The Angel of History Page 7

  When we slowly filed down at dawn, there were only nine of us left: Mariano and me, Luigi, Alfonso, Jacque, Sepúlveda, Lech, Jimmie and the Swiss cook.

  ‘All things considered, it’s still going well for us,’ muttered Luigi.

  ‘Why don’t you ask the opinion of the other guys – the ones we left up there?’ answered Alfonso.

  They were speaking Italian but Mariano and I could understand them.At least we got that sparks were about to start flying again. They calmed down instantly when a mortar shell landed just a few metres from us, reminding them we hadn’t reached safety yet.

  ‘Christ,’ they said almost in unison and lowered their heads.

  We were heading back to the ravine but we were advancing slowly. The Fascists had figured out it was a camp and were pounding it from the air. The caverns were full of soldiers and we must have been drawing too much fire outside. Mariano ordered us into an overflowing grotto. We stood at the entrance, almost outside, when a downpour of grenades and mortar fell on us. And where do you think the shrapnel got me? Here, on my right butt cheek. I felt a little pang and then nothing. I thought that I hadn’t even been hit, but I fell down in pain as soon as I tried to get up. Alfonso, Lech and Jimmie were right near me and they looked bad too. Mariano saw I was wounded and squinted. I thought he was going to come at me twisting his hair, but instead he tore the sleeve off his shirt and started bandaging me. Later on, when they were loading us into the ambulance he put his mouth up to my ear, grinned and said, ‘So you found a way, right, you figured out how to weasel out of this. I always knew deep down that you were a bed wetter.’

  He was teasing. But it’s true that my battle of Ebro ended there. I spent almost two months in the hospital after that, sharing a room with Jimmie and Alfonso. The shrapnel had gone all the way to the bone and had hit some nerves.

  ‘Amputate. Cut it off,’ said one French doctor, a blow-hard with a goatee. ‘If we don’t, we may risk total nerve damage.’

  Lucky for me there was another doctor there, an Englishman who was convinced he could save my leg. He operated on me cold, no anaesthesia – medical supplies were low. Hurt like the devil but may the god of medicine always protect that English doctor because you see my leg? I still have it and it works pretty well, almost.’

  I couldn’t get out of bed for a long time, but I ate like a fancy gentleman – a priest served me and waited on me. And Mercedes, even if that wasn’t her section, would come visit every two hours. She tended to my bottom, cuddled me. She loved me. If it weren’t for all the bad news coming in from the front I would have signed up to stay. But instead I just shook with anger there in my bed, getting news that those sons of bitches had razed Gandesa and Caposines; and that we were pulling out. Then one morning in late September I was released. I was brewing indecent fantasies in my head – not that I really wanted them to bomb us, I just wanted to find some special way of celebrating the occasion. But then I got the newspaper and went white before I even had time to read it. France and England had dropped their trousers for Hitler again in Munich and Hitler was swallowing Europe, bite by bite. They had abandoned us. We were alone again.

  Mercedes was waiting for me at the house, she’d even made my favourite dessert, but her smile faded when she saw me.

  ‘What is it? What happened,’ she asked.

  I didn’t say anything. I just spread the newspaper out on the table. She just glanced at the headline and pushed her hair back.

  ‘We’re fucked,’ she said.

  ‘Fucked – yes, we’re fucked.’ All I could do was repeat it.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Benjamin doesn’t look at the camera; his eyes are lowered, concentrating on his writing. Gisèle Freund frames him in the slyly taken shot at the National Library in Paris and yet he seems to be fading into the background, shrunken and bent over his papers. Old Benjamin, in his grey suit and waistcoat, just starting to look frayed. Distracted, almost circumspect in his peaceful setting. He grips a fountain pen in his right hand and holds the pages of a book open with his left. His unusually high forehead is crowned by wavy, unruly hair, which age had – as Gardel sings in an old tango – sprayed with ‘the snow of time’. His sharp nose protrudes under his glasses; his meaty, slightly flaccid cheeks belong to a man who has passed middle age but just barely, dragging a stubborn load of tiredness with him. There is an open inkwell and large sheets of stained blotter paper in front of his hands, which are expressive and stubby, like a child’s hands.

  Freund’s is an intense portrait, with a perfect harmony of geometry and the position of the elements: catalogue files, shelves full of books – and yet the image conveys unease, the same kind of unease that many of his friends and contemporaries must have felt when faced with Benjamin’s extraordinary intelligence. ‘He was one of the most bizarre, and most genial people I ever met,’ wrote Arthur Koestler. But he never totally revealed his intelligence. Benjamin hid behind minute details, criticism, commenting on the work of others. It was ten years from Walter’s first meeting with Gershom Scholem, who became his closest friend, to the day in 1921 when he finally conceded to addressing him with an intimate form of ‘you’. Benjamin cultivated mystery and erected protective barriers around the most futile and innocuous things: his ritual of gestures, his courtly manners, the hints of despotism in his character, the fatalistic and resolute way he drew toward the end with little steps; the way he looked at you, at once determined and lost, the stare of a man who takes reality too literally. Details, scraps. But no one knew better than Benjamin how to reconstruct his own story and make sense of it, building something out of these ‘by-products’, this ‘hill of broken crockery’ that made up his existence.

  In truth, Benjamin limped through life, trying to mask his ineptitude at living.When he wrote to Scholem about Kafka in June 1938, he could have been speaking of himself: ‘To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and peculiar beauty,’ he wrote, ‘one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the figure of failure. The circumstances of this failure are manifold. One is tempted to say: Once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream.’ And again, ‘He was of course speaking about himself,’ Hannah Arendt would write, ‘when, in complete agreement, he quoted what Jacque Rivière had said about Proust that he “died of the same inexperience that permitted him to write his works. He died of ignorance . . . because he didn’t know how to make a fire or open a window.”’

  Perhaps during the years of his exile, from 1933 to 1940, moving between Ibiza, San Remo and Skovsbostrand, the only place where Walter Benjamin found himself truly at ease, at home, was at ‘his place’ at the table in the National Library of Paris where Gisèle Freund took his picture. Housed in that building were the only territories Benjamin could move through with the surefootedness of the consummate explorer. He moved among those tables without the slightest indecision, almost suspended by the ‘light breeze of curiosity’. He discovered halls and corridors, forgotten foundations, he ventured into the Cabine des Estampes to the images that confirmed his imagination. He even managed to get himself admitted to the Enfer, the section where the obscene books were kept.

  However much circumstances conspired against him and however determinedly events seemed to force him away from Paris and the library, Benjamin never let go – not, that is, until the German army was standing at the doors to the city. Not until the last moment, months after the war had broken out and once his life was clearly in danger. Until then he took stubborn refuge in that silence, when the sky painted with summer colours glowed in through the window of the reading room. It was only there that he managed to escape from the ‘psychosis of noises’ that had tormented him for years, in every house and every room where he ever lived. Many of his letters are full of despairing descriptions of trucks passing on the road, elevators breaking his concentration, curses against the unlucky destiny come alive in a piano never heard before, the inconsolable lamentations of someone sufferin
g something like a dreadful toothache who simply can’t imagine anything worse. ‘I am now seriously considering whether it wouldn’t be better to work only at night, which would bring in turn numerous other inconveniences. But there must be other people who manage to find some kind of peace – aren’t there?’

  He almost never found it.As he drew near to the final chapter of his life it became more and more elusive. But Benjamin never wanted to acknowledge that, not until it was too late. Immersed in his books about Paris from another age, he stuck to his place at the library, watching fearfully and almost stealthily as the world rushed around him. Wavering images and uncertain figures like the Kaiserpanorama that he’d seen as a child, half-shadows that seemed to offer a ‘heartbreaking quality of farewell’. Unfortunately, those shadows were real, and they’d set a date with him on the final frontier.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Yes. Fine, Benjamin. But think about the story I’m telling you. There aren’t many of us left who can still tell this story. And any story, even one about my meeting your philosopher, has a ‘before’ and ‘after’ even if it seems that we’re all in such a rush these days and there’s a damned craze for forgetting. So listen, just be a little patient and we’ll get to Benjamin. First off, there were the last months in Barcelona when we already knew that it was all lost and the ration card went down to a few grams of lentils a day, when not even the bombings, which got worse and more frightening, seemed to bring back the urge to screw. There was sadness and resignation everywhere. Then I lost my heart to my trousers. I met Pilar again – my first girl, the one I did it with in Gijón in ’34. It was mid October and I was in a café on the Ramblas. I hadn’t had news of her for years but when I saw her again it was as if all that time built up in my head was reduced to nothing, a cigarette butt, a glob of spit. She was still beautiful, but her face had grown hard and there was a bitterness about her mouth that didn’t go away even when she smiled. She was a captain now, a Valladolid communist. She said she’d been angry as hell when they didn’t let her go to the front line too. Because women couldn’t fight! Was it a left-wing government or not?

  ‘Of course. You’re right,’ I said, stuttering because that girl still got right to my heart. My heart. I finished up my cortado and made up an excuse to leave.

  I was sorry but not too sorry. I was leaving the next day. Since my leg still acted up they’d given me a desk assignment in Sabadell. I was working on the payroll in the offices. The good thing about the job was that I travelled all day and often got back to Barcelona and Mercedes. That’s how I happened to be in the city when they were sending the International Brigades home. After the Munich agreement there was no reason for them to be here, they were useless. Arrivederci, thank you, and here’s a kick in the ass to everyone who fought harder for Spain than we did, thousands of them never leaving our trenches. Now the veterans were filing along the Diagonal. We hugged them and threw flowers, we saluted them with closed fists. Mercedes and me and Ana María had planned to meet Jimmie and Alfonso in the Plaza de las Glorias Catalans.When we got there Jimmie was crying a river and Alfonso was sitting all hunched up on a wall, he looked like he was in mourning, worse than an undertaker.

  Ana María went over to comfort Alfonso and that’s how I found out that they’d been together for some time. Nursemaid to cock that Ana María.

  ‘How is it,’ I asked Mercedes, ‘that you didn’t tell me anything about this?’

  I don’t even know why I was so angry. Instead of answering she shrugged her shoulders and pointed her chin toward Jimmie and Alfonso. Better to worry about those two, she was trying to say. There was a lovely autumn sun shining on the square lighting up the crowd and the posters, pictures of Azaña, Stalin, Negrín, flowers flying through the air, the pavement strewn with colour. Alfonso looked around as if he wanted to swallow all the people, eat them and make them his.

  ‘I’m not leaving,’ he said.

  I kept quiet and waited for the outburst, which soon followed.

  ‘Where am I supposed to go?’ he asked himself shaking his head back and forth. ‘I can’t ever go back to Italy. I’d have to live as an exile in France. How would you like to have that prospect in front of you? At least here I feel at home.’

  Then Mercedes and I hugged him.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, putting a hand on his shoulder. ‘Let’s go talk to someone at headquarters.’

  Up on the stage stood Azaña, Negrín, Martínez Barrio and la Pasionario – at least for the day they’d forgotten all their disagreements. You could see very well, even from a distance, that they were moved. Machado was even up there. What a great poet, don Antonio. I knew his poems by heart, as many of us did. Some nights out on the front I’d recite them for my buddies – even if Alfonso would really give me a hard time the next day. Machado was sick, but he hadn’t wanted to miss that day, to miss the chance of being among the two hundred thousand listening to Dolores Ibarruri’s speech: ‘You can leave with your heads held high.You are history.You are legend!’

  ‘No pasarán,’ we cried. But instead . . .

  Instead on October 30, the nationalists launched a week-long offensive on the Ebro. They started at dawn on the ramparts of the Sierra de Caballs, and then they attacked the mountains of Sierra de Pandols where we had fought. Even Mariano wrote that things looked bad. The government kept saying ‘Hold your ground, hold your ground.’ As if it were that easy. Within two weeks the battle of Ebro was over. The first snows were already falling when Yagüe entered Rabarroya, and when Lister brought the last of our troops over the river. But the worst, my son, had yet to arrive.

  I was busy travelling, going to the fronts to bring pay to the soldiers. They were starving in Barcelona now. There were a million refugees occupying the plazas, the porticos, the streets and everyone was just waiting for the last attack, the grand finale. I was in Barcelona when it started, because I had to bring the accounts to the command of my division. I wanted to spend the holidays with Mercedes but she disappeared on December 20, all of a sudden. Tramp. She left just like that without a warning. I knocked on her door day and night. I asked Ana María who knew nothing about nothing. The hospital told me that she had taken a month’s leave and I had a nervous breakdown. I would have smashed everything, shot up all the nurses and doctors, but instead I just leaned against a lamp post and burst into desperate tears.

  ‘Do you feel sick?’ a lady asked me as she passed.

  ‘Mind your own damn business,’ I answered.

  I couldn’t take that war anymore. I couldn’t take the life we’d been forced to live. Now it had even got Mercedes. I spent Christmas Eve at a shelter and then I was sent back to the front, to Balaguer in a sector that was already in retreat. I served as quartermaster with another three officers. They were sending entire companies right into the battle, just to buy some time. But for what? It was already late, too late to keep hoping. The enemy took Tarragona and then continued toward Barcelona. We caved all along the Catalonia front, abandoning our dead, our wounded, prisoners, planes, rifles, tanks. It was a bust. Run for your lives and focus on getting to France. I knew that I’d have to face exile again. On January 23, in Campdevànol, we received orders to destroy the archives and get a truck full of arms, papers and money – about two million pesetas – to the border crossing at Puigcerdà.

  I confess. I didn’t care about the orders. No one knew who was commanding who and I took advantage of the situation. There was only one thread of hope left, what if she’d gone home to her mother? What do you mean, she who? She, Mercedes. In the end, what difference did it make if I drove the supply truck to France via Port Bou? One border is the same as the next. So I took the road toward the Goubet hills, I got to Olot and hit the gas, east, toward Figueres. But I had to slow down almost immediately. At first I just saw scattered rows of people and then the procession expanded endlessly. All of Catalonia was on the run. There were tens of thousands of civilians and military, with their carts and mules, cars, trucks, invalids
, soldiers with gaping wounds, entire families walking, bowing under the weight of their chests, trunks, wardrobes, dogs, sheep, bottles and mattresses – everyone watching the sky for bombers. Only some of them had shoes. The women were dressed in black as if in mourning, carrying their children in their arms and giant bundles of their things wrapped in colourful scarves dragging behind them. The worst thing was the terrible silence. It was the silence of ice covering streets. All you could hear was the distant bursts of muted cannon fire or the engines of planes getting closer. And then everyone would throw themselves into the fields, drop into the gutters and try to find shelter behind the trees.

  There was a child alone in the middle of the intersection. People passed by him; he walked as if there were a vacuum around him.

  ‘Where is your mother?’ I asked, leaning out of the truck.

  ‘In France,’ he said.

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘Get in,’ I told him. ‘Climb up in back with the others.’

  I didn’t get to Port Bou till the next morning. It was just starting to clear and you could see the lights of villages, icy and still on the hills. It was a cold, crystal-clear morning. The sea was calm and reflected the sky, echoing its limpid light. In the distance, however, up north, the horizon seemed to melt into a stew of black clouds. I parked near a bombed-out house and went alone, on foot, into town.

  People were already out in little clusters on the street; they would pause here for an hour or so’s rest before pushing forward the last kilometres to the border. It wasn’t easy to locate someone who actually lived there.