Canalejas had been prime minister of the country for almost three years and had made enemies on the right and the left. So in those tense, hair-triggered times, no one was surprised when an anarchist from Aragon named Manuel Pardiñas fired off three rounds in the middle of Puerta del Sol, as the prime minister was on his way to the Ministry of Governance in the middle of the morning, wearing a frock coat and traveling with no bodyguard. Canalejas had stopped in front of the window display of the San Martín bookshop, and the pale, mustachioed anarchist with one bad eye took advantage of the distraction to draw near to him and to secure his place in the bloody history of Spain with the cry, “Long live anarchy and death to tyrants!” After that, finding himself surrounded, he repeated the cry and shot himself in the temple. The next day, Pardiñas was front page news in all the major papers, and no one in the country went unaware of the anarchist’s “deplorable act.” It was said that the perpetrator ate no meat nor fish, and that his only vice was books about anarchism—he didn’t drink or smoke, didn’t even play cards; it was also said that he had traveled to Argentina to dodge his military service and that they had expelled him from that country after the assassination of the police chief of Buenos Aires. Among his personal effects they found an anarchist pamphlet, a fountain pen with a golden plume, a section of Flammarion’s Astronomía popular, and a photograph of a woman with the dedication “To my unforgettable Manuel,” showing that even assassins can be mama’s boys. His personality caused such a sensation that a motion picture was produced, called The Assassination and Burial of Don José Canalejas, with the fresh, young Pepe Isbert in the leading role.
“Now for the king,” said Abelardo when he read the article in the newspaper.
And more than one took him literally.
•
PABLO REACHED MADRID AT THE START of April 1913. Atocha Station was the same human boiling pot as North Station had been twenty years earlier, but now the carriages were not just competing against each other: they also found themselves in a constant battle of insults and swindles against the onslaught of automobiles threatening to steal their business. Pablo had spent the last few months working as a boilermaker in a metallurgy plant in Pueblo Nuevo (he needed to save up some money before he could carry out his crazy plan), all the while establishing ties to the most radical elements of Barcelonan anarchism, even being tempted by the anarchist writer and lawyer Ángel Samblancat (a native of El Grado, like Pardiñas), to write an article in the weekly La Ira, which he was planning to publish with Federico Urales. Samblancat, a friend and mentor of the poet Salvat-Papasseit, would have been shocked to learn that years later his name would be used for a brand of trousers. But Pablo had in mind other ways of realizing his ire, more direct than writing little articles.
He had decided to go to Madrid because there he could kill two birds with one stone. Bird number 1: the vulture, Alfonso XIII, who had shown no hesitation in sending Ferrer Guàrdia to his death. Bird number 2: the dove, Angela, who had taken off flying and gotten lost in the firmament. The plan: attack the first to catch the attention of the second. The weapon: the pocket pistol that a certain lieutenant colonel had placed in his hands. (No question of using bombs as Mateo Morral had, lest he risk taking innocent lives. A precise job. One point-blank shot, and a passport straight into all the newspapers.) The justification: though the life of a tyrant may be very respectable, the life of the people is more sacred, as Saint Thomas Aquinas himself once said. In the worst case he would end up in the garrote, passing into posterity as the regicide who put an end to the tyranny of Alfonso. In the best case, the shot would miss and the monarch would come out unharmed, and capital punishment would be commuted to life in chains (in an act of royal magnanimity), and when the Republic was reestablished in Spain, he would be pardoned with full honors, and free to spend the rest of his life with Angela, who would be proud to be the wife of a national hero. Such were Pablo’s thoughts as the train crossed the central plateau toward Atocha Station. No doubt about it: he had come completely unhinged.
However, attacking the king would be no easy task. The rumor was going around that Pardiñas had shot Canalejas out of sheer opportunity, while his real objective had always been Alfonso XIII. In fact, a few days after the assassination, the Spanish ambassador in Paris sent a dispatch to the minister of state informing him that the prime minister’s death had emboldened anarchists to action, many of them residing in France and ready to complete the task that Pardiñas had left halfway done. So when Pablo reached Madrid, the capital was infested with revolutionaries, and security was tighter than ever. He took a room in an inn called the Amelia on Calle Montera, near the ever-widening wound of Gran Vía, the vast project of urban demolition that was changing the face of the city. The innkeeper was a female version of Don Quixote: tall, gaunt, and with that absent gaze unique to the adventurous and the mad.
“Do me a favor and show me your identification papers,” she muttered in greeting.
“This isn’t exactly the Ritz,” Pablo grumbled as he took out his documentation.
“Express orders of the government,” replied Doña Quixote.
So Pablo had no choice but to sign the registry with his real name. Then he was taken to his austere room, with an iron-framed bed, a bedside table topped with marble, an armoire of blackened wood, a slightly greasy easy chair, and a small washing station with a mirror and a ceramic basin. He unpacked his bag and hid his revolver under the mattress, but then changed his mind and decided to find it a safer hiding spot—he did not want to risk having that scarecrow innkeeper find it as she was making the bed and then report him to the police, ruining all his plans. So he felt around the back of the armoire until he found a protruding nail from which he could hang the pistol, securing it with a piece of twine from his bag; then he slid the easy chair over to the balcony, took down the curtain and filled its hollow rod with the five bullets he had purchased before leaving Barcelona. Only then did he decide to go out into the street, with the idea that he would find Vicente Holgado, the newsboy-cum-anarchist who had saved his life during the attack by Mateo Morral.
It took him a few days to find him, looking everywhere: in cafés, in meetings, in libertarian gatherings, and even in movie theaters, which had been proliferating like rabbits since the last time Pablo visited the capital. But he ended up finding him in the most unexpected way: at dusk on the fifth day he returned to the Amelia hostel and went out onto the balcony to smoke a cigarette. He leaned on the railing, took a deep drag, and exhaled the smoke, thinking that if he didn’t find Vicente soon, he would have to plan the attack by himself. And at that moment, he saw him, on the balcony of the hotel next door, leaning on the railing and smoking a cigarette, as if it were his own image reflected in a mirror.
“Vicente!” Pablo exclaimed.
“Pablo?” Vicente exclaimed in return.
And they looked at each other in surprise.
“What are you doing here?” asked the Madrileño, whose appearance was still vaguely gypsy, vaguely gangster.
“I came to—” Pablo started to say but bit his tongue. “Can we talk?”
Vicente looked him in the eyes, trying to decipher his intentions, and then looked around at all the balconies nearby.
“I think it would be better if we went somewhere else.”
And he brought him to the same bar they had been to seven years before.
“I want to thank you,” said Pablo after sitting down at a discreet corner table.
“Why?” asked Vicente, though he already knew the answer.
“For saving my life on the day of the royal wedding.”
“It was nothing,” he said. And then added: “But you didn’t want to talk to me just to thank me, did you?”
“No … I came to ask you to help me kill Alfonso XIII.”
Vicente said nothing, but his nostrils flared in reflex, as if at the smell of danger. He gazed steadily at Pablo, then took out his pouch of tobacco. After rolling a cigarette, he said:
“You know you are the fifth person to propose that idea to me this year?”
“Wow,” Pablo said, surprised, “apparently the work of regicide is in high demand.”
“But now is not the time.”
“What do you mean, it’s not the time? Any time is a good time to get rid of a tyrant!”
“Shhh, don’t talk so loud,” Vicente whispered, looking suspiciously at a pair of men who were leaning their elbows on the bar. “Look, Pablo, in my mind, the success of any revolutionary act depends largely on whether it’s committed at the right time. And this isn’t it: after what happened to Canalejas, the waters are really choppy and the cops are watching us closely. Actually, it’s better we stop talking about this. How do you know I’m not one of them? How do I know you’re not?”
Pablo remained silent, trying to get used to the situation: he had been sure that Vicente Holgado would help him plan the regicide, and now he felt somewhat betrayed by this revolutionary and his strategic pretenses. Although, when he really thought about it, perhaps this was only a pose, a distraction tactic on the part of the anarchists, who had probably already chosen the candidate destined for the front page of every newspaper: they had most likely been planning an attack for months, and it was even possible that Vicente himself had been assigned to the gruesome task, which is why he now had to dissuade all of the visionaries who might jeopardize his plan in their haste to do away with the king. So if Pablo wanted to shoot His Majesty, he would have to do it alone … and make sure nobody beat him to it.
“Alright, Vicente, I understand what you’re saying,” he finally conceded, “but I still think that there aren’t good times or bad times to get rid of the cancers of our society. That’s what I think and that’s what I say, because I’ve always preferred to have the world disagree with me rather than disagree with myself. But you have more experience in the matter than I do, and I respect what you say. When the right moment comes, I’ll be ready if you need me.”
“You promise you’re not going to pull some damn fool prank?”
“I promise,” said Pablo.
And he did not intend to go back on his word, because what he had in mind was no prank.
– 17 –
The Directory, desirous that public opinion should have true information preventing any confusion and establishing the importance of the facts, avoiding conscious and unconscious exaggerations by sources, finds that it must make known the following events, which seem to be revolutionary in character, instigated by anarchist elements coming from France, doubtless in relation to advanced Spanish syndicalism.
On the morning of the seventh day of this month, the municipal authorities of Vera (Navarra) observed suspicious individuals, who had doubtlessly crossed the border recently, and who, being thirty in number and armed, clashed violently in the vicinity of the village with a pair of civil guardsmen on duty, and then dispersed.
ABC, November 9, 1924
(official memorandum from the Office of the President)
THE GROUP OF REBELS IS RESTING in the darkness of the quarry, while the leaders stand next to the road discussing whether it is better to wait for the workers to come out of the factory or to assault the Civil Guard barracks immediately, when Manolito Monzón, who has gone over by the corner of the factory wall to empty his bladder, comes back running in a state of panic, gesticulating wildly. Only Perico Alarco, who is used to interpreting his accomplice’s flying hands, understands:
“Somebody’s coming,” he translates. “And they’re armed.”
After which both men disappear into the darkness.
The alerted revolutionaries instinctively go quiet, placing their hands on their holsters, but they have already been discovered: two silhouettes are visible against the illuminated wall of the factory, and these silhouettes are walking toward the quarry, topped with the unmistakable tricorn hats of the Civil Guard. The first to detect them are the leaders standing by the road: Bonifacio Manzanedo, Luís Naveira, Gil Galar, Julián Santillán, El Maño, and Robinsón, who quickly go from having their hands on their pistols to having their pistols in their hands. The rest of the expedition does the same, and some huddle closer to the cluster of leaders, including Pablo, Julianín, Leandro, and El Maestro, whose teeth have begun to chatter, who knows if from cold or fear. It is then that Luís Naveira, as if trying to keep the silhouettes at bay, lights his flashlight and shines it on them, causing them to stop in their tracks. The fat one lifts his gun to his shoulder and shouts:
“Halt in the name of the Civil Guard!”
To which the revolutionaries respond by pointing their own pistols in turn:
“Halt!” some of them shout.
“Who’s there?” demands the guardsman Ortiz when he hears their voices.
“Spanish citizens,” respond some.
“Where are you going?” Ortiz insists, as if reading from the manual.
“To liberate Spain!” responds Gil Galar, and he takes two steps forward.
“¡Viva the Republic!” exclaims Manzanedo, naively believing that his cry will be the magic words that make the guards lower their rifles.
“Halt!” shouts Corporal de la Fuente, his voice wavering, and he fires a warning shot into the air.
Chaos ensues: young Julianín’s hands begin to shake at the sound of the gunshot, his vision blurs, and as he is trying to pass his pistol to one of the comrades in the front line, the gun goes off in the direction of the guards. Pablo jumps on him, trying to avoid catastrophe, but the time for prevention has passed and the guards now feel threatened and start shooting. A bullet strikes Pablo’s thigh. The courageous guard Ortiz is kneeling to fire as per his training; with the fog and the darkness he cannot see that he is facing more than forty armed men, or perhaps the rapture of heroism has compromised his judgment. Corporal de la Fuente, more perceptive or more cowardly, is also pulling his rifle’s trigger, but in retreat, as he shouts to his partner, “Come on, Ortiz, let’s go!” a shout which collides in the air with that of Santillán, more concise and peremptory, “Fire!” and a hail of gunshots rings out in the night. Not even the barking of Kropotkin can be heard over the roar of battle.
Corporal de la Fuente does not have time to say anything else, because several bullets catch him in his retreat. One of these severs his carotid artery, and he falls on the ground twitching, while Ortiz defends himself like a titan. Of the five bullets in his magazine, at least four find their mark: two strike Bonifacio Manzanedo, one in each of his legs, and he falls to the ground howling in pain; another grazes Gil Galar in the right temple as he is trying to reload his pistol, though the wound is not quite fatal; one catches El Maestro in the kidney just as he turns to escape. But the valiant guard’s resistance is futile against the many-headed enemy before him. As he tries to reload his rifle, his body is riddled with bullets. Seeing that his cause is lost, he launches himself in desperation into the fray of gunfire, brandishing his bayonet as his only threat, until a bullet hits his chest and punctures his heart. The brave guard collapses like a sack of cement, his body a sieve pierced with sixteen bullet holes. Gil Galar, bleeding and stumbling, approaches the guardsman and tries to take his Mauser, but Ortiz does not seem to want to give it up, as though clutching his rifle were his last act of resistance. Then Galar takes out a knife and stabs him twice in the neck, just in case. But the guardsman is already a corpse.
“Let’s get out of here,” someone says.
“No, it’s better if we go on together,” advises Santillán in vain, as several have already started to run, such as Casiano Veloso and his crew from Villalpando, and the buffoons Perico Alarco and Manolito Monzón, who took off running at the first gunshot.
Of the injured, the worst off is Bonifacio Manzanedo: the bullets have destroyed his left knee and his right tibia. Gil Galar is also in bad shape, with a concussion, although it could have been much worse, considering that it was his temple. Pablo has also been lucky, despite the seriousness, as the bullet went
clean through his thigh, without hitting the femur. We know nothing of El Maestro, who disappeared into the woods with a handful of other revolutionaries and a bullet in his back. But thankfully they left behind the satchel, which Robinsón now approaches to find the first aid kit, also looking around for the bowler hat he lost in the fray. The rest of the men surround the injured ones, panicked in body and soul. Naveira takes the other first aid kit from his backpack, but he changes his mind at the last second:
“We’d better go to the river, we can use the water to clean the wounds,” he says with conviction that surprises even him.
Leandro and Santillán, the two largest men, hoist Bonifacio by the shoulders and bring him to the bank of the Bidasoa, while Pablo and Gil Galar make it with the help of Robinsón and Naveira, respectively. Two or three men, without anyone really knowing why, drag the corpse of the guardsman Ortiz and throw it in the water, still clutching the Mauser. But no one remembers Corporal de la Fuente, who reposes a hundred paces up the road, his head bathing in a pool of his own blood.
The Anarchist Who Shared My Name Page 34