Sometimes It Is Good to Shoot the King dedicated to the memory of Gaetano Bresci, an Italian immigrant who, for seven years, worked in a textile mill in Patterson, New Jersey, saved his pennies, then, in 1900, went to the World Flower Expo in Paris, then on to Italy, where he shot the king. Italy, having abolished the death penalty, sentenced him to a life of solitary confinement, at hard labor, in the Santo Stefano Penitentiary on the Island of Ventotene, decreeing at the same time that the surname Bresci should exist no more. On May 22, 1901, he was strangled in his cell by guards, and his body thrown into the sea. # Back in 1978, maybe ‘79, the wildest-assed years of my teenage days, I found myself down on my luck all the way to the donuts-at-the-mission bottom in Stockton, California, and took work as a cook in a small, dingy diner on the backside of the business district. I didn’t work there long, worked there only for the food and a couple of paychecks to get me somewhere else, but it was long enough to get to know one very old lady who came in midmornings. She always sat at the counter and had a tuna-on-toast sandwich. Midmornings I could escape from the kitchen and sit at the counter, enjoy like a human being a cup of coffee and a cigarette. That was the slowest time of the day, break time, and the old lady understood, didn’t mind a greasy, sweating cook sharing the counter while she ate. We talked baseball mostly. She listened to the Dodgers every game, and on Sunday nights, played bingo. She also said her mother had run a diner back when she was a small girl in Patterson, New Jersey, and always liked having a sandwich with her mother during the midmorning lull and now, long retired and lonely, doing so was often the highpoint of her day. I already knew that her mother had been Irish and her father Italian, and I also knew that Gaetano Bresci, after arriving in America in 1892, give or take a year, married an Irish gal and with her had one or two daughters, and that after he was arrested for shooting the king, the socialists, communists and anarchists of Patterson, New Jersey raised money enough to allow Gaetano’s soon-to-be widow to open a diner, so that she might provide for her family. Mrs. Bresci—redheaded and dumb as a box of rocks, it was said—had no interest in her husband’s causes and resented being known as the widow of the assassin of the King of Italy. After a few years, she closed the diner and took her family to California, where from history she disappeared. I tried to guess the age of the old woman at the counter. Was she into her eighties, I don’t know. She was old. In high school, I had read a book whose title I can’t recall, but was a compendious history of assassinations. Two thousand years of political murder and it’s striking feature was that as one read closer to the present, the more likely the self-styled hitman for God, liberty, country, king, whatever, was to be a crackpot, feeble minded, insane, deranged, deluded, but one, one in particular, was not. I said, “Patterson, New Jersey—your mother might have served Gaetano Bresci.” The old woman’s face fell. Fear turned her green cloudy eyes into redheaded fire, and I knew, at that moment, this was a daughter of the assassin of the King of Italy, Gaetano Bresci. After a few moments, maybe less, but it seemed a while, long enough for her to figure out that I was figuring it out, she looked up and at me and said, “It is not something you tell your children.” That I have never forgotten. I didn’t say anything. It seemed the polite, respectful thing to do, and in small talk and silence she finished her sentimental sandwich and left and didn’t come back the next day and the day after that I got a paycheck and left too, left for whatever and wherever was next, but I’m sure right now thinking the thing to have said to her was, “That is precisely what you tell your children.” And it is. I wish I had known then about Bresci Thompson. That might have been the respectful and polite thing to say, to ask, “Do you know about Bresci Thompson?” She probably wouldn’t have, being a baseball fan and bingo player and all, so I could have with pleasure told her that Bresci Thompson’s father had long ago jumped ship in New York, to escape military service in Argentina, and worked side by side to Gaetano in the Patterson silk mill. The man thought so highly of his coworker that when he heard that the Italian government had decreed that the name Bresci cease to exist, he named his first son Bresci. Even better, Bresci Thompson grew up to be an artist, a painter, a pacifist, a community activist, a life-long supporter and promoter of the Hudson Guild—and a long life it was, ninety-six years, all of them proudly lived under the name of the assassin of the King of Italy. The old lady in Stockton might have liked to have known that. She might have liked to have known that Bresci Thompson would get his own chapter in a Studs Terkel book and a minute or two of screen time in the Warren Beatty epic movie ‘Reds.’ But that would have been tough to predict. She might have liked to have known, if she didn’t, that her father, if he was her father, was highly thought of by all who knew him. He was considerate, sober, hard-working, gladly donated his time. He earned fifteen dollars a week as a silk weaver, had a wife and child, was sending money home to Italy, saving more to purchase his sister passage to America—and still was able to loan one hundred and fifty dollars, all he had in the world, to ‘La Questione Sociale,’ a newspaper to which he already was making a weekly contribution. All who knew him at this time describe a gentle, generous man, beloved by all—but those were recollections made after he had shot the king. Some recalled the care with which he tended to flowerboxes, his and others’, in the tenement’s windows. In 1898, the King of Italy, Umberto Primo, Humbert the First, raised the price of bread, and in the cities the poor went hungry. In Milan, thousands marched on the royal palace in unarmed protest. General Bava Beccaris, charged by his King with dispersing the mob, ordered his troops to open fire with cannons. Hundreds were killed. Some of Bresci’s American colleagues would later say Gaetano’s sister was killed then. Maybe so. Maybe not. At his trial, when Gaetano stated why he had killed the king, he made no mention of his sister, and, with the name Bresci erased from Italy, it’s tough to say with certainty. Still, hundreds were killed and many of those were women, many of whom, no doubt, had brothers, and at least a few of those were in America and read of the massacre in newspapers and never knew if among the uncounted and unnamed dead was a sister or brother. In 1899, Umberto Primo conferred Italy’s highest decoration on General Beccaris for his “brave defense of the royal house” and “services to civilization.” Some said this was what goaded Bresci to regicide. Maybe so. Maybe not. The newspaper ‘La Questione Sociale,’ which Bresci supported, said the king by this act had committed treason against mankind. And Bresci too, in the memory of others, spoke out against this act. But so did tens of thousands of other anarchists, socialists and communists. Even a few Republicans did so, though neither McKinley nor Roosevelt were among that small number. Early in 1900, Bresci asked the newspaper to return his loan of one hundred and fifty dollars. The newspaper claimed it was, as always, broke. It was after all a small weekly espousing anarchist, socialist and communistic sentiments. But Bresci was insistent. Repeatedly he insisted that his money be returned to him. He would give no reason why. His friends and colleagues turned against him, but eventually they raised the money to repay the loan. This was the last they would see of him, and it was a decidedly unfriendly parting. Very, very few history books record Bresci’s brief visit to the Paris Flower Expo of 1900. In fact, only one of the many books I consulted mentioned it at all, and that was an obscure and moldy and old and compendious history of assassinations I read in high school and whose title and author I have long forgotten. Recent attempts to find this book proved fruitless, but I know that I read that, Bresci’s Paris visit. That’s why I remembered his name and enough of his history to discompose a very old lady eating a tuna-and-toast sandwich in Stockton, California in 1978, maybe 1979, my wildest-assed days. Since reading it, his story had sung sang in my head like a children’s story: an Italian immigrant who, for seven years, worked in a textile mill in Patterson, New Jersey, saved his pennies, then, in 1900, went to the the Flower Show in Paris, then on to Italy, where he shot the king. Without that floral detail, his name I would have forgotten along with the dozens of other assassins in that book. And I have no doubt that it is true. Revolutionaries writing history books do not want their heroes pausing, enroute to their assignations with proletariat history, to admire the cultivated flowers of the bourgeoisie. And the writers of republican and monarchist histories do not want their villains that human. And responsible writers of history—what very few there are—haven’t time to investigate an unsubstantiated rumor of a visit to a flower show by a minor assassin of a minor king in a minor time. To me, though, it’s the key to the whole nursery rhyme. What happened before and what happened after Gaetano’s day or two in Paris are important, but without that detail, they are uninteresting. Arriving in Milan on May 17, Bresci took a room in a boarding house and soon thereafter applied to the police for a gun permit. Diligent and responsible, the police investigated and found that Gaetano Bresci, before departing for America years before, was known to have had anarchist sympathies, and his application was denied. Not requested to do otherwise, Gaetano kept his Hamilton and Booth Co. revolver, frequently taking target practice in the yard behind his rooming house. Maybe he wanted to be stopped. That has to be considered. Maybe he wanted the permit so that target practice would not get him in trouble and foil his plans. Maybe that too. On July 29, Gaetano traveled to the nearby alpine resort town of Monza, where Umberto Primo was to interrupt his hunting vacation to award medals to athletes at a gymnasium. The grounds of the place were expansive, with a long, narrow park in front. There Gaetano waited, drawing the attention that brooding, lone men draw when they lurk about in beautiful, festive places, but the guards did not act. They watched. Do you think Gaetano was nervous, palms sweating, heart pounding, wondering if he had the courage, or if his intentions were indeed honorable? Maybe he thought of the cannon shells ripping through a crowd of hungry and unarmed men and women? Maybe he tried to concentrate on the medal placed around General Bava Beccaris’s neck. Maybe he thought how far he was from home, from Patterson, New Jersey, several thousand miles, or maybe he thought of his native Tuscany, a few hundred kilometers to the south, eight or nine years in his past and never to be seen again. As the king left the gymnasium and stepped into his carriage to return to his hunt, Gaetano stepped from the small crowd and fired three bullets into the chest of the Umberto Primo. Immediately arrested, Gaetano said that he had killed the king in accordance with the principles of revolutionary anarchism. He also said that he had acted alone, that no other knew of his plan or aided him in any way. At his trial, he added nothing to that. Besides the hard labor, solitary confinement and the erasure of the name Bresci, his sentence, handed down on August 29, included stipulations that his will be destroyed, that he receive no visitors, that he be allowed neither pen nor paper. Imagine with some care then the ten months Gaetano spent in Santo Stefano Penitentiary, until he was strangled on his cot by guards who no doubt thought they were acting out of patriotism, and you’ll see the importance of his visit to the Paris Flower Expo. The farewells he had received in America, from his friends and colleagues, from his wife and child, were rude and caustic. His doom, without further communication, was certain. What effect his act had, if any, he would never know. He would not even know if he would receive credit for his heroism. I think then understood can be the flower show. Imagine being there, between the rude good-byes and certain doom. Imagine being in the solitary cell and remembering. I’d wager some that Gaetano thought he had got away with something. And, if you ask me what I think is the excuse for humanity, it’s that I’d say, Gaetano Bresci wandering the Paris Flower Expo of 1900. I don’t know anything as beautiful or moving as that. The textile workers, the socialists, anarchists and communists back in Patterson, New Jersey, hearing that Gaetano Bresci had assassinated the king of Italy, were instantly filled with remorse. How they had misjudged the man! How poorly they had treated him! How they lionized him now! Emma Goldman, the famous writer, speaker and social revolutionary, wrote about these days of aftermath in her autobiography, ‘Living My Life’: “I kept a previous engagement in Patterson, New Jersey … [&] was glad of the opportunity to find out more about Bresci & his life. What I learned from his closest comrades convinced me once more how difficult it is to gain a real insight into the human heart & how likely we all are to judge men by superficial indications.” The anarchists, the socialists and the communists of the time were loosely united behind the idea that one man should not rule another. On what this meant exactly and on how to go about achieving this they differed considerably, and any organization formed was almost immediately reft of direction by endless squabbles, splits and recriminations. You have to like that about them. Their only hope of effective political action was to unite behind a charismatic leader, but any man or woman who began to rise to leadership was immediately accused of betraying their own ideals. They were an ineffectual, squabbling lot, but for a day or two in September of 1900, they were united in celebration. They had killed a king. It was a custom of the time, among the Italian anarchists, socialists and communists of New Jersey and New York, to hire several boats once or twice a year and take an excursion up the Hudson River to Bear Mountain. These were festive occasions, filled with dancing and music making by violins, mandolins and accordions. They called them “pic-a-nics,” an Americanized adaptation of an old phrase they had stolen from the French. At the end of the day, a hat was passed around to raise money for the widows and orphans of the cause. Often enough, Gaetano Bresci had been the one passing the hat for others, but in September of 1900 the hat was passed for his wife and child. Maybe he knew such would happen, or believed it would, or hoped. Maybe. But when he had sailed from America, echoing in his ears were not promises that his family would be looked after, but accusations of selfishness and betrayal. On May 22, 1901, he was strangled in his cell by the prison guards and his body thrown into the sea. On July 31 of that year, Leon Czoglosz shot and fatally wounded the American president, William McKinley, who, while not a king, was certainly imperialistic, certainly a friend to those who would soon enough be called malefactors of great wealth. Leon, whose parents had immigrated to America when he was a child, was a moody fellow, a loner, brooder, drifted from job to job, place to place, Detroit, Cleveland, Steubenville, tried from time to time to become part of anarchist, socialist or communist groups. He had neither wife, nor child, nor friend. When he was arrested, he said he had been inspired by the actions of Gaetano Bresci and was a proud member of this or that revolutionary group, all members of which were also arrested. In the aftermath of the trial, many anarchist, socialist and communist organizers and writers and speakers were rounded up by police all over the country. Most were let go after paying heavy fines, paid for, of course, by the passing of hats. In June of 1924, in his palazzo in Milan, General Bava Beccaris lay dying. He is an old, old man. Around his neck and on his chest lay his ‘Hero of Civilization’ medal from Umberto Primo. He has made it clear that he wishes to be buried wearing the medal, so maybe he wears it now because in his last thoughts he is imagining how it will be to be laid out in his casket with the medal on his chest, to be seen by family, friends, admirers, others. He is surrounded now by his children, who weep, and his grandchildren, who stand in the background taking in their first strong whiffs of their own mortality. Several great-grandchildren play quietly, respectfully, in the courtyard. Their games do not even drown out the sound of the birds whose song and chatter enter the room like the breeze. There is a priest in the room, and two doctors and several household servants. His sister sits by the bed, ready with another story from their childhood. His wife holds his hand, tells him that yes, he is and will be known by what it says on the medal, “The Brave Defender of Civilization.” “I only did what was required of a man,” he says and slips away into the calm sea of eternity. In 1932, November, New York City, disease brings back for a few days, maybe a week, the rare beauty of Virgilia D’Andrea. She is forty-two years old, in the tenth year of forced exile from her homeland -- and dying. It is a room you would describe as shabby in which she lies, even by 1932 standards, but she never minded that before and doesn’t mind it now. In one of her poems she described her shabby lodgings as a kind of uniform. Not only by it would she know which side she was on, but so would everyone else. See, she was one of those women who walked into a room and lit it up with her vitality, spirit and beauty. Again and again, in Italy, until they gave her the boot in ’22, and in Paris, until she was booted from there in ’28, and Holland in ’29, and finally America, where she would die, she walked into rooms of men on the downtrodden side and said, “I am with you.” Because her clothes were worn, her lodgings poor, her radiant looks did not inspire these men to jealous aspirations that might have come from feeling that someone like her was unattainable by someone like them. Her sympathies were more than philosophical. Though the longtime companion of the famous anarchist Armando Borghi, she advocated free love—physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. When she touched these men, one by one, looked in their eyes, spoke to them, she did so with love and passion. No convention, no morality or authority would stand between her and the liberty she lifelong craved like some do air, water, drink or money. Prometheus, she said, gave mankind the gift of the individual freedom, not sour ideals of social contracts. One can only and with difficulty imagine the effect she must have had on downtrodden men who you know must have from time to time suspected that their own ideals might be something of a grudge against moneyed classes. And as she lay dying, the squalid room was perpetually crowded with these men who wanted not so much one last look at her, but one last look from her. But they didn’t get that. What they got her last few days was what some called a miracle. On an iron-framed cot they saw not a forty-two-year-old woman worn by a life of hardship and travel, but a radiant being, skin an angelic glow. She looked, it was said, as she must have in her heart when as a young teacher she had run off with Armando into a life of anarchism. And that might be how she looked, but look at them she did not. Her eyes her last few days were steadfast on the ceiling. “It ends with me?” she whispered to Armando, a question. He assured her it did not.”It ends with me?” she said louder, to the ceiling. “It ends with me!” she said louder yet, veins in her pink neck standing out, and maybe it was still a question, maybe not. She said no more and closed her eyes and soon enough breathed no more. Orphaned at age six, Virgilia was raised in a Catholic college under the supervision of nuns. When she was ten, she would write in a poem how she heard of the assassination of Umberto Primo by an anarchist called Bresci. She remembered how on that day, in church, in the pose of one praying for the nation and for the soul of its dead king, kindled in her young breast for the first time was the belief that freedom was possible for her and for all who would take it. And she got it right, Virgilia D’Andrea did, what all this class warfare was about. More than Marx and Lenin and Trotsky, more than Che Guevera and Marshal Tito and Eugene Debs, more than Castro and Chavez and Ho Chi Mihn, Virgilia D’Andrea, impossibly beautiful, got it right. It was not, she often enough said, about working towards an anarchistic, socialist or communist utopia. She enjoyed mocking such blather. It is about destroying that which causes misery, hate and superstition. It is about liberating men from that which binds them spiritually to the direction of another. It is about smashing those parts of society that claim for itself the right to dispose of its members. And, finally, it is about the joy and poetry of doing so. Though a highly literate woman, her writing output was slender. In 1922 she published a volume of poetry called ‘Tormento.’ In 1928, her prose was collected in book titled ‘L’Ora di Marmaldo.’ Shortly before her death, her political and social thoughts were published as ‘Torce nella Notte.’ She had planned to write much more, thought she would so do when old, when there wasn’t so much life to be lived. Those books are long out of print, were never translated. For the English reader there exists only an article she wrote in New York, “The Vanquished Who Do Not Die.” It was translated then and is frequently reprinted by one of the hundreds, if not thousands, of anarchist splinter groups. But it’s not that good. And certainly nothing she wrote caused hundreds, if not thousands, of downtrodden men and women to trek to a squalid room in New York’s lower eastside, as if making a pilgrimage. No. As one who was there wrote, “If our movement can be called a galley warship, she was its bow mascot. She was Lady Liberty herself.” In 1965, the Santo Stefano Penitentiary was closed, and the Island of Ventotene was left to the birds and lizards and weeds. Eventually it was declared a preserve, off limits to people. That may be the law, but from time to time, groups of Italian anarchists, socialists and communists hire boats, go the island, have themselves a pic-a-nic. Often, at a likely spot near the sea, they stand upright a large stone and on it paint “Gaetano Bresci.” The Italian Park Service, when it discovers the trespass and vandalism, lays the stone back down, erases the name. If the name cannot be erased, they push the stone into the sea. In the 19th century in America, towards the end of it, when John L. Sullivan was the boxing king, the biggest sports celebrity up to that time, it was a common thing for one working-class to meet another with greeting, “Shake the hand that shook the hand of John L. Sullivan.” Copping reflected glory from proximity to celebrity is nothing new. In New York, I was friends with a tax lawyer for a fancy Midtown firm, and his work often enough involved consultations with the likes of Donald Trump, Denzel Washington, David Letterman, so on. They’re assholes all, at least about taxes and lawyers, but I enjoyed the confidential gossip my friend shared on weekend sails. I’ve met some famous people on my own, Czeslaw Milowz, the Polish poet and Nobel Laureate, Kurt Vonnegut, the writer, John Glenn, the astronaut and U. S. senator. I can’t say any left much of an impression, though when meeting Mr. Vonnegut I was rather intoxicated and barely recall it. In 1983, at an all-night café in downtown Dallas, the singer Rick James came in with his entourage at four in the morning, He sat at the counter. They stood in a semi-circle behind him. I was working the grill, and with his chin an inch off the formica, he asked for a Rueben sandwich. “RoooooooBIN.” His eyes were nothing but slits of red. He was no doubt the stonedest human being I’ve ever seen. If he said anything else, I don’t remember. In 1984, maybe ’85, at a fancier restaurant in Toledo, Ohio, I was the table-side chef for a party that included Ron Howard. He was in town scouting out possible locations for his movie “Gung Ho” – a movie about how to make factory workers happy short of killing the bosses. I don’t remember anything he said either, though I remember him talking, even to me. I remember that he was very pleasant, and I remember not liking it, not liking that I couldn’t trust his pleasantness to be genuine. In 1978, maybe ‘79, in Stockton, California, I made a series of tuna-on-toast sandwiches for an old, old lady who might have been the daughter of Gaetano Bresci. She knew who he was anyway, which for a baseball-following, bingo-playing old lady in California during the reign of Disco was otherwise—say—unlikely. She probably didn’t think of herself as famous, but she, more than anyone else, when I realized to whom I was talking, sent shivers down my spine. I felt closer to true greatness then, more than at any other moment I can recall. Her father’s story I thought and think should be a story every child learns, learns in its truest form. She didn’t think so. If I could talk to her now, I’d tell that corrupting youth, from Socrates’ time to the present, is the occupation of the noble. I’d tell her that of her father’s life I will make a hundred nursery rhymes for every child to learn.
Posted on: Sat, 24 Aug 2013 22:44:22 +0000
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