The Anatomy of a Moment

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The frozen image shows the right wing of the chamber of the Congress of Deputies on the evening of 23 February. Almost a quarter of an hour has gone by since the rebel Civil Guards burst in and Captain Jesús Muñecas has just announced from the speakers’ rostrum the arrival of a competent military authority to take charge of the coup. At this precise moment the camera — the only camera still in operation — shows a fixed and frontal shot of that area of the chamber, with the figure of Adolfo Suárez almost in the exact centre of the image, monopolizing the spectator’s attention as if they were filming a historical drama in the hall and the Prime Minister were playing the starring role.

Nothing belies the similarity when the image unfreezes; nothing will contradict it to the end of the recorded film. After Captain Muñecas’ speech the atmosphere in the chamber relaxes, the deputies give each other lights and cigarettes and weak glances and Adolfo Suárez asks an usher for a cigarette with gestures and then stands up, walks over to the usher, takes the offered cigarette and goes back and sits down again. Suárez is an incorrigible smoker, he always has tobacco with him and this evening is no exception (in fact, he has already smoked several cigarettes since the beginning of the incursion), so his gesture is a way of sounding out the assailants, testing their level of permissiveness with the hostages and investigating a way of acquiring information about what is going on. He soon finds out. He hasn’t smoked half the cigarette yet when a man in civilian clothes enters through the right-hand door; behind him appears Lieutenant Colonel Tejero, who motions to his men to let the recent arrival take a seat next to the Prime Minister, on the staircase running up beside the benches. The man (thin and tall and swarthy, with a white handkerchief sticking out of the pocket of his dark jacket) sits in the indicated spot and he and Suárez begin a dialogue that goes on almost without interruption for the next several minutes; the word dialogue is excessive: Suárez just listens to the words of the recent arrival and occasionally offers comments or questions, or what look to be comments or questions. Who is the recent arrival? Why has he been allowed into the chamber? What is he talking about with Suárez? The recent arrival is Cavalry Major José Luis Goróstegui, General Gutiérrez Mellado’s adjutant; credibly, the assault on the Cortes has caught him by surprise in the vicinity of the building or in some office in the building; also credibly, he has made use of his position as a military officer, friend or acquaintance of Captain Muñecas and acquaintance of Tejero to get them to let him sit next to the Prime Minister and tell him what he knows. To judge by the distracted attention the ministers and deputies around Suárez pay him, Goróstegui must have very little and not very important news to impart; to judge by the undivided attention Suárez pays him, it must be abundant and of enormous importance. The news is most likely all four things at once, and Tejero has most likely allowed Goróstegui to talk to Suárez to undermine his morale, so that he’ll understand that everything in the Cortes is under control and that the coup has triumphed.

Several identical minutes pass in this way, after which a knife-like voice cuts the silence filled with coughs and murmurs that seems to shroud the chamber. ‘Doctor Petinto, please come here. This gentleman appears to be slightly injured.’ The voice belongs to one of the golpista officers or an NCO who summons the parliamentary doctor to attend to Fernando Sagaseta, deputy from the Canary Islands, who’s been hit by some pieces of the ceiling that have fallen after the shooting. All the parliamentarians have turned at the same time towards the upper area of the chamber, where the voice came from, though they soon go back to their positions on the bench; Adolfo Suárez does so as well, and seconds later resumes his discussion with Major Goróstegui. At a certain moment, however, the two men fall silent and stare at the left-hand entrance to the chamber: there, after a few seconds, almost imperceptible in the bottom corner of the screen, Lieutenant Colonel Tejero’s back appears, then he turns right round to look over the whole chamber, as if making sure that all is in order; the lieutenant colonel disappears and a moment later appears again and then disappears once more, and his coming and going is a mirror image of other comings and goings that animate the image: a deputy — Donato Fuejo, doctor and Socialist — goes up to Fernando Sagaseta’s seat, two ushers take glasses of water to the stenographers and finally take the stenographers out of the chamber, a journalist with his accreditation visible on the front of his pullover goes up one of the side stairways followed by a Civil Guard. These movements have not interrupted Adolfo Suárez and Major Goróstegui’s speculations and commentaries and, just after Antonio Jiménez Blanco (UCD member and president of the Council of State, who has heard the news of the assault on the radio and has managed to get the assailants to authorize him to enter the Cortes to share his colleagues’ fate) comes into the chamber and sits behind Goróstegui, Suárez gets up from his bench and says to the two Civil Guards watching the entrance to the chamber: ‘I want to talk to the commander of the force’; then he walks down the stairs and takes a few steps towards the Guards. What happens next is not registered by the camera, because, although unaware that it’s still recording, a Civil Guard has just bumped into its viewfinder and made it present a confusing close-up of the press box; the sound of the chamber, however, can still be heard clearly. We can hear Suárez’s voice, unintelligible, in the midst of a commotion; we hear harsh military voices trying to impose silence (one says: ‘Calm down, gentlemen!’; another says: ‘The next time someone moves their hands this is going to move, got it?’; another says: ‘Hands still. That’s for when you’re alone. Here it’s over.’); harsher, louder and more contemptuous than the others, one voice ends up dominating (‘Mr Suárez, stay in your seat!’) and that’s when the Prime Minister manages to make himself heard amid the uproar (‘I have the authority as Prime Minister of the government. .’) until his voice is drowned out in a hail of shouts, insults and threats that seem to quieten the hall and return it to the simulacrum of normality it has been for half an hour. From that moment on the earlier mortuary silence reigns in the chamber again, while the camera, abandoned, continues offering a static shot of the press box; there, in the minutes that follow, a disorder of unconnected fragments crosses in chiaroscuro: the fleeting face of a woman wearing glasses, jackets with illegible journalists’ accreditations, tense hands that vent their nervousness or fear by twirling cheap ballpoint pens or holding shaking cigarettes, a bundle of papers with Cortes letterhead lying on a step, the wrought-iron railing of a stairway, ties with rhomboids and white shirts and white fists and violet dresses and pleated skirts and grey sweaters and trousers and hands gripping folders bursting with papers and briefcases. And finally, almost thirty-five minutes after the beginning, the film finishes with a whirlwind of snow.

Chapter 1

That’s how the film ends: in a perfectly meaningless chaos, just as if the essential document about 23 February was not the chance result of a camera left running during the first minutes of the seizure, but the result of the guiding mind of a producer who decides to conclude his work with a plausible metaphor of the coup d’état; also, with a vindication of Adolfo Suárez as Prime Minister. Suárez was not a good Prime Minister during his last years in power, when democracy seemed to begin to establish itself in Spain, but maybe he was the best Prime Minister to confront a coup d’état, because no other Spanish politician of the time knew better than he did how to conduct himself in extreme circumstances or possessed his sense of the dramatic, his convert’s faith in the value of democracy, his mythologized concept of the dignity of a prime minister, his knowledge of the Army and his bravery in opposing the rebel military officers. ‘We must make very clear that in Spain there is no such thing as a civilian power and a military power,’ wrote Suárez in June 1982, in an article where he protested the benevolence of the sentences handed down to those prosecuted for the 23 February coup. ‘Power is only civilian.’ That was one of his obsessions during his five years at the head of the government: he was the Prime Minister of the country and the military officers’ only obligation was to obey his orders. Until the last moment of his mandate he got them to obey, until the last moment of his mandate he thought he’d subdued the military, but in the very last moment of his mandate on 23 February that belief was thwarted; maybe he’d lost his touch, or maybe it was impossible to subdue them. In any case, Suárez was not unaware of how to handle them, but he didn’t always think he should have to handle the military with kid gloves, and from the very day he became Prime Minister and especially as he established himself in the post he had a tendency abruptly to remind them of their obligations with orders or rudeness: he liked to take generals down a peg or two by making them wait outside his office door and never hesitated to confront any soldier who questioned his authority or showed him a lack of respect (or threatened him: in September 1976, during a very heated argument in Suárez’s office, having just accepted or demanded his resignation as Deputy Prime Minister, he was told by General de Santiago: ‘Let me remind you, Prime Minister, that this country has seen more than one coup d’état.’ ‘And let me remind you, General,’ answered Suárez, ‘that this country still has the death penalty’); he was brave enough to make vital decisions like the legalization of the Communist Party without the approval of the Armed Forces and against their almost unanimous view; and therefore the store of 23 February anecdotes is overflowing with examples of his outright refusal to be intimidated by the rebels or to cede a single centimetre of his power as Prime Minister. Some of these examples are inventions of Suárez’s hagiographers; two of them are undoubtedly true. The first happened in the early hours, in the tiny room near the chamber where Suárez was shut away after his first attempt to parley with the golpistas. According to the testimony of the Civil Guards keeping watch, at a certain moment Lieutenant Colonel Tejero burst into the room and without a word drew his pistol and aimed it at the Prime Minister’s chest; Suárez’s response was to stand up and twice shout in the face of the rebel officer the same emphatic order: ‘Stand at attention!’ The second happened on the evening of the 24th, once the coup had failed, during a meeting of the National Defence Council at the Zarzuela, chaired by the King; that was when Suárez understood that Armada had been the main ringleader of the coup and, after hearing the evidence that incriminated the King’s former secretary, among which were the recordings of the telephone conversations between the occupiers of the Cortes, the Prime Minister ordered General Gabeiras to arrest him immediately. Gabeiras seemed to hesitate — he was Armada’s immediate superior at Army General Headquarters, he had hardly been apart from him all night and the measure must have struck him as premature and disproportionate — then the general looked at the King for a ratification or a contradiction of the order he’d been given by Suárez, who, because he knew very well who the authentic chief of the Army was, hurled two furious phrases at the general: ‘Don’t look at the King. Look at me.’

That was Adolfo Suárez deep down or what he liked to imagine he was: a cocky provincial risen to the top of the government and completely immersed in his role of Prime Minister. That’s how he tried to behave during the almost five years he was in power and that’s how he behaved on 23 February. His gesture of standing up and trying to parley with the golpistas is basically no different from his gesture of confronting Tejero or Gabeiras: all three are attempts to assert himself as Prime Minister; nor is it basically any different from his gesture of remaining seated while the bullets whizzed around him in the chamber: this is a gesture of courage and grace and rebellion, a histrionic gesture and an entirely free gesture and a posthumous gesture, the gesture of a washed-up man who conceives of politics as an adventure and who tries agonizingly to legitimize himself and for one moment seems fully to embody democracy, but it is also a gesture of authority. That’s to say: a gesture of violence. That is: the gesture of a pure politician.

Chapter 2

What is a pure politician? Is a pure politician the same as a great politician, or an exceptional politician? Is an exceptional politician the same as an exceptional man, or an ethically irreproachable man, or simply a decent man? It’s very likely that Adolfo Suárez was a decent man, but not an ethically irreproachable man, or even an exceptional man, or at least not the kind of man usually thought of as exceptional; he was however, all things considered, the most forceful and decisive Spanish politician of the last century.

Around 1927 Ortega y Gasset tried to describe the exceptional politician and perhaps ended up describing the pure politician. For Ortega, this is not an ethically irreproachable man, nor does he have any reason to be (Ortega considers it insufficient or paltry to judge a politician ethically: he must be judged politically); some qualities that in the abstract tend to be considered virtues coexist in his nature with others that in the abstract tend to be considered defects, but the latter are no less essential than the former. Here are some virtues: natural intelligence, courage, serenity, fighting spirit, astuteness, stamina, healthy instincts, the ability to reconcile the irreconcilable. Here are some defects: impulsiveness, constant preoccupation, lack of scruples, talent to deceive, vulgarity or absence of refinement in one’s ideas and tastes; also, the absence of an inner life or a defined personality, which turns him into a chameleon-like actor and a transparent being whose deepest secret is that he lacks any secrets. The pure politician is the opposite of an ideologue, but he is not only a man of action; nor is he exactly the opposite of an intellectual: he possesses an intellectual’s enthusiasm for knowledge, but he has invested it entirely in detecting the dead in what appears to be alive and in refining the essential ingredient of his trade: historical intuition. That’s what Ortega called it; Isaiah Berlin would have given it another name: he would have called it a sense of reality, a transitory gift not learned in universities or in books, that assumes a certain familiarity with the relevant facts that allows certain politicians at certain moments to know ‘what fits with what: what can be done in given circumstances and what cannot, what means will work in what situations and how far, without necessarily being able to explain how they know this or even what they know’. The Ortegan handbook of the pure politician is not unassailable; that’s not why I’ve summarized it here, but because it proposes an exact portrait of the future Adolfo Suárez. It’s true that among the qualities of the pure politician Ortega barely mentions in passing the one for which Suárez was reproached most insistently in his day: ambition; but that’s because Ortega knows that for a politician, as for an artist or a scientist, ambition is not a quality — a virtue or a defect — but a basic premise.

Suárez complied with it comfortably. The feature that best defined him until he arrived in power was an outrageous hunger for power: like one of those wild young men of nineteenth-century novels who set out from the provinces to conquer the capital — like Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, like Balzac’s Lucien Rubempré, like Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau — Suárez was ambition incarnate and was never ashamed of that, because he never accepted there was anything reprehensible about the desire for power; on the contrary: he thought that without power there was no politics and without politics for him there was not the slightest possibility of fulfilment. He was a pure politician because he never thought of being anything else, because he never dreamt of being anything else, because he was an ascetic of power ready to sacrifice everything to acquire it and because he would have made a pact with the devil without a second thought in exchange for getting to be what he got to be. ‘What is power for you?’ a Paris Match journalist asked him days after he was named Prime Minister, and Suárez only managed to respond with his dazzling winner’s smile and a few words that explained nothing and explained everything: ‘Power? I love it.’ During his best years this jubilant brazenness gave him an unbeatable superiority over his adversaries, who saw insatiable greed in his eyes and were nevertheless unable to stare him down and kept feeding it to their own cost. Political power turned into his instrument of personal growth, but only because before it had been a free-standing, voracious passion, and if he had an idealized vision of the dignity of a prime minister to the point of myth it was because the position of Prime Minister constituted for him the highest expression of power and because for his whole life he hadn’t wanted anything other than to be Prime Minister.

It’s true: he was an uneducated rogue, he was a little provincial Falangist, he was a Francoist upstart, he was the King’s messenger boy; his detractors were right, except that his life story demonstrates that being right isn’t the whole story. He possessed an actor’s talent for deceit, but the first time he saw Santiago Carrillo he didn’t deceive him: he did belong to a family of defeated Republicans, several of whom had seen the inside of Franco’s prisons during the war; no one in his house, however, instilled in him the slightest political conviction, and it’s quite possible that no one ever talked to him about the war except as a natural catastrophe; it’s likely, however, that he learned from childhood to hate defeat the way one hates a family affliction. He was born in 1932 in Cebreros, a wine-producing town in the province of Ávila. His mother’s family had a small business, and she was a tough, religious and headstrong woman; his father was the son of the court secretary and also a likeable, cocky, vain, swindling, skirt-chasing gambler. Although he never really got on well with his father — or perhaps for this very reason — it might be that deep down he was just like his father, except for the fact that in his case the exercise of these inclinations and features of his character was entirely subordinate to the satisfaction of his only true appetite. He was a terrible student, who went from one school to the next and rarely set foot inside the university except to take exams for courses he’d often memorized without understanding; he never acquired the sedentary habit of reading, and till the end of his days he was pursued by a rumour, only initially encouraged by him, according to which he’d never gathered enough patience to read a book from the first page to the last. He was interested in other things: girls, dancing, football, tennis, cinema and cards. He was hyperactive, vital and compulsively sociable, a neighbourhood leader with a spontaneous kindness and indisputable success with women, but he flipped easily from euphoria to dejection and, although he probably never visited a psychiatrist, some of his close friends always considered him a prime candidate for psychiatry. The balm against his psychological fragilities was a solid religiosity that threw him into the arms of Acción Católica and channelled his vocation for prominence from adolescence by allowing him to found and preside over pious associations with innocuous political pretensions. At the end of the 1940s or beginning of the 1950s, in a city like Ávila, fortified by the provincial sanctimoniousness of Spanish Catholicism, Adolfo Suárez personified to perfection the ideal youth of the dictatorship: a neat, handsome, cheerful, sporty, Catholic, bold and enterprising young man, whose political ambitions were bound up with his social and economic ambitions and whose mentality of obedience and the sacristy could not even imagine that anybody might question the foundations and mechanisms of the regime, but only make use of them.

Everything seemed to augur a radiant future, but from one day to the next it all seemed to collapse. At the beginning of 1955, when he’d just turned twenty-three, finished his law degree with great difficulty and secured his first paying job at the Beneficencia de Ávila (a local welfare charity), his father fled from the city shrouded in a business scandal, abandoning the family. Suárez bore this desertion like a cataclysm: as well as the emotional wrench, his father’s flight meant social dishonour and economic poverty for a large family whose shortage of money did not correspond with their high social standing in the city; it’s likely that, prey to hypochondria and unable to meet the needs of his mother and four younger brothers on his trainee’s salary, Suárez seriously considered the escape route of entering a seminary. A stroke of luck freed him from his tribulations. In the month of August Suárez met Fernando Herrero Tejedor, a young Falangist prosecuting attorney and member of Opus Dei who had just been named civil governor and provincial chief of the Movimiento in Ávila and who, thanks to the recommendation of one of his private teachers, gave Suárez a job in the civil government, which allowed him to supplement his Beneficencia salary, enter the structure of the single party and cultivate the friendship of a powerful and well-connected person who over the years would become his political mentor. His joy, however, was short-lived: in 1956 Herrero Tejedor was transferred to Logroño, Suárez lost his job and the following year, with no money or hope of prosperity in the province, he decided to try his luck in Madrid. There he was reunited with his father, there he set up an office with him to practise as a legal agent (a line of work his father had practised irregularly in Ávila), there he managed to reunite under the same roof his father, his mother and one of his brothers in a flat on Calle Hermanos Miralles. But after only a few months things went off the rails again: his father got the family involved in shady financial business again and Suárez broke with him, left the office and went to live on his own in a boarding house. Perhaps at that stage he hit rock bottom, although we know little about it for sure: people say he barely knew anyone in Madrid, that he saw his mother occasionally and made his living with sporadic jobs, carrying luggage at the Príncipe Pío railway station or selling electrical appliances door to door; they say he suffered hardships, that he went hungry, that he spent a lot of time wandering the streets. Some of Suárez’s apologists appeal to the real predicaments of those days to depict a ‘self-made man’ who’d known misery and not the privileges the politicians of Francoism grew up with; the depiction is not false, as long as we don’t forget that the period was very brief and that, while it lasted, Suárez was just a young provincial fallen on hard times, exiled in the capital awaiting an opportunity worthy of his ambition. The one to provide it was again Herrero Tejedor, who then held the post of national provincial delegate in the secretary generalship of the Movimiento and who, as soon as the father of one of Suárez’s friends told him the situation he was in and asked for a job for him, hastened to appoint him as his personal secretary. That happened in the autumn of 1958. From that time on, and until the death of Herrero Tejedor in 1975, Suárez was hardly ever apart from his mentor; from that time on, and until he himself ended up destroying it, Suárez was hardly ever apart from Francoist power, because that was the ever so modest start of his step-by-step ascent of the Movimiento hierarchy. Before he began it, however, something else had happened: in Ávila Suárez had met Amparo Illana, a beautiful, rich, classy young woman with whom he fell immediately in love and whom he would take another four years to marry; by then he was about to leave for Madrid with nothing in his pockets but his hands, and the first time he visited the house of his future wife her father — a military lawyer with the rank of colonel and treasurer of the Press Association of Madrid — interrogated him about how he was earning his living. ‘Badly,’ he answered, with his cocky Ávila charm intact. ‘But don’t worry: before I’m thirty I’ll be civil governor; before forty, undersecretary; and before fifty, a minister in the government and then Prime Minister.’

It might be that the above-mentioned anecdote is false — one more of the legends that surround his youth — although Suárez did fulfil that programme point for point. In the closed and pyramidal order of Francoist power, where servility was an indispensable tool of political promotion, doing so demanded from the start that he thoroughly employ all his flair for congeniality and all his capacity for adulation. As Herrero Tejedor’s secretary his job consisted of taking care of correspondence, arranging appointments and attending to visitors, many of whom were Party leaders or civil governors passing through Madrid, none of whom would forget the handsome, diligent and enthusiastic Falangist who greeted them with a raised arm in an imitation of the fascist salute (At your service, chief!) and saw them off with an imitation of a military click of his heels (May I be of any further service?). This is how he began to carve out his prestige as a Falangist cub and scale the promotion ladder of two strategic enclaves of the regime: the secretary generalship of the Movimiento and the Prime Minister’s Office; and this was how, without giving up his loyalty to Herrero Tejedor, he began to win the confidence of the dictator’s subordinates who in the mid-1960s held most of the effective power in Spain and represented the most viable possibility of a future Francoism without Franco: Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, Minister of the Presidency, and Laureano López Rodó, Minister for the Development Plan. By that time Suárez already knew better than most all the nooks and crannies of the corridors of power, had developed a sixth sense for capturing the slightest tremor in the delicate tectonics that sustained it and had a doctorate with full honours in the extremely refined discipline of circulating among the conflicting families of the regime without making unmanageable enemies for himself, and persuading them all, from the Falangists to the members of Opus Dei, that he was one of their own. The time was still distant when he would consider the Madrid political village to be a great sewer: now that same city held him spellbound with the supernatural gleam of an exquisite jewel; his least indulgent biographer, Gregorio Morán, has described in detail the ambitious strategies he used in his desire to conquer. According to Morán, Suárez heaped attention on those he needed to captivate, he took advantage of any excuse to visit their houses and offices, he did everything possible to win over their relatives and, wielding first-hand information about the interiorities of power and of the abuses and weaknesses of those who exercised it, he came and went with news, gossip and rumours that made him a very valuable informer and opened the way for his climb. He took no notice of methods, didn’t skimp on resources. In 1965 he was appointed programme director of Radiotelevisión Española (RTVE); his boss was Juan José Rosón, a sombre Galician insensible to his talent and charm with whom he maintained not very cordial relations: he managed to improve them by moving with his family into a flat in the same building where he lived. Around about the same time he decided that his next objective should be to become a civil governor; it was a very attractive post because in those years a civil governor possessed enormous power in his province and, in order to win over the Minister of the Interior, Camilo Alonso Vega — close friend of Franco’s and responsible to a great extent for the appointment of civil governors — for three consecutive summers he rented an apartment next door to the one occupied every year by the minister in a development in Alicante and subjected him to a non-stop siege that began with the daily Mass first thing in the morning and ended with the last drink in the early hours. In 1973, when he was starting to harbour well-founded hopes of becoming a minister, he conceived the brilliant idea of renting a summer villa just a few metres from La Granja Palace in Segovia, in the gardens of which a celebration was held each year for an entire day to mark the anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War in the presence of Franco and all the bigwigs of Francoism; Suárez invited a select few to the villa, who, before and after the endless reception, the tedious lunch and the spectacle the Minister of Information and Tourism inflicted on those who attended, enjoyed the privilege of relief from the heartless heat of every 18 July, freedom from the torture of travelling the eighty kilometres that separated the palace from Madrid with their evening dresses and tuxedos stuck to their bodies with sweat, and being fêted by the host, whose sympathy and hospitality generated feelings of lasting gratitude.

He won the friendship of Camilo Alonso Vega, and in 1968 was named civil governor of Segovia; he won the friendship of Rosón — or at least managed to reduce the mistrust he inspired — and in 1969 was named director general of RTVE; he won the friendship of many of Francoism’s bigwigs, and in 1975 was named minister. He was irresistible, but these purely picaresque episodes not only constitute part of his real reputation, but also a demonstration that few politicians mastered as well as he did the degraded inbreeding of Francoist power and that few were willing to go as far as he was to make the most of it. That’s why the person who in certain respects best portrayed Suárez at this time was Francisco Franco, who was the person who knew better than anyone the logic of Francoist power because he was the one who’d created it. The two men hardly ever coincided in their lives outside of ceremonial occasions, on one of which, however, the young politician drew attention with some discordant declaration; maybe because of that, and undoubtedly using the psychological gifts that had served him so well in his occupation of the leadership of the state for forty years, Franco thought he recognized in Suárez the disposition of a blossoming traitor, and on one occasion, when Suárez was head of RTVE, after the two had been chatting for a while in El Pardo Palace the dictator commented to his personal physician: ‘That man’s ambition is dangerous. He has no scruples.’*

Franco was right: Suárez’s ambition ended up being lethal for Francoism; his lack of scruples as well. These two things alone, however, do not suffice to explain his stunning ascent in the 1960s and 1970s. Suárez was always working, and his political talent was beyond doubt: he had curiosity, listened more than he spoke, learned quickly, solved problems by the simplest and most direct routes, cleared out the teams of politicians he inherited without a second thought, knew how to bring opposing wills together, reconcile the irreconcilable and detect the dead in what appeared to be still alive; furthermore, he never let a single opportunity slip by to prove his worth: as if he really had sealed a pact with the devil, he didn’t even waste opportunities that could have ruined the career of any other politician. On 15 June 1969, when he was still civil governor of Segovia, fifty-eight people died under the rubble of a collapsed restaurant in the residential development of Los Ángeles de San Rafael; the tragedy was the result of the proprietor’s greed, but normally such a scandal would have spattered Suárez politically, especially at a time when the battle Falangists and Opus Dei were waging for control of the regime was reaching its decisive point; Suárez nevertheless managed to come out of the catastrophe reinforced: for weeks the newspapers were constantly praising the serenity and courage of the civil governor, who as the accounts kept repeating arrived at the scene of events shortly after the collapse, took charge of the situation and began pulling the wounded out of the debris with his own hands, and whom the government decorated a short time later for his conduct with the Great Cross of Civil Merit.

Months after the disaster of Los Ángeles de San Rafael an event that changed the future Prime Minister’s life occurred: he met the future King. By that time Suárez already had the conviction that Prince Juan Carlos was the winning horse in the imminent race of post-Francoism — he had it from Herrero Tejedor, from Admiral Carrero, from López Rodó, he had it especially from a reasoning and a political instinct that were in him the same thing — so he bet all his capital on the Prince, who, for his part, also bet on Suárez, in need as he was of the loyalty of young politicians prepared to do battle at his side against the powerful sector of old inflexible Francoists doubtful of his capacity to succeed Franco. That was the task to which Suárez devoted himself almost exclusively over the next six years, because he knew that doing battle to make the Prince King was doing battle for power, though also because, just as he knew how to detect what was dead in what appeared still alive, he knew how to detect what was still alive in what appeared dead. As for the King, from the beginning he felt enormous sympathy for Suárez, but never deceived himself about him: ‘Adolfo is neither for Opus Dei nor for the Falange,’ he said on some occasion. ‘Adolfo is for Adolfo.’ Shortly after meeting the Prince — and partly owing to his insistence — he was named director general of RTVE; he stayed in this post for four years during which he served the cause of the monarchy with belligerent fidelity, but this was also an important phase in his political life because this was when he discovered the brand-new potential of television to configure reality and because he began to feel the proximity and the actual breath of power and to prepare his assault on government: he visited the Zarzuela very frequently, where he gave the Prince recordings of his travels and ceremonial acts regularly broadcast on the news bulletin of the main channel, consulted with Admiral Carrero every week in the headquarters of the Prime Minister’s Office, at Castellana 3, where he was welcomed affectionately and where he received ideological orientation and concrete instructions he applied without hesitation, pampered military officers — who celebrated him for the generosity with which he received any proposal from the Army — and even the intelligence services, with whose chief, the future golpista Colonel José Ignacio San Martín, he struck up a certain friendship. It was also during that time, towards the end of his term at RTVE, that Suárez’s sixth sense registered an almost invisible shift of the centre of power which in a very short time would turn out to be decisive: although Carrero Blanco continued symbolizing the assurance that Francoism would continue after the death of Franco, López Rodó began to lose influence and instead Torcuato Fernández Miranda emerged as the new key politician, then Minister Secretary General of the Movimiento, a cold, cultured, fox-like and silent man whose haughty independence of mind provoked the suspicions of all the families of the regime and the partiality of the Prince, who had adopted that professor of constitutional law as his first political adviser. Suárez took note of the change: saw less of López Rodó and more of Fernández Miranda, who, although perhaps secretly despising him, publicly allowed himself to be befriended, undoubtedly because he was sure of being able to manage that young Falangist hungry for glory. Suárez’s hunch turned out to be right, and in June of 1973 Carrero was named Prime Minister — the first named by Franco who still kept the powers of head of state for himself — and Fernández Miranda added the leadership of the Movimiento to the vice-presidency of the Cabinet, but Suárez did not obtain the post of minister he thought he already deserved, and didn’t even convince Fernández Miranda to console him with the post of deputy Secretary General of the Movimiento. The disappointment was enormous: Suárez resigned from his post at RTVE because of it, taking refuge in the directorship of a state company and of the YMCA.

For the next two and a half years Suárez remained far from power, and his political career seemed stagnant; at some point it even seemed to have reached its end. Two violent deaths contributed to this fleeting impression: in December 1973 Admiral Carrero died in an ETA attack; in June 1975 Herrero Tejedor died in a car accident. The murder of Carrero was providential for the country because the disappearance of the Prime Minister who was to have preserved Francoism facilitated the change from dictatorship to democracy, but, given that with Carrero he lost a powerful protector, for Suárez it could have been catastrophic; Herrero Tejedor’s death could have been even worse: with it Suárez might have been said to have been left definitively out in the open, deprived as well of the shelter of the man in whose shadow most of his political career had been played out and who just three months before the accident had appointed him deputy Secretary General of the Movimiento. Suárez overcame that double setback because by the time it happened he was too sure of himself and of the Prince’s confidence to allow himself to be defeated by adversity, so he devoted that parenthesis in his political ascent to making money in shady business, convinced with reason that it was impossible to prosper politically in Francoism without the benefit of some personal fortune (‘I’m not a minister because I don’t live in Puerta de Hierro and I didn’t study at the Pilar,’ he once said during those years); he also devoted it to strengthening his relations with Fernández Miranda — and, through him, with the Prince — and to organizing the Union of the Spanish People (Unión del Pueblo Español, UDPE), a political association created in the wake of the tiny liberalizing impulse promoted by Admiral Carrero’s replacement at the head of the government, Carlos Arias Navarro, and made up of former ministers under Franco and young officials of the regime like Suárez himself. Otherwise, at a time when the death of Franco after forty years of absolute government appeared at once as an imminent and marvellous event and when every health crisis of the octogenarian dictator left the country trembling with uncertainty, Suárez cultivated masterfully the necessary ambiguity to prepare his future no matter what the future of Spain: on one hand, he let no opportunity slip by to proclaim his fidelity to Franco and to his regime, and on 1 October 1975, accompanied by other members of the UDPE, he attended a huge demonstration in the Plaza de Oriente in support of the general, hounded by the protests of the international community owing to his decision to execute several ETA and FRAP members; on the other hand, however, he went around saying in public and in private that he was in favour of opening up the political game and creating channels of expression for the different sensibilities present in society, commonplaces of the political soup of the time that sounded to Francoists like inoffensive impudence or naive ruses and to those in favour of ending Francoism could sound like still repressed affirmations of the desire for a democratic future for Spain. It is likely that neither on one hand nor the other — not when he declared himself unquestionably Francoist or when he declared himself an incipient democrat — was Suárez telling the truth, but it’s almost certain that, like a transparent being whose deepest secret consists of not having secrets or like a virtuoso actor declaiming his part on a stage, he always believed what he was saying, and that’s why everyone who heard him ended up believing in him.

The death of Franco — whose funeral chapel he visited in the company of the top brass of the UDPE after waiting for hours along with thousands of Francoists bathed in tears — relaunched his political career for good. After being proclaimed King, Juan Carlos ceded to the pressure of the most hard-line band of Francoism and kept a firm Francoist like Arias Navarro at the head of the government, but he managed to get Fernández Miranda to be both President of the Cortes and of the Council of the Kingdom — the other two principal organs of power — and also, thanks to Fernández Miranda, got Arias Navarro to appoint Suárez Minister Secretary General of the Movimiento. It was a post he’d been coveting for years, fit to satisfy the most ambitious ambition, but Suárez was more ambitious than the most ambitious, and did not settle for that. In theory his mission in that government that was to guide post-Francoism was almost ornamental (the substantial ministries were taken by older men with much more presence, prestige and political experience, like Manuel Fraga and José María de Areilza): Suárez was not unaware that he’d been placed there as the King’s valet or messenger boy; however, he was again quick to seize any opportunity that presented itself and, especially as Arias proved himself to be a clumsy and hesitant prime minister incapable of shrugging off his colossal Francoist debts, took advantage of the disunity and inefficiency of a government overtaken by a wave of social conflicts that were actually political actions to steal the limelight from his Cabinet colleagues: in March 1976, in the absence of Manuel Fraga, Minister of the Interior, Suárez skilfully managed the crisis provoked in Vitoria by the death of three workers at the hands of the police, preventing Prime Minister Arias from decreeing a state of emergency in order to suppress what in the eyes of the government seemed about to degenerate into a revolutionary outbreak; in June of the same year he defended in the Cortes, with a brilliant speech in which he advocated political pluralism, a timid attempt at reform sponsored by the government, as a way of achieving reconciliation among Spaniards. The attempt failed, but its failure meant a much greater success for Suárez than its success would have. It’s not a contradiction: at that moment, six months after the proclamation of the monarchy, the King and his political mentor, Fernández Miranda, had already understood that in order to conserve the throne he’d have to renounce the powers or a large part of the powers he’d inherited from Franco, converting the Francoist monarchy into a parliamentary monarchy; they’d also conceived a project of more profound and ambitious reform than that supported by the government, they knew that Arias Navarro could not and did not want to put it into practice and Suárez’s speech in the Cortes finished persuading them that the young politician was the right person to do it. Or rather finished persuading the King, because Fernández Miranda had been persuaded of it for some time by then, while the monarch had not yet clearly seen that this obliging and ambitious nonentity, that this affable, crooked, uncultured and cocky little Falangist — so useful to him as a valet or messenger boy — was the ideal character to carry out the extremely subtle task of dismantling Francoism without disasters and erecting some form of democracy on top of it that would assure the future of the monarchy. It was Fernández Miranda who, with his rhetoric of a reader of Machiavelli and his intellectual influence over him, convinced the King that at least for his purposes at the time those personal characteristics of Suárez’s were not defects but virtues: they needed an obliging and ambitious nonentity because his obligingness and ambition guaranteed an absolute loyalty, and because his lack of relevance and of a definite political project or ideas of his own guaranteed that he would apply those they dictated to him without deviating and that, once his mission was completed, they could get rid of him after thanking him for services rendered; they needed a cocky Falangist with his spirit because only a cocky, young, quick, tough, flexible, resolute, tenacious, spirited Falangist would be able to put up with the ferocious attacks of the Falangists and military officers first and keep them at bay afterwards; they needed an affable guy because he would need to seduce half the world and a crooked guy because he would need to fool the other half; and as for his lack of culture, Fernández Miranda was cultured enough to know that one doesn’t learn politics in books and for that endeavour culture could be a hindrance, and perceptive enough to have noticed already that Suárez possessed more than any other politician of his generation that transitory gift or that exact and inexplicable comprehension of what at that moment was dead and what was alive and that familiarity with significant events — with what fits and what doesn’t fit, with what can and cannot be done, with how and with whom and at what cost it can be done — that Ortega called historical intuition and Berlin called a sense of reality.

Resolved to make Suárez the Prime Minister who would carry out the reform, on 1 July 1976 the King secured Arias Navarro’s resignation; he did not have, however, a free hand in naming his replacement: according to Francoist legislation, he had to choose between a shortlist of three candidates presented to him by the Council of the Kingdom, a consultative body on which sat some of the most conspicuous members of orthodox Francoism. But, thanks to the guile and ability of Fernández Miranda, who chaired the Council and had been preparing this for months, at midday on 3 July the King received a shortlist that included the name of the chosen one. Suárez knew it; or rather: he knew he was on the shortlist, but he didn’t know he was the chosen one; or rather: he didn’t know it but he guessed, and that Saturday afternoon, while waiting for the King’s phone call in his house in Puerta de Hierro — he was finally living in Puerta de Hierro and that’s why he was a minister and could be Prime Minister — he was consumed by doubts. In his last years of lucidity Suárez remembered the scene publicly a few times, at least once on television, old, grey and with the same melancholy smile of triumph with which Julien Sorel or Lucien Rubempré or Frédéric Moreau would have remembered at the end of their lives their supreme moment, or with the same ironic smile of failure with which a man who’d sold his soul to the devil remembers many years later the moment when the devil finally fulfilled his part of the bargain. Suárez knew of the King’s and Fernández Miranda’s calculations, of Fernández Miranda’s certainties and the King’s doubts, knew the King appreciated his fidelity, his personal charm and the efficiency he’d demonstrated in government, but he wasn’t sure that at the last moment prudence or fear or conformity wouldn’t advise him to forget the audacity of appointing a secondary politician like him almost unknown to the public and opt for the long-serving Federico Silva Muñoz or Gregorio López Bravo, the two others on the shortlist. He’d never wanted to be anything else, never dreamt of being anything else, he’d always been an ascetic of power, and now everything seemed prepared to allow him to sate his hunger in real life and his ambition for plenitude sensed that if he didn’t get it now he would never get it. He felt impatient beside the telephone and finally, at some point in the afternoon, the telephone rang. It was the King; he asked him what he was doing. Nothing, he answered. I was getting some papers in order. Ah, said the King, and then he asked him how his family was. They’re on holiday, he explained. In Ibiza. I’ve stayed home alone with Mariam. He knew the King knew that he knew, but he didn’t say anything else and, after a very short silence that seemed eternal to him, he decided to ask the King if he wanted anything. Nothing, said the King. Just wanted to know how you were. Then the King said goodbye and Suárez hung up the phone with the certainty that the monarch had been unnerved and had appointed Silva or López Bravo and hadn’t had the courage to tell him. A short time later the phone rang again: it was the King again. Hey, Adolfo, he said. Why don’t you come over here? I want to talk to you about something. He tried to control the euphoria and, while he was getting dressed and driving his wife’s Seat 127 to the Zarzuela through the light traffic of a summer weekend, in order to protect himself from disappointment against which he was defenceless he kept telling himself over and over again that the King only called him to apologize for not having chosen him, to explain his decision, to assure him he was still counting on him, to wrap him in protestations of friendship and affection. At the Zarzuela he was received by an aide-de-camp, who made him wait a few minutes and then invited him to enter the King’s office. He went in, but he didn’t see anyone, and at that moment he experienced a sharp sense of unreality, as if he were about to conclude abruptly a theatrical performance he’d spent many years acting without knowing it. A loud laugh pulled him out of that second of panic or bewilderment; he turned around: the King had hidden behind his office door. I have to ask you a favour, Adolfo, he told him point-blank. I want you to be Prime Minister of the government. He didn’t yell in jubilation; all he managed to articulate was: Shit, Your Majesty, I thought you’d never ask.

* Suárez had gone to El Pardo that day to record Franco’s Christmas message; we don’t know what they talked about, but we do know that at some official reception held around the same time Suárez spoke to Franco — this is what I was referring to above when I mentioned a discordant declaration — of the inevitable democratic future awaiting the country after his death. For any of us this nerve means only that Suárez was a Francoist so sure of his impeccable Francoist record and of his loyalty to Franco that he allowed himself to cast doubt on the continuity of the regime without fear of unleashing the wrath of its founder; it’s possible that for Franco it might have meant the same thing, but that precisely for this reason he might have considered the comment even more insidious, and did not forget it.

Chapter 3

On 18 February 1981, five days before the coup d’état, the newspaper El País published an editorial comparing Adolfo Suárez to General Della Rovere. It was another cliché, or almost: in the Madrid political village at the beginning of the 1980s — in certain circles of the left of this village — comparing Suárez to the Italian who collaborated with the Nazis turned hero of the resistance, the protagonist of an old Roberto Rossellini film, was almost as common as mentioning the name of General Pavía every time there was a mention of the threat of a coup d’état. But, although Suárez had resigned from his post as Prime Minister three weeks before and this fact perhaps might have been an invitation to leave behind the errors and recall the successes of the maker of democracy, the newspaper was not resorting to the comparison to praise the figure of Suárez, but to denigrate him. The editorial was extremely harsh. It was titled ‘Adiós, Suárez, Adiós’ and contained not only implacable reproaches of his passivity as acting Prime Minister, but also especially a global rejection of his management at the head of the government; the only merit they seemed to admit consisted in ‘having conferred the dignity of a democratic prime minister on curbing the remains of Francoism for years, like a convinced General Della Rovere transmuted into his role as defender of democracy’. But the newspaper soon denied Suárez this consolation honour and accused him of having given in to right-wing blackmail with his resignation. ‘General Della Rovere died in front of a firing squad,’ it concluded, ‘and Suárez is running away in a hurry, with no end of bitterness and not a lot of guts.’

Did Suárez know Rossellini’s film? Had he read the editorial in El País? Suárez was very fond of the cinema: as a young man he’d been a regular at double features, and as Prime Minister rarely would a week go by that he wouldn’t watch at least one of the 16-mm films his butler Pepe Higueras obtained from Televisión Española and projected in a room in Moncloa (sometimes he watched these films with his family or with the family’s guests; he often watched them alone, in the early hours: Suárez slept little and ate badly, a diet based on black coffee, cigarettes and omelettes); his taste in movies was not sophisticated — he mostly enjoyed adventure films and American comedies — but it’s not impossible that he might have seen Rossellini’s film in 1960 when it was released in Spain, or even that he might have seen it years later in Moncloa, curious about the character the great sewer of Madrid was comparing him to. As for the editorial in El País, he probably read it; although in the months of political siege and personal collapse that preceded the coup he didn’t allow the newspapers into the family’s living quarters without being expurgated, to spare his wife and children the daily broadsides against him, Suárez continued to read them, or at least he continued to read El País: from the very day of his appointment until that of his resignation, the newspaper had been a very severe critic of his mandate, but, because it represented the intellectual, modern and democratic left that his unredeemed guilty conscience of a former Falangist envied and for years dreamt of representing, not for a single instant had he not kept it in mind and maybe even secretly sought its approval, and that’s why so many people in his party and outside it accused him of governing with one eye on its pages. I don’t actually know if Suárez read the editorial in El País on 18 February; if he did, he must have felt a profound humiliation, because nothing could humiliate the cocky old Falangist as much as being called a coward, and few things could have pleased him more than demonstrating five days later that the accusation was false. I don’t actually know if Suárez had a capricious urge or the curiosity to watch Rossellini’s film when he was still Prime Minister and so many were identifying him with its protagonist; but if he did, maybe he would have felt the same profound emotion that strikes when we see outside ourselves what we carry inside ourselves, if he’d remembered it after 23 February, maybe he would have thought of reality’s strange propensity to allow itself to be colonized by clichés, to demonstrate that, despite their being fossilized truths, that doesn’t mean they’re not the truth, or that they don’t foreshadow it.

General Della Rovere tells a fable set in the tattered ruins of an Italian city occupied by the Nazis. The protagonist is Emmanuele Bardone, a handsome, affable, skirt-chasing, lying, swindling, gambling nonentity, an unscrupulous rogue who extorts money from the families of anti-fascist prisoners with the lie that he’s using it to alleviate the captivity of their relatives. Bardone is also a chameleon: to the Germans he is an enthusiastic supporter of the Reich; to the Italians, an undercover adversary of the Reich; he employs all his seductive gifts on both sides, manages to convince both that there’s no one more important than them and that he is ready to do anything for their cause. Bardone’s destiny begins to change when, at a routine roadblock, the Germans kill General Della Rovere, an aristocratic and heroic Italian soldier recently returned to the country to coordinate the resistance against the invader; for Colonel Müller — the commanding officer of the occupying forces in the city — this is terrible news: had he been taken prisoner, Della Rovere could have been of some use; dead, he has none. Müller then decides to spread the news that Della Rovere has been taken prisoner, and very soon Bardone, whose acting talent the colonel has come to know not long before and whose shady dealings with a corrupt official he soon unmasks, offers him the chance to take advantage of this hoax: Müller proposes to save him from the firing squad and offers him freedom and money if he agrees to pass for General Della Rovere in jail, trusting he’ll be able to use his presence there in the future.

Bardone accepts the deal and is taken to a prison crowded with anti-fascist prisoners. From the first moment the unscrupulous rogue plays the part of the left-wing aristocrat with aplomb, and everything he sees or feels in prison seems to help his interpretation, shaking his conscience: the very day he arrives he reads the posthumous messages of executed partisans on the walls of his cell; the prisoners place themselves under his orders and treat him with the respect the man who for them personifies the promise of a liberated Italy deserves, ask him about relatives and friends who fought in units under his command, joke about the unhappy fate awaiting them, beg him wordlessly to instil them with courage; one of the prisoners who frequents Bardone commits suicide rather than turn informer; later, to establish Della Rovere in his role, the Germans torture Bardone himself, which almost sets off a riot among his fellow prisoners; later still Bardone receives a letter from the Contessa Della Rovere in which the general’s wife tries to comfort her husband by assuring him that she and his children are well and think only of being worthy of his courage and patriotism. This continuous series of impressions begins to cause a subtle, almost invisible metamorphosis in Bardone, and one night something unexpected happens: during an allied bombing raid that provokes cries of panic in the prison Bardone demands to leave his cell; he is trembling with fear, but, as if the general’s character had momentarily taken over his person, standing in the corridor of the political prisoners’ wing and, invested with the grandeur of Della Rovere, Bardone calms his comrades’ fear by raising his voice in the midst of the thunder of battle: ‘Friends, this is General Della Rovere,’ he says. ‘Show some dignity and self-control. Be men. Show these scoundrels you’re not afraid of dying. They’re the ones who should tremble. Every bomb that falls brings them closer to the end, and brings us closer to freedom.’

Shortly after this episode fate offers Colonel Müller the opportunity he’s been waiting for. A group of nine partisans captured in a raid are sent to the prison; one of them is Fabrizio, the leader of the resistance, but the Germans do not know which one: Müller asks Bardone first to identify him and then betray him. For a moment Bardone hesitates, as if Bardone and Della Rovere are fighting it out within him; but Müller reminds him of the promised money and liberty and adds the bribe of a safe conduct with which to escape to Switzerland, and finally breaks Bardone. He hasn’t yet managed to identify Fabrizio when a high-ranking fascist authority dies at the hands of the resistance; in reprisal, Müller must shoot ten partisans, and the colonel understands that this is the moment to facilitate Bardone’s task. The night before the execution Müller locks twenty men in a cell, ten of whom will be the expiatory victims; sure that at death’s door Fabrizio will make himself known to Della Rovere, Müller includes Bardone and the nine prisoners caught in the raid. Müller is not mistaken: over the long night awaiting execution, while the prisoners look for strength or consolation in the valiant company of the false General Della Rovere, Fabrizio reveals himself. Finally, at dawn, when the men come out of the cell, Bardone is one of them, but Fabrizio is not. They walk out to the firing squad formed on the patio of the prison, Müller stops Bardone, separates him from the line of the condemned, asks him if he’s managed to find out who Fabrizio is. Bardone stares at Müller, but says nothing; he needs only to say one word in order to be set free, with enough money to carry on his interrupted life of gambling and women, but he says nothing. Perplexed, Müller insists: he’s sure that Bardone knows who Fabrizio is, sure that on a night like that Fabrizio would have told him who he is. Bardone does not take his eyes off Müller. ‘And, what do you know?’ he finally says. ‘Have you ever spent a night like this?’ ‘Answer me!’ shouts Müller furiously. ‘Do you know who he is?’ In response, Bardone asks Müller for a pencil and paper, scribbles a few lines, hands them to him and, before the colonel can see whether they contain the real name of Fabrizio, he asks him to see that they get to Contessa Della Rovere. While Bardone orders a jailer to open the gates to the patio, Müller reads the paper: ‘My last thoughts are with you all,’ it says. ‘Viva Italia!’ The patio is covered with snow; tied to posts, ten blindfolded men wait for death. Bardone — who is no longer Bardone but Della Rovere, as if somehow Della Rovere had always been within him — takes his place beside his comrades and, just before falling under the bullets of the firing squad, speaks to them. ‘Gentlemen,’ he says. ‘In these final moments let us dedicate our thoughts to our families, our nation and His Majesty the King.’ And he adds: ‘Viva Italia!’

Chapter 4

It’s likely that the metamorphosis of Adolfo Suárez into the man who had somehow always been in him and who scarcely bore any relation to the former provincial Falangist upstart began the very day the King named him Prime Minister, but the reality is that it only started to become visible many months later. The reception afforded his appointment by public opinion was devastating. No one summed it up better than a cartoonist. In a Forges cartoon two Franco devotees in a bunker were commenting on the news; one of them said: ‘Isn’t it wonderful? He’s called Adolfo’; the other answered: ‘Indeed.’ That’s how it was: apart from rare exceptions, only the far right — from the old shirts of the Falange to the soldiers and technocrats of Opus Dei, along with the Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey — celebrated Suárez’s ascent to the premiership, convinced that the young, obsequious and disciplined Falangist represented new wine in old barrels, the palpable demonstration that the ideals of 18 July still prevailed and the best guarantee that Francoism, with all the cosmetic changes that circumstances demanded, wasn’t going to die along with Franco. Beyond the far right, however, there was only pessimism and fright: for the immense majority of the democratic opposition and the regime’s reformers, Suárez was just going to be, as Le Figaro wrote, ‘the executor of the low manoeuvrings of the far right, determined to torpedo democratization by any means’, or, as El País insinuated, the spearhead of ‘a machine that turns out to be the authentic immovable bunker of the country’, and which ‘embodies the traditional way of being Spanish according to its darkest and most irascible legend: economic and political power allied in perfect symbiosis with ecclesiastical fundamentalism’.

Suárez was not daunted: that was undoubtedly the reception he expected — given his trajectory, he couldn’t have expected any other — and it was also the reception that best suited him. Because if the King had charged him with dismantling Francoism to set up a parliamentary monarchy with its pieces, liquidating the dead that still seemed alive and bringing to life what seemed dead, the first thing he needed to count on was the complicity (or at least the confidence, or at least the passivity) of Francoist orthodoxy; the second thing he needed to count on was the comprehension (or at least the tolerance, or at least the patience) of the clandestine opposition. He embarked on this double, self-evidently impossible task from the first moment. Machiavelli recommends the politician ‘keep the minds of his subjects in suspense and admiration’, and link his actions with the object of not allowing his adversaries ‘the time to work steadily against him’. Perhaps Suárez had not read Machiavelli, but he followed his advice to the letter, and as soon as he was named Prime Minister began a sprint of coups de théâtre of such speed and confidence that no one could muster the reasons, resources or enthusiasm to stop him: the day after he took office he read a televised message in which, with a political language, tone and form incompatible with the tattered starch of Francoism, promised concord and reconciliation by way of a democracy in which governments would be ‘the result of the will of the majority of the Spanish people’, and the next day he formed with the help of his Deputy Prime Minister Alfonso Osorio an extremely youthful cabinet composed of Falangists and Christian Democrats who had good relations with the democratic opposition and the economic powers; one day he presented a programmatic declaration, virtually breaking with Francoism, in which the government committed itself to ‘the devolution of sovereignty to the Spanish people’, and announced a general election before 30 June of the coming year, the next day he reformed by decree the Penal Code that prevented the legalization of the parties and the day after that he decreed an amnesty for political crimes; one day he granted the heretofore banned Catalan language equal official status and the next he declared the banned Basque flag legal; one day he announced a law that authorized the repeal of the Fundamental Laws of Francoism and the next day he got the Francoist Cortes to pass it and the following day he called a referendum to approve it and the day after that he won it; one day he abolished by decree the Movimiento Nacional and the next day he ordered all the Falangist symbols to be removed secretly overnight from all the façades of all the Movimiento buildings and the following day he legalized the Communist Party by surprise and the day after that he called the first free elections in forty years. That was his way of proceeding during his first eleven-month term of government: he made an unusual decision and, as the country was still trying to take it in, he made another more unusual decision, and then another even more unusual, and then one more; he was constantly improvising; he swept events along, but also allowed himself to be swept along by them; he allowed no time to react, or to work against him, or to notice the disparity between what he did and what he said, no time even for admiration, or no more than he gave himself: all his adversaries could do was remain in suspense, attempt to understand what he was doing and try to keep up.

At the beginning of his mandate his main objective was to convince the Francoists and the democratic opposition that the reform he was going to carry out was the only way they would both achieve their conflicting purposes. He assured the Francoists that they’d have to renounce certain elements of Francoism in order to ensure the survival of Francoism; he assured the democratic opposition that they’d have to renounce certain elements of the break with Francoism in order to ensure the break with Francoism. To everyone’s surprise, he convinced them all. First he convinced the Francoists and, when he’d convinced them, he convinced the opposition: he completely deceived the Francoists, but not the opposition, or not entirely, or no more than he deceived himself, but he did as he pleased with them, obliged them to play on the field that he chose and by the rules he devised and, once he’d won the match, put them to work in his service. How did he achieve it? In a certain sense, with the same histrionic methods of seduction with which Emmanuele Bardone persuaded Italians and Germans alike that there was no one in the world more important than them and that he was ready to do anything for their cause, and with the same chameleon-like gifts with which Bardone convinced the Germans that he was a fervent supporter of the Reich and the Italians that he was an undercover adversary of the Reich. If he was almost always unbeatable on television, because he mastered it better than any other politician, face to face he was even better: he could sit down alone with a Falangist, with an Opus Dei technocrat or with a Guerrillero de Cristo Rey and the Falangist, technocrat or paramilitary would say goodbye to him with the certainty that deep down he was a paramilitary, a Falangist or a defender of Opus; he could sit down with a soldier and, remembering his time as a reserve second lieutenant, say: Don’t worry, deep down I’m still a soldier; he could sit with a monarchist and say: I am first and foremost a monarchist; he could sit down with a Christian Democrat and say: In reality, I’ve always been a Christian Democrat; he could sit with a Social Democrat and say: What I am, deep down, is a Social Democrat; he could sit with a Socialist or a Communist and say: I’m no Communist (or Socialist), but I am one of you, because my family was Republican and deep down I’ve never stopped being one. He’d say to the Francoists: Power must be ceded to win legitimacy and conserve power; to the democratic opposition he’d say: I have power and you have legitimacy: we have to understand each other. Everyone heard from Suárez what they needed to hear and everyone came out of those interviews enchanted by his kind-heartedness, his modesty, seriousness and receptiveness, his excellent intentions and his will to convert them into deeds; as for him, he wasn’t yet Prime Minister of a democratic government, but, just as Bardone tried to act the way he thought General Della Rovere would have acted from the moment he entered the prison, from the moment of his appointment as Prime Minister he tried to act the way he thought a prime minister of a democratic government would act: like Bardone, everything he saw and felt helped him to perfect his interpretation; like Bardone, he soon began to steep himself in the political and moral cause of the democratic parties; like Bardone, he deceived with such sincerity that not even he knew he was deceiving.

That was how over the course of that short first year in government Suárez constructed the foundations of a democracy out of the materials of a dictatorship by successfully carrying out unusual operations, the most unusual of which — and perhaps the most essential — entailed the liquidation of Francoism at the hands of the Francoists themselves. The idea he owed to Fernández Miranda, but Suárez was much more than simply its executor: he studied it, he got it ready and he put it into practice. It was almost about achieving the squaring of a circle, and in any case reconciling the irreconcilable to eliminate what was dead and seemed alive; at heart it was about a legal ruse based on the following reasoning: Franco’s Spain was ruled by an ensemble of Fundamental Laws that, as the dictator himself had often stressed, were perfect and offered perfect solutions for any eventuality; however, the Fundamental Laws could be perfect only if they could be modified — otherwise they wouldn’t have been perfect, because they wouldn’t have been capable of adapting to any eventuality — the plan conceived by Fernández Miranda and deployed by Suárez consisted of devising a new Fundamental Law, the Law for Political Reform, which would be added to the rest, apparently modifying them though actually repealing them or authorizing them to be repealed, which allowed the change of a dictatorial regime for a democratic regime respecting the legal procedures of the first. The sophistry was brilliant, but needed to be approved by the Francoist Cortes in an unprecedented act of collective immolation; its implementation was vertiginous: by the end of August 1976 a draft of the law was already prepared, at the beginning of September Suárez announced it on television and over the next two months threw himself into battle on all fronts to convince the Francoist representatives to accept their suicide. The strategy he devised to achieve it was a wonder of precision and swindle: while from his position as President of the Cortes Fernández Miranda threw spanners in the works of the law’s detractors, they put in charge of its presentation and defence the nephew of the founder of the Falange and member of the Council of the Kingdom, Miguel Primo de Rivera, who would ask them to vote in favour ‘in memory of Franco’; in the weeks before the plenary session, Suárez, his ministers and top government officials, after dividing up the procuradores, as the Francoist Cortes members were called, opposed to or reluctant to support the project, breakfasted, had aperitifs, lunched and dined with them, flattering them with brimming promises and tangling them in traps for the gullible; only in a few cases did they have to resort to unveiled threats, but with one group of recalcitrant members there was nothing for it but to pack them off on a Caribbean cruise on a junket to Panama. Finally, on 18 November, after three consecutive days of debate during which on more than one occasion it seemed like everything was going to fall through, the Cortes voted on the law; the result was unequivocal: 425 votes in favour, 59 against and 13 abstentions. The reform was approved. The television cameras captured the moment, and it’s since been reproduced on a multitude of occasions. The members of the Francoist Cortes stand and applaud; standing up, Suárez applauds the Francoist procuradores. He looks emotional; he looks like he’s on the verge of tears; there is no reason to think he’s pretending or, like the consummate actor he is, if he is pretending, that he’s not feeling what he’s pretending to feel. The truth is he might as well have been laughing inside and crying his eyes out for the bunch of fools who’ve just signed their own death sentence amid the embraces and congratulations of a tremendous Francoist fiesta.

It was a spectacular sleight of hand, and the greatest success of his life. In Spain the democratic opposition rubbed their eyes; outside Spain the incredulity was total: ‘stunning victory for suárez’, ran the headline in the New York Times; ‘cortes appointed by dictator have buried francoism’, said Le Monde. A few days later, allowing himself not an instant’s respite or his adversaries any time to recover from their stupor, he called a referendum on the recently approved law; it was held on 15 December and he won it with almost 80 per cent participation and almost 95 per cent of the votes in favour. For the Francoists and for the democratic opposition, who had advocated voting against or abstaining, the setback was conclusive; much more so for the former than for the latter, of course: from that moment on the Francoists could resort only to violence, and the week of 23 to 28 January — in which far-right groups murdered nine people in a pre-war atmosphere and Suárez was certain someone would attempt a coup d’état — was the first notice that they were ready to employ it; as for the democratic opposition, they found themselves obliged to discard the chimera of imposing their outright clean break with Francoism to accept the unexpected and tricky reforming break imposed by Suárez and began to negotiate with him, divided, messed up and weakened, under terms he had chosen and that best suited him. Furthermore, by then, around February 1977, it was already clear to everyone that Suárez was going to fulfil the task the King and Fernández Miranda had entrusted to him in record time; in fact, once the Rubicon of the Law for Political Reform was crossed, Suárez had only to finalize the dismantling of the legal and institutional framework of Francoism and call free elections after agreeing with the political parties the requisites of their legalization and participation in the elections. In theory his job ended there, that in theory was the end of the show, but by then Suárez already believed in his character and was elated, riding the biggest wave of the tsunami of his success, so nothing would have seemed more absurd to him than giving up the position he’d always dreamt of; it may be, however, that this was the King’s and Fernández Miranda’s intention when they gave him the starring role in that drama of seductions, half-truths and deceits, sure as they were perhaps that the charming and smooth nonentity would burn out on stage, sure as they were in any case that he would be incapable of managing the complexities of the state in normal conditions, and even more so after democratic elections: once these were called and his task concluded, Suárez should retire behind the curtain, amid applause and tokens of gratitude, to cede the favour of the spotlight to a real statesman, perhaps Fernández Miranda himself, perhaps the eternally prime ministerial Fraga, perhaps the Deputy Prime Minister Alfonso Osorio, perhaps the cultivated, elegant and aristocratic José María de Areilza. Of course, Suárez could have ignored the King’s intention, forced his hand and stood for election without his consent, but he was the Prime Minister appointed by the King and he wanted to be the King’s candidate and then the King’s Prime Minister-elect, and during those brilliant months, while he gradually freed himself of Fernández Miranda’s tutelage and paid less and less attention to Osorio, he worked hard at demonstrating to the King that he was the Prime Minister he needed because he was the only politician able to establish the monarchy by assembling a democracy just as he’d dismantled Francoism; he also worked at demonstrating that by contrast Fernández Miranda was just a spineless, old, unreal jurist, Fraga an indiscriminate bulldozer, Osorio a politician as pompous as he was inane and Areilza a well-dressed dead loss.

All this would become clear to the King at the beginning of April when Suárez pulled the most audacious move of his career, another death-defying political leap, but this time with no net: the legalization of the Communist Party. That measure was the limit the military had placed on the reform and which Suárez had seemed to accept or had made them believe he accepted; perhaps at first he really did accept it, but, as he became steeped in his character of democratic Prime Minister without democracy and he absorbed the reasons of an opposition pushing him from the street with popular demonstrations and forcing him to go much further than he had planned on the path of reform, Suárez understood he needed the Communist Party as much as the Communist Party needed him. Towards the end of February he’d already made one decision and had come up with an idea for a high-wire juggling act like the one that let Franco’s Cortes sacrifice themselves, except this time he chose to carry it out practically alone and practically in secret: first, with the disagreement of Fernández Miranda and Osorio but the agreement of the King, he held a secret meeting with Santiago Carrillo and sealed with him a pact of steel; then he sought to cover his back with a legal opinion from the Supreme Court favourable to the legalization and, when they refused him, he manoeuvred to get it out of the Attorney General’s Office; then he sounded out the military ministers and sowed confusion among them, ordering General Gutiérrez Mellado to warn them that the PCE could be legalized (they were waiting for a judicial proceeding, Gutiérrez Mellado told them, and also if they wanted some clarification the Prime Minister was prepared to provide it), although he didn’t tell them when or how or even if it was effectively going to be legalized, a juggling act within the juggling act with which he intended to avoid the charge from the military ministers that he hadn’t informed them and at the same time to prevent them from reacting against his decision before it was announced; then he waited for the Easter holidays, sent the King and Queen on a trip to France, Carrillo to Cannes, his ministers on vacation and, with the streets of the big cities deserted and the barracks deserted and the editorial offices of the newspapers and radio and television stations deserted, he stayed alone in Madrid, playing cards with General Gutiérrez Mellado. Finally, again with the King’s support and Osorio’s opposition and without even consulting Fernández Miranda, on Easter Saturday — the most deserted day of those deserted days — he legalized the PCE. It was a bombshell, and it very nearly blew up in his hands: he’d made that wild decision because triumphs had given him an absolute confidence in himself and, although he expected the shock to the Army would be brutal and that there would be protests and threats and perhaps outbreaks of rebellion, reality outdid his worst predictions, and at some moments during the four insane days that followed Easter Saturday, maybe Suárez thought more than once that he’d overestimated his strengths and that a coup d’état was inevitable, until on the fifth day he once again translated the imminent catastrophe into his own gain: he kept the utmost pressure on Carrillo until he managed to persuade the Party publicly to renounce some of its symbols and accept all those the Army considered threatened by their legalization: the monarchy, the unity of the nation and the red-and-yellow flag. At this point it all stopped. The soldiers stayed in their barracks, the whole country must have held its breath and Suárez scored a double victory: on the one hand he managed to tame the military — or at least tame them for the moment — forcing them to swallow what was for them an indigestible decision and for him (and for democracy) an indispensable one; on the other hand he managed to tame the Communist Party — and with the Communist Party, not much later, the whole democratic opposition — forcing them to join the project of the parliamentary monarchy unreservedly, turning the eternal adversary into the principal support of the system. To finish off the fluke, Suárez had converted Fernández Miranda and Osorio into two suddenly antiquated politicians, ready for retirement, and everything was ready to call the first democratic elections in forty years and win them by capitalizing on the success of his reforms.

He called them and won them, and along the way also eliminated Fraga and Areilza, his last two rivals. The first he shelved away in an antediluvian party where they flailed at the fugitive glories of the Francoist exodus; on the second he took no pity. Suárez had no party of his own with which to stand for election, so for months, crouched down, plotting from a distance and playing along with the bluff that he wasn’t even going to stand as a candidate, he waited while a huge coalition of centrist parties formed around a party led by Areilza; once the coalition was formed, he pounced on it and, strengthened by the generalized certainty that the electoral list headed by his prestige as midwife of the reform would be the winner of the elections, he placed before the leaders of the new formation a clear dilemma: either Areilza or him. There was no need to answer: Areilza had to withdraw, Suárez remodelled the coalition to suit himself and on 3 May 1977, the same day the UCD was founded, announced his candidacy in the elections. Less than a month and a half later he won. Perhaps Suárez rightly thought that he, not the UCD, had won, that without him the UCD was nothing; but, rightly or wrongly, perhaps he also began to think other things. Perhaps he thought that without him not only would the UCD not exist: the rest of the parties wouldn’t exist either. Perhaps he thought that without him not only would the rest of the parties not exist: democracy wouldn’t exist either. Perhaps he thought that he was his party, that he was the government, that he was democracy, because he was the charismatic leader who had brought forty years of dictatorship to an end in eleven months, peacefully with an unprecedented operation. Perhaps he thought he was going to govern for decades. Perhaps he thought, therefore, that he wasn’t going to govern just with a view to the right and to the centre — where his voters were, the ones who had put him in power — but also with a view to the left: after all, he would think, a true leader does not govern for the few, but for all; after all, he would think, he also needed the left to be able to govern; after all, he would think, deep down he was a Social Democrat, almost a Socialist; after all, he would think, he was no longer a Falangist but he had been one and Falangism and the left shared the same anti-capitalist rhetoric, the same social concern, the same contempt for the tycoons; after all, he would think, he was anything but a tycoon, he’d risen from the ranks in politics and in life, he knew the forsakenness of the street and miserable boarding houses and starvation wages and there was no way he was going to accept being described as a right-wing politician, he belonged to the centre left, increasingly more to the left and less to the centre although the centre and the right voted for him, he was light years away from Fraga and his Francoist pachyderms, to be on the right was to be old in body and spirit, to be against history and against the oppressed, carrying the guilt and the shame of forty years of Francoism, while to be progressive was the fairest, most modern and most audacious thing to be and he always — always: since he ruled his adolescent crew in Ávila and embodied to perfection the ideal youth of the dictatorship — had been the fairest, most modern and most audacious, his Francoist past was at once very far away and too close and humiliated him with its proximity, he was not who he had once been, he was now not only the maker of democracy but also its champion, the main bastion of its defence, he had constructed it with his own hands and he was going to defend it from the military and from the terrorists, from the far right and from the far left, the bankers and the businessmen, politicians and journalists and adventurers, Rome and Washington.

Perhaps that was what Adolfo Suárez felt as the years went by; that or part of it or something very similar to it, a feeling that started to come over him gradually as soon as he was elected Prime Minister in the first democratic elections and from that moment on began to cause him to undergo a radical metamorphosis: the former provincial Falangist, the former Francoist upstart, the Julien Sorel or Lucien Rubempré or Frédéric Moreau of the 1960s ended up investing himself with the dignity of a hero of democracy, Emmanuele Bardone believed himself to be General Della Rovere and the plebeian fascist dreamt of himself converted into a left-wing aristocrat. Like Bardone, he didn’t do it out of haughtiness, because there was no haughtiness in his nature, but because an aesthetic and political instinct surpassed him and pushed him to interpret with a fidelity deeper than reason the role history had assigned him or that he felt it had assigned him. I’ve said over the years, I’ve said gradually: like that of Bardone, Suárez’s mutation was not, it almost goes without saying, an instantaneous epiphany, but a slow, zigzagging process, often secret from everybody or almost everybody, but maybe especially from Suárez himself. Although it would be reasonable to date the origin of it all to the very day the King appointed him Prime Minister and, ennobled by the position, he proposed to act as if he were a prime minister appointed by the citizens, opening himself to the political and moral reason of the democratic opposition, the truth is that his new character didn’t show signs of life until, in order to disassociate himself from the right, shortly before the elections Suárez insisted on conceding a disproportionate weight in the UCD to the small Social Democratic Party in the coalition, and when, just afterwards — while his parliamentary group discussed the possibility that their deputies might occupy the left wing of the chamber in the Cortes, symbolically reserved for the parties of the left — he declared himself a Social Democrat to his former Deputy Prime Minister and announced the formation of a centre-left government. These postures anticipate the drift Suárez experienced during the four years he was still in government. They were years of decline: he was never again the explosive politician he’d been during the first eleven months of his mandate, but until March 1979, when he won his second general election, he was still a bold and efficient politician; from then until 1981 he was a mediocre, sometimes disastrous politician. Three projects monopolized the first period; three collective projects, which Suárez steered but in which the main political parties all took part: the Moncloa Pact, the drawing up of the Constitution and the designing of the so-called Estado de las Autonomías. They weren’t the epic undertakings that had spurred his imagination and multiplied his talent during his first year in the premiership, deeds that demanded juridical con-tricks, magic feints never before seen, false duels against false enemies, secret meetings, life-or-death decisions and stages set for a champion facing danger alone with his squire; they were not these sorts of undertakings, but they were matters of historical magnitude; he did not set upon them with the predatory momentum he’d shown up till then, but at least he did so with the conviction gained by the strength of his triumphs and the authority of the voters; he also did so while little by little General Della Rovere displaced Emmanuele Bardone inside him. Thus, the Moncloa Pact was a largely successful attempt to pacify a society on a war footing since the death rattles of Francoism and convulsed by the devastating consequences of the first oil crisis; but the pact was most of all an agreement between the government and the left and, although signed by all the main political parties, it received harsh criticism from the business sector, from the right and from certain sectors of the UCD, which accused the Prime Minister of having surrendered to the unions and the Communists. Thus as well, the Constitution was a successful attempt to give democracy a lasting legal framework; but Suárez most likely only agreed to draw it up owing to the demands pressed on him by the left, and it is certain that, despite at first doing everything possible to make the text conform to his interests down to the last letter, when he understood that this aspiration was useless and pernicious he endeavoured more than anyone to make sure the result was the work of the accord of all the parties, and not, as all or almost all the previous constitutions had been, a constant cause for discord and eventually a burden for democracy, just as it’s true that in order to achieve it he always sought alliances with the left and not with the right, which produced more resentment in his own party. These two great projects — the first approved in the Cortes in October 1977 and the second approved by a referendum in December 1978 — represented two successes for Suárez (and for democracy); with the third it’s again impossible not to imagine General Della Rovere fighting to supplant Emmanuele Bardone: the difference is that on this occasion Suárez lost his grip on the project and it ended up turning into one of the main causes of the political disorder that led to his leaving power and to the 23 February coup.

It shouldn’t have happened, because the idea of the Estado de las Autonomías was at least as valid as that of the Moncloa Pact and almost as necessary as that of drawing up a Constitution. Perhaps Suárez didn’t know a single word of history, as his detractors repeated, but what he did know is that democracy was not going to function in Spain if it didn’t satisfy the aspirations of the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia to see their historical and linguistic singularities recognized and to enjoy a certain amount of political autonomy. Title VIII of the Constitution, where the territorial organization of the state is defined, attempted to respond to these ancient demands; predictably, its writing ignited a battle between the political parties the result of which was a hybrid, confusing and ambiguous text that left almost all the doors open and which, to be applied with immediate success, would have called for guile, subtlety, a capacity to reconcile the irreconcilable and a historical intuition or sense of reality that from the beginning of 1979 Suárez was rapidly losing.

It all started long before the approval of the Constitution and it started well, or at least it started well for Suárez, who carried off another magic trick in Catalonia: in order to avert the danger of the left, which had won the general election there, forming an autonomous left-wing government, Suárez pulled out of his sleeve Josep Tarradellas, the last Prime Minister of the Catalan government in exile, a pragmatic old politician who at once guaranteed the support of all the Catalan parties and respect for the Crown, the Army and the unity of Spain, so his return in October 1977 meant turning the re-establishment after forty years of a Republican institution into a legitimizing tool of the parliamentary monarchy and into a victory for the government in Madrid. In Galicia things didn’t go so well, and in the Basque Country even less so. Many in the military took the announcement of the autonomy of these three territories to be an announcement of the dismembering of Spain, but the real problems arose later; later and in more than one sense through Suárez’s own fault or that of the General Della Rovere inside Suárez rushing to expel Emmanuele Bardone: given that with manifest incongruence in the Spain of those years nationalism was identified with the left, given that with manifest congruence the left was identified with the decentralization of the state, in part to move closer to the left and in any case so nobody could accuse him of discriminating against anybody — to continue being the fairest, most modern and most audacious — Suárez hurried to concede autonomy to all the territories, including those that had never asked for it because they lacked a consciousness or ambition of singularity, with the corollary that even before the constitutional referendum was held fourteen pre-autonomous governments appeared almost overnight and began to discuss fourteen statutes of autonomy, the approval of which would have required holding in a great rush dozens and dozens of referenda and regional elections in the midst of an improvised blooming of vernacular particularisms and of a latent war of suspicion and comparative injuries between communities. It was more than a secularly centralist state could bear in a few months without threatening to lose its mast, and even the nationalists and the most enthusiastic supporters of decentralization began to sound the alarm at a flight forward in which nobody could glimpse the finishing line and the consequences of which almost everybody began to fear. Towards the end of 1979 Suárez himself seemed to notice that the galloping disorder of the decentralization of the democratic state entailed a threat to democracy and to the state, so he tried to put it into reverse, rationalize it or slow it down, but by then he had already turned into an awkward, no longer resourceful politician, and the attempt to put the brakes on only managed to divide the government and his party and earn him unpopularity that at the beginning of the following year led him to lose in less than a month, successively and spectacularly, a referendum in Andalusia, one election in the Basque Country and another in Catalonia. It’s true that no one helped him fix the mess: by the spring and summer of 1980 it seemed anything was valid against him: instead of trying to prop him up as they had done during the first years of his mandate — because they understood that propping him up meant propping up democracy — the political parties became obsessed with toppling him at any price, not understanding that toppling him at any price meant contributing to toppling democracy; but it was not just that obsession: to articulate the state territorially was perhaps the central problem of the moment, and no other matter laid bare the indigence and frightful frivolity of a political class, which to its cost got embroiled over the course of 1980 in delirious quarrels, unscrupulously chased advantageous positions, encouraged an appearance of universal chaos and won an accelerated disrepute, placing the country in an increasingly precarious frame of mind while the second oil crisis dissipated the fleeting bonanza won by the Moncloa Pact, strangled the economy and left half the workers unemployed, and while ETA tried to bring on a coup d’état by murdering soldiers in the most merciless terrorist campaign of their history. That was the omnivorous soil in which 23 February was born and grew, and Suárez’s clumsiness in managing the start-up of the Estado de las Autonomías fed its voraciousness more than any of the other clumsinesses he committed at that time. Seen in hindsight, however, it is at least an exaggeration to claim that in those days the situation was objectively catastrophic and that the country was rushing uncontrollably towards its disintegration, but that seems to be what everyone was thinking on the eve of the coup d’état; not just the golpista soldiers: everyone, including some of the few who on 23 February had the courage to come to the defence of democracy from the first moment. On the penultimate day of December 1980 El País depicted an end-of-the-world scenario in which the territorial chaos augured a violent solution; after accusing all the political parties without exception of irresponsibility and reproaching them for their culpable ignorance of the point of arrival of the Estado de las Autonomías, or their interested lack of interest in defining it, the editorial ended by saying: ‘A less serious political decomposition than this one [. .] led Companys to rebel, on 6 October 1934, against a right-wing coalition government, and a Socialist faction to provoke the desperate rising in Asturias.’ Since this was the pre-revolutionary diagnosis of the newspaper that best represented the Spanish left, perhaps we might wonder whether a large part of democratic society was not providing the golpistas with daily excuses to reaffirm their certainty that the country was in a situation of maximum emergency that demanded maximum emergency solutions; perhaps we might even wonder — it’s only a more uncomfortable way of formulating the same question — if a large part of democratic society was not conspiring in spite of themselves to involuntarily facilitate the task of the enemies of democracy.

The Suárez of those days could be accused of passivity and incapacity, and also of political poverty, but not of being irresponsible or frivolous or an unscrupulous opportunist: Suárez was still Suárez but he was no longer a Julien Sorel or a Lucien Rubempré or a Frédéric Moreau, or an Emmanuele Bardone about to definitively transmute into General Della Rovere. Maybe the final occasion Suárez played Bardone was just before being elected Prime Minister for the second time, in March 1979; fearing a PSOE victory, he tried out his last conjurer’s trick, the final great swindle of the provincial rogue: he appeared on television the night before the election clamouring against the danger of the revolutionary left winning and destroying the family and the state; he knew very well that this clamour was nothing but a way of frightening old ladies, but perhaps he suspected that only by risking a demagogic prank could he win the election, and he did not hesitate to risk it. The ruse worked, he won the election, and after winning he held more power than he had ever had before. After a very short space of time, however, he went into free fall; we know the rest of the story: 1979 was a bad year for him; 1980 was worse. In spite of that, it’s likely that during this era of disasters — while the moment he would give up the job of Prime Minister and the moment of the military coup approached and he imagined himself in the centre of the ring, blind and staggering and sobbing amid the howling of the spectators and the heat of the lights, politically sunk and personally broken — Suárez would have been filling his aristocratic role of progressive statesman more than ever, increasingly convinced he was the final bastion of democracy when all democracy’s defences were tumbling down, increasingly sure that the innumerable political manoeuvres undertaken against him were pushing open the doors of democracy to the enemies of democracy, ever more profoundly invested with the dignity of his position as the Prime Minister of democracy and his responsibility as the maker of democracy, the character ever more incorporated in his person, like an invented Suárez but more real than the real Suárez because he was superimposed on the real one, transcending him, like an actor about to interpret the scene that will justify him to history hidden behind a mask which rather than covering reveals his authentic face, like an Emmanuele Bardone now converted once and for all into General Della Rovere who on the evening of 23 February, at the moment of truth, while the bullets whizzed around him in the chamber of the Cortes and the deputies sought shelter under their benches, would have remained in his amid the roar of battle to calm the fear of his comrades and help them to face up to the misfortune with these words: ‘Friends, this is your Prime Minister speaking. Show some dignity and self-control. Be men.’ And also with these words: ‘Show these scoundrels that you’re not afraid of dying.’ And also with these: ‘In these final moments let us dedicate our thoughts to our families, our nation and to His Majesty the King.’ And finally with these: ‘Viva Italia!’

Chapter 5

Rossellini wasn’t particularly proud of General Della Rovere, but an artist is not always the best judge of his own work, and I think he was mistaken: the film is traditional in form, sometimes even conventional, but the fable it tells of the destiny of Emmanuele Bardone — a collaborator with fascism converted into a hero of anti-fascist Italy — is one of extraordinary richness and complexity; even richer and more complex, perhaps, is the parallel fable of the destiny of Adolfo Suárez — a collaborator with Francoism converted into a hero of democratic Spain — because Suárez was a politician and his journey suggests that in a politician private vices can be public virtues or that in politics it’s possible to arrive at good through evil or that it’s not enough to judge a politician ethically and first he must be judged politically or that ethics and politics are incompatible and the expression political ethics is an oxymoron or perhaps that vices and virtues don’t exist in the abstract, but only in relation to the circumstances in which they’re practised: Suárez was not an ethically irreproachable man, but it’s very possible that he would never have been able to do what he did for years if he hadn’t been a rogue with the morality of a survivor and a gift for deceit, an upstart without much culture or firm political ideas, a cocky, fawning, swindling Falangist. It is reasonable to surmise that any of the young Francoist politicians who at the death of Franco knew or guessed like he did that Francoism had no future and would have to be expanded or transformed could have done what Suárez did; it’s reasonable, but the reality is that while almost all of them shared his private vices none of them combined his courage, his audacity, his strength, his toughness, his exclusive political vocation, his acting talent, his seriousness, his charm, his modesty, his natural intelligence, his aptitude for reconciling the irreconcilable and most of all a sense of reality and a historical intuition that allowed him to understand very early, pushed by the democratic opposition, that rather than trying to impose himself on reality he should allow it to mould him, that expanding or transforming Francoism would only give rise to misfortune and the only thing to do with it was to kill it once and for all, betraying the past in order not to betray the future. Be that as it may, we don’t need to exhaust the parallels between Bardone and Suárez: Bardone was a morally abject individual who committed atrocious sins in an atrocious time; Suárez was instead a basically honest man: while he occupied the leadership of the government his sins were not mortal ones — or they were only the mortal sins involved in the exercise of power — and before occupying the leadership of the government his sins were the usual sins of a rotten time. As well as the political successes he harvested, this perhaps explains why for so many years so many people admired him and kept voting for him; I mean that it’s not true that people voted for Suárez because they were deceived about his defects and limitations, or because Suárez managed to deceive them: they voted for him in part because he was like they would have liked to be, but most of all they voted for him because, less in his virtues than in his defects, he was just like them. That’s more or less what Spain in the 1970s was like: a country full of vulgar, uncultivated, swindling, womanizing, gambling men without many scruples, provincials with the morality of survivors brought up between Acción Católica and the Falange who had lived comfortably under Francoism, collaborators who wouldn’t even have admitted their collaboration but were secretly increasingly ashamed of it and trusted Suárez because they knew that, although he might have wanted to be the fairest and the most modern and most audacious — or precisely because he wanted to be — he would always be one of theirs and would never take them where they didn’t want to go. Suárez didn’t let them down: he constructed a future for them, and by constructing it he cleansed his past, or tried to cleanse it. If you look closely, at this point Suárez’s strange fate also resembles that of Bardone: by shouting ‘Viva Italia!’ at the firing squad on a snowy dawn, Bardone not only redeems himself, but in a way redeems his whole country for having collaborated massively with fascism; by remaining on his bench while the bullets whizz around him in the chamber on the evening of 23 February, Suárez not only redeems himself, but in a way redeems his whole country for having collaborated massively with Francoism. Who knows: maybe that’s why — maybe that’s also why — Suárez didn’t duck.

Chapter 6

Are a politician’s private vices public virtues? Is it possible to arrive at good by way of evil? Is it insufficient or ungenerous to judge a politician ethically and should he only be judged politically? Are ethics and politics incompatible and is the expression political ethics an oxymoron? At least since Plato philosophy has discussed the problem of the tension between means and ends, and there is no such thing as a serious code of ethics that has not wondered whether or not it is permissible to use dubious, or dangerous, or simply evil means to achieve good ends. Machiavelli had no doubt that it was possible to arrive at good by way of evil, but a near contemporary of his, Michel de Montaigne, was even more explicit: ‘The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre’; that’s why both thought politics should be left in the hands of ‘the strongest and boldest citizens, who sacrifice their honour and conscience for the good of their country’. Max Weber put the question in similar terms. Weber doesn’t think that ethics and politics are exactly incompatible, but he does think that political ethics are a specific type of ethics, with lethal secondary effects: against absolute ethics, which he calls the ‘ethics of conviction’ and which are concerned with the goodness of actions without regard to their consequences — Fiat justitia et pereat mundus — the politician practises relative ethics, which Weber calls ‘ethics of responsibility’, which instead of being concerned only with the goodness of actions are concerned most of all with the goodness of the consequences of the actions. However, if the essential means of politics is violence, as Weber thinks, then the politician’s calling consists of using perverse means, abiding by the ethics of responsibility, to achieve beneficial ends: from there it follows that for Weber a politician is a lost man because he cannot aspire to the salvation of his soul, because he made a pact with the devil when he made a pact with the forces of power and he’s condemned to suffer the consequences of that abominable pact. From there as well, I would add, power resembles an abrasive substance that leaves behind a wasteland, the more power accumulated the bigger the wasteland, and from there it follows that every pure politician sooner or later ends up thinking he’s sacrificed his honour and his conscience for the salvation of his country, because sooner or later he understands he’s sold his soul, and that he won’t be saved.

Suárez didn’t understand it immediately. After leaving power following the coup d’état he remained involved in politics for exactly ten years, but during that time he became a different politician; he didn’t stop being a pure politician, but he barely acted like one any more, and he began to be a politician with fewer responsibilities and more convictions — he, who as a young man had barely had any — as if he thought this last-minute change could prevent the devil from extracting his part of the deal. Around the time he presented his resignation as Prime Minister the King promised to grant him a dukedom as a reward for services rendered to the country; few people around the Zarzuela were in favour of ennobling that upstart who many thought had rebelled against the King and endangered the Crown, so the concession was postponed and, in a gesture more poignant than embarrassing — because it reveals the plebeian provincial arriviste still fighting for legitimacy and to atone for his past — Suárez demanded what he’d been promised and just two days after 23 February the monarch finally made Suárez a duke on the condition that he stayed away from politics for a while. Suárez wasted no time in accepting this degrading arrangement, having his shirts embroidered with a ducal crown and starting to use his title; these were the external signs that allowed him to nail down his interpretation of the character he’d aspired to be for some time and in a way already was: a progressive aristocrat, exactly like General Della Rovere. Perhaps less intent on his political future than on putting finishing touches to his historical figure, set on the futile proposal of merging the ethics of conviction with the ethics of responsibility, he tried to be faithful to this only partly unreal image for the rest of his political life: the image of a statesman with no ambition for power, devoted to what he then called ‘bringing ethics into politics’, preserving democracy, encouraging concord, expanding liberty and combating inequality and injustice. He didn’t always achieve his objective, sometimes through thoughtlessness, other times through spite, often through his difficulty in restraining the pure politician still inside him. Three days after the coup d’état he left for a long holiday in the United States and the Caribbean with his wife and a group of friends; it was the understandable bolting of a man undone and weary to the core, but it was also a bad way to leave the premiership, because it meant abandoning his successor: he did not hand over his powers, didn’t leave him a single suggestion or a single piece of advice, and all Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo found in his office in Moncloa was a locked safe of the ruler’s secrets but whose only contents turned out to be, as he found out after a locksmith forced it open, a piece of paper folded in four on which Suárez had written down the combination to the safe, as if he’d wanted to play a joke on his replacement or as if he’d wanted to give him a lesson on the true essence of power or as if he’d wanted to reveal that in reality he was only a chameleon-like actor without an inner life or distinct personality and a transparent being whose deepest secret was that he had no secrets.

But he didn’t just abandon his successor; he also abandoned his party. On his return from the holiday, Suárez set up a legal office with a handful of faithful from his cabinet, and for some time he made an effort to stay away from politics; the political village of Madrid facilitated his efforts: the calamity of the final months of his government and the trauma of his resignation and 23 February had made him just short of undesirable, and anybody who harboured the slightest ambition — and almost everybody who harboured none — endeavoured to keep him at a distance. His vocation, however, was much stronger than his insolvency and, in spite of the promise he’d made to the King, that period out of politics was brief and his distancing from power relative; after all he still maintained a certain control of UCD through some of his men, which didn’t prevent the Party from continuing to unhinge itself or him from watching this unhinging with a disgust mixed with vindictive rage: contrary to what so many of his fellow Party members had been predicting for a long time, it proved that his leadership had not been the cause of all the UCD’s woes; with his successor, on the other hand, the disgust was not mixed: as soon as he became Prime Minister Calvo Sotelo began to adopt measures that would root out Suárez’s policies and which he interpreted as an intolerable swing to the right. As a result of all this, within a few months of his retirement from politics Suárez began to prepare his return. By then Calvo Sotelo had removed Suárez’s supporters from the leadership of the UCD and he was feeling increasingly ill at ease in a party that rightly blamed him for its fall, so, although there were offers made for him to retake the wheel of the UCD to keep it from crashing, Suárez turned them down, and in the last days of June 1982, just three months before the general election, he announced the creation of a new party: the Centro Democrático y Social (CDS, Democratic and Social Centre).

It was his last political adventure. It was guided by a double purpose: on the one hand, to create a real party, organizationally and ideologically cohesive, as the UCD had never been; on the other hand, to promote his new principles of a progressive statesman of concord, his new political ethic of a left or centre-left aristocrat. He set up the party with hardly any resources, hardly any men, without anyone’s backing or hardly anyone’s, and less than none of the so-called powers that be, who had done everything they could to throw him out of power and contemplated the possibility of his return with horror. Far from disheartened, he was excited by this abandonment, maybe because he felt that it returned to politics an epic and aesthetic spirit that he hadn’t felt since his first months in government and had almost forgotten, authorizing him as well to present himself as a victim of the powerful and as a solitary fighter against injustice and adversity or, as he told the journalists at the presentation of the new party, as a Quixote coming out lance at the ready to take on all comers in the wind and the weather out on the road. Around that time a story was widely circulated that many consider apocryphal. The story goes that shortly before the election one of his collaborators recommended he hire an American adviser for the campaign; Suárez accepted the suggestion. Do you want to win the election? was the question the adviser asked Suárez straight away when they met. Naturally, Suárez said yes. Then let me use the film of the coup d’état, said the adviser. Show the people the empty chamber and you sitting on your bench and you’ll get an absolute majority. Suárez burst out laughing, thanked the adviser and dismissed him then and there. The anecdote resembles a vignette invented by one of Suárez’s hagiographers — to use the most devastating images of the democracy in an electoral campaign was not doing any favours to democracy, and the great man chose to wage a clean fight even at the cost of losing the election — I don’t know whether it is or not, but, if it’s true that some adviser made such a proposal to Suárez, I would bet that was his reaction: first, because he knew the adviser was mistaken and, although the image of the chamber on the evening of 23 February could have won him thousands of votes, it would never have won the election for him; and second — and especially — because, even supposing that the electoral use of those images would have won him the election, it would have ruined irredeemably the role he needed to play in order to definitively exorcize his past and fix his place in history; or to put it another way: perhaps Emmanuele Bardone would have accepted the adviser’s suggestions, but not General Della Rovere, and Suárez didn’t want anything to do with Emmanuele Bardone anymore and hadn’t for a long time.

In that election he won two seats. It was a very poor result, not even enough to form his own parliamentary group in the Cortes, and relegated him to the benches reserved for the mixed group beside his eternal buddy Santiago Carrillo, who by then was prolonging his agony at the head of the PCE and never tired of laughingly repeating to him that this was how the country was paying them back for their gesture of keeping their composure on the evening of 23 February; but it was also enough of a result to allow him to play the left-wing or centre-left aristocrat and statesman of concord. He began to do so at the first opportunity: during the session of investiture for the new Prime Minister he cast his vote for Felipe González, who had been his fiercest adversary while he led the government and who didn’t even thank him for the support, undoubtedly because the absolute majority obtained by the PSOE in the elections made it superfluous. ‘We mustn’t contribute to disillusion,’ Suárez said that day from the speakers’ rostrum in the Cortes. ‘We shall not cheer this government’s possible errors. We shall not participate, neither in this chamber nor outside of it, in destabilizing operations against the government. We are not supporters of the irresponsible and dangerous game of capitalizing on the difficulties of those who hold the honourable charge of governing Spain.’ These words were met with the sonorous indifference or silent disdain of an almost empty chamber, but contained a declaration of principles and a lesson in political ethics that over the next four years he did not tire of imparting: he was not prepared to do to others what they’d done to him at the price of provoking a crisis of state like the one that had led to his resignation and to 23 February. It was a retroactive form of defence and, although nobody recognized his authority to give anybody lessons in political ethics, Suárez continued doggedly preaching his new gospel. The truth is he abided by it, in part because his parliamentary insignificance permitted it, but above all because he wanted more than anything else to be true to the idiosyncrasies of his new character. That’s how he began to forge his resurrection: little by little people began to bury the disoriented politician of the last years of his mandate and dig up the vibrant maker of democracy, and little by little, and especially as some grew disappointed with the Socialist illusion, his statesman’s gestures and rhetoric, his ethical regenerationism began to catch on and a confusing progressive discourse that allowed him to flirt with the intellectual left in the capitals, to which he always wanted to belong, as well as recover part of his attraction for the traditional right of the provinces, to which he always had belonged.

Four years after his first speech in the Cortes as an ordinary deputy he felt that the general elections were again placing him at the gates of government. They were held in June 1986 and he stood again with hardly any money or media backing, but with a radical message that undermined his adversaries and handed him millions of votes and almost twenty parliamentarians. That enlarged and unexpected triumph plunged the right into sorrow (‘If this country gives nineteen seats to Suárez there’s no hope for it,’ declared Fraga, who would give up the leadership of his party a short time later) and the left into uncertainty, finding themselves forced to take Suárez’s rise seriously, from that moment on they kept asking him to stop trying to steal their voters and to go back to his old rhetoric and his proper place on the right. If his only purpose had been to reconquer the premiership, he should have done so: with Fraga out of the picture and the so-called powers that be resigned to his return to politics, Suárez was for almost everyone the natural leader of the centre right, and therefore Fraga’s successor offered him over and over again the chance to lead the electoral ticket of a big coalition capable of defeating the Socialists. He should have done it, but he didn’t: he’d lost his youthful pure politician’s ferocity and was no longer prepared to return to government by trampling on the ideas he’d made his own; he was a conviction politician and not a piranha of power; he felt closer to the generous left that looked after the disadvantaged than to the miserly right jealous of its privileges; in short: he’d resolved to play his character to the end. Besides, after five years of political hardships, success drove him to a euphoria that at times seemed to repay the agonies of his last years in Moncloa: flourishing the idealism of his values and his real achievements against what he considered the Socialists’ wingless pragmatism and the right’s futureless impotence, as if he’d never lost his old charisma and his capacity to reconcile the irreconcilable and his historical intuition, Suárez stirred his former supporters again over the following months and attracted politicians, professionals and intellectuals of the left or the centre left, and in a very short time had established a party, with no guarantees other than the stubbornness and record of its leader, across the whole of Spain, and some could imagine him setting up a serious alternative power to Socialist power.

It’s not impossible that some symbolic triumphs of this little return to the big stage meant in secret almost more than the electoral triumphs to him. In October 1989 he was named president of the Liberal International, an organization that on his insistence changed its name to the Liberal and Progressive International: it was a recognition that the Falangist from Ávila who had been Secretary General of Franco’s single party had turned into a benchmark politician for international progressiveness, and the definitive certificate that for the world as well Emmanuele Bardone was now General Della Rovere. A tiny thing that happened in the Cortes two years earlier must have made him privately happier still. During a parliamentary debate the new leader of the right, Antonio Hernández Mancha, whose requests for support Suárez had repeatedly rejected, dedicated with the haughty irony of a state lawyer some lines of verse reworked for the occasion that he attributed to St Teresa of Ávila: ‘What have I, Adolfo, that my enmity you should seek? / What wealth from it, my Adolfo, / that before my door, covered in dew, / you spend dark winter nights in snow and sleet?’ As soon as his adversary had finished speaking, Suárez jumped up from his bench and asked for the floor: he assured the chamber that Hernández Mancha had got each and every line of the quatrain wrong, then recited them correctly to finish by saying that the author was not St Teresa but Lope de Vega; then, without another word, he sat back down. It was the scene dreamt of by any cocky provincial with a desire for revenge: he’d always been a reserved and pedestrian parliamentarian, but he’d just shamed his most direct competitor before the television cameras and in a full session of the Cortes, reminding those who for years had considered him an uneducated nonentity that perhaps he hadn’t read as much as they had but he’d read enough to do much more for the country than they’d done, and reminding them in passing that Hernández Mancha was just one more of the many good-for-nothings adorned with honorary degrees he’d measured up to in his political career and who, because they thought they knew everything, would never understand anything.

All this was a mirage, the posthumous glow of an extinguished star, the hundred days of glory of a dethroned emperor. I refuse to believe that Suárez didn’t know it; I refuse to believe that he’d returned to politics unaware that he would not be returning to power: after all very few knew as well as he did that it was perhaps impossible to bring ethics into politics without renouncing politics, because very few knew as well as he did that perhaps nobody comes to power without using dubious or dangerous or simply evil means, playing fair or trying as hard as he could to play fair to make himself an honourable place in history; I even wonder if he didn’t know more, if he didn’t at least guess, supposing that we can truly admire heroes and that they don’t make us uncomfortable or offend us by diminishing us with the emphatic anomaly of their actions, maybe we cannot admire heroes of the retreat, or not fully, and that’s why we don’t want them to govern us again once their job is completed: because we suspect that they have sacrificed their honour and their conscience, and because we have an ethic of loyalty, but we do not have an ethic of betrayal. The mirage, in any case, barely lasted a couple of years: by the third the certainty had already begun to invade the Cortes and public opinion that what Suárez called politics of state was in reality ambiguous, tricky, populist politics, seeking left-wing votes in Madrid and right-wing ones in Ávila, and which allowed him to make pacts with the left in the Cortes and with the right in the municipalities; by the fourth, after disappointing results in the general and European elections, problems arose in the Party, internal divisions, expulsions of unruly members, and the right and the left saw the long-awaited occasion to kill off a common adversary and pounced on him at the same time in pursuit of their left-wing and right-wing voters; in the fifth year came the collapse: in the regional elections of 26 May 1991 the CDS lost more than half its votes and was left out of almost all the parliaments of the autonomous regions, and that same night Suárez announced his resignation as Party leader and relinquished his seat in the Cortes. It was the end: a mediocre ending, with no grandeur or brilliance. He had no more to give: he was exhausted and disappointed, powerless to battle on inside and out of his party. He didn’t retire: they retired him. He left nothing behind: the UCD had disappeared years before, and the CDS would soon disappear. Politics is a slaughterhouse: many sighs of relief were heard, but not a single lament for his withdrawal.

Over the next year Suárez began to familiarize himself with his future as a precociously retired politician, father of a nation on the dole, intermediary in occasional business deals, high-priced speaker in Latin America and player of prolonged games of golf. It was a long, peaceful and slightly insipid future, or that’s how he must’ve imagined it, perhaps with a certain unexpected dose of happiness. The first time he left power, after his resignation and the coup d’état, Suárez undoubtedly felt the chill of a heroin addict without heroin; it’s very possible that now he felt nothing of the sort, or that he felt only something very similar to the joyful astonishment of one who throws off an impediment he hadn’t been aware he was carrying. He forgot politics; politics forgot him. He continued to be profoundly religious and I don’t think he would have read Max Weber, so he had no reason to doubt he would be saved and that, although power was an abrasive substance and he had signed a pact with the devil, no one was going to come and collect on it; he continued to be a compulsive optimist, so he must have been sure that now all he had to do was let time go placidly by in the hope that the country would be grateful for his contribution to the victory of democracy. ‘The hero of retreat can only be sure of one thing,’ wrote Hans Magnus Enzensberger of Suárez shortly before he gave up politics, ‘the ingratitude of the fatherland.’ It appears that Enzensberger was mistaken, or at least he was partly mistaken, but Suárez was entirely mistaken, and a little while later a final metamorphosis began to work on him, as if, after having played a young arriviste from a nineteenth-century French novel and a grown-up rogue converted into an aristocratic hero of a neorealist Italian film, a demiurge had reserved for the last plot of his life the tragic role of a pious, old, devastated prince from a Russian novel.

Suárez received the first warning that a placid retirement was not what awaited him just a year and a half after leaving politics, when in the month of November 1992 he learned that his daughter Mariam had breast cancer and the doctors thought she had less than three months to live. The news left him stunned, but it did not paralyse him and without a minute to lose he devoted himself to stopping his daughter’s illness. Two years later, once he thought they’d managed it, they diagnosed an identical cancer in Amparo, his wife. On this occasion the blow was harder, because it came on top of the previous one, and this time he didn’t recover. It may be that, Catholic to the end, weakened by age and misfortune, he ended up being defeated not by that double mortal disease, but by guilt. In the year 2000, when his wife and daughter were still alive, Suárez wrote a prologue for a book his daughter wrote about her illness. ‘Why them? Why us?’ he lamented. ‘What have they done? What have we done?’ Suárez understands that such questions are absurd, ‘the logical attribute of an instinctive egomania’, but in spite of that it proves he posed them many times and that, although he hadn’t read Max Weber, remorse mortified him many times with the illusory reproach that the devil had come to collect his part of the bargain and that the burnt wasteland that surrounded him was the result of the instinctive egomania that had allowed him to get to be who he’d always wanted to be. And it was just then that it happened. It was just then, at perhaps the darkest moment of his life, that the inevitable arrived, the longed-for moment of public recognition, the opportunity for all to show their gratitude for the sacrifice of his honour and his conscience for the country, the humiliating national din of compassion, he was the great man cut down by misfortune who no longer bothered anyone, was no longer able to overshadow anyone, who was never going to return to politics and could be used by this side and that and converted into the perfect paladin of concord, into the unbeaten ace of reconciliation, into the immaculate enabler of democratic change, into a living statue suitable for hiding behind and cleansing consciences and securing shaky institutions and shamelessly exhibiting the satisfaction of the country with its immediate past and, in Wagnerian scenes of gratitude for the fallen leader, homages, awards, honorific distinctions began to rain down on him, he recovered the King’s friendship, the confidence of the Prime Ministers who followed him, popular favour, he achieved everything he’d wanted and anticipated although it was all a little false and forced and hurried and most of all late, because by then he was going or had gone and could barely contemplate his final collapse without understanding it too well and begging everyone who crossed his path to pray for his wife and for his daughter, as if his soul had got definitively lost in a labyrinth of self-pitying contrition and tormented meditations on the guilty fruits of egomania and he had become definitively transformed into the old repentant sinner prince of a novel by Dostoevsky.

In May 2001 his wife died; three years later his daughter died. By then his mind had abdicated and he was in another place, far from himself. The illness had begun to appear long before, taking him back and forth from memory to forgetfulness, but towards 2003 his deterioration could no longer be hidden. His last political speech dates from that time, although it wasn’t exactly a political speech; a fragment was shown on television. The party of the right had offered his son Adolfo the candidacy for premier of the autonomous community of Castilla-La Mancha; because he was not unaware that the intention of the offer was to cash in on the prestige of his surname, Suárez advised his son not to accept, but the yearning to emulate his father was stronger than his lack of vocation and the son stood as candidate and the father felt obliged to defend him. On 3 May the two of them held a rally in Albacete. Standing in front of the crowd facing a lectern, Suárez is wearing a dark suit, white shirt and a polka-dot tie; he is seventy years old and, though his body still has vestiges of his poise on the tennis court and dance floor, he looks it, his hair flecked with white, receding sharply, his skin mottled with age spots. He doesn’t talk of politics; he talks of his son, he mentions the fact that he studied at Harvard and then he stops dead. ‘My God,’ he says, barely smiling and shuffling the papers he’s prepared. ‘I think I’ve got myself in a terrible mess.’ The audience applauds, encourages him to go on, and he looks up from his papers, bites his lower lip with a faded flirtatiousness and smiles for a long time; for those who’ve known him for years, it’s an unmistakable smile: it’s the same smile of the beau sure of his charms with which in other times he could convince a Falangist, an Opus Dei technocrat or a Guerrillero de Cristo Rey that deep down he was a paramilitary, a Falangist or an admirer of Opus; it’s the same smile with which he could say: I’m no Communist (or Socialist), no, but I am one of you, because my family was always Republican and deep down I’ve always been one; it’s the same smile with which he said: I have power and you have legitimacy: we have to understand each other. It’s the same smile, perhaps a little less natural or more vague, but deep down it’s the same. He looks back at the papers, he says again that his son studied at Harvard, he stops dead again. ‘I don’t know if I’m repeating myself,’ he says. An urgent round of applause breaks out. ‘I’m in a terrible mess with these papers,’ he repeats. The music starts up, people stand to drown out his muttering with applause, he forgets about the papers and tries to improvise a closing, but amid all the uproar all that can be heard of what he says is the following phrase: ‘My son will not let you down.’

They were the last words he pronounced in public. There it all ended. Then, for some years, he disappeared, shut up in his house in La Florida, and it was as if he had died. In fact, everyone began to speak of him as if he were dead. I myself have written this book as if he were dead. One day, however, he appeared again: it was 18 July 2008. That morning all the Spanish newspapers had his latest photograph on the front cover. His son Adolfo had taken it the day before, and in it Suárez appears with the King in the garden of his house in La Florida. The two men have their backs to the camera, walking beneath the sun on a recently mown lawn towards a leafy tree. The King is wearing a grey suit and his right hand is resting on Suárez’s right shoulder, with a friendly or protective air; Suárez is wearing a light-blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, beige trousers and tan shoes. The photograph captures a moment of a visit by the King to give Suárez the chain of the Order of the Golden Fleece, the highest honour granted by the Spanish Royal Family; according to the articles, the King has also granted it to other significant figures in Spain’s recent past — among them Grand Duke Juan I of Luxembourg, Beatriz I of the Netherlands or Margarita II of Denmark — although he’s only granted it a little more than a year ago to the nonentity who helped him more than anyone to conserve the Crown, and until that day he hadn’t had time to bring it to him. The gratitude of the nation.

Chapter 7

We know what happened in the intelligence services before 23 February and on 23 February, but what happened afterwards? What happened afterwards presents very few doubts, and can be told briefly.

There was much nervousness in CESID during the days following the coup. Rumours circulated around the organization’s headquarters about the participation of members of Major Cortina’s unit in the coup attempt; many of them pointed to the three members of the SEA (Sección Especial de Agentes) — Sergeant Sales, Corporals Monge and Moya — to Captain Gómez Iglesias, Captain García-Almenta, Major Cortina’s second-in-command, and Cortina himself; all or almost all of them came from the same source: Captain Rubio Luengo and Sergeant Rando Parra, whom on the afternoon of the coup Monge had told of his adventures as a guide for Tejero’s buses to the Cortes, seconded by Moya and Sales, on the orders of García-Almenta and, according to general inference, of Cortina. The major might have been sure of having created during his five years in command of AOME an organization as elitist, hermetic, loyal and disciplined as an order of sworn knights, but at that time he found out that some of his men had unresolved grievances against him and had decided to take advantage of the opportunity to settle them. They were the ones who went to Calderón, the service’s strongman, to denounce Cortina and the rest of the golpistas of his unit. For obvious reasons, Calderón was terrified by the idea that responsibility for what had happened on 23 February might even graze CESID (the accusations of negligence and lack of foresight were enough to deal with), so he spoke to Cortina and, after being assured that AOME had not taken part in the coup, demanded he speak to his men and tackle the rumours. Over the following days Cortina held meetings with Rubio Luengo and Rando Parra: according to Cortina, he tried to prove to them that their accusations were false; according to Rubio Luengo and Rando Parra, he tried to buy their silence, blackmail and bribe them, and threatened them in a veiled way (the threats from some of their colleagues in the unit they’d informed on were more direct according to Rando Parra, and included insults, death threats and the destruction of a motorcycle). In the middle of March an AOME officer told the leader of the Congressional Defence Committee that the leadership of CESID was trying to cover up the participation of some of his colleagues in the coup, and at the end of the month, pressured from outside and from within — perhaps especially from within — Calderón ordered an investigation under the auspices of Lieutenant Colonel Juan Jáudenes, chief of the Interior Division, who, after several weeks of interrogations of accusers and accused, submitted a report that not unexpectedly absolved CESID in general and Major Cortina and his subordinates in particular of any link whatsoever to the coup.

It was all in vain. A few days after a new director of CESID took possession of his post at the beginning of May and sent the Jáudenes Report to the judge appointed by the government to try the case of those involved in the 23 February coup, Major Cortina was charged. He was not charged because of the report, although it’s likely that some of the information it contained contributed to convincing the judge of his implication in the coup; it was Lieutenant Colonel Tejero’s fault that he was prosecuted. In his first two declarations before the judge, he mentioned neither Cortina nor his friend Gómez Iglesias, according to Tejero because both of them sent him an identical message through his lawyer: the only thing he’d achieve by giving them away would be to deprive himself of their protection and that of CESID when he needed it most; however, in his third declaration, made at the beginning of April in the Castle of La Palma in Ferrol, the lieutenant colonel claimed that Cortina had been the real instigator of the coup. I’ve already noted the reasons for this change: during the two months since 23 February the defence counsels of almost all the accused had elaborated a joint strategy, cheered by the far-right press, consisting of maintaining the defendants were innocent of the crime of rebellion because they’d simply been obeying the orders of their superior officers, who were obeying the orders of Milans and of Armada, who were in their turn obeying the orders of the King; that was their principal line of argument before the trial and during the trial, and implicating Cortina was not only a way of implicating an essential organization of the state in the coup, but especially, because it could relate the major to Armada and to the King, a way of implicating the upper echelons of the Army and the Crown in the coup. So the third time he testified before the examining magistrate Lieutenant Colonel Tejero decided to forgo the promised shelter of CESID, and told or invented his two encounters with Cortina, accusing him of having spurred on the coup and of being his link to Armada, and on 21 May, after being interrogated by the examining magistrate, Major Cortina went to jail accused of having participated in the coup. Some days later, on 13 June, Captain Gómez Iglesias was charged. No other member of AOME underwent the same fate.

Chapter 8. 23 February

In a way, it was the most dangerous moment of the night. It was half past one in the morning and, after the King’s televised speech condemning the assault on the Cortes and demanding respect for the Constitution, many people all over the country who had been on tenterhooks until then, glued to the radio and the television, went to bed, and almost everyone felt that the appearance of the monarch marked the end of the coup or the beginning of the end of the coup. It was a feeling that was only partly accurate. After Armada’s failure in the Cortes the soft coup of Armada and Milans had failed, but not Tejero’s hard coup, a coup intended to finish with democracy even at the cost of finishing with the monarchy and which — with the lieutenant colonel still occupying the Cortes, Milans’ tanks still on the streets of Valencia, the reactions of the Captains General still pending and many generals, commanders and officers still tempted to act — was still waiting for a minimum movement of troops that might spark off a chain reaction in the Army. The problem was that at that point, with the King now standing firm against the golpistas, such a reaction would have entailed almost necessarily an armed confrontation between those loyal to the Crown and those in rebellion, something that had been a possibility since the beginning of the coup but that had perhaps never been as close to happening as then, when the King’s orders were only just beginning to erode the rebels’ morale and the certainty had not yet spread throughout the Army that the coup was now not going to triumph.

At that time, fifteen minutes after the King appeared on television, ten minutes after Armada left the Cortes without having been able to make his proposal for a unity government to the parliamentarians, the minimal troop movement the golpistas were hoping for occurred: a column of fifteen Land-Rovers occupied by a major, four captains, two lieutenants, five NCOs and a hundred and nine conscripts appeared in the centre of Madrid, got as far as Carrera de San Jerónimo, broke through the double security cordon of Civil Guards and national police surrounding the Cortes and, while the crowd milling around the Hotel Palace tried to discern whether the objective of the recent arrivals was to dislodge the rebels or support them, they joined Lieutenant Colonel Tejero’s forces. The column came from the headquarters of the Brunete Armoured Division on the outskirts of the capital and was under the command of Ricardo Pardo Zancada, the same major who on the eve of the coup, during a return trip to Valencia, received from Milans the mission to incite his division to rebellion with the help of General Torres Rojas and Colonel San Martín. Over the course of the whole evening and night Pardo Zancada had watched perplexed, irate and powerless as the rebellion failed at the Brunete once General Juste, the commanding officer, revoked the departure order issued to all the regiments minutes before the assault on the Cortes; embarrassed by the fleeing of Torres Rojas, who shortly after eight had flown back to La Coruña without carrying out his mission, and by the paralysis of San Martín and the rest of the commanders and officers of the unit, so often ardent enthusiasts of a coup, just before one in the morning Pardo Zancada changed out of his standard uniform and into battledress, improvised his column of light vehicles with the collaboration of several young captains and the only two companies stationed at headquarters and, after waiting in formation for more than a quarter of an hour at the exit barrier as a show of defiance or invitation to his comrades, left for the Cortes after verifying that no one was going to swell their ranks and threatening to shoot in the head any soldier who disobeyed his orders.

It was not a quixotic act. Given that Pardo Zancada joined Tejero when for many the coup had already practically been neutralized, many thought that his was a quixotic act or what is often designated a quixotic act: a noble gesture of loyalty to a lost cause. It was not: it’s true that, unlike many of his comrades, Pardo Zancada demonstrated he was no coward, just as it is true that he was an idealist with his imagination too inflamed by the reverence for the crock of Francoist heroism and a radical too soaked in the ideological concoction of the far right to be intimidated at the last moment, but it’s not true that his action was a quixotic act. It was an act of war: strictly speaking, the only act of war that had occurred since Tejero occupied the Cortes and Milans the streets of Valencia, and therefore the necessary pinprick to incite the military and let loose those repressed golpista outbursts that had been agitating the barracks for many hours, the spark that could ignite the powder keg of the Brunete Division and, with it, that of the whole Army. For this reason Pardo Zancada’s move was dangerous; for this reason and perhaps for another. Although on 23 February he was acting under the orders of Milans, it’s possible that Pardo Zancada was connected more or less closely to a group of colonels connected in turn to San Martín or captained by San Martín, a group that, as was explained in November of the previous year in Manuel Fernández-Monzón Altolaguirre’s report entitled ‘Panorama of Operations Under Way’, had spent months planning a hard coup the aim of which was the establishment of a presidential republic or a military directorate; San Martín and Pardo Zancada had climbed aboard Milans and Armada’s monarchist coup at the last moment, but, this having failed, the colonels’ coup was perhaps the only visible alternative for the golpistas in the midst of the reigning nervousness, confusion and chaos, and Pardo Zancada’s action could be a means, although perhaps not to activate that operation, to activate its organizers, accomplices and sympathizers of its organizers, incorporating them into the attempted coup and dragging Milans and other Captains General by force into a coup that could no longer be staged with the King, but only against the King.

In spite of the fact that at half past one in the morning perhaps few people feared that contingency might be enough of a counterirritant to hand triumph to the golpistas, Pardo Zancada’s first moments in the Cortes seemed to confirm these dark predictions. His column’s arrival lifted the spirits of the rebel Civil Guards, who were beginning to fall victim to fatigue and discouragement, aware that the failure of the negotiation between Armada and Tejero had impeded a favourable outcome of the hostage-taking and every moment that passed made it less likely that the Army would come to its assistance; but, as well as briefly boosting the rebels’ morale — allowing them to believe that the Brunete Division had finally joined the coup and this detachment was just the bridgehead of the expected general movement — as soon as he put himself at Tejero’s orders Pardo Zancada concentrated on the task of rousing other units to rebellion: armed with a division telephone book that he’d got from headquarters and jumping from one phone to another as those directing the siege of the Cortes cut his communications with the exterior until leaving only four or five phones working of the eighty in the building, Pardo Zancada spoke (from an office on the ground floor of the new building, from the switchboard, from the press box) with several officers at Brunete with troops at their command; after reporting to San Martín at headquarters, he spoke to Colonel Centeno Estévez, of the 11th Mechanized Brigade, to Lieutenant Colonel Fernando Pardo de Santayana, of the Anti-aircraft Artillery Group, to Colonel Pontijas, of the XII Armoured Brigade, to Lieutenant Colonel Santa Pau Corzán, of the 14th Villaviciosa Cavalry Regiment. The conversation with each of them was similar: Pardo Zancada informed them of what he’d done and then urged them to follow his example, assuring them that many others were getting ready to imitate his gesture and all they had to do was get a tank on Carrera de San Jerónimo for the coup to be irreversible. The reactions to his telephonic harangues oscillated between Pardo de Santayana’s defeatism and Santa Pau Corzán’s enthusiasm (‘Don’t worry, Ricardo, we won’t leave you there with your ass hanging out! We’re coming with you!’), and by half past three in the morning his efforts seemed to be bearing fruit when one of Milans’ adjutants phoned the Cortes to announce that the Villaviciosa and Pavía Cavalry Regiments had just rebelled and were on their way to Carrera de San Jerónimo. It wasn’t true, but — thanks to Lieutenant Colonel De Meer and Colonel Valencia Remón, who until well into the early hours were on the brink of sending the tanks out of the barracks — it was very close to being so; at least two or three other units from the Brunete were also very close to imitating Pardo Zancada. He also failed when he wanted to disseminate a manifesto outlining the golpistas’ reasons: the newspaper El Alcázar refused to publish it in its pages; the radio station La Voz de Madrid claimed to have technical problems in order not to broadcast it: both thus deprived the major of a means of propaganda directed at overcoming the indecision of his comrades-in-arms all over the country.

Shortly after receiving the news of this double setback Pardo Zancada called Valencia and spoke to Milans. It was the last time he did so that night; although the major didn’t know it, by then Milans had understood for several hours that the coup was drawing to a close. Minutes after the King’s televised address and Tejero’s refusal to obey him from the office in the new building of the Cortes, sealing the failure of his soft coup, Milans received a telex from the Zarzuela in which he was urged dramatically to put a stop to his uprising. In it, after reiterating his decision to defend constitutional order, the King said: ‘Any coup d’état cannot hide behind the King, it is against the King.’ And he also said: ‘I order you to withdraw all the units that you have mobilized.’ And also: ‘I order you to tell Tejero to desist immediately.’ And finally: ‘I swear that I will neither abdicate the Crown nor abandon Spain. Whoever rebels is ready to provoke a new civil war and will bear responsibility for doing so.’ This ultimatum appears to have overcome the resistance of Milans, who as soon as he received it dispatched to all his tactical groups the order to return to quarters, but the tension at the Captaincy General of Valencia would be prolonged for another several hours yet, and not only because of the failed attempts to arrest its incumbent directed from Army General Headquarters by General Gabeiras, but most of all because Milans was still tormented by doubts and not entirely ready to let his arm be twisted, as if he were relying on some straggling support that might still afford victory to the golpistas, or perhaps as if he were ashamed of abandoning the occupiers of the Cortes to their fate, having sent them there himself. There was no more support, no one dared to disobey the King, the colonels led by San Martín or linked to San Martín decided to keep waiting in the hope that a more auspicious occasion would arise and, after convincing themselves that nothing could be done for Tejero and Pardo Zancada either (or that the best thing they could do for them was precisely to abandon them, to provoke their surrender and end the occupation), Milans admitted his defeat. That’s what he eventually said to Pardo Zancada the last time they spoke by telephone that night: that no Captaincy General was backing the coup and that he’d returned his troops to quarters and rescinded the edict proclaiming a state of emergency; to this he added only that Pardo Zancada should try to persuade Tejero to accept the agreement that Armada had offered him and the lieutenant colonel had rejected hours before. At that moment the request was absurd, as well as futile, and they both knew it was futile and absurd. General, sir, said Pardo Zancada. Wouldn’t you like to speak to the lieutenant colonel yourself? No, answered Milans. You speak to him. Yes, sir, General, said Pardo Zancada. Is there anything else I can do for you, sir? No, nothing, said Milans. Take care, Pardo.

It was half past four on the morning of the 24th and the coup had still not ended, but its nature had definitively changed: until then it had been a political and military problem; from then on, once Milans and Armada’s soft coup had failed and so had the attempt at conversion there and then into Tejero’s hard coup, it was now just a problem of public order: everything consisted of finding a non-violent way to get the hostages released. And the reality was that by that time in the morning — after the King’s appearance on television as cascades of condemnations of the coup poured forth from political and professional organizations, trade unions, regional governments, municipalities, county councils, the press and from a whole country that had remained silent until it glimpsed the failure of the golpistas — the interior of the Cortes began to be ripe for capitulation, or that was at least what those who were directing the blockade were thinking now that they’d abandoned the idea of assaulting the building with groups from special operations out of fear of a massacre and had concluded that they just needed to allow time to go by so the lack of external support would make the occupiers succumb: except for the party leaders, isolated for the whole night in other rooms of the Cortes, the parliamentarians were still in the chamber, smoking and dozing and exchanging contradictory bits of news in low voices, more sure with each minute that passed of the defeat of the coup, watched over by Civil Guards who tried to make them forget the outrages of the first moments of the occupation, treating them with more and more consideration because they were more and more demoralized by the evidence of their solitude, more decimated by drowsiness, fatigue and discouragement, more repentant of having embarked on, having let themselves be embarked on, that odyssey with no way out, more frightened of the future awaiting them and more impatient for it all to be over as soon as possible.

Towards dawn the first attempts to negotiate the surrender of the rebels began. The first came from the Captaincy General of Madrid (or perhaps from the Zarzuela) and the one in charge of carrying it out was Colonel San Martín; the second came from Army General Headquarters and in charge of carrying it out was Lieutenant Colonel Eduardo Fuentes Gómez de Salazar. Both attempts sought to get Pardo Zancada out of the Cortes (the theory was that, if Pardo Zancada left, Tejero would soon follow), but, although San Martín seemed to be the ideal person to achieve it, since he was Pardo Zancada’s friend and immediate superior and because many might have suspected that he was somehow involved in the coup, the first attempt failed; not the second. Lieutenant Colonel Fuentes was an officer stationed in the Exterior Intelligence Division of Army General Headquarters and an old friend of Pardo Zancada’s: both had worked under San Martín’s orders in Admiral Carrero Blanco’s intelligence service, both were on the editorial board of the military magazine Reconquista and both shared radical ideas; that night Pardo Zancada and he had spoken by telephone on several occasions, haranguing each other, but towards eight in the morning Fuentes had accepted that his friend’s remaining in the Cortes no longer made sense and he decided to request his superiors’ permission to speak to him and try to get him to desist. His idea was well received at Headquarters, they granted him permission and, after passing through the command post of the blockade at the Hotel Palace — where Generals Aramburu Topete and Sáenz de Santamaría demanded he accept only surrender conditions he judged absolutely reasonable — shortly after nine he approached the Civil Guards watching over the access gate to the Cortes and asked to speak to Pardo Zancada.

Thus opened the epilogue of the coup. By then it had been several hours since the country had awoken to a rather belated antigolpista fervour, the newspapers were selling out of their special editions with front pages crackling with enthusiasm for the King and the Constitution and invective against the rebels and, although all the cities recovered the hustle and bustle of any winter morning following calls for normality sent out by the Zarzuela and by the provisional government, in Madrid more than four thousand people thronged the area around Carrera de San Jerónimo, disturbed during the night by far-right gangs, cheering for liberty and democracy; by then the occupiers were barely dominating the situation inside the Cortes any more: around eight in the morning the parliamentarians had refused amid shouts of protest to eat the provisions they offered them for breakfast — milk, cheese, sliced ham — around nine the Civil Guards had to put down with the threat of arms the beginnings of a riot led by Manuel Fraga and seconded by several of his associates, and there was still a little more than an hour to go before Tejero would allow the deputies to leave and several dozen Civil Guards would hand themselves over to the loyal forces by jumping out the window of the press room of the new building of the Cortes on to Carrera de San Jerónimo. These symptoms of stampede explain how, unlike Colonel San Martín a few hours earlier, Lieutenant Colonel Fuentes would find a Pardo Zancada predisposed to agree a finale. The negotiation, however, was long and laborious. Pardo Zancada asked to leave the Cortes at the same time as Tejero, he asked to do so at the command of his unit and to be able to hand it over at Brunete headquarters, he asked that only he and none of his men be held responsible, he asked that there be no photographers or television cameras allowed to film the moment of leaving. Fuentes considered all the conditions acceptable except for one. They won’t allow the captains to remain at liberty, he objected. All right, answered Pardo. Then from the lieutenants down. Fuentes left for the Hotel Palace, where they hurried to approve what he’d agreed, as did General Gabeiras from Army General Headquarters, and the lieutenant colonel went straight back to the Cortes to try to convince Tejero as well. After meeting with his officers and guards, Tejero endorsed Pardo Zancada’s demands, but qualified some and added others, among them that it should be General Armada who vouched for the accord with his presence. Fuentes wrote it all down on a sheet of paper, and as he left for the Hotel Palace again he met General Aramburu Topete a few metres from the entrance gate accompanied by General Armada, whom he’d summoned to reinforce the negotiations. There were more secret discussions, more comings and goings between the Cortes and the Hotel Palace, and by about half past one the surrender was complete: on the patio that separates the new building and the old building, on the roof of one of Pardo Zancada’s Land-Rovers, in the presence of him, Tejero, Fuentes and Aramburu Topete, General Armada guaranteed the fulfilment of the points of the pact by signing the sheet of paper where Fuentes had written them down. Half an hour later the evacuation of the Cortes began. It was carried out in an orderly fashion: the Speaker closed the session in due form and the parliamentarians began to file out; a final humiliation awaited them on the patio, however, where Pardo Zancada had lined up his column of soldiers three deep to force them to pass in front of it, ravaged by the anxiety of the sleepless night and observed from afar by the crowd waiting outside the doors of the Hotel Palace, before walking out into freedom on Carrera de San Jerónimo.

One of the first parliamentarians to leave was Adolfo Suárez. He did so alone, urgently, ignoring the soldiers lined up on the patio, but as he crossed the entrance gates and headed for his official car he noticed the presence of General Armada and, because at some point during his long hours locked up alone in the ushers’ room he’d heard that the King’s former secretary was negotiating a solution to the hostage-taking, Suárez changed direction and went over and greeted him warmly, almost embracing him, convinced that the man he’d always considered a potential golpista and in recent times the promoter of slippery political operations against the government had turned out to be the one responsible for his liberation and the failure of the coup. Other deputies copied Suárez’s gesture, among them General Gutiérrez Mellado, but almost all of them would remember many times the cadaverous look on General Armada’s face while he coped with their effusions. It was exactly twelve noon on a freezing foggy Tuesday, the most confusing and most decisive seventeen and a half hours of the last half-century of Spanish history had just gone by and the 23 February coup had ended.