Today, Thursday, Fátima Aburto celebrated in a very special way the fiftieth anniversary of 20-N, that day in 1975 when the dictator Francisco Franco died. This Medicine graduate returned on a cold November afternoon to the Congress of Deputies as if she were entering her home, because she was first a senator, and then a deputy, of the PSOE, from 2004 to 2011. Even if on this occasion socialist politics appeared in the Chamber as a guest of a special event, and on the arm of her niece: Aburto is the mother of the producer Manuela Ocón and, therefore, the mother-in-law of the filmmaker Alberto Rodríguez, director of the series Anatomy of a fall, which in its four episodes – written by Fran Araujo and Rafael Cobos – adapts the book by Javier Cercas dedicated to revealing what happened before and during the attempted coup d’état of 23 February 1981.
The first episode was screened this Thursday afternoon in the Constitutional Chamber of Congress, in the presence of its creators, several current deputies, the President of the Chamber, Francina Armengol, and, above all, the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, whose speech was carefully examined to find echoes of response to the Supreme Court’s ruling, a few hours earlier, of the State Attorney General’s two-year disqualification for revealing secrets. And yes, speaking of the half century since Franco’s death and reflecting on the 44 years of frustrated military revolt, he reconnected a thread with today’s events: “Democracy is a privilege to be defended every day from unfounded nostalgia, from economic interests, from attacks that change shape”, then assuring his “firm will to neutralize that threat, to defend popular sovereignty and democracy against those who believe they have the prerogative to protect or muzzle it”.
The president praised Cercas’ “monumental” book and the series itself directed by Alberto Rodríguez, since both “perform an essential function, that is, to help our young people understand that democracy in Spain was not an accident nor a historical automatism, but it was a collective achievement, a great collective achievement, an achievement that we ran the risk of losing, but which we defended tooth and nail.” Sánchez insisted: “Democracy can be lost in an instant, as Javier Cercas tells us, but it is built and preserved day by day, among everyone. And standing still in the face of a coup d’état was not written in any script. It was not inevitable. It was not safe.”
First Cercas, who had promised to behave well, after his latest criticisms of the president (“I played some jokes on him”) recalled that the three protagonists of his book (the outgoing president Adolfo Suárez, the vice president and captain general Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado and the then leader of the PCE Santiago Carrillo) “had not believed at a certain point in their lives in democracy”, and that that “moment”, the one which occurred at 6.23 pm, on 23 February 1981, when Civil Guard Colonel Antonio Tejero entered the hall to carry out his coup, “he is the founding myth of democracy” above other milestones or commemorative dates. That trio, “the three traitors,” refused to lie down on the ground as Tejero requested. And by “risking their lives for democracy” they ensured that at that moment “democracy was born, the transition ended and the civil war ended”.
The writer recalled that “the coup is saturated with lies.” “I myself dedicated ten hours a day for four years to the search for the truth: my book was created against lies. The Gospel already says it: the truth will make you free, which means that the lie will make you slaves”, he observed with a half smile. A few meters away there was another MP with a direct relationship with the Movistar Plus+ series, Blanca Cercas, Girona MP from the PSC and sister of the writer.
There was a shiver in the Constitutional Hall of Congress when the screening of the first episode began and the image of Antonio Tejero shouting, “Silence everyone,” appeared on the three screens of the chamber’s lectern. Present in the room were David Lorente, the actor who plays him brilliantly, as well as Alvaro Morte (Adolfo Suárez), Eduard Fernández (Santiago Carrillo) and Pedro Casablanc (Teodulfo Lagunero). Missing from the main cast were Miki Esparbé (King Juan Carlos) and Manolo Solo, who builds a grieving Gutiérrez Mellado subtly and enormously. Thanks to the applause received at the end of the screening, Tejero triumphed in Congress, even if only in fiction and for a while.
After the event, the technical-artistic team and the directors of Movistar Plus appeared on the stands of the Chamber, where the event began Memory on stage, in which several actors recreated the key speeches of deputies during the Transition such as Soledad Becerril, Santiago Carrillo, Enrique Tierno Galván or Miquel Roca. There Alberto Rodríguez, who recorded the series in its real setting, greeted Antonio Chaves, the usher who saw Tejero point the gun at Suárez on February 23. “The best thing about this trip was meeting all the congress participants from then and now”, confessed the Sevillian director. And having said this, he emotionally photographed his mother-in-law, his partner and his daughter together in the room which for a few hours hosted one of the final blows of the Franco regime.
