In the spa register, he had inscribed an assumed name. Establishments where a Prime Minister takes his repose foster habits of trust: one applies for a room, takes the waters, and reads the gazettes while awaiting the midday meal. The Italian had slipped effortlessly into this tranquil order. On August 8, 1897, at Santa Águeda, he stepped forth from it with a revolver in his hand.
Antonio Cánovas del Castillo was reading in a gallery. At this hour close to luncheon, many guests were still in their apartments, preparing to descend. A mining engineer named Azpíroz and the press correspondent Torres were standing near the President of the Council. Cánovas was therefore not alone; he was merely seated, occupied, and accessible. The assassin had no need to force a door. It was enough to cross the few paces that ordinary custom permitted to any fellow lodger.
The shots rang out. According to the account dispatched by Torres, he and the engineer threw themselves at once upon the Italian, who fired in their direction as well without hitting them. Other persons came running. An advocate seized him from behind; an officer of the Civil Guard and an inspector completed his restraint. Cánovas had been struck in the head and torso. He was borne to his bedchamber. The public scene had already drawn to a close; beside the bed began that other drama wherein the physician’s art encounters a boundary that no earthly rank can stay.
The Queen dispatched a physician aboard a special train. The ministrations arrived too late to alter the prognosis. Cánovas expired, and the State—while his wife was left a widow—set about providing for the vacancy. General Azcárraga was invested with the interim presidency of the Council. Ministers assembled, condolences circulated, and the funeral honors were decreed. The telegraph was tasked to bear at once the death of a man and the unbroken continuity of a government.
The prisoner had declared his name to be Rinaldi, then offered another, transcribed variously in the earliest dispatches. Beneath these shifting identities there emerged Michele Angiolillo, an Italian of twenty-six years. The press initially possessed only a physical description: spectacles, a beard, respectable attire, solitary walks. It would soon possess the history of an exile. Born in Foggia, turned anarchist, convicted in his native land for subversive propaganda, he had passed successively through several European nations. His trade as a compositor had carried him as far as London. The man who entered the gallery had not come directly from his birthplace; he arrived bearing the weight of all the assemblies and all the tidings encountered along his road.
Among those tidings was the name of Montjuïc. Following an outrage against a religious procession in Barcelona in 1896, the arrests and brutalities inflicted upon detainees had fueled an international campaign. For those who denounced these cruelties, the fortress had become less a physical place than a word of accusation. Angiolillo resolved to make Cánovas the author who must be struck down. This passage—from the denunciation of state repression to the murder of a statesman—was the very crux of his act: he arrogated to himself the right to condemn and to execute.
Emma Goldman later offered a militant account of the deed, strained entirely toward vindicating this resolve. She recounted that in London, Spaniards recently released from confinement had displayed their wounds during an assembly; Angiolillo, being present, was said to have been profoundly shaken by the spectacle. In her portrait, he worked as a compositor, learned English, and spoke with gentleness. His companions could not recognize in him the brutish figure so readily attached to an assassin. Goldman sought to make it understood how a man capable of affection could take a life in the name of an alien suffering.
This gentleness remembered by his friends did not erase the gallery of Santa Águeda. The exile had approached a man reading, had fired, and had then faced those who sought to master him. To the reported horror of Montjuïc, he had added another real and bloody tableau. His deed might become, for some, a righteous vengeance and, for others, proof that repression must be redoubled. It restored to no captive that which had been torn away.
The magistrate of Vergara arrived at the spa and took the initial depositions of the Civil Guard. The investigation had no need to pursue a fugitive: it held the presumptive author beside the scene of the crime, several witnesses, and a victim whose wounds bore material witness to the assault. It remained to establish his true identity, his movements, his intentions, and whatever he might reveal of his connections. The earliest newspapers mingled these inquiries with rumors of a wider conspiracy, which prudence forbade accepting as established fact.
In Madrid, the government suspended telephonic communication to maintain closer surveillance over the dissemination of news. The correspondent himself noted this censorship and the delays it imposed upon his despatches. The tidings of the crime traveled under constraint, yet the versions multiplied nonetheless. A name was corrected, an hour disputed, a detail concerning the gunshots altered from one dispatch to the next. The distant reader was already receiving an affair composed of essential certainties and still-shifting particulars.
On August 15, one week after the assassination, a court-martial convened at Vergara. The contemporary dispatch describes the small square outside as almost deserted, while some two hundred persons crowded into the chamber and adjoining corridors. The prisoner entered between two civil guards and took his place before the tribunal. A brief public hearing resulted in the sentence; the president and the members of the court then departed for San Sebastián to submit it for the approval of the supreme military authority. The law had allowed scant delay between the man taken with smoking weapons and the man condemned to die.
He was executed by the garrote on August 20, 1897, within the prison of Vergara. The intelligence reached Barcelona under a very brief notice. It announced the death and added that no incident worthy of relation had occurred. After the shifting names, the councils, the telegrams, and the ministerial prognoses, a few lines thus sufficed to close his earthly course officially. The newspaper devoted greater space to conjectures regarding the next cabinet; the living had returned to their calculations.
This final silence was not that of his memory. The gentle compositor depicted by Goldman and the armed guest of Santa Águeda continued to circulate as two irreconcilable portraits. Yet they belonged to the selfsame man. The entire difficulty of the affair lay precisely there: one must not blot out the assassin to understand the exile, nor erase the exile to chronicle the crime. In the gallery, Cánovas had fixed his eyes upon a newspaper. Another man, burdened with what the newspapers had taught him of the world, had determined that he should never read it to its end.