Given that it’s a courageous gesture, Suárez’s gesture is a graceful gesture, because every courageous gesture is, according to Ernest Hemingway, a gesture of grace under pressure. In this sense it is an affirmative gesture; in another it is a negative gesture, because every courageous gesture is, according to Albert Camus, the rebellious gesture of a man who says no. In both cases it is a supreme gesture of liberty; it is not contradictory to say that it is also a histrionic gesture: the gesture of a man playing a role. If I’m not mistaken, only a couple of novels completely centred on the 23 February coup have been published; they’re not great novels, but one of them has the added interest that its author is Josep Melià, a journalist who was an acerbic critic of Suárez before becoming one of his closest collaborators. Operating as a novelist, at a certain point in his story Melià asks himself what the first thing was that Suárez thought when he heard the first shot in the chamber; he answers: the front page of tomorrow’s New York Times. The answer, which might seem innocuous or malicious, is intended to be cordial; it strikes me most of all as true. Like any pure politician, Suárez was a consummate actor: young, athletic, extremely handsome and always dressed with the polish of a provincial ladies’ man who enchanted mothers of right-wing families and provoked the mockery of left-wing journalists — double-breasted jackets with gold buttons, dark-grey trousers, sky-blue shirts and navy-blue ties — Suárez knowingly took advantage of his Kennedy-like bearing, understood politics as spectacle and during his many years of work at Radiotelevisión Española learned that it was no longer reality that created images, rather images that created reality. A few days before 23 February, at the most dramatic moment of his political life, when he announced his resignation as Prime Minister in a speech to a small group of Party members, Suárez could not help but insert a comment of the incorrigible leading man that he was: ‘Do you realize?’ he said to them. ‘My resignation will be front-page news in every newspaper in the world.’ The evening of 23 February was not the most dramatic moment of his political life, but the most dramatic of his whole life and, in spite of that (or precisely because of it), it’s possible that while the bullets whizzed around him in the chamber an intuition trained over years of political stardom dictated the instantaneous obviousness that, no matter what role fate had reserved for him at the end of that barbarous performance, he would never again act before an audience so absorbed and so large. If that’s true, he was not mistaken: the next day his picture monopolized the front page of the New York Times and that of all the newspapers and television screens in the world. Suárez’s gesture, in this way, is the gesture of a man who’s posing. That’s what Melià imagines. But thinking it through perhaps his imagination is too slight; thinking it through, on the evening of 23 February Suárez was perhaps not posing just for the newspapers and television screens: just as he would from that moment on in his political life — just as if in that moment he’d known who he truly was — perhaps Suárez was posing for history.
That’s maybe another gesture his gesture contains: a posthumous gesture, so to speak. Because the fact is that at least for its main leaders the 23 February coup was not exactly a coup against democracy: it was a coup against Adolfo Suárez; or if you prefer: it was a coup against the kind of democracy Adolfo Suárez embodied for them. Suárez only understood this hours or days later, but in those first seconds he could not have been unaware that for almost five years of democracy no politician had attracted the hatred of the golpistas as much as he had and that, if blood was going to be spilled that evening in the Cortes, the first to be spilled would be his. Maybe that might be an explanation of his gesture: as soon as he heard the first shot, Suárez knew he could not protect himself from death, knew that he was already dead. I admit this is an embarrassing explanation, which tastelessly combines emphasis with melodrama; but that doesn’t make it false, especially since deep down Suárez’s gesture is still a gesture of emphatic melodrama characteristic of a man whose temperament tended as much towards comedy as tragedy and melodrama. Suárez, it’s true, would have rejected the explanation. In fact, whenever anyone asked him to explain his gesture he opted for the same reply: ‘Because I was still Prime Minister of His Majesty’s government and the Prime Minister of the government could not dive for cover.’ The reply, which I believe sincere, is predictable, and betrays a very important characteristic of Suárez: his sacramental devotion to power, the disproportionate dignity bestowed by the office he held; it is also not a boastful reply: it presupposes that, had he not still been Prime Minister, he would have acted upon the same prudent instinct as the rest of his colleagues, protecting himself from the gunshots under his bench; but it is, furthermore or most of all, an insufficient reply: it forgets that all the rest of the parliamentarians represented the sovereignty of the people with almost the same claim as he had — not to mention Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, who was going to be sworn in as Prime Minister that very evening, or Felipe González, who would be within a year and a half, or Manuel Fraga, who aspired to be, or Landelino Lavilla, who was the Speaker of the Cortes, or Agustín Rodríguez Sahagún, who was Minister of Defence and responsible for the Army. Be that as it may, one thing is beyond doubt: Suárez’s gesture is not the powerful gesture of a man confronting adversity at the height of his powers, but the gesture of a man politically finished and personally broken, who for the last six months has felt that the entire political class was plotting against him and maybe now also feels that the seditious Civil Guards bursting into the chamber of the Cortes is the result of this same widespread conspiracy.
Chapter 2
The first feeling is quite accurate; the second not so much. It’s true that during the autumn and winter of 1980 the Spanish ruling class has devoted itself to a series of strange political manoeuvres with the objective of bringing down Adolfo Suárez’s government, but it’s only partly true that the attack on the Cortes and the military coup are the result of this widespread conspiracy. Two different things are involved in the 23 February coup: one is a series of political operations against Adolfo Suárez, but not against democracy, or not in principle; the other is a military operation against Adolfo Suárez and also against democracy. The two things are not entirely independent; but neither are they entirely united: the political operations were the context that fostered the military operation; they were the placenta of the coup, not the coup itself: the nuance is key in understanding the coup. For this reason we don’t need to pay too much attention to the politicians of the time who state that they knew in advance what was going to happen in the Cortes that evening, or that many people in the chamber knew, or even that the whole chamber knew; they are almost certainly fictitious, vain or self-interested memories: the truth is, since the political operation and the military operation barely communicated, nobody or almost nobody in the chamber knew, and very few people outside knew.
What everyone in the whole country did know was that a coup d’état was in the air that winter. On 20 February, three days before the coup, Ricardo Paseyro, Madrid correspondent for Paris Match, wrote: ‘Spain’s economic situation is verging on catastrophe, terrorism is on the rise, scepticism towards institutions and their representatives is profoundly damaging the soul of the nation, the state is collapsing beneath the assault of feudalism and the excesses on the part of the autonomous governments, and Spain’s foreign policy is a fiasco.’ He concluded: ‘There is the scent of a coup d’état, a golpe de estado, in the air.’ Everyone knew what could happen, but no one or almost no one knew when, how and where; as for who, prospective candidates to carry out a coup d’état were not exactly in short supply in the Army, although it’s certain that as soon as Lieutenant Colonel Tejero burst into the chamber everyone or almost every one of the deputies must have recognized him immediately, because his face had been in the newspapers ever since mid-November 1978 when Diario 16 broke the news that he had been arrested for planning a coup based on taking the government hostage when the Cabinet was meeting at Moncloa and using the resulting power vacuum as an excuse to take over control of the state; after his arrest, Tejero was put on trial, but the military tribunal ended up imposing a laughable sentence and a few months later he was already at liberty and available for duty, that is without a concrete professional assignment, that is without any occupation other than making preparations for his second attempt with maximum discretion and the minimum number of people, which ought to prevent the leak that made the first one fall through. So, in the most absolute secrecy, counting on a very reduced number of military conspirators and with a very high degree of improvisation, the coup was hatched, and this explains to a great extent how, of all the threatened coups looming over Spanish democracy since the previous summer, this was the one that finally materialized.