The Angel of History Page 8

  ‘Mercedes Carraasco, the nurse? . . . Do you know where she lives?’

  Mostly people answered ‘no’ absent-mindedly or turned their backs and kept walking. I thought it must be how I looked – the long beard, the ragged, dirty uniform. But it was really fear.

  ‘Please, I’m begging you.’ I was almost whimpering to a lady and she finally understood she had nothing to fear.

  ‘Okay, wait here,’ she said.

  I sat on the pavement, a few steps from the beach. I kept my back to the sea, and I smoked and watched the people, looking for Mercedes. To my left, there was a promontory where you could see the outlines of a little cemetery with its white walls and rows of matching tombstones. Half an hour later, she was walking toward me, coming out of a little road leading from the main square. They had warned her, a man, a soldier was looking for her and here she was planted in front of me, staring at me. She was tense and nervous, there were bags under her eyes, her hair was falling out of its bun. I stood when I saw her but we didn’t kiss.

  ‘Hey,’ she said.

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Here,’ she answered gesturing around her. ‘Can’t you see?’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?’

  She looked back at me as if I were just an obstacle between her and the view of the sea.

  ‘Our agreement,’ she said, ‘was clear. Neither one of us owes the other one anything, don’t you remember?’

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ I rushed to agree. ‘But why don’t you come with me now? I have a truck.You can bring your mother, if you like.’

  She lowered her eyes. There might have been a tear caught in her eyelash, but I couldn’t be sure.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said.

  Women – can’t ever figure out what they’re thinking. I cursed under my breath and then managed to ask her why not.

  ‘Because I have a daughter,’ she answered all in one breath.

  I must have gone white, swallowed all of my spit, and then I was gasping like a male dog. I suddenly realised how little I knew that woman. And who knew what else she never told me. But it didn’t matter. I knew that I loved her and the thought of going on without her took my breath away; it strangled my heart.

  ‘Bring her too,’ I said.

  Mercedes shook her head. There was the ever so slight shadow of a smile lightening the corners of her mouth.

  ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘She’s sick and I can’t move her. Maybe, we’ll join you when she gets better.’

  ‘Will she get better?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘I really think she will. But you should go on now before it gets too late. And send me news.’

  It was useless to insist. I’d only met maybe one other woman, Pilar, who was that stubborn in my whole life. But we did kiss now. For a long time with our eyes closed and all the people around us watching. As slowly as I could I turned back toward my truck. After a few steps I called back, ‘What’s her name? What’s your daughter’s name?’

  ‘María.’

  I waved again and Mercedes finally smiled.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The moody February light came in through the windows, dripped down the walls, crawled up to the vaulted ceiling, came to stagnate sadly in the big reading room of the library. Benjamin was at his place, immersed in grey light, his hair more rumpled than usual – his only suit growing ever more threadbare. His movements were almost furtive as he read and reread the notes he’d taken in the little notebooks with black covers that he always carried with him. For years he’d been fishing those pearls from books, newspapers, conversations with friends and conversations on the train, recording it all with a maniacal fury and with a pride that often drove him to read his notes aloud to others as if they were part of some precious collections. There might be an obscure love poem from the eighteenth century or a passage from Balzac, a note about Simmel next to an article from a Viennese newspaper announcing the suspension of fuel service to Jews – which was just a suicidal economic loss to the fuel companies.

  That February morning, though, Benjamin was studying the notebooks reserved for Passagen-Werk. Horkheimer had asked him for another précis of the work, and if Benjamin could write it in French then it would be presented to a rich businessman in New York who might provide a grant. But it was so difficult to concentrate on that when all he really wished to think about was the wretchedness and terror of the world that was crushing him. Hitler standing outside Prague, Barcelona fallen to Franco, half a million Spaniards on an ill-fated flight over the French border. It just kept getting harder to focus. And it would be useless to pretend that he wasn’t still upset about the Baudelaire rejection. Every time his eyes fell on those notebooks it felt like a worm had got into his stomach and the taste of copper seemed to flood his throat. That was that, he would never be able to rewrite it. He was exhaling out his weariness when he realised that someone was standing behind him.

  ‘You seem tired, Walter. Why don’t we go get a coffee?’

  That wide mouth, a nose pointed as a nail – it was Bataille. They had met in the library, where Bataille worked, several years earlier when Benjamin was a new exile looking for a home.

  ‘Come on. It will do you good. Just a little break.’

  Bataille had everything that Benjamin was attracted to. He was his opposite. He was self-possessed, open, young. Bataille would speak of dépense, of excess, to a man who considered himself fated never to squander himself – a good middle-class German Jew, educated in being reserved and behaving evenly. How could Benjamin not be fascinated by a man who – though under a pen name – had written an honest-to-God erotic masterpiece like Histoire de l’oeil? Georges Bataille was like Walter’s dark side, his negative magnetic pole. Whereas in many other ways the two men were peers, they shared the same kind of life, rippled with thousands of useless rituals and the same gratuitous yet profound urge to surround themselves with the veil of mystery.

  Georges Bataille liked to pretend that the Collège de sociologie, which he founded along with Caillois and Leiris in 1937, was a kind of secret society. And Benjamin, who was a member, went along with that useless mystery. For years he never said a word about the meetings of the Collège held in cafés along the Left Bank gathering ethnologists, philosophers, sociologists, literary critics – all of them as disappointed by communism as by surrealism. Benjamin dived in and Bataille became one of his most frequent companions, although he never introduced him to his other friends. He kept it for himself, as with Scholem when they were young.

  Now they sat in a bar on rue Vivienne, two coffees in front of them. Benjamin was gloomy and Bataille was using his smile like a shoehorn, trying to wedge his way into his friend’s dark humour.

  ‘So what’s the matter?’ he asked.

  Walter snorted, rolled his neck and stared at the dirty rim of his coffee cup.

  ‘Nothing,’ he answered. ‘It’s just that I have to write a new proposal for Passagen-Werk and I don’t know where to start . . . with everything that’s been going on over these last months. There is all this information that I haven’t quite organised in my head. Things that might change my perspective on all my work.’

  ‘By new things, you mean Blanqui?’

  ‘Blanqui.’

  ‘You should include him.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I do, though it’s clearly not the only thing bothering you.’

  The sky turned angry and the clouds collected like skeins of filthy, coarse yarn. Bataille crossed his legs and smiled.

  ‘We should go now,’ he said.

  Back in the library, Benjamin closed his eyes for a minute or two and then opened them reluctantly over the first pages of the first notes he took on the project. He was almost searching for the happiness of those days, when he’d only begun at that very same table in the Library. ‘This work about the Parisian arcades,’ he’d noted many years earlier, ‘was started under a free blue and c
loudless sky arching over walls decorated with leaves, all veiled with the secular dust of millions of sheets of paper, rustling in the fresh breeze of diligence, the breathlessness of the researcher, the zealous impetuousness of youth, the slow wind of curiosity. The sky painted in the colours of summer flooded in through the arches of the reading room of the National Library in Paris, spreading dreamy, opaque mantle.’

  Benjamin turned the lamp on and flipped the pages slowly, one hand running through his hair. Sometimes he couldn’t even make out his own handwriting, trying to decipher those minute lines, driven by a hand that seemed without reason or memory. Phrases, fragments, declarations of intent: ‘Things that are deviations for others, are what define my project. I base my calculations of time differentials that for others might disrupt the overarching lines of research.’ Or, ‘Method for this project: literary collage. I don’t have anything to say. I only have to show. I don’t want to subtract from anything this precious and I won’t appropriate any rich expressions of spirit. Scraps and rejects only – but not as an inventory, rather in a way that renders them the greatest possible justice – by using them.’

  For years he’d been trying to compose a book made up exclusively of citations, braided together like a mosaic, ordered according to the most rigorous and painstaking design. When he was working on German Baroque Drama, he had collected over six hundred quotes and hung them on the wall of his study. ‘My citations,’ he wrote aphoristically in One Way Street, ‘are like armed plunderers who burst out suddenly ripping assent from the idle reader.’ These were words as emblems, images. He worked to rip them from their context, fragments of sentences, organising them around a centre that was his. Every sentence he wrote was written as if it were either the first observation of the world, or the last before catastrophe.

  Would he finally manage to construct a book this way with Passagen-Werk? This wasn’t the only thing worrying him. The Benjamin of ten years ago would have wanted to erect a ‘great construction over a foundation made up of minuscule elements chosen with care and precision’. He would have wanted to illuminate the ‘idea of a rendering that vibrates with the idea of happiness’. He would have wanted to begin such a historical exposition the same way Proust began the story of his life, ‘With the awakening’. It would be like a field of rubble seen through the eyes of a survivor who wakes up wounded the day after the battle.

  That field of rubble, we now know, was European culture. But that February morning in 1939, Benjamin couldn’t find a trace of that awakening and rendering. The only thing that seemed to relate to his state of mind was the almost unknown book of Louis-August Blanqui that he had picked out of a forgotten pile in the library. At the end of his life in the prison of Fort du Taureau, the revolutionary Blanqui found himself without any desire to believe in his own impulses. Society had defeated him. Then, perhaps without realising it, Blanqui put forth a final accusation of time. ‘Progress does not exist. What we call progress,’ he wrote, ‘is closed in every land, and disappears along with it. The very same drama, the very same scene on the same bleak stage is repeated everywhere and inevitably, noisy humanity, infatuated with its own bigness believing that it contains the university – it lives in the prison of its own immensity, trying to capture the entirety of the globe that it has carried for so long on its shoulders, the burden of its own pride. The monotony continues, the immobility of the external heavenly bodies. The universe repeats itself without end and stamps on its ground. Unperturbed eternity recites these same stories infinitely.’

  Bataille was right. That accusation and its desolate surrendering, the desperation and solitude set Benjamin moving again. He lifted his glasses to his forehead and rubbed his eyes. He uncapped his pen, opened a new black notebook and began writing. Several hours later, when he lifted his gaze again, the rain had begun to tap against the window panes. Outside, the precocious winter night had almost cancelled out the sky.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Mother of hell. María. How old were you? Were you the daughter of Mercedes’ husband, the fascist lawyer? And did Mercedes kill your father in cold blood? It was all too horrible and I couldn’t believe it. But if not that, then what? A mess. The more I tried to wrap my mind around it the harder it all was to put it together. I cursed myself for not having thought of them then and there. These questions. How could I have left them all hanging, waiting for answers that would never come? Now I had to carry that tangle with me, as I drove the speed of a man walking toward the border.

  The road was clogged, full of escaping people, of unleashed animals, families camped out on the banks of the road, the sick and wounded in wheelbarrows, broken carriages and cars run out of fuel just abandoned. We’d sit for hours only in order to advance a few metres and then kill the engine again. Never more than just a few metres.We just didn’t move. Those French sons of bitches didn’t want all these Reds in their house, and they’d shut the border. We waited there in the cold without anything to eat or drink. People passed us, faces sober, wrinkles black with dust. There were soldiers like me out there and then an automobile, flags waving, horn blasting a path through the crowd. Then an old man with a long beard stepped out into the middle of the road and lifted his rifle.

  ‘No one gets through here. Not even Jesus Christ.’

  ‘But it’s the minister,’ they told him.

  ‘What do I care? If I can’t get through then no one can.’

  They finally convinced him to move, who knows how. It had grown late. The wind picked up and there were big black clouds tumbling through the sky. A woman with a child in her arms stood near me, her eyes glazed, she begged for help from everyone who passed.

  ‘He has a fever. Can you please take care of him for me?’

  I watched a man in a black suit and tie reach out his arms to take the child then shake his head sadly. The woman had already disappeared into the confusion. The man came over to me, looking around, his anger dark but controlled.

  ‘He’s dead,’ he said. ‘This child is dead.’

  The cold got worse and then with nightfall the rain began. At first it just drizzled then came down in buckets with a strange kind of ferocity. It wasn’t just night, it was a moonless night. There was wind and rain; it was one of those nights when the lord god king and Lucifer are facing off in a battle. On the cliffs below us, the sea blew giant sprays of foam up over the edge of the overhang where we were all gathered. I was lucky to be sheltered in my truck, but what about everyone else outside? It was like time had stopped, got sticky like jam, gone cold and motionless. Sometime around midnight I saw about twenty people coming toward us. Days before they had probably been elegant well turned out high-class people but now they were reduced like the rest of us. They walked slowly, sinking into the mud through the cars and carriages, the animals and asses, the fires and the fallen, under that rain and right into the north wind whipping the water violently. That elderly man . . . yes! It was really him. It was Machado – don Antonio, leaning heavily on the arms of his brother along with his old mother and mother-in-law. I leaped right out the truck.

  ‘Don Antonio!’ I screamed but he didn’t hear me and I couldn’t go too far from the truck where all the money and papers were. When I climbed back inside the rain had become relentless, the thunder was making the doors shake and then a burst of lightning scratched yellow and violet against the sky. The rain didn’t let up for two days; it got heavier and then a little lighter. But I was stuck. I couldn’t go forward toward the border or backward to Mercedes. If you knew what torture that was, my son. Until the French finally relented. They let the wounded in first, then the civilians, and then they finally let the military through on the condition that we surrender our weapons.

  The border was two sentry boxes and a chain, as well as a little shack lit by a feeble lamp in the middle of the dark. A gendarmerie officer came over to my truck.

  ‘Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘Park over there in the field and wait for orders.’

  Orders? What
orders? And from whom? I was hungry and thirsty; it had been days since I’d slept over three hours. I couldn’t take this endless waiting any more. But I did have to wait – another night and into the next morning. I fell asleep instantly on the seat of the truck but it was a light, tortured sleep because I kept seeing Mercedes in Port Bou. I thought about her mysterious daughter and tried, senselessly, to come up with explanations. I saw Mariano running on the Sierra next to me, machine gun on his shoulder, and then the bloody face of the dead Dutchman. I kept seeing over and again the infinite procession of people streaming down the road in front of me and wondered whether they’d made it alive to France. The last memories of Spain I would carry with me were so sad.

  At about noon, a colonel and a captain from the Garde mobile came to make a first selection. There were thousands of soldiers on that field. They’d ordered the troops onto trucks and sent them all to a nearby camp. The colonel ordered us officers to guard the supplies.

  ‘What did he say?’ a captain asked me. He was one of our men, a career officer.A tall guy with closely set eyes and tapering ears. I was one of the few who knew a smattering of French.

  ‘Nothing,’ I answered. ‘He didn’t say anything except to stay here and wait.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said with a smile, ‘they’re planning on sending us back to Spain, putting us on a boat for Valencia so that we can go defend Madrid.’

  ‘Like hell,’ I said. ‘I know these guys. You just wait and see what they have in store for us.’

  He was a stubborn one. ‘No. I mean there must be half a million of us; they can’t possibly keep us all in France.’

  Three days later, after they told us that we were going to be interned, I went looking for that captain. He’d disappeared. It was a sorry satisfaction to be right about this one. Then the colonel of the Garde mobile came through the crowd looking for me.