Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

We always got along well, except maybe, inevitably, during my adolescence. I think at that time I was a little embarrassed to be his son, I think because I thought I was better than him, or that I was going to be. We didn’t argue much, but whenever we did argue we argued about politics, which is strange, because my father wasn’t terribly interested in politics, and neither was I, from which I deduce that this was our way of communicating at a time when we didn’t have much to communicate to each other, or when it wasn’t easy to do so. I said at the beginning of this book that my father was a Suarista then, as was my mother, and that I looked down on Suárez, one of Franco’s collaborators, an ignorant and superficial nonentity who through luck and fiddling had managed to prosper in democracy; it’s possible I thought something similar of my father, and that’s why I was a little bit embarrassed to be his son. The fact is that more than one argument ended in shouts, if not with a slammed door (my father, for example, was outraged and horrified by ETA’s murders; I was not in favour of ETA, at least not much, but I understood that it was all Suárez’s fault, that he left ETA no choice but to kill); the fact is also that, once adolescence ended, the arguments ended too. We, however, carried on talking about politics, I suppose because having pretended to be interested we’d ended up actually interested. When Suárez retired, my father continued to be a Suarista , he voted for the right and occasionally for the left, and although we didn’t stop disagreeing we’d discovered by then that it was better to disagree than to agree, because the conversation lasted longer. In reality, politics ended up being our main, almost our only topic of conversation; I don’t remember us talking very often about his work, or my books: my father was not a reader of novels and, despite knowing he read mine and that he was proud that I was a writer and that he clipped out and saved articles about me that appeared in the newspapers, I never heard him express an opinion on any of them. In recent years he gradually lost interest in everything, including politics, but his interest in my books grew, or that was my impression, and when I began to write this one I told him what it was about (I didn’t deceive him: I told him it was about Adolfo Suárez’s gesture, not the 23 February coup, because from the beginning I wanted to imagine that Adolfo Suárez’s gesture contained the events of 23 February as if in code); he looked at me: for a moment I thought he’d make some comment or burst out laughing or into tears, but he just frowned absently, I don’t know whether sardonically. Later, in the final months of his illness, when he’d wasted away and could barely move or speak, I went on telling him about this book. I talked to him about the years of the political change, about what happened on 23 February, about events and figures we’d argued over years before till we were fed up; now he listened to me distractedly, if he really was listening, to force his attention, sometimes I asked him questions, which he didn’t usually answer. But one evening I asked him why he and my mother had trusted Suárez and he suddenly seemed to wake out of his lethargy, trying in vain to lean back in his armchair he looked at me with wild eyes and moved his skeletal hands nervously, almost furiously, as if that fit of anger was going to put him for a moment back in charge of the family or send me back to adolescence, or as if we’d spent our whole lives embroiled in a meaningless argument and finally the occasion had arrived to settle it. ‘Because he was like us,’ he said with what little voice he had left. I was about to ask him what he meant by that when he added: ‘He was from a small town, he’d been in the Falange, he’d been in Acción Católica, he wasn’t going to do anything bad, you understand, don’t you?’

I understood. I think this time I understood. And that’s why a few months later, when his death and Adolfo Suárez’s resurrection in the newspapers formed the final symmetry, the final figure of this story, I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d started to write this book not to try to understand Adolfo Suárez or Adolfo Suárez’s gesture but to try to understand my father, if I’d kept writing it in order to keep talking to my father, if I’d wanted to finish it so my father could read it and know that I’d finally understood, that I’d understood that I wasn’t so right and he wasn’t so wrong, that I’m no better than him, and that now I never will be.

This book is in debt to many more people than I can mention, but I must thank Miguel Ángel Aguilar, Óscar Alzaga, Luis Alegre, Jordi Amat, Luis María Anson, Jacinto Antón, José Luis Barbería, Josep Anton Bofill, Javier Calderón, Antoni Candela, Jaime Castillo, Diego Camacho, Santiago Carrillo, Jordi Corominas, Carme Chacón, Javier Fernández López, Manuel Fernández-Monzón Altolaguirre, Felipe González, Jordi Gracia, Manuel López, Lídia Martínez (and Gemma Caballer and the rest of the librarians at Pavelló de la República), Carles Monguilod, Joaquim Nadal, Alberto Oliart, Àngel Quintana, Ricardo Pardo Zancada, Javier Pradera, Joaquín Prieto, Francisco Rico, Narcís Serra, Carlos Sobrino, Luis Miguel Sobrino, Mariano Torcal, David Trueba, Miguel Ángel Valladares and Enrique Zapata.

A substantial part of the information I’ve used to write this book comes from interviews I’ve done over the last three years with witnesses and protagonists of the coup d’état and the political transition. As for written sources, it should be remembered that the Supreme Court does not allow the trial proceedings to be consulted, and will not permit it until twenty-five years have passed since the death of the defendants or fifty since the coup; in spite of this, many jurists who took part in the trial have copies of witness statements and those of the defendants, and important fragments of that document have been published in various books, among them those by Juan Blanco, 23-F. Crónica fiel de un golpe anunciado , Madrid, Fuerza Nueva, 1995, Julio Merino, Tejero. 25 años después , Madrid, Espejo de Tinta, 2006, Juan Alberto Perote, 23-F. Ni Milans ni Tejero. El informe que se ocultó , Madrid, Foca, 2001, Manuel Rubio, 23-F. El proceso: del sumario a la sentencia , Barcelona, Libros Ceres, 1982, and Santiago Segura and Julio Merino, Jaque al Rey , Barcelona, Planeta, 1983. Furthermore, the court’s sentence is reproduced in books such as José Luis Martín Prieto’s Técnica de un golpe de estado , Barcelona, Planeta, 1982, pp. 335–385, José Oneto’s La verdad sobre el caso Tejero , Barcelona, Planeta, 1982, pp. 381–406, and Manuel Rubio’s 23-F. El proceso , pp. 631–704.

Below I list the titles of a few of the texts that have been especially useful to the writing of mine, dividing them according to the fundamental themes of the book, and after this minimal bibliography I’ve added a few notes meant only to specify the sources of quotes and, occasionally, to make some clarification about particularly doubtful or controversial aspects.

General Works

Agüero, Felipe, Militares, civiles y democracia , Madrid, Alianza, 1995.

Alonso-Castrillo, Silvia, La apuesta del centro: historia de la UCD , Madrid, Alianza, 1996.

Attard, Emilio, Vida y muerte de UCD , Barcelona, Planeta, 1983.

Calvo Sotelo, Leopoldo, Memoria viva de la transición , Barcelona, Plaza y Janés, 1990.

Colomer, Josep Maria, La transición a la democracia: el modelo español , Barcelona, Anagrama, 1998.

Fernández Miranda, Pilar and Alfonso, Lo que el Rey me ha pedido. Torcuato Fernández Miranda y la reforma política , Barcelona, Plaza y Janés, 1995.