Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

That’s the image; that’s the gesture: a translucent gesture that contains many gestures.

At the end of 1989, when Adolfo Suárez’s political career was drawing to a close, Hans Magnus Enzensberger celebrated in an essay the birth of a new type of hero: heroes of retreat. According to Enzensberger, instead of the classic hero, the hero of triumph and conquest, the twentieth century’s dictatorships have brought to light a new kind of modern hero, who is a hero of renunciation, reduction and dismantling: the first is a steadfast and principled idealist; the second, a dubious professional of fixing and negotiation; the first reaches the height of his achievement by imposing his positions; the second, by abandoning them, undermining himself. That’s why the hero of retreat is more than a political hero: he is also a moral hero. Enzensberger gives three examples of this innovative figure: Mikhail Gorbachev, who at the time was trying to dismantle the Soviet Union; Wojciech Jaruzelski, who in 1981 had prevented a Soviet invasion of Poland; Adolfo Suárez, who had dismantled the Franco regime. Adolfo Suárez a hero? And not just politically, but a moral hero? For the right as well as the left that was a difficult one to swallow: the left could not forget — had no reason to forget — that, although after a given moment he wanted to be a progressive politician, and up to a certain point he managed to be, Suárez was for many years a loyal collaborator with Francoism and a perfect prototype of the arriviste that the Franco regime’s institutionalized corruption favoured; the right could not forget — should not have forgotten — that Suárez never accepted his attachment to the right, that many policies he applied or advocated were not right-wing and no other Spanish politician of the second half of the twentieth century has exasperated the right as much as he did. Was Suárez then a hero of the centre, that political pipe dream he himself coined in order to harvest votes from the right and the left? Impossible, because the fanciful notion vanished as soon as Suárez left politics, or even before, the way magic vanishes as soon as the magician leaves the stage. Now, twenty years after Enzensberger’s report, when illness has destroyed Suárez and he is regarded as a praiseworthy figure by all, maybe because he can no longer bother anybody, there is among the Spanish ruling class an agreement to accord him a starring role in the foundation of the democracy; but it’s one thing to have participated in the founding of Spanish democracy and quite another to be a hero of democracy. Was he? Is Enzensberger right? And, if we forget for a moment that no one is a hero to their contemporaries and accept as a hypothesis that Enzensberger is right, does Suárez’s gesture on the evening of 23 February not acquire the value of a founding gesture of democracy? Does Suárez’s gesture not then become emblematic of Suárez as a hero of retreat?

The first thing that needs to be said is that this gesture is not a gratuitous gesture; Suárez’s gesture is a gesture with meaning, although we might not know exactly what it means, just as the gesture of all the rest of the parliamentarians — all except Gutiérrez Mellado and Santiago Carrillo — has meaning and is not gratuitous, those who instead of remaining seated during the gunfire obey the golpistas and seek shelter under their benches: that of the rest of the parliamentarians is not, let’s be honest, a terribly graceful gesture, which none of those involved has wanted to dwell on or return to, and rightly so, although one of them — someone as cold and calm as Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo — doesn’t hesitate to attribute the Parliament’s discredit to that desert of empty benches. The most obvious gesture Suárez’s gesture contains is a gesture of courage; a remarkable courage: those who lived through that moment in the Cortes all remember the apocalyptic din of the bursts of automatic-rifle fire in the enclosed space of the chamber, the horror of an immediate death, the certainty that this Armageddon — in the words of Alfonso Guerra, deputy leader of the Socialist Party, who was sitting opposite Suárez — could not end without a massacre, which is the same certainty overwhelming the television directors and technicians who watched the scene live from the Prado del Rey studios. That day the chamber was filled with about three hundred and fifty parliamentarians, some of whom — Simón Sánchez Montero, for example, or Gregorio López Raimundo — had demonstrated their valour in clandestinity and in Franco’s prisons; I don’t know if there’s much to reproach them for: whichever way you look at it, remaining in your seat during the skirmish was an act so rash it verged on a desire for martyrdom. In wartime, in the unthinking heat of combat, it is not unusually rash; in peacetime and in the solemn, habitual tedium of a parliamentary session it is. I’ll add that, to judge from the images, Suárez’s rashness is not one dictated by instinct but by reason: when the first shot sounds Suárez is on his feet; at the sound of the second he tries to bring General Gutiérrez Mellado back to the bench; at the sound of the third and the outbreak of the firing he sits down, settles on his bench and leans against the backrest waiting for the shooting to stop, or a bullet to kill him. It is a lingering, reflexive gesture; it appears to be a practised gesture, and maybe in a certain way it was: those who saw Suárez frequently at that time attested that he had spent a lot of time trying to prepare himself for a violent end, as if hounded by a dark premonition (for several months he’d been carrying a small pistol in his pocket; during the autumn and winter more than one visitor to Moncloa, the prime ministerial residence, heard him say: ‘The only way they’re going to get me out of here is by beating me in an election or carrying me out feet first’); it could be, but in any case it’s not easy to prepare oneself for a death like that, and it is especially difficult not to weaken when the moment arrives.

Given that it’s a courageous gesture, Suárez’s gesture is a graceful gesture, because every courageous gesture is, according to Ernest Hemingway, a gesture of grace under pressure. In this sense it is an affirmative gesture; in another it is a negative gesture, because every courageous gesture is, according to Albert Camus, the rebellious gesture of a man who says no. In both cases it is a supreme gesture of liberty; it is not contradictory to say that it is also a histrionic gesture: the gesture of a man playing a role. If I’m not mistaken, only a couple of novels completely centred on the 23 February coup have been published; they’re not great novels, but one of them has the added interest that its author is Josep Melià, a journalist who was an acerbic critic of Suárez before becoming one of his closest collaborators. Operating as a novelist, at a certain point in his story Melià asks himself what the first thing was that Suárez thought when he heard the first shot in the chamber; he answers: the front page of tomorrow’s New York Times . The answer, which might seem innocuous or malicious, is intended to be cordial; it strikes me most of all as true. Like any pure politician, Suárez was a consummate actor: young, athletic, extremely handsome and always dressed with the polish of a provincial ladies’ man who enchanted mothers of right-wing families and provoked the mockery of left-wing journalists — double-breasted jackets with gold buttons, dark-grey trousers, sky-blue shirts and navy-blue ties — Suárez knowingly took advantage of his Kennedy-like bearing, understood politics as spectacle and during his many years of work at Radiotelevisión Española learned that it was no longer reality that created images, rather images that created reality. A few days before 23 February, at the most dramatic moment of his political life, when he announced his resignation as Prime Minister in a speech to a small group of Party members, Suárez could not help but insert a comment of the incorrigible leading man that he was: ‘Do you realize?’ he said to them. ‘My resignation will be front-page news in every newspaper in the world.’ The evening of 23 February was not the most dramatic moment of his political life, but the most dramatic of his whole life and, in spite of that (or precisely because of it), it’s possible that while the bullets whizzed around him in the chamber an intuition trained over years of political stardom dictated the instantaneous obviousness that, no matter what role fate had reserved for him at the end of that barbarous performance, he would never again act before an audience so absorbed and so large. If that’s true, he was not mistaken: the next day his picture monopolized the front page of the New York Times and that of all the newspapers and television screens in the world. Suárez’s gesture, in this way, is the gesture of a man who’s posing. That’s what Melià imagines. But thinking it through perhaps his imagination is too slight; thinking it through, on the evening of 23 February Suárez was perhaps not posing just for the newspapers and television screens: just as he would from that moment on in his political life — just as if in that moment he’d known who he truly was — perhaps Suárez was posing for history.