The last gesture I recognize in Carrillo’s gesture is not a real gesture; it’s an imagined gesture or at least a gesture that I imagine, maybe whimsically. But if my imagination were truthful, then Carrillo’s gesture would contain a gesture of complicity, or of emulation, and its story would go as follows. Carrillo is sitting in the first seat of the seventh row in the left wing of the chamber; right opposite and below him, in the first seat of the first row in the right wing, sits Adolfo Suárez. When the firing begins, Carrillo’s first impulse is that dictated by common sense: the same way his comrades in the Communist old guard sitting beside him, who like him joined the Party the way one joins a militia of self-denial and danger and have known war, prison and exile and maybe also feel that if they survive the gunfire they’ll be executed, Carrillo instinctively forgets for a moment about courage, grace, liberty, rebellion, even his actor’s instinct, and prepares to obey the Guards’ orders and shelter from the bullets under his bench, but just before he does he notices that opposite him, below him, Adolfo Suárez remains seated in his Prime Minister’s bench, solitary, statuesque and spectral in a desert of empty benches. And then, deliberately, thoughtfully — as if in a single second he understood the complete significance of Suárez’s gesture — decides not to duck.
Chapter 2
It’s a whim, maybe it’s not truthfully imagined, but the reality is the two were much more than accomplices: the reality is that by February 1981 Santiago Carrillo and Adolfo Suárez had spent four years tied by an alliance that was political but was also more than political, and which only Suárez’s illness and loss would finally break.
History fabricates strange figures, frequently resigns itself to sentimentalism and does not disdain the symmetries of fiction, as if it wanted to endow itself with meaning that on its own it did not possess. Who could have predicted that the change from dictatorship to democracy in Spain would not be plotted by the democratic parties, but by the Falangists and the Communists, irreconcilable enemies of democracy and each other’s irreconcilable enemies during three years of war and forty post-war years? Who would have predicted that the Secretary General of the Communist Party in exile would set himself up as the most faithful political ally of the last Secretary General of the Movimiento, the single fascist party? Who could have imagined that Santiago Carrillo would end up turning into an unconditional protector of Adolfo Suárez and into one of his last friends and confidants? No one did, but maybe it wasn’t impossible to do: on the one hand, because only irreconcilable enemies could reconcile the irreconcilable Spain of Franco; on the other, because unlike Gutiérrez Mellado and Adolfo Suárez, who were profoundly different in spite of their superficial similarities, Santiago Carrillo and Adolfo Suárez were profoundly similar in spite of their superficial differences. The two of them were both pure politicians, more than professionals of politics they were professionals of power, because neither of the two conceived of politics without power or because both acted as if politics were to power what gravity is to the earth; both were bureaucrats who had prospered in the inflexible hierarchy of political organizations ruled by totalitarian methods and inspired by totalitarian ideologies; both were democratic converts, belated and a bit forced; both were long accustomed to giving orders: Suárez had held his first political post in 1955, when he was twenty-three, and since then had risen step by step up all the rungs of the Movimiento ladder until reaching its top and becoming Prime Minister; Carrillo had spent more than three decades dominating the Communist Party with the authority of the high priest of a clandestine religion, but before his twentieth birthday he was already leader of the Socialist Youth, when barely twenty-one he became Councillor for Public Order of the Defence Junta of Madrid at one of the most urgent moments of the war, at twenty-two he’d become a member of the politburo of the PCE and from there on never stopped monopolizing positions of responsibility in the Party and the Communist International. The parallels don’t stop there: both cultivated a personal vision of politics, at once epic and aesthetic, as if, rather than the slow, collective and laborious work of bending reality’s resistance, politics were a solitary adventure dotted with dramatic episodes and intrepid decisions; both had been educated in the street, lacked any university training and distrusted intellectuals; both were so tough they almost always felt invulnerable to the inclemencies of their trade and both possessed uncomplicated ambition, unlimited confidence in themselves, a changeable lack of scruples and a recognized talent for political sleight of hand and for the conversion of their defeats into victories. In short: deep down they seem like twin politicians. In 1983, when after the coup d’état neither Carrillo nor Suárez were what they had been any more and were trying to mend their political careers in fits and starts, Fernando Claudín — one of Carrillo’s closest friends and collaborators for over thirty years of Communist militancy — wrote the following about the eternal Secretary Generaclass="underline" ‘He lacked the least bit of knowledge of political and constitutional law, and made no efforts to acquire any. Economics, sociology and other subjects that might have allowed him to express fully formed opinions on most parliamentary debates were not his strong suits either [. .] His only speciality was “politics in general”, which tends to translate as talking a little bit about everything without going into anything in depth, and the Party machinery, in which, of course, no one could hold a candle to him. As had always happened to him, he couldn’t find time to study, always absorbed by Party meetings, interviews, secret discussions, delegations and other such activities. The iron will he showed for other tasks, especially holding on to power within the Party and making his way towards it in the state, unfortunately failed him when it came to acquiring education that would have stood him in better stead in the exercise of these functions.’ Twin politicians: if we admit that Claudín is right and that the previous quote defines some of Santiago Carrillo’s weaknesses, then we just need to replace Party with the word Movimiento for it to define also some of Adolfo Suárez’s weaknesses.