That’s the first part of the figure; below I describe the second. During the months that Carrillo ran the Office of Public Order of Madrid Gutiérrez Mellado was not, as many years later the Secretary General of the PCE believed, one of the leaders of the fifth column in the capital. Some time later he would be, but in the early hours of 6 November, just at the moment when the contrasting myth that would pursue Carrillo for the rest of his life was born — the myth of the hero of the defence of Madrid and the myth of the villain of the Paracuellos executions — Gutiérrez Mellado had been locked up for three months in the second corridor on the first floor of the San Antón prison, because the future general was one of the many officers who, after having tried to incite their garrisons to revolt against the legitimate government of the Republic in July and having been taken prisoner, had rejected the offer to join the Republican Army to defend the capital from the Francoist advance; that means that Gutiérrez Mellado was also one of the officers who, on 7 November, after the restricted meeting of Communist and anarchist leaders that followed the first meeting of the Defence Junta of Madrid the night before, should have been taken out of the prison along with dozens of his comrades and executed at dusk in Paracuellos. Miraculously, because of the disorder in which the operation was carried out, Gutiérrez Mellado was not taken out and shot that evening and somehow survived the sacas that followed in the San Antón prison until 30 November when the executions finished. Because both spent years fighting in the same trenches and became standard-bearers to the concord they combated in their youth, it’s impossible that Carrillo was still the villain of Paracuellos for Gutiérrez Mellado in 1981, but not that at some moment of the night of 23 February, while exchanging cigarettes and glances with him in the icy and humiliating silence of the clock room, the general would have intuited with all precision the strange irony that had brought him to die beside the same man who, as he probably believed (and he probably believed it because he too understood the real horror of war), one night forty-five years earlier had ordered his death. If it’s true that he believed it, perhaps it would have mattered to him to know he was mistaken.
Chapter 5
After the coup d’état Santiago Carrillo’s political star was rapidly eclipsed. He’d constructed democracy, risked his life for it on 23 February, but democracy had stopped needing him or didn’t want anything more to do with him; neither did his own party. Throughout 1981 the PCE continued debating the labyrinth of internal conflicts that had been tearing them apart since four years earlier when their Secretary General announced the abandonment of the Party’s Leninist essence; clinging to his post and to his old authoritarian conception of power, Carrillo tried to conserve the unity of the Communists under his command through purges, sanctions and disciplinary action. The result of this attempt at catharsis was lamentable: these actions, sanctions and purges provoked more purges, more sanctions and more actions, and by the summer of 1982 the PCE was a party on the point of collapse, with less than half the number of members it had just five years before and with an increasingly reduced and precarious social presence, broken in three pieces — the pro-Soviets, the reformers and the Carrillistas — unrecognizable to those who had belonged to it in the clandestine exuberance of late Francoism, when it was the biggest party of the opposition, or during the initial optimism of democracy, when it still seemed destined to be. Carrillo himself was unrecognizable: the hero of the defence of Madrid had been left behind, the myth of the anti-Francoist struggle, the internationally respected leader, the symbol of the new Euro-Communism, the Secretary General invested with the authority of demigod and the strategist able to turn any defeat into victory, the founder of democracy whom his own adversaries considered a solid, lucid, pragmatic, necessary statesman; now he was just a nervous petty tyrant on the defensive in a tangential party, embroiled in abstruse ideological debates and infighting where ambition was disguised as purity of principle and accumulated rage as longing for change, a waning politician with the manners of a Communist brontosaurus and the antiquated language of an apparatchik, lost in a cannibalistic labyrinth of conspiratorial paranoia. During those months of personal torment and political death throes Carrillo couldn’t even avoid the exasperated gesture of using the memory of 23 February to defend himself from the PCE rebels (or to attack them): he did so in meetings where his comrades were jeering at him — ‘If Lieutenant Colonel Tejero didn’t manage to get me on the floor, it’s hardly likely that you’re going to keep me quiet here,’ he said while they tried to shout him down at a function held on 12 March 1981 in Barcelona — and he did so at meetings of the Party organs, reproaching the leaders who were left in charge of the organization on the night of the coup for ineptitude or lack of courage to respond to the Army’s uprising by organizing mass demonstrations; perhaps he also did so (or at least his detractors took it like this) by favouring a painting by the Communist José Ortega, who depicted him sitting up straight in the chamber of the Cortes during the evening of 23 February, while the rest of the deputies except Adolfo Suárez and Gutiérrez Mellado — on the canvas two modest figures compared with the panoramic figure of the Secretary General — shelter under their benches from the golpistas’ gunshots.
It was all for naught. The October 1982 general election, the first one after the coup d’état, gave an absolute majority to the Socialist Party and allowed the formation of the first left-wing government since the war, but was a political death sentence for Santiago Carrillo: the PCE lost half its votes, and its Secretary General was left with no choice but to offer his resignation to the executive committee. He resigned from his post, but didn’t renounce power; Carrillo was a pure politician and a pure politician doesn’t give up power: he gets thrown out of it. Like that of Suárez before the coup, Carrillo’s withdrawal after the coup was not a definitive withdrawal but a tactical one, meant to maintain control of the Party from a distance and await a favourable moment for his return: he managed to place at the head of the secretary generalship a loyal and malleable substitute (or one whom he initially thought to be loyal and malleable), he continued to be a member of the executive committee and the central committee and retained the post of Party spokesman in the Cortes. There, with his paltry four deputies, they didn’t even manage to form their own parliamentary group and were forced to join the so-called mixed group, a group of all sorts of parties with minimal representation in the Cortes; and there he re-encountered Adolfo Suárez, who was trying to come back to political life after his resignation as Prime Minister and had just founded the CDS, a party with which he’d scraped in with half the paltry parliamentary representation obtained by Carrillo. And there they were again, indestructible twins, united in their last public adventure by the vice of politics, by the votes of citizens and by parliamentary norms, reduced by the political system they’d set up with their own four hands as if history wanted to make another figure out of them: five years after exchanging a dictatorship for a democracy, they were now two practically invisible deputies except as tiresome icons of an epoch the whole country seemed impatient to get over.