In Europe

theatre of medical technology, that deathbed of the old Spain.
    Franco addressed a crowd for the last time on 1 October, 1975. It was hard for him to speak, because he had trouble breathing. Two weeks later he had his first heart attack, and more followed. On 24 October, the gastric haemorrhages began. The Spanish radio began playing mournful music. Franco developed pneumonia, followed by more internal bleeding. An emergency operation was carried out in the palace. Kidney problems. Some Spanish papers began running daily maps of Franco's body, as though it were a war zone, with arrows pointing to vital organs and other positions under siege. On 5 November, two thirds of his stomach was removed. In the days that followed he was hooked up to all manner of life-support equipment, probably only for the sake of winning enough time for the reappointment of his vassal Rodriguez Valcaral to a fewimportant government posts. The press offered capital sums for photographs of the dying dictator; his thirty-two physicians refused categorically, but his son-in-law took one snapshot after the other. ‘How difficult it is to die,’ was the only thing Franco himself could whisper. Another haemorrhage, another operation. It was only on 20 November, after thirty-five days of struggling against death, that the dictator's coterie allowed him to depart in peace. In Barcelona, ‘the champagne corks flew through the autumn air,’ Manuel Vázquez Montalbán wrote, ‘but no one heard a thing. Barcelona, after all, was a city that had learned good manners. Silent in both joy and sadness.’
    After Franco's death, the prognoses for Spain were exceptionally pessimistic: the experts were almost unanimous in their predictions of old hatreds and new violence flaring up. Yet they had been deceived by the regime's outward appearance. Most countries pretend to be more modern than they are, but here it was precisely the opposite. Alongside and despite Spain's primitive system of government – Franco himself, for example, knew nothing at all about economic politics – the country had also witnessed the gradual rise of a modern trade and industry, backed by a great deal of foreign funding and led by technocrats with little affinity with the regime. In 1959 they convinced Franco of the need to abandon his old tenets. A sizeable package of reform measures was launched, including the Stabilisation and Liberalisation Act to free up trade and investments. Industrialisation was stimulated and the influx of foreign companies was encouraged. During the 1960s alone, Spanish industrial production tripled, and the economy grew faster than anywhere else in Europe.
    In the course of this change to a more or less democratic Spain, leading roles were played by two unlikely figures: the new prime minister, Adolfo Suárez, and the young King Juan Carlos, who Franco had already appointed as his successor in 1969. In a carefully planned coup, Suárez succeeded in ridding himself of the last members of the regime and forcing through a democratic constitution. It was an exceedingly delicate and dangerous operation, for the threat of a new civil war dangled continually over the country. The German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger therefore rightly picked Suárez as one of his ‘heroes of the retreat’.
    Behind the scenes, King Juan Carlos, grandson of King Alfons XIII, hadbeen carefully manoeuvred into place to play a modest role within the dictatorship; when it came down to it, however, and at precisely the right moment, he stood his ground. When pistol-toting Colonel Antonio Tejero tried to take the Spanish parliament hostage in 1981, Juan Carlos blocked his moves with a few fast manoeuvres of his own. In the appointments he made, he consistently chose innovators and democrats. And then, after this bloodless royal revolution, he withdrew into the lee of the parliamentary monarchy.
    Even while Franco was still alive, Franco's Spain had ceased to exist. His popular support was extremely limited: in the country's first free elections he received barely two per cent of the vote. Suárez was quickly forgotten. After all, as Enzensberger wrote, he remained a turncoat in the eyes of his former comrades. And, for the democrats he had helped into power, he would always remain one of Franco's lackeys. ‘The hero of the retreat can be sure of only one thing: the ingratitude of the fatherland.’

Chapter FIFTY-SIX
Lisbon
    ‘I'M TELLING YOU MY STORY AT A STRANGE MOMENT. MY