Although Milans and Gutiérrez Mellado had known each other for a long time, Milans’ animosity did not have a remote origin; it was born when Gutiérrez Mellado agreed to join Suárez’s first government and grew as the general turned into the Prime Minister’s most loyal ally and designed and put into practice a plan whose objective consisted of terminating the privileges of power conceded to the Army by the dictatorship and turning it into an instrument of democracy: Milans not only felt personally passed over and humiliated by the promotion policies of Gutiérrez Mellado, who did everything he could to keep him away from the top command positions and thus spare him golpista temptations; sheltered in his ultraconservative ideas and devotion to Franco, he also suffered as an insult Gutiérrez Mellado’s aspiration to dismantle Franco’s victorious Army, which he considered the only legitimate guarantee of the legitimate ultraconservative state founded by Franco and in consequence the only institution qualified to prevent another war (like the far right, like the far left, Milans was allergic to the word reconciliation, to his mind a simple euphemism for the word treason: several members of his family had been murdered during the conflict, and Milans felt that a worthy present could not forget the past, but must be founded on its permanent remembrance and on the prolongation of the triumph of Francoism over the Republic, which for him equalled the triumph of civilization over barbarism). Milans found in these two personal offences argument enough to condemn Gutiérrez Mellado to the condition of an upstart prepared to violate his oath of loyalty to Franco in order to satisfy his filthy political ambitions; this explains why he encouraged with all the means within reach, including chairmanship of the founding board of El Alcázar, a savage press campaign that left not a single nook of Gutiérrez Mellado’s personal, political or military life unexplored in search of ignominy with which to persuade his comrades-in-arms that the man who was carrying out a treacherous purge of the Armed Forces lacked the slightest inkling of moral or professional integrity; and this explains also why, as soon as Gutiérrez Mellado entered the government, Milans came to embody the Army’s resistance to Gutiérrez Mellado’s military reforms and to the political reforms that allowed them: between the end of 1976 and beginning of 1981 the Army barely saw a protest against the government, a serious disciplinary incident or a whisper of conspiracy Milans was not mixed up in or in which Milans’ name was not invoked. He boasted of never having deceived anybody and of never hiding his intentions, and during those years — first as commander of the Brunete Armoured Division and then as Captain General of Valencia — frequently used the threat of a coup: he liked to joke about it (‘Your Majesty,’ he said to the King over drinks at the end of one of the monarch’s visits to Brunete. ‘One more rum and I’ll order the tanks out on to the streets!’); the first time he really did so was after a tumultuous meeting of the High Command of the Armed Forces held on 12 April 1977, three days after Adolfo Suárez legalized the PCE with the support of Gutiérrez Mellado and contrary to what he had himself promised the military or contrary to what the military believed he’d promised. ‘The Prime Minister gave his word of honour that he would not legalize the Communist Party,’ Milans said that day to his comrades-in-arms. ‘Spain cannot have a Prime Minister without honour: we should order our tanks out on to the streets.’ In the almost three years he was in command of the Captaincy General of Valencia similar expressions were frequently on his lips. ‘Don’t worry, Señora,’ he was heard to say more than once to the ladies who flattered him at receptions, urging him to become the saviour of the nation in danger. ‘I won’t retire without ordering the tanks out on to the street.’ He kept his word in the nick of time: on 23 February he was just four months away from being retired to the reserves; he also kept faith with his golpista and monarchist genes, given that, in spite of being a staunch Francoist, his coup did not aspire to be a coup against the monarchy, but rather with the monarchy. Like Armada, who was sure he’d be able to dominate the Zarzuela that day with his authority as the King’s former secretary, on 23 February Milans was guilty of pride: he considered himself the most prestigious officer in the Army and believed his illusory aspect of invincible general would be enough to drag the rest of the Captains General along on an uncertain adventure and to bring the Brunete to mutiny without having prepared them to do so. He achieved neither one thing nor the other, and that was one of the reasons why the 23 February coup did not end up being what Milans had anticipated: a way of getting even for the humiliations Gutiérrez Mellado had inflicted on him and on his Army and also a way — recovering under the King’s command the foundations of the state installed by Franco — of recovering for the Army of the Victory the power Gutiérrez Mellado had wrenched away.
The final protagonist of the coup was Lieutenant Colonel Tejero. He is the icon of the coup and it’s obvious that he had an icon’s vocation and that his appearance like that of a Civil Guard from a local vignette or from a Lorca poem or from a Berlanga film — robust body, bushy moustache, fervent look in his eye, nasal voice and Andalusian accent — contributed to his vocation as an icon; but it’s also obvious that he was not the impetuous mediocrity the cliché of 23 February wanted him to be and the whole country insisted on constructing after 23 February, as if a collective guilty conscience for the complete lack of opposition to the coup needed to demonstrate to itself that only a lunatic could assault the Cortes at gunpoint and therefore the coup was just a nonsense that didn’t need to be resisted because it was doomed to failure from the start. It’s not true: Tejero was absolutely not a fairground madman; he was something much more dangerous: he was an idealist prepared to bend reality to his ideals, prepared to maintain loyalty to those he considered his own at any price, prepared to impose good and eliminate evil by force; on 23 February Tejero also proved to be many other things, but only because he was first and foremost an idealist. That Tejero’s ideals strike us as perverse and anachronistic does not qualify the goodness or evil of his intentions, because evil is often concocted from good and perhaps good from evil; much less does it authorize us to attribute his misdemeanour to a picturesque derangement: if Tejero had been deranged he would not have prepared for months and carried out successfully a complex and dangerous operation like the assault on the Cortes, he would not have been able to keep the almost absolute control he kept over the hostage-taking for the seventeen and a half hours it lasted, he would not have known how to play his cards and would not have manoeuvred to achieve his objectives with the serene rationality with which he did so; if he had been deranged, if he’d taken his madness to its limit, perhaps the seizure of the Cortes would have ended in slaughter and not the negotiation with which it ended once he was certain the coup had failed. The reality is that Tejero was a technically competent officer who had been assigned to positions of maximum responsibility — like the command of the San Sebastián Civil Guard — and who, though his fiery and emotional idealism provoked the suspicion of his commanders and comrades, also inspired the devotion of his subordinates. It is unnecessary to add that he was a fanatic from having ingested tons of patriotic pabulum, a moralist blinded by the vanity of virtue and a megalomaniac with an indomitable yearning for prominence. By temperament and by mentality he was quite distant from Armada, but not from Milans. Like Milans, Tejero considered himself a man of action, and he was; the difference is that Milans had been one most of all during his youth in an open civil war while Tejero had been one most of all as an adult during an undercover war in the Basque Country. Like Milans, Tejero dreamt of a utopia of Spain as a barracks — a radiant place of order, brotherhood and harmony regulated by reveilles and taps under the radiant rule of God — the difference is that Milans accepted the gradual conquest of utopia while Tejero aspired to put the revolution into immediate effect. Like Milans, Tejero was a Francoist above all; the difference is that, precisely because he belonged to a later generation than Milans and hadn’t seen the war or known any Spain other than Franco’s Spain, Tejero was if possible even more Francoist than Milans: he idolized Franco, he was ruled by the triad in capital letters of God, Fatherland and the Military, his mortal enemy was Marxism, that is Communism, that is the Anti-Spain, that is the enemies of the utopia of Spain as barracks, who should be eradicated from the native soil before they managed to poison it. This last of course formed part of the far right’s rhetorical bible in the 1970s, but for Tejero’s literal sentimentalism it also constituted an exact description of reality and an ethical command: in Tejero it grew into a finished fusion between patriotism and religion and, as Sánchez Ferlosio says, ‘It’s when there is God that all is permitted; as there is no one more ferociously dangerous than the just, with right on their side.’ From there, as for the whole of the far right, for Tejero, Santiago Carrillo came to represent something like what Adolfo Suárez represented for Armada and Gutiérrez Mellado for Milans: the personification of all the misfortunes of the nation and, in the midst of his hysterical egocentrism that allowed him to feel himself to be the personification of the nation, the personification of all its misfortunes; and from there as well, because the fusion between patriotism and religion dehumanizes the adversary and turns him into evil, as soon as he glimpsed the return to Spain of the Anti-Spain his eschatological fanaticism imposed the duty to finish it off, and from then on he exchanged his military record for a record of rebellion.