I got straight down to work. I don’t know whether I need to clarify that the aim of my novel was not to vindicate the figure of Suárez, or to denigrate him, or even to evaluate him, but only to explore the significance of a gesture. I would be lying, however, if I were to say that Suárez aroused much sympathy in me: I was a teenager when he was in power and I never considered him anything other than a Francoist on the make who had prospered through back-breaking bowing, an opportunistic, reactionary, pious, superficial and smooth politician who embodied what I most detested about my country and whom, I’m very much afraid, I identified with my father, an obstinate supporter of Suárez; over time my opinion of my father had improved, but not my opinion of Suárez, or not much: now, a quarter of a century later, I had him down as a short-sighted politician whose principal merit consisted in having been in the place where he had to be and at the moment when he had to be there, something that had granted him a fortuitous prominence during a change, the one from dictatorship to democracy, which the country was going to undertake with or without him, and this reticence is the reason I watched with more sarcasm than astonishment the celebration of his consecration in his own lifetime as the great statesman of democracy — celebrations in which I always thought I recognized the scent of an even greater hypocrisy than is customary in these cases, as if no one believed it at all or as if, more than celebrating Suárez, the celebrants were celebrating themselves. But, instead of impoverishing them, the negligible esteem in which I held him enriched with complexity the character and his gesture, especially as I investigated his life story and researched the coup. The first thing I did was to try to obtain from Televisión Española a copy of the complete footage of Lieutenant Colonel Tejero’s invasion of the Cortes. The procedure turned out to be trickier than expected, but it was worth the effort; the footage — most of which was shot by two cameras that kept running after the storming of the Cortes until they were unplugged by accident — is dazzling: the images we see every anniversary of 23 February last five, ten, fifteen seconds at most; the complete images last a hundred times longer: thirty-four minutes and twenty-four seconds. When they were shown on television, at midday on 24 February, the philosopher Julián Marías ventured the opinion that they deserved a prize for the year’s best film; almost three decades later I feel that was faint praise: they are extremely dense images, of extraordinary visual power, brimming with history and electrified by truth, that I watched many times without their spell being broken. Meanwhile, during that initial period I read several biographies of Suárez, several books about the years when he was in power and about the coup d’état, leafed through the odd newspaper of the day, interviewed a politician or two, the odd military officer, a journalist or two. One of the first people I spoke to was Javier Pradera, an ex-Communist editor transformed into the éminence grise of Spanish culture and also one of the few people who on 23 February, when he was writing editorials for El País and the newspaper brought out a special edition with a genuinely anti-coup text he’d written, had shown himself willing to risk his neck for democracy. I told Pradera of my project (I deceived him: I told him I was planning to write a novel about 23 February; or maybe I didn’t deceive him: maybe from the start I wanted to imagine that Adolfo Suárez’s gesture contained all that 23 February meant in code). Pradera was enthusiastic; since he’s not a man prone to enthusiasms, I raised my guard: I asked him why he was so enthusiastic. ‘Very simple,’ he answered. ‘Because the coup d’état is a novel. A detective novel. The plot goes like this: Cortina sets up the coup and Cortina knocks it down. Out of loyalty to the King.’ Cortina is Major José Luis Cortina; on 23 February Major José Luis Cortina was head of the special operations unit of CESID (Centro Superior de Información de la Defensa), the Spanish intelligence service: he had been a cadet at the military academy the same year as the King, was assumed to be close to the monarch and after 23 February had been accused of participating in the coup, or rather of unleashing it, and he’d been jailed, interrogated and absolved by the court martial that judged the case, but the suspicions hanging over him never entirely dissipated. ‘Cortina sets up the coup and Cortina knocks it down’: Pradera laughed sardonically; I laughed too: rather than the plot of a detective novel it seemed to me like the plot of a sophisticated version of The Three Musketeers, with Major Cortina in a role that blended D’Artagnan with Monsieur de Tréville.
I liked the idea. As it happens, a little while after talking to Pradera I read a book that fitted the fiction the old El País editorialist had in mind like a glove, except that the book wasn’t fiction: it was a work of investigative journalism. Its author is the journalist Jesús Palacios; its thesis is that, contrary to what appearances seem to suggest, the 23 February coup was not an improvised and botched job by an imperfect combination of hard-core Francoist military officers and monarchist military officers with political ambitions, but rather ‘a designer coup’, an operation planned down to the last detail by CESID — by Major Cortina but also by Lieutenant Colonel Calderón, his immediate superior and at the time the strong man of the intelligence services — whose purpose was not to destroy democracy but to trim it or change its direction, getting the premiership away from Adolfo Suárez and putting a military man in his place at the head of a government of salvation made up of representatives of all the political parties; according to Palacios, with this objective Calderón and Cortina had counted not only on the implicit consent or impetus of the King, anxious to overcome the crisis to which the country had been driven by the chronic crises of Suárez governments: Calderón and Cortina had selected the operation’s leader — General Armada, the King’s former secretary — had encouraged its operational branches — General Milans del Bosch and Lieutenant Colonel Tejero — and had woven an intricate conspiratorial web of military men, politicians, businessmen, journalists and diplomats that assembled scattered and contrasting ambitions in the common cause of the coup. It was an irresistible hypothesis: suddenly the chaos of 23 February tallied; suddenly everything was coherent, symmetrical, geometric, just like in a novel. Of course Palacios’ book wasn’t a novel, and a certain knowledge of the events — not to mention the opinion of the most diligent scholars — allowed one to glimpse that Palacios had taken certain liberties with reality to keep it from contradicting his hypothesis; but I wasn’t a historian, or even a journalist, just a writer of fiction, so I was authorized by reality to take as many liberties with her as necessary, because the novel is a genre that doesn’t answer to reality, but only to itself. Happily I thought Pradera and Palacios were offering me an improved version of The Three Musketeers: the story of a secret agent who, with the aim of saving the monarchy, hatches a gigantic conspiracy destined to topple by means of a coup d’état (a golpe de estado) the King’s Prime Minister, precisely the only politician (or almost the only one) who, when the moment arrives, refuses to comply with the will of the golpistas and remains in his seat while the bullets whizz around him in the Cortes.