* Suárez had gone to El Pardo that day to record Franco’s Christmas message; we don’t know what they talked about, but we do know that at some official reception held around the same time Suárez spoke to Franco — this is what I was referring to above when I mentioned a discordant declaration — of the inevitable democratic future awaiting the country after his death. For any of us this nerve means only that Suárez was a Francoist so sure of his impeccable Francoist record and of his loyalty to Franco that he allowed himself to cast doubt on the continuity of the regime without fear of unleashing the wrath of its founder; it’s possible that for Franco it might have meant the same thing, but that precisely for this reason he might have considered the comment even more insidious, and did not forget it.
Chapter 3
On 18 February 1981, five days before the coup d’état, the newspaper El País published an editorial comparing Adolfo Suárez to General Della Rovere. It was another cliché, or almost: in the Madrid political village at the beginning of the 1980s — in certain circles of the left of this village — comparing Suárez to the Italian who collaborated with the Nazis turned hero of the resistance, the protagonist of an old Roberto Rossellini film, was almost as common as mentioning the name of General Pavía every time there was a mention of the threat of a coup d’état. But, although Suárez had resigned from his post as Prime Minister three weeks before and this fact perhaps might have been an invitation to leave behind the errors and recall the successes of the maker of democracy, the newspaper was not resorting to the comparison to praise the figure of Suárez, but to denigrate him. The editorial was extremely harsh. It was titled ‘Adiós, Suárez, Adiós’ and contained not only implacable reproaches of his passivity as acting Prime Minister, but also especially a global rejection of his management at the head of the government; the only merit they seemed to admit consisted in ‘having conferred the dignity of a democratic prime minister on curbing the remains of Francoism for years, like a convinced General Della Rovere transmuted into his role as defender of democracy’. But the newspaper soon denied Suárez this consolation honour and accused him of having given in to right-wing blackmail with his resignation. ‘General Della Rovere died in front of a firing squad,’ it concluded, ‘and Suárez is running away in a hurry, with no end of bitterness and not a lot of guts.’
Did Suárez know Rossellini’s film? Had he read the editorial in El País? Suárez was very fond of the cinema: as a young man he’d been a regular at double features, and as Prime Minister rarely would a week go by that he wouldn’t watch at least one of the 16-mm films his butler Pepe Higueras obtained from Televisión Española and projected in a room in Moncloa (sometimes he watched these films with his family or with the family’s guests; he often watched them alone, in the early hours: Suárez slept little and ate badly, a diet based on black coffee, cigarettes and omelettes); his taste in movies was not sophisticated — he mostly enjoyed adventure films and American comedies — but it’s not impossible that he might have seen Rossellini’s film in 1960 when it was released in Spain, or even that he might have seen it years later in Moncloa, curious about the character the great sewer of Madrid was comparing him to. As for the editorial in El País, he probably read it; although in the months of political siege and personal collapse that preceded the coup he didn’t allow the newspapers into the family’s living quarters without being expurgated, to spare his wife and children the daily broadsides against him, Suárez continued to read them, or at least he continued to read El País: from the very day of his appointment until that of his resignation, the newspaper had been a very severe critic of his mandate, but, because it represented the intellectual, modern and democratic left that his unredeemed guilty conscience of a former Falangist envied and for years dreamt of representing, not for a single instant had he not kept it in mind and maybe even secretly sought its approval, and that’s why so many people in his party and outside it accused him of governing with one eye on its pages. I don’t actually know if Suárez read the editorial in El País on 18 February; if he did, he must have felt a profound humiliation, because nothing could humiliate the cocky old Falangist as much as being called a coward, and few things could have pleased him more than demonstrating five days later that the accusation was false. I don’t actually know if Suárez had a capricious urge or the curiosity to watch Rossellini’s film when he was still Prime Minister and so many were identifying him with its protagonist; but if he did, maybe he would have felt the same profound emotion that strikes when we see outside ourselves what we carry inside ourselves, if he’d remembered it after 23 February, maybe he would have thought of reality’s strange propensity to allow itself to be colonized by clichés, to demonstrate that, despite their being fossilized truths, that doesn’t mean they’re not the truth, or that they don’t foreshadow it.