The Anatomy of a Moment

Chapter 1

In the middle of March 2008, I read that according to a poll published in the United Kingdom almost a quarter of Britons thought Winston Churchill was a fictional character. At that time I had just finished a draft of a novel about the 23 February 1981 coup d’état in Spain, and was full of doubts about what I’d written and I remember wondering how many Spaniards must think Adolfo Suárez was a fictional character, that General Gutiérrez Mellado was a fictional character, that Santiago Carrillo or Lieutenant Colonel Tejero were fictional characters. It still strikes me as a relevant question. It’s true that Winston Churchill died more than forty years ago, that General Gutiérrez Mellado died less than fifteen years ago and as I write Adolfo Suárez, Santiago Carrillo and Lieutenant Colonel Tejero are still alive, but it’s also true that Churchill is a top-ranking historical figure and, if Suárez might share that position, at least in Spain, General Gutiérrez Mellado and Santiago Carrillo, not to mention Lieutenant Colonel Tejero, do not; furthermore, in Churchill’s time television was not yet the main fabricator of reality as well as the main fabricator of unreality on the planet, while one of the characteristics that defines the 23 February coup is that it was recorded by television cameras and broadcast all over the world. In fact, who knows whether by now Lieutenant Colonel Tejero might not be a television character to many people; perhaps even Adolfo Suárez, General Gutiérrez Mellado and Santiago Carrillo might also be to a certain extent, but not to the extent that he is: apart from people dressing up as him on comedy programmes and advertisements, the lieutenant colonel’s public life is confined to those few seconds repeated each year on television in which, wearing his tricorne and brandishing his new standard-issue pistol, he bursts into the Cortes and humiliates the deputies assembled there at gunpoint. Although we know he is a real character, he is an unreal character; although we know it is a real image, it is an unreal image: a scene from a cliché-ridden Spanish film fresh from the hackneyed brain of a mediocre imitator of Luis García Berlanga. No real person becomes fictitious by appearing on television, not even by being a television personality more than anything else, but television probably contaminates everything it touches with unreality, and the nature of an historic event alters in some way when it is broadcast on television, because television distorts (if not trivializes and demeans) the way we perceive things. The 23 February coup coexists with this anomaly: as far as I know, it’s the only coup in history filmed for television, and the fact that it was filmed is at once its guarantee of reality and its guarantee of unreality; added to the repeated astonishment the images produce, to the historic magnitude of the event and to the still troubling areas of real or assumed shadows, these circumstances might explain the unprecedented mishmash of fictions in the form of baseless theories, fanciful ideas, embellished speculations and invented memories that surround them.

Here’s a tiny example of the latter; tiny but not banal, because it is directly related to the coup’s televisual life. No Spaniard who’d reached the age of reason by 23 February 1981 has forgotten his or her whereabouts that evening, and many people blessed with good memories remember in detail — what time it was, where they were, with whom — having watched Lieutenant Colonel Tejero and his Civil Guards enter the Cortes live on television, to the point that they’d be willing to swear by what they hold most sacred that it is a real memory. It is not: although the coup was broadcast live on radio, the television images were shown only after the liberation of the parliamentary hostages, shortly after 12.30 on the 24th, and were seen live only by a handful of Televisión Española journalists and technicians, whose cameras were filming the interrupted parliamentary session and who circulated those images through the in-house network in the hope they’d be edited and broadcast on the evening news summaries and the nightly newscast. That’s what happened, but we all resist having our memories removed, for they’re our handle on our identity, and some put what they remember before what happened, so they carry on remembering that they watched the coup d’état live. It is, I suppose, a neurotic reaction, though logical, especially considering the 23 February coup, in which it is often difficult to distinguish the real from the fictitious. After all there are reasons to interpret the 23 February coup as the fruit of a collective neurosis. Or of collective paranoia. Or, more precisely, of a collective novel. In the society of the spectacle it was, in any case, one more spectacle. But that doesn’t mean it was a fiction: the 23 February coup existed, and twenty-seven years after that day, when its principal protagonists had perhaps begun to lose for many their status as historical characters and enter the realms of fiction, I had just finished a draft of a novel in which I tried to turn 23 February into fiction. And I was full of doubts.

Chapter 2

How could I even dream of writing a fiction about the 23 February coup? How could I dream of writing a novel about a neurosis, about a paranoia, about a collective novel?

There is no novelist who hasn’t felt at least once the presumptuous feeling that reality is demanding a novel of him, that he’s not the one looking for a novel, but that a novel is looking for him. I had that feeling on 23 February 2006. Shortly before this date an Italian newspaper had asked me to write an article on my memories of the coup d’état. I agreed; I wrote an article in which I said three things: the first was that I had been a hero; the second was that I hadn’t been a hero; the third was that no one had been a hero. I had been a hero because that evening, after hearing from my mother that a group of gun-toting Civil Guards had burst into the Cortes during the investiture vote for the new Prime Minister, I’d rushed off to the university with my eighteen-year-old imagination seething with revolutionary scenes of a city up in arms, riotous demonstrators opposing the coup and erecting barricades on every corner; I hadn’t been a hero because the truth is I hadn’t rushed to the university with the intrepid determination to join the defence of democracy against the rebellious military, but with the libidinous determination to find a classmate I had a huge crush on and perhaps take advantage of those romantic hours, or hours that seemed romantic to me, to win her over; no one had been a hero because, when I arrived at the university that evening, I didn’t find anyone there except the girl I was looking for and two other students, as meek as they were disoriented: no one at the university where I studied — not at mine or any other university — made the slightest gesture of opposing the coup; no one in the city where I lived — not mine or any other city — took to the streets to confront the rebellious Army officers: except for a handful of people who showed themselves ready to risk their necks to defend democracy, the whole country stayed at home and waited for the coup to fail. Or to triumph.

That’s a synopsis of what I said in my article and, undoubtedly because writing it reactivated forgotten memories, that 23 February I followed with more interest than usual the articles, reports and interviews with which the media commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the coup. I was left perplexed: I had described the 23 February coup as a total failure of democracy, but the majority of those articles, reports and interviews described it as a total triumph of democracy. And not just them. That same day the Cortes approved a declaration, which reads as follows: ‘The lack of the slightest hint of social endorsement, the exemplary attitude of the citizenry, the responsible behaviour of the political parties and the trade unions, as well as the media and in particular the democratic institutions [. .], sufficed to frustrate the coup d’état.’ It would be difficult to accumulate more falsehoods in fewer words, or so I thought when I read that paragraph: my impression was that the coup had not lacked social endorsement, that the citizenry’s attitude was not exemplary, the political parties’ and unions’ behaviour was irresponsible, and, with very few exceptions, the media and democratic institutions had done nothing to frustrate the coup. But it wasn’t the spectacular discrepancy between my personal memory of 23 February and the apparent collective memory that most struck me and produced the presumptuous hunch that reality was demanding I write a novel, but something much less shocking, or more elemental — although probably linked to that discrepancy. It was an obligatory image on every single television report about the coup: the image of Adolfo Suárez turned to stone in his seat while, seconds after Lieutenant Colonel Tejero entered the Cortes, Civil Guards’ bullets whizzed through the air around him and all the rest of the parliamentarians present there — all except two: General Gutiérrez Mellado and Santiago Carrillo — hit the floor seeking shelter from the gunfire. Of course, I had seen that image dozens of times, but for some reason that day I saw it as if I were seeing it for the first time: the shouts, the shots, the terrorized silence of the chamber and that man leaning back against the blue leather of his prime ministerial bench, solitary, statuesque and spectral in a desert of empty benches. It suddenly struck me as a mesmerizing and radiant image, meticulously complex, rich with meaning; perhaps because the truly enigmatic is not what no one has seen, but what we’ve all seen many times and which nevertheless refuses to divulge its significance, it suddenly struck me as an enigmatic image. That’s what set off the alarm. Borges says that ‘every destiny, however long and complicated, essentially boils down to a single moment — the moment a man knows, once and for all, who he is’. Seeing Adolfo Suárez on that 23 February sitting still while the bullets whizzed around him in the deserted chamber, I wondered whether in that moment Suárez had known once and for all who he was and what significance that remote image held, supposing it did hold some meaning. This double question did not leave me over the days that followed, and to try to answer it — or rather: to try to express it precisely — I decided to write a novel.

I got straight down to work. I don’t know whether I need to clarify that the aim of my novel was not to vindicate the figure of Suárez, or to denigrate him, or even to evaluate him, but only to explore the significance of a gesture. I would be lying, however, if I were to say that Suárez aroused much sympathy in me: I was a teenager when he was in power and I never considered him anything other than a Francoist on the make who had prospered through back-breaking bowing, an opportunistic, reactionary, pious, superficial and smooth politician who embodied what I most detested about my country and whom, I’m very much afraid, I identified with my father, an obstinate supporter of Suárez; over time my opinion of my father had improved, but not my opinion of Suárez, or not much: now, a quarter of a century later, I had him down as a short-sighted politician whose principal merit consisted in having been in the place where he had to be and at the moment when he had to be there, something that had granted him a fortuitous prominence during a change, the one from dictatorship to democracy, which the country was going to undertake with or without him, and this reticence is the reason I watched with more sarcasm than astonishment the celebration of his consecration in his own lifetime as the great statesman of democracy — celebrations in which I always thought I recognized the scent of an even greater hypocrisy than is customary in these cases, as if no one believed it at all or as if, more than celebrating Suárez, the celebrants were celebrating themselves. But, instead of impoverishing them, the negligible esteem in which I held him enriched with complexity the character and his gesture, especially as I investigated his life story and researched the coup. The first thing I did was to try to obtain from Televisión Española a copy of the complete footage of Lieutenant Colonel Tejero’s invasion of the Cortes. The procedure turned out to be trickier than expected, but it was worth the effort; the footage — most of which was shot by two cameras that kept running after the storming of the Cortes until they were unplugged by accident — is dazzling: the images we see every anniversary of 23 February last five, ten, fifteen seconds at most; the complete images last a hundred times longer: thirty-four minutes and twenty-four seconds. When they were shown on television, at midday on 24 February, the philosopher Julián Marías ventured the opinion that they deserved a prize for the year’s best film; almost three decades later I feel that was faint praise: they are extremely dense images, of extraordinary visual power, brimming with history and electrified by truth, that I watched many times without their spell being broken. Meanwhile, during that initial period I read several biographies of Suárez, several books about the years when he was in power and about the coup d’état, leafed through the odd newspaper of the day, interviewed a politician or two, the odd military officer, a journalist or two. One of the first people I spoke to was Javier Pradera, an ex-Communist editor transformed into the éminence grise of Spanish culture and also one of the few people who on 23 February, when he was writing editorials for El País and the newspaper brought out a special edition with a genuinely anti-coup text he’d written, had shown himself willing to risk his neck for democracy. I told Pradera of my project (I deceived him: I told him I was planning to write a novel about 23 February; or maybe I didn’t deceive him: maybe from the start I wanted to imagine that Adolfo Suárez’s gesture contained all that 23 February meant in code). Pradera was enthusiastic; since he’s not a man prone to enthusiasms, I raised my guard: I asked him why he was so enthusiastic. ‘Very simple,’ he answered. ‘Because the coup d’état is a novel. A detective novel. The plot goes like this: Cortina sets up the coup and Cortina knocks it down. Out of loyalty to the King.’ Cortina is Major José Luis Cortina; on 23 February Major José Luis Cortina was head of the special operations unit of CESID (Centro Superior de Información de la Defensa), the Spanish intelligence service: he had been a cadet at the military academy the same year as the King, was assumed to be close to the monarch and after 23 February had been accused of participating in the coup, or rather of unleashing it, and he’d been jailed, interrogated and absolved by the court martial that judged the case, but the suspicions hanging over him never entirely dissipated. ‘Cortina sets up the coup and Cortina knocks it down’: Pradera laughed sardonically; I laughed too: rather than the plot of a detective novel it seemed to me like the plot of a sophisticated version of The Three Musketeers, with Major Cortina in a role that blended D’Artagnan with Monsieur de Tréville.

I liked the idea. As it happens, a little while after talking to Pradera I read a book that fitted the fiction the old El País editorialist had in mind like a glove, except that the book wasn’t fiction: it was a work of investigative journalism. Its author is the journalist Jesús Palacios; its thesis is that, contrary to what appearances seem to suggest, the 23 February coup was not an improvised and botched job by an imperfect combination of hard-core Francoist military officers and monarchist military officers with political ambitions, but rather ‘a designer coup’, an operation planned down to the last detail by CESID — by Major Cortina but also by Lieutenant Colonel Calderón, his immediate superior and at the time the strong man of the intelligence services — whose purpose was not to destroy democracy but to trim it or change its direction, getting the premiership away from Adolfo Suárez and putting a military man in his place at the head of a government of salvation made up of representatives of all the political parties; according to Palacios, with this objective Calderón and Cortina had counted not only on the implicit consent or impetus of the King, anxious to overcome the crisis to which the country had been driven by the chronic crises of Suárez governments: Calderón and Cortina had selected the operation’s leader — General Armada, the King’s former secretary — had encouraged its operational branches — General Milans del Bosch and Lieutenant Colonel Tejero — and had woven an intricate conspiratorial web of military men, politicians, businessmen, journalists and diplomats that assembled scattered and contrasting ambitions in the common cause of the coup. It was an irresistible hypothesis: suddenly the chaos of 23 February tallied; suddenly everything was coherent, symmetrical, geometric, just like in a novel. Of course Palacios’ book wasn’t a novel, and a certain knowledge of the events — not to mention the opinion of the most diligent scholars — allowed one to glimpse that Palacios had taken certain liberties with reality to keep it from contradicting his hypothesis; but I wasn’t a historian, or even a journalist, just a writer of fiction, so I was authorized by reality to take as many liberties with her as necessary, because the novel is a genre that doesn’t answer to reality, but only to itself. Happily I thought Pradera and Palacios were offering me an improved version of The Three Musketeers: the story of a secret agent who, with the aim of saving the monarchy, hatches a gigantic conspiracy destined to topple by means of a coup d’état (a golpe de estado) the King’s Prime Minister, precisely the only politician (or almost the only one) who, when the moment arrives, refuses to comply with the will of the golpistas and remains in his seat while the bullets whizz around him in the Cortes.

In the autumn of 2006, when I decided I knew enough about the coup to develop that plot, I began to write the novel; for reasons that are beside the point, in the winter I abandoned it, but towards the end of the spring of 2007 I took it up again, and less than a year later I had a finished draft: it was, or wanted to be, the draft of a strange experimental version of The Three Musketeers, with Major Cortina as narrator and protagonist, and the action of which, instead of revolving around the diamond pendants presented by the Queen Consort of France, Anne of Austria, to the Duke of Buckingham, revolved around the solitary image of Adolfo Suárez sitting in the Cortes on the evening of 23 February. The text covered four hundred pages; I wrote it with unusual, almost triumphant fluidity, shooing away doubts by reasoning that the book was in an embryonic state and that only as I familiarized myself with its mechanism would the uncertainty finally clear away. This didn’t happen, and as soon as I’d finished the first draft the feeling of triumph evaporated, and the doubts, instead of clearing away, multiplied. For a start, after having spent months groping through the ins and outs of the coup in my imagination, I now believed I fully understood what before I had only guessed with fear or reluctance, and that Palacios’ hypothesis — which constituted the historical cement of my novel — was fundamentally false; the problem was not that Palacios’ book was entirely wrong or even bad: the problem was that the book was so good that anyone who wasn’t familiar with what happened on 23 February could end up thinking that for once history had been coherent, symmetrical and geometric, and not disorderly, turbulent and unpredictable, which is how it is in reality; in other words: the hypothesis upon which my novel was built was a fiction that, like any good fiction, had been constructed on the basis of facts, dates, names, analysis and conjecture, selected and arranged with a novelist’s cunning until everything connects with everything else and reality acquires a homogeneous meaning. All right then, if Palacios’ book was not exactly a work of investigative journalism, but rather a novel superimposed on a work of investigative journalism, was it not redundant to write a novel based on another novel? If a novel should illuminate reality through fiction, imposing geometry and symmetry where there is only disorder and chance, should it not start from reality, and not from fiction? Was it not superfluous to add geometry to geometry and symmetry to symmetry? If a novel should defeat reality, reinventing it in order to substitute it with a fiction as persuasive as itself, was it not indispensable to first know that reality in order to defeat it? Was it not the obligation of a novel about 23 February to renounce certain of the genre’s privileges and try to answer to reality as well as to itself?

They were rhetorical questions: in the spring of 2008 I decided that the only way to erect a fiction on the 23 February coup was to know as scrupulously as possible the reality of the 23 February coup. Only then did I dive into the depths of the mishmash of theoretical constructions, hypotheses, uncertainties, embellishments, falsehoods and invented memories surrounding that day. For several months, while travelling frequently to Madrid and returning over and over again to the footage of the storming of the Cortes — as if these images were hiding in their transparency the secret key to the coup — I worked full-time at reading all the books I could find about 23 February and the years that preceded it, I consulted newspapers and magazines of the time, I delved into the summary of the trial, I interviewed witnesses and protagonists. I spoke to politicians, military officers, Civil Guards, spies, journalists, people who had experienced first-hand the politics of those years of change from Francoism to democracy and had known Adolfo Suárez and General Gutiérrez Mellado and Santiago Carrillo, and people who had experienced 23 February in the places where the result of the coup was decided: in the Zarzuela Palace, together with the King, in the Cortes, at Army General Headquarters, at the Brunete Armoured Division, at the central headquarters of CESID and at the central headquarters of AOME, the secret CESID unit commanded by Major Cortina. They were obsessive, happy months, but as my investigations advanced and my vision of the coup d’état changed I began to understand very quickly not only that I was going deeper into a shimmering labyrinth of almost always irreconcilable memories, a place with hardly any certainties or documents, where historians prudently had hardly ventured, but especially that the reality of 23 February was of such magnitude that for the moment it was invincible, or at least it was for me, and it was therefore futile for me to propose the exploit of defeating it with a novel; it took me longer to understand something even more important: I understood that the events of 23 February on their own possessed all the dramatic force and symbolic power we demand of literature and I understood that, even though I was a writer of fiction, for once reality mattered more to me than fiction or mattered to me too much to want to reinvent it by substituting it with an alternative reality, because none of what I could imagine about 23 February concerned me and excited me as much or could be as complex and persuasive as the pure reality of 23 February.

Chapter 3

That’s how I decided to write this book. A book that is, more than anything else — I’d better admit from the start — the humble testimony of a failure: incapable of inventing what I know about 23 February, illuminating its reality with fiction, I have resigned myself to telling it. The pages that follow aim to endow this failure with a certain dignity. This means from the outset trying not to deprive the events of the dramatic force and symbolic power they possess on their own, or even their unexpected occasional coherence and symmetry and geometry; it also means trying to make them a little bit intelligible, narrating them without hiding their chaotic nature or erasing the tracks of a neurosis or paranoia or collective novel, but with maximum clarity, with all the innocence I’m capable of, as if no one had ever told them before or as if no one remembered them any more, in a certain sense as if it were true that for almost everyone Adolfo Suárez and General Gutiérrez Mellado and Santiago Carrillo and Lieutenant Colonel Tejero were now fictional characters or at least contaminated by unreality and the 23 February coup an invented memory; in the best of cases I’d tell them as a chronicler of antiquity would have or as a chronicler from far in the future; and this meant finally trying to tell the 23 February coup as if it were a tiny story and at the same time as if this tiny story were one of the decisive stories of the last seventy years of Spanish history.

But this book is just as much — I’d better admit from the start — an arrogant attempt to convert the failure of my novel about 23 February into a success, because it has the nerve not to renounce anything. Or almost anything: it won’t renounce getting right up close to the pure reality of 23 February, and from there, although it’s not a history book and no one should kid themselves and search it for hitherto unknown facts or relevant contributions to the knowledge of our recent past, it will not entirely renounce being read as a history book;* nor will it renounce answering to itself as well as answering to reality, and from there, although it’s not a novel, it won’t entirely renounce being read as a novel, not even as an incredibly strange experimental version of The Three Musketeers; and most of all — and this is perhaps its worst impudence — this book will not entirely renounce understanding by means of reality that which it renounced understanding by means of fiction, and from there seeing itself deep down as not being about 23 February, but only about an image of or a gesture from Adolfo Suárez on 23 February and, collaterally, about an image of or a gesture from General Gutiérrez Mellado and about an image of or a gesture from Santiago Carrillo on 23 February. To try to understand that gesture or that image is to try to answer the question I posed to myself one 23 February when I presumptuously felt that reality was demanding I write a novel; to try to understand it without the powers and liberty of fiction is the challenge this book sets itself.

* Just as if it did aspire to be read as a history book, it takes as its starting point the first documentary evidence of 23 February: the recorded images of the storming of the Cortes; it cannot use, however, the second and almost final piece of evidence: the recordings of the telephone conversations that took place during the evening and night of 23 February between the occupiers of the Cortes and people outside. The recording was made on the orders of Francisco Laína, Director of State Security and head of an emergency government formed that evening on the King’s orders by politicians belonging to the second line of state administration in order to stand in for the hijacked government in the Cortes. The recording or part of the recording was heard on the afternoon of the 24th by the National Defence Council presided over by the King and Adolfo Suárez, in the Zarzuela Palace (and was surely decisive in the government’s issuing an immediate arrest warrant for the leader of the coup, General Armada); it’s possible it was also head by the examining magistrate of the 23 February trial, who did not allow it to be admitted as evidence because it had been obtained without judicial permission; then it disappeared, and since then nothing certain has been known about it. There are those who say it is in the archives of the intelligence services, which is false. There are those who say it was destroyed. There are those who say that, if it wasn’t destroyed, it can only be in the archives of the Interior Ministry. There are those who say that it was in the archives of the Interior Ministry and only disappeared from there a few years after the coup. There are those who say that Adolfo Suárez took a copy of part of the recording with him when he left government. There are many other conjectures. I don’t know anything more.