Suárez complied with it comfortably. The feature that best defined him until he arrived in power was an outrageous hunger for power: like one of those wild young men of nineteenth-century novels who set out from the provinces to conquer the capital — like Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, like Balzac’s Lucien Rubempré, like Flaubert’s Frédéric Moreau — Suárez was ambition incarnate and was never ashamed of that, because he never accepted there was anything reprehensible about the desire for power; on the contrary: he thought that without power there was no politics and without politics for him there was not the slightest possibility of fulfilment. He was a pure politician because he never thought of being anything else, because he never dreamt of being anything else, because he was an ascetic of power ready to sacrifice everything to acquire it and because he would have made a pact with the devil without a second thought in exchange for getting to be what he got to be. ‘What is power for you?’ a Paris Match journalist asked him days after he was named Prime Minister, and Suárez only managed to respond with his dazzling winner’s smile and a few words that explained nothing and explained everything: ‘Power? I love it.’ During his best years this jubilant brazenness gave him an unbeatable superiority over his adversaries, who saw insatiable greed in his eyes and were nevertheless unable to stare him down and kept feeding it to their own cost. Political power turned into his instrument of personal growth, but only because before it had been a free-standing, voracious passion, and if he had an idealized vision of the dignity of a prime minister to the point of myth it was because the position of Prime Minister constituted for him the highest expression of power and because for his whole life he hadn’t wanted anything other than to be Prime Minister.
It’s true: he was an uneducated rogue, he was a little provincial Falangist, he was a Francoist upstart, he was the King’s messenger boy; his detractors were right, except that his life story demonstrates that being right isn’t the whole story. He possessed an actor’s talent for deceit, but the first time he saw Santiago Carrillo he didn’t deceive him: he did belong to a family of defeated Republicans, several of whom had seen the inside of Franco’s prisons during the war; no one in his house, however, instilled in him the slightest political conviction, and it’s quite possible that no one ever talked to him about the war except as a natural catastrophe; it’s likely, however, that he learned from childhood to hate defeat the way one hates a family affliction. He was born in 1932 in Cebreros, a wine-producing town in the province of Ávila. His mother’s family had a small business, and she was a tough, religious and headstrong woman; his father was the son of the court secretary and also a likeable, cocky, vain, swindling, skirt-chasing gambler. Although he never really got on well with his father — or perhaps for this very reason — it might be that deep down he was just like his father, except for the fact that in his case the exercise of these inclinations and features of his character was entirely subordinate to the satisfaction of his only true appetite. He was a terrible student, who went from one school to the next and rarely set foot inside the university except to take exams for courses he’d often memorized without understanding; he never acquired the sedentary habit of reading, and till the end of his days he was pursued by a rumour, only initially encouraged by him, according to which he’d never gathered enough patience to read a book from the first page to the last. He was interested in other things: girls, dancing, football, tennis, cinema and cards. He was hyperactive, vital and compulsively sociable, a neighbourhood leader with a spontaneous kindness and indisputable success with women, but he flipped easily from euphoria to dejection and, although he probably never visited a psychiatrist, some of his close friends always considered him a prime candidate for psychiatry. The balm against his psychological fragilities was a solid religiosity that threw him into the arms of Acción Católica and channelled his vocation for prominence from adolescence by allowing him to found and preside over pious associations with innocuous political pretensions. At the end of the 1940s or beginning of the 1950s, in a city like Ávila, fortified by the provincial sanctimoniousness of Spanish Catholicism, Adolfo Suárez personified to perfection the ideal youth of the dictatorship: a neat, handsome, cheerful, sporty, Catholic, bold and enterprising young man, whose political ambitions were bound up with his social and economic ambitions and whose mentality of obedience and the sacristy could not even imagine that anybody might question the foundations and mechanisms of the regime, but only make use of them.
Everything seemed to augur a radiant future, but from one day to the next it all seemed to collapse. At the beginning of 1955, when he’d just turned twenty-three, finished his law degree with great difficulty and secured his first paying job at the Beneficencia de Ávila (a local welfare charity), his father fled from the city shrouded in a business scandal, abandoning the family. Suárez bore this desertion like a cataclysm: as well as the emotional wrench, his father’s flight meant social dishonour and economic poverty for a large family whose shortage of money did not correspond with their high social standing in the city; it’s likely that, prey to hypochondria and unable to meet the needs of his mother and four younger brothers on his trainee’s salary, Suárez seriously considered the escape route of entering a seminary. A stroke of luck freed him from his tribulations. In the month of August Suárez met Fernando Herrero Tejedor, a young Falangist prosecuting attorney and member of Opus Dei who had just been named civil governor and provincial chief of the Movimiento in Ávila and who, thanks to the recommendation of one of his private teachers, gave Suárez a job in the civil government, which allowed him to supplement his Beneficencia salary, enter the structure of the single party and cultivate the friendship of a powerful and well-connected person who over the years would become his political mentor. His joy, however, was short-lived: in 1956 Herrero Tejedor was transferred to Logroño, Suárez lost his job and the following year, with no money or hope of prosperity in the province, he decided to try his luck in Madrid. There he was reunited with his father, there he set up an office with him to practise as a legal agent (a line of work his father had practised irregularly in Ávila), there he managed to reunite under the same roof his father, his mother and one of his brothers in a flat on Calle Hermanos Miralles. But after only a few months things went off the rails again: his father got the family involved in shady financial business again and Suárez broke with him, left the office and went to live on his own in a boarding house. Perhaps at that stage he hit rock bottom, although we know little about it for sure: people say he barely knew anyone in Madrid, that he saw his mother occasionally and made his living with sporadic jobs, carrying luggage at the Príncipe Pío railway station or selling electrical appliances door to door; they say he suffered hardships, that he went hungry, that he spent a lot of time wandering the streets. Some of Suárez’s apologists appeal to the real predicaments of those days to depict a ‘self-made man’ who’d known misery and not the privileges the politicians of Francoism grew up with; the depiction is not false, as long as we don’t forget that the period was very brief and that, while it lasted, Suárez was just a young provincial fallen on hard times, exiled in the capital awaiting an opportunity worthy of his ambition. The one to provide it was again Herrero Tejedor, who then held the post of national provincial delegate in the secretary generalship of the Movimiento and who, as soon as the father of one of Suárez’s friends told him the situation he was in and asked for a job for him, hastened to appoint him as his personal secretary. That happened in the autumn of 1958. From that time on, and until the death of Herrero Tejedor in 1975, Suárez was hardly ever apart from his mentor; from that time on, and until he himself ended up destroying it, Suárez was hardly ever apart from Francoist power, because that was the ever so modest start of his step-by-step ascent of the Movimiento hierarchy. Before he began it, however, something else had happened: in Ávila Suárez had met Amparo Illana, a beautiful, rich, classy young woman with whom he fell immediately in love and whom he would take another four years to marry; by then he was about to leave for Madrid with nothing in his pockets but his hands, and the first time he visited the house of his future wife her father — a military lawyer with the rank of colonel and treasurer of the Press Association of Madrid — interrogated him about how he was earning his living. ‘Badly,’ he answered, with his cocky Ávila charm intact. ‘But don’t worry: before I’m thirty I’ll be civil governor; before forty, undersecretary; and before fifty, a minister in the government and then Prime Minister.’