Flawed heroes
Javier Cercas sprang to international attention with Soldiers of Salamis, a best-selling novel that puts historical characters in fictional circumstances, and suggests that true heroism sometimes demands the betrayal of conventional loyalties, whether republican or fascist.
His new book started as a novel about another iconic moment in Spanish history: the military coup against Spain’s young democracy on 23 February, 30 years ago last month. But he confesses at once to failure: “incapable of inventing what I know about 23 February, illuminating its reality with fiction, I have resigned myself to telling it.”
But facts are things made, and not things found, and there is no simple or innocent way of telling this story. Cercas has leapt from a fictional frying pan into an historical firestorm, and the book crackles and sizzles and sometimes explodes with the energy of radically conflicting versions of highly-charged events.
Cercas frames the book with scenes from the extraordinary televised record of these extraordinary events. He extracts from its grainy footage a prolonged and complex meditation on the causes and consequences of the coup, and on the multiple strands of conspiracy that are knotted around both.
The context was a vote in the Spanish parliament for a new prime minister. Adolfo Suarez, the man who had steered the country from General Franco’s dictatorship to a fragile democracy in less than five years, had just resigned after a series of crises. As the roll-call vote began, Antonio Tejero, a Civil Guard lieutenant-colonel, stormed into the chamber brandishing a pistol, followed by dozens of paramilitary police.
Several of them opened fire at the ceiling, and almost all the MPs immediately ducked for a most undignified cover. Only three remained in their seats: Suarez, his defence minister General Gutiérrez Mellado, and the leader of the Communist Party, Santiago Carrillo.
Cercas focuses a penetrating light on these very different three men. Why did each make such an apparently defiant gesture at such a moment? Tejero looked to the outside world like a comic-opera fascist played by John Cleese, but he was a serious player in a plot to restore the dictatorship. The politicians had good reason to think they were about to be shot.
The author teases out every possible interpretation of their stance, not entirely discounting the obvious one that they were brave defenders of the new constitutional order. But then he unpicks it to reveal the seething tensions that underlay Spain’s much-vaunted transition to democracy.
He identifies all three as ‘heroes of retreat’ — or of betrayal in a good cause. Rather like Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, each of them had abandoned the convictions of a lifetime to build a democratic society, and so was regarded as a traitor by many of their erstwhile comrades.
Suarez, a consummate political fixer, had been an ambitious young boss in General Franco’s deeply authoritarian Movimiento, until Franco’s successor, King Juan Carlos ll made him prime minister on the understanding that he would dismantle the old order.
Gen Mellado had fought for Franco during the Civil War, and his fellow officers had watched with disgust as he assisted Suarez to usher in democratic reforms.
Carillo had fought on the other side to Mellado during the war, and had spent most of his life as a loyal discipline of Stalin, denying any validity to democracy under capitalism. But he also had cast aside old dogmas, and transformed his powerful revolutionary movement into advocates of very gradual reform.
Cercas’s literary skills equip him well to paint these telling psychological portraits, and through them of the changing Spains that made — and eventually broke — all three men. In Suarez’s case the portrait is superb. Written and reading at the speed of thought, it is a kaleidoscopic vision of a chameleon whose deepest conviction may have been that he had no convictions at all.
Where the book disappoints very badly, however, is in its failure to engage coherently with the biggest question underlying the coup. Was King Juan Carlos — who ordered it to be deactivated several hours after it began — responsible for encouraging it the first place?
Subsequent court investigations showed that the King’s former military tutor, General Armada, was a mastermind of the coup. But he was a proponent of a ‘soft’ coup; he wanted a national government under (his) military leadership to strengthen the monarchy, and slow down, but not totally destroy, democratic reforms.
But Tejero wanted a ‘hard’ coup, a return to open dictatorship, and the violent behaviour of his troops made a soft coup impossible, at least in the short term. The King, after a delay of several hours, used his powers as supreme commander of the armed forces to bring down Tejero.
Cercas points out several credible trails between the ‘soft’ conspirators and the throne, and then tiptoes discreetly away from them. One has to wonder whether this strange reticence is due to one of the undemocratic conditions of the Spanish transition to democracy: that the monarchy can still not be examined too closely, even today?
The one certainty is that, while both Tejero and Armada were jailed, the failure of the hard coup paradoxically created the conditions for fulfilling many of the aims of the soft coup. The monarchy became embedded in Spanish life, albeit as the champion of democracy. If Cercas had explored the possibility that this was no accident as deeply as he explores the psyche of Adolfo Suarez, this would have been a great book, and not just a good one.
And even that achievement is tarnished by his endorsement of other changes that the coup attempt imposed on Spanish democracy. Above all, his apparent approval of Madrid’s subsequent adoption of a ‘dirty war’ strategy against ETA, in which 27 people were murdered by State forces, is baffling and distressing from such a humane and subtle thinker as Cercas.
The shameful betrayal of human rights involved did not create any heroes worthy of a democracy.
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