It was a step with no way back towards the legalization of the PCE: once forced to legalize the Secretary General, the legalization of the Party was just a matter of time. Carrillo knew it and so did Suárez; but Suárez had time and Carrillo did not: the legalization of the rest of the parties had begun to happen at the beginning of January, and he was still not sure that Suárez would fulfil his part of the deal, or that he wouldn’t postpone his fulfilment until after the elections, or that he wouldn’t postpone it indefinitely. By the middle of January Carrillo urgently needed to dispel Suárez’s doubts, but it was reality that dispelled them for him, because that was when a lethal confusion of fear and violence took over Madrid, and when the false duel the two were engaged in was on the verge of ending because the whole country was on the verge of exploding. At a quarter to eleven on the night of 24 January, when Carrillo had been legally residing in Spain for less than a month, five partners of a Communist law firm are gunned down by a far-right hit squad in their office at 55 Calle Atocha. It was the macabre apotheosis of two days of carnage. On the morning of the previous day another far-right gunman had shot a student to death during a demonstration in favour of an amnesty law, and that same afternoon a student died as the result of the impact of a smoke canister launched by the forces of Public Order against a group of people protesting the previous day’s death, while just a few hours earlier the GRAPO — an ultraleft terrorist group that since 11 December had been holding Antonio María de Oriol y Urquijo, one of the most powerful, affluent and influential representatives of orthodox Francoism — kidnapped General Emilio Villaescusa, president of the Military Supreme Court. Four days later GRAPO was still going to murder two more national policemen and a Civil Guard, but on the night of the 24th Madrid is already living in an almost pre-war atmosphere: explosions and gunshots are heard in different spots around the capital, and ultraright gangs sow terror in the streets. Added to the other episodes of those bloody days, the slaughter of its Atocha members marks for the PCE a brutal challenge destined to provoke a violent response in its ranks that, provoking in its turn a violent response from the Army, would abort the incipient democratic reforms; but the Communists do not respond: the executive committee orders its members to avoid any demonstration or confrontation in the streets and to display all the serenity possible, and the order is carried out to the letter. After arduous negotiations with the government — which fears that any spark will ignite the conflagration the far right is seeking — the Party obtains permission to install a funeral shrine for the lawyers in the Palace of Justice on the Plaza de las Salesas, and also for the coffins to be carried on the shoulders of their comrades to the Plaza de Colón. And so they do just after four o’clock on Wednesday afternoon; the television cameras film a spectacle that overwhelms the centre of Madrid; the images have been shown many times: in the midst of a sea of red roses and closed fists and a silence and order imposed by the Party leadership and respected by the rank and file with a discipline honed in clandestinity, tens of thousands of people overflow the Plaza de las Salesas and the adjacent streets to pay their last respects to the murdered men; some stills show Santiago Carrillo walking among the crowd, guarded by a wall of militants. The ceremony ends without a single incident, in the same great silence in which it began, converted into a proclamation of concord that dispels all the government’s doubts about the PCE’s repudiation of violence and spreads a wave of solidarity with Party members all over the country.
According to his then closest collaborators, it’s very possible that Suárez secretly made the decision to legalize the Communist Party that very day; if so, it’s very possible that on that very day Suárez decided that before doing so he’d need to meet their leader in person. The fact is that barely a month later, on 27 February, the two men met in a house near Madrid belonging to their mediator, José Mario Armero. The encounter was organized in the strictest confidence: although for Carrillo it entailed no danger, for Suárez it entailed plenty, and for that reason two of the three people he consulted — his Deputy Prime Minister, Alfonso Osorio, and Torcuato Fernández Miranda, President of the Cortes and of the Council of the Kingdom and his political mentor for the last few years — strongly advised him against it, reasoning that if his meeting with the clandestine Communist leader came to be known the political earthquake would be formidable; but the King’s support of Suárez, his faith in Carrillo’s discretion and his trust in his lucky star and in his talent to seduce persuaded him to run the risk. He was not mistaken. Years later Suárez and Carrillo both described the encounter as love at first sight: it may well have been, but the truth is that necessity had united them long before they met; it may well have been, but the truth is that for the seven consecutive hours their face-to-face meeting lasted, while they smoked cigarette after cigarette in the presence of Armero and in the silence of an uninhabited country house, Carrillo and Suárez behaved like two blind men who’ve suddenly recovered their sight to recognize a twin, or like two duellists who exchange a false duel for a real duel into which both are putting their all to break their rival’s spell. The winner was Suárez, who as soon as the first handshake and jokes of introductions were concluded disarmed Carrillo by telling him of his Republican grandfather, his Republican father, the Republican dead of his family on the losing side of the war, and then finished him off with protests of modesty and praise of Carrillo’s political experience and top-class statesmanship; defeated, Carrillo offered words of understanding, realism and caution designed to try once more to convince his interlocutor that he and his party not only were not a danger to his democracy project, but with time would turn into its principal guarantee of success. The rest of the interview was devoted to talking a little bit about everything and not committing to anything except to continue to back each other up and consult each other on important decisions, and when the two men went their separate ways in the early hours of the morning neither of them harboured the slightest doubt: both could rely on the other’s loyalty; both were the only two real politicians in the country; both, once the PCE was legalized, the elections held and democracy installed, would end up together holding the reins of the future.
Events wasted no time in eroding this triple certainty, but it continued ruling Suárez’s and Carrillo’s behaviour for the four years that Suárez remained in government; nothing provided it with as much consistency as the way in which the Communist Party was finally legalized. It happened on Saturday 9 April, just over a month after the meeting between the two leaders, in the middle of the chaos of the Easter holiday and after which Suárez, knowing that public opinion had swiftly changed in favour of the measure he was getting ready to adopt, still sought to protect himself against the predictable outrage of the military and the far right with a legal report from the Junta de Fiscales (Attorney General’s office) supporting the legalization; Carrillo also protected him, or did what he could to protect him. On Suárez’s advice, the Secretary General had gone on vacation to Cannes, where he heard that very Saturday morning from José Mario Armero that the legalization was effective immediately and that Suárez asked two things of him: the first was that, in order not to irritate the Army and the far right still further, the Party should celebrate without raucousness; the second was that, in order to prevent the Army and the far right being able to accuse Suárez of complicity with the Communists, once the news was broadcast Carrillo should issue a public statement criticizing Suárez or at least distancing himself from him. Carrillo complied: the Communists celebrated the news discreetly and its Secretary General appeared that very day before the press to say a few words he’d agreed with the Prime Minister. ‘I don’t believe Prime Minister Suárez to be a friend of the Communists,’ proclaimed Carrillo. ‘I consider him rather to be anti-Communist, but an intelligent anti-Communist who has understood that ideas are not destroyed with repression and banning. And who is ready to confront ours with his own.’ It was not enough. During the days following the legalization a coup d’état seemed imminent. Suárez appealed to Carrillo again; Carrillo again complied. At midday on 14 April, while the first legal meeting of the central committee of the PCE in Spain since the end of the Civil War is being held on Calle Capitán Haya Santiago, José Mario Armero summons Jaime Ballesteros, his contact with the Communists, to the café of a nearby hotel. Right now Suárez’s head is not worth a cent, Armero tells Ballesteros. The military is on the verge of rising in revolt. Either you give us a hand or we’re all going to hell. Ballesteros speaks to Carrillo, and the next day, during the second stage of the central committee meeting, the Secretary General interrupts the session to make a dramatic statement. ‘We find ourselves today in the most difficult meeting we’ve had since the war,’ says Carrillo in the midst of a glacial silence. ‘In these hours, I’m not saying these days, these hours, it may be decided whether we move towards democracy or if we go into a very serious regression that will affect not only the Party and all the democratic forces of opposition, but also the reformist and institutional forces. . I don’t believe I’m being overly dramatic, I’m saying what’s happening at this minute.’ Immediately and without giving anyone time to react, as if he’d written it himself Carrillo reads a piece of paper perhaps drafted by the Prime Minister that Armero had handed to Ballesteros and which contains the solemn and unconditional renunciation of some of the symbols that have represented the Party since it was founded as well as the approval of some the Army considers threatened by its legalization: the red-and-yellow flag, the unity of the fatherland and the monarchy. Perplexed and fearful, used to obeying their leader unquestioningly, the members of the central committee approve the revolution imposed by Carrillo and the Party hastens to announce the good news at a press conference during which its leadership council appears in front of a surprising, enormous, improvised monarchist flag.