Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists

The exorcism of Coca-Louca. Still image from How Fernando Pessoa Saved Portugal, dir. Eugène Green (2018).

I’ll admit to the sanguine imaginary that was bubbling inside my head when I went to see the play Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last November. Having grown up in the mid-1970s in Portugal (with an interruption of two years in Brazil, which was then also under a dictatorial regime), I have often been perplexed about the following conundrum: Why is the longest-lasting fascist regime in twentieth-century Western Europe also the least recognized in global historiographical accounts? In what ways do the specificities of the Portuguese dictatorship—and of its ruler—prevent it from being vehemently designated as fascist, like other authoritarian regimes found elsewhere were? Was Portugal a pale version of fascism? The key to answering these questions, as historian Fernando Rosas explains, lies precisely in understanding how the longevity—nearly a half-century—of Estado Novo (New State), which is the official name of the corporatist system instituted in 1930 by the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, excepts it from being worthy of that name.1

In the background is the classic articulation of fascism as both a political-theological state of exception and a distinctive spatiotemporal horizon. Circular reasoning is at work in that coupling, however, insofar as the temporal hallmark of exception predetermines the very predications of fascism. Accordingly, fascism is exceptional not only because of the apparatuses that support extreme measures, but also because such extremism, once uncapped, is seen as temporally self-limited. It is short-lived. This temporal conditioning of the extreme elects as its counterpart effervescence, which functions as fascism’s chemical formula, as the imprint of a fascist style of sovereignty. It so happens, however, that Salazar abhorred effervescence of any kind. It was rather stillness that guided his fascist methodologies as part of the inevitable course of nature, of the passing of seasons, of life’s progression. His aversion to effervescence is legendarily captured in his prohibition against drinking Coca-Cola (renamed “Coca-Louca”), which was described by him (and communists alike) as the “dirty water of capitalism.” Coca-Cola stood for the political-theological state of exception in the form of a beverage: pungent, bubbly, and short-lived. Significantly, this prohibition, which went on for fifty years, all the way to 1974, was restricted to the metropole. It did not extend to the colonies, where the “altered state” of behavior that was associated with the beverage—which was likened to being “possessed by an evil spirit”—seemed, according to a racist imaginary, permissible. Nor was it prohibited in parts of the Azores after 1953 because of the US forces stationed at Lajes Air Base.

The Estado Novo regime adopted stillness as its method, as its long durée where, as in black-and-white slow-cinema style, actions happen discreetly but are carefully plotted, through whisperings, shadows, and fog, in service of a shrewd propaganda of cultivated “soft manners.” At the same time, realpolitik measures like those used by Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco were adopted: the suppression of all political parties into a single-party corporatist system; a state police force (PIDE) that killed and tortured hundreds of thousands; strict censorship (the so-called “blue-pencil”); the creation of militias (Legião Portuguesa, Mocidade Portuguesa) as well as of penal colonies in Portugal and in colonized areas of Africa and Asia, where empire was being maintained. What differentiated Salazar from those characterized as having a fascist personality was his quiet, reserved demeanor, his dislike of crowds, noise, and travelling. His bachelorism perhaps. His cult of poverty caused him to be depicted as an ascetic secular monk. Stillness was so deeply built into the system that it was believed by many Portuguese, above all by Salazar himself, that he was still governing the country while he was in a semi-comatose state during the last two years of his life. On August 3, 1968, Salazar had his personal podiatrist, Dr. Augusto Hilário, come to his home in Estoril to chisel the corns and calluses that were hardening his feet. Upon sitting in a chair, Salazar fell back and hit his head so hard that he suffered a serious concussion, from which he never fully recovered before his death on July 27, 1970. Despite his death, the regime went on until 1974.

Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists by Tiago Rodrigues stages Salazarismo’s fascist legacy via a duplicity of mirroring and inversion. Family, tradition, rural life, and ritual were key pillars of the regime, the very enabling aspects of its longevity. Yet in the play these elements are inverted, as the family’s house becomes the scenic grounds on which emerges a tradition of executing “fascists.” Powerfully, what once worked as the enabling background for a type of quiet fascism is brought to the foreground: domesticity. The family, composed by seven individuals, wears typical rural clothing regardless of gender or age. A long table covered with a white linen cloth anchors the solemnity of this familial gathering. Given the imminent execution of the captured fascist who, at some point, also joins the family at the table, it is also a prelude to a sacrifice and a reference to Christ’s last supper. The words Não passarão (Shall not pass) are embroidered in red on the tablecloth, and several times during the play the table is moved around in space, marking its double function as a physical support for a shared repast and a spatial barrier or compass in a multidimensional space.

The family’s ritual presumes a mythos of origin. On May 19, 1958, a twenty-six-year-old female farm worker named Catarina Eufémia was killed by a policeman in the rural town of Baleizão, located in the Alentejo region of Southern Portugal, during a strike by rural workers. Transferred to the play, Catarina Eufémia’s killer becomes the first fascist to have been killed by the family, seventy years before the timeline of the play (he was executed by his own wife, in front of his children). From then on, the family met in their house in Baleizão so that all members, equally called “Catarina,” followed the tradition. The play is set in 2028, thus slightly ahead of the audience’s own time of 2024. Yet this near future inspired by events of the past casts its sinister shadows over the present. The text refers to actual events and developments, such as the rise of the ultraright Chega Party in Portugal and its recent victories in the southern region of the country, where Baleizão is located, and which was historically the stage for syndicalist struggles, agrarian reform, and communist resistance to fascism. Yet by projecting itself into the near future, the play also abstracts itself from its specific geo-temporal setting and becomes an allegory for other nations and political contexts, globally, across regimes. The play abounds with lines, props, and gestures that intelligently juxtapose present-day referents—allusions to social media, memes, slogans, and fads—with markers of rural Portuguese tradition, such as the trinity of olive oil, bread, and wine, and the iconic andorinha (swallow), the bird that heralds the arrival of primavera (spring), an important element in the aesthetics of the regime and its rotating seasons.

Isabel Abreu in Catarina e a Beleza de Matar Fascistas (Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists). Photo: Jaime Machado.

It is significant that, despite the relative ignorance about the Portuguese context of an overextended authoritarianism, the plot and action of the play have successfully migrated to other parts of the world. This transferability is nowhere as concentrated as in the last twenty minutes of the show. After a scene of mayhem that, like smoke seemingly out of nowhere, shrouds the visibility of the family member who is holding the sacrificial pistol, seven shots are randomly fired, and the entire family is dead. The fascist is the sole survivor, now alone on stage. Moving toward the proscenium, the fascist, who throughout the play was completely silent, delivers a long monologue. The stage becomes a pulpit of recognizable right-wing talk. The monologue goes on and on, with the fascist spewing hate speech against migrants, condemning minorities, undermining women’s rights, etc., and gradually steering the audience of a sold-out theater to firing their own insults against the speaker, whose rigorous control and performative endurance is at once repulsive and admirable. The audience’s aspersions of f-words—“fascist!” or “shut the fuck-up”—merged with slogans from various banners of global protest, interspersed with jeering and booing. From one corner of the auditorium came the Portuguese revolutionary chant “O povo unido jamais será vencido” (The people, united, will never be defeated), and even the iconic song “Grândola Vila Morena” by Zeca Afonso, which signaled to the Armed Forces that the Revolution was to happen at dawn on April 24, 1974. I too sung the revolutionary song at some point and felt the anger welling up from childhood, from having witnessed mental and physical scars in those who came before me. In Spain and Portugal, where the memory of fascism is still very fresh, the play caused outrage; in some instances, audience members threw objects at, and invaded, the stage. Many walked out. Many more sung ¡No pasarán!, Não passarão!

Such strong reactions from our present-day auditoriums, some suggest, amount to theatrical “Artaudian cruelty.” Audiences were made to feel uncomfortable, incited to react against the surviving fascist, who represents all they despise. According to one prevailing interpretation, the audience’s extraordinary reaction should be understood in terms of the drama of catharsis, which confirms the Aristotelian version of tragic theater and its reliance on a mythos that is valuable for its pedagogic and purgative effects.2 But I wish to propose a different reading by suggesting that there is nothing cathartic about the play. The surviving fascist on stage is the “untragic hero” par excellence, who, much like the baroque theater of Calderón and others, sweeps Aristotelean theater under the rug (the “rogue,” I am tempted to write). Brecht, who is frequently mentioned in the play by the actors themselves, moved away from cathartic expressionism. At stake in his philosophy of theater is precisely the rupture of interiority upon which catharsis depends. Thus, in one interpretation of the play, the small shed in the background is read as a symbol of the interiority that stylistically confirms the great catharsis at the end. In my view, the shed posits not an interior state, but rather a redoubling of the stage, what in Spanish baroque theater was called a “stage within a stage,” as in Hamlet’s mousetrap, or something akin to Brecht’s own theatrical method of splitting the stage and making the split into the play’s proper theme. Rather than securing an interiority, the shed on stage is, if counterintuitively, what breaks the fourth wall. This strategy is evident in Brecht’s own theatrical style. In his tautological Man’s a Man play, for instance, such a redoubled word montage instigates an undecidable, confounding question about whether walls are breaking down or building up.

Brecht’s “epic theater” engages actors and audiences in what he describes as “epic stretching,” a philosophy of theater whose primary goal is to engage with the ability to cite. Brecht’s “epic stretching” is meant to enact and reveal the articulating points of the theatrical event, including what joins the stage, and all that is in, on, and across it, to the audience. In his essay “What Is Epic Theater?” Benjamin compares this revealing of “tension” and “extension” to a ballet dancer who uses the stage not to tell a meaningful story, with a beginning, middle, and end, but to expose the grammars of citable gestures, so that the stage ex-tends to the auditorium.3 Again, what is at issue here is not the empathic identification implied in Aristotelian dramaturgy, but rather a partaking that connects stage and audience in their very separation. For just as the old and the new can never be extricated from one another, so the reality on stage is meant to reveal how it is profoundly related to the auditorium. Brecht’s radical move is to show how rupture and break are not reducible to the new but are at work within tradition itself, much like how those in the audience are not wholly distinct from those acting on stage but are implicated in it.4

Thus conceived, stage and audience are no longer two compartmentalized places; they are sides that partake in the logical movement of acting. To insist on the audience’s cathartic version of released emotions against the fascist spouting fascist ideas is to help perpetuate, and to draw moral comfort from, the separation of Us versus Them. What would have happened if, instead of shouting back at the fascist’s vile aspersions, the audience (me) stayed in absolute silence, actively hollowing out the fascist’s lofty words, so that his verbosity fell lifelessly around him? Could it be that the play’s decisive turn, or peripeteia, is not, as one might be led to believe, an appeal to a collective purging of emotions, but a form of exposing the failure of the mainstream left to effectively reinvent a new grammar of response to—and responsibility for—the rampant expansion of the right globally? The prompt reaction is that such “shocking” speech is beyond respectable response: insult is the only way to talk back. But isn’t that the style of rhetoric that precisely needs to be interrupted, dismantled, neutralized?

In another context, Stuart Hall warned that name-calling can be a distraction from the actual struggle: “Finally there is ‘fascism’!” he writes. “There is a sense in which the appearance of organized fascism on the political stage seems to solve everything for the left. It confirms our own best-worst suspicions, awaking familiar ghost and specters. Away with all those time-waste speculations!”5 Hall’s point is not that “fascism” is an undeserving analytical term but rather that using it for name-calling is the wrong strategy. ”We miss precisely what is specific to this exceptional form of crisis of the capitalist state by mere name calling.” As with the durable Portuguese regime, what makes the rise of the right so alarming is the likelihood of its indefiniteness, and normalization. Brecht’s approach is to bring both actors and audience to realize how caught up they are in each other’s goings-on; the aim is not to purge, but to urge the question: Which historical, economic, and genealogical lineages brought us to this political moment? To this stage of things?

The Catarina who was appointed to kill the fascist in 2028 (who himself was picked for having hurt women) did not—could not—do it. Her refusal interrupts the tradition of initiation that all other family members underwent at the age of twenty-six. She was overtaken by a hesitation to wield violence, and such hesitation led to the survival of the captive and the death of the entire family. But what is the political outcome of such hesitation to use violence? Catarina, the would-be assassin, is haunted by the question, ethical and political, of whether ritually killing a human—even an enemy—helps perpetuate the very reality the killings set out to deny. Perhaps another category of intervention is possible, one that halts, both theatrically and in life, the perpetuation of the impasse we find ourselves in. In her important work On Violence, Hannah Arendt presents the logical grammar of seemingly synonymous terms that, according to the author, ought to be distinguished.6 These are: power, strength, force, authority, and violence. “Power” is the ability to act in concert; “strength” is close to the notion of character; “force” is an uncodified source of energy; “authority” is an acknowledged concentration of, or investment in, offices or people that can be questioned; lastly, “violence” is a state of hollowed-out powers. Arendt notes that these distinctions “hardly ever correspond to watertight compartments in the real world, from which they nevertheless are drawn.” Yet across the spectrum of the terms that she delineates, she highlights one key distinction, that between power and violence. “Politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where one rules absolutely, the other is absent.” Where one prevails, the other withers. Following Arendt, if Catarina’s power has not been destroyed by violence in 2028, even if at the cost of their lives, our political present will have been worth fighting for. Reversing the Portuguese proverb that “it is not because one swallow dies that spring will end,” one could say: it is not because one fascist survives that the winter will not come to an end.