The man had spent part of the first act seated beside a police inspector. Nothing in his conduct had drawn the officer’s notice. Beneath them, the house was filling; this was precisely what Santiago Salvador was waiting for. He had not chosen an individual. He had chosen an assembly, and within that assembly, all faces were entirely indifferent to him.
On November 7, 1893, the Liceu opened its season in Barcelona with Rossini’s William Tell. Salvador had purchased a ticket and mounted to the fifth tier. Beneath his clothing, two bombs were concealed upon his person. Before departing his lodging, he had explained to his wife that he was removing them because their presence in the house was perilous. The peril, then, was merely to change address. It would descend from the heights of a playhouse upon people who had paid to hear singing.
Salvador was a native of Castelserás, in Aragon. His parents had destined him for labour in the fields; as an adolescent, he had resided in Barcelona, subsequently taking up various domestic employments. He had served in the households of personages of sufficient consequence that their names would one day figure in his interrogation. Once married, he had sold wine, kept a tavern, pursued sundry trades among clientele, and ultimately turned to smuggling. His life offered neither advancement nor durable station: positions and enterprises followed one upon another without any holding him fast.
For some three years past, by his own account, newspapers, books, and workers’ assemblies had given him a taste for anarchist doctrines. In the circles he frequented, he had heard Paulí Pallàs, author of the attentat against General Martínez de Campos. One would naturally seek in Pallàs’s death the motive for his own crime. At his trial, Salvador would expressly reject this explanation. He claimed to have sought to strike at bourgeois society itself. This refusal of private vengeance rendered his resolve the more terrifying: no individual grievance existed to delineate its boundaries.
He had procured the devices from Mariano Cerezuela, whom he described as a partisan of direct action. He had kept them in a trunk, nestled among the household linen, cautioning his wife lest she come to harm. Once the second act had commenced, he hurled them toward the stalls. Only one bomb detonated. The other remained behind as the material measure of what might yet have come to pass.
The names of the victims, read out later in the courtroom, would restore families to the very place where the assassin had perceived only a social class. Cayo Cardellach, his two sisters, his wife, and his niece had perished. The niece’s father, wounded, survived this domestic circle, which was almost entirely annihilated. Elsewhere, a father, a mother, and their daughter had been carried off together. Other married couples would never return home. The judicial dossier recorded twenty dead and twenty-seven wounded: forty-seven existences that no political abstraction could ever restore to their rightful place.
In the ensuing tumult, Salvador lingered a moment before departing with the crowd. He kept a pistol concealed beneath his smock and carried as well a phial of poison. An officer posted on the floor below attempted to apprehend him; he slipped past nonetheless. Toward eleven o'clock, according to his statement, he returned to his lodgings and recounted the crime to his wife. She wept. He admitted to having threatened her to compel her silence. The man who professed a desire to liberate mankind began, within the confines of his own bedchamber, by forbidding a woman her terror.
His flight was no orderly, well-appointed journey. He went in search of beds, of succour, of acquaintances likely to harbour him. José Prats procured him a room and a few pesetas. Salvador then reached Sant Feliu de Llobregat, doubled back, departed once more toward Aragon, stopped at the house of Antonio Alfaro, and ended in Saragossa at the home of a cousin. When the police arrived, he attempted to discharge his weapon; the cartridge failed, and he turned the gun upon himself. The wound did not grant him that death which he had so lavishly distributed to others.
On July 11, 1894, the van conveying him to the tribunal had to force its way through a densely packed throng. Two men stood in the dock beside him: Prats and Alfaro, indicted for having aided his concealment or flight with full knowledge of the crime. The distinction between succouring an exhausted man and harbouring a murderer was to become their capital concern, in the midst of a trial wherein Salvador occupied nearly all the light.
The proceedings opened poorly for the defense. Counsel petitioned for five magistrates, deeming that number requisite whenever the penalty of death was demanded; the presiding judge countered with the provisions of the jury law and treated him with a severity that the press reported without softening. Yet that very same magistrate subsequently restrained the public prosecutor from forcing the accused to confine his answers within boundaries too narrow. The court had its bursts of temper, its procedural rules, and on occasion the latter checked the former.
Salvador did not deny his act. He explained that he had waited until the theatre was full. He admitted that the presence of Barcelona’s distinguished society had determined his choice. To slay this person or that one was of little consequence to him: his intention was to sow terror. This confession relieved the prosecution of any need to invent an obscure, troubled soul. The design laid itself bare with an almost administrative clarity.
The witnesses offered fragments of a less systematic nature. The inspector had observed nothing untoward during the first act. A lady in the audience had seen an object fall without being able to identify the hand that cast it. A wounded man had felt the detonation and his own injury. Salvador’s wife, Antonia Colom, declared herself unable to testify and withdrew. Her silence bore no resemblance to that of an empty file: it followed upon a night in which her husband had demanded that she cease her weeping.
Upon the resumption of the sitting, the prosecutor abandoned proceedings against Prats and Alfaro. Their discharge was ordered, subject to any other cause of detention. The trial was not to crush indiscriminately every person who had unlatched a door to the fugitive. For Salvador, the argument turned upon the legal classification of the facts. His counsel sought to subsume them under the offense of destruction by explosives; the court affirmed twenty counts of consummated murder and twenty-seven counts of attempted murder. The jury returned its verdict in a matter of minutes. Sentence of death was pronounced; at half past ten in the evening, the van bore the condemned man away.
Salvador was executed on November 21, 1894. A year had elapsed since the interrupted performance. Within that year had been contained the preliminary inquiry, the courtroom debates, the prisoner’s hopes, and their extinction; for the survivors, it had not closed a single absence. At his trial, the assassin had offered a general explanation for his deed. Justice had answered him with statutory definitions and penalties. Between the two remained the register of names, possessed of that obstinate quality proper to names which unmasks and dismantles grand rhetoric: a sister, another sister, a wife, a niece. These had come to the theatre together.