Neither of the two resigned himself to that secondary role. During the next three years Carrillo continued practising politics as far as he could in the Cortes and in the Party, where he fought to the end to keep control of the machinery and to guide his successor. Arguments between the two of them soon arose, and in April 1985 Carrillo was finally dismissed from all his posts and reduced to the condition of rank and file member; it was a covert expulsion, and his pride would not tolerate it: he immediately left the Party, in the company of a group of faithful, founded the Spanish Workers’ Party (Partido de los Trabajadores de España, PTE), an organization that demonstrated its predictable irrelevance within a short time and in 1991 sought to join the PSOE, his fierce adversary during four decades of Francoism and one and a half of democracy. Making a virtue of necessity, Carrillo interpreted this gesture as a way of closing a personal circle, as a gesture of reconciliation with his own biography: as a young man, the same day the myth of the hero of Madrid and the villain of Paracuellos was born, he’d abandoned the Socialist Party of his family, his childhood and adolescence to join the Communist Party; as an old man he went back the opposite way: he abandoned the Communist Party to join the Socialist Party. Of course, nobody accepted that interpretation, although it’s very possible that it really was a symbolic gesture: a symbolic recognition that, after a lifetime dedicated to reviling democratic socialism (or social democracy), it was democratic socialism (or social democracy) that was the inevitable result of the dismantling or undermining or ideological demolition of Communism that he’d begun years before. Perhaps it was also a gesture of rebelliousness, a final manoeuvring by a pure politician: although at seventy-six he no longer aspired to hold decisive positions, maybe he hadn’t yet renounced the idea of influencing from his vantage point of experienced old leader the young and all-powerful Socialists in government. Whatever it might have been, finally his gesture came to nothing: the PSOE took in the rest of the PTE members, but convinced him whether with fine words or the private intention of humiliating him that, given his political trajectory, it would be best for everyone not to formalize his admission to the Party.
This was the embittered culmination of his political career. What happened later did nothing to contradict that. Pushed out of active politics, writing newspaper articles and airing his opinions in his cracked, monotone, phlegmatic voice on radio discussions and television programmes, with his constant cigarette, during his last years of life Carrillo seemed to climb up on to the venerable pedestal of the fathers of the nation. He only seemed to. Beneath the occasional homage and the respect the media and institutions paid him flowed an adverse current as stubborn as it was powerfuclass="underline" the right never stopped associating his name with the horrors of the war and inventing new iniquities from his past, and to the end of his days he could barely appear at a public event without gangs of radicals trying to harass him with insults and attempts at physical aggression; as for the left, the rejection Carrillo provoked was less noisy and more subtle, but secretly maybe no less bitter, especially among his former comrades or among the heirs of his former comrades or among the heirs of the heirs of his former comrades: his former comrades professed for him an enduring aversion of old parishioners subdued by his domination, that deep down was also (or at least was for many) an enduring aversion for themselves for having belonged to a church where Carrillo was adored like a high priest; making Felipe González’s wickedness his, his former comrades’ heirs blamed him for managing in five years of democracy what Franco hadn’t managed in forty of dictatorship: destroying the Communist Party; as for the heirs of his former comrades’ heirs, they denigrated him by repeating unknowingly, hardened by ignorance and by the presumptuous impunity of youth, an old accusation: for them — Fiat justitia et pereat mundus — it had been Carrillo’s personal ambition and his complicity with Adolfo Suárez, added to his ideological revisionism, his wavering politics and his strategic errors, that had forced the left to make a disadvantageous pact with the right to exchange the dictatorship for democracy and had prevented the restitution of the legally elected Republic overthrown by Franco’s victory in the war, complete restitution to the victims of Francoism and prosecution of those responsible for forty years of dictatorship. None of them were right, but it’s absurd to deny that they were all partially right and that — although it would be good to know exactly what Carrillo’s comrades and the heirs of his comrades and the heirs of his comrades’ heirs were doing on the evening of 23 February, while he was risking his neck for democracy — to a certain extent Carrillo was essentially a failure, because, except for that of reconciling the irreconcilable Spain of Franco with democracy, all the great projects he undertook in his life failed: he tried to make a revolution to take power by force and failed; he tried to win a just war and failed; he tried to bring down an unjust regime and failed; he tried to reform Communism to take power by ballot and failed. He’s living out his last years surrounded by the false respect of almost everyone and the true respect of a very few. He has been many things, but he’s never been a fool or faint-hearted, and it’s possible that around him he sees only a scorched landscape of ideals in ruins and defeated hopes.
During this final stage his friendship with Adolfo Suárez remained intact. Both had given up political activity at the same time, in 1991, and over the course of the ten years that followed their connection grew more frequent and closer. They met often; they laughed a lot; they tried in vain not to talk politics. By the winter of 2001 Carrillo began to suspect that his friend was ill. In June of the following year, on the occasion of the official celebration of twenty-five years of democracy, Suárez made one of his now rare public appearances and declared to the press that José María Aznar, who then had been in the Moncloa for six years, was the best Prime Minister since the restoration of democracy. The dithyramb provoked numerous comments; Carrillo’s was taken by creatures of habit as an old dog’s cynicism ready to be rude about a friend to get a laugh from society: ‘Adolfo’s not welclass="underline" I think he’s suffering from brain damage.’ A little while later he visited Suárez at his house in La Florida, a housing development on the outskirts of Madrid. He found him the same as ever, or the same as he ever found him in those days, but at a certain moment Suárez told him of the long solitary walks he took through the neighbourhood and Carrillo interrupted him. You shouldn’t go out alone, he said. They could give you a fright. Suárez smiled. Who? He said. ETA? He didn’t let him answer: If they’ve got the balls, let them come and find me, he said. And then Carrillo watched him act out verbally the starring role of a scene from a Western: one day he went out on his own and, while he was walking through a nearby park, three armed terrorists jumped him, but before they could match him he spun around, pulled his pistol and disarmed them with three shots; then, after warning them that the next time he’d shoot to kill and that if they didn’t comply with the rule of law and the democratic will of the people they were going to spend the rest of their lives in prison, he handed them over bound hand and foot to the authorities.