Forbidden words

On 10 May 1958, on the first floor of the Café Chave d’Ouro, in the Rossio, the candidacy of General Humberto Delgado for the Presidency of the Republic was presented to the press, the foreign press included. He was asked what he would do with Salazar if he were elected. “Obviously, I’ll sack him!” (Obviamente, demito-o!) — the answer set the country alight and defined the campaign.²³

The café, founded in 1919 and a meeting place for the opposition, made way for a bank branch in 1961.⁴

Between 1957 and 1962, almost thirty poets, painters and publishers used to gather in the back room of the Café Gelo — among them Herberto Helder, Mário Cesariny, Luiz Pacheco, António José Forte, Manuel de Lima and Helder Macedo. In Pirâmide (Pyramid, 1959–1960), one of the two magazines they produced, Natália Correia and Pedro Oom also wrote. They had no programme and no school, Luiz Pacheco recalled: there was “a space for socialising in complete freedom” there.⁵

The meetings ended in 1962. On May Day (1 May) that year, during the demonstration that was put down in the Baixa, the police entered the café and beat up the people inside — “the sugar bowls went flying”, Luiz Pacheco recalled — and a few days later the manager told the group they could no longer stay there.⁵

On the night of 31 December 1968, after Cardinal Cerejeira’s Mass, more than a hundred Catholics stayed on in this church in a vigil against the colonial war, until six in the morning of the World Day of Peace. For that night, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen wrote the “Cantata da Paz” (Cantata of Peace), which Francisco Fanhais sang: “We see, we hear and we read / We cannot ignore” (Vemos, ouvimos e lemos / Não podemos ignorar).⁶

On 29 March 1974 the 1st Portuguese Song Meeting (I Encontro da Canção Portuguesa) filled the Coliseu, with PIDE agents and plain-clothes police watching the stage and the audience. At the last minute, the censors cut lyrics and banned songs — among them “Venham Mais Cinco” (Let five more come) and “A Morte Saiu à Rua” (Death Went Out into the Street), by José Afonso.⁷ José Afonso then sang “Grândola, Vila Morena” (Grândola, swarthy town), the hall sang with him, and at the end thousands of people shouted “Down with repression!” (abaixo a repressão!).⁸

Less than a month later, the same song went out on the radio as the signal for the revolution.

In May 1965, a jury of the Portuguese Society of Writers — Alexandre Pinheiro Torres, Augusto Abelaira, Fernanda Botelho, João Gaspar Simões and Manuel da Fonseca — gave the Grand Prize for Fiction to Luuanda, by José Luandino Vieira, who was imprisoned at Tarrafal for his links to the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).⁹

On 21 May the Minister of National Education dissolved the Society. That night its headquarters, on the first floor of No. 20 on this street, were broken into and ransacked by “unknown persons” backed by the PIDE, who left a sign at the door: “Terrorists’ agency in the Metropole” (Agência dos terroristas na Metrópole). Three of the jurors were arrested; Fernanda Botelho, the only woman on the jury, was questioned.⁹¹⁰

This palace housed the newspaper O Século (The Century). In 1908 Virgínia Quaresma, one of the first Portuguese women reporters, joined its newsroom.¹¹ Twenty years later, Maria Lamas took charge of its supplement Modas e Bordados (Fashions and Embroidery), written “from woman to woman”; in 1930 she organised the exhibition “Portuguese Women” (Mulheres Portuguesas) here, under the slogan “Let us be intelligently women” (Sejamos inteligentemente mulheres).¹²¹³

In 1947 the regime forced her to choose between the magazine and the National Council of Portuguese Women, which she chaired. She chose the Council.¹⁴

At No. 116 Rua da Misericórdia stood República, the daily of the democratic opposition — almost opposite the censorship office, which had been working at No. 125 since 1969.¹⁵ Two of its journalists, Álvaro Guerra and Carlos Albino, put the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) in touch with the radio programme that would broadcast the signal for the revolution.¹⁷¹⁵

On 25 April 1974 its editor, Raul Rego, refused to send the proofs to the “Prior Examination”. The paper came out with a line at the foot of the front page: “This newspaper has not been vetted by any Censorship Commission” (Este jornal não foi visado por qualquer Comissão de Censura).¹⁵

In 1910 Virgínia Quaresma moved to A Capital (The Capital), the republican evening daily whose newsroom was at No. 3 Rua do Norte, on this corner; she went to live right opposite.¹¹ It was A Capital that, on 29 April 1911, printed the ruling that ordered Carolina Beatriz Ângelo to be registered as a voter, and called it “a victory for national feminism”.¹⁸

In August that year, Virgínia told the paper that she loved her profession and wanted to see other women earning their living in journalism.¹¹