PORTUGAL: Beauty & Order

“Beauty and order are inseparable.” So Portugal’s dour, scholarly Premier António de Oliveira Salazar is fond of saying. As a spangled religious procession wound through a Lisbon park, both these elements of his 14-year-old clerico-fascist regime were evident. Beauty was represented by the silken banners and swinging censers, order by the plainclothesmen of the dreaded P.V.D.E. (Police of Vigilance and Defense of the State).

But one onlooker, teenaged, tuberculous João do Nascimento, was unappreciative. Like thousands of others, he had tried for two years to get into one of the Government sanatoriums (3,324 beds for 75,000 tuberculous Portuguese), growing steadily weaker while indifferent functionaries of the Estado Novo shuffled his papers. Rashly João complained to a friend: “There is always plenty of money to finance processions, but to take care of the sick such as myself there never seems to be a penny.”

Two P.V.D.E. men overheard and hustled the sickly lad to court. The trial was speedy, the sentence light by Lisbon standards: 25 days in jail and 100 escudos ($4) fine. But João’s mother sobbed and bystanders growled as the boy collapsed on seeing Portuguese justice open a prison cell instead of a hospital ward. The Portuguese press rarely murmurs against the order Salazar has maintained for 14 years, but last week the Lisbon Diario de Lisboa reported João’s case with obvious sympathy.