[African Diamonds 01.0] The Angolan Clan

by Christopher Lowery

  “Did he know much about it?”

  “He knows of my father’s reputation down there, which is a good thing. I suppose that’s why he invited me, getting some local input. He’ll know that Mario’s people are ultra loyal to the family and to APA. No leverage for him there.”

  “Did you tell him about Henriques?”

  “Only that we do some banking business with him. Nothing about the joint venture.”

  “Some bloody joint venture. It’s on the back burner until God knows when. We don’t know if it’ll ever come off it.” Charlie was furious that the opportunity might be lost.

  “Cunhal did tell me one thing which I wasn’t expecting.”

  “And that was?”

  “They’re reopening diplomatic relations with Moscow. It’s already in the works.”

  “What did I tell you? Now we’ll be living in a Russian suburb. I suppose you offered to be the new ambassador?”

  “They can’t afford me. Besides, I don’t speak communist.”

  Olivier would try to maintain close contact with this new source of information. If nothing else, APA might be better informed than their competitors.

  This state of uncertainty continued for the next several months. The political scenario changed incessantly and daily life became a dangerous and sometimes terrifying experience. Tanks and soldiers were ever present throughout Lisbon and other large cities, and street searches were common. Anti-fascist demonstrations occurred almost daily, some of them very violent. Cars were burned and homes, shops and offices vandalised if the left-wing crowd believed they were owned by capitalists. More properties and businesses were taken over by the workers and the mood of the people shifted more and more to the left. The communist faction was taking control.

  On July 15th, at nine in the evening, Alvaro Cunhal and his bodyguard, Alberto Pires da Silva, arrived at the Palace of Belem and were taken up to the first floor. Leaving Alberto seated outside, Cunhal was shown into a palatial reception room. Seated around a table were four left-wing members of the Junta of National Salvation: de Azevedo, Neto, Rosa Coutinho and da Costa Gomes. Also present was General Vasco dos Santos Gonçalves. The remaining three moderate members of the Junta, including the President, General Spinola, were noticeably absent. After about an hour, Cunhal left the room and Alberto drove him back to his apartment.

  On July 18th, General Vasco dos Santos Gonçalves, the Marxist ‘strong man’ of the MFA, replaced the moderate Adélino da Palma Carlos as Prime Minister of Portugal.

  “I’ve just heard that the MFA, that’s the Communist Committee who are in charge of the army now, have set up something called COPCON.”

  It was a warm summers’ evening, with not a breath of wind. Charlie and Ellen were strolling around the garden in Cascais. Ronnie was in bed and they had just finished dinner on the terrace. The smell of eucalyptus and jasmine pervaded the air. Apart from the sound of crickets chirping in the bushes, there was no noise at all. A tiny sliver of a moon was slowly making its journey across the backdrop of stars.

  Charlie’s words dragged Ellen reluctantly back from this idyllic moment into the reality of the politics of post-revolution Portugal. “What on earth does it stand for?”

  “I don’t know the exact name in Portuguese, but it’s a new secret police force, run by the army. It’s just like the Secret Political Police that Salazar set up to destroy communism. But this time it’s to convert everybody to the Russian flag. There’s five thousand of them and they’re going to beat the crap out of the right-wing and moderate citizens until they turn the entire population of Portugal into red flag carriers. It’s insanity! They disbanded the Fascist secret police and now they’ve replaced them with the Marxist secret police. I suppose they’re going to bash people on the other side of the head, to show the change in their political stance.”

  Ellen shivered. “You don’t think any of this is going to affect us here in Cascais, do you? I mean, Ronnie and school, the club, our family life and everything. And what about you, your job, the APA business, our livelihood?”

  “I honestly don’t know, Ellen. The communists are winning every point for the moment but I can’t believe the international community will let the country become an outright communist state. It’s in nobody’s interests for that to happen, especially the Portuguese people.

  “And if it does happen, you don’t get changes like that overnight. We’ll have time to pull up sticks and get back to the UK, or wherever we decide to go. I’m quite capable of starting again, it won’t be the first time. But for the moment, I don’t think we should panic. Cascais is just a tiny fishing village. We’re not in the eye of the storm, we’re not Portuguese and we don’t own big properties or businesses. I’m making good money here and we’re saving a lot. I think we should wait until we see a change in the things that really affect us.”

  “That’s more or less what the British embassy said when I called them yesterday. They haven’t given out any panic instructions, so I suppose you’re right.” Ellen was a pragmatic Yorkshire woman who liked to form her own impressions, with the maximum amount of input. “And I’m not so sure it’s the best time to be thinking about starting again. My father says things in the UK are really bad. With a Labour government and an oil crisis, unemployment is bound to be on the rise again. We’d best wait and see what happens.

  “I’ve been thinking about Nick,” she continued. “He shouldn’t be taking risks in Lisbon if we’re not. He should move in with us until we see what happens. You might find you need to go into town less often. He must be fed up living in that hotel, it’s no fun on your own.”

  Won’t it be a lot of work for you?”

  “Charlie, you know very well that Maria does just about everything in the house,” Ellen scoffed. “It won’t make any difference to me at all.”

  Charlie liked the suggestion. This change might help to remotivate Nick. He had little to do since his project had been shelved, so Charlie had brought him into his international business team. He was a clever worker, quick on the uptake and with a mind for detail. More importantly, he was one of the few men he could trust. His time could be spent more productively than moping around, waiting for a solution to the Angolan project.

  He told Nick the next morning at the APA offices. “It’s Ellen’s idea, she thinks you need mothering. The property is big enough for ten. You don’t have to worry about treading on our toes. It’ll be just like staying in the hotel except you’ll have company.”

  Nick cheered up at this invitation, he had been feeling lonely and depressed He still missed Rachel and being in the almost empty hotel was not helping. He had also dropped his morning jog, the city had become far too dangerous. He could take it up again in Cascais.

  They drove down to the hotel that afternoon to pick up his bags. As they walked from the car, Charlie was looking around, sniffing the air, like a bloodhound on the trail.

  “What’s up?”

  “Have you noticed the difference?”

  “You mean the soldiers and tanks and stuff?”

  “No. Those are the obvious things. I mean the other changes, the ones you can’t see.”

  “Like what?” Nick wasn’t following Charlie’s drift.

  “It’s hard to put your finger on it. It’s just that nothing seems the same. There’s a different smell in the air, you know? Not that soft, warm, fragrant smell like before. That’s gone. It’s more like a hard, impersonal smell now. There’s a different mood, a different tempo. You can actually feel it, smell it, hear it. Something precious is gone and I doubt it’ll ever return.”

  Charlie was right. Things would never be the same again, there were too many changes which were now irreversible. However, for most people, it would take time for those changes to become apparent. Time for them to mature. Time before they would wreak their eventual havoc on the lives of everyone concerned. Inside and outside the state of Portugal.

  Nick moved in that evening, happy to be with friendly company a
nd away from the capital in the frighteningly chaotic ambience that had enveloped the country. They spent the weekends swapping rumours with the other members at the tennis and golf clubs. Everyone seemed to know someone who had already left the country.

  “At this rate we’ll be the only ones left,” Nick cracked as they drove back to the house one Sunday evening. The remark was truer than he could foretell.

  Apart from the fact that life was still comparatively tranquil and there were fewer disturbances in Cascais, Ellen had other reasons for wanting to stay. She didn’t want to disrupt Ronnie’s school life. He had just started at St. Julien’s English School in Carcavelhos and had made friends and was doing well at his lessons. She enjoyed her tennis and her golf and Charlie had a well paid job which he loved. As long as they were safe, she would give things a chance to get better.

  At the tennis club singles championship, she was beaten by a new member, a young Australian woman called Maggie Attwell. It turned out that her son, Alan, was a schoolmate of Ronnie’s at St. Julien’s. The two women became friends and started playing together regularly.

  Ellen rationalised her losing streak. “She’s much too good for me, but I don’t mind her beating me all the time. My game is actually improving with every match I lose.”

  Divorced, Maggie worked with the Australian Consulate in Lisbon as a Commercial Attaché and lived in a flat along the road in Estoril. They invited her to bring Alan round to swim with Ronnie at the weekends. Then they would enjoy an al fresco lunch together.

  Ellen would often play the piano for them and the kids adored it. “Play the ABBA song, Mammy. Waterloo.” It wasn’t what she was trained for, but it helped to keep them happy, especially over the occasional rainy weekend. Nick printed out the words so they could all sing along. ABBA had no need to worry about the competition.

  Ellen was also happy to have a new source of information to update her on events in Portugal. Every week, Maggie briefed her on the latest diplomatic moves and likely happenings. Like the British, the Australians hadn’t issued any leaving instructions to their staff or expat residents. This constant flow of information comforted her in their decision to remain, but she was prepared to get out at a moment’s notice if the news changed.

  Charlie and Nick stopped going into Lisbon on the train, it had become too dangerous. Bands of demonstrators and hooligans roamed the carriages, terrorising anyone who looked like a capitalist, especially foreigners. They drove in on the Marginal, the coast road, although they were constantly held up by army convoys, political rallies and occasional road blocks.

  Then Charlie’s beloved Triumph TR4 was written off by an apparently deranged driver on a perfectly clear morning, near Ronnie’s school. Only the sports car’s “A” frame chassis prevented them both from being killed. The driver denied that he’d been driving at over a hundred an hour on the wrong side of the road. The police came to the scene, but went off without making a report when they saw it was a Portuguese driver against a foreigner.

  Charlie was able to get a statement from a teacher at the school who witnessed the ‘accident’ and he invested the insurance money into a fairly new Morgan, offered at a bargain price by a friend at the golf club who was returning to the UK.

  Nick was convinced that the man had deliberately driven into them, but Charlie couldn’t credit it. “There are easier ways of killing us than by a suicidal crash on the Marginal.”

  “Not if you want to make it look like an accident. Nothing would surprise me these days.”

  The political situation made business increasingly difficult, both inside and outside of Portugal. Charlie had to continuously replace left-wing employees who walked out of the company, as well as disillusioned outgoing trading partners with incoming ones. But he somehow managed to juggle all of the conflicting balls in the air and maintain traction in his international division.

  Thanks to his skilful management the division was doing well, exceeding their annual targets. Nick flew down to Luanda on a couple of occasions to see Mario, the local APA director, about shipments and new business opportunities, which were surprisingly numerous.

  Henriques, the mine owner, came to Luanda to meet him and they tried to salvage a business opportunity from the joint-venture. It was a compromise approach, using Nick’s contacts to process the rough diamonds in small batches and go directly to the market with finished stones, to increase sales prices and profits. The strategy was feasible, but the timing depended on developments in Portugal and Angola, which were not looking promising.

  Olivier and Alberto met together frequently, the banker’s initial reason being to maintain a contact in the political arena. Surprisingly, the two of them became friends, despite their widely differing points of view. The Angolan turned out to be a very cultured person, well read and speaking French, Russian and English besides his own language. Born in 1920, Alberto was a third generation Angolan from Spanish and Portuguese blood. His great-grandparents had left Portugal to establish a smallholding near Luanda, farming and raising livestock.

  In 1950 he had married Inês, a niece of a senior official in the Portuguese Colonial Administration in Luanda. He was soon offered a job in the administration service and five years later he was promoted to senior liaison officer. Disgusted at the sight of so much undistributed wealth shared by just a few hundred Portuguese families, he joined the PCA, the Angolan Communist Party. At that time, there was little communist activity and it was hidden deeply underground. Salazar’s secret police quickly snuffed out any political movement that he didn’t control. The information that Alberto could obtain through his key position in the administration was highly valuable and he became an influential member of the PCA.

  In 1956, the PCA was merged into Agostinho Neto’s MPLA, Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola and he became a prominent member, happy to help a group of apparently impotent intellectuals to fight the occupation of the fascist Portuguese regime. He was proud to be chosen to go to Portugal in 1958 to organise Cunhal’s escape, although he told Olivier, “I’m sure it was only because I was big enough for the job, not smart enough.”

  When Neto and his MPLA supporters were exiled from Angola in 1959 his ambitions of being involved in a swift rebellion, leading to independence were thwarted, but now that he’d returned to Lisbon, he was witnessing the resurgance of a movement that he’d believed in and fought for for over twenty years.

  He tried to convince Olivier that the only solution for his country was Marxism. “Angola is not ready for democracy. If we can get rid of what is in reality a Portuguese dictatorship, my country will need time to adjust, time to educate and train people who have been treated like slaves for many, many generations. This can not be done in a capitalist environment. It will be just another form of slavery. Our way is the only way.”

  Olivier couldn’t convince Alberto otherwise. It looks like we have to go through another failed communist experiment to get back to where we started, he realised.

  Apart from the occasional public demonstration and the inevitable interruptions to services and utilities, things remained fairly quiet in Cascais. After Maggie Attwell had been over to the house several times, Nick invited her to dinner and they started to see each other regularly. He bought an old Opel Kapitan. A huge, six cylindered battleship of a car, with an enormous interior and a boot big enough for the contents of a small house. Nick called it the ‘Tank.’ He would stay over at Maggie’s flat in Estoril and take her and Alan out on the weekends.

  Maggie was great company, always in a good mood and he started to put the disappointment of his failed project behind him and enjoy himself again. He found that Australian women were very liberated. She taught him a lot of interesting things in bed. He never forgot Rachel, but he was not in a hurry to leave Portugal.

  It seemed that from one day to the next, the tourists stopped coming. In July and August the beaches at Cascais and Estoril were deserted of holiday-makers. Charlie’s parents and Ellen’s mother had us
ually come down for a couple of weeks’ holiday in previous years, but they decided that tanks, soldiers and machine guns were not the most inviting welcome to Lisbon.

  During these months, hundreds of thousands of Portuguese ex-patriots and first or second generation African settlers returned home from the colonies. The numbers of homeless and jobless rose on a daily basis. There was no plan to look after them, no money to help them.

  On the other side of the street from the Bishop’s house in Cascais there were no houses, just a small copse of trees, where some immigrants had set up tents, like a small shanty town. The newcomers hadn’t disturbed the Bishop’s daily life except to make Ellen feel guilty.

  She said to the others, “Can you imagine this happening in England? These poor displaced people have been dumped here and they’ve got nothing. The only thing they can do is to go begging in the Cascais market place. The whole town is full of beggars. Where do they all come from? Nobody cares about these people. They’re not criminals. It’s disgusting, I wish we could do something about it.”

  But there was nothing they could do. It seemed that there was nothing anybody could, or would do. Even though Ellen was possibly right and the immigrants were not criminals, they were obliged to turn to petty theft and pick-pocketing to survive. But there was no evidence of increased police presence. The bars in Lisbon were full of prostitutes, both female and male and seemingly younger and younger. Crime began to be a real problem, people were afraid.

  TWENTY-ONE

  August – September, 1974

  Lisbon, Portugal

  In August, Charlie’s secretary, Bella, came to him with an invitation to her wedding to Carlos Souza Machado. The date was set for Saturday 21st September. The ceremony was to be held in the sixteenth century Jeronimos Monastery church in Belem and the reception at the Cocina del Palacio Nacional de Sintra, a famous restaurant to the north of Cascais.