On the first day of the trial, I left the Supreme Court mid-morning thinking about everything, a little dazed by the task, when I met Iñaki Gabilondo in Via Barquillo. Madrid is a crazy city. You are thinking about a journalistic question and suddenly Iñaki Gabilondo comes towards you smiling. Like when you know what to buy from Zara, but from the Zara of current political events. Obviously. Sometimes I think that the City Council has prepared these things for us who come from outside. I’m getting hungry and Alberto Chicote gets out of a taxi. I told Gabilondo where I was from and what worried me. I spoke to him about the institutional crisis, about citizens’ distrust in justice, about the visible cracks in the democratic pillars, everything was going badly. I almost grabbed his arm to keep from fainting: “Sorry, it’s about Spain.” “There are three exits,” he said. I pulled out the notebook sheepishly, not believing how lucky I am. “Land, sea and air,” he said. “Well, let’s see,” I thought, making the same confusion as Rajoy when asked a question in English.
Maybe I underestimated the diagnosis. In fact, I only told it this Thursday, while the last hearing of the trial is underway and the parties, prosecution and defense, are ascertaining the facts, meeting and presenting the story. It’s amazing to be a judge. In trainspottingthe book by Irvine Welsh, one of the heroin addicts, Spud, is put on trial, and at the trial he is attended by his friend Begbie, a violent psychopath who listens to the legal arguments with wide eyes and turns to Renton, the protagonist: “You have to have a fucking brain to be a judge”. I always remember that sentence, I read it in the late 90s and it’s still there every time I see a judge. Not for his language, but for the final work, the most delicate: believing. When there is no proof of the accusation, nor the confession, when both sides are heard and both put their stories together with proven facts, each supporting their own side, who do you believe? Who convinces you? Were the indications of the investigation so sensational that it now decides whether someone goes to prison to gentlemen who, after all, must trust others or not? Yes, this is judging. That’s why you have to have brains.
In the morning the prosecuting lawyers develop their story. It is the moment of eloquence, of persuasion. The lawyer Gabriel Rodríguez Ramos, who represents the complainant González Amador, when he has something powerful (the cancellation of the cell phone by the FGE) makes gestures of admiration, as if we had the smoking gun here. Then there are the valley moments, obviously, those that one of my aunts described with a detestable expression: pichipacha. But they are fun, because the lawyer has to maintain the accusatory pace, and raises his voice on matters that do not deserve such a tone. You often see this in movies: “And that day, after receiving it his blue coatGonzález Amador’s lawyer is brilliant, or at least conscientious and persistent. It wasn’t an easy job but he got valuable points, even from witnesses. The Hands Cleans lawyer, who was the third or fourth to speak out about the accusation, now has a piece of paper in front of him. The lawyers on the one hand are intrigued: they compete with each other, like at McLaren. Let’s see who scores a goal, let’s see who finds a crack, let’s see who finds the key. The young lawyer from Manos Cleans is intelligent: he sees the calico and dedicates generous words to the other lawyers, he looks at them with respect, he gets so emotional that he almost asks for his acquittal.
In the afternoon, the FGE defense insists on the known lines and defends a profession that aims, paradoxically, at two great exclusives. Journalists José Precedo and Miguel Ángel Campos said they physically had the leaked email before the state Attorney General had it. Several veteran investigative journalists also had access to the content. I imagine them lying in the Supreme Court, compromising a decades-long professional career and exposing themselves to the inference of false testimony, that is, to prison sentences, and it makes me laugh a little. But I am not a judge, nor do I have the brains to be one, and the judge cannot presuppose what I presuppose. If FGE is convicted, shouldn’t perjury be inferred from all of them when the court assumes they lied?
Three exits.
