Javier Cercas - The Anatomy of a Moment

‘. . Sabino Fernández Campo, in theory the third authority in the Royal Household. .’The first authority was General Nicolás Cotoner y Cotoner, Marquis of Mondéjar; the second, commander of the Military Chamber, General Joaquín de Valenzuela. The operation of the Household and the powers of each of the authorities that run it are explained in detail in Javier Cremades, La casa de S.M. el Rey , Madrid, Civitas, 1998, pp. 61–105.

‘. . Quintana Lacaci is an unwavering Francoist. .’A few days after the failure of the 23 February coup General Quintana Lacaci told the new Minister of Defence, Alberto Oliart, at the first meeting they held: ‘Minister, before I sit down I must tell you that I am a Francoist, that I adore the memory of General Franco. For eight years I served as a colonel in his personal guard. I wear this military medal that I won in Russia. I fought in the Civil War. So you can well imagine my way of thinking. But the Caudillo gave me the order to obey his successor and the King ordered me to stop the coup on 23 February. If he had ordered me to assault the Cortes, I would have done so.’ See Paul Preston, Juan Carlos. A People’s King , p. 485.

Part Three. A Revolutionary Confronts the Coup

‘. . he was Secretary General of the Communist Party. .’See Santiago Carrillo, Memorias , p. 712.

Max Weber, ‘Politics as a vocation’, Essays in Sociology , p. 160.

Fernando Claudín, Santiago Carrillo , p. 303.

Suárez is quoted in Sánchez Navarro, La transición española en sus documentos , p. 288; Carrillo, in ‘Tras la inevitable caída. .’, Mundo Obrero , 7.7.1976.

‘According to his then closest collaborators. .’See for example Alfonso Osorio, Trayectoria de un ministro de la Corona , p. 277, or Rodolfo Martín Villa, Al servicio del Estado , Barcelona, Planeta, 1984, p. 62. Perhaps it is Salvador Sánchez-Terán who best sums up the opinion of Suárez’s circle on the behaviour of the Communists in reaction to the Atocha murders: ‘The PCE won in a few hours — and by the blood of their men — more democratic respectability than in all their demands for restoration of liberties carried out during the entire transition’; La Transición. Síntesis y claves , Barcelona, Planeta, 2008, pp. 157–158.

The most extensive version I know of the meeting between Suárez and Carrillo — a version the protagonists themselves have approved — is found in Joaquín Bardavío, Sábado Santo rojo , Madrid, Ediciones Uve, 1980, pp. 155–171. Carrillo has also described it at length in Juez y parte. 15 retratos españoles , Barcelona, Plaza y Janés, 1995, pp. 218–223. Otherwise, shortly after the conversation took place Carrillo told Manuel Azcárate that in the course of it Suárez had told him: ‘In this country there are two politicians: you and me’; Manuel Azcárate, Crisis del eurocomunismo , Barcelona, Argos-Vergara, 1982, p. 247. As for the change in public opinion in favour of the legalization of the PCE, it was in fact spectacularly fast; see the opinion polls in Tusell, La transición a la democracia , p. 116.

Carrillo’s first quote is in Prego, Así se hizo la transición , p. 656; the second, in Morán, Miseria y grandeza del partido comunista de España. 1939–1985 , p. 542, which is for the most part where I got the description of what happened in the meeting on Calle Capitán Haya: it is Morán himself who claims that the paper read by Carrillo was written by Suárez. But see also Prego, Así se hizo la transición , pp. 663–667.

Le Monde , 22.10.1977. Quoted by Fernando Claudín, Santiago Carrillo , p. 279.

Time , 21.11.1977.

Carrillo is quoted in Carlos Abella, Adolfo Suárez , p. 455.

Carrillo, Memorias , p. 712.

Footnote.It should be said that in his memoirs Guerra regrets having said this — in September 1979, during an extraordinary PSOE conference; see Cuando el tiempo nos alcanza , pp. 274–275.

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , trans. Daniel De Leon, Chicago, Charles H. Kerr, 1907, p. 5.

Nicolás Estévanez, Fragmentos de mis memorias , Madrid, Tipográfico de los Hijos de R. Álvarez, 1903, p. 460.

Santiago Carrillo, Memorias , pp. 712–716. What happened in the clock room is also reconstructed by Alfonso Guerra, in Cuando el tiempo nos alcanza , pp. 297–301.

Santiago Carrillo interviewed by María Antonia Iglesias, El País semanal , 9.1.2005. The quote from El Socialista is in Fernando Claudín, Santiago Carrillo , p. 19.

Ian Gibson, Paracuellos: cómo fue , Madrid, Temas de Hoy, 1983; Jorge M. Reverte, La batalla de Madrid , Barcelona, Crítica, 2004, pp. 673–679, where the minutes of the meeting between the Communists and anarchists, during which the executions of Paracuellos were planned, are reproduced; and Ángel Viñas, El escudo de la República. El oro de España, la apuesta soviética y los hechos de mayo de 1937 , Barcelona, Crítica, 2007, pp. 35–78.

‘. . the order might have come from Alexander Orlov. .’Antonio Elorza claims the order did not come from Orlov, and that ‘it could only have been issued by the delegate of the Communist International in Spain’, Victorio Codovilla; ‘Codovilla en Paracuellos’, El País , 1.11.2008. Carrillo is quoted in Gibson, Paracuellos , p. 229.

Carrillo is quoted in Diario 16 , 16.3.1981.

Carrillo is quoted in José García Abad, Adolfo Suárez , p. 22.

M. Vázquez Montalbán, ‘José Luis Cortina Prieto. Cocido madrileño nocturno’, in Mis almuerzos con gente inquietante , Barcelona, Planeta, 1984, p. 91. ‘. . he participated in GODSA. .’In fact, GODSA was the culmination of a study group called Team XXI founded by Antonio and José Luis Cortina in the late 1960s and which, in many articles published in magazines at the time, expressed the at once radical and tame Falangism of both brothers. For more on Team XXI, see Jeroen Oskam, Interferencias entre política y literatura bajo el franquismo , Amsterdam, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1992, pp. 215, 226–234, among others; on GODSA, see Cristina Palomares, Sobrevivir después de Franco , Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 2006, pp. 198–205.

‘. . the most plausible are the following. .’My account fundamentally follows that of Fernández López, in Diecisiete horas y media , pp. 133–134. Tejero’s words are quoted by Aramburu in Manuel de Ramón, Los generales que salvaron la democracia , p. 99, where one can also read the version offered of the confrontation between Aramburu and Tejero by Aramburu himself and one of Tejero’s Civil Guards. ‘. . the Cortes was filled with the rarefied air. .’What happened in the Parliament during the evening and night of the 23rd and the morning of the 24th is described in a report commissioned by the President of the Chamber, written by his secretaries — Víctor Carrascal, Leopoldo Torres, Soledad Becerril and José Bono — and sent to the investigating magistrate; it is dated 15 March 1981, consists of thirty-five pages and includes several appendices where the damages caused to the Cortes by the assault are specified right down to the consumption of alcohol — including nineteen bottles of champagne, four of which were Moët Chandon — food and tobacco in the bar. Part of my account comes from this source.

‘. . circulating in a fragmentary and confused way as well was the news picked up secretly from a transistor radio by former Deputy Prime Minister Fernando Abril Martorell. .’According to El País (25.2.1981), there was another transistor radio in the Cortes, belonging to the UCD deputy Enrique Sánchez de León; according to José Oneto ( La noche de Tejero , Barcelona, Planeta, 1981, p. 123), the radio Abril Martorell was listening to belonged to Julen Guimon, also a UCD deputy.