The Anatomy of a Moment

Chapter 1

The trial of those involved in the 23 February coup d’état was held between 19 February and 3 June 1982 in the paper warehouse of the Army’s Geographical Service, in Campamento, a compound of military installations near Madrid, under strict security measures and over the course of interminable morning and afternoon sessions, in a courtroom crammed with relatives, lawyers, journalists, military committees, invited guests and observers. The tribunal was composed of thirty-two general officers of the Supreme Court of Military Justice, the highest branch of military jurisdiction, and thirty-three people were tried, all military officers except for one civilian. It is a ridiculous figure compared with the real number of those involved in the coup; the reason for this disparity is clear: three days after the attempted coup a special judge was appointed to investigate the case, and from that point on, over the course of the four full months the legal proceedings lasted, Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo’s government did everything it could to limit to the utmost the number of those charged because he thought the shaky post-coup democracy would not withstand a procession of hundreds of top-ranking military officers through the courtroom and the rigorous examination of their civilian accomplices, an examination liable to splatter many members of the ruling class who knowingly or unknowingly prepared the placenta of the coup. In fact, between the time of the coup and that of the hearing, while a campaign in the barracks and the far-right newspapers designed to blame the King in order to exonerate the golpistas was growing stronger, some of the defendants nurtured the hope that the trial would not take place, and shortly before the sessions began the Prime Minister himself met with the editorial directors of the main national newspapers and asked them to avoid publishing news the military would find hurtful, not to turn their pages into involuntary loudspeakers for the golpistas’ propaganda and therefore to report what happened in the courtroom of the Army’s Geographical Service in a minor key, almost on the quiet. There was a trial, the accuseds’ hopes of impunity were dashed, but the newspapers refused the kind of self-censorship the government requested of them, and over more than three months of public interrogations the Spanish people had daily and exhaustive news of the coup and the golpistas had at their disposal a potent amplifier for each of their words, something that contrary to what the government feared contributed to discrediting them before the majority of the population, although providing them with extra prestige in the eyes of their unconditional supporters.

It was the longest trial in Spanish history. Since the judges and the defendants were military officers and the Army a meticulously inbred institution, it was basically an almost impossible trial: judges and defendants had shared military destinations and quarters, their wives were friends and shopped at the same stores, their children were friends and went to the same schools; some of the judges could have been in the defendants’ position and some of the defendants could have been in the judges’ position. From the first moment the golpistas, their families and their defence lawyers tried to transform the hearing room and surroundings into the stage for a sordid carnival, and up to a certain point they succeeded: barely a day went by without stoppages, protests, shouts, applause, insults, threats, expulsions, interruptions or provocations, to such an extent that as the days went on the accused and their defenders became bolder and bolder until they managed to intimidate the tribunal, which explains why before the preliminary deliberations on the verdict the presiding general, too weak to bear the pressure to which he was being subjected and keep the golpistas’ bullying under control, was replaced. From the first moment it was also clear that the defence strategy was dividing the accused into two antagonistic groups: one was made up of General Armada, Major Cortina and Captain Gómez Iglesias, Cortina’s subordinate in AOME; the other was made up of the rest, with General Milans and Lieutenant Colonel Tejero at its head. The first kept to defending themselves for better or for worse against the crime of military rebellion and trying to dissociate themselves from the coup and from the rest of the accused; whereas the second group — with the exception of Major Pardo Zancada, who openly accepted responsibility for his part in the events — tried to associate themselves with the first group and, through them, with the King, seeking to convert the court martial into a political trial and presenting themselves as a group of honourable men who had acted under the orders of Armada, who in his turn had acted on the orders of the King, with the aim of saving a country corrupted by a corrupt political regime and a corrupt political class, and in accordance with the military grounds for acquittal of due obedience and the political grounds for acquittal of state of necessity. Legally this line of defence was apparently logical: either Armada had told Milans the truth in their conspiratorial meetings and the coup d’état was an operation desired by the King, therefore according to their defence lawyers the accused were not guilty because they had merely been obeying the King through Armada and Milans, or Armada had lied to Milans and the King did not want a coup and therefore the only one guilty of everything was Armada; in reality it was a contradictory and ludicrous line of defence: contradictory because the due-obedience grounds for acquittal negated the state-of-necessity grounds for acquittal, given that if the golpistas considered a golpe de estado necessary or indispensable it was because they knew the situation the country was in and could therefore not have been acting ingenuously and blindly on the orders of the King; ludicrous because it was ludicrous to pretend that the judicial concept of due obedience should cover outrages like the assault on the Parliament or the invasion of Valencia with tanks. That was how on the basis of contradictions and nonsense the trial deteriorated into a festival of lies in which, except for Pardo Zancada, none of the defendants said what they should have said: that they’d done what they’d done because they believed it was what had to be done, availing themselves of the fact that Milans said that Armada said that the King said that it was what had to be done, and in any case what they would have done sooner or later, because it was exactly what so many of their comrades had been wanting to do for such a long time.

During the hearing the principal protagonists of the coup behaved like what they were: Tejero, like a brutalized lout with a clear conscience; Milans, like a uniformed and defiant filibusterer; Armada, like a millionaire, double-dealing courtier: isolated, despised and insulted by almost all the others in the dock with him, who demanded he inform on the King or admit that he’d lied, Armada on the one hand refused to implicate the monarch, but on the other insinuated with his proclamations of loyalty to the Crown and even more with his silences, which suggested he was keeping quiet to protect the King; as for Major Cortina, he proved to be by far the most intelligent of the defendants: he dismantled all the accusations hanging over his head, dodged all the traps laid for him by the prosecutor and the defence attorneys and, according to Martín Prieto — court reporter for El País during the trial — subjected his interrogators to ‘greater suffering than humans are able to bear’. The final days were difficult for Armada, Cortina and Gómez Iglesias; although for months they had coexisted without too many problems with the rest of the accused in the Geographical Service’s quarters, as the time of the verdict approached and it was obvious that all or almost all of them were going to be found guilty, relations between the two groups became untenable, and the same day that Tejero tried to lay into Cortina at the end of the morning session the tribunal decided to confine the three dissidents to a separate wing of the quarters for their protection. Finally, on 3 June, the tribunal delivered its judgement: Tejero and Milans were condemned to thirty years in prison — the maximum sentence — but Armada received only six, as did Torres Rojas and Pardo Zancada, and all the rest of the commanders and officers got off with sentences of between one and five years; all except Cortina, who was acquitted, as were one Brunete captain and one of the captains and nine of the lieutenants who had accompanied Tejero into the Parliament. It was not just an indulgent sentence, but practically an invitation to repeat the coup, and the government appealed it before the civilian magistrates of the Supreme Court. Less than a year later the final court passed the definitive sentence; the majority of the accused saw their sentences at least doubled: Armada went from six years to thirty, Torres Rojas and Pardo Zancada from six to twelve, Ibáñez Inglés from five to ten, San Martín from three to ten, and so on, and even the lieutenants who stormed the Parliament and had been declared innocent by the first court were also found guilty. The government did not appeal Cortina’s acquittal or that of the two captains, and the Supreme Court simply confirmed the thirty years handed down to Milans and Tejero.

Perhaps the punishment was still benevolent, but there were no more courts to turn to and the golpistas began to leave prison shortly after their final sentences were handed down. Some were forced out of the Army, but almost all of them had the opportunity to remain, even of course the Civil Guards and NCOs who, in spite of having fired shots inside the chamber of the Cortes and roughed up General Gutiérrez Mellado, were not even tried. There were officers who had notable military careers after the coup: Manuel Boza — a lieutenant shown in the footage of the assault on the Cortes face to face with Adolfo Suárez, probably berating or insulting him — was reinstated in the Civil Guard after serving a twelve-month prison sentence, and in subsequent years received the following decorations for his exceptional merits and impeccable conduct: Civil Guard Cross of Merit with White Emblem, Royal Order of St Hermenegildo, Plaque of St Hermenegildo and Command of St Hermenegildo; Juan Pérez de la Lastra — a captain whose enthusiasm for the coup did not prevent him from leaving his men in the Cortes on the night of 23 February to go home for a few hours’ sleep and come back without anyone noticing his absence — also returned to the Civil Guard once he’d served his sentence, and in 1996 retired with the rank of colonel and with the following decorations granted since the coup: Cross of St Hermenegildo, Command of St Hermenegildo and Plaque of St Hermenegildo. The gratitude of the nation.

Those mainly responsible for 23 February took longer to get out of prison; some of them have died. The last to obtain his liberty was Lieutenant Colonel Tejero, who a year after the coup tried in vain to stand for election with an ephemeral party called Spanish Solidarity whose campaign slogan went: ‘Put Tejero in the Cortes with your vote’; like many of his comrades, during his years of imprisonment he led a comfortable life, guest of honour to some of the wardens of the jails where he served his sentence and converted into an icon of the far right, but when he left prison in 1996 he was no longer an icon of anything or he was just a pop icon, and his only known activities since then are painting pictures nobody buys and sending letters to newspaper editors that nobody reads, as well as celebrating the anniversary of his exploit every February. Milans died in July 1997 in Madrid; he was buried in the crypt of the Alcázar in Toledo, where he had begun his record as a Francoist war hero; like Tejero, he never repented of having organized 23 February, but after that date he abandoned his lifelong monarchism, and over the years he spent in prison spurred on or gave his blessing to almost every new attempted coup d’état, including the one on 2 June 1985 that planned to assassinate the upper echelons of the Army, the Prime Minister and the entire Royal Family during a military parade. Armada, on the other hand, did continue to be a monarchist, or at least he claims to be, even if in none of his numerous public declarations — or of course in his mellifluous and tricky memoirs — has he stopped nurturing the ambiguity about the King’s role in the coup; he was pardoned by a Socialist government at the end of 1988, and since then he has divided his time between his house in Madrid and his country estate in Santa Cruz de Rivadulla, in La Coruña, a baroque aristocratic mansion where until recently he personally looked after a nursery that produced a hundred thousand camellias. As for Cortina, what happened to him after the coup deserves a less succinct explanation.

In the early hours of 14 June 1982, just over a month after the sentence of the Court of Military Justice absolved the intelligence service major, four powerful explosive charges blew up four secret AOME headquarters. The bombs exploded almost at the same time, in a synchronized operation that produced no victims, and the next day the media attributed the attack to a new terrorist offensive on the part of ETA. This was false: ETA never claimed responsibility for the action, which had the Civil Guard’s signature written all over it and could only have been carried out with information from AOME members. Still under the effect of the tremendous military tension provoked by the mass court martial and the sentencing of some of the most prestigious leaders of the Army, there were those who interpreted the quadruple attack as a sign that a new military coup was under way and as a warning to CESID not to get in its organizers’ way this time; it was most likely a more personal warning: many in the military and the Civil Guard were furious with CESID for not having been on the side of the coup on 23 February and for having done everything possible to stop it, but they were even more furious with Cortina, who according to them had launched the golpistas on the adventure, left them in the lurch and then managed to come through the trial unscathed. This ominous precedent and certain coincidences of dates and locations explain the doubts aroused by an episode that happened a year later, 27 July 1983. That day, just months after the Supreme Court passed their definitive ruling at least doubling the length of the sentences of most of those found guilty of the 23 February coup, Cortina’s father burned to death in a fire at his home; the fact that the location was, according to Tejero, where his interview with the major had taken place in the days leading up to the coup, not to mention the circumstances of the calamity — at four o’clock in the afternoon while Cortina’s father was taking his siesta — reinforced the hypothesis of revenge. Cortina and the investigators attributed the fire to an electrical short-circuit; the explanation convinced almost no one, but the truth is not always convincing. Be that as it may, after the trial Cortina was reinstated in the Army; although he never returned to the intelligence services — all his assignments from then on were related to logistics — he did not manage to dispel the suspicions that hung over him, his equivocal reputation followed him everywhere and in recent years the Army has hardly had a single scandal not somehow associated with his name. In 1991, by then promoted to colonel, he was relieved of his command for facilitating a leak to the press of secret plans of military operations, but, in spite of being finally absolved of the accusation of negligence, by then he’d already requested a transfer to the reserves. Later, for a time, he served as adviser to a deputy prime minister in José María Aznar’s government, and at present he runs a logistics firm called I2V and participates in a family security business. As I complete this book he is an athletic old man, with sparse white hair, freckle-spattered scalp, gold-rimmed glasses and a boxer’s nose, an affable, ironic and cheerful man, who has an autographed portrait of the King in his office and for many years has not wanted to hear a word about 23 February.

Chapter 2

During the months that followed the failure of the coup d’état some democratic politicians and journalists frequently repeated that the coup had triumphed, or at least that it hadn’t entirely failed. It was a figure of speech, a way of pointing up what they considered a shrinking of democracy after 23 February. The coup did not triumph, it didn’t even triumph in part, but in the short term some of the golpistas’ political objectives seemed to be fulfilled.

What in theory was the golpistas’ fundamental political objective? For Armada, for Cortina, for those who thought like Armada and Cortina — not for Milans or for Tejero or for those who thought like Milans and Tejero, who were undoubtedly the majority of the golpistas — the fundamental political objective of 23 February consisted of protecting the monarchy, rooting it in Spain and correcting or trimming or shrinking a democracy that in their judgement constituted a threat to it. To achieve this fundamental objective they had to achieve another fundamental objective: put a stop to the political career of Adolfo Suárez, who was mainly responsible for the state of affairs; then they had to put a stop to that state of affairs: they had to put a stop to the risk of a hard-core, anti-monarchist coup, had to put a stop to terrorism, had to put a stop to the Estado de las Autonomías or put it in brackets or humble its pretensions and consolidate national feelings, had to put a stop to the economic crisis, had to put a stop to international policies that irritated the United States because they were distancing Spain from the Western bloc, had to narrow the space for tolerance in all areas, had to teach the political class a lesson and had to give the country back its lost confidence. Those were in theory, I insist, the objectives of 23 February. In the months after the coup — while the country tried to take in what had happened, awaiting the golpistas’ trial with more scepticism than fear, and while the government and the opposition practised the politics of pacification with the military and certain politicians and many journalists denounced the reality of a democracy watched over by the Army — some of them were immediately fulfilled. Adolfo Suárez’s political career ended on 23 February, just as he carried out his last truly political act by remaining seated while the bullets whizzed around the chamber of the Cortes: without the coup Suárez might have had some chance to return to power; with the coup he had none: perhaps we can admire heroes, perhaps we can even admire heroes of the retreat, but we don’t want them to govern us, so after 23 February Suárez was nothing more than a survivor of himself, a posthumous politician. After the coup d’état all official offices, every municipal balcony, all the party headquarters and all the autonomous-government assemblies suddenly bloomed with national flags, and all the jails filled with common criminals. The coup d’état, it has often been said, was the most efficient vaccination against another coup d’état, and it’s true: after 23 February Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo’s government invested billions in modernizing the Armed Forces and carried out a far-reaching purge — replaced the Joint Chiefs of Staff en masse, retired the most Francoist generals, rejuvenated the command structure, strictly controlled promotions and remodelled the intelligence services — and, although after 1981 there were still several attempts at military rebellion, the truth is they were organized by an ever more eccentric and isolated minority, because 23 February not only discredited the golpistas in the eyes of society, but also in the eyes of their own comrades-in-arms, thus hastening the end of a two-century tradition of military coups. Barely three months after 23 February, the government signed the NATO accession treaty that Suárez refused to sign for years, which reassured the United States, contributed to civilizing the Army by putting it in contact with democratic armies and embedded the country firmly in the Western bloc. A short time later, at the beginning of June, the government, businessmen and trade unions, with the support of politicians from the other parties and a similar intention to that behind the Moncloa Pact, signed a National Employment Accord, which halted the daily destruction of thousands of jobs, reduced inflation and meant the start of a series of changes that heralded the beginning of the economic recovery of the mid-1980s. And a month and a half later the government and the opposition, amid howls of protests from the nationalists, signed the so-called LOAPA, an organic law defending the need to rationalize the autonomous powers of the regions that tried to put the brakes on the decentralization of the state. The terrorists did not stop killing, of course, but it’s a fact that after the coup the attitude of the country changed towards them, the left did its best to wrest away the alibis it’d allowed them, the Armed Forces began to notice the solidarity of civil society and the governments began to fight against ETA with instruments Suárez never dared use: in March 1981 Calvo Sotelo authorized the Army’s intervention in the anti-terrorist struggle on land and maritime borders, and just two years later, recently arrived in power, the Socialists created GAL, a group of state-financed mercenaries who began a campaign of kidnapping and assassinating terrorists in the south of France. The greater social belligerence against terrorism was just one aspect of a wider social change. Seventeen and a half hours of humiliation in the chamber of Parliament amounted to a sufficient corrective for the political class, who seemed to find a sudden forced maturity, shelved for a time their furious inter-party rows and the furious greed for power that had served to create the placenta of the coup, stopped speculating with shady operations of constitutional engineering and did not mention again caretaker or interim or salvation or unity governments or involving the Army in any way; no less tough was the lesson for the majority of the country, which had passively accepted Francoism, had been excited at first by democracy and then seemed disillusioned: the disenchantment vanished overnight and everyone seemed to rediscover with enthusiasm how good liberty was, and maybe the best proof is that a year and a half after the coup an unknown majority of Spaniards decided there would be no real reconciliation until the heirs of the losers of the war governed again, permitting a rotation of power that ended up consolidating democracy and the monarchy. This is another secondary effect difficult not to credit, at least partially, to 23 February’s account: at the beginning of 1981 it was still difficult to imagine the Socialist Party governing Spain, but in October of the following year it came to power with ten million votes and all the congratulations of the monarchy, the Army, businessmen and bankers, journalists, Rome and Washington.

It’s true: none of the preceding happened thanks to the coup, but in spite of the coup; it didn’t happen because the coup triumphed, but because it failed and because its failure convulsed the country and seemed to change it completely. But without the coup this convulsion would not have happened, nor would this change, or not the way it happened and with the speed it happened, and most of all, the most important thing would not have happened, and that is the Crown accumulated a power and legitimacy it could only have dreamt of before the coup. The King’s power came from Franco, and his legitimacy from having renounced Franco’s powers or part of his powers to cede them to popular sovereignty and become a constitutional monarch; but this was a precarious legitimacy, which deducted effective power from the King and left him exposed to the risk of the swings of fortune of a history that had expelled from the throne many of those who’d preceded him. The coup d’état reinforced the Crown: acting apart from the Constitution, using a powerless King’s last trick of power — which he held as symbolic commander-in-chief of the Army and Franco’s heir — the King stopped the coup and became democracy’s saviour, which lavished legitimacy upon the monarchy and turned it into the most solid, most appreciated, most popular, most safeguarded from criticism and, deep down, most powerful institution in the country. That’s what it still is today, to the incredulity from beyond the grave of the King’s ancestors and the envy of all the Continent’s monarchies. Or to put it another way: if before 23 February the golpistas had calculated the risks and benefits they would have reached the conclusion that it was less dangerous for the parliamentary monarchy to stage a coup or allow one than not to stage one, or if they’d designed the coup not to destroy democracy but to shrink it for a time and thus safeguard the monarchy in a moment of anxiety and consolidate it in the country, then there would be reasons to maintain that the 23 February coup triumphed, or at least didn’t completely fail. But it’s better to put it like this: the coup d’état failed completely and it was its complete failure that turned the democratic system in the form of a parliamentary monarchy into the only viable system of government in Spain, and for that reason it’s also possible to say, as if I’d wanted to insinuate that violence is history’s essence, the material of which it is made, and that only an act of war can revoke another act of war — as if I’d wanted to insinuate that only a coup d’état can revoke another coup d’état, that only a coup d’état could revoke the coup d’état that on 18 July 1936 engendered the war and the prolongation of the war by other means that was Franco’s regime — 23 February not only brought an end to the transition and to Franco’s post-war regime: 23 February brought an end to the war.

Chapter 3

Is Borges right and is it true that every destiny, however long and complicated, essentially boils down to a single moment, the moment a man knows once and for all who he is? I look again at the image of Adolfo Suárez on the evening of 23 February and, as if I hadn’t seen it hundreds of times, it strikes me again as a radiant, hypnotic image, real and unreal at the same time, meticulously stuffed with meaning: the Civil Guards shooting over the chamber, General Gutiérrez Mellado standing beside him, the depopulated Parliament, the stenographers and ushers lying on the floor, the parliamentarians lying on the floor and Suárez leaning back against the blue leather of his prime ministerial bench while the bullets whizz around him, solitary, statuesque and spectral in a desert of empty benches.

It’s a slippery image. If I’m not mistaken, there is in the parallel gestures of Gutiérrez Mellado and Santiago Carrillo a logic we sense straight away, with instinct rather than intelligence, as if they were two gestures necessary for those who had been programmed by history and by their two counterpoised biographies of old wartime enemies. Suárez’s gesture is almost identical to theirs, but at the same time we sense that it’s different and more complex, or at least I sense this, undoubtedly because I also sense that its complete significance escapes me. It’s true that it’s a courageous gesture and a graceful gesture and a rebellious gesture, a supreme gesture of liberty and a histrionic gesture, the gesture of a man who’s finished and who conceives of politics as an adventure and is trying for deathbed legitimacy and for a moment seems fully to embody democracy, a gesture of authority and a gesture of individual and perhaps collective redemption, the final purely political gesture of a pure politician, and for that reason the most violent; all this is true, but it’s also true that for some reason that inventory of definitions does not satisfy the emotions, the instinct or the intelligence, as if Suárez’s gesture were an inexhaustible or inexplicable or absurd gesture, or as if it contained an infinity of gestures. A few days ago, for example, I thought Suárez’s gesture wasn’t really a gesture of courage, but a gesture of fear: I remembered a bullfighter who said the only thing that moved him to tears was fighting bulls, not by how well he did it, but because fear made him overcome fear, and I remembered at the same time a poet saying a bullfighter walked into the ring scared to death and that, since he was already dead, he was no longer scared of the bull and was invulnerable, and then I thought that in that moment Suárez was so still on his bench because he was moved to tears, bathed in tears inside, scared to death. The night before last I thought that Suárez’s gesture was the gesture of a neurotic, the gesture of a man who crumbles in the face of good fortune and comes into his own in adversity. Last night I thought something else: I thought I had written many pages about Suárez and I still hadn’t said that Suárez was anything but a nonentity, that he was a serious character, a fellow who was responsible for his words and his actions, a guy who had put together democracy or felt that he had put it together and on the evening of 23 February he understood that democracy was in his care and he did not hide and remained still on his bench while the bullets whizzed around him in the chamber like a captain who remains at the helm of his sinking ship. And a while ago, after writing Borges’ sentence that opens this fragment, I thought that Suárez’s gesture was a Borgesian gesture and that scene a Borgesian scene, because I remembered Alan Pauls, who in an essay on Borges claims that the duel is the DNA of Borges’ short stories, their fingerprint, and I said to myself, instead of the false duel Adolfo Suárez and Santiago Carrillo once pretended to engage in, that scene was a real duel, a duel between armed men and unarmed men, a state of ecstasy, a vertiginous juncture, a hallucination, a second extirpated from the current of time, ‘a suspension of the world’, says Pauls, ‘a block of life torn out of the context of life’, a tiny dazzling hole that repels all explanations or perhaps contains them all, as if it would be enough effectively to know how to look in order to see in that eternal moment the exact code of 23 February, or as if mysteriously, in that eternal moment, not just Suárez but everyone in the country had known once and for all who they were.

I don’t know: maybe I could prolong this book indefinitely and extract different meanings from Suárez’s gesture indefinitely without exhausting its meaning or grazing or discerning its real meaning. I don’t know. Sometimes I tell myself that this is all a mistake, one more fantasy added to the incalculable fantasies that surround 23 February, the last and most insidious: although the truly enigmatic is not what nobody’s seen, but what everyone has seen and nobody has managed entirely to understand, maybe Suárez’s gesture holds no secret or real meaning, or no more than any other gesture holds, all inexhaustible or inexplicable or absurd, all arrows flying off in countless directions. But other times, most of the time, I tell myself that it’s not like that: the gestures of Gutiérrez Mellado and Santiago Carrillo are translucent, exhaustible, explicable, intelligible, or that’s what we feel; Suárez’s gesture is not: if you don’t wonder what it means then you understand what it means; but if you wonder what it means then you don’t understand what it means. That’s why Suárez’s gesture is not a translucent gesture but a transparent gesture: a meaningful gesture because in itself it doesn’t mean anything, a gesture that contains nothing but through which, as through a window, we feel we could see everything — we could see Adolfo Suárez, 23 February, the recent history of Spain, perhaps a face that might be our own true face — a gesture all the more disconcerting because its deepest secret lies in its having no secret. Unless, of course, that rather than a mistake or a correct answer all this is a misunderstanding, and that examining the meaning of Suárez’s gesture doesn’t amount to the same thing as coming up with a correct question or a mistaken question or an unanswerable question, but just coming up with an essentially ironic question, whose true answer lies in the question itself. Unless, I mean, that the challenge I set myself in writing this book, trying to respond by way of reality to what I didn’t know and didn’t want to respond to by way of fiction, was an unmeetable challenge, and that the answer to that question — the only possible answer to that question — is a novel.

Chapter 4

‘The transition is now history,’ wrote the sociologist Juan J. Linz in 1996. ‘It is not today the subject of debate or political struggle.’ A decade later Linz could no longer say that: for some time now the transition has not only been subject to debate, but also — sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly — the subject of political struggle. It occurs to me that this change is the consequence of at least two factors: the first is a generation of leftists coming to political, economic and intellectual power, my generation, who took no active part in the change from dictatorship to democracy and who consider this change to have been done badly, or that it could have been done much better than it was; the second is the renewal in the intellectual centres of an old far-left discourse that argues that the transition was the consequence of a fraud negotiated between Francoists wanting to stay in power at any cost, led by Adolfo Suárez, and supine leftists led by Santiago Carrillo, a fraud the result of which was not an authentic rupture with Francoism and which left real power in the same hands that had usurped it during the dictatorship, shaping a dull, insufficient and defective democracy.* In part as a consequence of a conscience as clear and rock hard as those of the golpistas of 23 February, of an irrepressible nostalgia for the clarities of authoritarianism and sometimes a simple ignorance of recent history, both factors run the risk of delivering the monopoly of the transition to the right — which has rushed to accept it, glorifying the time to a ridiculous extent, that is mystifying it — while the left, caving in to the combined blackmail of narcissistic youth and an ultramontane left, seems at times ready to wash its hands of it the way one washes one’s hands of an awkward bequest.

I think it’s a mistake. Although it didn’t have the joy of an instantaneous collapse of a frightful regime, the rupture with Francoism was a genuine rupture. To achieve it the left made many concessions, but practising politics involves making concessions, because it involves giving way on the incidentals in order not to give way on the essentials; the left gave way on the incidentals, but the Francoists gave way on the essentials, because Francoism disappeared and they had to renounce the absolute power they’d held for almost half a century. It’s true that justice was not entirely done, that the Republican legitimacy violated by Francoism was not restored, those responsible for the dictatorship did not face trial, its victims were not fully and immediately compensated, but it’s also true that in exchange a democracy was constructed that would have been impossible to construct if the prime objective hadn’t been that of crafting a future but — Fiat justitia et pereat mundus — making amends for the past: on 23 February 1981, when it seemed the system of liberties was no longer at risk after four years of democratic government, the Army attempted a coup d’état, which was on the brink of succeeding, so it’s easy to imagine how long democracy would have lasted if four years earlier, when it had barely got started, a government had decided to bring justice to all, though the world perish. It’s also true that political and economic power did not change hands overnight — which would probably not have happened either if instead of a negotiated rupture with Francoism there had been a direct rupture — but it’s evident that power soon began to operate under the restrictions imposed by the new regime, which brought the left to government after five years and long before began a profound reorganization of economic power. Furthermore, to state that the political system that arose out of those years is not a perfect democracy is to state the obvious: perhaps a perfect dictatorship exists — they all aspire to it, in some way all feel they are — but there’s no such thing as a perfect democracy, because what defines a true democracy is its flexible, open, malleable character — that is, permanently improvable — in such a way that the only perfect democracy is one that can be for ever perfected. Spanish democracy is not perfect, but it is real, worse than some and better than many, and anyway, incidentally, more solid and deeper than the fragile democracy General Franco overthrew by force. All this was to a great extent a triumph for anti-Francoism, a triumph for the democratic opposition, a triumph for the left, which obliged the Francoists to understand that Francoism had no future other than its total extinction. Suárez understood that immediately and acted accordingly; all this we owe him; all this and, to a great extent, also the obvious: the longest period of freedom Spain has enjoyed in its entire history. That’s what the last thirty years have been. Denying it is to deny reality, the inveterate vice of a certain section of the left that continues to inconvenience democracy and certain intellectuals whose difficulty in emancipating themselves from abstraction and the absolute prevents them from connecting ideas to experience. All in all, Francoism was a bad story, but the end of that story has not been bad. It could have been: the proof is that in the middle of the 1970s the most lucid foreign analysts were predicting a catastrophic exit from the dictatorship; maybe the best proof is what happened on 23 February. It could have been, but it wasn’t, and I see no reason why those of us who didn’t participate in that story owing to age should not celebrate it; nor do I think that, had we been old enough to participate, we would have committed fewer errors than our parents did.

* To those two facts a philosopher could add another, less circumstantial and maybe more profound: human beings’ growing capacity for dissatisfaction, a paradoxical result of Western society’s growing capacity to satisfy our needs. ‘Where cultural progress is genuinely successful and ills are cured, this progress is seldom received with enthusiasm,’ writes Odo Marquard. ‘Instead, it is taken for granted and attention focuses on those ills that remain. And these remaining ills are subject to the law of increasing annoyance. The more negative elements disappear from reality, the more annoying the remaining negative elements become, precisely because of this decrease.’

Chapter 5

On 17 July 2008, the day before Adolfo Suárez last appeared in the newspapers, photographed in the garden of his house in La Florida in the company of the King — when he’d already seemed to be dead for a long time or everyone had talked about him for a long time as if he were dead — I buried my father. He was seventy-nine, three years older than Suárez, and he’d died the previous day at home, sitting in his favourite armchair, in a gentle, painless way, perhaps without understanding he was dying. Like Suárez, he was an ordinary man: he came from a rich family that had come down in the world settled since time immemorial in a village in Extremadura, he’d studied in Córdoba and in the 1960s had emigrated to Catalonia; he didn’t drink, he’d been an obstinate smoker but didn’t smoke any more, in his youth he’d belonged to Acción Católica and the Falange; he’d been a handsome young man, kind, conceited, a lady’s man and gambler, a good verbena dancer, although I’d swear he was never cocky. He was, however, a good veterinary surgeon, and I suppose he could have made money, but he didn’t, or no more than necessary to support his family and put three of his five children through university. He had few friends, no hobbies, didn’t travel and for his last fifteen years lived on his pension. Like Suárez, he was dark-haired, thin, handsome, frugal and transparent; unlike Suárez, he tried to go unnoticed, and I think he managed it. I won’t presume to declare that he was never involved in any crooked deal in those crooked times, but I can say, as far as I know, there was no one who didn’t take him for a decent man.

We always got along well, except maybe, inevitably, during my adolescence. I think at that time I was a little embarrassed to be his son, I think because I thought I was better than him, or that I was going to be. We didn’t argue much, but whenever we did argue we argued about politics, which is strange, because my father wasn’t terribly interested in politics, and neither was I, from which I deduce that this was our way of communicating at a time when we didn’t have much to communicate to each other, or when it wasn’t easy to do so. I said at the beginning of this book that my father was a Suarista then, as was my mother, and that I looked down on Suárez, one of Franco’s collaborators, an ignorant and superficial nonentity who through luck and fiddling had managed to prosper in democracy; it’s possible I thought something similar of my father, and that’s why I was a little bit embarrassed to be his son. The fact is that more than one argument ended in shouts, if not with a slammed door (my father, for example, was outraged and horrified by ETA’s murders; I was not in favour of ETA, at least not much, but I understood that it was all Suárez’s fault, that he left ETA no choice but to kill); the fact is also that, once adolescence ended, the arguments ended too. We, however, carried on talking about politics, I suppose because having pretended to be interested we’d ended up actually interested. When Suárez retired, my father continued to be a Suarista, he voted for the right and occasionally for the left, and although we didn’t stop disagreeing we’d discovered by then that it was better to disagree than to agree, because the conversation lasted longer. In reality, politics ended up being our main, almost our only topic of conversation; I don’t remember us talking very often about his work, or my books: my father was not a reader of novels and, despite knowing he read mine and that he was proud that I was a writer and that he clipped out and saved articles about me that appeared in the newspapers, I never heard him express an opinion on any of them. In recent years he gradually lost interest in everything, including politics, but his interest in my books grew, or that was my impression, and when I began to write this one I told him what it was about (I didn’t deceive him: I told him it was about Adolfo Suárez’s gesture, not the 23 February coup, because from the beginning I wanted to imagine that Adolfo Suárez’s gesture contained the events of 23 February as if in code); he looked at me: for a moment I thought he’d make some comment or burst out laughing or into tears, but he just frowned absently, I don’t know whether sardonically. Later, in the final months of his illness, when he’d wasted away and could barely move or speak, I went on telling him about this book. I talked to him about the years of the political change, about what happened on 23 February, about events and figures we’d argued over years before till we were fed up; now he listened to me distractedly, if he really was listening, to force his attention, sometimes I asked him questions, which he didn’t usually answer. But one evening I asked him why he and my mother had trusted Suárez and he suddenly seemed to wake out of his lethargy, trying in vain to lean back in his armchair he looked at me with wild eyes and moved his skeletal hands nervously, almost furiously, as if that fit of anger was going to put him for a moment back in charge of the family or send me back to adolescence, or as if we’d spent our whole lives embroiled in a meaningless argument and finally the occasion had arrived to settle it. ‘Because he was like us,’ he said with what little voice he had left. I was about to ask him what he meant by that when he added: ‘He was from a small town, he’d been in the Falange, he’d been in Acción Católica, he wasn’t going to do anything bad, you understand, don’t you?’

I understood. I think this time I understood. And that’s why a few months later, when his death and Adolfo Suárez’s resurrection in the newspapers formed the final symmetry, the final figure of this story, I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d started to write this book not to try to understand Adolfo Suárez or Adolfo Suárez’s gesture but to try to understand my father, if I’d kept writing it in order to keep talking to my father, if I’d wanted to finish it so my father could read it and know that I’d finally understood, that I’d understood that I wasn’t so right and he wasn’t so wrong, that I’m no better than him, and that now I never will be.