Nothing essential varies in the scene if we unfreeze the image: the Guard armed with the automatic weapon keeps watch to the left and right, taking little steps hushed by the carpet of the central semicircle; the parliamentarians seem petrified in their benches; a silence broken only by a murmur of coughing dominates the chamber. Now the angle changes and the image includes the central semicircle and the right wing of the chamber: in the central semicircle the stenographer and an usher stand up after having spent the last minutes lying on the carpet, and the Secretary of the Congress, Víctor Carrascal — who at the beginning of the coup had been caught by surprise directing the roll-call voting to confirm Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo as the new Prime Minister to replace Adolfo Suárez — stands stiffly under the speakers’ rostrum smoking; as for the right wing of the chamber, all the ministers and deputies remain there, sitting in their seats, the majority with their hands visible on the armrests, the majority of them still. Adolfo Suárez does not belong to this majority, and not only because his hands are not in sight, but because he does not stop moving in his seat; in reality, he has not stopped moving since the firing ceased and General Gutiérrez Mellado returned to sit beside him after his confrontation with the Civil Guards: restless, he’s been turning around to his left, to his right, looking behind him, he’s lit one cigarette after another, he’s crossed and recrossed his legs unceasingly; now he has his back to the chamber, looking at the group of Civil Guards controlling the entrance, as if he’s looking for someone, maybe Lieutenant Colonel Tejero. But if that’s who he’s looking for he doesn’t find him, and when he turns around again he sees, at a Civil Guard’s gesture, Víctor Carrascal is ceding his place under the podium to an usher and, with a cigarette in one hand and the list of deputies’ names in the other, he walks up the steps to the congressional platform, stands at the speakers’ rostrum, drops his suddenly useless papers on the lectern, raises his eyes and looks to his right and left with an expression halfway between confusion and entreaty, as if it suddenly struck him as absurd or ridiculous or dangerous to have climbed up there and he were begging for a place to hide, or as if in the expectant expressions of his comrades he had just read that they thought the golpistas had ordered him up there to say something or to resume the voting where it had been interrupted, and he was trying to correct the misunderstanding.
But the misunderstanding corrects itself. A minute after Víctor Carrascal goes up to the speakers’ rostrum, a captain of the Civil Guard takes his place to address some words to the whole chamber. The captain is called Jesús Muñecas and he is lieutenant colonel Tejero’s most trusted officer that evening, as well as having been one of his strongest supporters during the days before the coup. The lieutenant colonel has asked him to calm the deputies down and, after examining the chamber for a moment from the hall — just as a cautious orator might inspect the conditions of the setting in which he has to give a speech, to adapt it to them — with his automatic weapon in one hand and his tricorne in the other he walks up to the speakers’ rostrum. Nevertheless, as soon as the officer begins his speech someone disconnects voluntarily or involuntarily the camera that is showing it to us and, after offering a few nervous and fleeting shots of the captain, the image melts into blackness. Luckily there is another camera, situated in the left wing of the chamber, which is still functioning and which, before the captain finishes his address, shows him to us again, almost imperceptible, just a blurry uniformed profile on the extreme right of the image. What on the other hand is perceptible with absolute clarity are his words, which resound through the chamber in the midst of absolute silence. The captain’s words are precisely these: ‘Good evening. Nothing’s going to happen, but we’re going to wait a moment for a competent military authority to come to arrange. . what has to be done and what he himself. . will tell all of us. So stay calm. I don’t know if it’ll be a matter of a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes, half an hour. . I imagine not longer. An authority who is competent, military of course, will be the one who determines what will take place. Of course nothing’s going to happen. So you can all calm down.’ Nothing more: the captain has spoken with a clear voice, accustomed to giving orders, though not without the odd vacillation or without two sequential stresses — his second mention of the word competent and the word military — betrayed the vigorously neutral tone of his speech’s coercive emphasis. Nothing more: the captain walks down the steps of the speakers’ rostrum and, while he blends into the group of Civil Guards who’ve been listening to him from the hall of the chamber, the image freezes again.
Chapter 1
Who was the competent authority? Who was the military man whose arrival the hijacked parliamentarians were awaiting in vain throughout the evening and night of 23 February? Ever since the day of the coup this has been one of the official enigmas of the coup; it has also been one of the most exploited deposits of the insatiable embellishments that surround it. In fact, there is hardly a politician of the era who has not proposed his hypothesis on the identity of the soldier, and there is no book on 23 February that has not devised its own: some claim it was General Torres Rojas, who — after relieving General Juste of his command of the Brunete Armoured Division and occupying Madrid — would lead his troops to the Cortes to relieve Lieutenant Colonel Tejero; others argue that it was General Milans, who would arrive in Madrid from Valencia in the name of the King and the rebel Captains General; others conjecture that it was General Fernando de Santiago, Gutiérrez Mellado’s predecessor in the post of Deputy Prime Minister and member of a group of generals in the reserves who had been plotting for some time in favour of a coup; others maintain it was the King himself, who would appear in the Cortes to address the deputies in his capacity as head of state and of the Armed Forces. Those four names do not exhaust the number of candidates; there are even those who increase the intrigue not by adding a candidate to the list but by omitting the name of theirs: in 1988 Adolfo Suárez claimed there were only two people who knew the identity of the military officer, and one of them was him. Naturally, there was no one more interested in feeding the mystery than the golpistas themselves. In this task Lieutenant Colonel Tejero excelled, declaring during the 23 February trial that at one of the meetings before the coup Major Cortina had identified the military authority who would come to the Cortes by a code name: the White Elephant; it’s very possible that Tejero’s testimony was just a fantasy designed to add confusion to the confusion of the first hearing, but some journalist mentioned it in his report and in this way managed to fill in the missing proper name with the energy of a symbol and prolong to this day the vitality of the enigma. An enigma that is no enigma, because the truth is once again obvious: the announced military man could only be General Armada, who in accordance with the golpistas’ plans would arrive at the Cortes from the Zarzuela and, with the King’s authorization and the backing of the mutinous Army, would liberate the parliamentarians in exchange for their acceptance of the formation of a coalition or caretaker or unity government under his leadership. That was what was anticipated and, if it’s true that the White Elephant was the code name of the announced soldier, Armada was the White Elephant.