«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. I was left perplexed: I had described the 23 February coup as a total failure of democracy, but the majority of those articles, reports and interviews described it as a total triumph of democracy. And not just them. That same day the Cortes approved a declaration, which reads as follows: ‘The lack of the slightest hint of social endorsement, the exemplary attitude of the citizenry, the responsible behaviour of the political parties and the trade unions, as well as the media and in particular the democratic institutions [. . .], sufficed to frustrate the coup d’état.’ It would be difficult to accumulate more falsehoods in fewer words, or so I thought when I read that paragraph: my impression was that the coup had not lacked social endorsement, that the citizenry’s attitude was not exemplary, the political parties’ and unions’ behaviour was irresponsible, and, with very few exceptions, the media and democratic institutions had done nothing to frustrate the coup. But it wasn’t the spectacular discrepancy between my personal memory of 23 February and the apparent collective memory that most struck me and produced the presumptuous hunch that reality was demanding I write a novel, but something much less shocking, or more elemental – although probably linked to that discrepancy.
It was an obligatory image on every single television report about the coup: the image of Adolfo Suárez turned to stone in his seat while, seconds after Lieutenant Colonel Tejero entered the Cortes, Civil Guards’ bullets whizzed through the air around him and all the rest of the parliamentarians present there – all except two: General Gutiérrez Mellado and Santiago Carrillo – hit the floor seeking shelter from the gunfire. Of course, I had seen that image dozens of times, but for some reason that day I saw it as if I were seeing it for the first time: the shouts, the shots, the terrorized silence of the chamber and that man leaning back against the blue leather of his prime ministerial bench, solitary, statuesque and spectral in a desert of empty benches. It suddenly struck me as a mesmerizing and radiant image, meticulously complex, rich with meaning; perhaps because the truly enigmatic is not what no one has seen, but what we’ve all seen many times and which nevertheless refuses to divulge its significance, it suddenly struck me as an enigmatic image. That’s what set off the alarm. Borges says that ‘every destiny, however long and complicated, essentially boils down to a single moment – the moment a man knows, once and for all, who he is’. Seeing Adolfo Suárez on that 23 February sitting still while the bullets whizzed around him in the deserted chamber, I wondered whether in that moment Suárez had known once and for all who he was and what significance that remote image held, supposing it did hold some meaning. This double question did not leave me over the days that followed, and to try to answer it – or rather: to try to express it precisely – I decided to write a novel».
Javier Cercas: «The Anatomy of a Moment»
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