Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

‘The transition is now history,’ wrote the sociologist Juan J. Linz in 1996. ‘It is not today the subject of debate or political struggle.’ A decade later Linz could no longer say that: for some time now the transition has not only been subject to debate, but also — sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly — the subject of political struggle. It occurs to me that this change is the consequence of at least two factors: the first is a generation of leftists coming to political, economic and intellectual power, my generation, who took no active part in the change from dictatorship to democracy and who consider this change to have been done badly, or that it could have been done much better than it was; the second is the renewal in the intellectual centres of an old far-left discourse that argues that the transition was the consequence of a fraud negotiated between Francoists wanting to stay in power at any cost, led by Adolfo Suárez, and supine leftists led by Santiago Carrillo, a fraud the result of which was not an authentic rupture with Francoism and which left real power in the same hands that had usurped it during the dictatorship, shaping a dull, insufficient and defective democracy.* In part as a consequence of a conscience as clear and rock hard as those of the golpistas of 23 February, of an irrepressible nostalgia for the clarities of authoritarianism and sometimes a simple ignorance of recent history, both factors run the risk of delivering the monopoly of the transition to the right — which has rushed to accept it, glorifying the time to a ridiculous extent, that is mystifying it — while the left, caving in to the combined blackmail of narcissistic youth and an ultramontane left, seems at times ready to wash its hands of it the way one washes one’s hands of an awkward bequest.

I think it’s a mistake. Although it didn’t have the joy of an instantaneous collapse of a frightful regime, the rupture with Francoism was a genuine rupture. To achieve it the left made many concessions, but practising politics involves making concessions, because it involves giving way on the incidentals in order not to give way on the essentials; the left gave way on the incidentals, but the Francoists gave way on the essentials, because Francoism disappeared and they had to renounce the absolute power they’d held for almost half a century. It’s true that justice was not entirely done, that the Republican legitimacy violated by Francoism was not restored, those responsible for the dictatorship did not face trial, its victims were not fully and immediately compensated, but it’s also true that in exchange a democracy was constructed that would have been impossible to construct if the prime objective hadn’t been that of crafting a future but — Fiat justitia et pereat mundus — making amends for the past: on 23 February 1981, when it seemed the system of liberties was no longer at risk after four years of democratic government, the Army attempted a coup d’état, which was on the brink of succeeding, so it’s easy to imagine how long democracy would have lasted if four years earlier, when it had barely got started, a government had decided to bring justice to all, though the world perish. It’s also true that political and economic power did not change hands overnight — which would probably not have happened either if instead of a negotiated rupture with Francoism there had been a direct rupture — but it’s evident that power soon began to operate under the restrictions imposed by the new regime, which brought the left to government after five years and long before began a profound reorganization of economic power. Furthermore, to state that the political system that arose out of those years is not a perfect democracy is to state the obvious: perhaps a perfect dictatorship exists — they all aspire to it, in some way all feel they are — but there’s no such thing as a perfect democracy, because what defines a true democracy is its flexible, open, malleable character — that is, permanently improvable — in such a way that the only perfect democracy is one that can be for ever perfected. Spanish democracy is not perfect, but it is real, worse than some and better than many, and anyway, incidentally, more solid and deeper than the fragile democracy General Franco overthrew by force. All this was to a great extent a triumph for anti-Francoism, a triumph for the democratic opposition, a triumph for the left, which obliged the Francoists to understand that Francoism had no future other than its total extinction. Suárez understood that immediately and acted accordingly; all this we owe him; all this and, to a great extent, also the obvious: the longest period of freedom Spain has enjoyed in its entire history. That’s what the last thirty years have been. Denying it is to deny reality, the inveterate vice of a certain section of the left that continues to inconvenience democracy and certain intellectuals whose difficulty in emancipating themselves from abstraction and the absolute prevents them from connecting ideas to experience. All in all, Francoism was a bad story, but the end of that story has not been bad. It could have been: the proof is that in the middle of the 1970s the most lucid foreign analysts were predicting a catastrophic exit from the dictatorship; maybe the best proof is what happened on 23 February. It could have been, but it wasn’t, and I see no reason why those of us who didn’t participate in that story owing to age should not celebrate it; nor do I think that, had we been old enough to participate, we would have committed fewer errors than our parents did.

* To those two facts a philosopher could add another, less circumstantial and maybe more profound: human beings’ growing capacity for dissatisfaction, a paradoxical result of Western society’s growing capacity to satisfy our needs. ‘Where cultural progress is genuinely successful and ills are cured, this progress is seldom received with enthusiasm,’ writes Odo Marquard. ‘Instead, it is taken for granted and attention focuses on those ills that remain. And these remaining ills are subject to the law of increasing annoyance. The more negative elements disappear from reality, the more annoying the remaining negative elements become, precisely because of this decrease.’

On 17 July 2008, the day before Adolfo Suárez last appeared in the newspapers, photographed in the garden of his house in La Florida in the company of the King — when he’d already seemed to be dead for a long time or everyone had talked about him for a long time as if he were dead — I buried my father. He was seventy-nine, three years older than Suárez, and he’d died the previous day at home, sitting in his favourite armchair, in a gentle, painless way, perhaps without understanding he was dying. Like Suárez, he was an ordinary man: he came from a rich family that had come down in the world settled since time immemorial in a village in Extremadura, he’d studied in Córdoba and in the 1960s had emigrated to Catalonia; he didn’t drink, he’d been an obstinate smoker but didn’t smoke any more, in his youth he’d belonged to Acción Católica and the Falange; he’d been a handsome young man, kind, conceited, a lady’s man and gambler, a good verbena dancer, although I’d swear he was never cocky. He was, however, a good veterinary surgeon, and I suppose he could have made money, but he didn’t, or no more than necessary to support his family and put three of his five children through university. He had few friends, no hobbies, didn’t travel and for his last fifteen years lived on his pension. Like Suárez, he was dark-haired, thin, handsome, frugal and transparent; unlike Suárez, he tried to go unnoticed, and I think he managed it. I won’t presume to declare that he was never involved in any crooked deal in those crooked times, but I can say, as far as I know, there was no one who didn’t take him for a decent man.