Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

Shortly after this episode fate offers Colonel Müller the opportunity he’s been waiting for. A group of nine partisans captured in a raid are sent to the prison; one of them is Fabrizio, the leader of the resistance, but the Germans do not know which one: Müller asks Bardone first to identify him and then betray him. For a moment Bardone hesitates, as if Bardone and Della Rovere are fighting it out within him; but Müller reminds him of the promised money and liberty and adds the bribe of a safe conduct with which to escape to Switzerland, and finally breaks Bardone. He hasn’t yet managed to identify Fabrizio when a high-ranking fascist authority dies at the hands of the resistance; in reprisal, Müller must shoot ten partisans, and the colonel understands that this is the moment to facilitate Bardone’s task. The night before the execution Müller locks twenty men in a cell, ten of whom will be the expiatory victims; sure that at death’s door Fabrizio will make himself known to Della Rovere, Müller includes Bardone and the nine prisoners caught in the raid. Müller is not mistaken: over the long night awaiting execution, while the prisoners look for strength or consolation in the valiant company of the false General Della Rovere, Fabrizio reveals himself. Finally, at dawn, when the men come out of the cell, Bardone is one of them, but Fabrizio is not. They walk out to the firing squad formed on the patio of the prison, Müller stops Bardone, separates him from the line of the condemned, asks him if he’s managed to find out who Fabrizio is. Bardone stares at Müller, but says nothing; he needs only to say one word in order to be set free, with enough money to carry on his interrupted life of gambling and women, but he says nothing. Perplexed, Müller insists: he’s sure that Bardone knows who Fabrizio is, sure that on a night like that Fabrizio would have told him who he is. Bardone does not take his eyes off Müller. ‘And, what do you know?’ he finally says. ‘Have you ever spent a night like this?’ ‘Answer me!’ shouts Müller furiously. ‘Do you know who he is?’ In response, Bardone asks Müller for a pencil and paper, scribbles a few lines, hands them to him and, before the colonel can see whether they contain the real name of Fabrizio, he asks him to see that they get to Contessa Della Rovere. While Bardone orders a jailer to open the gates to the patio, Müller reads the paper: ‘My last thoughts are with you all,’ it says. ‘ Viva Italia! ’ The patio is covered with snow; tied to posts, ten blindfolded men wait for death. Bardone — who is no longer Bardone but Della Rovere, as if somehow Della Rovere had always been within him — takes his place beside his comrades and, just before falling under the bullets of the firing squad, speaks to them. ‘Gentlemen,’ he says. ‘In these final moments let us dedicate our thoughts to our families, our nation and His Majesty the King.’ And he adds: ‘ Viva Italia! ’

It’s likely that the metamorphosis of Adolfo Suárez into the man who had somehow always been in him and who scarcely bore any relation to the former provincial Falangist upstart began the very day the King named him Prime Minister, but the reality is that it only started to become visible many months later. The reception afforded his appointment by public opinion was devastating. No one summed it up better than a cartoonist. In a Forges cartoon two Franco devotees in a bunker were commenting on the news; one of them said: ‘Isn’t it wonderful? He’s called Adolfo’; the other answered: ‘Indeed.’ That’s how it was: apart from rare exceptions, only the far right — from the old shirts of the Falange to the soldiers and technocrats of Opus Dei, along with the Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey — celebrated Suárez’s ascent to the premiership, convinced that the young, obsequious and disciplined Falangist represented new wine in old barrels, the palpable demonstration that the ideals of 18 July still prevailed and the best guarantee that Francoism, with all the cosmetic changes that circumstances demanded, wasn’t going to die along with Franco. Beyond the far right, however, there was only pessimism and fright: for the immense majority of the democratic opposition and the regime’s reformers, Suárez was just going to be, as Le Figaro wrote, ‘the executor of the low manoeuvrings of the far right, determined to torpedo democratization by any means’, or, as El País insinuated, the spearhead of ‘a machine that turns out to be the authentic immovable bunker of the country’, and which ‘embodies the traditional way of being Spanish according to its darkest and most irascible legend: economic and political power allied in perfect symbiosis with ecclesiastical fundamentalism’.

Suárez was not daunted: that was undoubtedly the reception he expected — given his trajectory, he couldn’t have expected any other — and it was also the reception that best suited him. Because if the King had charged him with dismantling Francoism to set up a parliamentary monarchy with its pieces, liquidating the dead that still seemed alive and bringing to life what seemed dead, the first thing he needed to count on was the complicity (or at least the confidence, or at least the passivity) of Francoist orthodoxy; the second thing he needed to count on was the comprehension (or at least the tolerance, or at least the patience) of the clandestine opposition. He embarked on this double, self-evidently impossible task from the first moment. Machiavelli recommends the politician ‘keep the minds of his subjects in suspense and admiration’, and link his actions with the object of not allowing his adversaries ‘the time to work steadily against him’. Perhaps Suárez had not read Machiavelli, but he followed his advice to the letter, and as soon as he was named Prime Minister began a sprint of coups de théâtre of such speed and confidence that no one could muster the reasons, resources or enthusiasm to stop him: the day after he took office he read a televised message in which, with a political language, tone and form incompatible with the tattered starch of Francoism, promised concord and reconciliation by way of a democracy in which governments would be ‘the result of the will of the majority of the Spanish people’, and the next day he formed with the help of his Deputy Prime Minister Alfonso Osorio an extremely youthful cabinet composed of Falangists and Christian Democrats who had good relations with the democratic opposition and the economic powers; one day he presented a programmatic declaration, virtually breaking with Francoism, in which the government committed itself to ‘the devolution of sovereignty to the Spanish people’, and announced a general election before 30 June of the coming year, the next day he reformed by decree the Penal Code that prevented the legalization of the parties and the day after that he decreed an amnesty for political crimes; one day he granted the heretofore banned Catalan language equal official status and the next he declared the banned Basque flag legal; one day he announced a law that authorized the repeal of the Fundamental Laws of Francoism and the next day he got the Francoist Cortes to pass it and the following day he called a referendum to approve it and the day after that he won it; one day he abolished by decree the Movimiento Nacional and the next day he ordered all the Falangist symbols to be removed secretly overnight from all the façades of all the Movimiento buildings and the following day he legalized the Communist Party by surprise and the day after that he called the first free elections in forty years. That was his way of proceeding during his first eleven-month term of government: he made an unusual decision and, as the country was still trying to take it in, he made another more unusual decision, and then another even more unusual, and then one more; he was constantly improvising; he swept events along, but also allowed himself to be swept along by them; he allowed no time to react, or to work against him, or to notice the disparity between what he did and what he said, no time even for admiration, or no more than he gave himself: all his adversaries could do was remain in suspense, attempt to understand what he was doing and try to keep up.