Lamas worked for almost twenty years at O Século (The Century), in charge of the magazine Modas e Bordados (Fashions and Embroidery). In 1947, forced to choose between the magazine and the National Council of Portuguese Women, which she chaired, she chose the Council — which the police closed down that year — and was left without a livelihood.¹⁷¹⁶ Redress came in 1975: Maria Antónia Fiadeiro, the magazine’s managing editor, invited her to be honorary editor and dedicated a special issue to her; Modas e Bordados was renamed Mulher – Modas e Bordados (Woman – Fashions and Embroidery) and took on a feminist editorial line.¹⁶¹⁷ The beginning of this story is told in the route Forbidden words.

The following year, on 20 April 1976, the paper launched a daily political supplement, O Século — Hoje (O Século — Today), edited by Natália Correia. The first issue carried the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as its editorial; the issue of 24 April, the eve of elections, came out with “Vetted by the Reflection Commission” (Visado pela Comissão de Reflexão) in red on the front page, as in the days of censorship, when newspapers carried “This issue has been vetted by the Censorship Commission” (Este número foi visado pela Comissão de Censura). On 29 April, on a proposal from President Costa Gomes, the Council of the Revolution shut the supplement down for publishing articles “offensive and slanderous towards the Council of the Revolution and the Armed Forces”. The ninth and last issue came out the following day.¹⁸

Under the Estado Novo (“New State”), the Corporative Chamber sat in this palace, in the room that had been used by the Chamber of Peers and is today the Sala do Senado (Senate Room).¹⁹ From 1969 to 1974 Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo, a chemical engineer, sat there: she had refused to go on the list of deputies for the National Assembly, but agreed to be a member (procuradora) of the Chamber, and she signed opinions on press freedom, the model of economic development and amendments to the Constitution with a “dissenting vote”.¹⁷²⁰ Ten years after she first came here, she became the first woman to head a government in Portugal — and she is still the only one.¹⁷

After 1975, the palace became the seat of an elected parliament. Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen chaired here the committee that drafted the preamble to the Constitution.²¹ Maria Barroso was a deputy from 1976 to 1983 and vice-chair of the parliamentary Education Committee.¹² Natália Correia was a deputy from 1979 to 1983 and from 1987 to 1991, and replied with a poem to the deputy who, in the first debate on abortion, in 1982, said that the sexual act was “so that one may see the birth of a child”.²²²³

Álvaro Cunhal was elected a deputy to the Constituent Assembly in 1975 and to the Assembly of the Republic in the elections that followed, until 1987.²⁴ Mário Soares, a deputy in the Constituent Assembly and later prime minister of three governments, came back here on 9 March 1986 to be sworn in as President of the Republic: the first civilian elected to the office by direct universal suffrage.³⁴