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* To those two facts a philosopher could add another, less circumstantial and maybe more profound: human beings’ growing capacity for dissatisfaction, a paradoxical result of Western society’s growing capacity to satisfy our needs. ‘Where cultural progress is genuinely successful and ills are cured, this progress is seldom received with enthusiasm,’ writes Odo Marquard. ‘Instead, it is taken for granted and attention focuses on those ills that remain. And these remaining ills are subject to the law of increasing annoyance. The more negative elements disappear from reality, the more annoying the remaining negative elements become, precisely because of this decrease.’

Chapter 5

On 17 July 2008, the day before Adolfo Suárez last appeared in the newspapers, photographed in the garden of his house in La Florida in the company of the King — when he’d already seemed to be dead for a long time or everyone had talked about him for a long time as if he were dead — I buried my father. He was seventy-nine, three years older than Suárez, and he’d died the previous day at home, sitting in his favourite armchair, in a gentle, painless way, perhaps without understanding he was dying. Like Suárez, he was an ordinary man: he came from a rich family that had come down in the world settled since time immemorial in a village in Extremadura, he’d studied in Córdoba and in the 1960s had emigrated to Catalonia; he didn’t drink, he’d been an obstinate smoker but didn’t smoke any more, in his youth he’d belonged to Acción Católica and the Falange; he’d been a handsome young man, kind, conceited, a lady’s man and gambler, a good verbena dancer, although I’d swear he was never cocky. He was, however, a good veterinary surgeon, and I suppose he could have made money, but he didn’t, or no more than necessary to support his family and put three of his five children through university. He had few friends, no hobbies, didn’t travel and for his last fifteen years lived on his pension. Like Suárez, he was dark-haired, thin, handsome, frugal and transparent; unlike Suárez, he tried to go unnoticed, and I think he managed it. I won’t presume to declare that he was never involved in any crooked deal in those crooked times, but I can say, as far as I know, there was no one who didn’t take him for a decent man.

We always got along well, except maybe, inevitably, during my adolescence. I think at that time I was a little embarrassed to be his son, I think because I thought I was better than him, or that I was going to be. We didn’t argue much, but whenever we did argue we argued about politics, which is strange, because my father wasn’t terribly interested in politics, and neither was I, from which I deduce that this was our way of communicating at a time when we didn’t have much to communicate to each other, or when it wasn’t easy to do so. I said at the beginning of this book that my father was a Suarista then, as was my mother, and that I looked down on Suárez, one of Franco’s collaborators, an ignorant and superficial nonentity who through luck and fiddling had managed to prosper in democracy; it’s possible I thought something similar of my father, and that’s why I was a little bit embarrassed to be his son. The fact is that more than one argument ended in shouts, if not with a slammed door (my father, for example, was outraged and horrified by ETA’s murders; I was not in favour of ETA, at least not much, but I understood that it was all Suárez’s fault, that he left ETA no choice but to kill); the fact is also that, once adolescence ended, the arguments ended too. We, however, carried on talking about politics, I suppose because having pretended to be interested we’d ended up actually interested. When Suárez retired, my father continued to be a Suarista, he voted for the right and occasionally for the left, and although we didn’t stop disagreeing we’d discovered by then that it was better to disagree than to agree, because the conversation lasted longer. In reality, politics ended up being our main, almost our only topic of conversation; I don’t remember us talking very often about his work, or my books: my father was not a reader of novels and, despite knowing he read mine and that he was proud that I was a writer and that he clipped out and saved articles about me that appeared in the newspapers, I never heard him express an opinion on any of them. In recent years he gradually lost interest in everything, including politics, but his interest in my books grew, or that was my impression, and when I began to write this one I told him what it was about (I didn’t deceive him: I told him it was about Adolfo Suárez’s gesture, not the 23 February coup, because from the beginning I wanted to imagine that Adolfo Suárez’s gesture contained the events of 23 February as if in code); he looked at me: for a moment I thought he’d make some comment or burst out laughing or into tears, but he just frowned absently, I don’t know whether sardonically. Later, in the final months of his illness, when he’d wasted away and could barely move or speak, I went on telling him about this book. I talked to him about the years of the political change, about what happened on 23 February, about events and figures we’d argued over years before till we were fed up; now he listened to me distractedly, if he really was listening, to force his attention, sometimes I asked him questions, which he didn’t usually answer. But one evening I asked him why he and my mother had trusted Suárez and he suddenly seemed to wake out of his lethargy, trying in vain to lean back in his armchair he looked at me with wild eyes and moved his skeletal hands nervously, almost furiously, as if that fit of anger was going to put him for a moment back in charge of the family or send me back to adolescence, or as if we’d spent our whole lives embroiled in a meaningless argument and finally the occasion had arrived to settle it. ‘Because he was like us,’ he said with what little voice he had left. I was about to ask him what he meant by that when he added: ‘He was from a small town, he’d been in the Falange, he’d been in Acción Católica, he wasn’t going to do anything bad, you understand, don’t you?’

I understood. I think this time I understood. And that’s why a few months later, when his death and Adolfo Suárez’s resurrection in the newspapers formed the final symmetry, the final figure of this story, I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d started to write this book not to try to understand Adolfo Suárez or Adolfo Suárez’s gesture but to try to understand my father, if I’d kept writing it in order to keep talking to my father, if I’d wanted to finish it so my father could read it and know that I’d finally understood, that I’d understood that I wasn’t so right and he wasn’t so wrong, that I’m no better than him, and that now I never will be.