In the autumn of 2006, when I decided I knew enough about the coup to develop that plot, I began to write the novel; for reasons that are beside the point, in the winter I abandoned it, but towards the end of the spring of 2007 I took it up again, and less than a year later I had a finished draft: it was, or wanted to be, the draft of a strange experimental version of The Three Musketeers, with Major Cortina as narrator and protagonist, and the action of which, instead of revolving around the diamond pendants presented by the Queen Consort of France, Anne of Austria, to the Duke of Buckingham, revolved around the solitary image of Adolfo Suárez sitting in the Cortes on the evening of 23 February. The text covered four hundred pages; I wrote it with unusual, almost triumphant fluidity, shooing away doubts by reasoning that the book was in an embryonic state and that only as I familiarized myself with its mechanism would the uncertainty finally clear away. This didn’t happen, and as soon as I’d finished the first draft the feeling of triumph evaporated, and the doubts, instead of clearing away, multiplied. For a start, after having spent months groping through the ins and outs of the coup in my imagination, I now believed I fully understood what before I had only guessed with fear or reluctance, and that Palacios’ hypothesis — which constituted the historical cement of my novel — was fundamentally false; the problem was not that Palacios’ book was entirely wrong or even bad: the problem was that the book was so good that anyone who wasn’t familiar with what happened on 23 February could end up thinking that for once history had been coherent, symmetrical and geometric, and not disorderly, turbulent and unpredictable, which is how it is in reality; in other words: the hypothesis upon which my novel was built was a fiction that, like any good fiction, had been constructed on the basis of facts, dates, names, analysis and conjecture, selected and arranged with a novelist’s cunning until everything connects with everything else and reality acquires a homogeneous meaning. All right then, if Palacios’ book was not exactly a work of investigative journalism, but rather a novel superimposed on a work of investigative journalism, was it not redundant to write a novel based on another novel? If a novel should illuminate reality through fiction, imposing geometry and symmetry where there is only disorder and chance, should it not start from reality, and not from fiction? Was it not superfluous to add geometry to geometry and symmetry to symmetry? If a novel should defeat reality, reinventing it in order to substitute it with a fiction as persuasive as itself, was it not indispensable to first know that reality in order to defeat it? Was it not the obligation of a novel about 23 February to renounce certain of the genre’s privileges and try to answer to reality as well as to itself?
They were rhetorical questions: in the spring of 2008 I decided that the only way to erect a fiction on the 23 February coup was to know as scrupulously as possible the reality of the 23 February coup. Only then did I dive into the depths of the mishmash of theoretical constructions, hypotheses, uncertainties, embellishments, falsehoods and invented memories surrounding that day. For several months, while travelling frequently to Madrid and returning over and over again to the footage of the storming of the Cortes — as if these images were hiding in their transparency the secret key to the coup — I worked full-time at reading all the books I could find about 23 February and the years that preceded it, I consulted newspapers and magazines of the time, I delved into the summary of the trial, I interviewed witnesses and protagonists. I spoke to politicians, military officers, Civil Guards, spies, journalists, people who had experienced first-hand the politics of those years of change from Francoism to democracy and had known Adolfo Suárez and General Gutiérrez Mellado and Santiago Carrillo, and people who had experienced 23 February in the places where the result of the coup was decided: in the Zarzuela Palace, together with the King, in the Cortes, at Army General Headquarters, at the Brunete Armoured Division, at the central headquarters of CESID and at the central headquarters of AOME, the secret CESID unit commanded by Major Cortina. They were obsessive, happy months, but as my investigations advanced and my vision of the coup d’état changed I began to understand very quickly not only that I was going deeper into a shimmering labyrinth of almost always irreconcilable memories, a place with hardly any certainties or documents, where historians prudently had hardly ventured, but especially that the reality of 23 February was of such magnitude that for the moment it was invincible, or at least it was for me, and it was therefore futile for me to propose the exploit of defeating it with a novel; it took me longer to understand something even more important: I understood that the events of 23 February on their own possessed all the dramatic force and symbolic power we demand of literature and I understood that, even though I was a writer of fiction, for once reality mattered more to me than fiction or mattered to me too much to want to reinvent it by substituting it with an alternative reality, because none of what I could imagine about 23 February concerned me and excited me as much or could be as complex and persuasive as the pure reality of 23 February.
Chapter 3
That’s how I decided to write this book. A book that is, more than anything else — I’d better admit from the start — the humble testimony of a failure: incapable of inventing what I know about 23 February, illuminating its reality with fiction, I have resigned myself to telling it. The pages that follow aim to endow this failure with a certain dignity. This means from the outset trying not to deprive the events of the dramatic force and symbolic power they possess on their own, or even their unexpected occasional coherence and symmetry and geometry; it also means trying to make them a little bit intelligible, narrating them without hiding their chaotic nature or erasing the tracks of a neurosis or paranoia or collective novel, but with maximum clarity, with all the innocence I’m capable of, as if no one had ever told them before or as if no one remembered them any more, in a certain sense as if it were true that for almost everyone Adolfo Suárez and General Gutiérrez Mellado and Santiago Carrillo and Lieutenant Colonel Tejero were now fictional characters or at least contaminated by unreality and the 23 February coup an invented memory; in the best of cases I’d tell them as a chronicler of antiquity would have or as a chronicler from far in the future; and this meant finally trying to tell the 23 February coup as if it were a tiny story and at the same time as if this tiny story were one of the decisive stories of the last seventy years of Spanish history.