Ghosts of Spain (15 page)

Phone conversations between the king and Armada show that, whatever might have been said before, Juan Carlos never wavered in his opposition to the coup once it started. ‘I think you've gone mad,' he told him. Juan Carlos told Milans del Bosch the plotters would have to shoot him if they wanted to achieve their aims.

It was one of various coup plots since Franco's death, but the only one to make it out of the barracks. There would be rumours of further, later plots, too, that would only come to light much later. But the 23-F attempt finally spelt the end of the
pronunciamientos
– the uprisings and takeovers by generals – that had wracked Spanish history for 170 years. It is unthinkable, today, that the military could ever rise up in arms again.

The Tejero coup, which also embarrassed much of the army, had one major effect. It helped catapult the Socialist Party of Felipe González into power and, eventually, provoked the
disappearance
of Suárez's UCD party.

The day Felipe González and his wily, some would say
Machiavellian
, number two, Alfonso Guerra, leant out of a window at the Hotel Palace, waving a red rose to salute their victory in the 1982 general election, Spanish democracy hit a new gear. González would stay in power for thirteen years. It was a period in which most residues of Francoism were left to die off from natural causes. By the end of it, the
Transición
really was over.

Of all the angry words about Franco poured onto pages and pronounced in speeches in the years since his death, none have come from King Juan Carlos. Some modern-day Republicans see
this as proof that he does not deserve to reign. In a country where former Franco officials often either gloss over, or completely ignore, their years of loyal service to the Caudillo, Juan Carlos's attitude is, at least, refreshingly coherent.

Juan Carlos is an outwardly pleasant man and a genuinely popular monarch. He is credited with having converted a whole generation of the Spanish left from republicans into
juancarlistas,
Juan Carlos fans. His opponents are, however, not only those on the extreme right who point out that those ‘permanent and
inalterable
' Movimiento Nacional principles he had sworn to uphold included a pledge to keep Spain in strict observance of ‘the doctrine of the Holy, Roman and Apostolic Church'. The anti-monarchical right has its equivalent, more numerously, amongst those who have remained Republicans. These have become increasingly visible in recent years, with the republican flag now a fixture at left-wing demonstrations. These republicans cannot see why Spain, having expelled three of their five monarchs over 150 years, should have replaced a dictator with a king – especially one
hand-picked
by the same dictator.

Within three years of Franco's death in 1975, the king had not only buried the Movimiento Nacional principles that he had once sworn to uphold, he had buried the Movimiento altogether. By the end of 1978 Spain had become a democracy. Francoism was dead, the Movimiento had been dissolved and the voters were happily piling earth on the graves of both. It was a remarkable
transformation
. It saw Juan Carlos himself shed almost all his powers to become the largely ornamental head of a constitutional,
parliamentary
monarchy. He is, in that sense, Europe's last true king – the last monarch to have held the powers of a ruler. No other living European monarch has enjoyed such power, or given it all up. His supporters like to claim that he is also that rare thing, an elected king. When Spaniards approved their constitution in 1978, they voted for parliamentary monarchy.

Yet Juan Carlos himself is also subject to a dose of Spanish silence. For Spanish journalists freely admit that the king – along with his family – is their last great taboo subject. ‘There is freedom
of speech on everything, except the king and the monarchy,' Cebrían tells González in their book. Journalists talk of
autocensura
,
self-censorship. It is not something they are proud of. As one of Spain's most prolific royal writers, Juan Balansó, put it (despite being a fervent Juan Carlos fan): ‘There is one thing worse than censorship, self-censorship.' Juan Carlos is not easily criticised. His past in Franco's shadow – even as his temporary replacement when the Caudillo was ill – is glossed over. His finances are not scrutinised. His private life is, well, private.

‘There was always a timid editor, prepared to suspect that behind this or that affair [involving royal advisor Manuel de Prado] one might find the king himself,' wrote Pilar Urbano, a prominent journalist, after a financial scandal hit those close to the king in the 1990s.

Spaniards generally give two explanations for this royal
reverence
. One is that the king deserves it, having seen through the
Transición
and squashed the 1981 coup. Another is that, given its history, the Spanish monarchy needs all the help it can get. ‘The fragility of the monarchy is greater than it may seem at first sight,' warned Tusell. ‘In the Spanish case, the repetition of cases such as we have seen in other latitudes would have far more devastating effects … After all, the interruptions in our tradition of monarchy in contemporary times are far more pronounced.'

In a rare breaking of ranks, Vicenç Navarro made a list of
royal-related
affairs which television journalism – in a country where only one in ten people buy a newspaper – had chosen to ignore completely. They included four ‘economic assessors of the Royal household' who ended up in jail ‘without anybody investigating the relationship between them and the king'. There were, he said, a list of presents that went from yachts and palaces to luxury cars from ‘business groups and people who try to influence' the king. ‘None of them have been commented on by our television stations, which is where most citizens garner their basic information on political life. Such silence would be unthinkable in other democracies.' When the satirical magazine
El Jueves
brought out a book of royal cartoons called
Tocando los Borbones
, the editor complained that
two privately owned television stations, Canal Plus and Telecinco, refused to run its advertisements. ‘The fact is that we worry that the monarchy is not well enough rooted, and that anything might finish it off,' says a former
El País
editor, Juan Luis Cebrián.

Given the British press's – and newspaper readers' – surfeit of interest in the UK royal family, there is a healthy side to this silence. If Spaniards and their newspapers are not interested in their politicians' private lives, why should they intrude on the royal family's? And if the royal family behaves properly in public, why worry about what it does behind closed doors?

Compared to their British counterparts, the Spanish royals are, at least in public, remarkably modest. When I went to their Zarzuela Palace to see how they lived a few years ago, their press officer proudly showed me the dining room – with seating room for just eighteen. The palace, a former hunting lodge on the outskirts of Madrid, is both relatively small and very unstuffy. Nobody seemed to mind that I took a wrong turning out of the car park and got lost in the royal deer park afterwards. When I eventually found a guard post – pop music wafting out from a radio inside it – I was politely invited to drive myself down a short cut towards the proper exit. The relaxed atmosphere could not have been more distant from the starched surroundings of Britain's royal family.

Trailing the king and his offspring for a couple of days, I found him easy-going and hard-working. His style was more
presidential
than regal. Hands were shaken and backs, occcasionally, given a manly slap. Women were kissed on the hand. He was rather like a man seeking votes. ‘The king says they must go out to work daily, to be with the people,' one staffer explained. The king, in other words, knows he must work to keep his popularity. Given his family's history, that is obviously a sensible idea.

Not all is perfect, however, in the life of a man who – by eschewing ostentation and getting down to street level – has avoided the spectacular own goals of other royal families.
Occasionally
, newspapers or journalists have broken ranks, running rumours about the king's relationships with a number of women.

Does the king's ‘enthusiasm for beautiful women' – as one
biographer delicately puts it – matter to Spaniards? Not really. Gossiping is a national pastime. In the birthplace of
¡Hola!
magazine and a dozen competitors (whose enthusiasm for royal scandals seems limited to those of other countries) it is also a large publishing and television industry. Spaniards enjoy the tittle-tattle but are rarely judgemental. ‘A Borbón will always be a Borbón,' they say knowingly, referring to the far more colourful lives of previous monarchs. (Isabel II was said to be a
nymphomaniac
, while Alfonso XIII had three bastard children, one of whom, Leandro Alfonso, was formally recognised as such by a Spanish court in 2003.) It is a different matter, however, when that enthusiasm encourages, in the words of the same biographer, ‘attempts at blackmail by financiers'.

Paul Preston, the professor of Spanish history at the London School of Economics, wrote the biography referred to above. He also sheds light on one of those episodes that Spanish writers
generally
ignore or skirt around in their – almost unanimously
adulatory
– descriptions of their king. In one of the most tragic moments of a difficult childhood, Juan Carlos shot his own brother dead. Juan Carlos, then seventeen, and fourteen-year-old Alfonsito were playing with a gun in the exiled family's home in Portugal. No clear account of what happened has yet been given. The gun, it seems, was in Juan Carlos's hands when it went off. The bullet from the .22 pistol either bounced off a wall or simply went straight into Alfonsito's forehead. Juan Carlos' father, Don Juan de Borbón, tried to keep his son alive. The wound, however, was mortal. He died a few minutes later. His father wrapped the teenage corpse in a Spanish flag. The incident must have been a key moment in Juan Carlos's life – both in his relations with a father already using him as a pawn in his games with Franco and in the creation of his own personality, which was still in its
formative
years. ‘The incident affected the Prince dramatically. The rather extrovert figure … now seemed afflicted by a tendency to introspection. Relations with his father were never the same again,' says Preston.

On a rainy day in Madrid, I was reminded of the republican
blood that seems to boil under the surface of a significant number of Spaniards. I had gone to hire a car. It was a Saturday and much of central Madrid was cordoned off. The king's son and heir, Prince Felipe, was getting married to a television journalist, Letizia Ortiz. To the disgust of some hard-core conservatives, he had broken ranks with tradition. His bride was not just a
commoner
– granddaughter of a taxi driver – but a divorcee. The
wedding
ceremony at the Almudena Cathedral looked set to start under a torrential downpour.

It was a sign of the family's chequered history as on-off monarchs that this was the first royal wedding Madrid had seen since the prince's great-grandfather, King Alfonso XIII, married a British princess, Victoria Eugenia, in 1906. That wedding had been marred by an anarchist bomb attack on their carriage that spattered her dress with the victims' blood. Twenty-five years later, in 1931, she would be forced into exile after the Republic was proclaimed. She did not return until 1968, and then only for the baptism of Prince Felipe. She died the following year. Her remains were eventually taken from Lausanne to the royal
pudridero
, literally the rotting chamber, at the sombre, imposing, five-hundred-year-old royal monastery in San Lorenzo del
Escorial
– where they still await final burial alongside those of other members of the Spanish royal family.

Security for the royal wedding was tight. Police helicopters clattered overhead. City centre metro stations had been closed. Madrid was only too aware of what a handful of determined terrorists could do. Just a couple of months earlier Islamist bombers had killed 191 people in simultaneous attacks on four commuter trains into the city.

The heavens had opened, keeping most people at home. They would watch the wedding of their future monarch on the
television.
His bride, a former newsreader whose voice they used to hear on state television every day, had hardly said a word in
public
since they got engaged and she disappeared off their screens. (One newspaper previously reported that a special safe had been bought to lock up her divorce papers.)

Three young men in green company uniforms were sitting behind the counter at the car hire place. ‘It looks like the royal wedding is a washout,' I said, making conversation. They
sniggered
. ‘
¡Qué se mojen!
' – ‘Let them get wet!' – said one. The others sniggered some more. Spain's royal family, I was reminded, was not universally loved.

A poll published in 2005 in
El Mundo
suggested that trouble might be brewing for Spain's monarchy. Almost a quater of Spaniards declared themselves to be republicans. That was fifty per cent more than five years earlier. Nearly forty per cent of
eighteen
to twenty-nine-year-olds were republicans – slightly more than those who declared themselves to be monarchists. This was despite the fact that very few said they had a poor opinion of the king or his son as individuals.

Juan Carlos oversaw the
Transición
, stopped a coup and gave up the supremacy handed to him as Europe's last old-fashioned, power-wielding monarch. His personal trajectory – from declared supporter of Francoism and its principles to diehard democrat – sums up the
Transición
itself. The
pacto del olvido
was the price one sector of Spanish society, that of the Civil War
vencidos
and their heirs, paid so that Juan Carlos could pull the
Francoists
into democracy. If the pact, and the silence, is being broken now, it is – at least in part – because most of the latter were so thoroughly converted.