PART FIVE. VIVA ITALIA!
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The frozen image shows the right wing of the chamber of the Congress of Deputies on the evening of 23 February. Almost a quarter of an hour has gone by since the rebel Civil Guards burst in and Captain Jesús Muñecas has just announced from the speakers’ rostrum the arrival of a competent military authority to take charge of the coup. At this precise moment the camera — the only camera still in operation — shows a fixed and frontal shot of that area of the chamber, with the figure of Adolfo Suárez almost in the exact centre of the image, monopolizing the spectator’s attention as if they were filming a historical drama in the hall and the Prime Minister were playing the starring role.
Nothing belies the similarity when the image unfreezes; nothing will contradict it to the end of the recorded film. After Captain Muñecas’ speech the atmosphere in the chamber relaxes, the deputies give each other lights and cigarettes and weak glances and Adolfo Suárez asks an usher for a cigarette with gestures and then stands up, walks over to the usher, takes the offered cigarette and goes back and sits down again. Suárez is an incorrigible smoker, he always has tobacco with him and this evening is no exception (in fact, he has already smoked several cigarettes since the beginning of the incursion), so his gesture is a way of sounding out the assailants, testing their level of permissiveness with the hostages and investigating a way of acquiring information about what is going on. He soon finds out. He hasn’t smoked half the cigarette yet when a man in civilian clothes enters through the right-hand door; behind him appears Lieutenant Colonel Tejero, who motions to his men to let the recent arrival take a seat next to the Prime Minister, on the staircase running up beside the benches. The man (thin and tall and swarthy, with a white handkerchief sticking out of the pocket of his dark jacket) sits in the indicated spot and he and Suárez begin a dialogue that goes on almost without interruption for the next several minutes; the word dialogue is excessive: Suárez just listens to the words of the recent arrival and occasionally offers comments or questions, or what look to be comments or questions. Who is the recent arrival? Why has he been allowed into the chamber? What is he talking about with Suárez? The recent arrival is Cavalry Major José Luis Goróstegui, General Gutiérrez Mellado’s adjutant; credibly, the assault on the Cortes has caught him by surprise in the vicinity of the building or in some office in the building; also credibly, he has made use of his position as a military officer, friend or acquaintance of Captain Muñecas and acquaintance of Tejero to get them to let him sit next to the Prime Minister and tell him what he knows. To judge by the distracted attention the ministers and deputies around Suárez pay him, Goróstegui must have very little and not very important news to impart; to judge by the undivided attention Suárez pays him, it must be abundant and of enormous importance. The news is most likely all four things at once, and Tejero has most likely allowed Goróstegui to talk to Suárez to undermine his morale, so that he’ll understand that everything in the Cortes is under control and that the coup has triumphed.
Several identical minutes pass in this way, after which a knife-like voice cuts the silence filled with coughs and murmurs that seems to shroud the chamber. ‘Doctor Petinto, please come here. This gentleman appears to be slightly injured.’ The voice belongs to one of the golpista officers or an NCO who summons the parliamentary doctor to attend to Fernando Sagaseta, deputy from the Canary Islands, who’s been hit by some pieces of the ceiling that have fallen after the shooting. All the parliamentarians have turned at the same time towards the upper area of the chamber, where the voice came from, though they soon go back to their positions on the bench; Adolfo Suárez does so as well, and seconds later resumes his discussion with Major Goróstegui. At a certain moment, however, the two men fall silent and stare at the left-hand entrance to the chamber: there, after a few seconds, almost imperceptible in the bottom corner of the screen, Lieutenant Colonel Tejero’s back appears, then he turns right round to look over the whole chamber, as if making sure that all is in order; the lieutenant colonel disappears and a moment later appears again and then disappears once more, and his coming and going is a mirror image of other comings and goings that animate the image: a deputy — Donato Fuejo, doctor and Socialist — goes up to Fernando Sagaseta’s seat, two ushers take glasses of water to the stenographers and finally take the stenographers out of the chamber, a journalist with his accreditation visible on the front of his pullover goes up one of the side stairways followed by a Civil Guard. These movements have not interrupted Adolfo Suárez and Major Goróstegui’s speculations and commentaries and, just after Antonio Jiménez Blanco (UCD member and president of the Council of State, who has heard the news of the assault on the radio and has managed to get the assailants to authorize him to enter the Cortes to share his colleagues’ fate) comes into the chamber and sits behind Goróstegui, Suárez gets up from his bench and says to the two Civil Guards watching the entrance to the chamber: ‘I want to talk to the commander of the force’; then he walks down the stairs and takes a few steps towards the Guards. What happens next is not registered by the camera, because, although unaware that it’s still recording, a Civil Guard has just bumped into its viewfinder and made it present a confusing close-up of the press box; the sound of the chamber, however, can still be heard clearly. We can hear Suárez’s voice, unintelligible, in the midst of a commotion; we hear harsh military voices trying to impose silence (one says: ‘Calm down, gentlemen!’; another says: ‘The next time someone moves their hands this is going to move, got it?’; another says: ‘Hands still. That’s for when you’re alone. Here it’s over.’); harsher, louder and more contemptuous than the others, one voice ends up dominating (‘Mr Suárez, stay in your seat!’) and that’s when the Prime Minister manages to make himself heard amid the uproar (‘I have the authority as Prime Minister of the government. .’) until his voice is drowned out in a hail of shouts, insults and threats that seem to quieten the hall and return it to the simulacrum of normality it has been for half an hour. From that moment on the earlier mortuary silence reigns in the chamber again, while the camera, abandoned, continues offering a static shot of the press box; there, in the minutes that follow, a disorder of unconnected fragments crosses in chiaroscuro: the fleeting face of a woman wearing glasses, jackets with illegible journalists’ accreditations, tense hands that vent their nervousness or fear by twirling cheap ballpoint pens or holding shaking cigarettes, a bundle of papers with Cortes letterhead lying on a step, the wrought-iron railing of a stairway, ties with rhomboids and white shirts and white fists and violet dresses and pleated skirts and grey sweaters and trousers and hands gripping folders bursting with papers and briefcases. And finally, almost thirty-five minutes after the beginning, the film finishes with a whirlwind of snow.