But if we unfreeze the image the stillness vanishes and reality regains its course. Slowly, while the shots grow more intermittent, General Gutiérrez Mellado turns, puts his hands on his hips, turning his back on the Civil Guards and Lieutenant Colonel Tejero, observes the abandoned chamber, like a punctilious officer taking visual stock of the destruction when the battle has not yet entirely concluded; meanwhile, Prime Minister Suárez leans back in his seat, straightening up a little, and the lieutenant colonel finally manages to get the Guards to obey his orders and the chamber is overtaken by a silence exaggerated by the recent din, as dense as the silence that follows an earthquake or a plane crash. At this moment the angle changes; the image we now see shows the lieutenant colonel from the front, with his pistol held high, standing on the stairs to the speakers’ rostrum; on his left, the Secretary of the Congress, Víctor Carrascal — still with the papers on his lap with the list of deputies that only a few seconds ago he was reciting monotonously during the investiture vote — watches in panic, lying on the ground, as two Civil Guards point their weapons at General Gutiérrez Mellado, who watches them in turn with his hands on his hips. Then, noticing out of the blue that the old general is still there, standing defiantly, the lieutenant colonel rushes down the stairs, pounces on him from behind, grabs him by the neck and tries to force him to the ground before the eyes of two Civil Guards and Víctor Carrascal, who at this moment hides his face in his arms as if he lacks the courage to see what is going to happen or as if he feels an incalculable shame at not being able to prevent it.
The angle changes again. It is also a frontal view of the chamber, but wider: the deputies lie tucked under their benches and the heads of a few of them cautiously peek over to see what’s going on in the central semicircle, in front of the speakers’ rostrum, where the lieutenant colonel has not managed to fell General Gutiérrez Mellado, who has stayed on his feet holding on with all his might to the armrest in front of the ministers’ bench. Now he is surrounded by the lieutenant colonel and three Civil Guards, pointing their guns at him, and Prime Minister Suárez, barely a metre from the general, stands up from his seat and approaches him, also holding on to the armrest: for a moment the Civil Guards seem to be about to fire; for a moment, on the armrest in front of their bench, the hand of the young Prime Minister and the hand of the old general seem to seek each other, as if the two men wanted to face up to their destiny together. But the destiny does not arrive, the shots do not arrive, or not yet, although the Civil Guards close in round the general — no longer four but eight of them now — and, while one of them insults him and shouts the demand that he obey and lie down on the carpet of the central semicircle, the lieutenant-colonel approaches him from behind and trips him and this time almost manages to throw him down, but the general resists again, clinging to the armrest as to a life raft. Only then does the lieutenant colonel give up and he and his Guards walk away from the general while Prime Minister Suárez seeks his hand again, takes it for an instant before the general pulls away angrily, without taking his eyes off his aggressors; the Prime Minister, however, insists, tries to calm his rage with words, begs him to return to his seat and makes him see reason: taking him by the hand as if he were a child, pulls him towards him, stands up and lets him pass, and the old general — after unbuttoning his jacket with a gesture that reveals his white shirt, his grey waistcoat and his dark tie — finally sits down in his seat.
Chapter 1
There is a second translucent gesture here that perhaps like the first contains many gestures. Like Adolfo Suárez’s gesture of remaining seated on his bench while the bullets whizz around him in the chamber, General Gutiérrez Mellado’s gesture of furiously confronting the military golpistas is a courageous gesture, a graceful gesture, a rebellious gesture, a supreme gesture of liberty. Perhaps it might also be, in a manner of speaking, a posthumous gesture, the gesture of a man who knows he is going to die or that he’s already dead, because, with the exception of Adolfo Suárez, since the advent of democracy no one has stockpiled as much military hatred as General Gutiérrez Mellado, who as soon as the shooting started perhaps felt, like almost all of those present, that it could only end in a massacre and, supposing he were to survive it, the golpistas would not take long to get rid of him. I don’t believe it is, however, a histrionic gesture: although he’d been practising politics for the last five years, General Gutiérrez Mellado was never essentially a politician; he was always a soldier, and therefore, because he was always a soldier, his gesture that evening was above all a military gesture and therefore also in some way a logical, obligatory, almost fatal gesture: Gutiérrez Mellado was the only soldier present in the chamber and, like any soldier, he carried in his genes the imperative of discipline and could not tolerate soldiers’ insubordination. I’m not noting this fact to detract from the general in any way; I do so only to try to pin down the significance of his gesture. A significance that on the other hand we might not be able to pin down entirely if we don’t imagine that, while he is facing up to the golpistas, refusing to obey them or while shouting his demand that they leave the Cortes, the general could see himself in the Civil Guards defying his authority by shooting over the chamber, because forty-five years earlier he had disobeyed the genetic imperative of discipline and had rebelled against the civilian power embodied in a democratic government; or in other words: perhaps General Gutiérrez Mellado’s fury is not made only of a visible fury against some rebellious Civil Guards, but also of a secret fury against himself, and perhaps it wouldn’t be entirely illegitimate to understand his gesture of confronting the golpistas as an extreme gesture of contrition by a former golpista.
The general would not have accepted this interpretation, or he would not have accepted it publicly: he wouldn’t have accepted that forty-five years earlier he had been a rebellious officer who had supported a military coup against a political system fundamentally identical to the one he now represented in government. But no one escapes his biography, and the general’s biography would correct him: on 18 July 1936, when he was a barely twenty-four-year-old lieutenant just out of the Artillery Academy, a member of the Falange and assigned to a regiment stationed a few kilometres from Madrid, Gutiérrez Mellado helped to incite his unit to join the rebellion against the legitimate government of the Republic, and on the 19th, until the military insurrection was crushed in Madrid, spent the morning on the roof of his barracks shooting with a conventional machine gun at the Breguet XIX planes from the Getafe airfield that had been bombing the rebel positions since dawn. The general never denied these facts, but he would have denied the comparison between the democracy of 1936 and that of 1981 and between the golpistas of 18 July and those of 23 February: he never repented publicly of having mutinied in 1936, he would never have admitted that the political regime against which he’d rebelled in his youth was fundamentally identical to the one he’d contributed to creating in his old age and now represented, and he always asserted that General Franco’s coup d’état had been necessary because the democracy of 1936, which had allowed three hundred violent deaths in political incidents over a few months, was scandalously imperfect and unsustainable and had given up power to the streets, where the Army had simply picked it up. This or something very similar was the general’s argument (an argument shared by the substantial segment of the Spanish right that still has not broken its historical devotion to Francoism); its incoherence is glaring: did the golpistas of 1981 not invoke reasons resembling those of 1936? Did they not assert that the democracy of 1981 was scandalously imperfect? Did they not assert that power was in the street, ready for someone to come along and pick it up? And did they not have as many or almost as many reasons to say so as the golpistas of 1936 did? How many deaths need to be on the table before a democratic regime is no longer one or is unsustainable and ends up making military intervention necessary? Two hundred? Two hundred and fifty? Three hundred? Four hundred? Wouldn’t fewer be enough? In the week of 23 to 30 January 1977, when General Gutiérrez Mellado had been Deputy Prime Minister of Adolfo Suárez’s first government for four months, ten people were murdered for political motives in Spain, fifteen were seriously injured and there were two kidnappings of high-ranking figures of the regime (Antonio María de Oriol y Urquijo, president of the Council of State, and General Emilio Villaescusa, president of the Supreme Council of Military Justice); in 1980 alone there were more than four hundred and fifty terrorist attacks, more than four hundred wounded, more than a hundred and thirty deaths, the equivalent of more than one attack a day, more than one person wounded a day, almost one death every three days. Was that a sustainable situation? Was the democracy that allowed it a real democracy? Was military intervention necessary in 1977 or in 1981? One answer to these questions is obvious: if, as General Gutiérrez Mellado said towards the end of his life, the Republic in 1936 was an unsustainable regime, then the constitutional monarchy in February 1981 was as well and it wasn’t the general who was in the right but the Civil Guards who attacked the Cortes that evening.