In Europe

almost American. Nowhere else in Europe have I seen the Third World so naturally present as it is here. The
retornados
, the flood of emigrants from the former colonies, have beentaken in by the Portuguese with the fatigued tolerance of a family that already had so many mouths to feed. And most of them have got by, even the non-whites. Today, over two decades later, they are so much a part of Lisbon that it seems as though they have lived here for ten generations, proud and self-aware, for if there is anything that stimulates integration it is the solidarity of the poor. Once at quayside the crowd scatters away, rushing for buses and cars. In the twilight, great clouds of smoke hang around the little stands that sell roasted chestnuts.
    That evening I have dinner with a friend from Lisbon, in a crowded and aromatic establishment. ‘We still walk around with the inheritance of our isolation,’ he feels. ‘To a certain extent, Spain actually participated in the European adventure, it accepted American aid and modernised in the 1950s. But Portugal under Salazar turned its back on all that. Agriculture here was almost medieval, everything revolved around the colonies. When they revolted, that also meant the end of the Portuguese economy.’
    He cites statistics: fifteen per cent of all Portuguese citizens are still illiterate; in some villages it's as high as forty per cent; since the opening of the borders with the EU, the country's agriculture has almost collapsed; in rural areas, the standard of living is half that of the European average; the villages continue to empty out; almost one out of every three families lives beneath the poverty level. There are nearly as many Portuguese people living in and around Paris as there are in all of Porto.
    Later that evening we stroll through the narrow streets. The rain patters down; this is a place that makes you melancholy. Every once in a while a staggering black man appears from the darkness, reeling from the alcohol, drugs or misery. The sea is everywhere.
    I dedicate a large part of the next day to Lisbon's loveliest tourist attraction: tram line 28. The driver picks his way like a jockey through the old town, rattles his throttle, clenches the silver brake handle as we descend steeply, then kicks in the groaning electric motor again, back uphill. We creak around a corner into an alleyway, stamp like an elephant past cobblers and tailors, the bells ring, the manometers tremble, the pumps rattle, but we make it through every era.
    Lisbon is possessed of a great, dilapidated beauty, the same beauty as some Eastern European capitals, but without the intense buffing-up that has taken place there in the last decade. ‘An entire country, embalmedlike a mummy for forty years! That was Salazar's achievement!’ Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote twelve years ago, during a visit to this city. ‘Salazar was, in his own way, a utopian. His ideal was a world where nothing moved, a state of total hypnosis.’
    During that visit, Enzensberger also took a ride on line 28. Back in 1987 he saw the trams still in their original condition, with little folding gates at the entrance, plush on the seats and all the patents from 1889–1916 stamped on plates in a nickel frame. Today I see buttons, electric sliding doors and leatherette. Along line 15 the supertram glides through the streets like a black and red snake; the old trams have been sold to American amusement parks. Line 28, too, is undergoing a metamorphosis, from a means of transport to a tourist attraction. In the local papers, the panic is rising. There is talk of the danger of landslides in this already hard-struck city, due to the construction of a new subway line, right under the old town. ‘Dozens of old buildings may collapse any moment into a pile of rubble and dust!’
O Independente
writes. The mummy is finally beginning to stir.
    In Lisbon there are almost no traces of the turbulent 1970s, of those days when Portugal seized and held the attention of all Europe. Democratic deeds of heroism are not commemorated with pompous blocks of stone. At Largo do Carmo, a lovely old square, a simple round paving stone is the only thing commemorating the historic scene that took place here in 1974: Caetano's surrender to the rebel tanks and the cheering crowd.
    I try to meet with a few of the protagonists. The left-wing revolutionary hero Otelo de Carvalho cannot be reached. He runs a trading office these days, acquaintances tell me,