Lisbon

by Mariane Pearl

Chapter 2 - The Carnation Revolution

Laika was only as wise as that one revolution, the Carnation revolution in April 1974, in Portugal. The others had happened before her time: the Cuban one and the student revolution in France, in May 1968, when the people claimed the beach beneath the streets. Marita had told her daughter stories about how she used to go with Hanco to the barricades to throw cobble stones at the police while chanting “It is forbidden to forbid,” coupled with slogans about ending the brutal colonial war in Algeria. Students were joined by artists, all manners of employees, and blue-collar workers who challenged the old and dusty French moral establishment that imposed an obsequious respect for the high-ranking. A system that implemented with quasi-religious fervor a narrow discipline in universities and factories. Sacralized rules and immutable hierarchies reigned over families, companies, and at church. 1968, general strikes, media war, endless conversations in overheated theaters. Ideas flew over people’s heads, everyone talking, nobody listening, drinking wine in unison after the demonstrations were over.

Laika knew that the revolution she had witnessed had been different. It had been a bloodless, even cheerful, uprising. One that brought about the overthrow of an entrenched right-wing dictatorship. And it had the added benefit of ending European colonialism in Africa, which made it about as perfect a revolution as there can be. The family had been living in Lisbon, where Hanco had taken a job as an engineer a few months prior to the events, and life was starting to look promising. Their house in the posh area of Cascal was a four-story mansion with wooden shutters stylishly adorned with blue and green carved designs shaped like question marks. They had a live-in family to cater to their needs: Maria was the maid and the cook. She was married to Joaquim, the gardener, who was always deferential in a way that kept you from guessing what he was really thinking. Their daughter Otilia became Satchi and Laika’s designated babysitter. They also had a dog named Raoul, after Fidel Castro’s brother. The dog was a bastard but so was the brother, Hanco argued. As an expatriate for a French company, Hanco was earning a good salary and a benefit package that covered living costs. They all enjoyed the financial respite, even though Hanco was against private capital on principle. Laika lacked the guts to admit that she enjoyed being well-to-do. It gave her prestige at the Lycée Français where she went to school. She also loved bossing poor Otilia around, and her only legitimacy to do so was that her family was middle-class and Otilia's wasn’t. 

 
    “The human soul is such a cheap commodity,” said Hanco to his children one day when the family was gathered for dinner, which was a rare occurrence even then. For the occasion, Marita had cooked cod in a green curry sauce, she had set the table with colorful napkins and lit some candles which soft light reflected on the ceiling’s mosaic tiles. Laika wondered if this was one of her father’s quotes, the out-of-the-blue statements he liked to start conversations with. “Commodity. Does that mean you can buy one?” Satchi asked, showing off his recently acquired knowledge in economics. With his wild afro and skinny frame, he looked just like a microphone.

“A soul?” Laika intervened. “You idiot, how can you buy something that doesn’t even exist?”

“Language!” Marita admonished. “And of course, it exists, without a soul you would just be empty, a shell of a human being, that’s what.”

“So, you can buy it!” Satchi insisted.

“I guess,” Hanco finally spoke. “Souls for sale to the highest bidder. … the devil himself, that’s when you betray your own values to satisfy petty appetites, personal gain.”

“When you betray yourself do you betray others as well? Laika said.

Hanco shrugged: "How could you be lying to yourself while staying truthful to others?”

“Politicians betray themselves all the time.” Satchi was keen to please Hanco with comments that he believed would make his father proud. Hanco did smile to bis son. “Yes, we compromise values for the sake of power. That’s why we’re cheap commodities.”

“Dad, did you ever compromise or lie to yourself?” Laika dared to ask Hanco. The pleasant atmosphere was relaxing her, she lay back on her chair. Taken by the conversation she had left most of her meal untouched.

“I do it all the time. Right now, I am pretending to be someone else”.

“Someone like whom?”

“Someone like the father you’d want me to be.”

“But enough of that, let’s eat desert,” Marita said, not liking the direction the conversation was going. She brought yogurts and oranges to the table, she didn’t want a mea culpa or too much self-criticism, she just wanted casual talk. She looked at her husband, and the sight of him was satisfying now. He had a job; he was required to look and behave like a regular man which she knew was his idea of punishment. Laika too loved his ties and formal attire even though she could also tell they were stifling him, he often made awkward movements as if trying to fit his own clothing. In the mornings, she could see him staring unkindly at his image in the mirror, he acted like he was daring his own reflection to feel legitimate as a man, as a worthwhile husband and father. Laika always woke up early just so she could wave at him long after he had put his helmet on and disappeared with a rumble on his Yamaha.

  Shortly after this conversation, Laika took to stealing money out of her mother's purse. She did it every day, pocketing coins and notes alike. At first, she just kept the money in a secret little blue box meant to contain her diary. Until one day, on impulse, she went to the drugstore and spent it all on notebooks and fancy pens, along with staplers and other office equipment she had no use for. Before she knew it, her extravagant purchase was the talk of the neighborhood. Laika had to admit publicly to sneaking money from her mother's purse and the humiliation felt like a bleeding stain on her revolutionary daughter’s psyche. She struggled to come up with a plausible excuse that would bring forgiveness, but nothing came to mind other than raw greed, the pure joy of owning things that were hers to share or not. Her soul was that of a thief, there you go, a cheap commodity, she thought. She felt vulgar almost, seeing that she could be bought with simple stationary. When she was finally allowed to wander around the house again, Laika stayed away from her father’s scornful gaze. She wished he had screamed at her or explained why one always needed to worry about the greater good, but his irate disappointment achieved more than that. Laika could only hope her mischief would turn into a dirty little family secret and join the ever-growing cohort of things that best remained unsaid.

 
Laika took refuge on the veranda where Marita kept their parrot Madiba, the nickname of Nelson Mandela who also lived in a cage, and their hedgehog Karl Marx, who mostly liked to hide and produce shrilling noises when he was being held. Madiba was a beautiful animal whose feathers shifted from emerald green to azure, gold, and a burgundy red. A family friend had given her to Marita as a birthday present and the bird’s vocabulary was limited to a single expression, “What the fuuuuck?”, that he would repeat ceaselessly unless you covered his cage with a towel. Despite all the swearing he’d heard by then from Laika and her brother, he refused to enrich his vocabulary. "Shut up, you worthless feathered piece of crap!" Hanco would scream at Madiba. "What the fuuuuck?", the parrot would squawk back. He wasn’t destined to live a long life.

Meanwhile, Marita had started to fully enjoy her expat life, she wanted to learn how to swim, drive, write, and find an occupation to channel her eccentric talent in the art of empathy. She started to imagine herself as more than a refugee defined by her island's history and the unusual fascination people around her expressed for the romanticism of the Cuban Revolution. She wore colorful, ample shirts with bold designs, her thin curls roaming free, and delighted in their beautiful house at the top of a quiet street, lined with nut trees and vines. Meanwhile, as political unrest became more conspicuous, Hanco got involved with workers’ unions. He reached out to them and offered his expertise in matters of social upheavals. The neighbors, suspicious of Hanco’s activities and political inclinations, kept spying on the constant stream of visitors. They would have gladly denounced him for fomenting a coup, but they couldn’t prove anything. He was just a nosy and gregarious foreigner. For the authorities, he probably hardly mattered. To her delight, Marita now had new strangers to welcome to their home. She catered to them, bringing viño verde, cured ham and olives to the table, emptying ashtrays and listening with an ardor that made speakers sit up straight. With their blue uniforms and heavy, black work shoes, the timid crowd of hard laborers, who started coming over regularly, looked like they had collectively walked out of a Zola novel. All were die-hard communists, chain-smoking their lungs out, holding their cigarettes with crease-stained and callous hands. Generally short but stout, with leathery skin and an infinite number of wrinkles that drew rivers and bas-relief onto their worker faces. They loved tickling Laika. They kissed their index fingers afterwards and grinned, as if her roundness were a sort of good omen. But Laika grew to like these men, the way they sat in the kitchen listening to her father’s intricate advice, always apologizing. They would pull a chair back, sit on it and say sorry. They said sorry for being poor and sometimes illiterate. They talked in short, and fast sentences; they knew how to speak on behalf of others, they were like an army, a band of brothers. But most importantly, these men knew how to pump blood back into Hanco’s face. They kept saying he was one of them, they called him brother, or companion, and that alone did wonders. Laika had come to realize she was lucky to even have her dad. At the Lycée Français, several of Laika’s classmates lamented the death of their fathers and brothers out there in a colonial war that meant nothing to them, a conflict launched to protect riches they had never enjoyed. They knew better than to protest though, they had learned to live in fear. In pure dictatorship style, President Salazar wasn't ready to leave without squeezing the last drop of blood out of his people. In his mind, defeat, lethal as it may be, was better than compromise.

“He’s a ruthless dictator, yet he doesn’t compromise or betray his values,” Laika reflected one afternoon as she sat in the kitchen watching Marita organize the fridge. “So, you can sell your soul to more devils than one?”

“That’s right, mi amor,” Marita responded, “Idealist doesn’t mean worthy. There’s no shortage of men who have massacred others in the name of their ideals.”

“I wish it were simpler.” Laika sighed “it would be easier if they were just good and bad people. What if Salazar is sincere? If he genuinely believes his dictatorship is what the country needs.”

“A sincere jackass is still a jackass.”

Laika shook her head while sticking her tongue out to signify that all these concepts about the nature of mankind were messing with her mind.

 
Portugal was losing its colonies and was confronting a massive and unwelcomed repatriation from Mozambique and Angola. Anti-immigration slogans were being graffitied on the city’s walls and news stories of violence against black foreigners were multiplying by the day.

“Damned be those racists, a bunch of ignorant, pigs.” Marita told her kids the day she saw on the news that a young man from Angola had been killed in broad daylight. Nobody intervened when a hooded man knifed him on a busy street shouting “death to the negroes.” The young man was left to bleed on the sidewalk, his legs sprayed out, his arms in the shape of a cross as if he was surrendering to his demise. It took half an hour for the ambulance to arrive. Traffic…the driver explained.

“I am racist against racists,” Satchi said. “What does that make me?”

“What about us. Would they want us dead too?” Laika asked Marita.

“Don’t let these idiots scare you. Anyway, I’m not even sure we would fully qualify as blacks, we’re a mix, the darker you are, the worst it gets.”

“Are all the racists white?”

“No, but they are just a majority in this country,” Marita replied. “Blacks can perfectly hate each other and themselves, it’s complicated. Self-hatred. My mother is one of them.” Marita drank a sip from her tea, she shook her head in disapproval then shrugged, at lost with the logic of it all.

“Your mother?” Laika was curious now.

“Yes, she’s a black, or rather a brown woman who despises people darker than her. You’ll meet her in person someday.” Marita said.

“Your mother is a racist, that’s sad.”

“It’s a long story, let’s just say that she isn’t the best mother. And she’s prejudiced, there’s that.”

“Even about you?” Laika wondered.

“Especially about me.”

“She wishes you were whiter?”

“She wishes I wasn’t me.”

The young Angolan’s name was Sammy, the anchor was now saying, he was 24, undocumented but had been working illegally at a spare parts factory for automobiles. The killer, a white man in his 40’s, was on the run. The police had opened a hotline for information and the mayor was to deliver a speech any minute. Marita switched the television off. “Politicians… He doesn’t believe a word he’s saying, he couldn’t care less about Sammy.” she commented.

“My point about politicians.” Satchi retorted.

“Well, I’m not racist against white people, I like the workers who come over for instance, daddy’s new friends” Laika said, earning a hug from her mother. After a while, Laika even felt stupid to have noticed such trivial details as the stream of saliva one of them had hanging between his teeth or the fact that their women were systematically referred to in derogatory terms. Around these men, she could breathe the air that kept her father going. They conveyed enough humility to put her mother to shame, as if all that luxury she was enjoying lately had led her to betray her modest origins, a source of pride in Laika’s family. Marita had to beg her Cuban roots to gain trust among the leftists, but that did the trick just fine: the workers held the Cuban revolution as a model for the one they had in mind. 

  
The coup d’état happened overnight. Laika and Satchi were seating at Joaquim’s table as he heard the news that all political prisoners were being freed. He was holding his big special knife; thick veins running beneath his hairy arms. His face appeared hurt: he looked like a drawing, a rough draft that had been angrily dismissed. Laika, Satchi and Otilia were served ceramic plates with meat and bean soup and pieces of bread. As he listened to the radio, Joaquim stood up slowly, paying no attention to the urgent bursts and cries coming from all directions. The sirens, the songs, the children running and jumping on everything they could. Joaquim gave Laika her first glass of red wine. “To freedom and to those who have paid the price,” he said in Portuguese with his broken face. He was staring ahead, as if all the men who had disappeared in Salazar’s cells were standing there, ready to solemnly toast back. Laika and Satchi drank a few sips of their wine, they winced to each other and ran outside. They went out dancing in the streets, along with most of the city's population, dancing, at last, to something much bigger than the sum of their lives. The carnations seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, shaming the guns into oblivion. Crowds cried and sang “The people united can never be defeated!”. The army had warned the population against coming out of their homes once the course of action was firmly decided, but nobody listened. The signals to launch the celebrations were songs and poems broadcast on the radio. For a few hours, it seemed normal to embrace strangers and smile indiscriminately. Those who had been tortured and killed during thirty-six years of merciless dictatorship were earnestly remembered. Laika’s parents stayed out until the crack of dawn. When she was put to bed, Laika thought about Joaquim for a long time. An austere man leading his family with an iron fist. She knew that talks about political prisoners had hurt Joaquim. Perhaps he had been jailed himself, perhaps his father had, she would never know. Joaquim wasn’t weak, he didn’t display emotions. This was being a man in his mind. Laika thought about Otilia too. Poor Otilia, she looked old already with her premature wrinkles and sad eyes like those of a beaten puppy. That night, Laika brought back a bunch of carnations she had carefully gathered for her. Otilia took them without saying anything but for the first time, she looked straight back at Laika, an unflinching stare that wasn’t hateful but wasn’t kind either. Laika shivered and turned to her brother who was drinking the rest of his wine, with an attitude.

The next morning, the dust had settled. The sun came out as if nothing of significance had just happened. The quiet was back, the streets were still paved with flowers, but it was the day after. Everyone had somewhere to attend to or someone to tend to, people were ready to resume daily life and see their revolution turn into a banal power struggle between left and right, a drama played so many times that the pursuit of authentic ideals had no chance to survive. Hanco came home and called in sick. He slept all day and the following one too. When he emerged from his slumber, he looked like a devil with dark circles under his red and swollen eyes. Laika was at the breakfast table, ready to report excitedly about the glass of wine but when she saw him, she was frightened. Despite the pretty image her family formed then, she understood that life wasn't likely to go on that way. In the following days, while doing his best to adjust to the relative normalcy of their new existence, her father seemed to be constantly pacing on its edges, like a weary soccer coach. He was crushed. Once the people went home, the revolutionary ideals remained on the pavement to be picked up by politicians and all manners of populists. Heroes became men again, back to bureaucracy and the old, the weary, power struggle.

A few weeks later, on a warm spring day, Hanco’s contract came to an end and the family moved back to France. Hanco was driving and, and as they crossed into the country, their car crashed into a truck that was parked in a curve at a blind angle. Hanco was able to drive the damaged car to the nearest garage but the mood in the vehicle was tense. Laika started to sing out loud, a silly Portuguese pop tune. She wouldn’t shut up as she was ordered to, so her father turned around abruptly and slapped her in the face, his left hand still holding the wheel. She had a loose tooth that started to bleed. She looked at herself in the rear-view mirror, warm blood dripping on her chin, and saw her father’s stare in the rearview mirror, it was blank. Without a word, Marita wiped the blood and recovered the tooth. That night, at the hotel, Hanco apologized to Laika. He took her face in his hands, she felt like his daughter again. His protégé. It was worth the tooth.

“I apologize too, I was being naughty,” she said.

“What’s going on in that head of yours?” he asked twisting his own head to examine the gap in her mouth where she had lost her tooth.

“What’s going to happen to us now? Are we going to another revolution?” Hanco didn’t answer, instead, he looked above her head still holding her face, then stroked her hair as if to ruffle away her last questions.

When they had left Portugal, Joaquim, Maria, and Otilia had lined up in a row at the entrance of the house as they said goodbye to the family. Only Maria was smiling faintly, small, and round with a faint moustache on her upper lip. She waved as if to say, this was just a parenthesis. You have never been one of us. Only once they reached Paris, did Laika find out that the meat they ate that fateful night at Joaquim’s was their Karl Marx’s, cooked in a stew. 

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