folded down her thumb and waved her remaining fingers in the air.
‘I have four others,’ she answered, smiling sadly. ‘But that’s none of your business. I’m a free woman, got that?’
Free love and all that crap. Do you remember it?
‘Please,’ I managed to say to her. ‘Why would I care?’
Of course I cared and boy did I. My stomach was in knots, my intestines were growling and twisting. But little by little she kept getting sweeter and soon it was just like before. Within two hours we were back at her house in bed. She was on all fours, face in the pillow, and I took her from behind. I already told you that we liked it like that. That was when we heard the sirens and a faraway grumble, that buzz that kept getting louder and heavier and the next thing you knew all you could hear were engines rumbling. Heinkel planes.We could hear the first bombs fall, far away, beyond the train station.
‘Don’t stop,’ she said. ‘Keep going.’
Well, that’s easier said than done. The troops were already starting to pull out, abandon the front. Plop it went – getting out of the trench.You want to be able to shake it off, but nothing doing. The planes were coming and going low overhead. Mercedes turned around and looked at me, head to toe.
‘You’re really just a boy,’ she said. ‘Okay. Let’s get dressed now and we’ll go down into the shelter.
We didn’t know what was in store for us.We ended up staying there for two days, packed in like sardines. Nothing to eat or drink. All that whimpering and snivelling in between the blasts. A dust came down over us every time the walls shook from the explosion. The bombings came in waves, about every three hours, sometimes more frequently, hitting every neighbourhood and every civic and military target. We’d never seen anything like it before – it was the first time there’d ever been a bombing like that, and there I was in the middle. Once we could come out we realised right away that the death toll would be in the thousands. Streams of blood were running down the pavement; there were arms, heads and legs just scattered in the middle of rubble. The smell of burnt earth, stone and flesh got into your nose. I should’ve built up a tougher skin by then. But I couldn’t manage to keep calm. Mercedes looked slowly around and started sobbing. Then I hugged her and we kissed.
‘I have to go now,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to get to the hospital.’
‘When will we see each other again?’ I asked.
She shrugged and indicated the disaster all around us.
‘When you get back from the front,’ she answered and took off.
The front. Damn. They were still waiting for ammo back at the camp. I got there right in time – in time to partake in the dismantling. Mariano shouted when he saw me.
‘Back already? You could have stayed on for a while longer. Our own little lord out on a jaunt and we’re back here dying. Three-day lock-up.’
Mariano loved to cut people down. He liked it twice as much when he was doing it to me. But I answered back this time.
‘Didn’t you hear that they bombed Barcelona? The whole world is angry at Franco and Mussolini and you’re taking it out on your friend.’
‘Friend my ass,’ he yelled. ‘Remember that I’m your superior.’
He never got over that. I was about to jump on him when Mariano looked at me and smiled, ‘Did you see Ana María?’
‘Yes, sure,’ I lied. ‘She’s thinking about you and sends her best.’
The peace didn’t last. On March 22, Solchaga and Moscardó’s troops attacked between Huesca and Saragozza. It was our turn the next day – us against Yagüe. When I saw the Moroccans coming across the river in their fezzes and white trousers, I realised that it was all over. Even Mariano realised it; and he gave the orders to abandon our position. We ran for kilometres, days on end, we crossed Aragon under air fire, through lines of civilians abandoning their villages and cities, dragging carts filled with mattresses, chickens, goats. And then Lérida fell on April 3. Two weeks later the fourth Navarra Division led by Camilo Alonso Vega reached the sea near Vinaroz. Our territory was cleaved in two.
Chapter Nine
Five years after his arrival in Paris, Benjamin finally scraped together enough money to rent a room for himself. Number 10 rue Dombasle in the fifteenth arrondissement was an early twentieth-century building, a good distance from the centre. A lot of German immigrants lived there under the surveillance of Madame Dubois, an elderly but good-natured landlady. The Hungarian journalist Arthur Koestler, who, after having been condemned to death by Franco for his coverage of the German and Italian participation in the civil war, scandalously left the Communist Party, lived there. Above him lived his lady friend, the very young English sculptor Daphne Hardy. Elsewhere in the building: Fritz Fränkel, a famous doctor who in the past had supervised Benjamin’s hashish and opium experiments; a German psychoanalyst; and Lisa Fittko’s brother, Hans. Benjamin had met Lisa Fittko and her husband – also named Hans – one afternoon in 1933 at the Café Dôme. The Fittkos with their anti-Hitler activism were a little like a parsley sprig among the leftist exiled intellectuals. But Benjamin never had much interest in them. Though he did spend an evening at the couple’s little apartment in Montmartre looking out over an intersection of rue Norvis, rue de Saules and rue St-Rustique that had been often painted by Utrillo. Since Hans lived right above Benjamin, he came to appreciate him in time – tall and handsome and a theoretical physicist.Without his favourite chess opponent, Brecht, Benjamin spent many winter evenings playing with Hans instead, bombarding him with questions about his research but never revealing the first thing about his own.
Five years to secure an apartment and gather his papers and books.Yet Benjamin never managed to resolve the problem of furnishing those few square metres. Despite his best efforts, the room stayed bare and uncomfortable. The only thing Benjamin really had was a splintered mahogany desk on which he kept a leather briefcase that had belonged to his father. On one wall hung the only painting he’d managed to keep, Klee’s Angelus Novus – his secret emblem.
It was fine. Sometimes, sitting at his desk looking through his books, his light adjusted low almost on the desk, Benjamin would think back with disgust on the places he’d lived during his years of exile. The last one had been a small ground-floor room, dank and dark, looking over one of the main thoroughfares out of Paris. The roar of trucks getting onto the highway had actually kept him from working on his Baudelaire essay. Here on rue Dombasle, the lift just on the other side of the wall made a racket that drove him to distraction. On very hot days, when he opened the window, the street noise managed to drown out the squeaking pulleys and hollow hum of the motor, permitting him several hours of concentration.
Gershom Scholem visited him in that room late in February. He’d been invited to New York to give a series of lectures on Jewish mysticism and organised a five-day stopover in Paris so that he could see his old friend. The encounter had been cancelled so many times, left up in the air and postponed, that Walter had written that he was starting to think of it as ‘the meeting of leaves torn from their distant trees in a storm’.
They hadn’t seen each other for eleven years. Benjamin even let himself be hugged before settling onto the bed and smoking one Salomé after another. Pipe tobacco had become so expensive that he only allowed himself a very occasional pipe, and in the meantime settled for the dreadful, cheap Turkish cigarettes instead. Sitting uncomfortably on the least shredded of the chairs, Scholem sized up his friend. Walter looked older than his forty-six
