Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

The Suárez of those days could be accused of passivity and incapacity, and also of political poverty, but not of being irresponsible or frivolous or an unscrupulous opportunist: Suárez was still Suárez but he was no longer a Julien Sorel or a Lucien Rubempré or a Frédéric Moreau, or an Emmanuele Bardone about to definitively transmute into General Della Rovere. Maybe the final occasion Suárez played Bardone was just before being elected Prime Minister for the second time, in March 1979; fearing a PSOE victory, he tried out his last conjurer’s trick, the final great swindle of the provincial rogue: he appeared on television the night before the election clamouring against the danger of the revolutionary left winning and destroying the family and the state; he knew very well that this clamour was nothing but a way of frightening old ladies, but perhaps he suspected that only by risking a demagogic prank could he win the election, and he did not hesitate to risk it. The ruse worked, he won the election, and after winning he held more power than he had ever had before. After a very short space of time, however, he went into free fall; we know the rest of the story: 1979 was a bad year for him; 1980 was worse. In spite of that, it’s likely that during this era of disasters — while the moment he would give up the job of Prime Minister and the moment of the military coup approached and he imagined himself in the centre of the ring, blind and staggering and sobbing amid the howling of the spectators and the heat of the lights, politically sunk and personally broken — Suárez would have been filling his aristocratic role of progressive statesman more than ever, increasingly convinced he was the final bastion of democracy when all democracy’s defences were tumbling down, increasingly sure that the innumerable political manoeuvres undertaken against him were pushing open the doors of democracy to the enemies of democracy, ever more profoundly invested with the dignity of his position as the Prime Minister of democracy and his responsibility as the maker of democracy, the character ever more incorporated in his person, like an invented Suárez but more real than the real Suárez because he was superimposed on the real one, transcending him, like an actor about to interpret the scene that will justify him to history hidden behind a mask which rather than covering reveals his authentic face, like an Emmanuele Bardone now converted once and for all into General Della Rovere who on the evening of 23 February, at the moment of truth, while the bullets whizzed around him in the chamber of the Cortes and the deputies sought shelter under their benches, would have remained in his amid the roar of battle to calm the fear of his comrades and help them to face up to the misfortune with these words: ‘Friends, this is your Prime Minister speaking. Show some dignity and self-control. Be men.’ And also with these words: ‘Show these scoundrels that you’re not afraid of dying.’ And also with these: ‘In these final moments let us dedicate our thoughts to our families, our nation and to His Majesty the King.’ And finally with these: ‘ Viva Italia! ’

Rossellini wasn’t particularly proud of General Della Rovere , but an artist is not always the best judge of his own work, and I think he was mistaken: the film is traditional in form, sometimes even conventional, but the fable it tells of the destiny of Emmanuele Bardone — a collaborator with fascism converted into a hero of anti-fascist Italy — is one of extraordinary richness and complexity; even richer and more complex, perhaps, is the parallel fable of the destiny of Adolfo Suárez — a collaborator with Francoism converted into a hero of democratic Spain — because Suárez was a politician and his journey suggests that in a politician private vices can be public virtues or that in politics it’s possible to arrive at good through evil or that it’s not enough to judge a politician ethically and first he must be judged politically or that ethics and politics are incompatible and the expression political ethics is an oxymoron or perhaps that vices and virtues don’t exist in the abstract, but only in relation to the circumstances in which they’re practised: Suárez was not an ethically irreproachable man, but it’s very possible that he would never have been able to do what he did for years if he hadn’t been a rogue with the morality of a survivor and a gift for deceit, an upstart without much culture or firm political ideas, a cocky, fawning, swindling Falangist. It is reasonable to surmise that any of the young Francoist politicians who at the death of Franco knew or guessed like he did that Francoism had no future and would have to be expanded or transformed could have done what Suárez did; it’s reasonable, but the reality is that while almost all of them shared his private vices none of them combined his courage, his audacity, his strength, his toughness, his exclusive political vocation, his acting talent, his seriousness, his charm, his modesty, his natural intelligence, his aptitude for reconciling the irreconcilable and most of all a sense of reality and a historical intuition that allowed him to understand very early, pushed by the democratic opposition, that rather than trying to impose himself on reality he should allow it to mould him, that expanding or transforming Francoism would only give rise to misfortune and the only thing to do with it was to kill it once and for all, betraying the past in order not to betray the future. Be that as it may, we don’t need to exhaust the parallels between Bardone and Suárez: Bardone was a morally abject individual who committed atrocious sins in an atrocious time; Suárez was instead a basically honest man: while he occupied the leadership of the government his sins were not mortal ones — or they were only the mortal sins involved in the exercise of power — and before occupying the leadership of the government his sins were the usual sins of a rotten time. As well as the political successes he harvested, this perhaps explains why for so many years so many people admired him and kept voting for him; I mean that it’s not true that people voted for Suárez because they were deceived about his defects and limitations, or because Suárez managed to deceive them: they voted for him in part because he was like they would have liked to be, but most of all they voted for him because, less in his virtues than in his defects, he was just like them. That’s more or less what Spain in the 1970s was like: a country full of vulgar, uncultivated, swindling, womanizing, gambling men without many scruples, provincials with the morality of survivors brought up between Acción Católica and the Falange who had lived comfortably under Francoism, collaborators who wouldn’t even have admitted their collaboration but were secretly increasingly ashamed of it and trusted Suárez because they knew that, although he might have wanted to be the fairest and the most modern and most audacious — or precisely because he wanted to be — he would always be one of theirs and would never take them where they didn’t want to go. Suárez didn’t let them down: he constructed a future for them, and by constructing it he cleansed his past, or tried to cleanse it. If you look closely, at this point Suárez’s strange fate also resembles that of Bardone: by shouting ‘ Viva Italia! ’ at the firing squad on a snowy dawn, Bardone not only redeems himself, but in a way redeems his whole country for having collaborated massively with fascism; by remaining on his bench while the bullets whizz around him in the chamber on the evening of 23 February, Suárez not only redeems himself, but in a way redeems his whole country for having collaborated massively with Francoism. Who knows: maybe that’s why — maybe that’s also why — Suárez didn’t duck.