to the hospital. In reality there wasn’t much to laugh about.You couldn’t even count the dead and wounded. The smoke and dust was everywhere, the ambulance sirens were screeching all around. Entire buildings crumbled like cookies. Craters gaped in the street. Water shot from broken pipes and swirled around the bodies of the godforsaken people who hadn’t made it to the shelter. We helped; we did what we could and then went to the Carl Marx mess for lunch. That night we saw Ana María and Mercedes again on the Ramblas and an hour later we were all in bed. That’s how it was back then. People living under death’s shadow do things intensely. Is my grandson Andrés still around? Good, so I can tell you. That girl would have made a corpse stiff. She wanted it; she was hungry and open to anything. I didn’t have much experience but I was the happiest man in the world.You know what? Get closer, so I don’t have to shout. I thought I should just stick it up her ass and throw away the key and burn the receipt. That was such a great life. Nights in bed with Mercedes. And then during the day while she was working and our men were falling by the thousands in Teruel, we were off raising hell with our buddies. Even Mariano was happy. But it all ended on the fourth of January when they called us all to the barracks. There were two hundred of us altogether – mostly Spaniards, but not only. There were Czechs, Brits, Poles, French, Italians and Finns.
‘Get undressed,’ ordered the officer.
After our shower they gave each of us two uniforms, two berets, a coat, a poncho, linens, even cigarettes and a pouch of American tobacco. Two thirty, in the middle of a downpour, a military train was heading out from the Francia station, destination unknown. Mariano and I were on that train. Ana María and Mercedes were down on the platform waving their handkerchiefs. There were no tears shed. I felt more angry, nostalgic and sick. It was like my stomach was eating itself. Mariano, on the other hand, was acting like he’d just come out of a long sleep. It didn’t take much. Maybe he could already smell combat and that excited him.
‘And we’re back in business,’ he said rubbing his hands together.
I looked at him and then turned away to look out the window at the factory smokestacks getting smaller in the distance, the fields outside Barcelona reduced to swamps under the completely grey sky and the rain beating against the glass. I imagined myself back in the trenches – the cold, the cannon fire.
‘You’re out of your mind,’ I told him and then went to sit down.
Chapter Seven
Benjamin performed an about-face and completely abandoned his plan to take his own life in that little room at the Hôtel du Petit Parc in Nice. His reasons remain a mystery. Over the months that followed, he hunkered down and worked, taking full advantage of his incredible capacity for concentration and fishing through his ‘reservoir of profound serenity’ – nothing seemed to upset him. It was as if passing through death and looking it in the eyes, he’d passed some kind of initiation ritual. After that, life couldn’t present him with anything worse. In the meantime, living was worthwhile.
And yet, a year later, after his escape from Berlin to Paris, he’d spent only a few days in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower before descending back into turmoil. In bed, at a hotel on rue de la Tour in the sixteenth arrondissement, Benjamin watched his pipe smoke curl up toward the sink and the cracked mirror on the wall in front of him; it filled the grimy room, spread greyly over the grey walls. He’d come back to Paris from Ibiza at the end of September 1933 tormented by a fever that came over him in waves. Malaria, claimed the doctor.A hearty quinine cure lowered his body temperature but his strength didn’t come back. He squandered the little energy he had writing letter after letter. ‘This illness,’ he wrote to his friend in Palestine, ‘has left me just enough strength to recognise the wretchedness of my situation – but not enough strength to extricate myself from it. I’m not even healthy enough to climb the stairs of the cheap hotel where I’ve been forced to take lodging.’
Lying on that bed, covers pulled up to his nose, he listened carefully to the growl of the city beyond the closed blinds – snarling and ready to pounce. This wasn’t the same city that he’d once known. But then he wasn’t the curious carefree tourist of a few years before either. For a person like him, alone and without money or a home, without a country or a language, for a Jew running from the Nazis, Paris showed another face, a harsher, harder face. Benjamin didn’t even need to go to Ibiza and then come back to France in order to comprehend the situation. He’d already predicted it to Scholem two months earlier: ‘The Parisians are saying “Les émigrés sont pires que les boches,” and that should give you an accurate idea of the kind of society that awaits one there.’
He wasn’t wrong.With the exception of a brief period under the Popular Front government, the émigré life in France just kept getting harder. There were expulsions and arrests; it was impossible to process any kind of paperwork. As if that weren’t enough, the group of exiles and intellectuals who had gathered in Paris so committed to proving that there was another ‘better’ Germany drew far too much attention from the Brownshirts. They were put under surveillance – terrorised, robbed, assassinated. The exile centres filled with spies compiling lists, watching activities, furnishing information and trying to discourage the leadership. It was dangerous to be too politically exposed and talking to anyone you didn’t already know very well was a risk seldom worth running.
Benjamin was hardly prepared for that battle. Which is why (following the shadowy contortions of his complex temperament) he simply absented himself and avoided growing attached to anyone. He preferred to stay away from the in-fighting of the communist movement or the oblivious pettiness of the various émigré groups. He was reserved, yes, but he ended up alone, choosing isolation. And for years he wrote the saddest letters to his friends, who were by now scattered to all four corners of the world, regretting that loneliness. He wrote letters pretending that letter writing wasn’t anachronistic. Letters allowed him, as Adorno explained, ‘To reject the separation and remain no less far away, no less separated.’ He wrote confessions without revealing to himself that he felt profoundly more alone than ever before and that he still preferred not to join the other émigrés at the café. In the end, for someone like him, it was almost better to be lost in the anonymity of a giant foreign city.
It was difficult. Benjamin was really distressed by the conversations he had with his few, highly selected friends from Berlin. The number of people he associated with in Paris could be counted on one hand: Hans Sahl, the photographer Gisèle Freund, Hannah Arendt (philosopher and distant relative), Stephan Lackner and Fritz Lieb (Karl Barth’s student) whom he addressed almost immediately in intimate terms while it had taken him almost ten years to speak like that with Scholem, a bosom friend and companion since youth. Later on, Walter would become involved with Adrienne Monnier, Sylvia Beach, and Arthur Koestler – that was after he returned from Spain and left the Communist Party – and Pierre Klosowski and Georges Bataille. But it’s not possible to replace friends you’ve had for twenty years, the people you discovered the world with. Those friends were all out of reach. Scholem was in Palestine. His ex-wife Dora was in Italy, Jula Cohn, whom he’d loved in the years leading up to the divorce, was in Germany with her husband Felix Noeggerath. And Alfred Cohn was in Spain. This is another one of the blows that exile delivers – it takes everyone along the path of their own individual diaspora. It shatters the collective spirit. Not much remains afterward.You’re left alone to settle your accounts, ruminating over the same crop of thoughts every day, cultivating them in solitude. Perhaps the only thing left afterward is your work.
‘Until it was written,’ said Sahl in his memoir, ‘it was still being lived. Until it was written, Hitler hadn’t won yet.’ But what if you were like Benjamin, racked with such a pitiful vision of yourself that it’s almost suffocating? ‘Living among the émigrés is unbearable,’ he confessed to Scholem on the last day of 1933. ‘A solitary life is not more tolerable. Living in a French world is impossible. All that is left then is work. Although nothing is more threatening to work than the plain recognition that work is the entirety of your inner life.’
But that was what allowed him to keep going, to persist. In March 1934, Benjamin resumed work on his Parisian Passagen-Werk – threshold spaces, places where ancient myths and the merchandise of the modern world came together. And he felt