The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination

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.

... 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.

...after all very few knew as well as he did that it was perhaps impossible to bring ethics into politics without renouncing politics, because very few knew as well as he did that perhaps nobody comes to power without using dubious or dangerous or simply evil means, playing fair or trying as hard as he could to play fair to make himself an honourable place in history; I even wonder if he didn’t know more, if he didn’t at least guess, supposing that we can truly admire heroes and that they don’t make us uncomfortable or offend us by diminishing us with the emphatic anomaly of their actions, maybe we cannot admire heroes of the retreat, or not fully, and that’s why we don’t want them to govern us again once their job is completed: because we suspect that they have sacrificed their honour and their conscience, and because we have an ethic of loyalty, but we do not have an ethic of betrayal.

That’s more or less what Spain in the 1970s was like: a country full of vulgar, uncultivated, swindling, womanizing, gambling men without many scruples, provincials with the morality of survivors brought up between Acción Católica and the Falange who had lived comfortably under Francoism, collaborators who wouldn’t even have admitted their collaboration but were secretly increasingly ashamed of it and trusted Suárez because they knew that, although he might have wanted to be the fairest and the most modern and most audacious – or precisely because he wanted to be – he would always be one of theirs and would never take them where they didn’t want to go. Suárez didn’t let them down: he constructed a future for them, and by constructing it he cleansed his past, or tried to cleanse it. If you look closely, at this point Suárez’s strange fate also resembles that of Bardone: by shouting ‘Viva Italia!’ at the firing squad on a snowy dawn, Bardone not only redeems himself, but in a way redeems his whole country for having collaborated massively with fascism; by remaining on his bench while the bullets whizz around him in the chamber on the evening of 23 February, Suárez not only redeems himself, but in a way redeems his whole country for having collaborated massively with Francoism. Who knows: maybe that’s why – maybe that’s also why – Suárez didn’t duck.

During the transition few people in Spain forgot, and the memory of the war was more present than ever in the memory of the political class and the population in general; that is precisely one of the reasons why no one or hardly anyone opposed the 23 February coup: during those years everyone wanted to avoid at any price the risk of repeating the savage orgy of bloodletting that had happened forty years earlier, and everyone transmitted that desire to a political class that was only its reflection. It was not a heroic desire, anxious for justice (or apocalypse); it was just a brave and reasonable bourgeois desire, and the political class fulfilled it, bravely and reasonably: although in the autumn and winter of 1980 the political class behaved with an irresponsibility that verged on sending the country back to barbarism, between 1976 and 1980 it was much less incompetent than its last two centuries of history might have predicted. All this is valid, especially, for the generation that had fought the war and conspired for such a thing never to happen again.

...the day after he took office he read a televised message in which, with a political language, tone and form incompatible with the tattered starch of Francoism, promised concord and reconciliation by way of a democracy in which governments would be ‘the result of the will of the majority of the Spanish people’, and the next day he formed with the help of his Deputy Prime Minister Alfonso Osorio an extremely youthful cabinet composed of Falangists and Christian Democrats who had good relations with the democratic opposition and the economic powers; one day he presented a programmatic declaration, virtually breaking with Francoism, in which the government committed itself to ‘the devolution of sovereignty to the Spanish people’, and announced a general election before 30 June of the coming year, the next day he reformed by decree the Penal Code that prevented the legalization of the parties and the day after that he decreed an amnesty for political crimes; one day he granted the heretofore banned Catalan language equal official status and the next he declared the banned Basque flag legal; one day he announced a law that authorized the repeal of the Fundamental Laws of Francoism and the next day he got the Francoist Cortes to pass it and the following day he called a referendum to approve it and the day after that he won it; one day he abolished by decree the Movimiento Nacional and the next day he ordered all the Falangist symbols to be removed secretly overnight from all the façades of all the Movimiento buildings and the following day he legalized the Communist Party by surprise and the day after that he called the first free elections in forty years. That was his way of proceeding during his first eleven-month term of government: he made an unusual decision and, as the country was still trying to take it in, he made another more unusual decision, and then another even more unusual, and then one more; he was constantly improvising; he swept events along, but also allowed himself to be swept along by them; he allowed no time to react, or to work against him, or to notice the disparity between what he did and what he said, no time even for admiration, or no more than he gave himself: all his adversaries could do was remain in suspense, attempt to understand what he was doing and try to keep up.