But something unforeseen could still happen, and a turnaround as welclass="underline" the King had smothered part of the rebellion, but he hadn’t extinguished it. The most flammable points between seven and nine that evening were the Cortes and the Brunete Armoured Division, the most crucial unit to the triumph of the coup. What happened during those two hours at the Brunete is inexplicable; inexplicable unless one admits that as much cowardice or indecision as overcame the Captains General also overcame the golpistas of the Brunete Division. Persuaded by them that the operation had the King’s consent, in the minutes before the coup the commander of Brunete, General Juste, had issued the order to all his units to leave for Madrid, but before seven, after talking to the Zarzuela Palace and receiving unequivocal orders from General Quintana Lacaci — his immediate superior — Juste had issued the countermand; many regiment commanders, however, continued to show unwilling to obey it and some of the more fiery among them — Colonel Valencia Remón, Colonel Ortiz Call, Lieutenant Colonel De Meer — were looking for excuses or courage with which to send their troops out on to the streets, sure that it would take no more than one armoured vehicle in the centre of Madrid to dispel the scruples or vacillations of their comrades-in-arms and resolve the triumph of the coup. They didn’t find either of the two things, but most of all they didn’t find the golpista ringleaders within the division (General Torres Rojas, replacing Juste according to the conspirators’ plans, Colonel San Martín, chief of staff, and Major Pardo Zancada, charged by Milans with putting the operation into action), or any of the other commanders and officers who were agitating in the midst of the generalized jumpiness: like so many other soldiers during the years before the coup, many had been lavish with their threats against the government with flag-waving boasts, but when the moment came to put them into practice they were unable to wrest command from the weak and doubtful Juste and, although it is true that during the first hours of the coup Torres Rojas and San Martín were still trying to convince Juste to rescind his countermand of the departure order, the truth is they did so with scant conviction, and the pressures they exerted against the commander of the Brunete Division vanished a little after eight when, docilely obeying his superiors’ orders, Torres Rojas left headquarters and returned on a regular flight to his post in La Coruña.
Meanwhile, while those at the Brunete were chomping at the bit, in and around the Cortes the formidable stir raised by the parliamentarians being taken hostage seemed to be gradually calming down. The first two hours there following the start of the coup had been demented. As the evening went on, Madrid turned into a ghost town (a city without any open bars or restaurants, with no taxis and barely any traffic, with empty streets where gangs of extreme right-wingers strutted about chanting slogans, smashing windows and intimidating the few passersby as people shut themselves up in their houses and sat glued to the radio or television, which for a while had broadcast nothing but military music or classical music, because since before eight the public radio and television stations had been occupied by a detachment commanded by a captain from the Brunete Division), opposite the façade of the Cortes, on the other side of Carrera de San Jerónimo, the salons and stairways of the Hotel Palace began to seethe with military men of every force and rank, journalists, photographers, radio broadcasters, onlookers, drunks and crackpots, and almost immediately a little crisis cabinet was set up in the manager’s office composed among others of General Aramburu Topete, Director General of the Civil Guard, and General Sáenz de Santamaría, Inspector General of the national police, two loyal members of the military who’d arrived at the Cortes building shortly after the assault and who, as soon as they understood that the hostage situation could go on for an unpredictable length of time, set up two security cordons — one of national police, the other of Civil Guards — with the aim of sealing off the building and keeping control of the maelstrom around it. It took them hours to achieve these two things, if they really did achieve them; in fact, vociferous groups of supporters of the golpistas besieged Carrera de San Jerónimo all night long and, from the first minutes of the seizure to the last, soldiers, police and Civil Guards in uniform or plainclothes entered the Cortes at will without anyone knowing with certainty if they were going in to join Tejero and his men or to find out their intentions, to declare support for their cause or to undermine their morale, to take them news from outside or to collect news from inside to inform the authorities, to parley with them or to snoop; even more: many people who approached the Cortes building in the first moments of the coup claim that, in the midst of that uproar, no one seemed to have been absolutely clear whether Aramburu’s Civil Guards and Sáenz de Santamaría’s police had surrounded the building to subdue the assailants or for their protection, to prevent more contingents of soldiers or civilians from reinforcing their numbers or to give them free entry, to repel the coup or to encourage it. It was an erroneous impression, or at least it became increasingly erroneous as the circumstances of the coup became clear, and, although they may never have gained absolute control over the cordon and didn’t entirely seal off the Cortes, towards eight in the evening Aramburu and Sáenz de Santamaría had at least managed to get the blockade of the rebels organized and put a stop to the improvised attempts to bring the seizure to an end in an expeditious manner, removing their fear that an outburst of violence between supporters and opponents of the coup might precipitate with a massive Army intervention the turnaround the golpistas were longing for.* Two of those attempts had happened very early: the first took place half an hour after the assault on the Cortes and featured Colonel Félix Alcalá-Galiano of the national police; the second took place just five minutes later and featured General Aramburu himself. Different versions circulate about what happened in both cases; the most plausible are the following: