It happens often with many people who talk and talk until they are dizzy, but they don’t know what they are saying. It’s not that they don’t think about it, mind you, it’s different: they just don’t know it. There is a difference and an important nuance. Of ignorance, to begin with, or worse, of awareness of the language. This flaw undoubtedly affects King Juan Carlos. Discretion has never been his most important virtue. We saw him capable of unconsciously encouraging, with pure verbiage and with great annoyance in plotting, the coup of 23-F. Then, he crushed anyone who opposed him by removing Adolfo Suárez, as Javier Cercas demonstrates, and now in the great series that has been created on the novel in Anatomy of a moment. So what won’t the monarch say in the 512 pages of his memoirs?
When under the title of Reconciliation – see how he totally lacks knowledge of the language – when the book appears in Spanish, it will no longer be worth buying for all that has been revealed. To the simple curiosity satisfied by the serialized content – and the hallucinatory shocks – is added our limit of patience: who will put up with all that cataract of printed nonsense? To the point that, as an eminent Italian correspondent friend told me the other day, he wants to paraphrase himself in that episode with Hugo Chávez and blurt out: “Juan Carlos, why don’t you shut up?”.
Especially because, apart from the mental and moral resistance of the Spaniards, direct witnesses will begin to deny it relentlessly, as has already happened with Javier Cercas. In that dinner that President Emmanuel Macron organized at the Elysée for Vargas Llosa, the Spanish writer emeritus lied, as the king said The Figarothat he would scold him in any way or blame him for anything regarding 23-F.
The same thing that may be false to common sense or, at least, an error of perception worthy of his total lack of sensitivity, which reproaches us for the fact that he was a prisoner at the expense of serving his people… That he did not feel free, that he could not return the millionaire gifts of the Saudis and others, even if he admits the mistake of accepting them… And now, in the anthology of nonsense and lack of tact, he complains that his wife did not come to visit him his exile volunteer and golden in Abu Dhabi. It is not surprising if, in addition to everything we know, from these memoirs we also learn that his eldest daughter is called Helena, not as a gesture towards a Greek wife in memory of the Trojan War, but in homage to the impossible love of a French princess of the Orleans branch.
Poor man… So much dedication, so many debts we owe him and at the same time he boasts of having given us democracy suggest that it was Franco who also believed that it was inevitable. Regret? “Explanations?” he asked, half hesitant and evasive. About what?, he replied to journalists during one of his sailing visits with his friends in Sansenxo. So that? Well, perhaps so that the Spaniards do not ask themselves to what extent it is worth not doubting the convenience of a monarchy.
Since he evidently does not know what he is saying – indeed, he wants to underline everything that is written – in this case he takes away the main merit with which he exercised the leadership of the State with the excuse of having led us towards a new dawn. It wasn’t even your idea or desire, but Franco’s?
He wanted to be king of all the Spaniards, but this goal had already been proclaimed by his father, Don Juan, since the 1940s. For this reason Franco set his sights on him and made sure that he never ascended to the throne, as well as subjecting him to a continuous exercise of psychological sadism, constantly removing his illusions or surprising him with phrases such as: “The Spaniards are easy to govern”. Then, too, in the moment of truth, his son betrayed him.
The truth is also that Juan Carlos, fed up with the manipulations to which his father and mentor, Franco in this case, had subjected him, soon understood that he had to find a way to take advantage of his situation. His life program was largely based on two axes: enrich himself without limits and maintain the tradition of the right of pernada. In the latter, he proved to be very fiery even at a very young age. Paul Preston recounts in his brilliant biography of the monarch – rather favorable to the character – that the military secret services reported the following information to Pardo: between April 1956 and September 1957, the prince had had three hundred and thirty-two sexual intercourses.
These forces could develop better and for a longer period of time in a democratic regime than under the apparatus of a Francoist regime inherited and decaying. His was not a generous gift to the Spaniards, but a decision motivated by personal convenience. The monarchy would not last so much as persist in that medieval dynamic that devastated Spain for four decades. He was aware of it or had been well informed.
At all times he never ceased to appear indiscreet, capricious, fickle, spoiled. Today, from his words, that character derives in complete transparency. He was able to enjoy that freedom without any restrictions, a realm in which he did not give up when it came to giving free rein to his greed or his instincts. And he has benefited from a deplorable pact of silence that forces us to ask ourselves, and now not only, why he does not remain silent once and for all. But why have we also remained silent for so long?
