It was Christmas 1961. Margarida, then with the false identity of Teresa, 33 years old and nine years of activism in the PCP, was living in hiding in Lisbon with her partner, José Dias Coelho, then “Fausto”, 38 years old. and an affiliate since 1949.
They were both visual artists, had met in the visual arts and had been expelled for activities against the regime. They were united by an overwhelming love and by 1961 they already had two young daughters. They had gone underground in 1955, when the Party, using their talents as visual artists, commissioned them to set up a workshop for forging documents (passports, identity cards, trade union identity cards, bicycle licenses, etc.).
Days before Christmas 1961, José left home and there was no way to return. Margarida started to think he had been arrested. On the 26th, when night fell, he met a comrade and he told him, out of the blue, that José had not been arrested – he had been murdered by PIDE, with two direct shots, on the 19th, in what was then Rua da Creche , in Alcântara, today Rua José Dias Coelho. Margarida even asked if she could go to the funeral, but that had already happened. Many years later he told how he reacted. Desperate, she began to wander the streets of the Restelo district: “It was full of lights hanging from the trees and everything was sparkling with Christmas. It was a terrible thing, I never saw Christmas lights and things like that again..” José Afonso composed “Death left the street” and evoked this murder.
Daughter of the Portimão bourgeoisie (her father headed the local branch of the Bank of Portugal), born in 1928, she said several times that when she went underground she did not know how to cook or wash clothes (“with my parents at home we had two maids”). And it was men from the party who taught her. He hated washing sheets so much that with the first machine he had, only after April 25, he spent the entire time watching how it worked: “What a great satisfaction, you can’t even imagine !” Regarding the machismo of the communists, he divided them into two groups: “Party men, in different parts of the country and even in the capital, were influenced by the general climate in which little attention was paid to the specific problems of women. But this did not exist among central management and the general staff.”
After Dias Coelho’s death he went into exile. He worked directly with Cunhal in Moscow and at “Rádio Portugal Livre”, in Bucharest. He returned to Portugal in 1968. He was in Matosinhos when April 25 occurred. His then partner Carlos Costa (1928-2021) led the PCP organization in the North. From 1974 to 1988 he was a member of the Central Committee. She served as a deputy in the third and fourth legislatures.
He dedicated his life to never letting the memory of the struggle against the dictatorship disappear. In 2018 he published “Memoirs of a Forger – The Clandestine Struggle for Freedom in Portugal” (Colibri editions). He died on Thursday at the age of 95 in Portimão. Not so long ago, during a session with young people, he assured: “Although there were explorers and exploited, there must be a revolution.” The PCP reported that the body of Margarida Tengarrinha will be in the combustion chamber of the morgue of the Igreja do Colégio, in Portimão, on Tuesday, October 31, from 9:30 am and will leave for the Albufeira crematorium at 12:30 pm. The cremation will take place at 2 p.m..
Source: DN
