Comic Odyssey

Since his days as Portugal's NATO military attache in Washington a decade ago, General Humberto Delgado, 55, has been an admirer of General Douglas MacArthur. He is not an admirer, however, of Portugal's Dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. After Delgado fled to exile in Brazil in 1959, he began flooding his homeland with cream-colored pictures bearing a familiar slogan. "En voltarei," they proclaimed--"I shall return."

Last week Delgado disclosed that he had indeed returned, but only briefly and ingloriously. Back in Brazil after a secret twelve-day visit to Portugal that was more comic odyssey than triumphal march, he confessed that he had vainly tried to join the abortive New Year's coup at Beja (TIME, Jan. 12). It proved to be, he said, a most "untimely return."

Too Much for the Passport. Delgado got out of Portugal soon after he polled an uncomfortably large 23% of the vote against Premier Salazar's hand-picked candidate for President in the 1958 election. Impatient for action and convinced that "the only solution is bullets," he flew to Morocco last October to hatch a rebel lion against the durable Dr. Salazar. Delgado-made 18 futile attempts to sneak into Portugal, finally decided he needed a passport, a readily available item in wide-open Casablanca. The Colombian, French, Italian and U.S. passports offered to him by dealers were too expensive, but somehow he got hold of a Portuguese passport. "I found it on the street," he says with a straight face. While the plotters inside Portugal postponed the uprising from Dec. 3 to Dec. 24 and at last to Dec. 31, Delgado cultivated a disguise to match the man in the passport picture: he shaved off his sparse hair

("How beautiful it was," he laments, "what a shame." He still keeps a lock of hair in an envelope), grew a thick mustache and blackened it with mascara, put on horn-rimmed glasses, stuffed a lump of metal in his right boot to force a limp and affected a severe facial tic.

Looking more like a palsied pensioner than a fire-breathing general, Delgado limped off to misadventure. He sailed across the Strait of Gibraltar--after losing two days because he missed one ferry--then drove to Seville to meet his resourceful Argentine traveling companion. Mrs. Arajaryr Campos, 27. In the lining of her overcoat was sewn one of Delgado's flashier uniforms--for use in the event that Salazar's 33-year regime were to crumble in the face of his visit.

Delgado lost five more days dickering unsuccessfully for horses to cross the border, finally risked driving into Portugal by bus through a guarded checkpoint. Limping, stooping and squinting "like somebody out of a horror movie," Delgado was admitted without question, and headed straight for a grubby pension in Lisbon. "I was used to living in palaces," says he disgustedly.

Too Late for the Party. On New Year's Eve, two carloads of what appeared to bs drunken celebrators roared up to Delgado's hideaway. Out stepped a man in white tie and tails. "General," he whispered, "the revolution is tonight," and off sped the cars toward the southern provincial capital of Beja to join a planned attack on infantry barracks. But it was all over by the time they got there: the attack had been beaten back, with two of the insurgents killed and 13 arrested. Delgado and his party hastily left the scene. He holed up for two days in a remote village, then caught a train to Spain and hustled back to Brazil.

"I had promised I would return to the soil of the mother country," Delgado declared last week. "I kept my promise."

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