Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

I don’t know if the success or failure of a coup d’état is settled in its first minutes; I do know that at twenty-five to seven that evening, ten minutes after it began, the coup d’état was a success: Lieutenant Colonel Tejero had taken the Cortes, General Milans del Bosch’s tanks were patrolling the streets of Valencia, the tanks of the Brunete Armoured Division were preparing to leave their barracks, General Armada was waiting for the King’s phone call in his office at Army General Headquarters; at twenty-five to seven that evening everything was going as the golpistas had anticipated, but at twenty to seven their plans had changed and the coup was beginning to fail. There were high stakes riding on those crucial five minutes in the Zarzuela Palace. It was the King’s hand to play.

Ever since the very day of 23 February there have been unceasing accusations that the King organized the 23 February coup, that he was somehow implicated in the coup, that in some way he had wanted it to triumph. It is an absurd accusation: if the King had organized the coup, if he’d been implicated in it or had wanted it to triumph, the coup would have triumphed without the slightest doubt. The truth is obvious: the King did not organize the coup but rather stopped it, for the simple reason that he was the only person who could stop it. Stating the above is not the same as stating that the King’s behaviour in relation to 23 February was irreproachable; it was not, just as that of the majority of the political class was not: as with the political class, many extenuating circumstances can be found for the King — his youth, immaturity, inexperience, fear — but the reality is that in the months before 23 February he did things he shouldn’t have done. He should not have abandoned the strict neutrality of his constitutional role as arbiter between institutions. He should not have encouraged the replacement of Suárez. He should not have encouraged or considered alternative solutions to Suárez. He should not have spoken to anyone or allowed anyone to speak to him about the possibility of replacing Suárez’s government with a coalition or caretaker or unity government headed by a soldier. He should not have submitted the government to the utmost pressure to have it accept General Armada as Deputy Chief of the Army General Staff, authorizing him to conceive and propagate the idea that he’d been brought to Madrid to be made Prime Minister of a coalition or caretaker or unity government. He should not have been ambiguous; he should have been emphatic: he should not have allowed any politician, any businessman, any journalist, any soldier — especially any soldier — to even imagine that he might support forcibly constitutional manoeuvres that were straining the recently installed hinges of democracy, pushing ajar its doors for an army eager to finish it off. Like almost the entire political class, in the months before 23 February the King behaved imprudently at the very least and — because for the military he was not only the head of state, but also the head of the Armed Forces and Franco’s heir — much more than that of the political class his own imprudence gave wings to the advocates of a coup. But on 23 February it was the King who clipped them.

It’s not easy to reconstruct what happened in the Zarzuela Palace during the first fifteen minutes of the coup; they were moments of enormous commotion: it’s not just that testimonies from the protagonists are scarce and contradict each other; the thing is that sometimes the protagonists contradict themselves. I am deliberately using the plural: the King is not the only protagonist; there is also — in a secondary but appreciable role — his secretary, Sabino Fernández Campo, in theory the third authority in the Royal Household, but in practice the first. Fernández Campo was by then a general with political experience, legal knowledge and wide-ranging military relations, who did not belong to the monarchist aristocracy and who four years earlier had replaced General Armada, with whom at first he maintained an excellent relationship that in the months before the coup had deteriorated, maybe because after a few years of distance from the Palace Armada had managed to get close to the King again and his shadow had begun to hover over the Zarzuela once again. It was Fernández Campo who on the evening of 23 February, after hearing the gunshots in the Cortes on the radio, sent word to the King, who was playing a game of squash with a friend and who, like his secretary, immediately understood they were facing a coup d’état. What happens next in the Zarzuela — what happens over the course of the night in the Zarzuela — happens in a few square metres, in the King’s office and in Fernández Campo’s, which was the outer office of the King’s outer office. When the King arrives, he finds out almost at the same time about the assault on the Cortes and that Milans del Bosch has just issued an edict proclaiming a state of emergency in Valencia and, given that Milans is a solidly monarchist soldier whose fidelity he has taken great pains to cultivate, calls him on the telephone; Milans calms him down or tries to calm the King down: there’s nothing to worry about, he is at his command as ever, has just assumed all the powers in the region to safeguard order until the hijacking of the Cortes is resolved. While the King is speaking to Milans, Fernández Campo manages to get in contact with Tejero thanks to a member of the Royal Guard who was attending the session of investiture of the new Prime Minister of the government in plain clothes and informs the royal secretary of what’s happened from a phone booth and gives him a telephone number: Fernández Campo speaks to Tejero, forbids him to invoke the King’s name, as he appears to have done when he burst into the Cortes, orders him to leave the Cortes immediately; before he finishes speaking, however, Tejero hangs up on him. That’s when Fernández Campo calls General Juste, commander of the Brunete Armoured Division. He does so because he knows the Brunete — the most powerful, modern and hardened unit of the Army, and the nearest to the capital — is crucial for the triumph or failure of a coup; he also does so because he and Juste have been friends for many years. After the unplanned gunfire in the Cortes, which has endowed what had been intended as a soft coup with the scenery of a hard coup, the dialogue between Juste and Fernández Campo constitutes the second setback for the golpistas and the first stage of the dismantling of the coup. At the beginning of the conversation neither of the two generals speaks openly, in part because neither knows on which side of the coup his interlocutor will position himself, but especially because in Juste’s office with him are General Torres Rojas and Colonel San Martín, who with Major Pardo Zancada are leading the uprising in the Brunete and who have convinced him to send his troops into Madrid with the argument that the operation has been ordered by Milans, enjoys the backing of the King and is being piloted from the Zarzuela Palace by Armada; Torres Rojas and San Martín listen carefully to the words Juste says to Fernández Campo, and they flow with difficulty down the telephone line, sinuous and plagued by guesswork, until the commander of Brunete mentions Armada’s name and everything seems suddenly to fall into place for him: Juste asks Fernández Campo if Armada is at the Zarzuela and Fernández Campo answers no; then Juste asks if they’re expecting Armada at the Zarzuela and Fernández Campo answers no again; then Juste says: Ah. That changes everything.

That’s how the countercoup begins. The conversation between Juste and Fernández Campo goes on for a few more minutes, by the end of which the commander of the Brunete Division has understood that Torres Rojas, San Martín and Pardo Zancada have deceived him and the King does not endorse the operation; Juste hangs up the phone, picks it up again and calls his immediate superior and the highest military authority of the region of Madrid, General Guillermo Quintana Lacaci. By then Quintana Lacaci has spoken fleetingly with the King; like all the Captains General, Quintana Lacaci is an unwavering Francoist, but, unlike what almost all the other Captains General will do over the hours that follow, he has put himself unwaveringly under the orders of the King for whatever the King orders him to do: stop the coup or bring out the tanks; the King has thanked him for his loyalty and ordered him not to move his troops, so when Quintana Lacaci receives Juste’s call announcing that the Brunete Division is ready to occupy Madrid on the orders of Milans, the Captain General flies into a rage: his subordinate has jumped the chain of command and has given an order with enormous implications without consulting him; he orders him to revoke it: he must confine the division to barracks and oblige those who have already taken to the streets or are preparing to do so to return to their units. Juste complies with the order and from that moment begins to put things into reverse, or tries to; he tries without much faith, without much energy, menaced by the mood of rebellion that has overtaken the Brunete headquarters and by the intimidating proximity of Torres Rojas and San Martín — who, on the other hand, paralysed by vertigo or fear, find neither sufficient energy nor faith to relieve him of his command of the unit and prevent him from putting the brakes on the coup — so it’s mainly Quintana Lacaci who initiates a violent telephonic struggle, bristling with shouts, threats, insults and calls to order, with the Brunete regiment commanders, who minutes before were euphorically obeying the order to take Madrid and are now refusing to obey the countermand or postponing as long as they can, by way of excuses, evasions and military hair-splitting, the moment of doing so, hoping the military uprising will overflow the barracks and flood the capital and then the entire country. That, however, is not going to happen, although throughout the whole evening and night of 23 February it seems about to happen, and if it doesn’t happen it’s not just because fifteen minutes after the assault on the Cortes Quintana Lacaci (or Juste and Quintana Lacaci, or Juste and Quintana Lacaci on the King’s orders) have set in motion the mechanism of the countercoup in Madrid, but also because at that very moment an even more important event is taking place, that entirely thwarts the golpistas ’ plans: the King (or Fernández Campo, or the King and Fernández Campo) have refused General Armada permission to come to the Zarzuela Palace.