* One of the most resonant belongs to the deputy leader of the Socialist Party, Alfonso Guerra. ‘If Pavía’s horse comes into the Cortes,’ said Guerra, ‘Suárez will be riding it.’ The prediction was not very accurate, although it sums up quite well the opinion that many held of the Prime Minister at that moment.
Chapter 4
It’s true: history fabricates strange figures and does not reject the symmetries of fiction, just as if with that formal design it were seeking to endow itself with a significance it did not possess on its own. The story of the 23 February coup abounds with them: they’re fabricated by the events and the men, the living and the dead, the present and the past; perhaps the one formed by Santiago Carrillo and General Gutiérrez Mellado in one of the rooms of the Cortes that night is not the least strange.
At a quarter to eight in the evening, when more than an hour had already passed since the captain of the Civil Guard had announced from the speakers’ podium the arrival at the Cortes of a competent military authority who would take charge of the coup, Carrillo saw from his bench that some Civil Guards were taking Adolfo Suárez out of the chamber. Like all the rest of the deputies, the Secretary General of the PCE deduced that the golpistas were taking the Prime Minister away to kill him. That they should do so didn’t surprise him, but it did that half an hour later they took out General Gutiérrez Mellado and, not only him, but Felipe González. A little while later his surprise was dispelled: a Civil Guard, machine gun in hand, ordered him to stand up and forced him to leave the chamber; with him left Alfonso Guerra, deputy leader of the PSOE, and Agustín Rodríguez Sahagún, Minister of Defence. They took the three of them to a place known as the clock room, where Gutiérrez Mellado and Felipe González already were, but not Adolfo Suárez, who had been confined alone in the ushers’ cloakroom, a few metres from the chamber. They pointed him towards a chair at one end of the room; Carrillo sat down, and for the next fifteen hours he barely moved from there, his gaze almost always fixed on a big chiming clock made by a nineteenth-century Swiss clockmaker called Alberto Billeter; on his left, very near, sat General Gutiérrez Mellado; opposite him, in the centre of the room with his back to him, was Rodríguez Sahagún, and further on, facing the wall (or at least that’s how they remembered it when they remembered that night), González and Guerra. At each of the doors rebel soldiers armed with machine guns stood guard; there was no heating, or no one had turned it on, and a skylight in the ceiling open to the February dew kept the five men trembling with cold all night.
Like his companions, during the first hours of being shut up in the clock room Carrillo thought he was going to die. He thought he should prepare himself to die. He thought he was prepared to die and at the same time he wasn’t prepared to die. He feared the pain. He feared his murderers would laugh at him. He feared weakening at the last moment. It won’t be any big deal, he thought, looking for courage. It’ll just be an instant: they’ll put a pistol to your head, pull the trigger and it’ll all be over. Maybe because it’s not death but the uncertainty of death that we find intolerable, this last thought calmed him; two more things calmed him: one was the pride of not having obeyed the order of the rebel soldiers and remaining in his seat while the bullets whizzed around him in the chamber; the other was that death would liberate him from the torment his Party comrades were subjecting him to. How peaceful you’re going to be, he said to himself. What a relief never to have to deal with so many irresponsible bastards ever again. What a relief not to have to smile at them ever again. As soon as he began to think that maybe he wasn’t going to die the anxiety returned. He didn’t remember exactly when it had happened (perhaps when the sound of aeroplanes flying over the Cortes came in through the skylight; perhaps when Alfonso Guerra returned from the toilet giving them stealthy encouraging glances; undoubtedly as time went by and news of the military authority announced by the golpistas failed to arrive); the only thing he remembered was that, once he’d accepted that he might not die, his mind turned into a whirlwind of conjecture. He didn’t know what was happening in the chamber or what had happened outside the Cortes, he didn’t know if Tejero’s operation was part of a wider operation or was an isolated operation, but he knew it was a coup d’état and he was sure that its triumph or failure depended on the King: if the King accepted the coup, the coup would triumph; if the King did not accept the coup, the coup would fail. He wasn’t sure about the King; he didn’t even know if he was still at liberty or if the golpistas had taken him prisoner. He wasn’t sure what the Cortes’ attitude would be when the military authority showed up, supposing that he showed up: it wouldn’t be the first time that, coerced by weapons, a democratic Parliament handed power over to a military, he thought. He wasn’t only thinking about Pavía; half his life had been spent in France and he remembered in 1940, coerced by the German Army after the debacle of the war, how the French National Assembly had handed power over to Marshal Pétain, and in 1958, coerced by its own army in Algeria, had handed it over to General de Gaulle. Now, he thought, the same thing could happen, or something similar, and he wasn’t sure whether the deputies would refuse to bow down to blackmaiclass="underline" he was sure of Adolfo Suárez, he was sure of the old guard of his party (not the youngsters), he was sure of himself; but he wasn’t sure of anyone else. As for the fact that the golpistas had isolated him with those precise companions, as the hours went past and he sensed increasing hope that the coup was paralysed, he began to think that maybe they had done so to keep a close rein on the most representative or most dangerous leaders, or those with the power to negotiate with them when the moment came. But he didn’t know what there would be to negotiate, or with whom they’d have to negotiate it, or even in truth if there was any possibility of negotiating, and the whirlwind carried on spinning.