Chapter 3
Did they represent only themselves? Did they no longer represent anybody or hardly anybody?
I don’t know what the first words were that Adolfo Suárez and General Gutiérrez Mellado said when they saw Lieutenant Colonel Tejero burst into the Cortes, and I don’t think it’s important to know; I do, however, know the first words Santiago Carrillo said — because not only he himself but some of his comrades in nearby seats recalled them on various occasions — and of course they’re not important. What Carrillo said was: ‘Pavía’s arrived earlier than expected.’ It was a cliché: for more than a century the name Pavía in Spain has been a metonym for the expression golpe de estado, because the coup d’état staged by General Manuel Pavía — a soldier who according to legend burst into the Cortes on horseback on 3 January 1874 — was until 23 February 1981 the most spectacular abuse the democratic institutions had suffered, and from the beginning of this democracy — and especially after the summer of 1980, and especially in the political village of Madrid obsessed since the summer of 1980 with the rumours of an impending coup d’état — rare was the comment on a coup d’état that didn’t contain the name Pavía.* But Carrillo’s phrase being a commonplace, and not having any importance, doesn’t mean it’s not interesting, because reality suffers from a curious propensity to deal in commonplaces, or allow itself to be colonized by them; it also takes pleasure sometimes — as I mentioned earlier — in fabricating strange figures, and one of those figures is that General Pavía’s coup seems to anticipate 23 February, and what it was meant to be.
History repeats itself. Marx observed that great events and characters appear in history twice, first as tragedy and then as farce, just as in moments of profound transformation men, frightened by their responsibility, invoked the spirits of the past, adopted their names, their mannerisms and slogans to represent with this prestigious disguise and detachable language a new historical scene as if it were a seance. In the case of 23 February Marx’s intuition is valid though incomplete. The legend is partially false: General Pavía did not burst into the Cortes on horseback, he did so on foot and with a detachment of Civil Guards under his orders and ejected the parliamentarians of the First Republic at gunpoint and precipitated a coup d’état that the conservative press had been advocating for months as a remedy against the disorder the country had sunk into, a coup that led to the formation of a government of national unity led by General Serrano, who prolonged the regime’s agony for less than a year with a peculiar Republican dictatorship until General Martínez Campos finished it off with a military uprising. A valid intuition though incomplete: Pavía’s coup was a tragedy, but Tejero’s coup was not a farce, or not entirely, or only because its failure prevented the tragedy, or we only imagine that it was now because tragedy plus time equals farce; Tejero’s coup was, indeed, an echo, a parody, a seance: Tejero aspired to be Pavía; Armada aspired to be Serrano, and it could be imagined that, had the coup triumphed, Armada’s unity or coalition or caretaker government would not have done anything but agonizingly prolong, with a peculiar authoritarian democracy or a peculiar monarchist dictatorship, the life of a mortally wounded regime.
There is still another parallel between the coup of 1874 and that of 1981, between Pavía’s coup and Tejero’s coup. Engravings of the time show the deputies of the First Republic greeting the rebellious Civil Guards’ entrance into the chamber with gestures of protest, facing up to the attackers; that’s another legend, except this time it’s not partially but totally false. The 1874 deputies’ attitude to the coup was almost identical to that of the 1981 deputies: just as the 1981 deputies hid beneath their benches as soon as the first shots were fired, as soon as the first shots were heard in the corridors of the Cortes the 1874 deputies fled in terror from the chamber, which was empty when the Civil Guards arrived. Thirty years after Pavía’s coup, Nicolás Estévanez, one of the deputies present in the Cortes, wrote: ‘I don’t deny my share of responsibility for the incredible shame of that day; we all behaved indecently.’ Thirty years have not yet passed since Tejero’s attempted coup and, as far as I know, none of the deputies present in the Cortes on 23 February has written anything similar. Whether or not one of them does so in the future, I’m not sure any of them behaved indecently; hiding from gunfire under a bench is not a very splendid gesture, but I don’t think anyone can be blamed for doing so: much as it’s possible that the majority of the parliamentarians present in the chamber were ashamed of not having remained in their seats, and much as it’s certain that democracy would have been grateful if at least certain of them had done so, I don’t think anyone is indecent for seeking shelter when bullets are flying. Besides, at least in 1981 — in 1874, too, I think — the deputies’ attitude was a mirror image of that of the majority of society, because there was barely a gesture of public rejection of the coup in all of Spain until in the early hours of the morning the King appeared on television condemning the attack on the Cortes and the putsch was given up as a failure: apart from the head of the provisional government named by the King, Francisco Laína, or the premier of the autonomous Catalan government, Jordi Pujol, on the evening of 23 February all or almost all the responsible politicians who hadn’t been taken hostage by Tejero — party leaders, senators, regional deputies and premiers, civil governors, mayors and councillors — restricted themselves to awaiting the outcome of events, and some hid or escaped or tried to escape abroad; apart from the newspaper El País — which brought out a special edition at ten at night — and Diario 16 — which brought one out at midnight — there was barely a media organization that came out in defence of democracy; apart from the Police Trade Union and the PSUC, the Catalan Communist Party, there was barely a political or social organization that issued a statement of protest and, when some trade union discussed the possibility of mobilizing its membership, it was immediately dissuaded from doing so with the argument that any demonstration could provoke further military action. Furthermore, that evening the memory of the war closed people up in their houses, paralysed the country, silenced it: no one put up the slightest resistance to the coup and everyone took the hijacking of the Cortes and the occupation of Valencia by tanks with moods that varied from terror to euphoria by way of apathy, but with identical passivity. That was the popular response to the coup: none. I’m very much afraid that, as well as not being a splendid response, it was not a decent response: although in those moments the order disseminated by the Zarzuela Palace and the provisional government was to keep calm and act as if nothing had happened, the fact is that something had happened and that nobody or hardly anybody said to the golpistas from the opening moments that society did not approve of that outrage. Nobody or hardly anybody told them, which forces the question of whether Armada, Milans and Tejero had committed an error in imagining the country was ripe for the coup, and in supposing that, had it achieved its objective, the majority would have accepted it with less resignation than relief. It also forces the question of whether the deputies who on 23 February hid under their benches did not embody the popular will better than those who did not duck. In short: maybe it’s an exaggeration to say that by the winter of 1981 Santiago Carrillo and Adolfo Suárez didn’t represent anybody, but to judge by what happened on the evening of 23 February you wouldn’t say they represented many people.