Chapter 1
This is the third man, the third gesture; a translucent gesture, like the two previous ones, but also a double, reiterated gesture: when the golpistas interrupt the investiture session Carrillo disobeys the general order to get down and remains in his seat while the Civil Guards shoot up the chamber, and two minutes later disobeys a specific order from one of the hijackers and remains in his seat while pretending to get down. Like that of Suárez, like that of Gutiérrez Mellado, Carrillo’s is not a random or unreflexive gesture: with perfect deliberation Carrillo refuses to obey the golpistas; like that of Suárez and that of Gutiérrez Mellado, Carrillo’s gesture is a gesture that contains many gestures. It is a courageous gesture, a graceful gesture, a rebellious gesture, a supreme gesture of liberty. It is also, like that of Suárez and that of Gutiérrez Mellado, a posthumous gesture, in a manner of speaking, the gesture of a man who knows he’s going to die or who’s already dead; like many deputies, as soon as he sees Lieutenant Colonel Tejero, Carrillo understands that his entry into the chamber is the beginning of a coup d’état, and as soon as the shooting starts he understands that if he survives the gunfire the golpistas will execute him: he is not unaware that, with the exception of Suárez and Gutiérrez Mellado, there is no one the far-right military officers hate as much as him, who symbolizes in their eyes the quintessence of the Communist enemy. Like that of Suárez, Carrillo’s gesture is also a histrionic gesture: Carrillo is a pure politician, just like Suárez, and therefore a consummate actor, who chooses to die on his feet with an elegant, photogenic gesture, and who always said he didn’t dive under his seat on the evening of 23 February for the same scenic, representative and insufficient reason Suárez always put forward: he was Secretary General of the Communist Party and the Secretary General of the Communist Party could not lie down. Like that of Gutiérrez Mellado, Carrillo’s gesture is a military gesture, because Carrillo had joined the Communist Party half a century earlier the way someone joins a military order and his whole life story had been preparing him for a moment like this: he was raised in a family of professional revolutionaries, since he’d reached the age of reason he’d been a professional revolutionary, in his youth he was imprisoned several times, he’d confronted political gunmen, survived a death sentence, knew the clamour of combat, the brutality of three years of war and the uprooting of forty years of exile and clandestinity. Maybe there was more: maybe there’s another similarity between Carrillo’s gesture and that of Gutiérrez Mellado, a less apparent but more profound similarity.
Like Gutiérrez Mellado, Carrillo belongs to the generation that fought the war; like Gutiérrez Mellado, Carrillo did not believe in democracy until very late in life, even though he’d been defending a democratic republic during the war; like Gutiérrez Mellado, Carrillo participated as a young man in an armed insurrection against the government of the Republic: the uprising in Asturias, forming part of its revolutionary committee when he was barely nineteen years old; like Gutiérrez Mellado, Carrillo never publicly repented for having rebelled against democratic legality, but, also like Gutiérrez Mellado, at least since the mid-1970s he did nothing but repent with his actions for having participated in that rebellion. I don’t mean to equate the desperate proletarian revolt Carrillo advanced in October 1934 with the military coup of the rich and powerful that Gutiérrez Mellado advanced in 1936; I am just saying, however understandable it may have been — and reasons to understand it abound — that the revolt was an error and that, especially from the moment when the transition began and the Communists started to play a decisive role in it, Carrillo acted as though it had been, deactivating the ideological and political mechanisms that might have led to the repetition of the error, a little bit the way since joining the government Gutiérrez Mellado set about deactivating the ideological and political mechanisms of the Army that forty years earlier had provoked the war. Not just that: Carrillo — and with him the old guard of the Communist Party — also gave up the chance to settle scores from an ignominious past of war, repression and exile, as if he considered trying to settle scores with those who had committed the error of settling scores for forty years a way of piling ignominy on ignominy, or as if he’d read Max Weber and felt like him that there was nothing more abject than practising an ethic that sought only to be right and that obliges people to spend time discussing the errors of an unjust and enslaved past with the aim of taking moral and material advantage of other people’s confession of guilt, instead of devoting themselves to constructing a just and free future. As the head of the Communist old guard, during the transition and to make democracy possible, Carrillo signed a pact with the victors of the war and administrators of the dictatorship that included the renunciation of using the past politically, but he didn’t do so because he’d forgotten the war and the dictatorship, but because he remembered them very well and was ready to do anything to keep them from happening again, as long as the victors of the war and administrators of the dictatorship accepted ending it and replacing it with a political system that welcomed victors and vanquished and was essentially identical to that which the vanquished had defended in the war. Carrillo was ready to do anything, or almost anything: to give up the myth of the revolution, the egalitarian ideal of Communism, the nostalgia of the defeated Republic, the very idea of historical justice. . Because with Franco’s death, justice dictated a return to the Republican legitimacy violated forty years earlier by a coup d’état and the resulting war, prosecution of those responsible for Francoism and complete reparation to its victims; Carrillo renounced all of that, and not only because he lacked the strength to achieve it, but also because he understood that often the most noble ideals of men are incompatible with each other and trying to impose at that moment in Spain the absolute triumph of justice was to risk provoking the absolute defeat of liberty, turning absolute justice into the worst injustice. Many left-wingers, in favour of letting justice be done though the world should perish (Fiat justitia et pereat mundus), bitterly reproached him for these concessions, which for them were a form of betrayal; they did not forgive him, in the same way many right-wingers did not forgive Suárez and Gutiérrez Mellado for theirs: like the Communist old guard, to build democracy Carrillo gave up his lifelong ideals and chose harmony and liberty over justice and revolution, and in this way he also turned into a professional of demolition and dismantling who fulfilled himself completely by undermining himself, like a hero of the retreat. Like Suárez’s and Gutiérrez Mellado’s detractors, Carrillo’s detractors claim there was more calculated personal interest and pure eagerness for political survival involved than authentic conviction; I don’t know: what I do know is that this judgement of intentions is politically irrelevant, because it forgets that, however ignoble, personal motives do not cancel out the error or wisdom of a decision. What’s relevant, what’s politically relevant, is that, given that the decisions he adopted gave rise to the creation of a fairer, freer political system than any Spain had ever known in its history, and essentially identical to the one that was defeated in the war (although one was a republic and the other a monarchy, both were parliamentary democracies), at least on this point history has proven Carrillo right, whose gesture of courage and grace and liberty and rebellion when faced with the golpistas on the evening of 23 February thus acquires a different significance: like that of Gutiérrez Mellado, it is the gesture of a man who having combated democracy constructs it like someone expiating a youthful error, who constructs it by destroying his own ideas, who constructs it by denying his own people and denying his very self, who stakes himself entirely on it, who finally decides to risk his neck for it.