Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

It’s true: none of the preceding happened thanks to the coup, but in spite of the coup; it didn’t happen because the coup triumphed, but because it failed and because its failure convulsed the country and seemed to change it completely. But without the coup this convulsion would not have happened, nor would this change, or not the way it happened and with the speed it happened, and most of all, the most important thing would not have happened, and that is the Crown accumulated a power and legitimacy it could only have dreamt of before the coup. The King’s power came from Franco, and his legitimacy from having renounced Franco’s powers or part of his powers to cede them to popular sovereignty and become a constitutional monarch; but this was a precarious legitimacy, which deducted effective power from the King and left him exposed to the risk of the swings of fortune of a history that had expelled from the throne many of those who’d preceded him. The coup d’état reinforced the Crown: acting apart from the Constitution, using a powerless King’s last trick of power — which he held as symbolic commander-in-chief of the Army and Franco’s heir — the King stopped the coup and became democracy’s saviour, which lavished legitimacy upon the monarchy and turned it into the most solid, most appreciated, most popular, most safeguarded from criticism and, deep down, most powerful institution in the country. That’s what it still is today, to the incredulity from beyond the grave of the King’s ancestors and the envy of all the Continent’s monarchies. Or to put it another way: if before 23 February the golpistas had calculated the risks and benefits they would have reached the conclusion that it was less dangerous for the parliamentary monarchy to stage a coup or allow one than not to stage one, or if they’d designed the coup not to destroy democracy but to shrink it for a time and thus safeguard the monarchy in a moment of anxiety and consolidate it in the country, then there would be reasons to maintain that the 23 February coup triumphed, or at least didn’t completely fail. But it’s better to put it like this: the coup d’état failed completely and it was its complete failure that turned the democratic system in the form of a parliamentary monarchy into the only viable system of government in Spain, and for that reason it’s also possible to say, as if I’d wanted to insinuate that violence is history’s essence, the material of which it is made, and that only an act of war can revoke another act of war — as if I’d wanted to insinuate that only a coup d’état can revoke another coup d’état, that only a coup d’état could revoke the coup d’état that on 18 July 1936 engendered the war and the prolongation of the war by other means that was Franco’s regime — 23 February not only brought an end to the transition and to Franco’s post-war regime: 23 February brought an end to the war.

Is Borges right and is it true that every destiny, however long and complicated, essentially boils down to a single moment, the moment a man knows once and for all who he is? I look again at the image of Adolfo Suárez on the evening of 23 February and, as if I hadn’t seen it hundreds of times, it strikes me again as a radiant, hypnotic image, real and unreal at the same time, meticulously stuffed with meaning: the Civil Guards shooting over the chamber, General Gutiérrez Mellado standing beside him, the depopulated Parliament, the stenographers and ushers lying on the floor, the parliamentarians lying on the floor and Suárez leaning back against the blue leather of his prime ministerial bench while the bullets whizz around him, solitary, statuesque and spectral in a desert of empty benches.

It’s a slippery image. If I’m not mistaken, there is in the parallel gestures of Gutiérrez Mellado and Santiago Carrillo a logic we sense straight away, with instinct rather than intelligence, as if they were two gestures necessary for those who had been programmed by history and by their two counterpoised biographies of old wartime enemies. Suárez’s gesture is almost identical to theirs, but at the same time we sense that it’s different and more complex, or at least I sense this, undoubtedly because I also sense that its complete significance escapes me. It’s true that it’s a courageous gesture and a graceful gesture and a rebellious gesture, a supreme gesture of liberty and a histrionic gesture, the gesture of a man who’s finished and who conceives of politics as an adventure and is trying for deathbed legitimacy and for a moment seems fully to embody democracy, a gesture of authority and a gesture of individual and perhaps collective redemption, the final purely political gesture of a pure politician, and for that reason the most violent; all this is true, but it’s also true that for some reason that inventory of definitions does not satisfy the emotions, the instinct or the intelligence, as if Suárez’s gesture were an inexhaustible or inexplicable or absurd gesture, or as if it contained an infinity of gestures. A few days ago, for example, I thought Suárez’s gesture wasn’t really a gesture of courage, but a gesture of fear: I remembered a bullfighter who said the only thing that moved him to tears was fighting bulls, not by how well he did it, but because fear made him overcome fear, and I remembered at the same time a poet saying a bullfighter walked into the ring scared to death and that, since he was already dead, he was no longer scared of the bull and was invulnerable, and then I thought that in that moment Suárez was so still on his bench because he was moved to tears, bathed in tears inside, scared to death. The night before last I thought that Suárez’s gesture was the gesture of a neurotic, the gesture of a man who crumbles in the face of good fortune and comes into his own in adversity. Last night I thought something else: I thought I had written many pages about Suárez and I still hadn’t said that Suárez was anything but a nonentity, that he was a serious character, a fellow who was responsible for his words and his actions, a guy who had put together democracy or felt that he had put it together and on the evening of 23 February he understood that democracy was in his care and he did not hide and remained still on his bench while the bullets whizzed around him in the chamber like a captain who remains at the helm of his sinking ship. And a while ago, after writing Borges’ sentence that opens this fragment, I thought that Suárez’s gesture was a Borgesian gesture and that scene a Borgesian scene, because I remembered Alan Pauls, who in an essay on Borges claims that the duel is the DNA of Borges’ short stories, their fingerprint, and I said to myself, instead of the false duel Adolfo Suárez and Santiago Carrillo once pretended to engage in, that scene was a real duel, a duel between armed men and unarmed men, a state of ecstasy, a vertiginous juncture, a hallucination, a second extirpated from the current of time, ‘a suspension of the world’, says Pauls, ‘a block of life torn out of the context of life’, a tiny dazzling hole that repels all explanations or perhaps contains them all, as if it would be enough effectively to know how to look in order to see in that eternal moment the exact code of 23 February, or as if mysteriously, in that eternal moment, not just Suárez but everyone in the country had known once and for all who they were.

I don’t know: maybe I could prolong this book indefinitely and extract different meanings from Suárez’s gesture indefinitely without exhausting its meaning or grazing or discerning its real meaning. I don’t know. Sometimes I tell myself that this is all a mistake, one more fantasy added to the incalculable fantasies that surround 23 February, the last and most insidious: although the truly enigmatic is not what nobody’s seen, but what everyone has seen and nobody has managed entirely to understand, maybe Suárez’s gesture holds no secret or real meaning, or no more than any other gesture holds, all inexhaustible or inexplicable or absurd, all arrows flying off in countless directions. But other times, most of the time, I tell myself that it’s not like that: the gestures of Gutiérrez Mellado and Santiago Carrillo are translucent, exhaustible, explicable, intelligible, or that’s what we feel; Suárez’s gesture is not: if you don’t wonder what it means then you understand what it means; but if you wonder what it means then you don’t understand what it means. That’s why Suárez’s gesture is not a translucent gesture but a transparent gesture: a meaningful gesture because in itself it doesn’t mean anything, a gesture that contains nothing but through which, as through a window, we feel we could see everything — we could see Adolfo Suárez, 23 February, the recent history of Spain, perhaps a face that might be our own true face — a gesture all the more disconcerting because its deepest secret lies in its having no secret. Unless, of course, that rather than a mistake or a correct answer all this is a misunderstanding, and that examining the meaning of Suárez’s gesture doesn’t amount to the same thing as coming up with a correct question or a mistaken question or an unanswerable question, but just coming up with an essentially ironic question, whose true answer lies in the question itself. Unless, I mean, that the challenge I set myself in writing this book, trying to respond by way of reality to what I didn’t know and didn’t want to respond to by way of fiction, was an unmeetable challenge, and that the answer to that question — the only possible answer to that question — is a novel.