Colonel Alcalá-Galiano is one of the first of the high-ranking military commanders to arrive at Carrera de San Jerónimo after the start of the coup. When he does so he has just spoken to General Gabeiras, Chief of the Army General Staff, who had ordered him to enter the Cortes and arrest or eliminate Lieutenant Colonel Tejero. Alcalá-Galiano obeys: he enters the building, locates Tejero and, while speaking to him, awaits his opportunity to capture or kill him; at a certain moment in the conversation, however, Tejero is called to the telephone to speak to Milans’ deputy chief of staff in Valencia, Colonel Ibáñez Inglés, who when he hears that Alcalá-Galiano is in the Cortes orders Tejero to disarm and arrest him immediately, but the lieutenant colonel doesn’t even have time to try, because Alcalá-Galiano has taken the astute precaution of listening in on another telephone to the conversation between the two rebels and then has the skill, amid strained jokes and friendly words between acquaintances and comrades-in-arms, to persuade Ibáñez Inglés to rescind the order and Tejero lets him return to the street. As for General Aramburu’s attempt, it is much less subtle or devious, much more awkward as well. As soon as he arrives at Carrera de San Jerónimo, shortly after Alcalá-Galiano has come back out of the Cortes, Aramburu walks over to the entrance in the company of two of his adjutants and demands to speak to the leader of the mutineers; seconds later Lieutenant Colonel Tejero appears, pistol in hand, his expression and gestures defiant, and without any preambles the general gives him the categorical order to vacate the building and surrender. Aramburu is head of the Civil Guard and therefore the highest authority of the corps to which the lieutenant colonel belongs, but Tejero is not daunted and, brandishing his weapon while a group of rebel Civil Guards aim theirs at Aramburu, answers: ‘General, sir, before surrendering I’d shoot you and then myself.’ Aramburu’s reply is instinctive and consists of reaching for his pistol, but one of his two adjutants holds his arm, prevents him from drawing his weapon and manages to bring the skirmish to a close with no further violence than insubordination and with Aramburu leaving the Cortes furious and stunned, convinced that Tejero’s resolution augurs a protracted siege.
This episode took place towards seven in the evening. By then, once past the assailants’ initial shouts and gunfire and the panic and stupor of the parliamentarians, journalists and guests who were in the chamber, the Cortes was filled with the rarefied air of a nightmare, or many of those who remained there remember it like that, almost as if the session of confirming the new Prime Minister of the government might be carrying on in a different dimension, or as if just tiny horrific or ridiculous details had been altered, making it subtly unreal. The parliamentarians were walking along the wide corridor that rings the chamber as usual, except with heads bowed, humiliated, fear etched on their faces, escorted by Civil Guards who accompanied them to the toilets and hearing the commanding voices and shouts of jubilation of the
golpistas resounding through the offices and hallways; sometimes the toilets seemed full of people like in the recesses of the plenary sessions, except the politicians and journalists lined up at the urinals did not exchange the usual unimportant comments, but only sighs of uncertainty, anguish, self-pity or black humour; also as in the recesses of any plenary session, the usual-sized crowd had gathered in the bar, at that time situated by the main entrance of the old building, and the waiters were serving drinks, bringing bills and receiving tips, except that the clientele wasn’t made up of politicians and journalists but Civil Guard officers, NCOs and constables armed with Cetme assault rifles and Star submachine guns who hurled encouragement, curses, sharp remarks and patriotic brazenness back and forth across the bar, and except that the carajillos, gin-and-tonics, cognacs, shots of whisky and glasses of beer greatly exceeded the usual amount. As for the chamber, after the irruption of the golpistas, an ominous silence reigned there interrupted by the coughs of parliamentarians and the occasional orders of the Civil Guards; the silence froze when, ten minutes after the start, a captain walked up the steps to the rostrum to announce the arrival of a military authority who would take charge of the coup, and was shattered when a short time later Adolfo Suárez stood up from his bench and demanded to speak to Lieutenant Colonel Tejero, provoking a commotion that was on the verge of unleashing another burst of gunfire, and ended when the Civil Guards got the Prime Minister to sit down again by way of shouts and threats. Minutes later, undoubtedly to boost the morale of his men and weaken that of his hostages, Tejero announced that Milans had decreed a general mobilization in Valencia. It was not the only announcement of this type the rebels would make from the rostrum over the course of the night: at a certain moment an officer read out to the parliamentarians the war-measures edict Milans had enacted in Valencia; at another, a Civil Guard read out news favourable to the golpistas transmitted by press agencies; at another, shortly before midnight, Tejero proclaimed that several military regions — the II, III, IV and the V — had accepted Milans as the new Prime Minister of the government. This news was all the deputies received about what was happening outside the Cortes during the first hours of the seizure; or almost alclass="underline" circulating in a fragmentary and confused way as well was the news picked up secretly from a transistor radio by former Deputy Prime Minister Fernando Abril Martorell, who sent around airbrushed bulletins to keep his comrades’ spirits up. Of course, he didn’t keep anybody’s spirits up, at least not in those initial hours, when not a single one of the events occurring in the chamber — not even the fact that the announced military authority had not arrived, not even the fact that the assailants had allowed those who were not parliamentarians to leave the Cortes — served to assuage the deputies’ anxiety: for a long time the cataclysm seemed inevitable and the tension, anger and brutal behaviour of the Civil Guards did not abate, and around half past seven, after the repeated flickering of the lights in the room made the kidnappers fear a deliberate power cut that would be the prologue to an attempt to get them out of the Cortes by force, Lieutenant Colonel Tejero doubled the guard on the access routes to the chamber and shouted to his men that in the case of a power cut they were to open fire at the slightest sign or sound of anything out of the ordinary, and then he ordered some chairs to be chopped up to set up a bonfire in front of the podium to replace the possible lack of light, which made the deputies shudder, convinced that any fire would automatically spread in that thickly carpeted, wood-lined enclosure. That shudder was just a foretaste of the one that ran through the chamber at twenty to eight, at the moment when several Civil Guards took Adolfo Suárez away and then, successively, General Gutiérrez Mellado, Felipe González, Santiago Carrillo, Alfonso Guerra and Agustín Rodríguez Sahagún. The six of them left the room in the midst of a horrified silence, some white as chalk, all trying to maintain their fortitude, or feign it, and the majority of their colleagues watched them leave with the premonition they would be executed and that the golpistas had the same fate in store for many of them. The foreboding did not leave them for most of the night, because the deputies only began very slowly to set aside the fear of a bloodbath and to cherish the hope that the golpistas had simply isolated their leaders to negotiate a way out of the coup they never actually negotiated with a military authority they never actually saw.