Just as happened with Suárez, the beginning of the decline of Carrillo’s political career coincided with the exact moment of its peak. In November 1977, during his triumphant trip to the United States, Carrillo announced without consulting his party that at their next conference the PCE would abandon Leninism. Deep down, it was the logical consequence of the dismantling or demolition or undermining of Communist principles that he’d begun years before — the logical consequence of the attempt to bring into being the oxymoron of democratic Communism he called Euro-Communism — but if months earlier accepting the monarchy and the red-and-yellow flag had been difficult for many, the abrupt abandonment of the Party’s invariable ideological vector all through its history was even more so, because it meant such a radical change of direction that it placed the PCE in practice on the borders of socialism (or social democracy) and also demonstrated that the democratization of the Party on the outside did not assume a corresponding democratization behind closed doors: the Secretary General carried on without restrictions dictating PCE policy and governing it in accord with so-called democratic centralism, a Stalinist method that had nothing democratic about it and was entirely centralist, because it was based on the all-embracing power of the Secretary General, on the extremely hierarchical organizational structure and the uncritical obedience of the rank and file. That was when the Party’s unanimity began to split for all to see, and when Carrillo noticed with astonishment that his authority was becoming a matter for discussion among his comrades: some — the so-called reformists — rejected his individualism and his authoritarian methods and demanded more internal democracy, while others — the so-called pro-Soviets — rejected his ideological revisionism and confrontation with the Soviet Union and demanded a return to Communist orthodoxy; each as much as the other criticized his unshakeable support for Adolfo Suárez’s government and his unshakeable ambition to make common cause with him. But the submissive or disciplined habit of consenting to the dictates of the Secretary General still dominated the spirit of the Communists and, given that the promise of power operated over political parties like a binding agent, these divergences remained more or less buried in the PCE until the next elections, in March 1979: that’s how Carrillo managed in April 1978 to get the 9th Party Conference to adopt Euro-Communism and abandon Leninism. However, a new electoral failure — in the March elections the PCE experienced a slight increase in votes but barely reached a third of the number their direct Socialist competitors received — brought the discrepancies virulently out into the open; in a very short space of time, Carrillo was no longer able to convince his people that this defeat was in reality a victory and that they had to keep backing Suárez and confronting the Socialists who were taking over their political space and their electorate, and during the following years the Communists sank into a succession of increasingly profound internal crises, aggravated by their loss of influence in the politics of the country: with the new distribution of power resulting from the elections, with the end of the politics of accord between all the parties after the approval of the Constitution, after 1979 Suárez didn’t need Carrillo to govern any more and sought the support of the Socialists and not the Communists, turning them into an isolated irrelevant party which barely mattered for the resolution of the big problems, and furthermore whose leader had squandered the statesman’s halo he’d sported just a few months ago. As happened to Suárez at the same time, Carrillo’s loss of prestige in the country’s politics translated into a loss of prestige in his party’s politics. While the protests against the national leadership of the PCE intensified, revolts were being prepared in Catalonia and in the Basque Country, and in Madrid some members of the executive committee stood up to the Secretary Generaclass="underline" in July 1980, at the same time as the Party bosses of the UCD rebelled against Adolfo Suárez in a meeting held on a country estate in Manzanares el Real and the movements to remove him from power were getting under way, several high-ranking members of the PCE called Carrillo to the house of Ramón Tamames — the most visible leader of the so-called reformist sector — with the aim of exposing the Party’s problems to him, reproaching him for his errors and calling his leadership into question; it was an unprecedented scene in the history of Spanish Communism, but it was repeated at the beginning of November in the heart of the central committee, when Tamames went so far as to propose that the secretary generalship should be turned into a collective position, almost like a few months earlier, at the Manzanares el Real meeting, the UCD Party bosses had demanded Suárez share his power over the Party and the government with them. Unlike Suárez, Carrillo did not give in, but by then his organization was already irremediably divided between reformers, pro-Soviets and Carrillistas, and in January 1981 that division was consummated in the breaking away of the PSUC, the Communist Party of Catalonia, which constituted just a hint of the ferocious internal fights that would tear apart the PCE for the next year and a half and would go on almost uninterruptedly until the virtual extinction of the Party.
So on the eve of 23 February Santiago Carrillo was not in such a different situation from that of Adolfo Suárez. Their time at the height of their powers had passed: both were now politically hounded, personally diminished, lacking credit with public opinion, furiously attacked within their own parties, embittered by the ingratitude and betrayals of their fellows or what they felt as ingratitude and betrayals of their fellows, two exhausted and disoriented men who’d lost their touch, increasingly hindered by defects that just a few years before had been invisible or hadn’t seemed like defects: their personal notion of power, their talent for political exchange, their inveterate bureaucratic habits of totalitarian structures and incompatibility with the application of the democracy they’d built. Undermining even their demolition of the systems in which they’d grown up and which they’d manipulated as few others could — one Communism and the other Francoism — both had ended up fighting for survival amid the rubble of their former dominion. Neither of the two managed it, and on the eve of 23 February it was already obvious that neither of the two would manage it. At that time their personal relationship was meagre, because they’d turned into two fitters and a fitter is absorbed in the task of fitting. They probably looked at each other out of the corner of their eye every once in a while, remembering not so old times when together they sorted out the country’s destiny with sparkling pyrotechnics of false duels, four-handed sparring, wordless pacts, secret meetings and great accords of state, and the iron alliance they’d forged in those years certainly remained immutable: in the autumn and winter of 198 °Carrillo was one of the few front-line politicians who did not participate in the political manoeuvring against Suárez that laid the ground for 23 February, and never mentioned surgical coups or a touch on the rudder unless denouncing that sinister terminology and that flirting with the Army that constituted ideal ammunition for golpismo; denouncing it outside of his party and within his party: there were also advocates of political shock therapy in the PCE of the time, but when Ramón Tamames twice proclaimed to the press his agreement with a unity government headed by a military officer, Carrillo was quick to use the occasion to defend Suárez, once again fulminating against his main adversary in the Party with a devastating diagnosis: ‘Ramón’s raving.’ On the eve of 23 February Carrillo was still clinging to Suárez the way one shipwrecked man clings to another, he was still thinking that supporting Suárez meant supporting democracy, he was still keeping his eyes open against the risk of a coup d’état and still considering that his formula of a government of national unity with Suárez was the only way to prevent it and to thwart the collapse of what four years earlier they had begun to construct between the two of them. Of course, by that time the idea of governing with Suárez was unworkable; doubly unworkable: because neither he nor Suárez controlled his own party any more and because, although four years before their personal alliance represented a collective alliance between Franco’s two irreconcilable Spains, by the time of 23 February it’s more than likely that he and Suárez no longer represented anybody or hardly anybody, and represented only themselves. But it’s possible that on the evening of the coup, while both remained in their seats in the midst of the gunshots and the rest of the deputies obeyed the golpistas’ orders and lay down on the floor, Carrillo might have felt a sort of vengeful satisfaction, as if that instant corroborated what he’d always believed, and that he and Suárez were the only two real politicians in the country, or at least the only two politicians ready to risk their necks for democracy. I can’t resist imagining that, if it’s true that they both cultivated an epic and aesthetic conception of politics as an individual adventure flecked with dramatic episodes and intrepid decisions, that instant also condensed their twin conception of politics, because neither of the two experienced a more dramatic episode than that burst of gunfire in the Cortes nor ever took a more intrepid decision than the one they both took to remain in their seats while the bullets whizzed around them in the chamber.