Javier Cercas: The Anatomy of a Moment

In the middle of March 2008, I read that according to a poll published in the United Kingdom almost a quarter of Britons thought Winston Churchill was a fictional character. At that time I had just finished a draft of a novel about the 23 February 1981 coup d’état in Spain, and was full of doubts about what I’d written and I remember wondering how many Spaniards must think Adolfo Suárez was a fictional character, that General Gutiérrez Mellado was a fictional character, that Santiago Carrillo or Lieutenant Colonel Tejero were fictional characters. It still strikes me as a relevant question. It’s true that Winston Churchill died more than forty years ago, that General Gutiérrez Mellado died less than fifteen years ago and as I write Adolfo Suárez, Santiago Carrillo and Lieutenant Colonel Tejero are still alive, but it’s also true that Churchill is a top-ranking historical figure and, if Suárez might share that position, at least in Spain, General Gutiérrez Mellado and Santiago Carrillo, not to mention Lieutenant Colonel Tejero, do not; furthermore, in Churchill’s time television was not yet the main fabricator of reality as well as the main fabricator of unreality on the planet, while one of the characteristics that defines the 23 February coup is that it was recorded by television cameras and broadcast all over the world. In fact, who knows whether by now Lieutenant Colonel Tejero might not be a television character to many people; perhaps even Adolfo Suárez, General Gutiérrez Mellado and Santiago Carrillo might also be to a certain extent, but not to the extent that he is: apart from people dressing up as him on comedy programmes and advertisements, the lieutenant colonel’s public life is confined to those few seconds repeated each year on television in which, wearing his tricorne and brandishing his new standard-issue pistol, he bursts into the Cortes and humiliates the deputies assembled there at gunpoint. Although we know he is a real character, he is an unreal character; although we know it is a real image, it is an unreal image: a scene from a cliché-ridden Spanish film fresh from the hackneyed brain of a mediocre imitator of Luis García Berlanga. No real person becomes fictitious by appearing on television, not even by being a television personality more than anything else, but television probably contaminates everything it touches with unreality, and the nature of an historic event alters in some way when it is broadcast on television, because television distorts (if not trivializes and demeans) the way we perceive things. The 23 February coup coexists with this anomaly: as far as I know, it’s the only coup in history filmed for television, and the fact that it was filmed is at once its guarantee of reality and its guarantee of unreality; added to the repeated astonishment the images produce, to the historic magnitude of the event and to the still troubling areas of real or assumed shadows, these circumstances might explain the unprecedented mishmash of fictions in the form of baseless theories, fanciful ideas, embellished speculations and invented memories that surround them.

Here’s a tiny example of the latter; tiny but not banal, because it is directly related to the coup’s televisual life. No Spaniard who’d reached the age of reason by 23 February 1981 has forgotten his or her whereabouts that evening, and many people blessed with good memories remember in detail — what time it was, where they were, with whom — having watched Lieutenant Colonel Tejero and his Civil Guards enter the Cortes live on television, to the point that they’d be willing to swear by what they hold most sacred that it is a real memory. It is not: although the coup was broadcast live on radio, the television images were shown only after the liberation of the parliamentary hostages, shortly after 12.30 on the 24th, and were seen live only by a handful of Televisión Española journalists and technicians, whose cameras were filming the interrupted parliamentary session and who circulated those images through the in-house network in the hope they’d be edited and broadcast on the evening news summaries and the nightly newscast. That’s what happened, but we all resist having our memories removed, for they’re our handle on our identity, and some put what they remember before what happened, so they carry on remembering that they watched the coup d’état live. It is, I suppose, a neurotic reaction, though logical, especially considering the 23 February coup, in which it is often difficult to distinguish the real from the fictitious. After all there are reasons to interpret the 23 February coup as the fruit of a collective neurosis. Or of collective paranoia. Or, more precisely, of a collective novel. In the society of the spectacle it was, in any case, one more spectacle. But that doesn’t mean it was a fiction: the 23 February coup existed, and twenty-seven years after that day, when its principal protagonists had perhaps begun to lose for many their status as historical characters and enter the realms of fiction, I had just finished a draft of a novel in which I tried to turn 23 February into fiction. And I was full of doubts.

How could I even dream of writing a fiction about the 23 February coup? How could I dream of writing a novel about a neurosis, about a paranoia, about a collective novel?

There is no novelist who hasn’t felt at least once the presumptuous feeling that reality is demanding a novel of him, that he’s not the one looking for a novel, but that a novel is looking for him. I had that feeling on 23 February 2006. Shortly before this date an Italian newspaper had asked me to write an article on my memories of the coup d’état. I agreed; I wrote an article in which I said three things: the first was that I had been a hero; the second was that I hadn’t been a hero; the third was that no one had been a hero. I had been a hero because that evening, after hearing from my mother that a group of gun-toting Civil Guards had burst into the Cortes during the investiture vote for the new Prime Minister, I’d rushed off to the university with my eighteen-year-old imagination seething with revolutionary scenes of a city up in arms, riotous demonstrators opposing the coup and erecting barricades on every corner; I hadn’t been a hero because the truth is I hadn’t rushed to the university with the intrepid determination to join the defence of democracy against the rebellious military, but with the libidinous determination to find a classmate I had a huge crush on and perhaps take advantage of those romantic hours, or hours that seemed romantic to me, to win her over; no one had been a hero because, when I arrived at the university that evening, I didn’t find anyone there except the girl I was looking for and two other students, as meek as they were disoriented: no one at the university where I studied — not at mine or any other university — made the slightest gesture of opposing the coup; no one in the city where I lived — not mine or any other city — took to the streets to confront the rebellious Army officers: except for a handful of people who showed themselves ready to risk their necks to defend democracy, the whole country stayed at home and waited for the coup to fail. Or to triumph.

That’s a synopsis of what I said in my article and, undoubtedly because writing it reactivated forgotten memories, that 23 February I followed with more interest than usual the articles, reports and interviews with which the media commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the coup.