That was the situation towards 8.30 or nine on the night of 23 February: with the Cortes held hostage, the region of Valencia in revolt, the Brunete Armoured Division and the Captains General still devoured by doubts and the entire country plunged into a frightened, resigned and expectant passivity, the rebels’ coup seemed blocked by the Zarzuela’s countercoup, and also seemed to be waiting for someone — the rebels or the Zarzuela — to unblock it, removing it from the parentheses in which the partial failure of the first and partial success of the second had enclosed it. That was when two opposed and determining movements started up, one launched from Army General Headquarters, in the Buenavista Palace, and the other from the Zarzuela, one in favour of the coup and the other in favour of the countercoup. Towards 7.30 or eight in the evening, while the King and Fernández Campo were still sounding out the Captains General and demanding they confine their troops to barracks, in the Zarzuela they had begun to discuss the possibility that the King might appear on television with a message to dispel any misunderstanding of his rejection of the assault on the Cortes and reiterate the order to defend legality he’d already issued by telephone and by telex to Milans and the rest of the Captains General; the idea immediately gained urgency, but before they could come up with a satisfactory way to do it the Royal Household had to confront an earlier problem: for the moment it was impossible to record and broadcast the monarch’s address because the radio and television studios in Prado del Rey were occupied by a detachment of Brunete cavalry; so the Zarzuela Palace mobilized over the following minutes to remove the golpistas from there, until the Marquis of Mondéjar, head of the Royal Household and Cavalry general, after discovering that the occupying force belonged to the 14th Villaviciosa Cavalry Regiment, commanded by Colonel Valencia Remón, finally managed to get his comrade-in-arms to withdraw his men, and a little while later the Zarzuela requested the recently liberated television station to send round a mobile team to record the King’s message.
That was the beginning of the first of the two opposing movements, the movement against the coup. The second, the movement in favour of the coup, possibly started to ferment in the minds of the rebel ringleaders not long after the King forbade Armada access to the Zarzuela, and must have strengthened as they understood that the King was not going to support the coup in principle and the Captains General were not in principle disposed to do so either; deep down, the movement was no more than an almost obligatory variation of the original coup plan: in the original plan Armada would arrive at the occupied Cortes from the Zarzuela and, with the explicit backing of the King and of the entire Army, form a coalition or caretaker or unity government under his premiership in exchange for the deputies’ liberty and the Army’s return to barracks; in this almost obligatory variation Armada would arrive at the Cortes with the same proposal, except not from the Zarzuela but from Army General Headquarters, where he had his command post as Deputy Chief of the Army General Staff, with all the explicit or implicit backing he was able to claim, starting with the backing of the King. For the golpistas the movement was more arduous and more unsure than the one originally planned, because no one knew how much support Armada could count on in those circumstances, but, given the unexpected negative reaction towards the coup on the part of the King, it was also, I repeat, almost obligatory, or it was for Milans and for Armada: Milans had acted openly ordering his troops on to the streets and refusing to withdraw them, so he now had no option but to carry on, pushing Armada to carry out the anticipated plan, though it might be under worse conditions than those anticipated; as for Armada, who had remained stationary and almost ambushed in Army General Headquarters, trying not to make any gesture that would give away his involvement in the coup, the movement entailed additional risks, but could also afford some advantages: if the movement triumphed, Armada would end up leading the government, just as the original plan anticipated, but if it failed it would cleanse him of the suspicions that had been accumulating around him since the beginning of the coup, allowing him to appear as the self-sacrificing though frustrated negotiator of the liberation of the Cortes. It is probable that towards nine that night Milans and Armada had each on his own arrived at the conclusion that this movement was necessary. In any case, half an hour later Milans called the Buenavista Palace and asked to speak with Armada, at that moment the highest authority at Army General Headquarters in the absence of General Gabeiras, who was meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at their headquarters on Calle Vitruvio. The conversation, long and complicated, was the first the two golpista generals held that night, and from then on, for many of those who soon heard of it, the stalemate of the coup d’état seemed about to be unblocked; the reality is that it simply entered a different phase.
* The fear of the consequences of an armed confrontation also served to dissuade Francisco Laína, head of the provisional government, from carrying out a project he was pushing until well into the night — taking the occupied Cortes by force with a special-operations company of the Civil Guard — and which after much doubt and discussion he finally rejected, convinced by Aramburu and Sáenz de Santamaría that Tejero and his men were prepared to repel the attack and that it could only end in a massacre.
PART FOUR. ALL THE COUPS OF THE COUP
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The image, frozen, shows the left wing of the chamber of the Congress of Deputies: on the right are the benches, completely occupied by parliamentarians; in the centre, the press gallery is packed with journalists; on the left the Congress table, in profile, with the speakers’ rostrum in the foreground. The image is the usual image of a plenary session of the Cortes in the first years of democracy; except for two details: first, the hands of the ministers and deputies are all visible on the armrests in front of their benches; the second one is the presence of a Civil Guard in the chamber: he’s stationed in the left corner of the central semicircle, facing the deputies with his finger on the trigger of his automatic assault rifle. These two details destroy any illusion of normality. It is thirty-two minutes past six on the evening of Monday 23 February and exactly nine minutes earlier Lieutenant Colonel Tejero had burst into the Cortes and the coup d’état had begun.