“Pass me the scissors,” says Naveira, who being a former doctor takes charge of the operation, and tears open the trouser leg of poor Bonifacio Manzanedo, who cannot contain his painful shrieking. “Give me your tie,” says Naveira, and he ties it around the man’s upper thigh as a tourniquet. Someone rolls up a handkerchief and puts it in Bonifacio’s mouth to bite, to help manage the pain.
During this time, Pablo has taken off his own trousers and is letting Kropotkin lick his wound, knowing that there is no better disinfectant than saliva, even dog saliva. Gil Galar, kneeling at the river’s edge, plunges his romantic-poet head into the icy waters of the Bidasoa, trying to control the bleeding. Robinsón takes out the linen compresses and soaks them with iodine tincture, while Naveira finishes disinfecting the wounds by applying an antiseptic ointment, seeing by the flashlights of El Maño and Santillán. Then he bandages Bonifacio’s and Pablo’s legs with astonishing speed, taking a little more care with Gil Galar’s head.
In the meantime, the rest of the group discusses what to do next. Their victory in this first battle is indisputable, but the skirmish has chilled the spirits of the partisans, who appear finally to have understood the dangerousness of their mission, and are seriously starting to doubt the likelihood of its success. Few have faith that another encounter with the forces of order will transpire without fatal casualties among the rebels.
“Now is the time to attack the Civil Guard barracks,” hisses Santillán, “because they’re short two men.”
“Or the time to escape before it’s too late,” says Martín Lacouza.
“Weren’t we told that the revolution had already broken out in Spain?” asks Anastasio Duarte, who still unquestioningly believes what Max told him when he was plying him with cocaine.
“We’d best get the hell out of here,” someone adds. “They must have heard the gunfight from the village, and they’re sure to send reinforcements any minute.”
Not even Gil Galar, with his newly bandaged head, dares to disagree. They all seem to have finally realized that no one was waiting for them on this side of the border. Although there is one who does not want to admit it:
“Let’s try to make it to Lesaca,” Santillán proposes, “maybe the comrades from the interior are already organized there.”
And since no one has a better idea, the group makes its way down the Carretera de Pamplona, which runs parallel to the Bidasoa, anguish written on their faces, dragging Bonifacio Manzanedo, who is starting to grow delirious with the pain and to ask for a pistol to blow his brains out, until he loses consciousness. As they try to wake him, they send three men ahead to look for any signs of trouble, but these three come running back:
“Two carabiniers are coming down the road!” says one.
“It looks like they arrested one of our men!” says another.
Indeed, hearing the exchange of gunfire, the pair of carabiniers from the outpost at Lesaca, named Santos Pombart and Emilio de Inés, interrupted from their night watch on the Carretera de Pamplona, came running toward the source of the gunfire. They quickly came across José Antonio Vázquez Bouzas, one of the revolutionaries who took off running at the first shots and who, unlike those who ran into the woods, opted to stick to the road with no idea where he was going.
“Halt in the name of the carabiniers!” they shouted, pointing their rifles and flashlights at him. “Who’s there?”
“Just a worker, headed to Bilbao to look for a job,” Vázquez Bouzas blubbered, raising his arms and starting to shake.
“Then you’ve got the wrong road, because this is the way to Pamplona,” Santos Pombart informed him. “What were those gunshots?”
“I don’t know … I saw a few men quarreling on the way out of Vera, but I kept my distance.”
“You’re under arrest,” said the carabinier Pombart; and after taking down his information and making sure he was unarmed, he said: “Come with us.”
That is when the rebel lookouts spotted them and came running back to inform the group.
“Everyone into the ditch!” orders Luís Naveira, apparently taking charge of the situation. “You three,” he says to the group that spotted the carabiniers, “let’s go see what they want.”
The road curves to the right a few paces ahead and they can see the carabiniers’ lights as they approach the bend. Naveira and the other men huddle down in the ditch, hiding behind a telegraph station. When the pair comes near, Naveira shouts:
“Stop or we’ll shoot!”
To which Santos Pombart responds in turn, pointing his carbine:
“Halt in the name of the carabiniers!”
But Naveira is already firing the three bullets left in his magazine at point-blank range, but with such poor aim (the aim of a doctor’s assistant, no more and no less) that he only manages to perforate Pombart’s cap, while the latter only needs to pull his trigger once: the bullet enters Naveira’s body just below the nose, crosses the superior maxilla, and exits via the occiput, exploding out the back of the skull. Naveira falls to his knees on the ground, his eyes already lifeless. The three men next to him take off running, and the carabiniers’ shots do not find their marks. A little further on, hearing the gunshots coming from the direction of Lesaca, the group of revolutionaries feels surrounded, and there is a general flight into the woods, despite Santillán’s efforts to keep the group together. But even he ends up accepting the situation and, with Leandro’s help, tries to hoist Bonifacio Manzanedo, who has regained consciousness and is vehemently resisting:
“Leave me, leave me, comrades! For God’s sake, save yourselves if you can, I’ll only be a burden!”
Faced with his insistence and the gravity of the situation, they have no choice but to leave him there in the ditch, hoping someone will find him before he bleeds to death. Robinsón helps Pablo get up and they trudge off into the woods, struggling to find balance between their respective limping, followed by Kropotkin, Leandro, and Julianín, whose eyes are bulging out of their sockets. Joining them are Santillán and the guide Piperra, though the group will be quick to fragment. So when the carabiniers advance a little further, accompanied by the detainee Vázquez Bouzas, all they hear are voices and footsteps in the woods, so they decide to turn back, fearing an ambush, without ever discovering Manzanedo lying seriously injured in the ditch. They go back to the bridge of Lesaca and take refuge in an electricity plant, the Electra Bidasoa, where they telephone the outposts of Vera and Lesaca to ask for backup and to report what has happened.
In the meantime, the constable Don Enrique Berasáin, who had already fled a hundred yards homeward when the clash erupted in the quarry, came running back into town at the first sound of gunfire to alert the other pair in the barracks, the guardsmen Silvestre López and José Oncina. So the three take off in the direction of the quarry of Argaitza, and before reaching the foundry they can hear the carbine shots coming from the road to Pamplona. Guardsman Silvestre López knocks with the butt of his gun on the door of the factory, and this time the watchman hears and quickly opens. When asked, he replies that he just heard the shots, but that they are the first he has heard all night. “Come with us,” they say, and the watchman comes out with an acetylene torch to light the way. A short distance ahead, they discover the body of Corporal de la Fuente, in the middle of the street, lying face down and shrouded in his cape. After checking that he is indeed dead, they drag him back toward the corner of the factory wall. As they seem to hear noises in the forest, they decide not to keep advancing, but they call after the guardsman Ortiz by name, once, twice, thrice. Receiving no reply, Silvestre López says to the constable:
“Go back to the village and tell the civil and military authorities: the mayor, the municipal judge, the head of the Somatén, the captain of the carabiniers, and whoever else you damn well have to. We’ll stay here and wait for reinforcements.”
And Don Enrique Berasáin, “the Dandy,” retraces the path he has already covered four times over the course of this long, horri
ble night.
XVI
(1913)
PABLO SLID THE ARMOIRE AND BEHIND it wrote: “On April 13, 1913, Alfonso XIII will die.” He used a piece of gypsum, which left his fingers chalk-stained. Then he took down his Velo-dog revolver and tossed it on the bed, with the twine still tied on. He slid the chair over to the window, climbed up with catlike agility, and took down the bar containing his five bullets. It was then that the door of the room opened unexpectedly, and in marched the proprietress, Don Quixote in skirts, broomstick at the ready. Seeing him perched up there, she made a nasty face and muttered “Sorry, I thought you’d already left,” and she exited, giving one last look at the pistol lying on the bed. “Shit,” mumbled Pablo, regretting that he had not locked the door on his return from breakfast. But now it mattered little: in a few hours all of Spain would know of his act. His fingers felt hot as he slid the bullets into the cylinder of the revolver, and then he used the twine to hide it, as he had learned to do during his flirtation with the anarchists of Barcelona: he tied it to the button that held his suspenders in place, put a hole in the right trouser pocket and let the weapon slide down until it almost reached his ankle. If he were to be patted down, no cop would go that low: duty first, but it’s not worth the risk of throwing out your back. Later, all Pablo would have to do to use the pistol is put his hand in his pocket and pull the string. Before leaving the inn, Pablo took his lucky amulet from his suitcase, kissed it, and hung it around his neck. Then, in the street, he breathed deeply.
A magnificent spring sun was shining in the sky, and many Madrileños were taking advantage of the Sunday morning to attend the event of the day: the great military parade of allegiance to the flag, presided over by His Majesty Alfonso XIII. After the military ceremony, the monarch was to travel to the palace in front of his Presidential Guard, departing down the Paseo de La Castellana, turning onto Calle Alcalá, crossing Puerta del Sol, and finally taking Calle Mayor—an itinerary very similar to the one he had taken on his wedding day. Pablo thought that if the anarchists were planning an attack, they would do it toward the end of the parade, as Mateo Morral had done seven years back, since the narrow streets of the old town were more propitious for escape than the big avenues. So he went to Calle Alcalá and walked toward Plaza de Castelar—dominated by the statue of the goddess Cybele—to get a jump on any other would-be assailants. The main buildings were covered with garlands, colored banners were hung from the streetlamps, and the streets were starting to be taken over by zealous visitors, journalists, and peddlers, looking forward to a boom in sales of peanuts, lupin beans, and other treats. Next to the door of the casino, a man on his knees was begging for alms, holding in his hands a sign that said: “To err is human, but to blame it on someone else is even more human.” Pablo kept thinking about this phrase until he arrived at the palace of the Marquis de Casa Riera, all locked up as it had been ever since, as legend had it, having suffering an amorous slight in his gardens, the marquis had planted a cypress tree, making his descendants promise that, until that tree died, his palace would remain uninhabited and his garden untended.
“The king is gonna come this way, right? He’s gonna come this way?” a madwoman suddenly erupted in Pablo’s face, muttering hysterically. Her eyes were bulging, her gums bloody.
“Yes, Señora, he’ll come this way, don’t worry,” Pablo said soothingly, when he had recovered from the initial surprise. And then, in a lower voice, he added: “Unless somebody stops him, of course.”
The woman made a surprised face and lifted her hand to her mouth. Pablo took advantage of the opportunity to get away from the encounter and continue his way through the crowd. A little farther, he saw a man exiting the bar La Elipa wearing a strange camel’s hair cape: their eyes met and the man half-closed one eye, giving Pablo a little wink of complicity. Since he didn’t know the man at all, Pablo turned around, surprised, but the man kept going without a word. Damn, he thought, people are getting crazier all the time. And his own thought surprised him: maybe he too was off his rocker? What would his father have said if he knew what his son was about to do? And what would his mother and sister say when they saw him on the front page of all the newspapers, having committed regicide? He had a moment of hesitation, and he stopped walking. For an instant, he thought this was all a huge mistake. But then he remembered Angela’s eyes and Ferrer Guàrdia’s defiant goatee, and he recovered his courage. He put his hand in his pocket, tugged on the twine and noted the heft of the revolver; then he lifted his gaze, saw that he was standing in front of the Bank of Spain, and decided that that was the right place to wait for the passage of the military procession. Before making his way to the front row, he bought a cone of lupin beans. As the first bean crunched between his teeth, he thought of Robinsón, who used to call them chochos, and he felt strangely calm.
The front of the procession appeared in the square under the goddess Cybele shortly after one thirty in the afternoon, and a cool breeze picked up quickly, as though Aeolus wanted in on the party. Alfonso XIII, in an impeccable dress uniform and gleaming tall boots, was riding his beautiful Alarún, flanked by the count of Aibar and the chief of the Cazadores, followed a few yards back by the minister of war, the captain general of Madrid, and a good number of officers. On his usual expressionless face, the Bourbon smile seemed drawn on to dissimulate his underbite. Several riders led the procession, opening a path on the left side of Calle Alcalá and obliging the public to step back onto the sidewalk in front of the Bank of Spain or onto the tramway rails running down the center of the avenue. When the monarch saw that his path was open, he clicked his spurs gallantly, striking out ahead of his entourage, and the impassioned crowd shouted. Pablo understood that this was the moment, and for the first time he felt butterflies in his stomach. He put his hand in his pocket and started pulling up the twine little by little. He felt the butt reach his hand just as the king was approaching, and took a step forward out of the throng to get a clear shot. Just then, something caught his attention in the crowd before him. He stopped, completely petrified, frozen, stunned, almost dead: a few yards away, in the front line of people on the opposite side of the road, there was a woman watching the royal procession. And although her eyes had lost the glimmer of yesteryear, Pablo recognized her in an instant.
It was Angela.
He felt time stand still. He stopped hearing the shouts of the multitude. His fingers relaxed, and the revolver slid back down his leg. He fastened his gaze to Angela’s face, and the world around him disappeared for a moment, erased or blurred by the hand of God or the devil. At first he could only see her in parts, as if he were incapable, after so much time, of taking in her whole existence: first he saw her eyes, then her lips; a moment later, her nose, her cheeks, and her hair, held in place with pins; then he became aware of her whole face, her neck, the black dress hugging her body; then his gaze fell on her arms, and traveled the length of them: the left was extended to hold a parasol, the right was bent, enlaced with another arm. And it was at that moment that Pablo understood that the line that separates happiness and doom can be razor thin. It was at that moment that Pablo felt something in his heart break forever. It was at that moment that Pablo discovered that the arm enlaced with Angela’s arm was that of another man, a man whose other arm was holding a little girl, a little girl who was looking at Angela and moving her lips, lips that were saying: “Mama, when is the king coming?” and it was the man who responded, moving his lips in turn, and anyone paying attention could see that they were saying: “But, sweetie, he’s already here.” And the man and Angela looked at each other, and in that look there was love, or affection, or complicity, and he smiled and she returned the smile, a sad smile, it is true, but a smile nonetheless. And so the procession passed between them, like a solar eclipse, leaving that image engraved forever in Pablo’s memory and choking his throat, at the epiglottis, like a rope around his neck. A few seconds passed in which he couldn’t breathe, and perhaps he would have died of asphyxiation rig
ht there if fate had not held another surprise for him: suddenly, two gunshots rang out and everything turned to confusion and shouting and rioting.
The noise of the gunshots released Pablo’s throat and a blast of cold air flooded into his lungs. When he came to his senses he still had time to see, a few yards away, the pistol in the hand of a man with glassy eyes, spellbound by his own audacity, before two guards jumped on him to subdue him. He had just shot at His Majesty Alfonso XIII, who appeared to have snapped out of his trance. And from the ground, the would-be assassin pulled the trigger of his Puppy-Velo-dog for the third time: there was a flash and a bang without smoke, and the man was buried under a human avalanche ready to lynch him, as various soldiers from the Royal Guard drew their swords to protect the Bourbon, and the air was filled with an acrid, dry, unnerving smell. Pablo did not get as far as thinking that such might have been his own fate, despite how closely his own weapon resembled the assassin’s; instead, he looked immediately to the opposite sidewalk, as the crowd erupted into cheers for the king and hurrahs for the monarchy. He got down on his knees to try to spot Angela between the horses’ legs, but Angela was not there. So, on all fours like a dog, he broke out in a convulsive sob, from which he couldn’t even be rescued by the consoling words of a girl at his side who said to him:
“Don’t cry, sir, the king is alive. Look.”
In fact, while the guards and agents of order moved on the anarchist (no one had any doubt that the author of the attack was an anarchist), Alfonso XIII once again smiled, and corrected the official who had ordered the procession to resume at a gallop:
“No, General. At a pace! As if nothing happened.”
Later it would be known that the would-be assassin was named Rafael Sancho Alegre, a member of the anarchist group known as Sin Patria who had come directly from Barcelona to attack His Majesty. But all he accomplished was to increase Alfonso XIII’s reputation as indestructible, letting him come unscathed through the umpteenth attempt on his life, and to boast to the journalists when he arrived at his palace: “I saw him step away from the group,” he would say in reference to Sancho Alegre, “and start walking toward me; for a moment I thought it was to praise me, but at the same time I thought he might be an evildoer, and I prepared to defend myself. I could have killed him, but I did not care to.”
The Anarchist Who Shared My Name Page 35