Half a mile or so beyond Margaret Island, in the lower Danube, there is a dense proletarian sector where Budapest’s workers live and die all on top of each other. There are some closed taverns, warm and full of smoke, where customers drink huge glasses of beer amid that sustained machine gun rattling that is conversation in the Hungarian language. The afternoon of October 28, those people were there when word came that the students had started the uprising. Then they left their glasses of beer, walked up the bank of the Danube to the little square of the poet Petofi, and joined the movement. I went to those taverns at nightfall and discovered that despite the military regime, the Soviet intervention, and the apparent tranquility that reigns in the country, the seed of the uprising is still alive. When I entered the bars, the rattling turned into a dense buzz. Nobody wanted to talk. But when the people are quiet—out of fear or prejudice—you have to enter the washrooms to find out what they’re thinking. There I found what I was looking for: in among the pornographic drawings, classics now by all urinals of the world, there was Kádár’s name, in an anonymous but extraordinarily significant protest. Those notices represent a valid testimony on the Hungarian situation: “Kádár, murderer of the people,” “Kádár, traitor,” “Kádár, the Russians’ attack dog.”
November 15, 1957, Momento, Caracas
The World’s Most Famous Year
The international year of 1957 did not begin on the 1st of January. It began on Wednesday the 9th, at six in the evening, in London. At that hour, the British prime minister, the child prodigy of international politics, Sir Anthony Eden, the best-dressed man in the world, opened the door of 10 Downing Street, his official residence, and that was the last time he opened it as prime minister. Wearing a black overcoat with a fur collar, carrying a top hat for solemn occasions, Sir Anthony Eden had just attended a tempestuous cabinet meeting, the last of his mandate and the last of his political career. That afternoon, in less than two hours, Sir Anthony Eden did the most number of definitive things a man of his importance, of his stature, of his upbringing, can allow himself in two hours: he fell out with his ministers, visited Queen Elizabeth for the last time, offered his resignation, packed his bags, moved out of the house, and retired to private life.
More than any other man, Sir Anthony Eden had been born with 10 Downing Street etched on his heart, inscribed in a line on his palm. For thirty years he had bewitched the salons of Europe, as well as foreign offices all over the world, and he had played a prominent role in the biggest political negotiations on earth. He had forged a reputation for physical and moral elegance, rigorous principles, and political audacity, which hid from the wider public certain weaknesses of his character, his whims, his disorder, and his tendency to indecision that in certain circumstances could lead him to decide too quickly, too intensely, alone, and against everyone. Three months earlier—November 2, 1956—Sir Anthony Eden, faced with a secret invitation from France to seize control of the Suez Canal by force, he had shown such indecision that he decided too quickly, too intensely, against the opinion of the majority of his ministers, the archbishop of Canterbury, the press, and even the people of London, who expressed their disagreement with the largest popular demonstration Trafalgar Square has seen this century. As a consequence of the solitary and hasty decision, he had to decide in those two melancholy hours on January 9—and this time with the approval of his ministers, with the approval of the great majority of the subjects of the British Empire—to perform the most significant act of his life: resign.
That very night, while Sir Anthony Eden, accompanied by his wife, Lady Clarissa, Winston Churchill’s niece, was driven away in his long black motorcar to their private residence in the London suburbs, a man as tall as he is, just as well dressed, moved from number 11 to number 10 Downing Street. Mr. Harold MacMillan, the new prime minister, only had to walk fifteen yards to take charge of the sensitive business of the British Empire.
That news, however, which exploded like a torpedo on the front page of all the newspapers of the world, must have seemed like a meaningless rumor to the cramped crowd of four thousand people on the other side of the Atlantic who gathered a few hours later outside the small protestant church in Los Angeles, California, to attend the funeral of Humphrey Bogart, who died of throat cancer, on Sunday, January 6. “Believe me,” Humphrey Bogart had once said, “I’ve got more female admirers over the age of eight and under sixty than anyone else in this country, and that’s why I earn $200,000 per picture.” A few hours before he died, the most beloved gangster in cinema history, Hollywood’s tender thug had said to his lifelong friend Frank Sinatra, “The only thing that’s doing well is my bank account.”
The great movie actor was the third notable death that January: in the same month, the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral and the Italian orchestra conductor—one of the most famous in the history of music and also one of the richest—Arturo Toscanini also died, while the Polish people ratified their confidence in Wladislaw Gomulka at the ballot box and French drivers lined up at the gas pumps. The Suez adventure only left France with nothing but immense disappointment and a grave fuel crisis. During the transit upheavals caused by the restriction, one of the few things that arrived on time—on January 23—were the seven pounds, two ounces, of Carolina Luisa Margarita, Princess of Monaco, daughter of Rainier III and Grace Kelly.
IN FEBRUARY THE NEWS OF THE YEAR WAS LOST
Rock Around the Clock sold out in London, a million copies in thirty days—the biggest record since The Third Man—the morning that Queen Elizabeth II boarded the plane that would take her to Lisbon. That visit to the discreet and paternalistic president of Portugal, Oliveira Salazar, seemed to have such an indecipherable political intention that it was interpreted as a simple pretext of the English sovereign to go to see her husband, Prince Philip of Edinburgh, who for the last four months had been sailing the last high seas of the British Empire on a yacht filled with men. That was a week of indecipherable news, of frustrated predictions, of hopes dashed in the hearts of journalists, who were undoubtedly anticipating the sentimental event of the year: the breakup of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. In the clean and labyrinthine Lisbon airfield, where the Duke of Edinburgh arrived five minutes late—in the first place because he’s not English, but Greek, and in the second because he had to shave off his beard to kiss his wife—the anticipated event did not happen, and that was, in 1957, the big news that might have been but was not.
On the other hand, in that same February when Brigitte Bardot wore a neckline that plunged to implausible depths at the Munich carnival and the French prime minister, M. Guy Mollet, crossed the Atlantic to reconcile his country with the United States after the Suez disaster, Moscow released the first surprise of what would be the busiest, most disconcerting and efficient year for the Soviet Union. That surprise, presented by Pravda as a secondary event, was the replacement of the sixth Soviet minister of foreign affairs, Dmitri Shepilov, by the new boy wonder of world diplomacy, Andrei Gromyko.
Shepilov, former editor of Pravda, had been appointed in June 1956. His time spent in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs constituted a speed record: all his predecessors had remained in the post for an average of eight years. Shepilov lasted eight months. The West, which hasn’t been able to understand the complex political chess of the Kremlin, had reasons to think Gromyko would only last eight days.
At 8:33 in the morning, in the fog and cold of the indecisive Washington spring, the vice president of the United States, Mr. Richard Nixon, embarked on a seventeen-day trip to Africa. Thus began the third month, March, the month of travel. With the 10,000 miles in three stages that Mr. Foster Dulles traveled a few days later from Australia to New York, the U.S. secretary of state covered the equivalent of sixteen times around the world, since he took office: 236,000 in total. The president of the United States, General Eisenhower, traveled that same week, on board the battleship Canberra, to the idyllic British possession of Be
rmuda, where he was to hold talks with the British prime minister, Mr. Harold MacMillan, who hopped over the Atlantic in an overnight flight to try to put in order some of the things his predecessor Mr. Eden had left pending.
Golda Meir, one of Israel’s ministers, participated in that race against time in a record-breaking trip, from Tel Aviv to Washington, where she intended to remind Mr. Foster Dulles to fulfill American promises to “guarantee that the Gaza Strip would not be occupied again by Egyptian troops and the security of the United States would not allow the strait of Alaska to be closed again.” In this confusion of journeys, of comings and goings around the world, the president of the Philippines, Señor Magsaysay, embarked in a new and well-maintained C-47, which a few hours after takeoff plunged to the ground, in a ball of flames. This accident, and we don’t know for certain whether it really was an accident, was the only one in a month when a simple engine failure could have reversed—or righted—the history of the world. One Philippine personality, Señor Néstor Mato, who was traveling in the same plane as the president and miraculously survived the catastrophe, revealed that the disaster had been provoked by a violent explosion on board the plane. While the rescue expeditions searched in vain for the body of President Magsaysay and political circles in the Western world attributed the accident to a communist attack, President Eisenhower, packing his bags to travel to Nassau, took off his jacket in front of an open window and caught a cold. In the torpor of the African spring, Mr. Nixon was at that hour grinding seeds of wild plants, between his tough schoolboy jaws, as proof of his country’s sympathy for the healthy-looking, befeathered citizens of Uganda.
PEDRO INFANTE GOES. BATISTA STAYS
That untimely travel fever among politicians was aimed to patch up the last loose wires after the Suez adventure, which four months later was still causing headaches for the Westerners, despite the UN troops that were stationed between Egypt and Israel and the fact that the engineers had started to remove the ships General Nasser had scuttled in the canal in November. In reality, if Vice President Nixon traveled to Africa, if he took the trouble to eat and drink as many strange things as the primitive monarchs of the dark continent offered him, he did not miss the opportunity to take mint tea in Morocco with Moulay Hassan, the Technicolor movie prince who constituted one of the three pillars of the Arab world. Mr. Harold MacMillan, for his part, tried to convince the president not to entrust the problems of the East entirely to the UN. The president listened to him very attentively, in spite of his cold and in spite of the fact that—for reasons protocol could never explain—during the meeting he had his ears stuffed with cotton.
Very near where this conversation was taking place, in Cuba, where President Batista was beginning to lose sleep due to problems of public order in Oriente Province, the dance of the year, the music that infected the youth of the whole world in less than three months, from Paris to Tokyo, from London to Buenos Aires, suffered its first setback: rock ’n’ roll was banned on Cuban television. “It was,” said the proscription, “an immoral and degrading dance, the music of which was contributing to the adoption of strange movements, which offend morals and decency.” In a curious coincidence, that very same week, at a party in Palm Beach, the Swedish actress Anita Ekberg and her husband Anthony Steel had a fistfight with the Cuban sculptor Joseph Dobronyi, because he had shown a sculpture of a completely nude woman for which, he said, he’d taken the Swedish actress as a model. In the name of morals and decency, she attacked the sculptor with her high heels. Another Swedish actress, Ingrid Bergman, figured that same week in world news, when she won an Oscar for her role in Anastasia. That event was interpreted as a reconciliation between Ingrid Bergman and the public of the United States, who for eight years considered her questionable because of her marriage to the Italian director Roberto Rossellini.
The explorer Richard Byrd, who had traveled to the South Pole, died a few days before the French politician Edouard Herriot. France barely had time to observe twenty-four hours of mourning, busy as it was with the Algerian War and with the preparations for the reception of Queen Elizabeth.
A young Cuban lawyer, who on one occasion in Mexico spent his last twenty dollars on the publication of a speech, landed in Cuba with a group of opponents to President Batista. The lawyer’s name is Fidel Castro, and he knows strategy better than he does legal codes. President Batista, who is having difficulty explaining why his armed forces have not been able to expel Fidel Castro from the island, gave some exalted speeches to say “all quiet on the eastern front,” but the fact is that the disquiet still continued in April. The government’s enemies were appearing everywhere: on the Calzada de Puentes Grandes—in Havana—where detectives discovered an arms deposit of modern weapons at the beginning of the month; in the east of the country, where serious signs exist that the civilian population is protecting and helping Fidel Castro’s men, as in Miami, in Mexico City, in the key points around the rebellious Caribbean. But public opinion in that minuscule and conflictive corner of the earth, which has not for a single moment been indifferent to political entanglements, forgot about Cuba’s problems to shudder at the death of Pedro Infante, the Mexican singer, victim of an aircraft accident.
THE SCANDAL OF THE CENTURY ENDS. RESULT: 0
Seven thousand miles from the place where the plane carrying the popular idol crashed, a long and complex drama took on comedic overtones: the Montesi case, tried in Venice, with a complete team of defendants and witnesses, judges and lawyers, journalists and simply curious onlookers who rode to court in gondolas, dissolved into meaningless suppositions. The murder of Wilma Montesi, the modest girl from Vía Tagliamento, considered as the scandal of the century, has gone unpunished, and seems likely to stay that way.
Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Paris, defying the last icy breezes of spring, went out onto the streets to greet, in an outburst of monarchical fervor, Queen Elizabeth II, who crossed the English Channel in her private “Viscount” to tell President Coty, in French, that the two countries were more united and closer than ever after their joint failure at Suez. The French, who love the Queen of England almost as much as President Coty, in spite of maintaining the opposite, have not been bothered for a long time to stand for four hours behind a police cordon to greet a visitor. This time they did, and their shouts of welcome concealed for three days France’s tremendous economic crisis, which the prime minister, M. Guy Mollet, tried desperately to repair at the moment when the Queen of England, in Orly, descended from an airplane in which she’d forgotten her parasol.
Secretly, without anyone daring to insinuate it, a fear circulated through the streets of Paris when the British sovereign’s topless automobile drove down the Champs-Élysées: it was the fear that the rebels of Algeria, who are infiltrated everywhere, who in their country confront groups of paratroopers and in Paris play hide-and-seek with the police, would throw a bomb at the royal automobile. That would have been the most spectacular episode of an anonymous war, almost a clandestine war, which has been going on for three years, and which in 1957 was again not resolved as the world waits impatiently.
BOGOTANOS IN PAJAMAS BRING DOWN ROJAS
The inhabitants of Bogotá, many of them in pajamas, went outside, on May 10, at four in the morning, to celebrate the fall of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, who had been in power since June 13, 1953. Since May 7—three days earlier—the country was practically paralyzed in protest at the presidential maneuver of convening the National Constituent Assembly to get himself reelected for another term. Banks, businesses, and factories all closed their doors for seventy-two hours, in a show of passive resistance supported by all the forces of the country. When on May 10, at four in the morning, the capital of Colombia spilled into the streets to celebrate the fall of Rojas Pinilla, he was in the San Carlos Palace, meeting with his most faithful collaborators, and he must surely have had to ask one of them what was happening in the city. In reality, Rojas Pinilla, who flew to Spain with
216 suitcases, did not actually resign until four hours later: at eight in the morning. That same morning, another government collapsed: that of Guy Mollet, in France, which had lasted fifteen months, and was the longest lasting of French governments, after that of Poincaré. Although M. Mollet managed to fall “due to the economy,” observers of French politics knew the true cause was something else: the war in Algeria, which had bled the country’s finances dry and was the real cause of the two crises of 1957.
In Rome, the James Dean club, made up of teenagers who drive seventy-five miles per hour in cars without brakes, in homage to the actor who died last year in a car accident, kept on meeting in secret, after the police interceded in May to put a stop to their activities, at the request of their fathers. None of them had suffered the slightest accident, when the French novelist Françoise Sagan—who profoundly hates being called “the James Dean of French literature”—crashed her car, on the outskirts of Paris. For a week the twenty-two-year-old writer, who four months earlier had scandalized the good bourgeois readers of France with her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse, was in a coma on the brink of death. When she left the hospital, a month later, her new book went to press: Those Without Shadows. Its sales were record-breaking: the first edition had sold out before the fall of the new French government, presided over by M. Bourges Maunouri. Things happened so fast in those two weeks that many of James Dean’s admirers decided to go to the barbershop and have their heads shaved in one fell swoop to follow the fashion set by Yul Brynner.
The Scandal of the Century Page 14
