José Luis Ábalos skirted, in the first question of his interrogation, the key issue affecting the trial. The meeting of two unknown human beings, him and Koldo García, which is always the meeting of two intelligences (high, medium, or low, it doesn’t matter) that begin to brush against each other first, to get to know each other later, and finally to establish a deep relationship between them. With an extraordinary incentive, which is their work environment: power and everything it grants access to.
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It is a relationship, in their case, conditioned by Ábalos’s power and the unemployment situation in which Koldo was when Ábalos met him; that is, a relationship born flawed in terms of equality. But still, a fascinating relationship.
Hand on hand on the table, glasses placed upside down on a pile of papers, dark blue suit and light blue shirt without a tie, the former minister explains how, in his newly started role as secretary of Organization, he needed a driver for his many trips with such demanding schedules that it could not be a conventional chauffeur but “a driver who could endure my schedules” (what Ábalos basically means is that his driver could not be under any union agreement). “He accompanied me 24 hours a day,” he finally summarized. And he not only wanted a driver but someone who would be an activist. “I had to rebuild the party,” Ábalos tells the court.
They had run in the 2017 primaries. They met superficially there. When Ábalos needed a dedicated driver, Santos Cerdán told him about his old friend Koldo García. It is easy to imagine the first trip. Two men studying each other, one sitting in front and the other behind. Not a trip like anyone could take in a taxi, but the first of many across all of Spain, who knows for how long.
It is also easy to suspect the days before at Koldo García’s house with his wife Patricia Úriz, the conversations between them about the possibilities that opened up by sharing so much time, in such a small space, with the all-powerful number two of the PSOE, the party that had just won the elections in Spain. Koldo was not going to be just a driver. He was going to be an active activist, in fact, he already was: Pedro Sánchez had dedicated a post to him on Facebook in 2014. And this Ábalos, will he be nice, will he be cool? No matter how withdrawn the powerful one is, no matter how gruff he is, isn’t it true that being 24 hours with another man, even if not of his condition, and many of those hours in the cabin of a car, he ends up opening up a bit? “We are human beings, not octopuses, Patricia, we need contact,” he could argue.
But Ábalos was not the shy one at the party, the elusive, the stern and stiff type for whom subordinates are AI-generated bodies. Sociable, festive, talkative, a guy who rubs shoulders with the world, who does not pay attention to labels; the kind of man who, traveling first class on the Titanic by the ways of life, knows that the real party, the wild and morally relaxed party, is always downstairs, where the disinherited are. Those who die first if the ship sinks.
The interesting thing about the crime (at a strictly human level, which does not coincide with the judicial) is the moment when a man begins to consider breaking the law. That instant when a guy like José Luis Ábalos, who has everything, intends to risk it for a little more. It is a common place in the PSOE and surroundings that Ábalos raised his standard of living so much that what could be done within the law was no longer enough, and one had to look beyond. But sometimes one cannot know anything about what happens in the darkest corners of the mind, sometimes not even the owner of that mind.
The truth is that Koldo García and José Luis Ábalos began to truly get to know each other on the road, we suppose in the midst of the silences of astonishment that the plateau always provokes (Quico Cadaval, the good one, the Galician, said that a riazor blues woke up when they were going to Madrid for the Copa final, looked to the sides amazed and said: “Here the tide really goes down”).
I do not know what movie-like tension scene took place between Koldo and Ábalos when they both began to understand, as they talked, as their intelligences explored each other to find points of convergence, that they could get along. That even (and this is what distinguishes true friendships) they could share a secret. But there is no doubt that, before the first big revelations, there was a silence. A silence in which both chew over what they are going to say. When someone tells you that they find you attractive, and you respond that the attraction is mutual, there is automatically a tense silence. A preamble that anticipates that one of the two, whoever it is, must take one more step, the decisive step. But it must be taken, and it is not easy. The silence is the run-up. And who takes the plunge afterward, despite the clues, to ask someone out, propose a crime, offer a bísnes?
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Many years ago, Juan Marsé gave an impressive interview to Arcadi Espada in EL PAÍS in which he told how his biological father, a taxi driver, had lost his wife in childbirth and did not know what to do with the kid, and how a couple who had lost their baby got into his car at the hospital. They told each other how everything was and, upon learning it, they fell silent. “I suppose then, after mutual consolations, there would be a few seconds, or even minutes of silence. This is the stuff of novels.” Of course.
There must have been many such silences in the car that Koldo García drove taking Minister Ábalos across Spain. Who says what first even knowing that the other is willing.
That relationship was strengthened by talking, they came to understand that some idle interests united them, I suppose talking in certain codes, exploring each other with language and humor to study reactions to increasingly thorny matters. Also, even without committing crimes, extreme trust is needed to deceive their partners together, to party hard, to exchange catalogs of girls, to agree on versions about this and that. It is not done among strangers or people with whom you do not have absolute trust. And to create that, their intelligences evaluated each other, rubbed against each other, began to mesh, albeit with some clauses: Koldo García, for example, soon began recording everything. You never know, until you know.
In the absence of the third element, the corrupter Víctor de Aldama, sitting with them on the bench, that relationship between Ábalos and Koldo is the truly interesting thing about this trial. At least in the eyes of someone who wants to understand, even a little, the human condition. Aldama is what he is and what he claims to be and what he himself has told the court: bribing and taking. But the bribed, those two against nature friends who have even shown their harmony in the Supreme Court, confessing things to each other, synchronizing strategies, demand exuberant attention.
The boss and the subordinate, equal on the bench and in jail. “Mr. Ábalos was a man who had a lot of work and I took care of the mundane things so that he could dedicate himself to the important,” said Koldo: “I will be grateful to Mr. Ábalos all my life, all of it.” As for Ábalos, he said he took Koldo to the ministry as soon as he could, went from driver to advisor and, later, to counselor of Renfe. What training and knowledge did Koldo have to be on the Board of Directors of Renfe Mercancías? Ábalos smiles at prosecutor Alejandro Luzón. “Look, the requirement to be on a board is the trust of the person who appoints you. But this is with everyone, huh?”
José Luis Ábalos says in the Supreme Court that as a driver, Koldo had an active part in his “intimacy” and his “personal life.” Therefore, “singular bonds” were generated. The novel by Ruth Rendell or Patricia Highsmith is here, not anywhere else in the room. In The American Friend, Highsmith narrates how her psychopath Tom Ripley, through an intermediary, seduces Treeves, a weak and vulnerable man, to commit a crime. But Treeves, like his wife, was a straight and upright man, of strong principles. “Which meant he was a man who could be pushed in any direction; it was enough to do it intelligently.”
It happens in Highsmith’s best novels. Apparently upright and incorruptible men who, with a little intelligence, can be pushed in any direction. Incorruptible values because no one has known how to make the right offer. Family men of impeccable life who end up, a hundred pages later, killing someone in a crowded station in the most natural way in the world, and with hardly any guilt.
There is an internal and logical drama in the relationship between José Luis Ábalos and Koldo García, even though they present themselves on equal terms. One pushed more than the other. And if the one who pushed them was Aldama, one of the two let himself be pushed more than the other. Who? Who knows. In that slight imbalance, in that minimal psychological imbalance between the two, which happens to them and to us in our friendships, lies the almost indecipherable secret that leads to the “why.” Which is always the most curious question, therefore the most human, of all.
