Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

Over the next year Suárez began to familiarize himself with his future as a precociously retired politician, father of a nation on the dole, intermediary in occasional business deals, high-priced speaker in Latin America and player of prolonged games of golf. It was a long, peaceful and slightly insipid future, or that’s how he must’ve imagined it, perhaps with a certain unexpected dose of happiness. The first time he left power, after his resignation and the coup d’état, Suárez undoubtedly felt the chill of a heroin addict without heroin; it’s very possible that now he felt nothing of the sort, or that he felt only something very similar to the joyful astonishment of one who throws off an impediment he hadn’t been aware he was carrying. He forgot politics; politics forgot him. He continued to be profoundly religious and I don’t think he would have read Max Weber, so he had no reason to doubt he would be saved and that, although power was an abrasive substance and he had signed a pact with the devil, no one was going to come and collect on it; he continued to be a compulsive optimist, so he must have been sure that now all he had to do was let time go placidly by in the hope that the country would be grateful for his contribution to the victory of democracy. ‘The hero of retreat can only be sure of one thing,’ wrote Hans Magnus Enzensberger of Suárez shortly before he gave up politics, ‘the ingratitude of the fatherland.’ It appears that Enzensberger was mistaken, or at least he was partly mistaken, but Suárez was entirely mistaken, and a little while later a final metamorphosis began to work on him, as if, after having played a young arriviste from a nineteenth-century French novel and a grown-up rogue converted into an aristocratic hero of a neorealist Italian film, a demiurge had reserved for the last plot of his life the tragic role of a pious, old, devastated prince from a Russian novel.

Suárez received the first warning that a placid retirement was not what awaited him just a year and a half after leaving politics, when in the month of November 1992 he learned that his daughter Mariam had breast cancer and the doctors thought she had less than three months to live. The news left him stunned, but it did not paralyse him and without a minute to lose he devoted himself to stopping his daughter’s illness. Two years later, once he thought they’d managed it, they diagnosed an identical cancer in Amparo, his wife. On this occasion the blow was harder, because it came on top of the previous one, and this time he didn’t recover. It may be that, Catholic to the end, weakened by age and misfortune, he ended up being defeated not by that double mortal disease, but by guilt. In the year 2000, when his wife and daughter were still alive, Suárez wrote a prologue for a book his daughter wrote about her illness. ‘Why them? Why us?’ he lamented. ‘What have they done? What have we done?’ Suárez understands that such questions are absurd, ‘the logical attribute of an instinctive egomania’, but in spite of that it proves he posed them many times and that, although he hadn’t read Max Weber, remorse mortified him many times with the illusory reproach that the devil had come to collect his part of the bargain and that the burnt wasteland that surrounded him was the result of the instinctive egomania that had allowed him to get to be who he’d always wanted to be. And it was just then that it happened. It was just then, at perhaps the darkest moment of his life, that the inevitable arrived, the longed-for moment of public recognition, the opportunity for all to show their gratitude for the sacrifice of his honour and his conscience for the country, the humiliating national din of compassion, he was the great man cut down by misfortune who no longer bothered anyone, was no longer able to overshadow anyone, who was never going to return to politics and could be used by this side and that and converted into the perfect paladin of concord, into the unbeaten ace of reconciliation, into the immaculate enabler of democratic change, into a living statue suitable for hiding behind and cleansing consciences and securing shaky institutions and shamelessly exhibiting the satisfaction of the country with its immediate past and, in Wagnerian scenes of gratitude for the fallen leader, homages, awards, honorific distinctions began to rain down on him, he recovered the King’s friendship, the confidence of the Prime Ministers who followed him, popular favour, he achieved everything he’d wanted and anticipated although it was all a little false and forced and hurried and most of all late, because by then he was going or had gone and could barely contemplate his final collapse without understanding it too well and begging everyone who crossed his path to pray for his wife and for his daughter, as if his soul had got definitively lost in a labyrinth of self-pitying contrition and tormented meditations on the guilty fruits of egomania and he had become definitively transformed into the old repentant sinner prince of a novel by Dostoevsky.

In May 2001 his wife died; three years later his daughter died. By then his mind had abdicated and he was in another place, far from himself. The illness had begun to appear long before, taking him back and forth from memory to forgetfulness, but towards 2003 his deterioration could no longer be hidden. His last political speech dates from that time, although it wasn’t exactly a political speech; a fragment was shown on television. The party of the right had offered his son Adolfo the candidacy for premier of the autonomous community of Castilla-La Mancha; because he was not unaware that the intention of the offer was to cash in on the prestige of his surname, Suárez advised his son not to accept, but the yearning to emulate his father was stronger than his lack of vocation and the son stood as candidate and the father felt obliged to defend him. On 3 May the two of them held a rally in Albacete. Standing in front of the crowd facing a lectern, Suárez is wearing a dark suit, white shirt and a polka-dot tie; he is seventy years old and, though his body still has vestiges of his poise on the tennis court and dance floor, he looks it, his hair flecked with white, receding sharply, his skin mottled with age spots. He doesn’t talk of politics; he talks of his son, he mentions the fact that he studied at Harvard and then he stops dead. ‘My God,’ he says, barely smiling and shuffling the papers he’s prepared. ‘I think I’ve got myself in a terrible mess.’ The audience applauds, encourages him to go on, and he looks up from his papers, bites his lower lip with a faded flirtatiousness and smiles for a long time; for those who’ve known him for years, it’s an unmistakable smile: it’s the same smile of the beau sure of his charms with which in other times he could convince a Falangist, an Opus Dei technocrat or a Guerrillero de Cristo Rey that deep down he was a paramilitary, a Falangist or an admirer of Opus; it’s the same smile with which he could say: I’m no Communist (or Socialist), no, but I am one of you, because my family was always Republican and deep down I’ve always been one; it’s the same smile with which he said: I have power and you have legitimacy: we have to understand each other. It’s the same smile, perhaps a little less natural or more vague, but deep down it’s the same. He looks back at the papers, he says again that his son studied at Harvard, he stops dead again. ‘I don’t know if I’m repeating myself,’ he says. An urgent round of applause breaks out. ‘I’m in a terrible mess with these papers,’ he repeats. The music starts up, people stand to drown out his muttering with applause, he forgets about the papers and tries to improvise a closing, but amid all the uproar all that can be heard of what he says is the following phrase: ‘My son will not let you down.’