The percussion cap for this string of insubordination was what Tejero considered the unmasked manifestation of the Anti-Spain: terrorism. During the 23 February trial his defence lawyer described an episode that happened after the murder at the hands of ETA of one of the Civil Guards under his command at the Guipúzcoa station; more than an event it was an image, a gruesome but not faked image: the image of the lieutenant colonel bending over the corpse destroyed by an explosion and standing up with his lips and uniform stained with the blood of his subordinate. It’s very probable that Tejero never knew how to or wanted to or could experience terrorism as anything but a savage intimate aggression, and there is no doubt that it was terrorism that turned him into a chronic rebel and saturated him with justification as long as the state showed itself incapable of putting a stop to it and part of society seemed indifferent to the ravages it caused among his comrades-in-arms. In January 1977, not long after the murder of one of his men, the lieutenant colonel was relieved of his command in Guipúzcoa and placed under a month’s arrest for sending a sarcastic telegram to the Minister of the Interior, who had just legalized the Basque flag while, as he repeated every time the incident was mentioned, the city of San Sebastián was filled with burning Spanish flags; in October of the same year he was relieved of his command in Málaga and again placed under arrest for another month after forbidding an authorized demonstration pistol in hand with the argument that ETA had just killed two Civil Guards and all of Spain should be in mourning; in August 1978, while the political parties discussed the projected Constitution, he was arrested for fourteen days for publishing in El Imparcial an open letter to the King in which he requested that he, as head of state and of the Armed Forces, prevent the approval of any text that did not include ‘some of the values for which we believe our lives are worth risking’, that he enact a law capable of ending the massacre of terrorism and finishing off ‘the apologists of this bloody farce, whether or not they might be parliamentarians and sit among the fathers of the nation’; in November 1978 he was arrested and tried for planning a coup that anticipated the 23 February coup — the so-called Operation Galaxia: the idea was to take the Cabinet hostage in the Moncloa Palace and, with the help of the rest of the Army, then oblige the King to form a government of national salvation — but less than a year later was released from prison in the middle of 1980 after the court sentenced him to an insignificant term which he’d already served, and which convinced him that he could try again without running any greater risk than to spend a short and comfortable time in jail, converted into a semi-secret hero of the Army and a resounding hero of the far right. That was when he acquired a passion for notoriety; that was when the obsession with a coup became lodged in his brain; that’s when he began to prepare 23 February. The idea was his: he gave birth to it and nursed it and raised it; Milans and Armada wanted to adopt it, subordinating it to their ends, but by that time the lieutenant colonel already felt himself to be its proprietor and when, on the night of 23 February, he came to realize that the two generals were pursuing the triumph of a different coup than the one he’d bred, Tejero preferred the failure of the coup over the triumph of a coup that wasn’t his, because he thought the triumph of Milans and Armada’s coup did not guarantee the immediate realization of his utopia of Spain as barracks and the liquidation of the Anti-Spain that no one personified better than Santiago Carrillo, or because for Tejero the coup d’état was more than anything a way to finish off Santiago Carrillo or what Santiago Carrillo personified and — recovering the radiant order of brotherhood and harmony regulated by reveilles under the radiant rule of God that had been abolished with the arrival of democracy — to recover what Santiago Carrillo, or what Santiago Carrillo personified to him, had wrenched away.