Novus’.
The move had been costly and each month he struggled to get his rent money together. But he was happy in that house, adapting to the bachelor life and his new working nest. From his window he could see the old Wilmersdorfer Luch clock, which over time became a luxury he regretted having to give up. In the winter he could even see the children on the ice-skating rinks. Instead of sitting at a table, he’d write and work reclining on a sofa inherited from the former tenant. On that sofa, surrounded by his books and pictures – a vision of calm – he’d been able to start his Passagen-Werk, a sweeping portrait of nineteenth-century Paris that he’d spent years gathering material on. There were obstacles to spare, but for the first time Benjamin seemed resolute, free from that ‘exhausting slowness’ that seemed to cling to him. In truth he spent those months reconciling his debts – to himself and to life.
Disappearing, committing suicide, being over and done with everything – this was the thought spinning in his head like a sluggish, trapped horsefly. It pursued him through his travels in 1932 along the Riviera and down to Ibiza and then back to Germany. Sometimes, when he was reading at home on his couch, Benjamin could barely manage to finish a page without drifting into such a total state of disembodiment he’d forget to turn the page. He’d reflect on his project and plan it out. Should he do it at home or in a hotel? Was it really inevitable? The more he thought about doing it the more peaceful he felt. This ‘project’ dogged him for a year, working its way into his head and making him fluctuate between depression and ataraxy. He never revealed any of this in his letters to friends, despite the fact that it was distracting from his edits on what would eventually and miraculously become the short prose pieces in Berlin Childhood. Until he almost did it. It happened in Nice, at the Hôtel du Petit Parc near the end of July in 1932, two weeks after his fortieth birthday. It must have been an awful day – the doomed moment of gathering up all the threads of his life, putting the weights on a scale, everything that was and all that should have been. If he’d looked in the mirror that day, he would have seen a man who women found bodiless, a friend at most, a tired, poor, melancholy man, a stranger in his own world – a world that was slowly evaporating. This is why a few days earlier, when he was still on Ibiza, he’d written to his oldest friend Scholem, who had emigrated to Palestine. Of course he’d revealed it in his own way, with that passion for obscurity and mystery that had set him apart even when he was a young man, sending cryptic, desperate messages hoping that sooner or later his friend would understand. ‘To think,’ he wrote, ‘that I’ll be spending my birthday in Nice, in the company of a very silly man who I’ve met frequently on my trips, and we will drink to my health, unless I decide to be alone.’ Who in the world was this man, wondered Scholem, trying to understand. Today, we might suppose that he was writing of the hunchbacked dwarf of childhood nursery rhymes who haunted his worst nightmares – his destiny already formed. Exhaustion seized Benjamin at the Hôtel du Petit Parc. It was as if the entire predicament of his existence were falling on him at once, as if the stars guiding his life had lined up in a perfect trajectory of misfortune.
He spent the day he arrived in Nice sitting on a bench on the Promenade des Anglais watching the sea. There was a heavy, hot sirocco blowing; it took his breath away. The wind mounted and the sea churned, the waves tossed up on the beach, sending up a foamy, brackish odour. And then Benjamin tore his gaze away from the horizon, took his fountain pen from its case and wrote Scholem a letter full of signs, breadcrumbs and clues about the tangled thoughts cluttering his mind. The letter was difficult to decipher. He wrote of looking reality in the face with a solemnity that felt like desperation. He’d had enough of the compromises he’d made in order to continue his life. He closed his bag and walked slowly through the alleys of the old city, working his way through the flower market, inhaling the good smells coming from the restaurants, watching people rush around finishing the day’s errands. Just before sunset he counted the money he had left and ordered a croissant in a café on Place Rossetti. Then, his decision made, he returned to the hotel. He was very close to taking the final step. He spent the night stretched out on the bed, smoking his pipe and contemplating the faint ray of broken light that streamed hesitantly through the blinds from a street lamp. Until that yellow light turned golden in the early dawn. Then Benjamin closed the shutters and sat down at the table by the bed and composed his will. All of his manuscripts would go to Scholem. He carefully extracted a few pieces of paper and wrote three short messages to Ernst Schoen, Franz Hessel and Jula Cohn – one of the three most important women in his life along with Dora and Asja Lacis. He wrote to Jula: ‘You know that I’ve loved you for a long time. And standing here on the brink of death, life offers me no rewards greater than those I suffered for you. This farewell must be enough.Yours, Walter.’
When he had finished writing, Benjamin removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. They were tired and as fiercely blue as ever. He stood, lit his pipe and then lay down on the bed, his shoes still on, staring motionless at a corner of the ceiling. Outside the July sun beat mercilessly on the old city and over the sea; it snuck into the alleys and worked through his shutters – the sound of the street rising with it. His pipe went out and Benjamin thought to himself that he wouldn’t even be allowed to die in silence.
Chapter Six
Of course I haven’t forgotten. We’re getting to your philosopher. What was I talking about? Ah yes, how we ended up in Barcelona. Well, I would have liked a few days of rest, to steal some time back from that damn war, just walk around the city. But not Mariano. He got angry and stamped his feet and said that it was treachery to sit around with your hands in your pockets at a time like this, to act like a tourist while our brothers were fighting. So the very next morning we reported to the recruiting headquarters. They were very good to us. We were welcomed like rich men at a bank. ‘Please come in. A pleasure to meet you. Make yourselves comfortable.’ A captain asked us where we were from and then complimented us on our work. In the end, he gave us coupons to eat in any of the mess halls, a travel pass through the Republican zone, ration books, money and cigarettes. Most importantly, we walked out with a thirty-day leave. They said we’d talk about us going back to the front after Christmas. I was almost jumping for joy, but Mariano was practically black in the face he was so mad.
‘Don’t be upset,’ I said. ‘Command knows what’s best for us.’
It didn’t happen overnight, but we started taking pleasure in that life. We’d eat in whichever mess hall we pleased, or at the Basque tavern near the post office.We walked down the Ramblas and around the Barrio Chino, buying pack after pack of toasted almonds. Sometimes we’d go all the way down to the sea to wait for the fishermen to come in and we’d gorge ourselves on fresh sardines.We frittered away our time at the cinema and in crowded bars, until one morning there were sirens and we ran for a shelter. That’s where I met her. What do you mean, who? Mercedes! Are you sure I haven’t told you about her already? She was from Port Bou, near the border, but she was living in Barcelona. She was a nurse in the Calle Talleres hospital. Brunette – looked a little Gypsy with her high cheekbones and those green eyes. And if you could have seen her ass. She reminded me of my first girl, Pilar, who I’d taken when I was sixteen, by the barricades. They even had similar temperaments. But Mercedes was more hot-headed. To think she was an anarchist who was forced into marriage as a girl with an old fascist lawyer! She did away with him herself during the first days of the insurrection. But I didn’t find out about that until much later. I didn’t know anything when I saw her for the first time, sitting on a bench, in the dull lantern light, her legs crossed like a queen in the middle of all those hundreds of people cowering in the shelter. She was with a friend, Ana María – a pretty piece of work herself. Outside we could hear the bombs whistling and the explosions getting closer. We were all quiet and tense, but those two girls acted like nothing special was going on, whispering together. It’s a mystery to me how women always find something to talk about.
I might have stood there forever watching her like an idiot. Lucky for me, I had Mariano.You could tell that he liked Ana María. He nudged me with his elbow and then put his hand on my back.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
He had to push me physically because he knew what a disaster I was with girls. My stomach got all twisted and words would get stuck in my throat. He never thought twice about plunging