I’m not happy writing this. The day on which a date appears after the date of birth and the dash, the dash that is the crossing of the River Styx with the boatman Charon.
One of the unwritten commandments of journalism is to have the obituaries of important people and, above all, very important people, prepared and ready to come out of the oven. This is what big newspapers like the New York Times do, a flagship that has not gone to the bottom in the naval battle with technology. Obituaries are written in advance, calmly and carefully, the facts are confirmed, so that a divine proportion is established between the figure seen in the intimacy of affection and seen through the lens of History. Some obituaries are even read by “obituaries”.
Woody Allen’s obituary must be written. Advanced age determines anticipation, and in some cases, it is not even expected. The importance generates the dismissal of existence is properly conceived in newsrooms. But, as Woody Allen says, I don’t want to live forever in the hearts of my admirers, I want to live forever in my apartment. Wise words, death can be tolerated without being welcomed with open arms. Neither for those who leave nor for those who remain. Those who stay have the task of talking about those who leave.
I worked for many years, decades of my life, with Francisco Pinto Balsemão. “O Balsemão”, “Doctor Balsemão”, “the boss”, “O Francisco”, “the boss”. In personal terms, “dear friend”. And I don’t want to write about the departure, however sudden and announced it may have been, something elegiac, funereal, dark, tragic or pompous. The man was none of those things. It was solar and vital. Once we had a conversation about the death of an important person, and either he or I said, we have to avoid the “sad outcome” phrase. The “sad outcome” was a cliché of 20th century journalism that Expresso helped so much to destroy, and a pitfall to avoid in prose, any prose. For him, journalistic prose was above all a question of freedom and underneath a question of cleanliness, of clarity. Write in good Portuguese with simplicity and without baroque ornaments. A precept that George Orwell, master of good journalists, had already considered the foundation of good prose.
With a clinical eye for style, and in a detached language of someone who doesn’t want to make amends, Francisco Pinto Balsemão knew the advantages of drying out the paragraph and not slipping into nostalgia and easy tears. For the text, at the time everything was called “the text”, it would be a sad outcome.
And now, that there was in fact an outcome, not tragic and just chronological, I don’t really know what to say. He would tell me, in a gentle way, “if I had prepared the obituary I wouldn’t be in such anguish. It was predictable. You have to be prepared.” And I would stubbornly respond, “You know, certain things we have to wait for the moment to generate spontaneity. Pre-cooked dishes are always reheated.” He would reply, always in a gentle way, “you know, but there are advantages in preparing for events”.
In his life, the great event for which he prepared, with method and intelligence, was the advent of democracy in Portugal. The regime languished in a thousand intrigues, quarrels and weaknesses and the colonial war dragged on with no political solution in sight. Francisco Pinto Balsemão knew, from the English experience of the liberal newspapers that he successfully copied, that free and quality journalism is the cornerstone of democracy and a representative, multi-party political system with universal suffrage and respect for the rights, freedoms and guarantees of citizens. This is how the Expresso project was born and for this reason and for democracy, the Liberal Wing fought against the regime, alongside Sá Carneiro. Thus was born, in addition to Expresso, one of the founding parties of post-revolutionary Portuguese democracy, the PPD, today PSD.
I think that the two big parties, in the phase that PS and PSD are in, ended up not studying the detailed history of their foundation, limiting themselves to paying allegiance and homage to the founding fathers. Sometimes dripping in this lip service, a saliva of ingratitude. If only they knew the onerous problems of installing a new party within a revolution with extremist and contradictory forces, from those nostalgic for the old regime who conspired inside and outside Portugal in sighed exile, to leftist commanders with undisguised Stalinist and especially Leninist characteristics. If only they knew the courage it took. The determination.
The impetus of the revolution, the newness it brought to hearts after almost half a century of oppression, authorized all derivations for brand new forms of oppression and this had to be fought every day, every hour, every minute. For a young man like Balsemão, who could have chosen a rich boy’s life with convertibles and parties with high society and with the King of Spain, known as the Emeritus, in nightclubs and palatial rooms, from Estoril to the French Riviera, courtships and inconsequences, sports and hair in the wind, choosing to work was also a revolutionary impetus.
He chose to work. It should be said, in passing, that our friend the king also chose to work and succeed the Franco dictatorship in democracy, with the crown being a stimulus.
Balsemão first worked as a journalist on the tarimba, and the tarimba was the university of style. And on the tarimba, curiously, obituaries of minor figures were written, to start the party. The newspaper was Diário Popular, which belonged to his uncle, but Francisco didn’t enter through the big door. It was learning to write and think, and to find merit and competence in smaller tasks. The tarimba, then. He spoke of those times with nostalgia, times when so many responsibilities did not weigh on his shoulders, so many salaries to be paid at the end of the month. Part of that longing was the longing for youth, when dreams become reality. He converted. Having arrived here, he would tell me. “Clara, this thing about turning dreams into reality is a bit commonplace, don’t you think?” In gentle mode. And I, reply, would say to you “what would we do without a good commonplace?”
An obituary that he had not prepared arrived on December 4, 1980. Francisco Sá Carneiro, the other Francisco from the PPD, died in a plane crash in Camarate. I was with Sá Carneiro a few hours earlier, at a press conference at the Tivoli hotel, where he announced the defeat in the presidential elections of General Soares Carneiro, the PPD candidate against General Ramalho Eanes. The military supervised politics. For Sá Carneiro, the defeat would be merciless. I wrote down phrases on my notepad, and a mute impotence hovered on the stage. A few hours later, we looked at the smoking, hot, charred wreckage. How was it possible? Dead? A feeling of orphanhood took the country by storm, and overwhelmed the PPD.
Francisco Pinto Balsemão had the tough, very tough mission of becoming the head of the party he had helped to found, and the prime minister. He didn’t have an easy life, and the newspaper he owned didn’t give him an easy life. He was attacked and underestimated, accused of a thousand sins and weaknesses, he was betrayed, which he never forgot, and he was dismounted. He maintained a coherent social project, which he never abandoned. A free and civil society, without military, police or autocratic supervision. Civil society was the dream he helped make come true. He returned to Expresso, not as director.
The rest of the story is known, and others will tell it as a deep line in time and in the History of Portugal, which he traced and will not be erased. He gave the podcast, a new medium to which he joined with youthful enthusiasm, the title “Leaving the World Better”. Lately, I was fascinated with Artificial Intelligence. The past interested him more as a relic than as a life lived, and he looked to the future, what is about to happen, with avidity. In this, he was the same as his friend Mário Soares, with whom he maintained a firm and constant friendship. Both men valued loyalty as an ontological value. As a moral imperative.
One smoked, the other didn’t. One played the drums and enjoyed music, the other confessed to being “deaf”. At the Pessoa Prize jury meetings, another dream of Pinto Balsemão that he founded, being with these two in conversation, a whiskey, a Port, a gin, no orange juice or mineral waters, smoke in the air, it was a history lesson with laughter. We never realized the brevity of our stay on dry land before leaving for the high seas of eternity. We never realize the vulnerability of being, mortality. We never believe that our friends, interlocutors, our mentors and our founders can cease to exist.
Francisco Pinto Balsemão did not found my journalistic career, he made it largely possible and gave me complete freedom. He never censured me, he never dishonored me, he never forbade me, he never singled me out. A good boss. He defended me when I was attacked and when he himself came under intolerable political pressure because of things I wrote. In return, I gave him loyalty, and friendship, which I received in return. Only once did he advise me that moderation was a virtue, but it had nothing to do with political intrigues.
I wanted to leave for the Wakhan Corridor, a kind of autonomous and tribal province within Afghanistan, in Badakhshan on the way to Xinjiang, China. So the end of the world. The Wakhan is high in the mountains, more than four thousand meters above sea level on the route of commercial caravan traffic and opium trafficking. The Panj and Pamir rivers originate there, which converge into the great Amu Dária. Strangely, the Corridor maintained an ancestral and almost peaceful and autonomous way of life in the midst of infinite wars and border disputes in the most unstable and vicious region on the planet, where powers confront each other and where they will die. Cemetery of empires, that is the name of Afghanistan. I dreamed of traveling there through Afghanistan, and this after 9/11, and staying there long enough to understand the mystery of the Corridor. An evasion, which would be written. There, he would be incommunicado. One month, two…
In a gentle way, Francisco made me see that he had responsibilities, a family, and family was very important to him, a weekly column, a weekly television program, in short, responsibilities. We were no longer twenty years old, we couldn’t abandon everything and run to Badakhshan. Where the hell is that? I understood the gesture, and would certainly make a good series of reports. The trip would be paid for by me, I didn’t ask for money, I asked for time, but I would have to assess the damage it would cause to the group’s routine. And in my personal life, which would be at risk in a danger zone. For him, subjecting children to this risk was intolerable.
I replied, in a teenage way, that television or whatever happens weekly in life sometimes becomes a wheel with Alexandre O’Neill’s bloody paw in Adeus Português. And that journalism needs to escape from time to time. To leave the place. Journalism is a crystal with a romantic, or novelistic, facet. Showing what cannot be seen. Tell stories.
He, in serenity, “For me, I have been dragging the shackles for many years and I continue to run. And things are not easy. Leaving the place does not mean going to Afghanistan. The time is not for adventures. Being free does not mean running away”. He said this in a fatherly way.
It didn’t stop me from going, it showed me that decisions have consequences and that we can’t escape what repeats us, what bothers us, what bothers us or what doesn’t make us happy. Of what threatens us. We can’t escape the routine, not always. He never ran away. The world turned twice and journalism became an endangered species, but the optimistic liberal that Francisco Pinto Balsemão was maintained until the end his elegance and sense of justice and independence.
I didn’t go to the Wakhan Corridor.
When he started writing Memoirs he encountered an enemy he didn’t know about: writer’s block. We met at the PABE conspiracy table, “Dr. Balsemão’s table”, the biggest of all, and he described to me the failure of the beginnings, the blank page. He described trips and positions, tried to restore the historical truth, repair some injustices of which he had been a victim, discover immortality. This was going to be time-consuming to write and painful to read. I gave you some advice, start at the beginning. Start by telling us about your life, your childhood, your parents, your youth and so on. The rest goes by drag. Leave the positions and travel. Talk about yourself, start with yourself, who you are, where you come from, and where you went. Simple.
It was simple. The book wrote itself. A top-selling juggernaut that many people thought they would never write. We cannot escape the mission, the work, the responsibility. Not even the blank page. He never ran away. And free remained and we remain.