“Walking down through Baixa from the hotel, Morgan crossed Rua do
Arsenal, the street where Capitão Salgueiro Maia had confronted units of
a tank-brigade loyal to the Caetano regime – main-battle tanks, as big as
dinosaurs in a museum, gunning their engines in plumes of blue exhaust –
climbing down from his armoured car, his arms raised high above his head,
walking under the muzzles of the guns and calling on the tank-crews to join
the revolution: the exact intersection of history and the individual.
Morgan waited for a gap in the traffic, hurrying across the street between tour
buses. In the vivid sunlight, through tunnels of deep shade, swifts and house-martins
flashed through the arcades on the north side of the square. Everywhere, in the
surging traffic, in the shops and cafés, in the ceaseless intensity of the murmuring
crowds, the glittering, elaborate surfaces of the morning lay like an impenetrable
lacquer over the past. Deep below, unreachable at the bottom of a well of time,
Morgan and Matty’s ghosts ran through the city like drowned children.”
Flirting at the Funeral p.89