A Fado for Jos

Under the bland rule of Dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, 70, Portugal has slumbered for more than a quarter century. Occasionally the nation of 11,450,000 seems on the point of waking, e.g., in 1958, when General Humberto Delgado (now in exile in Brazil) broke all the rules by campaigning seriously for the presidency. Last year Portugal twitched again when the government announced that it had smashed a military plot to overthrow aging Dr. Salazar. Among those arrested: handsome Captain Jose de Almeida Santos, 39. a cavalry officer with a record of distinguished service in the Portuguese colonies of Goa and Mozambique.

Clapped into prison at Elvas, 135 miles from Lisbon, Captain Santos set about plotting his escape: "The government does not honor its own laws, and I would not receive a fair trial," he told a prison friend. With the help of another prisoner and a sympathetic jail guard, Santos escaped last November. He was met outside the jail by his young mistress, Maria Jose Sequeira, who drove Santos and his two friends to a cabin hideout near the Spanish border. As time went on, the others made their way to safety in France, but Captain Santos remained behind in the cabin.

Last week, on the lovely beach at the fashionable resort of Guincho, near Lisbon, a fisherman's dog dug into the sand, uncovered a shallow grave in which lay the body of a man. He had been shot in the back of the head and through the heart, was dressed in a sweater, grey trousers and black shoes--placed on the wrong feet. The dead man was identified as Captain Jose Santos.

The political opposition blamed his death on the police; the police, as is customary in Portugal, blamed it on the Communists. But whoever committed the murder, the story of handsome Captain Santos and his beauteous mistress captured public imagination and brought on a rash of clandestine poems and fados (wailing songs of lost love). Said one fado for Josee last week:

They killed him from behind, not in front. Sand dunes, storms and rain covered tip the act; The newspapers and the police covered up the rest.

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