The Anatomy of a Moment

~ ~ ~

The image, frozen, shows the deserted chamber of the Cortes. No, the image is frozen, but the chamber (or rather: its right wing, which is what the image is actually showing) is not deserted: Adolfo Suárez still remains sitting on his blue prime ministerial bench, still, statuesque and spectral. But he is no longer solitary: two minutes have passed since Lieutenant Colonel Tejero entered the Cortes and beside the Prime Minister, sitting on his right, is General Gutiérrez Mellado; further to his right are three ministers who have just retaken their seats, also blue, following both men’s example; to his left, in the entrance hall, in the central semicircle, a group of Civil Guards intimidates the chamber with their weapons. A watery, sparse and unreal light envelops the scene, as if it were taking place inside a tank or inside a nightmare or as if it were only lit by the baroque cluster of spherical lamps hanging from one wall, in the top right-hand corner of the image.

Which suddenly unfreezes: I unfreeze it. Now, in the crackling and frightened silence of the chamber, the Civil Guards roam the entrance hall, the central semicircle, the four stairways among the benches, still looking for their place in the machinery of the operation; above Adolfo Suárez and the string of ministers beside him, from the desolation of empty benches, peek out one, two, three, four timid deputies struggling between curiosity and fear. Then the angle changes, and for the first time we have an image of the left wing of the chamber, where, as well as a few ministers, the Socialist Party and Communist Party deputies sit. What we see now is curiously similar and curiously different to what we’ve seen up till now, almost as if what’s happening in the left wing of the chamber were an inverted reflection of what’s happening in the right wing. Here, in the left wing, all the blue benches of the government are empty; the red benches of the deputies are too, or all except one: at the top edge of the image, in the first seat of the seventh row, just beside the press box, the floor of which is crowded with parliamentary reporters, one remains seated and smoking. The deputy is sixty-six years old, the gesture and the look behind his wire-framed glasses stony, the forehead so broad it blends into his baldness; he’s wearing a dark suit, dark tie, white shirt. It’s Santiago Carrillo, Secretary General of the Communist Party: like Suárez, like Gutiérrez Mellado, Carrillo has disobeyed the order to get down on the floor and has remained seated while the bullets riddle the chamber and his comrades seek shelter under the benches. He has disobeyed the order and now, two minutes after the gunfire, he’s going to disobey it again: after a Civil Guard walks past him without saying anything, without even looking at him, the voice of someone invisible to us orders him to imitate his colleagues and get down on the floor; Carrillo makes as if to obey, but does not obey: he moves a little in his seat, looks like he’s going to lie down or kneel down, but in the end leans to one side, the arm of the hand with the cigarette in it leaning on the armrest of the bench, in a posture as strange as it is forced, which allows him to pretend to the soldier that he’s obeyed his order without actually having obeyed.

The angle changes again: the image again includes the right wing of the chamber, where we see Suárez, Gutiérrez Mellado, a few ministers of the government and the deputies of the party that keeps it in power. Nothing substantial has changed, except that there are more and more deputies’ heads dotting the desert of empty benches: while the shot of the right wing alternates with a frontal shot of the Cortes’ dais (on the steps of which Víctor Carrascal is still lying, sheltered there since the assault caught him reading out the list of deputies’ names from the podium during the investiture vote), Suárez and the ministers lined up next to him remain in their seats, the Civil Guards continue roaming up and down the chamber, every once in a while you hear their commanding voices and unintelligible comments. Right behind one of them in the lower left of the image, at the bottom of one of the stairways between the benches, a woman appears with a Civil Guard holding her by the arm; the two of them cross the central semicircle, stepping over the prone bodies of the ushers and stenographers, and disappear off the lower right edge of the image, towards the exit. The woman is Anna Balletbó, Socialist deputy for Barcelona, who is visibly pregnant and whom the attackers set free. As soon as she’s left, a crash of breaking glass is heard in the chamber; the noise alarms the Guards and their submachine guns point to the upper part of the room, the deputies also all turn in unison in that direction, but a moment later — because it turns out to be a banal incident: undoubtedly a belated consequence of the gunfire at the beginning — everything goes back to how it was, the silence goes back to how it was and the angle changes again and the image shows Santiago Carrillo again in the midst of a desolation of empty benches, old, disobedient and smoking away, sitting alone in the left wing of the chamber. Soon, on the orders of a Guard, in the first row of benches some ministers stand up and take their seats, their faces upset, their hands humiliatingly visible on the bench’s armrests: we recognize Rodolfo Martín Villa, Minister for Territorial Administration; José Luis Álvarez, Transport Minister; Íñigo Cavero, Culture Minister; Alberto Oliart, Health Minister; Luis González Seara, Minister of Higher Education and Research. When the angle changes again and the camera again shows an image of the right wing of the chamber, something catches the eye that until then had gone unnoticed: just behind Adolfo Suárez, on the side stairway to the benches, a deputy has remained lying face down since the first shots were fired; it catches the eye because now the deputy is moving and, pale and dishevelled, he turns around on all fours while Adolfo Suárez also turns for a moment and notices — as we notice — that it is Miguel Herrero de Miñón, spokesman of his parliamentary group and one of his harshest critics within the UCD. Martial, brazen, pistol in hand, seconds later an officer from the traffic subsection of the Civil Guard makes his appearance in the entrance hall of the chamber: it is Lieutenant Manuel Boza. Instead of entering the chamber, the officer stays there, just a few metres from Suárez, observing the chamber and observing Suárez; he takes a step forward, then another and, when he’s very close to the Prime Minister, he addresses him with a surly gesture of silent violence, he says something as if provoking him or as if spitting on him, he’s probably insulting him; at first Suárez doesn’t hear him or pretends not to hear him, but then he turns towards him and for a moment the two men hold each other’s gaze in silence, motionless, and a moment later they stop looking at each other and the lieutenant climbs the side stairway and disappears into the top of the chamber. A short time later clear, commanding voices are heard (clear but also indecipherable), and then a muffled noise begins to rise while the images show alternately the right wing and the left wing of the chamber, as if wanting to offer a panoramic view of what’s happening; and what’s happening is that, obeying the order of one of the Civil Guards, the more than two hundred people who until that moment remained lying on the floor begin to stand up and retake their seats: in the left wing the first to do so are the journalists in the press box, then the members of the Communist group and finally the Socialists, so that in just a few seconds all the deputies are again visible on their benches. All, including Santiago Carrillo, who unlike the others has not had to get up because he never got down on the floor. And who carries on smoking while the image freezes.

Chapter 1

This is the third man, the third gesture; a translucent gesture, like the two previous ones, but also a double, reiterated gesture: when the golpistas interrupt the investiture session Carrillo disobeys the general order to get down and remains in his seat while the Civil Guards shoot up the chamber, and two minutes later disobeys a specific order from one of the hijackers and remains in his seat while pretending to get down. Like that of Suárez, like that of Gutiérrez Mellado, Carrillo’s is not a random or unreflexive gesture: with perfect deliberation Carrillo refuses to obey the golpistas; like that of Suárez and that of Gutiérrez Mellado, Carrillo’s gesture is a gesture that contains many gestures. It is a courageous gesture, a graceful gesture, a rebellious gesture, a supreme gesture of liberty. It is also, like that of Suárez and that of Gutiérrez Mellado, a posthumous gesture, in a manner of speaking, the gesture of a man who knows he’s going to die or who’s already dead; like many deputies, as soon as he sees Lieutenant Colonel Tejero, Carrillo understands that his entry into the chamber is the beginning of a coup d’état, and as soon as the shooting starts he understands that if he survives the gunfire the golpistas will execute him: he is not unaware that, with the exception of Suárez and Gutiérrez Mellado, there is no one the far-right military officers hate as much as him, who symbolizes in their eyes the quintessence of the Communist enemy. Like that of Suárez, Carrillo’s gesture is also a histrionic gesture: Carrillo is a pure politician, just like Suárez, and therefore a consummate actor, who chooses to die on his feet with an elegant, photogenic gesture, and who always said he didn’t dive under his seat on the evening of 23 February for the same scenic, representative and insufficient reason Suárez always put forward: he was Secretary General of the Communist Party and the Secretary General of the Communist Party could not lie down. Like that of Gutiérrez Mellado, Carrillo’s gesture is a military gesture, because Carrillo had joined the Communist Party half a century earlier the way someone joins a military order and his whole life story had been preparing him for a moment like this: he was raised in a family of professional revolutionaries, since he’d reached the age of reason he’d been a professional revolutionary, in his youth he was imprisoned several times, he’d confronted political gunmen, survived a death sentence, knew the clamour of combat, the brutality of three years of war and the uprooting of forty years of exile and clandestinity. Maybe there was more: maybe there’s another similarity between Carrillo’s gesture and that of Gutiérrez Mellado, a less apparent but more profound similarity.

Like Gutiérrez Mellado, Carrillo belongs to the generation that fought the war; like Gutiérrez Mellado, Carrillo did not believe in democracy until very late in life, even though he’d been defending a democratic republic during the war; like Gutiérrez Mellado, Carrillo participated as a young man in an armed insurrection against the government of the Republic: the uprising in Asturias, forming part of its revolutionary committee when he was barely nineteen years old; like Gutiérrez Mellado, Carrillo never publicly repented for having rebelled against democratic legality, but, also like Gutiérrez Mellado, at least since the mid-1970s he did nothing but repent with his actions for having participated in that rebellion. I don’t mean to equate the desperate proletarian revolt Carrillo advanced in October 1934 with the military coup of the rich and powerful that Gutiérrez Mellado advanced in 1936; I am just saying, however understandable it may have been — and reasons to understand it abound — that the revolt was an error and that, especially from the moment when the transition began and the Communists started to play a decisive role in it, Carrillo acted as though it had been, deactivating the ideological and political mechanisms that might have led to the repetition of the error, a little bit the way since joining the government Gutiérrez Mellado set about deactivating the ideological and political mechanisms of the Army that forty years earlier had provoked the war. Not just that: Carrillo — and with him the old guard of the Communist Party — also gave up the chance to settle scores from an ignominious past of war, repression and exile, as if he considered trying to settle scores with those who had committed the error of settling scores for forty years a way of piling ignominy on ignominy, or as if he’d read Max Weber and felt like him that there was nothing more abject than practising an ethic that sought only to be right and that obliges people to spend time discussing the errors of an unjust and enslaved past with the aim of taking moral and material advantage of other people’s confession of guilt, instead of devoting themselves to constructing a just and free future. As the head of the Communist old guard, during the transition and to make democracy possible, Carrillo signed a pact with the victors of the war and administrators of the dictatorship that included the renunciation of using the past politically, but he didn’t do so because he’d forgotten the war and the dictatorship, but because he remembered them very well and was ready to do anything to keep them from happening again, as long as the victors of the war and administrators of the dictatorship accepted ending it and replacing it with a political system that welcomed victors and vanquished and was essentially identical to that which the vanquished had defended in the war. Carrillo was ready to do anything, or almost anything: to give up the myth of the revolution, the egalitarian ideal of Communism, the nostalgia of the defeated Republic, the very idea of historical justice. . Because with Franco’s death, justice dictated a return to the Republican legitimacy violated forty years earlier by a coup d’état and the resulting war, prosecution of those responsible for Francoism and complete reparation to its victims; Carrillo renounced all of that, and not only because he lacked the strength to achieve it, but also because he understood that often the most noble ideals of men are incompatible with each other and trying to impose at that moment in Spain the absolute triumph of justice was to risk provoking the absolute defeat of liberty, turning absolute justice into the worst injustice. Many left-wingers, in favour of letting justice be done though the world should perish (Fiat justitia et pereat mundus), bitterly reproached him for these concessions, which for them were a form of betrayal; they did not forgive him, in the same way many right-wingers did not forgive Suárez and Gutiérrez Mellado for theirs: like the Communist old guard, to build democracy Carrillo gave up his lifelong ideals and chose harmony and liberty over justice and revolution, and in this way he also turned into a professional of demolition and dismantling who fulfilled himself completely by undermining himself, like a hero of the retreat. Like Suárez’s and Gutiérrez Mellado’s detractors, Carrillo’s detractors claim there was more calculated personal interest and pure eagerness for political survival involved than authentic conviction; I don’t know: what I do know is that this judgement of intentions is politically irrelevant, because it forgets that, however ignoble, personal motives do not cancel out the error or wisdom of a decision. What’s relevant, what’s politically relevant, is that, given that the decisions he adopted gave rise to the creation of a fairer, freer political system than any Spain had ever known in its history, and essentially identical to the one that was defeated in the war (although one was a republic and the other a monarchy, both were parliamentary democracies), at least on this point history has proven Carrillo right, whose gesture of courage and grace and liberty and rebellion when faced with the golpistas on the evening of 23 February thus acquires a different significance: like that of Gutiérrez Mellado, it is the gesture of a man who having combated democracy constructs it like someone expiating a youthful error, who constructs it by destroying his own ideas, who constructs it by denying his own people and denying his very self, who stakes himself entirely on it, who finally decides to risk his neck for it.

The last gesture I recognize in Carrillo’s gesture is not a real gesture; it’s an imagined gesture or at least a gesture that I imagine, maybe whimsically. But if my imagination were truthful, then Carrillo’s gesture would contain a gesture of complicity, or of emulation, and its story would go as follows. Carrillo is sitting in the first seat of the seventh row in the left wing of the chamber; right opposite and below him, in the first seat of the first row in the right wing, sits Adolfo Suárez. When the firing begins, Carrillo’s first impulse is that dictated by common sense: the same way his comrades in the Communist old guard sitting beside him, who like him joined the Party the way one joins a militia of self-denial and danger and have known war, prison and exile and maybe also feel that if they survive the gunfire they’ll be executed, Carrillo instinctively forgets for a moment about courage, grace, liberty, rebellion, even his actor’s instinct, and prepares to obey the Guards’ orders and shelter from the bullets under his bench, but just before he does he notices that opposite him, below him, Adolfo Suárez remains seated in his Prime Minister’s bench, solitary, statuesque and spectral in a desert of empty benches. And then, deliberately, thoughtfully — as if in a single second he understood the complete significance of Suárez’s gesture — decides not to duck.

Chapter 2

It’s a whim, maybe it’s not truthfully imagined, but the reality is the two were much more than accomplices: the reality is that by February 1981 Santiago Carrillo and Adolfo Suárez had spent four years tied by an alliance that was political but was also more than political, and which only Suárez’s illness and loss would finally break.

History fabricates strange figures, frequently resigns itself to sentimentalism and does not disdain the symmetries of fiction, as if it wanted to endow itself with meaning that on its own it did not possess. Who could have predicted that the change from dictatorship to democracy in Spain would not be plotted by the democratic parties, but by the Falangists and the Communists, irreconcilable enemies of democracy and each other’s irreconcilable enemies during three years of war and forty post-war years? Who would have predicted that the Secretary General of the Communist Party in exile would set himself up as the most faithful political ally of the last Secretary General of the Movimiento, the single fascist party? Who could have imagined that Santiago Carrillo would end up turning into an unconditional protector of Adolfo Suárez and into one of his last friends and confidants? No one did, but maybe it wasn’t impossible to do: on the one hand, because only irreconcilable enemies could reconcile the irreconcilable Spain of Franco; on the other, because unlike Gutiérrez Mellado and Adolfo Suárez, who were profoundly different in spite of their superficial similarities, Santiago Carrillo and Adolfo Suárez were profoundly similar in spite of their superficial differences. The two of them were both pure politicians, more than professionals of politics they were professionals of power, because neither of the two conceived of politics without power or because both acted as if politics were to power what gravity is to the earth; both were bureaucrats who had prospered in the inflexible hierarchy of political organizations ruled by totalitarian methods and inspired by totalitarian ideologies; both were democratic converts, belated and a bit forced; both were long accustomed to giving orders: Suárez had held his first political post in 1955, when he was twenty-three, and since then had risen step by step up all the rungs of the Movimiento ladder until reaching its top and becoming Prime Minister; Carrillo had spent more than three decades dominating the Communist Party with the authority of the high priest of a clandestine religion, but before his twentieth birthday he was already leader of the Socialist Youth, when barely twenty-one he became Councillor for Public Order of the Defence Junta of Madrid at one of the most urgent moments of the war, at twenty-two he’d become a member of the politburo of the PCE and from there on never stopped monopolizing positions of responsibility in the Party and the Communist International. The parallels don’t stop there: both cultivated a personal vision of politics, at once epic and aesthetic, as if, rather than the slow, collective and laborious work of bending reality’s resistance, politics were a solitary adventure dotted with dramatic episodes and intrepid decisions; both had been educated in the street, lacked any university training and distrusted intellectuals; both were so tough they almost always felt invulnerable to the inclemencies of their trade and both possessed uncomplicated ambition, unlimited confidence in themselves, a changeable lack of scruples and a recognized talent for political sleight of hand and for the conversion of their defeats into victories. In short: deep down they seem like twin politicians. In 1983, when after the coup d’état neither Carrillo nor Suárez were what they had been any more and were trying to mend their political careers in fits and starts, Fernando Claudín — one of Carrillo’s closest friends and collaborators for over thirty years of Communist militancy — wrote the following about the eternal Secretary General: ‘He lacked the least bit of knowledge of political and constitutional law, and made no efforts to acquire any. Economics, sociology and other subjects that might have allowed him to express fully formed opinions on most parliamentary debates were not his strong suits either [. .] His only speciality was “politics in general”, which tends to translate as talking a little bit about everything without going into anything in depth, and the Party machinery, in which, of course, no one could hold a candle to him. As had always happened to him, he couldn’t find time to study, always absorbed by Party meetings, interviews, secret discussions, delegations and other such activities. The iron will he showed for other tasks, especially holding on to power within the Party and making his way towards it in the state, unfortunately failed him when it came to acquiring education that would have stood him in better stead in the exercise of these functions.’ Twin politicians: if we admit that Claudín is right and that the previous quote defines some of Santiago Carrillo’s weaknesses, then we just need to replace Party with the word Movimiento for it to define also some of Adolfo Suárez’s weaknesses.

It’s possible that these similarities were blindingly obvious to both as soon as they met at the end of February 1977, but it’s certain that neither of the two would have sealed the pact they sealed with the other had they not both understood long before that they needed each other to prevail in politics, because at that moment Suárez had the power of Francoism but Carrillo had the legitimacy of anti-Francoism, and Suárez needed legitimacy as much as Carrillo needed power; something else is certain: since they were both pure politicians, they would not have sealed that pact if they hadn’t believed that the country could do without their individual alliance, but not that of the collective alliance between the two irreconcilable Spains they represented, and which also needed each other. In spite of that, one might well assume that for Suárez, raised in the Manichaean claustrophobia of the dictatorship, it would be surprising to recognize his intimate kinship with the dictatorship’s official bad guy; one might also assume that Carrillo’s surprise would be even greater upon realizing that a young provincial Falangist was competing advantageously with the skill of an experienced old politician — whose heroic reputation in war and exile, international prestige and absolute power in the Party lent him the image of a demigod — forcing him to liquidate in a few months the strategy for post-Francoism he’d planned and maintained for years and to follow the path the younger man had marked out.

The story of that liquidation and its consequences is in part the story of the change from dictatorship to democracy and without it the unbreakable link between Santiago Carrillo and Adolfo Suárez that lasted for years cannot be understood; neither can 23 February; nor, perhaps, the twin gesture of these two twins on the evening of 23 February, while the bullets whizzed around the chamber of the Cortes. The story begins at some moment in 1976. Let’s say it begins on 3 July 1976, the same day the King appoints Adolfo Suárez Prime Minister amid generalized stupor. By then, after thirty-six years of exile, Santiago Carrillo had been living clandestinely in Madrid for six months, in a house on the Viso housing estate, convinced that he needed to gauge the country’s reality and cement his hold on the Party within the country so the Communists would be able to assert themselves as the most numerous, most active and best organized political force of opposition to the regime in the emerging post-Francoism. By then exactly a year had gone by since Carrillo initiated the dismantling or undermining or ideological demolition of the PCE with the aim of presenting it to Spanish society as a modern party free of the old Stalinist dogmatism: in July 1975 along with Enrico Berlinguer and Georges Marchais — leaders of the Italian and French Communists — he’d founded Euro-Communism, an ambiguous and heterodox version of Communism that proclaimed its independence from the Soviet Union, its rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat and its respect for parliamentary democracy. By then it had been exactly three decades since the PCE had elaborated the so-called policy of national reconciliation, which in practice meant that the Party renounced the aim of overthrowing the regime by force and was confident that a non-violent national strike could paralyse the country so that power would be handed over to a provisional government composed of all the parties of the democratic opposition, whose first task would be to call free elections. By then, however, Carrillo had already become aware that, in spite of this still being official Party policy, the anti-Francoist organizations on their own lacked the strength to finish off the prolongation of Francoism embodied at that moment by the monarchy; he was no less aware, if the objective was bloodlessly to install a democracy in Spain, sooner or later the political parties of the opposition would have to end up negotiating with reform-inclined representatives of the regime — now that they could no longer break Francoism to impose democracy they had to negotiate the rupture of Francoism with Francoists lucid enough or resigned enough to accept that the only future for Francoism was democracy — a change of strategy that did not begin to be glimpsed in official PCE doctrine until the beginning of 1976 when the Secretary General introduced a terminological nuance into his speech and stopped talking about the ‘democratic rupture’ to talk about the ‘negotiated rupture’.

So, Carrillo received the unexpected news of Suárez’s appointment at a moment of total uncertainty and certain despondency, knowing that, although it seemed strong, his party was still weak, and that, although it seemed weak, Francoism was still strong. His response to the news was as unexpected as the news itself, or at least it was for the officials and members of his party, which like the democratic opposition and regime’s reformers and the majority of public opinion considered the choice of the last Secretary General of the Movimiento meant the end of their liberalizing hopes and the triumph of the reactionaries of the regime. On 7 July, four days after the appointment of Suárez and barely a few hours after he announced on television that his government’s aim was to achieve democratic normalization (‘That the governments of the future may be the result of the free will of the Spanish people,’ he’d said), Carrillo published in the weekly Mundo Obrero, clandestine organ of the PCE, an article full of benevolent scepticism towards the new Prime Minister: he didn’t believe that Suárez was capable of fulfilling his promises, he wasn’t even sure if they were sincere, but he recognized that his language and tone were not those of a usual Falangist leader and that his good proposals deserved to be given the benefit of the doubt. ‘The Suárez government,’ he concluded, ‘could serve to bring about the negotiation that leads to the agreed rupture.’

Carrillo’s prediction was spot on. Or almost: Suárez not only brought about the negotiation that led to the rupture; he also formulated it in terms no one was expecting: for Carrillo, for the democratic opposition, for the regime’s reformers, the political dilemma of post-Francoism consisted in choosing between the reform of Francoism, changing its form but not its content, and the rupture with Francoism, changing its form to change its content; Suárez took only months to decide the dilemma was false: he understood that in politics the form is the content, and therefore it was possible to realize a reform of Francoism that was in practice a rupture with Francoism. He understood gradually, as he came to understand that it was imperative to break with Francoism, but as soon as he took up his post and made a programmatic declaration in which he announced free elections before 30 June of the coming year Suárez began a cautious series of interviews with the leaders of the illegal opposition to sound out their intentions and explain his project. Carrillo remained on the sidelines; at that moment Suárez was in a hurry for everything, except for talking to Carrillo: although he sensed that without the Communists his political reform lacked credibility, for the moment he was not suggesting the legalization of the Party, maybe especially because he was sure that would be an unacceptable measure for the Francoist mentality of the Army and of the social sectors he needed to shepherd towards democracy or towards some form of democracy. Carrillo, however, was in a hurry to talk to him: Suárez had promised in his first speech as Prime Minister to meet with all the political forces, but the promise hadn’t been kept and, although he still didn’t know if Suárez really meant to break with Francoism or simply reform it, Carrillo did not want to run the risk that the country might be heading for some form of democracy without the presence of the Communists, because he thought that would indefinitely prolong the Party’s clandestinity and condemn it to ostracism and maybe extinction. So in the middle of August Carrillo takes the initiative and a little while later manages to get in contact with Suárez through José Mario Armero, head of the news agency Europe Press. The first interview between Carrillo and Armero is held in Cannes, at the end of August; the second is held in Paris at the beginning of September. Neither of the two encounters produces concrete results (Armero assures Carrillo that Suárez is heading for democracy and asks him for patience: conditions are not yet right for legalizing the PCE; Carrillo offers his help in constructing the new system, does not demand the immediate legalization of his party and claims that it won’t reject the monarchy if it amounts to an authentic democracy); but neither of the two encounters is a failure. On the contrary: starting in September and all through the autumn and winter of 1976 Carrillo and Suárez remain in contact through Armero and Jaime Ballesteros, Carrillo’s right-hand man in the PCE leadership. And that’s when a strange complicity begins to tie them together through the intervening persons: like two blind men touching each other’s features in search of a face, for months Carrillo and Suárez put their proposals, their loyalty, their intelligence and their cleverness to the test, they glimpse common interests, discover secret affinities, admit they should understand each other; both understand that they need democracy to survive and that they need each other, because neither of the two holds the key to democracy but each of them holds a part — Suárez has power, Carrillo legitimacy — which completes what the other holds: while he insists over and over again on speaking to him in person, Carrillo realizes with increasing clarity the difficulties Suárez is facing, the biggest of which stems from the resistance of a powerful section of the country to the legalization of the PCE; while the social pressure in favour of a democratic regime pushes him day by day to recognize that Francoism is only reformable with a reform that means its rupture and begins to dismantle the framework of the regime and holds dialogues with the leaders of the rest of the opposition political forces — on whom he absolutely does not press the legalization of the PCE: in general they don’t believe in running any risk that might endanger the promised elections — Suárez understands with increasing clarity that there will be no credible democracy without the Communists and that Carrillo is keeping his party under control, has retired his revolutionary ideals and is ready to make as many concessions as might be necessary to get the PCE into the new political system. From a distance, the two men’s initial caution and mutual distrust begin to dissolve; in fact, it’s possible that towards the end of October or beginning of November Suárez and Carrillo were outlining a strategy to legalize the Party, an implicit strategy, elaborated not with words but with inferences, that would turn out to be a total success for Suárez and only a relative success for Carrillo, who accepts it because he has no alternative, because by this stage he has already assumed the form of political change that Suárez is proposing to be valid and because he entertains the hope that his success will also be total.

The strategy has two parts. On the one hand, Suárez will do his best to legalize the PCE before the elections in exchange for Carrillo persuading the Communists to forget their aim of a frontal rupture with Francoism and that they’ll only achieve legitimacy and will only construct a democracy through the reform of the Francoist institutions that the government is brewing, because that reform is in practice a rupture; Carrillo immediately fulfils this part of the deal: in a clandestine meeting of the executive committee of the PCE held on 21 November, the Secretary General discards the Party’s tactical programme during Francoism, convincing his people that neither a democratic rupture nor an agreed rupture is any longer any use but only the reforming rupture proposed by Suárez. The second part of the strategy is more complex and more dangerous, and maybe therefore satisfies Carrillo’s and Suárez’s intimate propensity for politics as an adventure. In order to legalize the PCE, Suárez needs Carrillo’s party to oblige the government to increase the margin of tolerance for the Communists, to make them increasingly visible, to give them their naturalization papers with the aim of getting the majority of citizens of the country to understand that not only are they harmless for the future democracy, but that the future democracy cannot be constructed without them. This progressive de facto legalization, that should facilitate the de jure legalization, took the form of a duel between the government and the Communists in which the Communists didn’t want to finish off the government and the government didn’t want to finish off the Communists, and in which both knew in advance (or at least suspected or guessed) when and where they were going to hit their adversary: the blows of this false duel were blows for propaganda effect that included a general strike that did not manage to paralyse the country but did put the government in a tight spot, massive sales of Mundo Obrero on the streets of Madrid and massive distribution of Party membership cards, French and Swedish television reports showing Carrillo driving through the centre of the capital, a notorious clandestine press conference in which the Secretary General of the PCE — along with Dolores Ibárruri, the myth par excellence of the anti-Francoist resistance, demonized or idealized in equal measure by a great part of the population — announced between conciliating words that he’d been in Madrid for months and had no plans to leave, and finally the arrest of Carrillo himself, who once in prison the government could no longer expel from the country without breaking the law and could not keep hold of either in the midst of the national and international scandal occasioned by his capture, so that a few days later Carrillo was set free and converted into a Spanish citizen with full rights.

It was a step with no way back towards the legalization of the PCE: once forced to legalize the Secretary General, the legalization of the Party was just a matter of time. Carrillo knew it and so did Suárez; but Suárez had time and Carrillo did not: the legalization of the rest of the parties had begun to happen at the beginning of January, and he was still not sure that Suárez would fulfil his part of the deal, or that he wouldn’t postpone his fulfilment until after the elections, or that he wouldn’t postpone it indefinitely. By the middle of January Carrillo urgently needed to dispel Suárez’s doubts, but it was reality that dispelled them for him, because that was when a lethal confusion of fear and violence took over Madrid, and when the false duel the two were engaged in was on the verge of ending because the whole country was on the verge of exploding. At a quarter to eleven on the night of 24 January, when Carrillo had been legally residing in Spain for less than a month, five partners of a Communist law firm are gunned down by a far-right hit squad in their office at 55 Calle Atocha. It was the macabre apotheosis of two days of carnage. On the morning of the previous day another far-right gunman had shot a student to death during a demonstration in favour of an amnesty law, and that same afternoon a student died as the result of the impact of a smoke canister launched by the forces of Public Order against a group of people protesting the previous day’s death, while just a few hours earlier the GRAPO — an ultraleft terrorist group that since 11 December had been holding Antonio María de Oriol y Urquijo, one of the most powerful, affluent and influential representatives of orthodox Francoism — kidnapped General Emilio Villaescusa, president of the Military Supreme Court. Four days later GRAPO was still going to murder two more national policemen and a Civil Guard, but on the night of the 24th Madrid is already living in an almost pre-war atmosphere: explosions and gunshots are heard in different spots around the capital, and ultraright gangs sow terror in the streets. Added to the other episodes of those bloody days, the slaughter of its Atocha members marks for the PCE a brutal challenge destined to provoke a violent response in its ranks that, provoking in its turn a violent response from the Army, would abort the incipient democratic reforms; but the Communists do not respond: the executive committee orders its members to avoid any demonstration or confrontation in the streets and to display all the serenity possible, and the order is carried out to the letter. After arduous negotiations with the government — which fears that any spark will ignite the conflagration the far right is seeking — the Party obtains permission to install a funeral shrine for the lawyers in the Palace of Justice on the Plaza de las Salesas, and also for the coffins to be carried on the shoulders of their comrades to the Plaza de Colón. And so they do just after four o’clock on Wednesday afternoon; the television cameras film a spectacle that overwhelms the centre of Madrid; the images have been shown many times: in the midst of a sea of red roses and closed fists and a silence and order imposed by the Party leadership and respected by the rank and file with a discipline honed in clandestinity, tens of thousands of people overflow the Plaza de las Salesas and the adjacent streets to pay their last respects to the murdered men; some stills show Santiago Carrillo walking among the crowd, guarded by a wall of militants. The ceremony ends without a single incident, in the same great silence in which it began, converted into a proclamation of concord that dispels all the government’s doubts about the PCE’s repudiation of violence and spreads a wave of solidarity with Party members all over the country.

According to his then closest collaborators, it’s very possible that Suárez secretly made the decision to legalize the Communist Party that very day; if so, it’s very possible that on that very day Suárez decided that before doing so he’d need to meet their leader in person. The fact is that barely a month later, on 27 February, the two men met in a house near Madrid belonging to their mediator, José Mario Armero. The encounter was organized in the strictest confidence: although for Carrillo it entailed no danger, for Suárez it entailed plenty, and for that reason two of the three people he consulted — his Deputy Prime Minister, Alfonso Osorio, and Torcuato Fernández Miranda, President of the Cortes and of the Council of the Kingdom and his political mentor for the last few years — strongly advised him against it, reasoning that if his meeting with the clandestine Communist leader came to be known the political earthquake would be formidable; but the King’s support of Suárez, his faith in Carrillo’s discretion and his trust in his lucky star and in his talent to seduce persuaded him to run the risk. He was not mistaken. Years later Suárez and Carrillo both described the encounter as love at first sight: it may well have been, but the truth is that necessity had united them long before they met; it may well have been, but the truth is that for the seven consecutive hours their face-to-face meeting lasted, while they smoked cigarette after cigarette in the presence of Armero and in the silence of an uninhabited country house, Carrillo and Suárez behaved like two blind men who’ve suddenly recovered their sight to recognize a twin, or like two duellists who exchange a false duel for a real duel into which both are putting their all to break their rival’s spell. The winner was Suárez, who as soon as the first handshake and jokes of introductions were concluded disarmed Carrillo by telling him of his Republican grandfather, his Republican father, the Republican dead of his family on the losing side of the war, and then finished him off with protests of modesty and praise of Carrillo’s political experience and top-class statesmanship; defeated, Carrillo offered words of understanding, realism and caution designed to try once more to convince his interlocutor that he and his party not only were not a danger to his democracy project, but with time would turn into its principal guarantee of success. The rest of the interview was devoted to talking a little bit about everything and not committing to anything except to continue to back each other up and consult each other on important decisions, and when the two men went their separate ways in the early hours of the morning neither of them harboured the slightest doubt: both could rely on the other’s loyalty; both were the only two real politicians in the country; both, once the PCE was legalized, the elections held and democracy installed, would end up together holding the reins of the future.

Events wasted no time in eroding this triple certainty, but it continued ruling Suárez’s and Carrillo’s behaviour for the four years that Suárez remained in government; nothing provided it with as much consistency as the way in which the Communist Party was finally legalized. It happened on Saturday 9 April, just over a month after the meeting between the two leaders, in the middle of the chaos of the Easter holiday and after which Suárez, knowing that public opinion had swiftly changed in favour of the measure he was getting ready to adopt, still sought to protect himself against the predictable outrage of the military and the far right with a legal report from the Junta de Fiscales (Attorney General’s office) supporting the legalization; Carrillo also protected him, or did what he could to protect him. On Suárez’s advice, the Secretary General had gone on vacation to Cannes, where he heard that very Saturday morning from José Mario Armero that the legalization was effective immediately and that Suárez asked two things of him: the first was that, in order not to irritate the Army and the far right still further, the Party should celebrate without raucousness; the second was that, in order to prevent the Army and the far right being able to accuse Suárez of complicity with the Communists, once the news was broadcast Carrillo should issue a public statement criticizing Suárez or at least distancing himself from him. Carrillo complied: the Communists celebrated the news discreetly and its Secretary General appeared that very day before the press to say a few words he’d agreed with the Prime Minister. ‘I don’t believe Prime Minister Suárez to be a friend of the Communists,’ proclaimed Carrillo. ‘I consider him rather to be anti-Communist, but an intelligent anti-Communist who has understood that ideas are not destroyed with repression and banning. And who is ready to confront ours with his own.’ It was not enough. During the days following the legalization a coup d’état seemed imminent. Suárez appealed to Carrillo again; Carrillo again complied. At midday on 14 April, while the first legal meeting of the central committee of the PCE in Spain since the end of the Civil War is being held on Calle Capitán Haya Santiago, José Mario Armero summons Jaime Ballesteros, his contact with the Communists, to the café of a nearby hotel. Right now Suárez’s head is not worth a cent, Armero tells Ballesteros. The military is on the verge of rising in revolt. Either you give us a hand or we’re all going to hell. Ballesteros speaks to Carrillo, and the next day, during the second stage of the central committee meeting, the Secretary General interrupts the session to make a dramatic statement. ‘We find ourselves today in the most difficult meeting we’ve had since the war,’ says Carrillo in the midst of a glacial silence. ‘In these hours, I’m not saying these days, these hours, it may be decided whether we move towards democracy or if we go into a very serious regression that will affect not only the Party and all the democratic forces of opposition, but also the reformist and institutional forces. . I don’t believe I’m being overly dramatic, I’m saying what’s happening at this minute.’ Immediately and without giving anyone time to react, as if he’d written it himself Carrillo reads a piece of paper perhaps drafted by the Prime Minister that Armero had handed to Ballesteros and which contains the solemn and unconditional renunciation of some of the symbols that have represented the Party since it was founded as well as the approval of some the Army considers threatened by its legalization: the red-and-yellow flag, the unity of the fatherland and the monarchy. Perplexed and fearful, used to obeying their leader unquestioningly, the members of the central committee approve the revolution imposed by Carrillo and the Party hastens to announce the good news at a press conference during which its leadership council appears in front of a surprising, enormous, improvised monarchist flag.

The coup d’état does not materialize, although the 23 February coup began to be hatched then — because the military never forgave Suárez for legalizing the Communist Party and from that moment on did not stop plotting against the treacherous Prime Minister — but the PCE could only digest such pragmatism and so many concessions snatched from them by the threat of a coup d’état with much difficulty. According to Carrillo’s predictions, the result of his pact of prudence over the last year and of half a century’s monopoly of anti-Francoism would be an electoral triumph of millions of votes that would turn his party into the second biggest in the country after Suárez’s party and would turn him and Suárez into the two great protagonists of democracy; it didn’t happen like that: like a mummy that disintegrates on exhumation, in the elections of 15 June 1977 the PCE received just over 9 per cent of the vote, less than half of what they expected and less than a third of that of the PSOE, which surprisingly took over the leadership of the left because it was able to absorb the caution and disenchantment of many Communist sympathizers and also because it offered an image of youth and modernity in contrast to the old candidates of the PCE coming back from exile, the Communist old guard starting with Carrillo himself who evoked for voters the frightening past of the war and blocked the renovation of the Party by the young Communists from inside the country. Although Carrillo never felt defeated, Suárez had won again: for the Prime Minister the legalization of the PCE was an unqualified success, because it made democracy credible by integrating the Communists, blocked the man he considered his most dangerous rival at the polls and gained him a lasting ally; for the Communists’ Secretary General it was not a failure, but nor was it the success he’d hoped for: although the legalization of the PCE assured that Suárez’s reform truly was a rupture with Francoism and that the consequence of the rupture would be a real democracy, the things they were forced to concede by the way it was carried out, abandoning the symbols and diluting the traditional postulates of the organization, made the dream of making the Communist Party the hegemonic party of the left even more distant. The response of the PCE to this electoral fiasco was what was maybe to be expected from an organization marked by a history of assent to the dictates of its Secretary General and imbued with its unappeasable historic mission of an ideology in retreat: instead of admitting their errors in the light of reality with the aim of correcting them, they attributed their own errors to reality. The Party convinced itself (or more precisely the Secretary General convinced the Party) that it hadn’t been them but the voters who’d been mistaken: two short months of legality had not been able to counteract forty years of anti-Communist propaganda, but the PSOE would waste no time in demonstrating their immaturity and inconsistency and the following elections would return to the PCE their rightful role of first party of the opposition that the Socialists had usurped, given that in Spain there were no serious parties other than the PCE and the UCD or any real political leaders other than Santiago Carrillo and Adolfo Suárez.

Unexpectedly, after the first elections Carrillo’s predictions seemed to be starting to come true and he could for a time dazzle his comrades with the illusion that the defeat had in reality been a victory or the best preparation for victory. ‘Of all the Spanish political leaders,’ wrote Le Monde in October 1977, ‘Santiago Carrillo is undoubtedly the one who has come to the fore most rapidly and with most authority in recent months.’ That’s how it was: in a very short time, all over the country, Carrillo won a vigorous reputation as a responsible politician who contributed to making the PCE appear to be a solid party capable of governing and that deserved much greater relevance than its poor electoral results seemed to indicate. His understanding with Suárez was perfect, and his whole political strategy of those years revolved around a proposal that meant to institutionalize it and to armour-plate the democracy they would construct between the two of them or that he thought they should construct between the two of them: the government of national unity. The formula resembled in name only what the majority of the ruling class was discussing or sponsoring in the months before 23 February (and which facilitated it): this was no government headed by a soldier but a government headed by Suárez and supported by the UCD and the PCE although with the cooperation of other political parties; according to Carrillo, only the fortitude of a government like that could bring stability to the country while they drew up the Constitution, strengthened democracy and warded off the danger of a coup d’état, and the Pacts of Moncloa — an important ensemble of social and economic measures designed to overcome the national economic crisis stemming from the first worldwide oil crisis, negotiated by Carrillo and Suárez and then signed by the main political parties and ratified by the Cortes in October 1977 — constituted for the Secretary General of the PCE the foretaste of this unitary government. Carrillo reiterated his proposal over and over again and, although at some moment he had hints that Suárez was thinking of accepting it, the government of national unity never came to be formed: it’s very possible that Suárez would have happily governed along with Carrillo, but he probably never considered it seriously, maybe because he feared the reaction of the military and of a large part of society. In spite of that, Carrillo continued to sustain Suárez in the certainty that sustaining Suárez meant sustaining democracy, which made him an indispensable support of the system and meant that, although he didn’t obtain the benefit of power, he obtained national and international respect: after the signing of the Pacts of Moncloa Carrillo received a standing ovation in the Cortes from the UCD deputies and a welcome into the country’s most conservative forums for debate; around the same time he travelled to the United Kingdom and France and became the first Secretary General of a Communist Party allowed to enter the United States, where he was hailed by Time magazine as ‘the apostle of Euro-Communism’. In the short term this was the result of his alliance with Suárez: during those years Carrillo personified a sort of oxymoron, democratic Communism; in the long term the result was his undoing.

Just as happened with Suárez, the beginning of the decline of Carrillo’s political career coincided with the exact moment of its peak. In November 1977, during his triumphant trip to the United States, Carrillo announced without consulting his party that at their next conference the PCE would abandon Leninism. Deep down, it was the logical consequence of the dismantling or demolition or undermining of Communist principles that he’d begun years before — the logical consequence of the attempt to bring into being the oxymoron of democratic Communism he called Euro-Communism — but if months earlier accepting the monarchy and the red-and-yellow flag had been difficult for many, the abrupt abandonment of the Party’s invariable ideological vector all through its history was even more so, because it meant such a radical change of direction that it placed the PCE in practice on the borders of socialism (or social democracy) and also demonstrated that the democratization of the Party on the outside did not assume a corresponding democratization behind closed doors: the Secretary General carried on without restrictions dictating PCE policy and governing it in accord with so-called democratic centralism, a Stalinist method that had nothing democratic about it and was entirely centralist, because it was based on the all-embracing power of the Secretary General, on the extremely hierarchical organizational structure and the uncritical obedience of the rank and file. That was when the Party’s unanimity began to split for all to see, and when Carrillo noticed with astonishment that his authority was becoming a matter for discussion among his comrades: some — the so-called reformists — rejected his individualism and his authoritarian methods and demanded more internal democracy, while others — the so-called pro-Soviets — rejected his ideological revisionism and confrontation with the Soviet Union and demanded a return to Communist orthodoxy; each as much as the other criticized his unshakeable support for Adolfo Suárez’s government and his unshakeable ambition to make common cause with him. But the submissive or disciplined habit of consenting to the dictates of the Secretary General still dominated the spirit of the Communists and, given that the promise of power operated over political parties like a binding agent, these divergences remained more or less buried in the PCE until the next elections, in March 1979: that’s how Carrillo managed in April 1978 to get the 9th Party Conference to adopt Euro-Communism and abandon Leninism. However, a new electoral failure — in the March elections the PCE experienced a slight increase in votes but barely reached a third of the number their direct Socialist competitors received — brought the discrepancies virulently out into the open; in a very short space of time, Carrillo was no longer able to convince his people that this defeat was in reality a victory and that they had to keep backing Suárez and confronting the Socialists who were taking over their political space and their electorate, and during the following years the Communists sank into a succession of increasingly profound internal crises, aggravated by their loss of influence in the politics of the country: with the new distribution of power resulting from the elections, with the end of the politics of accord between all the parties after the approval of the Constitution, after 1979 Suárez didn’t need Carrillo to govern any more and sought the support of the Socialists and not the Communists, turning them into an isolated irrelevant party which barely mattered for the resolution of the big problems, and furthermore whose leader had squandered the statesman’s halo he’d sported just a few months ago. As happened to Suárez at the same time, Carrillo’s loss of prestige in the country’s politics translated into a loss of prestige in his party’s politics. While the protests against the national leadership of the PCE intensified, revolts were being prepared in Catalonia and in the Basque Country, and in Madrid some members of the executive committee stood up to the Secretary General: in July 1980, at the same time as the Party bosses of the UCD rebelled against Adolfo Suárez in a meeting held on a country estate in Manzanares el Real and the movements to remove him from power were getting under way, several high-ranking members of the PCE called Carrillo to the house of Ramón Tamames — the most visible leader of the so-called reformist sector — with the aim of exposing the Party’s problems to him, reproaching him for his errors and calling his leadership into question; it was an unprecedented scene in the history of Spanish Communism, but it was repeated at the beginning of November in the heart of the central committee, when Tamames went so far as to propose that the secretary generalship should be turned into a collective position, almost like a few months earlier, at the Manzanares el Real meeting, the UCD Party bosses had demanded Suárez share his power over the Party and the government with them. Unlike Suárez, Carrillo did not give in, but by then his organization was already irremediably divided between reformers, pro-Soviets and Carrillistas, and in January 1981 that division was consummated in the breaking away of the PSUC, the Communist Party of Catalonia, which constituted just a hint of the ferocious internal fights that would tear apart the PCE for the next year and a half and would go on almost uninterruptedly until the virtual extinction of the Party.

So on the eve of 23 February Santiago Carrillo was not in such a different situation from that of Adolfo Suárez. Their time at the height of their powers had passed: both were now politically hounded, personally diminished, lacking credit with public opinion, furiously attacked within their own parties, embittered by the ingratitude and betrayals of their fellows or what they felt as ingratitude and betrayals of their fellows, two exhausted and disoriented men who’d lost their touch, increasingly hindered by defects that just a few years before had been invisible or hadn’t seemed like defects: their personal notion of power, their talent for political exchange, their inveterate bureaucratic habits of totalitarian structures and incompatibility with the application of the democracy they’d built. Undermining even their demolition of the systems in which they’d grown up and which they’d manipulated as few others could — one Communism and the other Francoism — both had ended up fighting for survival amid the rubble of their former dominion. Neither of the two managed it, and on the eve of 23 February it was already obvious that neither of the two would manage it. At that time their personal relationship was meagre, because they’d turned into two fitters and a fitter is absorbed in the task of fitting. They probably looked at each other out of the corner of their eye every once in a while, remembering not so old times when together they sorted out the country’s destiny with sparkling pyrotechnics of false duels, four-handed sparring, wordless pacts, secret meetings and great accords of state, and the iron alliance they’d forged in those years certainly remained immutable: in the autumn and winter of 198 °Carrillo was one of the few front-line politicians who did not participate in the political manoeuvring against Suárez that laid the ground for 23 February, and never mentioned surgical coups or a touch on the rudder unless denouncing that sinister terminology and that flirting with the Army that constituted ideal ammunition for golpismo; denouncing it outside of his party and within his party: there were also advocates of political shock therapy in the PCE of the time, but when Ramón Tamames twice proclaimed to the press his agreement with a unity government headed by a military officer, Carrillo was quick to use the occasion to defend Suárez, once again fulminating against his main adversary in the Party with a devastating diagnosis: ‘Ramón’s raving.’ On the eve of 23 February Carrillo was still clinging to Suárez the way one shipwrecked man clings to another, he was still thinking that supporting Suárez meant supporting democracy, he was still keeping his eyes open against the risk of a coup d’état and still considering that his formula of a government of national unity with Suárez was the only way to prevent it and to thwart the collapse of what four years earlier they had begun to construct between the two of them. Of course, by that time the idea of governing with Suárez was unworkable; doubly unworkable: because neither he nor Suárez controlled his own party any more and because, although four years before their personal alliance represented a collective alliance between Franco’s two irreconcilable Spains, by the time of 23 February it’s more than likely that he and Suárez no longer represented anybody or hardly anybody, and represented only themselves. But it’s possible that on the evening of the coup, while both remained in their seats in the midst of the gunshots and the rest of the deputies obeyed the golpistas’ orders and lay down on the floor, Carrillo might have felt a sort of vengeful satisfaction, as if that instant corroborated what he’d always believed, and that he and Suárez were the only two real politicians in the country, or at least the only two politicians ready to risk their necks for democracy. I can’t resist imagining that, if it’s true that they both cultivated an epic and aesthetic conception of politics as an individual adventure flecked with dramatic episodes and intrepid decisions, that instant also condensed their twin conception of politics, because neither of the two experienced a more dramatic episode than that burst of gunfire in the Cortes nor ever took a more intrepid decision than the one they both took to remain in their seats while the bullets whizzed around them in the chamber.

Chapter 3

Did they represent only themselves? Did they no longer represent anybody or hardly anybody?

I don’t know what the first words were that Adolfo Suárez and General Gutiérrez Mellado said when they saw Lieutenant Colonel Tejero burst into the Cortes, and I don’t think it’s important to know; I do, however, know the first words Santiago Carrillo said — because not only he himself but some of his comrades in nearby seats recalled them on various occasions — and of course they’re not important. What Carrillo said was: ‘Pavía’s arrived earlier than expected.’ It was a cliché: for more than a century the name Pavía in Spain has been a metonym for the expression golpe de estado, because the coup d’état staged by General Manuel Pavía — a soldier who according to legend burst into the Cortes on horseback on 3 January 1874 — was until 23 February 1981 the most spectacular abuse the democratic institutions had suffered, and from the beginning of this democracy — and especially after the summer of 1980, and especially in the political village of Madrid obsessed since the summer of 1980 with the rumours of an impending coup d’état — rare was the comment on a coup d’état that didn’t contain the name Pavía.* But Carrillo’s phrase being a commonplace, and not having any importance, doesn’t mean it’s not interesting, because reality suffers from a curious propensity to deal in commonplaces, or allow itself to be colonized by them; it also takes pleasure sometimes — as I mentioned earlier — in fabricating strange figures, and one of those figures is that General Pavía’s coup seems to anticipate 23 February, and what it was meant to be.

History repeats itself. Marx observed that great events and characters appear in history twice, first as tragedy and then as farce, just as in moments of profound transformation men, frightened by their responsibility, invoked the spirits of the past, adopted their names, their mannerisms and slogans to represent with this prestigious disguise and detachable language a new historical scene as if it were a seance. In the case of 23 February Marx’s intuition is valid though incomplete. The legend is partially false: General Pavía did not burst into the Cortes on horseback, he did so on foot and with a detachment of Civil Guards under his orders and ejected the parliamentarians of the First Republic at gunpoint and precipitated a coup d’état that the conservative press had been advocating for months as a remedy against the disorder the country had sunk into, a coup that led to the formation of a government of national unity led by General Serrano, who prolonged the regime’s agony for less than a year with a peculiar Republican dictatorship until General Martínez Campos finished it off with a military uprising. A valid intuition though incomplete: Pavía’s coup was a tragedy, but Tejero’s coup was not a farce, or not entirely, or only because its failure prevented the tragedy, or we only imagine that it was now because tragedy plus time equals farce; Tejero’s coup was, indeed, an echo, a parody, a seance: Tejero aspired to be Pavía; Armada aspired to be Serrano, and it could be imagined that, had the coup triumphed, Armada’s unity or coalition or caretaker government would not have done anything but agonizingly prolong, with a peculiar authoritarian democracy or a peculiar monarchist dictatorship, the life of a mortally wounded regime.

There is still another parallel between the coup of 1874 and that of 1981, between Pavía’s coup and Tejero’s coup. Engravings of the time show the deputies of the First Republic greeting the rebellious Civil Guards’ entrance into the chamber with gestures of protest, facing up to the attackers; that’s another legend, except this time it’s not partially but totally false. The 1874 deputies’ attitude to the coup was almost identical to that of the 1981 deputies: just as the 1981 deputies hid beneath their benches as soon as the first shots were fired, as soon as the first shots were heard in the corridors of the Cortes the 1874 deputies fled in terror from the chamber, which was empty when the Civil Guards arrived. Thirty years after Pavía’s coup, Nicolás Estévanez, one of the deputies present in the Cortes, wrote: ‘I don’t deny my share of responsibility for the incredible shame of that day; we all behaved indecently.’ Thirty years have not yet passed since Tejero’s attempted coup and, as far as I know, none of the deputies present in the Cortes on 23 February has written anything similar. Whether or not one of them does so in the future, I’m not sure any of them behaved indecently; hiding from gunfire under a bench is not a very splendid gesture, but I don’t think anyone can be blamed for doing so: much as it’s possible that the majority of the parliamentarians present in the chamber were ashamed of not having remained in their seats, and much as it’s certain that democracy would have been grateful if at least certain of them had done so, I don’t think anyone is indecent for seeking shelter when bullets are flying. Besides, at least in 1981 — in 1874, too, I think — the deputies’ attitude was a mirror image of that of the majority of society, because there was barely a gesture of public rejection of the coup in all of Spain until in the early hours of the morning the King appeared on television condemning the attack on the Cortes and the putsch was given up as a failure: apart from the head of the provisional government named by the King, Francisco Laína, or the premier of the autonomous Catalan government, Jordi Pujol, on the evening of 23 February all or almost all the responsible politicians who hadn’t been taken hostage by Tejero — party leaders, senators, regional deputies and premiers, civil governors, mayors and councillors — restricted themselves to awaiting the outcome of events, and some hid or escaped or tried to escape abroad; apart from the newspaper El País — which brought out a special edition at ten at night — and Diario 16 — which brought one out at midnight — there was barely a media organization that came out in defence of democracy; apart from the Police Trade Union and the PSUC, the Catalan Communist Party, there was barely a political or social organization that issued a statement of protest and, when some trade union discussed the possibility of mobilizing its membership, it was immediately dissuaded from doing so with the argument that any demonstration could provoke further military action. Furthermore, that evening the memory of the war closed people up in their houses, paralysed the country, silenced it: no one put up the slightest resistance to the coup and everyone took the hijacking of the Cortes and the occupation of Valencia by tanks with moods that varied from terror to euphoria by way of apathy, but with identical passivity. That was the popular response to the coup: none. I’m very much afraid that, as well as not being a splendid response, it was not a decent response: although in those moments the order disseminated by the Zarzuela Palace and the provisional government was to keep calm and act as if nothing had happened, the fact is that something had happened and that nobody or hardly anybody said to the golpistas from the opening moments that society did not approve of that outrage. Nobody or hardly anybody told them, which forces the question of whether Armada, Milans and Tejero had committed an error in imagining the country was ripe for the coup, and in supposing that, had it achieved its objective, the majority would have accepted it with less resignation than relief. It also forces the question of whether the deputies who on 23 February hid under their benches did not embody the popular will better than those who did not duck. In short: maybe it’s an exaggeration to say that by the winter of 1981 Santiago Carrillo and Adolfo Suárez didn’t represent anybody, but to judge by what happened on the evening of 23 February you wouldn’t say they represented many people.

* One of the most resonant belongs to the deputy leader of the Socialist Party, Alfonso Guerra. ‘If Pavía’s horse comes into the Cortes,’ said Guerra, ‘Suárez will be riding it.’ The prediction was not very accurate, although it sums up quite well the opinion that many held of the Prime Minister at that moment.

Chapter 4

It’s true: history fabricates strange figures and does not reject the symmetries of fiction, just as if with that formal design it were seeking to endow itself with a significance it did not possess on its own. The story of the 23 February coup abounds with them: they’re fabricated by the events and the men, the living and the dead, the present and the past; perhaps the one formed by Santiago Carrillo and General Gutiérrez Mellado in one of the rooms of the Cortes that night is not the least strange.

At a quarter to eight in the evening, when more than an hour had already passed since the captain of the Civil Guard had announced from the speakers’ podium the arrival at the Cortes of a competent military authority who would take charge of the coup, Carrillo saw from his bench that some Civil Guards were taking Adolfo Suárez out of the chamber. Like all the rest of the deputies, the Secretary General of the PCE deduced that the golpistas were taking the Prime Minister away to kill him. That they should do so didn’t surprise him, but it did that half an hour later they took out General Gutiérrez Mellado and, not only him, but Felipe González. A little while later his surprise was dispelled: a Civil Guard, machine gun in hand, ordered him to stand up and forced him to leave the chamber; with him left Alfonso Guerra, deputy leader of the PSOE, and Agustín Rodríguez Sahagún, Minister of Defence. They took the three of them to a place known as the clock room, where Gutiérrez Mellado and Felipe González already were, but not Adolfo Suárez, who had been confined alone in the ushers’ cloakroom, a few metres from the chamber. They pointed him towards a chair at one end of the room; Carrillo sat down, and for the next fifteen hours he barely moved from there, his gaze almost always fixed on a big chiming clock made by a nineteenth-century Swiss clockmaker called Alberto Billeter; on his left, very near, sat General Gutiérrez Mellado; opposite him, in the centre of the room with his back to him, was Rodríguez Sahagún, and further on, facing the wall (or at least that’s how they remembered it when they remembered that night), González and Guerra. At each of the doors rebel soldiers armed with machine guns stood guard; there was no heating, or no one had turned it on, and a skylight in the ceiling open to the February dew kept the five men trembling with cold all night.

Like his companions, during the first hours of being shut up in the clock room Carrillo thought he was going to die. He thought he should prepare himself to die. He thought he was prepared to die and at the same time he wasn’t prepared to die. He feared the pain. He feared his murderers would laugh at him. He feared weakening at the last moment. It won’t be any big deal, he thought, looking for courage. It’ll just be an instant: they’ll put a pistol to your head, pull the trigger and it’ll all be over. Maybe because it’s not death but the uncertainty of death that we find intolerable, this last thought calmed him; two more things calmed him: one was the pride of not having obeyed the order of the rebel soldiers and remaining in his seat while the bullets whizzed around him in the chamber; the other was that death would liberate him from the torment his Party comrades were subjecting him to. How peaceful you’re going to be, he said to himself. What a relief never to have to deal with so many irresponsible bastards ever again. What a relief not to have to smile at them ever again. As soon as he began to think that maybe he wasn’t going to die the anxiety returned. He didn’t remember exactly when it had happened (perhaps when the sound of aeroplanes flying over the Cortes came in through the skylight; perhaps when Alfonso Guerra returned from the toilet giving them stealthy encouraging glances; undoubtedly as time went by and news of the military authority announced by the golpistas failed to arrive); the only thing he remembered was that, once he’d accepted that he might not die, his mind turned into a whirlwind of conjecture. He didn’t know what was happening in the chamber or what had happened outside the Cortes, he didn’t know if Tejero’s operation was part of a wider operation or was an isolated operation, but he knew it was a coup d’état and he was sure that its triumph or failure depended on the King: if the King accepted the coup, the coup would triumph; if the King did not accept the coup, the coup would fail. He wasn’t sure about the King; he didn’t even know if he was still at liberty or if the golpistas had taken him prisoner. He wasn’t sure what the Cortes’ attitude would be when the military authority showed up, supposing that he showed up: it wouldn’t be the first time that, coerced by weapons, a democratic Parliament handed power over to a military, he thought. He wasn’t only thinking about Pavía; half his life had been spent in France and he remembered in 1940, coerced by the German Army after the debacle of the war, how the French National Assembly had handed power over to Marshal Pétain, and in 1958, coerced by its own army in Algeria, had handed it over to General de Gaulle. Now, he thought, the same thing could happen, or something similar, and he wasn’t sure whether the deputies would refuse to bow down to blackmail: he was sure of Adolfo Suárez, he was sure of the old guard of his party (not the youngsters), he was sure of himself; but he wasn’t sure of anyone else. As for the fact that the golpistas had isolated him with those precise companions, as the hours went past and he sensed increasing hope that the coup was paralysed, he began to think that maybe they had done so to keep a close rein on the most representative or most dangerous leaders, or those with the power to negotiate with them when the moment came. But he didn’t know what there would be to negotiate, or with whom they’d have to negotiate it, or even in truth if there was any possibility of negotiating, and the whirlwind carried on spinning.

He spent the night sitting beside General Gutiérrez Mellado. They didn’t say a single word to each other, but exchanged countless looks and cigarettes. In spite of being almost the same age and having shared the corridors of the Cortes for almost four years, they didn’t know each other well, they’d barely spoken except on chance or formal occasions, they barely had anything in common except for friendship with Adolfo Suárez: almost everything else divided them; most of all, history divided them. They both knew it: the difference is that Gutiérrez Mellado, who thought he knew it more specifically, never mentioned it (at least not in public), while Carrillo did so on several occasions. In an interview on his ninetieth birthday, the former Secretary General of the PCE recalled that during those hours of captivity, while listening to Gutiérrez Mellado’s bronchitic cough and seeing him sitting there elderly and exhausted, he thought more than once of the strange and ironic figure destiny was forcing them to compose. In 1936 this general was one of the leaders of the fifth column in Madrid, he thought. And I was the Public Order officer and my mission was to fight against the fifth column. At that moment we were mortal enemies and tonight here we are together, and we’re going to die side by side. Carrillo glimpsed the figure, but not its precise form, because the data he had was not precise: had it been he would have discovered that the figure was still more ironic and strange than he imagined.

The first part of the figure consists of the crucial point of his biography: on 6 November 1936, when the Civil War had barely started, Carrillo began to turn into the villain of Francoism and the hero of anti-Francoism. He’d just turned twenty and, like Gutiérrez Mellado except from the opposite trench, was anything but the champion of concord he’d turn into in later years (‘Concord? No!’ he wrote at the beginning of 1934 in El Socialista newspaper. ‘Class war! Mortal hatred of the criminal bourgeoisie!’). For several months he’d been head of the JSU, the unified Socialist and Communist youth wings, and that very day, as a result of his gradual ideological radicalization but also of his certainty that this was the best way to contribute to defending the Republic against Franco’s coup, he’d joined the Communist Party. The Republic, however, seemed about to be defeated. For several days Madrid had been in a panic, with the troops of the Army of Africa at its gates and the streets invaded by thousands of refugees who were fleeing Francoist terror in a mass exodus. Convinced that the fall of the capital was inevitable, the government of the Republic had escaped to Valencia and left the impossible defence of Madrid in the hands of General Miaja, who at ten o’clock that night called a meeting at the War Ministry to constitute the Defence Junta, the new government of the city in which all the parties supporting the fugitive government should be represented; the meeting went on until very late, and it was decided to entrust the position of Security Chief to the leader of the JSU: Santiago Carrillo. But after that general meeting an improvised restricted meeting was held, in the course of which the Communists and the anarchists organized an expeditious arrangement for the secondary problem posed during the first meeting; a secondary problem in the midst of the life-and-death emergency of the defence of Madrid, I mean: the prisons of the capital — Modelo, San Antón, Porlier and Ventas — were overflowing with about ten thousand prisoners; many of them were fascists or rebel officers who’d been offered the opportunity to join the Army of the Republic and had turned the offer down; Franco could take the city at any moment — in fact, there was fighting two hundred metres from the Modelo prison — and in that case the officers and fascists locked up there would go immediately to swell the ranks of the mutinous Army. We don’t know how long the meeting lasted; we do know that its participants resolved to divide the prisoners into three categories and apply the death penalty to the most dangerous ones: the fascists and rebel officers. Before dawn on that very morning the executions started at Paracuellos del Jarama, just over thirty kilometres from the capital, and during the three weeks that followed more than two thousand Francoist prisoners were executed without any trial whatsoever.

It was the biggest massacre perpetrated by the Republicans during the war. Did Carrillo participate in that improvised restricted meeting? Did he make the decision to carry out the slaughter or take part in the decision? Francoist propaganda, which made the Paracuellos executions into the epitome of Republican barbarism, always insisted he did: Carrillo, it claimed, was the person responsible for the slaughter, among other reasons because it would have been impossible to remove such a huge number of inmates from the prisons without counting on the Security Chief of the Office of Public Order; for his part, Carrillo always defended his innocence: he simply evacuated inmates from the prisons to avert the risk of them joining up with the Francoists, but his jurisdiction ended with the capital and the crimes occurred outside it and should be imputed to the groups of uncontrolled elements that prospered in the heat of the disorder of war reigning in Madrid and the surrounding area. Was the Francoist propaganda right? Is Carrillo right? The historians have argued over the matter ad nauseam; in my opinion, the investigations by Ian Gibson, Jorge M. Reverte and Ángel Viñas are those that get closest to the truth of events. There’s no doubt about the Communist and anarchist authorship of the murders and that they weren’t the work of uncontrollables; it’s certain that the inspiration came from the Communists, that Carrillo did not give the order to commit them, and that, as far as the documentary evidence shows, he was not directly implicated in them. According to Viñas, the order might have come from Alexander Orlov, Soviet NKVD agent in Spain, it might have been transmitted by Pedro Checa, strongman of the PCE, and executed by the Communist Segundo Serrano Poncela, Public Order delegate on the Public Order Council. The preceding does not exonerate Carrillo of all responsibility for the events: there is no record of his participation in the restricted meeting after the meeting of the Defence Junta in which the executions were planned — not decided: the decision was already made — but Serrano Poncela answered to him and, although it’s likely that the executions on the first days happened without Carrillo knowing, it’s very difficult to accept that those on the days that followed wouldn’t have reached his ears. Carrillo can be accused of not having intervened to stop them, of having looked the other way; he cannot be accused of having ordered or organized them. Not intervening to stop such an atrocity is unjustifiable, but maybe understandable if one makes an effort to imagine a young man just past adolescence, newly joined member of a militarized party whose decisions he was not in a position to argue with or contradict, recently arrived in a post the reins of power of which he had not yet completely mastered (although as he did so he put a stop to much of the arbitrary violence infesting Madrid) and especially overwhelmed by the chaos and the vast demands of the defence of a desperate city, where militiamen were falling like flies on the outskirts and the bombs and shelling were killing people every day (and which astonishingly resisted Franco’s siege for another two and a half years). Making the effort to imagine these things is not, I insist, trying to justify the deaths of more than two thousand people: it’s just not to fail completely to understand the real horror of war. Carrillo understood it and that’s why — and although probably in the Spain of the 1980s very few would dare to exonerate him of direct responsibility for the murders — he never denied his indirect responsibility for them. ‘I cannot say, if Paracuellos happened while I was in charge of Security,’ he declared in 1982, ‘that I am totally blameless for what happened.’

That’s the first part of the figure; below I describe the second. During the months that Carrillo ran the Office of Public Order of Madrid Gutiérrez Mellado was not, as many years later the Secretary General of the PCE believed, one of the leaders of the fifth column in the capital. Some time later he would be, but in the early hours of 6 November, just at the moment when the contrasting myth that would pursue Carrillo for the rest of his life was born — the myth of the hero of the defence of Madrid and the myth of the villain of the Paracuellos executions — Gutiérrez Mellado had been locked up for three months in the second corridor on the first floor of the San Antón prison, because the future general was one of the many officers who, after having tried to incite their garrisons to revolt against the legitimate government of the Republic in July and having been taken prisoner, had rejected the offer to join the Republican Army to defend the capital from the Francoist advance; that means that Gutiérrez Mellado was also one of the officers who, on 7 November, after the restricted meeting of Communist and anarchist leaders that followed the first meeting of the Defence Junta of Madrid the night before, should have been taken out of the prison along with dozens of his comrades and executed at dusk in Paracuellos. Miraculously, because of the disorder in which the operation was carried out, Gutiérrez Mellado was not taken out and shot that evening and somehow survived the sacas that followed in the San Antón prison until 30 November when the executions finished. Because both spent years fighting in the same trenches and became standard-bearers to the concord they combated in their youth, it’s impossible that Carrillo was still the villain of Paracuellos for Gutiérrez Mellado in 1981, but not that at some moment of the night of 23 February, while exchanging cigarettes and glances with him in the icy and humiliating silence of the clock room, the general would have intuited with all precision the strange irony that had brought him to die beside the same man who, as he probably believed (and he probably believed it because he too understood the real horror of war), one night forty-five years earlier had ordered his death. If it’s true that he believed it, perhaps it would have mattered to him to know he was mistaken.

Chapter 5

After the coup d’état Santiago Carrillo’s political star was rapidly eclipsed. He’d constructed democracy, risked his life for it on 23 February, but democracy had stopped needing him or didn’t want anything more to do with him; neither did his own party. Throughout 1981 the PCE continued debating the labyrinth of internal conflicts that had been tearing them apart since four years earlier when their Secretary General announced the abandonment of the Party’s Leninist essence; clinging to his post and to his old authoritarian conception of power, Carrillo tried to conserve the unity of the Communists under his command through purges, sanctions and disciplinary action. The result of this attempt at catharsis was lamentable: these actions, sanctions and purges provoked more purges, more sanctions and more actions, and by the summer of 1982 the PCE was a party on the point of collapse, with less than half the number of members it had just five years before and with an increasingly reduced and precarious social presence, broken in three pieces — the pro-Soviets, the reformers and the Carrillistas — unrecognizable to those who had belonged to it in the clandestine exuberance of late Francoism, when it was the biggest party of the opposition, or during the initial optimism of democracy, when it still seemed destined to be. Carrillo himself was unrecognizable: the hero of the defence of Madrid had been left behind, the myth of the anti-Francoist struggle, the internationally respected leader, the symbol of the new Euro-Communism, the Secretary General invested with the authority of demigod and the strategist able to turn any defeat into victory, the founder of democracy whom his own adversaries considered a solid, lucid, pragmatic, necessary statesman; now he was just a nervous petty tyrant on the defensive in a tangential party, embroiled in abstruse ideological debates and infighting where ambition was disguised as purity of principle and accumulated rage as longing for change, a waning politician with the manners of a Communist brontosaurus and the antiquated language of an apparatchik, lost in a cannibalistic labyrinth of conspiratorial paranoia. During those months of personal torment and political death throes Carrillo couldn’t even avoid the exasperated gesture of using the memory of 23 February to defend himself from the PCE rebels (or to attack them): he did so in meetings where his comrades were jeering at him — ‘If Lieutenant Colonel Tejero didn’t manage to get me on the floor, it’s hardly likely that you’re going to keep me quiet here,’ he said while they tried to shout him down at a function held on 12 March 1981 in Barcelona — and he did so at meetings of the Party organs, reproaching the leaders who were left in charge of the organization on the night of the coup for ineptitude or lack of courage to respond to the Army’s uprising by organizing mass demonstrations; perhaps he also did so (or at least his detractors took it like this) by favouring a painting by the Communist José Ortega, who depicted him sitting up straight in the chamber of the Cortes during the evening of 23 February, while the rest of the deputies except Adolfo Suárez and Gutiérrez Mellado — on the canvas two modest figures compared with the panoramic figure of the Secretary General — shelter under their benches from the golpistas’ gunshots.

It was all for naught. The October 1982 general election, the first one after the coup d’état, gave an absolute majority to the Socialist Party and allowed the formation of the first left-wing government since the war, but was a political death sentence for Santiago Carrillo: the PCE lost half its votes, and its Secretary General was left with no choice but to offer his resignation to the executive committee. He resigned from his post, but didn’t renounce power; Carrillo was a pure politician and a pure politician doesn’t give up power: he gets thrown out of it. Like that of Suárez before the coup, Carrillo’s withdrawal after the coup was not a definitive withdrawal but a tactical one, meant to maintain control of the Party from a distance and await a favourable moment for his return: he managed to place at the head of the secretary generalship a loyal and malleable substitute (or one whom he initially thought to be loyal and malleable), he continued to be a member of the executive committee and the central committee and retained the post of Party spokesman in the Cortes. There, with his paltry four deputies, they didn’t even manage to form their own parliamentary group and were forced to join the so-called mixed group, a group of all sorts of parties with minimal representation in the Cortes; and there he re-encountered Adolfo Suárez, who was trying to come back to political life after his resignation as Prime Minister and had just founded the CDS, a party with which he’d scraped in with half the paltry parliamentary representation obtained by Carrillo. And there they were again, indestructible twins, united in their last public adventure by the vice of politics, by the votes of citizens and by parliamentary norms, reduced by the political system they’d set up with their own four hands as if history wanted to make another figure out of them: five years after exchanging a dictatorship for a democracy, they were now two practically invisible deputies except as tiresome icons of an epoch the whole country seemed impatient to get over.

Neither of the two resigned himself to that secondary role. During the next three years Carrillo continued practising politics as far as he could in the Cortes and in the Party, where he fought to the end to keep control of the machinery and to guide his successor. Arguments between the two of them soon arose, and in April 1985 Carrillo was finally dismissed from all his posts and reduced to the condition of rank and file member; it was a covert expulsion, and his pride would not tolerate it: he immediately left the Party, in the company of a group of faithful, founded the Spanish Workers’ Party (Partido de los Trabajadores de España, PTE), an organization that demonstrated its predictable irrelevance within a short time and in 1991 sought to join the PSOE, his fierce adversary during four decades of Francoism and one and a half of democracy. Making a virtue of necessity, Carrillo interpreted this gesture as a way of closing a personal circle, as a gesture of reconciliation with his own biography: as a young man, the same day the myth of the hero of Madrid and the villain of Paracuellos was born, he’d abandoned the Socialist Party of his family, his childhood and adolescence to join the Communist Party; as an old man he went back the opposite way: he abandoned the Communist Party to join the Socialist Party. Of course, nobody accepted that interpretation, although it’s very possible that it really was a symbolic gesture: a symbolic recognition that, after a lifetime dedicated to reviling democratic socialism (or social democracy), it was democratic socialism (or social democracy) that was the inevitable result of the dismantling or undermining or ideological demolition of Communism that he’d begun years before. Perhaps it was also a gesture of rebelliousness, a final manoeuvring by a pure politician: although at seventy-six he no longer aspired to hold decisive positions, maybe he hadn’t yet renounced the idea of influencing from his vantage point of experienced old leader the young and all-powerful Socialists in government. Whatever it might have been, finally his gesture came to nothing: the PSOE took in the rest of the PTE members, but convinced him whether with fine words or the private intention of humiliating him that, given his political trajectory, it would be best for everyone not to formalize his admission to the Party.

This was the embittered culmination of his political career. What happened later did nothing to contradict that. Pushed out of active politics, writing newspaper articles and airing his opinions in his cracked, monotone, phlegmatic voice on radio discussions and television programmes, with his constant cigarette, during his last years of life Carrillo seemed to climb up on to the venerable pedestal of the fathers of the nation. He only seemed to. Beneath the occasional homage and the respect the media and institutions paid him flowed an adverse current as stubborn as it was powerful: the right never stopped associating his name with the horrors of the war and inventing new iniquities from his past, and to the end of his days he could barely appear at a public event without gangs of radicals trying to harass him with insults and attempts at physical aggression; as for the left, the rejection Carrillo provoked was less noisy and more subtle, but secretly maybe no less bitter, especially among his former comrades or among the heirs of his former comrades or among the heirs of the heirs of his former comrades: his former comrades professed for him an enduring aversion of old parishioners subdued by his domination, that deep down was also (or at least was for many) an enduring aversion for themselves for having belonged to a church where Carrillo was adored like a high priest; making Felipe González’s wickedness his, his former comrades’ heirs blamed him for managing in five years of democracy what Franco hadn’t managed in forty of dictatorship: destroying the Communist Party; as for the heirs of his former comrades’ heirs, they denigrated him by repeating unknowingly, hardened by ignorance and by the presumptuous impunity of youth, an old accusation: for them — Fiat justitia et pereat mundus — it had been Carrillo’s personal ambition and his complicity with Adolfo Suárez, added to his ideological revisionism, his wavering politics and his strategic errors, that had forced the left to make a disadvantageous pact with the right to exchange the dictatorship for democracy and had prevented the restitution of the legally elected Republic overthrown by Franco’s victory in the war, complete restitution to the victims of Francoism and prosecution of those responsible for forty years of dictatorship. None of them were right, but it’s absurd to deny that they were all partially right and that — although it would be good to know exactly what Carrillo’s comrades and the heirs of his comrades and the heirs of his comrades’ heirs were doing on the evening of 23 February, while he was risking his neck for democracy — to a certain extent Carrillo was essentially a failure, because, except for that of reconciling the irreconcilable Spain of Franco with democracy, all the great projects he undertook in his life failed: he tried to make a revolution to take power by force and failed; he tried to win a just war and failed; he tried to bring down an unjust regime and failed; he tried to reform Communism to take power by ballot and failed. He’s living out his last years surrounded by the false respect of almost everyone and the true respect of a very few. He has been many things, but he’s never been a fool or faint-hearted, and it’s possible that around him he sees only a scorched landscape of ideals in ruins and defeated hopes.

During this final stage his friendship with Adolfo Suárez remained intact. Both had given up political activity at the same time, in 1991, and over the course of the ten years that followed their connection grew more frequent and closer. They met often; they laughed a lot; they tried in vain not to talk politics. By the winter of 2001 Carrillo began to suspect that his friend was ill. In June of the following year, on the occasion of the official celebration of twenty-five years of democracy, Suárez made one of his now rare public appearances and declared to the press that José María Aznar, who then had been in the Moncloa for six years, was the best Prime Minister since the restoration of democracy. The dithyramb provoked numerous comments; Carrillo’s was taken by creatures of habit as an old dog’s cynicism ready to be rude about a friend to get a laugh from society: ‘Adolfo’s not well: I think he’s suffering from brain damage.’ A little while later he visited Suárez at his house in La Florida, a housing development on the outskirts of Madrid. He found him the same as ever, or the same as he ever found him in those days, but at a certain moment Suárez told him of the long solitary walks he took through the neighbourhood and Carrillo interrupted him. You shouldn’t go out alone, he said. They could give you a fright. Suárez smiled. Who? He said. ETA? He didn’t let him answer: If they’ve got the balls, let them come and find me, he said. And then Carrillo watched him act out verbally the starring role of a scene from a Western: one day he went out on his own and, while he was walking through a nearby park, three armed terrorists jumped him, but before they could match him he spun around, pulled his pistol and disarmed them with three shots; then, after warning them that the next time he’d shoot to kill and that if they didn’t comply with the rule of law and the democratic will of the people they were going to spend the rest of their lives in prison, he handed them over bound hand and foot to the authorities.

He didn’t see Adolfo Suárez again. Or at least that’s what Carrillo told me the only time I met him, one morning in the spring of 2007. The appointment was for noon at his home, a modest apartment in a building on Plaza de los Reyes Magos, in the Niño Jesús neighbourhood, very close to the Parque Retiro. By then Carrillo was in his nineties, but he looked the same as he did in his sixties; perhaps his body seemed a little smaller and his frame a little more fragile, his scalp a little balder, his mouth a little sunken, his nose a little softer, his eyes a little less sarcastic and friendlier behind his bifocals. While we were together he smoked a whole pack of cigarettes; he talked with neither bitterness nor pride, with an urge for precision assisted by an irreproachable memory. I asked him all about the years of political change, about the legalization of the PCE and about 23 February; he talked to me most of all about Adolfo Suárez (‘Having worked in a university you’ll have known lots of educated idiots, right?’ he asked me twice. ‘Well, Suárez was just the opposite’). The conversation lasted more than three hours during which we sat face to face in his study, a small room, every wall covered floor to ceiling in books; on his desk were more books, papers, a full ashtray; through a half-open window giving on to the street came the sound of children playing; behind my interlocutor, leaning on a shelf, a photo of 23 February dominated the room: the front-page photo from the New York Times in which Adolfo Suárez, young, brave and dishevelled, is leaving his bench to confront the Civil Guards who are jostling General Gutiérrez Mellado in the chamber of the Cortes.

Chapter 6

The question about the intelligence services is still pending, although now it’s another one. We know that CESID headed by Javier Calderón as such did not organize or participate in the coup, but rather opposed it, but we also know that several members of the elite CESID unit headed by Major José Luis Cortina, AOME, collaborated with Lieutenant Colonel Tejero in the attack on the Cortes (without doubt Captain Gómez Iglesias, who at the last moment persuaded certain indecisive officers to back up the lieutenant colonel; possibly Sergeant Miguel Sales and Corporals José Moya and Rafael Monge, who escorted Tejero’s buses to their target); the question therefore is: did AOME organize or support 23 February? Did Major Cortina organize or support 23 February? In reality, it’s impossible to answer these two questions without answering two prior questions: who was Major Cortina? What was AOME?

Outwardly, José Luis Cortina’s biography offers many similarities to that of Javier Calderón, with whom he began in the 1970s a friendship that endures to this day; but the similarities are only outward, because Cortina is a much more complex and more ambiguous character than the former Secretary General of CESID, someone described with admirable consistency by those who know him best as an authentic man of action and at the same time as a virtuoso of camouflage: a twelve-faced character, as Manuel Vázquez Montalbán wrote after interviewing him. Like Calderón, Cortina was raised within the socially concerned Falangism of the Colegio Pinilla, except that Cortina’s political vocation was always much more solid than Calderón’s and led him in the 1960s to join little radical groups on the left wing of the Falange, like the Social Revolutionary Front, which aimed, without leaving the fold of the regime, to renovate or purify it with pro-Marxist injections and sympathy for the Cuba of Fidel Castro. This ideological hodgepodge, not infrequent among the politicized youth of the day, afforded him the odd run-in with the Army intelligence service and with the police, but also relations with members of the opposition to Francoism, in particular with the Communists. Having graduated from the Military Academy at the top of his class — the 14th, the same as the King’s — Cortina did not become part of the intelligence services until 1968, when, just turned thirty, he was co-opted by the High Command General Staff to organize the first special operations unit of the intelligence services, SOME (Sección Operativa de Medios Especiales), in which he worked until the mid-1970s. By then he’d tempered his pseudo-revolutionary impulses, like Calderón and like his brother Antonio, with whom he always shared ideas and political projects, he participated in GODSA, the think-tank or embryonic political party that linked up with Manuel Fraga in the search for a ruptureless reform of Francoism and then moved away from him (or many of its members did) as soon as it was clear that the monarchy was betting on Suárez’s reform with a rupture; like Calderón, at that time Cortina acted as defence lawyer for one of the anti-Franco military officers of the Democratic Military Union: Captain García Márquez. Finally, in the autumn of 1977, shortly after the creation of CESID after the first democratic elections, its first director charged him with setting up the special operations unit of the centre, AOME, which he led until a few weeks after 23 February when the judge had him arrested for his presumed participation in the coup. From the political point of view, towards the beginning of the 1980s Cortina was a faithfully monarchist military officer who, although four years earlier he’d unhesitatingly accepted the democratic system, now thought like a good part of the political class (and unlike Calderón, tied by loyalty to Gutiérrez Mellado) that Adolfo Suárez had made a bad job of democracy or had spoiled it, that the system had entered into a profound crisis that threatened the Crown, and that the best way of getting out of this crisis was the formation of a coalition or caretaker or unity government under the auspices of a soldier with the characteristics of General Armada, whom Cortina knew well and to whom he was also linked through his brother Antonio, who had a good friendship with the general and had continued his political career in the ranks of Manuel Fraga’s Alianza Popular; from the technical point of view, from the point of view of his espionage work, nothing defines Cortina better than the very nature of AOME.

Although it was part of CESID, AOME didn’t share its organizational chaos or its precariousness of resources; on the contrary: perhaps it was one of the few units of the Spanish intelligence services comparable to units of the Western intelligence services. The merit was entirely due to its founder: Cortina commanded AOME for four years, enjoying almost complete autonomy; his only hierarchical link to CESID was Calderón, who didn’t supervise the unit in practice but simply requested from it, on behalf of the various divisions of the centre, information the major would later obtain without answering to anybody about his manner of obtaining it. Like all those of similar characteristics in the Western intelligence services, AOME was a secret unit within the secret service itself, to a certain extent secret even to the secret service. Its structure was simple. It was made up of three operational groups subdivided into two subgroups which in turn were subdivided into three teams, each of which was made up of seven or eight people and allocated three or four vehicles and a personal transmitter with which to communicate with the rest of the members of the team and vehicles; each team was assigned a task and each agent had a speciality: photography, communications, locks, explosives, etc. As well as these three operational groups, AOME had its own academy from very early on, where every year it taught a course on intelligence techniques that allowed it to instruct students in sophisticated methods of information gathering and to choose those most suitable to carry out its missions, always the most exposed CESID jobs: tailings, phone tapping, clandestine entries into residences and offices, seizures. The nature of such activities explains why those who carried them out led semi-clandestine lives, including within CESID itself, the members of which did not know the identities of AOME agents or the location of the unit’s secret headquarters, four houses on the outskirts of Madrid known respectively as Paris, Berlin, Rome and Jaca. This inscrutability could perhaps only be maintained, furthermore, thanks to a sort of sect mentality; according to those who were under his orders during those years, Cortina managed to inspire this mentality in his two hundred or so men and managed to form them into a compact elite who imagined themselves as something like a chivalrous order disciplined and loyal to their chief and to a slogan shared with other Army units: ‘If it’s possible, it’s already done; if impossible, we’ll get right on it.’

That, broadly speaking, was Major José Luis Cortina; that, broadly speaking, was AOME. Given the major’s personal characteristics and given the organizational and operational characteristics of the unit he commanded, always on the border of legality or beyond, always operating covertly and without any external overseeing, there is no doubt that Cortina’s AOME could have supported the 23 February coup while Calderón’s CESID opposed it; given the internal cohesion with which Cortina endowed AOME, it’s very improbable that its members could have acted without the major’s authorization or knowledge. I’m not saying impossible (after all, the unit’s internal cohesion demonstrated that it was not entirely without cracks, because it was AOME members who, after 23 February, denounced the participation of their comrades and Cortina himself in the coup d’état; after all, although maybe Captain Gómez Iglesias had been put in charge of watching Tejero months before by Cortina, at the last moment he could have joined the coup without consulting Cortina, guided by his old friendship and the communion of ideas that united him to the lieutenant colonel); I’m saying it’s very improbable. Is that what happened? Did Major Cortina organize and support 23 February? And if he did, why did he? To back up Armada’s government with force? Or did he support the coup just enough to be on the winning side if the coup triumphed and fight it just enough to be on the winning side if the coup failed? Or did he support it as a double agent, or as an agent provocateur, joining the coup to control it from within and make it fail? All these hypotheses have been proposed at one time or another, but it’s impossible to try to answer these five questions without first trying to answer five prior questions: did Cortina know beforehand the who, the when, the how and the where of 23 February? Was Cortina in contact with Armada and the rest of the golpistas in the days before 23 February? What exactly did Cortina do the night before 23 February? What exactly did Cortina do on 23 February? What exactly happened in AOME on 23 February?

Chapter 7. 23 February

At twenty to seven in the evening, when fifteen minutes had passed since the assault on the Cortes and the King was preventing General Armada from coming to the Zarzuela, the coup d’état ran aground. That doesn’t mean that at this moment, with the Cabinet and parliamentarians held hostage, the region of Valencia in revolt and the Brunete Armoured Division threatening Madrid, the coup no longer had any outcome other than failure; it only means that, as well as the coup, at this moment the countercoup was already under way, and from then on and until shortly after nine the golpistas’ plans were put on hold, waiting for more military units to join the uprising.

The countercoup command post was located in the Zarzuela, in the King’s office, where he remained for the rest of the night in the company of his secretary, Sabino Fernández Campo, the Queen, his son Prince Felipe — then a thirteen-year-old boy — and an aide-de-camp, while the adjoining salons of the Palace were filling up with relatives, friends and members of the Royal Household who answered or made phone calls or discussed the events. Although according to the Constitution he was no more than symbolic head of the Armed Forces, whose effective command resided in the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defence, in that exceptional situation the King acted as commander-in-chief of the Army and from the first moment began to issue orders to his comrades-in-arms to respect legality. At first, with the aim of having a stand-in for the sequestered government, the King approved a proposal according to which all executive powers would be placed in the hands of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest organ in the hierarchy of the Armed Forces, but hastened to withdraw his approval as soon as someone — perhaps Fernández Campo, perhaps the Queen herself — made him see that this measure meant relegating civilian power in favour of military power and in practice sanctioning the coup; this false step aborted in time made clear in the Zarzuela the need to constitute a covering civilian government, which was done before eight o’clock that night, calling together a group of secretaries of state and undersecretaries from the ministries under the leadership of the Director of State Security, Francisco Laína. By that time, however, the King’s main worry was not Lieutenant Colonel Tejero, who had the Cortes under his control, or General Milans, who had the region of Valencia in a state of rebellion, or the conspirators at the Brunete Armoured Division, who in spite of the countermands of their division commander and the Captain General of Madrid had not yet refused to join the coup, or even General Armada, around whom more and more suspicions converged as the golpistas put forward his name (Tejero referred to him, Milans referred to him, the conspirators at Brunete referred to him); the King was mainly worried about the Captains General.

These were almost a dozen generals who held a viceregal control over the eleven military regions into which the country was divided. All of them were Francoists: all had fought the war with Franco, almost all of them had fought on the Russian front with the Blue Division alongside Hitler’s troops, all were ideologically attached to the far right or had good relations with it, all had accepted democracy reluctantly and out of a sense of duty and by 1981 many considered the Army’s intervention in the country’s politics to be indispensable or advisable. In the days before 23 February Milans, operating from the headquarters of the III military region, had obtained explicit or implicit support for his cause from five of the Captains General (Merry Gordon, chief of the II region; Elícegui, of the V; Campano, of the VII; Fernández Posse, of the VIII; Delgado, of the IX), but when the coup was barely under way and the King and Fernández Campo began to telephone them one by one and they had to state their positions, none of them clearly seconded Milans. They did not, however, unhesitatingly respect the King’s authority either; they would have done if the King had ordered them to bring their troops out on to the streets, but, given that the order that came from the Zarzuela was exactly the opposite, all the Captains General except for two (Quintana Lacaci, in Madrid, and Luis Polanco, in Burgos) struggled with their doubts throughout the whole evening and night, urged from one side by Milans’ telephonic harangues and his appeals to military honour and the salvation of Spain and the commitment to duty, and on the other subject to the respect for the King and at times by reticence or by the prudence of their second-in-commands, maybe fascinated by the vertigo of reliving in old age the insurrectional epic of their youth as officers under Franco and aware that any one of them backing the coup could swing it in favour of the golpistas — decisive for the intervention of the rest of their comrades and compelling all together the King to freeze or suppress a political regime they all detested — but also aware that this very backing could ruin their service records, annul their pleasant retirement plans and condemn them to spend the rest of their days in a military prison. Those generals probably had high opinions of themselves, but, to judge by what happened on 23 February, barring exceptions they only showed themselves to be a handful of cowardly, dishonourable, swaggering and spoiled-rotten soldiers: if they had been honourable soldiers they would not have wavered for a second before putting themselves at the King’s orders to protect the legality they’d sworn to defend; if they hadn’t been honourable soldiers but had been brave they would have done what their ideals and their guts were telling them to do and would have ordered their tanks on to the streets. With few exceptions, they did neither one thing nor the other; with few exceptions, their behaviour fluctuated between the embarrassing and the grotesque: for example, General Merry Gordon, commander of the II region, who had promised to be on Milans’ side, spent the evening and the night in bed, laid out by an overdose of gin; or General Delgado, commander of the IX region, who set up an improvised headquarters in a restaurant on the outskirts of Granada where he remained shielded from the vicissitudes of the coup and without coming out in favour of it or against it until after midnight when he considered the situation was cleared up and returned to his office headquarters; or General Campano, commander of the VII region, who did not stop searching for strategies that would allow him to join the coup while protecting him from an eventual accusation of golpismo; or General González del Yerro, chief of the unified command of the Canary Islands (equivalent to the XI military region), who was willing to collaborate in the coup on the condition that it would not be Armada but he himself who would occupy the leadership of the resulting government. The anecdotes could be multiplied, but the category is always the same: except for Milans, no Captain General openly supported the coup, but, except for Quintana Lacaci and Polanco, no Captain General openly opposed it. In spite of that, and also in spite of the fact that throughout the whole evening and evening the pieces of news that arrived at the Zarzuela from the regional headquarters varied from one minute to the next and seemed to be or were frequently contradictory, it’s very possible that before nine that evening the King had a reasonable certainty that barring something unforeseen turning the situation around drastically the Captains General were not going to dare to disobey his orders for the moment.

But something unforeseen could still happen, and a turnaround as well: the King had smothered part of the rebellion, but he hadn’t extinguished it. The most flammable points between seven and nine that evening were the Cortes and the Brunete Armoured Division, the most crucial unit to the triumph of the coup. What happened during those two hours at the Brunete is inexplicable; inexplicable unless one admits that as much cowardice or indecision as overcame the Captains General also overcame the golpistas of the Brunete Division. Persuaded by them that the operation had the King’s consent, in the minutes before the coup the commander of Brunete, General Juste, had issued the order to all his units to leave for Madrid, but before seven, after talking to the Zarzuela Palace and receiving unequivocal orders from General Quintana Lacaci — his immediate superior — Juste had issued the countermand; many regiment commanders, however, continued to show unwilling to obey it and some of the more fiery among them — Colonel Valencia Remón, Colonel Ortiz Call, Lieutenant Colonel De Meer — were looking for excuses or courage with which to send their troops out on to the streets, sure that it would take no more than one armoured vehicle in the centre of Madrid to dispel the scruples or vacillations of their comrades-in-arms and resolve the triumph of the coup. They didn’t find either of the two things, but most of all they didn’t find the golpista ringleaders within the division (General Torres Rojas, replacing Juste according to the conspirators’ plans, Colonel San Martín, chief of staff, and Major Pardo Zancada, charged by Milans with putting the operation into action), or any of the other commanders and officers who were agitating in the midst of the generalized jumpiness: like so many other soldiers during the years before the coup, many had been lavish with their threats against the government with flag-waving boasts, but when the moment came to put them into practice they were unable to wrest command from the weak and doubtful Juste and, although it is true that during the first hours of the coup Torres Rojas and San Martín were still trying to convince Juste to rescind his countermand of the departure order, the truth is they did so with scant conviction, and the pressures they exerted against the commander of the Brunete Division vanished a little after eight when, docilely obeying his superiors’ orders, Torres Rojas left headquarters and returned on a regular flight to his post in La Coruña.

Meanwhile, while those at the Brunete were chomping at the bit, in and around the Cortes the formidable stir raised by the parliamentarians being taken hostage seemed to be gradually calming down. The first two hours there following the start of the coup had been demented. As the evening went on, Madrid turned into a ghost town (a city without any open bars or restaurants, with no taxis and barely any traffic, with empty streets where gangs of extreme right-wingers strutted about chanting slogans, smashing windows and intimidating the few passersby as people shut themselves up in their houses and sat glued to the radio or television, which for a while had broadcast nothing but military music or classical music, because since before eight the public radio and television stations had been occupied by a detachment commanded by a captain from the Brunete Division), opposite the façade of the Cortes, on the other side of Carrera de San Jerónimo, the salons and stairways of the Hotel Palace began to seethe with military men of every force and rank, journalists, photographers, radio broadcasters, onlookers, drunks and crackpots, and almost immediately a little crisis cabinet was set up in the manager’s office composed among others of General Aramburu Topete, Director General of the Civil Guard, and General Sáenz de Santamaría, Inspector General of the national police, two loyal members of the military who’d arrived at the Cortes building shortly after the assault and who, as soon as they understood that the hostage situation could go on for an unpredictable length of time, set up two security cordons — one of national police, the other of Civil Guards — with the aim of sealing off the building and keeping control of the maelstrom around it. It took them hours to achieve these two things, if they really did achieve them; in fact, vociferous groups of supporters of the golpistas besieged Carrera de San Jerónimo all night long and, from the first minutes of the seizure to the last, soldiers, police and Civil Guards in uniform or plainclothes entered the Cortes at will without anyone knowing with certainty if they were going in to join Tejero and his men or to find out their intentions, to declare support for their cause or to undermine their morale, to take them news from outside or to collect news from inside to inform the authorities, to parley with them or to snoop; even more: many people who approached the Cortes building in the first moments of the coup claim that, in the midst of that uproar, no one seemed to have been absolutely clear whether Aramburu’s Civil Guards and Sáenz de Santamaría’s police had surrounded the building to subdue the assailants or for their protection, to prevent more contingents of soldiers or civilians from reinforcing their numbers or to give them free entry, to repel the coup or to encourage it. It was an erroneous impression, or at least it became increasingly erroneous as the circumstances of the coup became clear, and, although they may never have gained absolute control over the cordon and didn’t entirely seal off the Cortes, towards eight in the evening Aramburu and Sáenz de Santamaría had at least managed to get the blockade of the rebels organized and put a stop to the improvised attempts to bring the seizure to an end in an expeditious manner, removing their fear that an outburst of violence between supporters and opponents of the coup might precipitate with a massive Army intervention the turnaround the golpistas were longing for.* Two of those attempts had happened very early: the first took place half an hour after the assault on the Cortes and featured Colonel Félix Alcalá-Galiano of the national police; the second took place just five minutes later and featured General Aramburu himself. Different versions circulate about what happened in both cases; the most plausible are the following:

Colonel Alcalá-Galiano is one of the first of the high-ranking military commanders to arrive at Carrera de San Jerónimo after the start of the coup. When he does so he has just spoken to General Gabeiras, Chief of the Army General Staff, who had ordered him to enter the Cortes and arrest or eliminate Lieutenant Colonel Tejero. Alcalá-Galiano obeys: he enters the building, locates Tejero and, while speaking to him, awaits his opportunity to capture or kill him; at a certain moment in the conversation, however, Tejero is called to the telephone to speak to Milans’ deputy chief of staff in Valencia, Colonel Ibáñez Inglés, who when he hears that Alcalá-Galiano is in the Cortes orders Tejero to disarm and arrest him immediately, but the lieutenant colonel doesn’t even have time to try, because Alcalá-Galiano has taken the astute precaution of listening in on another telephone to the conversation between the two rebels and then has the skill, amid strained jokes and friendly words between acquaintances and comrades-in-arms, to persuade Ibáñez Inglés to rescind the order and Tejero lets him return to the street. As for General Aramburu’s attempt, it is much less subtle or devious, much more awkward as well. As soon as he arrives at Carrera de San Jerónimo, shortly after Alcalá-Galiano has come back out of the Cortes, Aramburu walks over to the entrance in the company of two of his adjutants and demands to speak to the leader of the mutineers; seconds later Lieutenant Colonel Tejero appears, pistol in hand, his expression and gestures defiant, and without any preambles the general gives him the categorical order to vacate the building and surrender. Aramburu is head of the Civil Guard and therefore the highest authority of the corps to which the lieutenant colonel belongs, but Tejero is not daunted and, brandishing his weapon while a group of rebel Civil Guards aim theirs at Aramburu, answers: ‘General, sir, before surrendering I’d shoot you and then myself.’ Aramburu’s reply is instinctive and consists of reaching for his pistol, but one of his two adjutants holds his arm, prevents him from drawing his weapon and manages to bring the skirmish to a close with no further violence than insubordination and with Aramburu leaving the Cortes furious and stunned, convinced that Tejero’s resolution augurs a protracted siege.

This episode took place towards seven in the evening. By then, once past the assailants’ initial shouts and gunfire and the panic and stupor of the parliamentarians, journalists and guests who were in the chamber, the Cortes was filled with the rarefied air of a nightmare, or many of those who remained there remember it like that, almost as if the session of confirming the new Prime Minister of the government might be carrying on in a different dimension, or as if just tiny horrific or ridiculous details had been altered, making it subtly unreal. The parliamentarians were walking along the wide corridor that rings the chamber as usual, except with heads bowed, humiliated, fear etched on their faces, escorted by Civil Guards who accompanied them to the toilets and hearing the commanding voices and shouts of jubilation of the golpistas resounding through the offices and hallways; sometimes the toilets seemed full of people like in the recesses of the plenary sessions, except the politicians and journalists lined up at the urinals did not exchange the usual unimportant comments, but only sighs of uncertainty, anguish, self-pity or black humour; also as in the recesses of any plenary session, the usual-sized crowd had gathered in the bar, at that time situated by the main entrance of the old building, and the waiters were serving drinks, bringing bills and receiving tips, except that the clientele wasn’t made up of politicians and journalists but Civil Guard officers, NCOs and constables armed with Cetme assault rifles and Star submachine guns who hurled encouragement, curses, sharp remarks and patriotic brazenness back and forth across the bar, and except that the carajillos, gin-and-tonics, cognacs, shots of whisky and glasses of beer greatly exceeded the usual amount. As for the chamber, after the irruption of the golpistas, an ominous silence reigned there interrupted by the coughs of parliamentarians and the occasional orders of the Civil Guards; the silence froze when, ten minutes after the start, a captain walked up the steps to the rostrum to announce the arrival of a military authority who would take charge of the coup, and was shattered when a short time later Adolfo Suárez stood up from his bench and demanded to speak to Lieutenant Colonel Tejero, provoking a commotion that was on the verge of unleashing another burst of gunfire, and ended when the Civil Guards got the Prime Minister to sit down again by way of shouts and threats. Minutes later, undoubtedly to boost the morale of his men and weaken that of his hostages, Tejero announced that Milans had decreed a general mobilization in Valencia. It was not the only announcement of this type the rebels would make from the rostrum over the course of the night: at a certain moment an officer read out to the parliamentarians the war-measures edict Milans had enacted in Valencia; at another, a Civil Guard read out news favourable to the golpistas transmitted by press agencies; at another, shortly before midnight, Tejero proclaimed that several military regions — the II, III, IV and the V — had accepted Milans as the new Prime Minister of the government. This news was all the deputies received about what was happening outside the Cortes during the first hours of the seizure; or almost all: circulating in a fragmentary and confused way as well was the news picked up secretly from a transistor radio by former Deputy Prime Minister Fernando Abril Martorell, who sent around airbrushed bulletins to keep his comrades’ spirits up. Of course, he didn’t keep anybody’s spirits up, at least not in those initial hours, when not a single one of the events occurring in the chamber — not even the fact that the announced military authority had not arrived, not even the fact that the assailants had allowed those who were not parliamentarians to leave the Cortes — served to assuage the deputies’ anxiety: for a long time the cataclysm seemed inevitable and the tension, anger and brutal behaviour of the Civil Guards did not abate, and around half past seven, after the repeated flickering of the lights in the room made the kidnappers fear a deliberate power cut that would be the prologue to an attempt to get them out of the Cortes by force, Lieutenant Colonel Tejero doubled the guard on the access routes to the chamber and shouted to his men that in the case of a power cut they were to open fire at the slightest sign or sound of anything out of the ordinary, and then he ordered some chairs to be chopped up to set up a bonfire in front of the podium to replace the possible lack of light, which made the deputies shudder, convinced that any fire would automatically spread in that thickly carpeted, wood-lined enclosure. That shudder was just a foretaste of the one that ran through the chamber at twenty to eight, at the moment when several Civil Guards took Adolfo Suárez away and then, successively, General Gutiérrez Mellado, Felipe González, Santiago Carrillo, Alfonso Guerra and Agustín Rodríguez Sahagún. The six of them left the room in the midst of a horrified silence, some white as chalk, all trying to maintain their fortitude, or feign it, and the majority of their colleagues watched them leave with the premonition they would be executed and that the golpistas had the same fate in store for many of them. The foreboding did not leave them for most of the night, because the deputies only began very slowly to set aside the fear of a bloodbath and to cherish the hope that the golpistas had simply isolated their leaders to negotiate a way out of the coup they never actually negotiated with a military authority they never actually saw.

That was the situation towards 8.30 or nine on the night of 23 February: with the Cortes held hostage, the region of Valencia in revolt, the Brunete Armoured Division and the Captains General still devoured by doubts and the entire country plunged into a frightened, resigned and expectant passivity, the rebels’ coup seemed blocked by the Zarzuela’s countercoup, and also seemed to be waiting for someone — the rebels or the Zarzuela — to unblock it, removing it from the parentheses in which the partial failure of the first and partial success of the second had enclosed it. That was when two opposed and determining movements started up, one launched from Army General Headquarters, in the Buenavista Palace, and the other from the Zarzuela, one in favour of the coup and the other in favour of the countercoup. Towards 7.30 or eight in the evening, while the King and Fernández Campo were still sounding out the Captains General and demanding they confine their troops to barracks, in the Zarzuela they had begun to discuss the possibility that the King might appear on television with a message to dispel any misunderstanding of his rejection of the assault on the Cortes and reiterate the order to defend legality he’d already issued by telephone and by telex to Milans and the rest of the Captains General; the idea immediately gained urgency, but before they could come up with a satisfactory way to do it the Royal Household had to confront an earlier problem: for the moment it was impossible to record and broadcast the monarch’s address because the radio and television studios in Prado del Rey were occupied by a detachment of Brunete cavalry; so the Zarzuela Palace mobilized over the following minutes to remove the golpistas from there, until the Marquis of Mondéjar, head of the Royal Household and Cavalry general, after discovering that the occupying force belonged to the 14th Villaviciosa Cavalry Regiment, commanded by Colonel Valencia Remón, finally managed to get his comrade-in-arms to withdraw his men, and a little while later the Zarzuela requested the recently liberated television station to send round a mobile team to record the King’s message.

That was the beginning of the first of the two opposing movements, the movement against the coup. The second, the movement in favour of the coup, possibly started to ferment in the minds of the rebel ringleaders not long after the King forbade Armada access to the Zarzuela, and must have strengthened as they understood that the King was not going to support the coup in principle and the Captains General were not in principle disposed to do so either; deep down, the movement was no more than an almost obligatory variation of the original coup plan: in the original plan Armada would arrive at the occupied Cortes from the Zarzuela and, with the explicit backing of the King and of the entire Army, form a coalition or caretaker or unity government under his premiership in exchange for the deputies’ liberty and the Army’s return to barracks; in this almost obligatory variation Armada would arrive at the Cortes with the same proposal, except not from the Zarzuela but from Army General Headquarters, where he had his command post as Deputy Chief of the Army General Staff, with all the explicit or implicit backing he was able to claim, starting with the backing of the King. For the golpistas the movement was more arduous and more unsure than the one originally planned, because no one knew how much support Armada could count on in those circumstances, but, given the unexpected negative reaction towards the coup on the part of the King, it was also, I repeat, almost obligatory, or it was for Milans and for Armada: Milans had acted openly ordering his troops on to the streets and refusing to withdraw them, so he now had no option but to carry on, pushing Armada to carry out the anticipated plan, though it might be under worse conditions than those anticipated; as for Armada, who had remained stationary and almost ambushed in Army General Headquarters, trying not to make any gesture that would give away his involvement in the coup, the movement entailed additional risks, but could also afford some advantages: if the movement triumphed, Armada would end up leading the government, just as the original plan anticipated, but if it failed it would cleanse him of the suspicions that had been accumulating around him since the beginning of the coup, allowing him to appear as the self-sacrificing though frustrated negotiator of the liberation of the Cortes. It is probable that towards nine that night Milans and Armada had each on his own arrived at the conclusion that this movement was necessary. In any case, half an hour later Milans called the Buenavista Palace and asked to speak with Armada, at that moment the highest authority at Army General Headquarters in the absence of General Gabeiras, who was meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at their headquarters on Calle Vitruvio. The conversation, long and complicated, was the first the two golpista generals held that night, and from then on, for many of those who soon heard of it, the stalemate of the coup d’état seemed about to be unblocked; the reality is that it simply entered a different phase.

* The fear of the consequences of an armed confrontation also served to dissuade Francisco Laína, head of the provisional government, from carrying out a project he was pushing until well into the night — taking the occupied Cortes by force with a special-operations company of the Civil Guard — and which after much doubt and discussion he finally rejected, convinced by Aramburu and Sáenz de Santamaría that Tejero and his men were prepared to repel the attack and that it could only end in a massacre.