Carrillo’s prediction was spot on. Or almost: Suárez not only brought about the negotiation that led to the rupture; he also formulated it in terms no one was expecting: for Carrillo, for the democratic opposition, for the regime’s reformers, the political dilemma of post-Francoism consisted in choosing between the reform of Francoism, changing its form but not its content, and the rupture with Francoism, changing its form to change its content; Suárez took only months to decide the dilemma was false: he understood that in politics the form is the content, and therefore it was possible to realize a reform of Francoism that was in practice a rupture with Francoism. He understood gradually, as he came to understand that it was imperative to break with Francoism, but as soon as he took up his post and made a programmatic declaration in which he announced free elections before 30 June of the coming year Suárez began a cautious series of interviews with the leaders of the illegal opposition to sound out their intentions and explain his project. Carrillo remained on the sidelines; at that moment Suárez was in a hurry for everything, except for talking to Carrillo: although he sensed that without the Communists his political reform lacked credibility, for the moment he was not suggesting the legalization of the Party, maybe especially because he was sure that would be an unacceptable measure for the Francoist mentality of the Army and of the social sectors he needed to shepherd towards democracy or towards some form of democracy. Carrillo, however, was in a hurry to talk to him: Suárez had promised in his first speech as Prime Minister to meet with all the political forces, but the promise hadn’t been kept and, although he still didn’t know if Suárez really meant to break with Francoism or simply reform it, Carrillo did not want to run the risk that the country might be heading for some form of democracy without the presence of the Communists, because he thought that would indefinitely prolong the Party’s clandestinity and condemn it to ostracism and maybe extinction. So in the middle of August Carrillo takes the initiative and a little while later manages to get in contact with Suárez through José Mario Armero, head of the news agency Europe Press. The first interview between Carrillo and Armero is held in Cannes, at the end of August; the second is held in Paris at the beginning of September. Neither of the two encounters produces concrete results (Armero assures Carrillo that Suárez is heading for democracy and asks him for patience: conditions are not yet right for legalizing the PCE; Carrillo offers his help in constructing the new system, does not demand the immediate legalization of his party and claims that it won’t reject the monarchy if it amounts to an authentic democracy); but neither of the two encounters is a failure. On the contrary: starting in September and all through the autumn and winter of 1976 Carrillo and Suárez remain in contact through Armero and Jaime Ballesteros, Carrillo’s right-hand man in the PCE leadership. And that’s when a strange complicity begins to tie them together through the intervening persons: like two blind men touching each other’s features in search of a face, for months Carrillo and Suárez put their proposals, their loyalty, their intelligence and their cleverness to the test, they glimpse common interests, discover secret affinities, admit they should understand each other; both understand that they need democracy to survive and that they need each other, because neither of the two holds the key to democracy but each of them holds a part — Suárez has power, Carrillo legitimacy — which completes what the other holds: while he insists over and over again on speaking to him in person, Carrillo realizes with increasing clarity the difficulties Suárez is facing, the biggest of which stems from the resistance of a powerful section of the country to the legalization of the PCE; while the social pressure in favour of a democratic regime pushes him day by day to recognize that Francoism is only reformable with a reform that means its rupture and begins to dismantle the framework of the regime and holds dialogues with the leaders of the rest of the opposition political forces — on whom he absolutely does not press the legalization of the PCE: in general they don’t believe in running any risk that might endanger the promised elections — Suárez understands with increasing clarity that there will be no credible democracy without the Communists and that Carrillo is keeping his party under control, has retired his revolutionary ideals and is ready to make as many concessions as might be necessary to get the PCE into the new political system. From a distance, the two men’s initial caution and mutual distrust begin to dissolve; in fact, it’s possible that towards the end of October or beginning of November Suárez and Carrillo were outlining a strategy to legalize the Party, an implicit strategy, elaborated not with words but with inferences, that would turn out to be a total success for Suárez and only a relative success for Carrillo, who accepts it because he has no alternative, because by this stage he has already assumed the form of political change that Suárez is proposing to be valid and because he entertains the hope that his success will also be total.
The strategy has two parts. On the one hand, Suárez will do his best to legalize the PCE before the elections in exchange for Carrillo persuading the Communists to forget their aim of a frontal rupture with Francoism and that they’ll only achieve legitimacy and will only construct a democracy through the reform of the Francoist institutions that the government is brewing, because that reform is in practice a rupture; Carrillo immediately fulfils this part of the deaclass="underline" in a clandestine meeting of the executive committee of the PCE held on 21 November, the Secretary General discards the Party’s tactical programme during Francoism, convincing his people that neither a democratic rupture nor an agreed rupture is any longer any use but only the reforming rupture proposed by Suárez. The second part of the strategy is more complex and more dangerous, and maybe therefore satisfies Carrillo’s and Suárez’s intimate propensity for politics as an adventure. In order to legalize the PCE, Suárez needs Carrillo’s party to oblige the government to increase the margin of tolerance for the Communists, to make them increasingly visible, to give them their naturalization papers with the aim of getting the majority of citizens of the country to understand that not only are they harmless for the future democracy, but that the future democracy cannot be constructed without them. This progressive de facto legalization, that should facilitate the de jure legalization, took the form of a duel between the government and the Communists in which the Communists didn’t want to finish off the government and the government didn’t want to finish off the Communists, and in which both knew in advance (or at least suspected or guessed) when and where they were going to hit their adversary: the blows of this false duel were blows for propaganda effect that included a general strike that did not manage to paralyse the country but did put the government in a tight spot, massive sales of Mundo Obrero on the streets of Madrid and massive distribution of Party membership cards, French and Swedish television reports showing Carrillo driving through the centre of the capital, a notorious clandestine press conference in which the Secretary General of the PCE — along with Dolores Ibárruri, the myth par excellence of the anti-Francoist resistance, demonized or idealized in equal measure by a great part of the population — announced between conciliating words that he’d been in Madrid for months and had no plans to leave, and finally the arrest of Carrillo himself, who once in prison the government could no longer expel from the country without breaking the law and could not keep hold of either in the midst of the national and international scandal occasioned by his capture, so that a few days later Carrillo was set free and converted into a Spanish citizen with full rights.