Arriving in Portugal is like lying down on a comfortable sofa. Around here, everything goes more slowly, everything is softer, even in Lisbon or Porto, where a considerable urban darkness reigns. The tourists who visit us appreciate this existential moss. The sweet feeling that one lives in slow motion. However, this pillow of tranquility that is Portugal today has a bloody past: our history spills blood. At times, it even feels like a horror movie.
This scary film includes a king, D. Pedro, the Cru, who ate in front of the crowd the freshly extracted heart of executed enemies; a viceroy of India, Afonso d’Albuquerque, the Terrible, who cut off the ears and noses of prisoners of war; terrible tortures, such as those suffered by the noble Távora family on the gallows; several million slaves (yes, millions) transported from African shores to America. And it is clear, the traditional Iberian act of faith, that the crowd enjoyed with the tranquility of those who are entertained with a reality show.
In our great national book, Os Lusíadas, from 1572, when Vasco da Gama (the captain of the Lusitanian armada that arrived in India by sea in 1498) begins to explain national history to a pagan king, he says the following : “First I will speak of the long land; after the bloody war”. Geography and blood: this was Portugal. An endless catalog of battles to secure a territory and arm an empire.
In the first half of the 19th century, this violence, which had been projected mainly in the imperial horizons, was concentrated in the country. If one day time travel tourism is invented, don’t want to travel to that Portuguese era: three French invasions, two civil wars. We were something like today’s Afghanistan, but in Europe. Oliveira Martins, a Lusitanian historian, comments that ordinary Portuguese went around armed with the porra, the club machine gun that existed at the time.
It was then, when the horror was projected onto our European territory, that we discovered the charm of peace. Two important writers, Alexandre Herculano and Antero de Quental, condemned the imperial adventure. The Portuguese citizenry began to pull the fragile thread of concord. We were one of the first countries in Europe to abolish the death penalty: in 1852 for political crimes and in 1867 for common crimes.
But the kinetic energy of conflict, of social confrontation, is difficult to stop in a society. Already during the 20th century, the Lusitanians still had a regicide, in 1908, and a first republican experience, from 1910, quite turbulent and bloody. The Republicans, in addition, decided to participate in the First World War, alongside France and England, to obtain the international recognition of the new regime and guarantee the possession of the African colonies.
Miguel de Unamuno, who visited us in the first decade of the 20th century, saw with a penetrating gaze the cultural mutation that was taking place: “The softness, the Portuguese meiguice (tenderness), is only there on the surface; scratch it, and you will find plebeian violence that will frighten you. […] Whiteness is a mask”, wrote the Basque author in 1908.
But this Lusitanian citizenship, despite the fierce Iberian DNA it had, continued to pull the thread of concord: Salazarism asserted itself, in the initial phase, as a project of national pacification, which culminated in neutrality during the Second War world When Salazar plunged into the colonial war, starting in 1961, the people gradually turned their backs on him. And, on April 25, 1974, a beautiful story happened: Celeste Caeiro, who worked at the Franjinhas restaurant in Lisbon, brought a bunch of carnations to decorate the tables of the establishment, which was celebrating the anniversary of the inauguration . The owner of the place told him that he would not open because of the revolution. Let her take advantage of the flowers.
Shortly after, a soldier, from a military truck, asked him for a cigarette. Celeste, who didn’t smoke, gave him a carnation and he put it in the barrel of the machine gun. Afterwards, this woman distributed all the flowers among the troop. The gesture became, as we would say today, viral. Thus was born, by chance, the most shocking metaphor in contemporary Lusitanian history: carnations silencing the guns. Portugal sheathed the swords of its bloody past once and for all. The empire, scene of so much violence, evaporated forever.
We lost the empire (or, perhaps better, we got rid of it), but, as an internationally recognized nation of peace, we have won the world: the Secretary General of the UN, António Guterres, is Portuguese; José Manuel Durão Barroso, another Portuguese, was president of the European Commission; Jorge Sampaio was the first high representative of the Alliance of Civilizations. What is achieved through peace is worth much more than what empires bite.
For this reason, from this Portuguese corner, a servant would advise you: continue, please, to pull the thread of peace in Spain, as was done during the transition. It is the people who must exert constant pressure in this direction, penalizing excessive aggression. In Spain, the engine of tension is still humming. If the Portugal of peace is a nice reference to the world, imagine the light that would be a Spain flying a flag of full harmony. A plural Spain, diverse and itself: we have the panorama here, at our fingertips. Each person just needs to keep pulling the thread of peace.
