I don’t know: maybe I could prolong this book indefinitely and extract different meanings from Suárez’s gesture indefinitely without exhausting its meaning or grazing or discerning its real meaning. I don’t know. Sometimes I tell myself that this is all a mistake, one more fantasy added to the incalculable fantasies that surround 23 February, the last and most insidious: although the truly enigmatic is not what nobody’s seen, but what everyone has seen and nobody has managed entirely to understand, maybe Suárez’s gesture holds no secret or real meaning, or no more than any other gesture holds, all inexhaustible or inexplicable or absurd, all arrows flying off in countless directions. But other times, most of the time, I tell myself that it’s not like that: the gestures of Gutiérrez Mellado and Santiago Carrillo are translucent, exhaustible, explicable, intelligible, or that’s what we feel; Suárez’s gesture is not: if you don’t wonder what it means then you understand what it means; but if you wonder what it means then you don’t understand what it means. That’s why Suárez’s gesture is not a translucent gesture but a transparent gesture: a meaningful gesture because in itself it doesn’t mean anything, a gesture that contains nothing but through which, as through a window, we feel we could see everything — we could see Adolfo Suárez, 23 February, the recent history of Spain, perhaps a face that might be our own true face — a gesture all the more disconcerting because its deepest secret lies in its having no secret. Unless, of course, that rather than a mistake or a correct answer all this is a misunderstanding, and that examining the meaning of Suárez’s gesture doesn’t amount to the same thing as coming up with a correct question or a mistaken question or an unanswerable question, but just coming up with an essentially ironic question, whose true answer lies in the question itself. Unless, I mean, that the challenge I set myself in writing this book, trying to respond by way of reality to what I didn’t know and didn’t want to respond to by way of fiction, was an unmeetable challenge, and that the answer to that question — the only possible answer to that question — is a novel.
Chapter 4
‘The transition is now history,’ wrote the sociologist Juan J. Linz in 1996. ‘It is not today the subject of debate or political struggle.’ A decade later Linz could no longer say that: for some time now the transition has not only been subject to debate, but also — sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly — the subject of political struggle. It occurs to me that this change is the consequence of at least two factors: the first is a generation of leftists coming to political, economic and intellectual power, my generation, who took no active part in the change from dictatorship to democracy and who consider this change to have been done badly, or that it could have been done much better than it was; the second is the renewal in the intellectual centres of an old far-left discourse that argues that the transition was the consequence of a fraud negotiated between Francoists wanting to stay in power at any cost, led by Adolfo Suárez, and supine leftists led by Santiago Carrillo, a fraud the result of which was not an authentic rupture with Francoism and which left real power in the same hands that had usurped it during the dictatorship, shaping a dull, insufficient and defective democracy.* In part as a consequence of a conscience as clear and rock hard as those of the golpistas of 23 February, of an irrepressible nostalgia for the clarities of authoritarianism and sometimes a simple ignorance of recent history, both factors run the risk of delivering the monopoly of the transition to the right — which has rushed to accept it, glorifying the time to a ridiculous extent, that is mystifying it — while the left, caving in to the combined blackmail of narcissistic youth and an ultramontane left, seems at times ready to wash its hands of it the way one washes one’s hands of an awkward bequest.
I think it’s a mistake. Although it didn’t have the joy of an instantaneous collapse of a frightful regime, the rupture with Francoism was a genuine rupture. To achieve it the left made many concessions, but practising politics involves making concessions, because it involves giving way on the incidentals in order not to give way on the essentials; the left gave way on the incidentals, but the Francoists gave way on the essentials, because Francoism disappeared and they had to renounce the absolute power they’d held for almost half a century. It’s true that justice was not entirely done, that the Republican legitimacy violated by Francoism was not restored, those responsible for the dictatorship did not face trial, its victims were not fully and immediately compensated, but it’s also true that in exchange a democracy was constructed that would have been impossible to construct if the prime objective hadn’t been that of crafting a future but — Fiat justitia et pereat mundus — making amends for the past: on 23 February 1981, when it seemed the system of liberties was no longer at risk after four years of democratic government, the Army attempted a coup d’état, which was on the brink of succeeding, so it’s easy to imagine how long democracy would have lasted if four years earlier, when it had barely got started, a government had decided to bring justice to all, though the world perish. It’s also true that political and economic power did not change hands overnight — which would probably not have happened either if instead of a negotiated rupture with Francoism there had been a direct rupture — but it’s evident that power soon began to operate under the restrictions imposed by the new regime, which brought the left to government after five years and long before began a profound reorganization of economic power. Furthermore, to state that the political system that arose out of those years is not a perfect democracy is to state the obvious: perhaps a perfect dictatorship exists — they all aspire to it, in some way all feel they are — but there’s no such thing as a perfect democracy, because what defines a true democracy is its flexible, open, malleable character — that is, permanently improvable — in such a way that the only perfect democracy is one that can be for ever perfected. Spanish democracy is not perfect, but it is real, worse than some and better than many, and anyway, incidentally, more solid and deeper than the fragile democracy General Franco overthrew by force. All this was to a great extent a triumph for anti-Francoism, a triumph for the democratic opposition, a triumph for the left, which obliged the Francoists to understand that Francoism had no future other than its total extinction. Suárez understood that immediately and acted accordingly; all this we owe him; all this and, to a great extent, also the obvious: the longest period of freedom Spain has enjoyed in its entire history. That’s what the last thirty years have been. Denying it is to deny reality, the inveterate vice of a certain section of the left that continues to inconvenience democracy and certain intellectuals whose difficulty in emancipating themselves from abstraction and the absolute prevents them from connecting ideas to experience. All in all, Francoism was a bad story, but the end of that story has not been bad. It could have been: the proof is that in the middle of the 1970s the most lucid foreign analysts were predicting a catastrophic exit from the dictatorship; maybe the best proof is what happened on 23 February. It could have been, but it wasn’t, and I see no reason why those of us who didn’t participate in that story owing to age should not celebrate it; nor do I think that, had we been old enough to participate, we would have committed fewer errors than our parents did.