In Europe

edge of the village which bears the sign ‘
Conquista do Povo – Cooperativa de Consumo dos Trabalhadores do Couço
’ (The People's Conquest – Consumption Cooperative of the Workers of Couço). Inside are long shelves full of Becel margarine, Fitness grain breakfast cereal, Servitas cheese, Huggies Nappies, Seven-Up Light, Nuts bars, Mars bars, Heineken beer and everything else that capitalism has to offer.
    A part of the People's Conquest has been sectioned off with wooden panels. This is the village café where fifteen time-worn men sit in silence, watching a football match on television. On the wall are three clocks, a football poster, a picture showing thirty different species of fish, and a printed notice: ‘Due to the proposal to eliminate section 3 of article 42, a general meeting of the Collective of the Consumption Cooperative will be held by appeal on the 30th of this month at three o'clock …’
    I go in search of Sol Posto, the house with the soft beds. Amid the stinging nettles, only the walls are still standing. In the restaurant a little further along, the proprietor comes and sits at my table.‘Things are going well in this part of Portugal, yes,’ he says. The rest of Portugal, that's adifferent story, but here a lot of European money has flowed in and is starting to produce results. ‘Do you know how many tomatoes we get from a hectare of land these days?’ He writes it down for me: 100,000 kilos. ‘When they're ripe, the whole plain here is bright red, it all goes to the paste factory and we sell it all the way to Russia.’ He says that's why he came back to Couço. He carried out his own private revolution by leaving the village, worked as a painter in a French body shop for twenty years, came back and now he has a restaurant and a twenty-year-old son who does nothing but work with horses, and absolutely nothing else.
    The next morning, all Portugal is dripping with rain. I drive on, a little closer to the coast. There are decaying haciendas everywhere and old factory buildings where the harvests were once dried or canned long ago. Now they are overgrown ruins with birds flying in and out. In the village of Vimeiro the houses are drab and sagging, the rotting doors almost falling apart. Beside the old abandoned factory is a wood where the crows nest, and if you climb the dark path there, past the autumnal kitchen gardens and a neglected orchard, you suddenly find yourself standing before the humble birthplace of António Salazar, tall and stern, like an overly-tended Dracula castle.
    For years Portugal was dominated by academic hubris, by the over-weening pride of this professor who thought he could squeeze a whole country into his theories. But whatever else you can say about him, he was not a man given to appearances. In the village cemetery the better families have stacked their loved ones’ coffins in neat little houses, some of them with venetian blinds at the windows, like railway carriages to eternity. There are no less than nineteen children's graves, all but three of them covered in flowers. But the Salazars rest beneath bare, grey stones, nameless, and the only thing lying on António's grave is a brown, mouldy rose.

Chapter FIFTY-SEVEN
Dublin
    ‘GOLD,’ THE MAN IN THE SCARLET SWEATER SAYS. ‘MARK MY WORDS , get into gold!’ The man he's talking to has bulging eyes and a red face. He starts talking about his house in Spain, the bathroom fittings, the guest house, the swimming pool. ‘But unfortunately, it's ripe for selling,’ his wife says. ‘At first the village was so cute and simple, but now the villagers have smelled money and then it all goes downhill quite quickly.’ ‘That's right, then the property loses its charm,’ the sweater man says. ‘Then it's time to divest.’ ‘Money ruins so much,’ the woman says. ‘Fortunately it's not too late, it hasn't lost its value.’
    The car deck of the overnight ferry from Santander to Plymouth is full of dusty Land Rovers, the mood in the ship's restaurant remains animated all night. The news-stand on board sells the
Daily Mail
. War has broken out again, this time between England and France, over meat imports and whatnot, and feelings are running high. The newspaper systematically refers to the French as the ‘Huns’, an epithet once reserved for the troops of Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler. An English footballer reveals how he was spat on by a French player: ‘I could smell the garlic.’ The editors: