The Angel of History Read online

  ‘Are you listening to me or not?’

  ‘No, Dora. I’m not listening. I’m sorry. I’m tired.’

  He leaned back in his seat and turned to look outside again. Before his eyes closed in sleep, he made out a row of pine trees along a river in a distant city, the spire of a cathedral pointing like a finger at the silver-grey sky, twisting in the storm.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Alfonso and I were the first to wake up. It must have been five in the morning. It was a transitional time of day, the night sky was shrouded by the fog that clung to the walls of the courtyard and farm – the walls that were still standing, and the sun slowly sending its first rays down. It was quiet all around us. Though we could hear the occasional shots of a cannon in the distance. Mariano and Sepúlveda looked like they had just finally succumbed to morning sleep. Alfonso and I exchanged a glance and understood each other instantly. We had no more desire to escape. In that moment all we could feel was a tremendous, almost animal-like hunger. So we went out into the field to gather some potatoes and then came back to the courtyard to start a fire so we could boil them up. Standing by the barn, we could see the forests and fields, a straight and dusty road that extended out and then got lost in the hills. We were peeling the potatoes when we saw a white cloud and heard a motorcycle engine. Within seconds, barely time to say Ave Maria, there were two Germans standing in front of us. They climbed off their bike screaming bloody murder, Hands up! Face the wall! I’d spent the last two years of my life fighting. I’d fought on the Ebro and in Aragon. But standing there in front of those two Krauts and you couldn’t have put a needle up my ass I was so scared. I started shivering in my teeth and it went down my neck in waves that moved all the way down my legs. One of them put the barrel of his rifle on my back and I felt like I was melting. I still remember that feeling. I thought of my mother and of Mercedes, who I would never see again, of Uncle Adolfo, and about the old socialist in the port, the day my father took me to the merry-go-round and I fell off the blue horse. It was all just a flash and then that son of a bitch whacked me on the arm with the butt of his rifle to make me drop the knife I was still holding.

  Those two Germans were laughing at our fear. They laughed and that’s what fucked them. Because they lifted their heads and sort of pulled back, just enough. I can’t remember hearing the shots. I just know that when I turned around I saw this ridiculous hole in the Kraut’s face, right under his helmet, and I saw that frozen smile. The other one was on the ground next to him. I looked up to the window above and there was Sepúlveda and Mariano, smiling and waving down at us.

  ‘You shit yourself, huh, Laureano?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ I spat, and slid to the ground.

  ‘Come on,’ said Alfonso. ‘We have to get out of here,’ and he touched my shoulder.

  I was almost crying as I curled up against the wall, while my three buddies moved around, surefooted, collecting the Germans’ weapons and disabling the motorcycle.

  ‘Get up, Laureano!’ yelled Alfonso.

  ‘Don’t forget the potatoes,’ said Mariano.

  And so we set off, heading through Morlange to Bruyèyes. We really did feel like escaping now. I would have done anything never to have to face a Nazi armed to the teeth ever again. Hunger was better; exhaustion was better, and the thought of Mercedes pushed me on like a train engine. We walked at a breakneck pace through the hills, ignoring the stomach cramps, the German patrols, and all those kilometres we still had left to cover. We were moving like warriors now. Mariano out in front, leading, the three of us behind. We looked for sheltered paths, walked at night and hid during the day. We swam across the Moselle south of Saint-Amé at night. It was useless to remember Ebro and the rest – that was all history.

  ‘You never bathe twice in the same river,’ I said, just to say it once we’d got across. We were drenched and heaving.

  ‘Funny joke,’ said Sepúlveda icily. ‘But enough of that. Let’s just concentrate on walking.’

  And we walked. I still remember those towns even if we only saw them from a distance. Luxelle-Bains, Vesoul, then Besançon, Louhans, Chauffailless. I don’t remember where we were when we heard about Pétain begging the Krauts for an armistice. An old farmer told us about it. He had an open debt on the Germans from twenty years before. If we hadn’t met him, I wouldn’t be here talking to you today. He saved us. First because he gave us meat, wine and fresh fruit. Then, because he told us that the town was split over handing foreigners over to the Krauts. We gorged ourselves, and realised that we weren’t going to be able to trust either the gendarmerie or the French army.

  ‘It’s better that way,’ I spluttered.

  ‘Better like hell,’ said Mariano.

  From that point on we had to keep from meeting anyone along the way. We ate roots and drank from rivers or abandoned wells. Sometimes we’d steal carrots and tomatoes from gardens. One foot after the other, we headed south. We were shadows, crossing France like ghosts, like shades – the invisibles. Good thing because the Germans took thousands of Spaniards back to Mauthasen. They were kept in concentration camps throughout France, camps that had already been filled to the brim by Pétain and his cronies. Maybe because we’d fought alongside the French army, my fellow Spaniards thought they’d be safe under the Geneva Convention, instead they were tossed like bones to the dogs.

  We always played straight with each other, and yet somehow, I don’t know how, midway through July when we reached Limoux, about twenty kilometres south of Carcassonne, we realised that something wasn’t right between us. There was a strange tension. If you asked Mariano how he was, he didn’t answer. Or he’d tell me to walk faster and I’d tell him to shove it. So it was. We realised what the problem was one evening standing on the edge of a stream in the middle of a cane field. I had been pushing toward the sea in order to get to Port Bou and Mercedes. But he was aiming west, to cross the border near Pamplona and get back to Asturias.

  ‘We still have friends there, support,’ he said tossing stones into the water.

  It was just before sunset. There was a yellowish glow on the western horizon and to the east, by the sea, the sky was a lifeless, cold blue.

  ‘More support than Mercedes . . .’ I stuttered, but he ignored me.

  ‘If things go well,’ he continued, ‘we could even get back into the fight.’

  The stone went plop. I didn’t say anything and he resented my silence.

  ‘I never would have thought it of you . . .’ he said sadly to himself. ‘One hair on a pussy and you lose your head. Isn’t that so?’

  What the hell did he want from me? Instead of answering, I turned to look at the others. You could see that Alfonso agreed with me and felt like he was on thin ice. He wanted to go back to Barcelona and find Ana María, but he couldn’t tell Mariano that, considering how riled up Mariano was likely to get. Sepúlveda was leaning against a tree and plucking leaves off the branches.

  ‘What do you say?’ asked Alfonso under his breath.

  He slid to the ground and scratched his head.

  ‘I’m going with Mariano,’ he finally croaked.

  We split up half an hour later, exchanging hugs and kisses. Alfonso and I cut across the field heading east and the other two went toward Foix. I never saw them again.

  I learned years later that Sepúlveda had made it to Chile. Mariano was executed by Franco’s men in 1943. He’d become one of the leaders of the guerrilla fighters in Asturias. An old buddy of ours from Gijón sold him out. Someone who’d fought by our sides in ’34. Maybe he did it for money, or to get out of jail – but he told them where Mariano was and what he was doing. They came for him early in the morning where he was staying in a farm near Sama. An entire unit to take one man. They beat him to a pulp first, then they put him up against a wall and shot him as he stood there on his own two feet, no blindfold, in cold blood. I doubt they even buried him; there was never any tomb. Oh, my son. I can’t even count the friends I’ve lost along the way, but M
ariano, well, he was different. The day I found out what happened to him was the day that I really started to know what it felt like to be alone. I haven’t slept well since then. I often wake when it’s still dark out, dripping with sweat from some dream. Maybe it’s not about Mariano, or even about that war. Maybe it’s this city. I’ve been here for so many years that I couldn’t even imagine living somewhere else. But I have to admit that it’s as if the noise of the cars, the old Indians sitting on their rugs with their wares, the smog, the volcanoes, the police raiding the kiosks, dogs running wild on the streets, the taco and carnitas stalls. Each day that passes I realise that the people who seem much older than me are younger and that there are more names crossed out with a black mark in my address book than living people. What can you do? I have to be philosophical. Oh God, you’re right. That man. Your philosopher.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  By now Benjamin could sense a headache long before it ever got to him, when it was still a swaddled hint, the faintest pressure on his temples, growing more and more intolerable. He started to sense one coming on when he woke at the station in Anoulême, drifting in his seat, breathing the almost solid air in which there was mixed the breath and sweat of passengers all crammed together into one car. It got worse as they moved from one city to the next, suspended on a thread of stilted, dull light. By early afternoon in Pau, the headache had become a beast bearing down on his neck; he could hardly talk from the pain. He found a little respite when they finally got to Lourdes – going through the endless military checkpoints at the station, and then the queue at the welcome centre. They were at last assigned a room, but there was still the boulevard to walk, dragging their bags among scores of shops, their displays full of Madonna figurines and terracotta renditions of the miracle, and a flood of wandering pilgrims and lost-looking refugees.

  As soon as they got to the inn, he abandoned his black bag and threw himself onto the bed without even looking around the room – two cots side by side, white sheets, a sink dark with lime, flowered wallpaper on the walls. He felt weak now, worn down. The pain wasn’t only pounding in his head but seemed to have attached itself to his stomach, twisting. He felt like throwing up.

  ‘Close the blinds, Dora.’

  ‘Do you want me to get you something to drink or eat?’ asked Dora.

  ‘No,’ he groaned, ‘I just want a little peace.’

  He stayed where he was, whimpering and panting, alone in the shadows, stretched out with his eyes closed, trying to ward off the torture, begging pity from a god he didn’t believe in – only to feel ashamed a moment later. He struggled to his feet and vomited a thin stream of acid specked with bread and cheese from breakfast into the sink. Purged, exhausted, a fetid taste in his mouth, his face creased. But once he lay down again he could feel the pain lifting slowly, like a long tide pulling out to sea. Sleep came suddenly, with no warning, almost depriving him of being able to enjoy his liberation from the ache. He slept so deeply that he didn’t hear Dora return and the next morning he hardly noticed her rising and going out to the bathroom, then coming back and getting dressed.

  ‘How do you feel?’ she gently asked.

  ‘Better,’ he answered. ‘I feel better, thank you. I know my headaches. You have to give them time, let them run their course, or else they’ll persecute you for a week.’

  A quiet light filtered in the window, striking the objects in the room at a slant, sculpting them with almost agonising precision. The room was modest, unadorned, but looked out over a garden of hibiscus and wisteria. The bathroom was downstairs, and they shared it with the nine other rooms. It was next to a dining room and a little parlour furnished with faded armchairs clustered around a radio. This was where Benjamin spent his first day in Lourdes, listening to Reynaud’s speech, his last, in which he refused England’s offer to unite the two empires. Walter immediately understood that this was a surrender. Pétain took Reynaud’s place and the next day the old marshal’s weak voice rippled out from the radio, coughing and whispering the words that Benjamin had never wanted to hear. ‘It is with a broken heart,’ he said, ‘that I must inform you all that the fighting must end.’

  ‘Fallait en finir,’ agreed the innkeeper, Madame Toussaint.

  Benjamin stared at her. She was an elderly lady with green eyes and white hair that she wore gathered low on the nape of her neck. She wasn’t sad, but rather seemed relieved that the war was at last over. Like many other French, she didn’t seem to grasp the gravity of what was happening. ‘Sparrows,’ Koestler would later write, ‘sparrows twittering on the telephone wires – the same wires that were transmitting the telegraphed order to kill them.’ But Benjamin could see his future as if he were reading it in a book, a children’s book full of drawings and figures, like one from his collection that he’d entirely lost track of. He saw himself walking down a road stinking of candle wax and prayer, joining others at a queue in a soup kitchen hoping for something to eat, a piece of bread, writing letters that grew increasingly anguished as he waited for a visa to go to the United States, or even travel papers for Marseille, where he might be able to climb onto a ship that would carry him to safety.

  ‘We’re stuck here in Lourdes,’ he whispered, ‘like in a labyrinth.’

  And so it was. But not even Benjamin realised that the armistice that Radio Paris was announcing, Horst Wessel Lied, foresaw the delivery of all the anti-Nazi refugees identified by the Gestapo to the Germans. After June 22, any kind of movement for men and women like Benjamin would be overseen by the authorities. From that point onward they would have to avoid the welcome centres in order not to fall into that web of horrors. They had to hide, move like wolves – starving and cautious, in a furious attempt to escape. Walter moved through that trap like a sleepwalker. Sometimes he was so overcome by resignation and laziness that he’d spend whole days in bed reading and worrying about the fate of his abandoned manuscripts. The sky outside was a fierce blue and a ruinous heat rose from the streets, weighing down gestures and words. Only during the long, diaphanous June twilights, after the eight o’clock curfew, when the moon was shining like crumpled soap-stone behind the bell tower, would Benjamin manage to write the letters in which he tried to recapture hope that they would ever find a way out of the labyrinth – or else he’d just express his desperation. ‘I can say,’ he wrote to Gretel Adorno, a few days after his forty-eighth birthday, ‘that I predicted everything but was unable to protect anything.’ In the meantime, over the month of July, France was split in two and old Pétain claimed to be directing a national revolution. Adorno and Horkheimer were trying to get him a visa for the United States. They called on the National Refugee Service; they appealed to Scholem for help; they tried to get him an assignment in Havana or Santo Domingo to get him out of that place. But it all seemed hopeless. The doors of the labyrinth closed back on him every time Benjamin got a whiff of freedom.

  ‘I told you not to trust Adorno.’

  It was the beginning of August by then. The dark, sticky heat died a slow death in their room. Dora came in to find him still in bed, reading, glum and sad, exactly how she’d left him earlier in the afternoon.

  ‘Aren’t you going to eat dinner?’ she asked, peeking through the door. He muttered that he didn’t feel up to it. She shot him a look of rage and compassion.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ she suddenly said with an unforeseen decisiveness. ‘I’m going to the countryside with Emma. She has friends there who will hide us in an old house.’

  She waited for him to respond, but he didn’t even look up from his book. Dora opened the closet and pulled out her suitcase. Then she moved to turn on the light. At which point she finally resolved to finish her sentence.

  ‘You’re coming too,’ she whispered, sure what his reaction would be. And she was right when he did answer, immediately, dripping with anger and resentment.

  ‘How else can I explain,’ he almost shouted. ‘I am waiting for a visa to go to the United States.’

  ‘You ha
ve been waiting for a year. I told you never to count on Adorno.’

  Dora’s voice was like a drill, an indefatigable drain on the brain. And the way she was taking aim at the Institute was twice as cutting as it raised doubts that Walter didn’t want to entertain. It was over an hour before Benjamin’s anger quieted and he was able to see his sister again as she was, weak and frightened, looking for support from her brother that he didn’t know how to give. The spectral silence of the deserted night street rose out of the freshness of the end of the day. Walter stood and held out exactly half of the money that Adrienne had given him.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said.

  ‘Please come with me.’

  ‘No, Dora. I have to get to Marseille. We’ll meet up again soon. Don’t worry, a month at the most.’

  There were tears in the corners of their eyes, but they both forced them back, out of fear of sadness. Once she left, Benjamin went over to the window and looked out, inhaling the perfume of the wisteria that was winding up the drainpipe – he looked out on nightfall that was coming in on tiptoe, like a collapsing agreement. Now he was really alone. The bells outside struck eight thirty. It was time. The moment in which he was almost transported by his desire to disappear even deeper into this trap. He wanted to write to someone in order to sweep away a little of the solitude. He wrote to Adorno. He sat down on the bed and began, ‘The complete uncertainty about what the next day, even the next hour, may bring has dominated my life for weeks now. I am condemned to read every newspaper as if it were a summons served on me in particular, to hear the voice of fateful tidings in every radio broadcast.’