consequently I am now living as a boarder with some émigrés. Beyond that, I have succeeded in obtaining permission to take my midday meal at a restaurant that has a special arrangement for French intellectuals. In the first place, however, this permission is temporary and, in the second place, I can make use of it only on those days I am not in the library, for the restaurant is very far from there. I will only mention in passing that I ought to renew my carte d’identité but do not have the one hundred francs this requires. Since it involves a fee of fifty francs, I have also not yet been able to join the Presse Étrangère, which I was urged to do for administrative reasons.’ To Scholem he wrote, ‘I don’t know how long my powers of resistance will last in view of all the circumstances, since I am provided with only the bare necessities for at most two weeks a month. The most trifling purchase depends on a miracle taking place.’
Was he exaggerating? Possibly. Even Scholem, his very best friend, would admit years later that he’d had doubts and harboured suspicions. The truth might have been that when it came to money and other practical things – what it takes to put food on the table – Benjamin was like a man lost in the desert, a time-traveller who stumbled into the present.
‘You should have been born in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, like one of your flâneurs,’ Hannah Arendt told him once. It must have been at the Café de la Paix after she’d returned from one of her trips to Palestine. During that period Hannah was director of the Paris office of the Alijah Youth, which organised the emigration of children to Palestine. ‘Really you’re an homme de lettres and you don’t belong to any time,’ she sighed as she finished off her tea and tossed her mane of black hair over her shoulder. ‘You should have lived in a time when you could have been paid to write what you write without ever thinking about obligations.Wouldn’t you like a stipend that had no obligations attached?’
She seemed to grow meaner as she spoke, meaner and more tired. It was as if she was going to tell him everything she thought this time, without weighing her words.
‘No, not at all . . .’ Walter spluttered.
‘Of course you remember that we no longer live in the age of Pascal and Montaigne. Things didn’t go in your favour at the university, and then they went badly with Scholem and the Zionists, and badly with your Marxist friend.Will you ever open your eyes?’
She was off and running now. It was a bad sign when she knit her brows like that.
‘It’s useless to keep trying,’ she added sternly. ‘You will never find anyone who is willing to give you money so that you can live happily ever after as an homme de lettres, a revolutionary aristocrat. I am sorry to be the one to tell you, Walter, but there’s not much room left in the world for men like you.’
He could only remember a very few occasions in which anyone had dared to speak so harshly with him. Benjamin looked at her, trying to fight against the onslaught of emotions that seemed to be pressing on him from all sides. The people sitting around them in the café seemed a muffled crowd in the distance, only concerned with what was going on at their table. He thought he should say something, but every sentence that came to mind deteriorated before he could open his mouth.
‘One becomes ever more what one is,’ he finally mumbled.
Hannah didn’t answer. It would have been useless to continue the discussion. It would have been equally impossible to chat about something else.As they left, Benjamin took off his glasses, wiped them carefully, waved at her with some embarrassment and headed for the metro. The thoughts running through his head seemed false, they didn’t belong to him – these compact black masses like storm clouds, chaotic and powerful images – the threadbare suit, the wretched room where he lived, the meals made of a croissant and coffee, the nightmares and loneliness, everything that he’d forsaken, the thousand humiliations he’d suffered for the publication of an article, or an essay, even the translation of a novel. Anything to thwart his horoscope. How long could he go on like this?
And of course, over seven years of his exile in Paris, Benjamin had been forced to change house eighteen times, live in a sublet with strangers and fellow immigrants, in the fleapits of banlieue, in noisy little draughty rooms and all of this meant that until 1938 he couldn’t even keep his books with him or receive visitors. He could only work at the National Library or in a café on the Left Bank, where if you ordered a coffee the waiters would let you sit for hours. Except for the brief period when he visited Brecht in Denmark or took advantage of Dora’s hospitality in San Remo, Walter was always in the library or at one of those cafés, biding time as his life slowly crumbled around him.
Chapter Eight
The cold, my boy. It was four below zero centigrade when we got to the front. They brought us to Saragozza in Pina to relieve the soldiers stationed on the Ebro river. There was mud, coagulated mud and mud men – frozen and bundled up in that tangle of trenches. That was the front that winter. On the bright side, things were calm there – a burst of gunfire every so often, an isolated mortar shell – just so we felt useful. Further south, Teruel was a slaughter. Our side had launched the attack but now Franco’s forces were fighting back and Italian artillery alongside the Legione Condor were crushing the advance. By the end of February, they’d taken back Teruel and collected interest along the way. They got all the way to Alfambra. We lost ten thousand men; another fifteen thousand were taken prisoner. Mariano was seething. The news kept coming in and making him hungrier than ever for combat. At night he made us patrol the river in that cold that would turn your breath to ice, just to show that we were at war too.
‘The men are tired,’ I said one morning. ‘They know these midnight walks are as good as useless.’
He seemed to think about that. Then he snorted and heaved a glob of spit the size of an egg on the ground.
‘Remember that I’m your Lieutenant,’ he said and went off to sleep.
Something ugly had come between us but we didn’t have any time to clear the air. Franco moved down the front and even those of us at Aragon came under fire. They forced us down with artillery and then charged. We were face to face with the Moroccan soldiers under General Yagüe. He was a tough character, a Falange fascist who had always been commander of the Regulares d’Africa. We couldn’t have been in a worse situation. Mariano and I had faced the Moroccans in ’34 at Gijón, and then again in Bilbao and Santander the summer before. They were worse than animals; they were inhumanly cruel, raped women and cut your throat laughing like possessed men. They even got a kick out of the lowest kind of actions, like occupying a hospital and exterminating the doctors and the wounded with their bayonets, goring them in their stretchers. Now they were advancing along the right bank and coming toward us, razing everything in their path. There weren’t many of us and we weren’t well armed. Meanwhile our front was collapsing, Belchite, Alcañiz, Rudilla. Colonel Aranda took Montalbán.
We decided that I should go to Barcelona to get more ammunition and bring it back fast. I drove the truck full-speed and pulled into headquarters in the early afternoon. The city seemed numb from a recent bombing. Over the last few months the Italians had gone mad, they were taking off from Maiorca and dropping as many bombs as they could. Barcelona had turned greyer and sadder, people dragged themselves grimly through the dusty streets. A colonel at the command station told me that it would take them all night to load the truck. Six o’clock and there I was waiting in front of the Calle Telleres hospital. Who else would I be waiting for? Mercedes. She was what she was. My woman. With her flashing green eyes, and curves in all the right places. It was like she was made just for me. I had two months to catch up on and just seeing her again triggered something in my trousers. She was happy to see me. Sure. But not happy enough.
‘Did you meet someone else?’ I asked outright as we walked
