These were not frivolous questions. The burst with which González responded, “I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about,” was a lot like lightning. It became clear that if it was up to him, we would never achieve anything resembling the truth.
I tend to distrust memoirs because they are rarely sincere. Even when they are written with sincerity, something is wrong. Over time, personal memories transform and adapt to a more or less coherent story that does not entirely correspond to reality. The brain fictionalizes our lives to pretend that things have meaning.
One way to get around the fiction with which neurons assemble real fragments is to ask others to do research: this is what Katherine Graham, owner of the Washington Post in the golden age of the press, to reconstruct his biography in “A Personal History”. But it’s expensive.
Memory plays tricks. I myself confused last week, in an article, Màrius Carol and Antonio Franco, two journalists from Barcelona (Franco, my former director, has already died) who are similar on several points. By searching among the possible causes of the short circuit of my neurotransmitters (if I still have any left), I recovered vital incidents from an era, the first 80s of the last century, which I considered forgotten.
And I realized that my current memory of the famous Transition did not correspond to my perception at the time. I was 18 years old during the first elections, in 1977, and I must admit that all of it (including the violence, the coup d’état, the terrorism, the uncertainty) seemed very amusing to me. I even regretted the end of the Franco regime a little: I thought I would miss my little experiences of clandestinity under a dictatorship. Imagine how little secrecy a teenager can achieve. In short, what is experienced at 18 as an adventure changes and takes on sudden perceptions of mistakes made, risks taken and myths fabricated.
I don’t know why Felipe González, president of the Spanish government between 1982 (with an overwhelming absolute majority) and 1996 (when he suffered what he called “a sweet defeat” against José María Aznar) did not write a conventional memory. . As leader of the opposition to Adolfo Suárez, and then as president, he lived through a few years about which we don’t know much. In fact, we know so little about all this (the pacts, the coup d’état, the authentic plot of 23-F, the possible participation of the king in the attack, the maneuvers of the secret services) that from time to time time we discover things we don’t even know. We knew we didn’t know.
Important nodes of this process remain covered by state secrecy. And those who know remain silent. Or they forget. I found Felipe González’s reaction the other day spectacular, when he was asked about the recordings of conversations between Juan Carlos I and one of his lovers, the actress Bárbara Rey. The silence of General Alfonso Armada, right-hand man of the monarch at the time and found guilty of the 23-F attempt, was mentioned. These were not frivolous questions. The burst with which González responded, “I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about,” was a lot like lightning. It became clear that if it were up to him, we would never get anything resembling the truth. Felipe González has a lot of time to criticize the current socialist government, which provides many elements of criticism, but he does not remember when he led the government. “No fucking idea.”
Maybe one day, when the Emeritus is dead, when the obituary of Felipe González has been published for some time and there will be no one left, not even the young people of the time like me, who lived the events, the mysteries will begin to reveal themselves. Even people’s deceptive memory will not remain. It will be as if today we discovered the definitive proof that the son of Isabel II, the future Alfonso XII, did not have as father the king consort Francisco de Asís, but the Count of Torrefiel. Well, go ahead. It wouldn’t matter to us much.
And that’s what will happen when our grandchildren, or great-great-grandchildren, find out what happened after 23-F. History and the ineffable law of official secrecy will have defrauded the generations who experienced this anguish. I hope that at least our great-great-grandchildren will be surprised and talk about the strange things that kings did when they existed.
