To Walk Alone in the Crowd

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  WE TAKE YOU WHEREVER YOU WANT. Insidiously, without warning, darkness returns like a familiar voice perceived from afar, among other voices in a train station. It may not be true darkness yet but rather the fear of darkness, an advance warning from a highly sensitive surveillance system. That sense of strangeness which suddenly comes upon you in a busy public place, perhaps a supermarket just before Christmas, or a train station, as you glide on a moving ramp down to the platforms and the waiting cars. It is not a localized pain but a vague discomfort that cannot be clearly defined, a grief that is all the more noticeable because it arrives suddenly and for no reason. You walk across the concourse and look up at the screens to find the platform number for your train. Suddenly you feel detached from everything around you, a sense of disconnection, a letting go, as if the ground had given way beneath you in a dream or gravity could no longer anchor your steps. You are now a stranger among your fellow human beings. Not on account of a subjective mood, or something in your character, but of a final separation, a fundamental difference that is hard to perceive from the outside; like a secret agent in a conquered country whose borders have been closed or like a traveler from the past—not the fixed and certain past of a history book but a recent past, just ten or twenty years back. It makes no difference that many of his old contemporaries are still alive and may preserve some memory of him. Even if they saw him, they wouldn’t know what to say. There would be something monstrous in his strangeness.

  * * *

  AN UNMATCHED EXPERIENCE AT AN UNMATCHED PRICE. Ignorant of what everybody else knows. Dying without ever knowing that the Twin Towers would be attacked. Assuming there would always be telephone booths, video rental stores, well-stocked newsstands. Not realizing that those smooth black prisms everyone holds in one hand and mysteriously attends to are phones. Searching with anxious perplexity for buttons to press. Not knowing, when he is given by the receptionist what looks like a credit card, that it’s the key to his room. Unable to recognize the faces in the paper, to understand most of the words it endlessly repeats, allusions that everyone else takes for granted, turns of phrase that became common during the years of his absence.

  * * *

  AS YOU MOVE YOU WRITE YOUR STORY ON THE EARTH. That is what you are when the darkness returns, the pain, the fear of fear, and of the poisonous voice that in fact disappeared not so long ago, just a few months back, not even a year. Then you see, far off in the crowd of travelers at the station, the figure you hadn’t seen for several months, thinking it had vanished when perhaps it had only become invisible. You see it and you feel an urge to walk faster so as not to be found. You want to go down to the tracks as soon as possible and you also want to abandon your trip, fearing that you will see it in the train, in the next car over or the seat behind you, if not the one right next to you. It would be best to leave the station while you still have time, like a secret agent in a hostile country, giving those who follow him the slip at the last possible moment. Assuming you are still in time. Assuming there is not already someone following behind, unnoticed, watching your every step.

  EXTRAORDINARY THINGS HAPPEN EVERY DAY. Officials have also expressed concern that returning residents could be attacked by the boars, which have settled comfortably into houses and farms in the years since the explosion, and lost their fear of humans. Photographs and video footage from the affected cities are reminiscent of Chernobyl, where wild fauna has continued to flourish despite high levels of radioactivity. Due to the absence of human beings, the region around the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl has become a sanctuary for all kinds of animals, including deer, brown bears, wolves, and lynx. Videos taken by journalists in Fukushima after the 2011 nuclear disaster show large packs of dogs roaming the roads. Colonies of rats have taken over the supermarkets. Agricultural lands have quickly reverted to wild prairies that provide a perfect habitat for foxes and boars.

  * * *

  BEYOND THE LIMITS. Damage by wild boars to farms near the reactor already amounts to $845,000. Local authorities are recruiting hunting parties in an attempt to reduce the wild boar population. But the species’ reproductive capacity seems to exceed by far the number of animals killed. Authorities in the town of Tomioka say they have hunted and killed eight hundred, a number that does not seem significant. While the total number of boars hunted in a year was three thousand in 2014, it had risen to thirteen thousand by the end of last year. Aside from hunting, emergency measures being evaluated include installing special traps and using drones to frighten off the animals from inhabited areas. The neighboring city of Nihonmatsu dug up three pits to bury the remains of 1,800 boars, but local authorities say there is no more room for further burials, especially taking into account the risk of radioactive contamination entailed by such a large number of buried creatures. Last year the city of Soma installed specially designed incinerators to burn the remains and filter out cesium so it would not be released into the atmosphere. The project was suspended due to a lack of personnel to carry the carcasses and throw them in the incinerator.

  3D IS EVERYWHERE. Walter Benjamin fled Berlin in March 1933 leaving everything in his apartment exactly as it was, his furniture, his library, his collection of children’s toys and books. For the next five years he was without a fixed address, a home, a place to leave in the morning and lock the door and later go back to. An entire congress of Perambulation, a mountain of documents and research papers will be devoted to his comings and goings between the spring of 1933 and January 1938, when he finally moved into a small furnished apartment in Paris, tiny but with a balcony that looked out over the city, up on a seventh floor but a little noisy since it was right next to the big piece of machinery that hoisted the elevator. It was only for that reason, and because it was a very old apartment, that Benjamin was able to afford it. Tracing his movements during those five years requires a map of Europe and other maps as well: one of Ibiza, for instance, and one of Paris. In March 1933 Benjamin arrived in Ibiza after spending two weeks in the Hotel Istria in Paris. He had sold his collection of ancient coins. In Ibiza, where he had spent his holidays just a year earlier, in 1932, before he became an exile, he now found that life had become more expensive and noisier. From a plurisensory as well as a multidisciplinary perspective, one could speculate that Benjamin’s movements were due in part to a permanent and hopeless attempt to find quiet. On the island, he tries to escape from the noise of the wind, the noise of the guests coming through the thin walls of the hotel, the noise of drunks at night, the noise of workers opening ditches and raising new buildings. In order to write in peace, he grabs a folding chair and table, as well as the satchel with his pen, his papers and books, and hides away in a pine grove. The wind blows his writing off the table. The prospect of making a living is highly uncertain. Jewish authors are not allowed to publish in Germany. The émigré newspapers pay almost nothing, or have no readers, or both. Benjamin rents a room in a boardinghouse for one peseta a day. Soon after, he can no longer afford it. An acquaintance lets him have a room in a house that is under construction. The room has walls and a ceiling, but the rest of the house is a building site. In Ibiza he smokes opium with a German friend. There is a window in the room with a curtain that sways in the wind. Benjamin invents the word curtainology. He says, entranced, that curtains are interpreters of the language of the wind.

  * * *

  GET READY FOR THE COLD. His only steady income is the rent he receives for his Berlin apartment. “I have nothing and I am attached to nothing,” he says in one of his letters. He suffers the additional calamity of losing his fountain pen. Without his pen and a good notebook, he is unable to write. His inspiration depends on his writing materials. An academic traveled to Ibiza in the nineties and interviewed some old people who still remembered Benjamin: his clothes, formal though quite tattered, and his plodding walk.

  * * *

  EXPERIENCE IT AGAIN LIKE THE FIRST TIME. He goes back to Paris in the fall, or the beginning of winter. He is horrified by the grayness of
the city, the lowering sky and rain, the xenophobia of the French. At the post office he hears someone say, “The émigrés are worse than the krauts.” Each day he eats at a cheaper restaurant. Every few weeks he changes hotels. With the aid of a map of Paris and some old telephone books it is possible to reconstruct his movements. His tangled path crisscrosses the city grid: Hôtel Régina, Hôtel Le Palace, Hôtel Floridol, Hôtel Panthéon, Hôtel Littré. He says he lives in the perpetual murmur and fog of depression. He knows he is entirely outside the world. His life takes place among strangers, surrounded by indifference and hostility. The people he cares for are far away and he can only communicate with them by mail. He avoids the cafés where the German émigrés come together only to embroil themselves in the same useless, passionate disputes as when they lived in Germany, nursing a hope of return that seems childish to him. He must have run into Joseph Roth without knowing it. He crosses paths with French writers whom he knows well and for whom he is invisible. He is forty-one, he has spent his whole life studying and writing and he has nothing, and he is no one. “The present intellectual industry finds it impossible to make room for my thinking, just as the present economic order finds it impossible to accommodate my life.”

  * * *

  YOU THINK YOU HAVE DISCOVERED EVERYTHING. For a few months someone lends him a tiny room with a shared bathroom in an apartment with other tenants. Then he moves into a maid’s room in the house of a family that is away on vacation. It is in a busy part of town, and the noise of traffic barely allows him to sleep or to do any work. During the summers he is invited by Bertolt Brecht to join him and his family at a country house they rent in Denmark. Brecht is a German exile, but a famous one, well known as a fugitive from the Nazis wherever he goes; someone, too, who will make it out in time and reach California, where he will join Thomas Mann, Arnold Schönberg, the upper echelon of the émigrés. Everyone seems better than Benjamin at making a go of it, at finding a position in life. Adorno travels to the United States in the company of his beautiful wife, Gretel Karplus, having secured an academic position at Princeton. There are always those who make it and those who drown; those who see it coming before others and take measures in advance; those who get there early and those who stay at the back of the line; those who outrun the rest and those who are clumsy and slow and let the devil take the hindmost. While others find a way out, Benjamin remains trapped in Europe, watching them leave, just as Miguel Hernández, at the end of the Spanish Civil War, saw his companions get on a plane but stayed behind because no one had saved him a seat.

  * * *

  DISCOVERING NEW THINGS IS WHAT KEEPS YOU ALIVE. To have a little distance from the racket of Brecht’s family life—his children, his wife, his lover, his sycophants, his parasites—Benjamin rents a room in a nearby farmhouse. He finally has a large table to do his work. His friend Gretel Karplus has sent part of his Berlin library to Brecht’s holiday house. But the children are so noisy that Benjamin considers renting a room in a separate house, a place no one goes near because the owner is mentally deranged. There are no newspapers, or they arrive several days late, but every night the radio delivers its dark news. Hitler’s barking in Berlin is heard through the airwaves in the Danish countryside. Benjamin plays chess with Brecht. They discuss the plot of a detective novel that they plan to write together.

  * * *

  ANYTHING YOU WANT, AT A PRICE YOU’LL APPRECIATE. He returns to Paris at the end of summer feeling increasingly trapped. He spends his days writing letters or waiting for them, filled with dread when they fail to arrive, sometimes having to gather his courage before opening an envelope. Letters fly from one European city to another, or they bear exotic postage stamps from New York, Shanghai, Jerusalem. His brother has been taken, tortured by the gestapo, and sent to a concentration camp. All traces of Asja Lācis have vanished in the great totalitarian silence that envelops Moscow. At least his ex-wife and son are safe in England. The names of New York City streets seem even more poetic to him because they appear on envelopes bearing letters from Gretel Karplus, now Gretel Adorno. The GPS of the past will show that Benjamin moves in an ever-narrower circle. The ground sways beneath his feet when he steps out each morning to walk to the Bibliothèque Nationale, in his dignified and ruined suit, his inadequate glasses, and his old satchel under one arm, like the professor he has not managed and will never manage to become. The world is crumbling around him, but slowly, silently, so no one seems to notice. People sit at the cafés, out on the sidewalk, smoking, sipping cognac, and calmly opening the newspaper, which is filled with terrifying headlines. Benjamin himself is crumbling inward beneath the weight of a relentless depression, a silent darkness that began to stalk him when he was quite young and that has now returned, strengthened and made more virulent by a real and external terror. He thinks he will be relatively safe if he can become a French citizen. To file his petition, he needs official documents that are supposed to arrive from distant offices in Germany. Everything takes a long time. Everything takes a long time and everything is urgent. Though it all seems fine on the surface, he knows, he feels that something awful is already taking place, that something beyond repair is happening to him. He is unable to separate fear from remorse. He is helpless and he is also guilty. If only he had moved when there was still time, if only he had gotten his papers together, made a real effort to emigrate anywhere at all, to Palestine or the United States. He thought as well of emigrating to the Soviet Union, but what he read in the newspapers and Asja Lācis’s unaccountable silence made him abandon that thought.

  * * *

  SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY EVERY DAY. He can’t see well. He needed a new pair of glasses long ago, but he has no money to go to the eye doctor or to pay for them. What is most startling is not how desperately poor he has become, but that, having so few and such basic needs, he is unable to meet them. The more his expectations diminish, the more unattainable they seem to become. Soon he will no longer be able to afford even a humble destitution. Others indulge in political delusions, or get drunk, or dream of going back home. They try in one way or another to build themselves an artificial paradise. German, and now Austrian exiles too, argue heatedly in the cafés and claim that Hitler’s days are numbered. Joseph Roth and Walter Benjamin cross paths on a narrow sidewalk but neither one recognizes the other: one of them can barely see, the other is drunk.

  * * *

  EXPERIENCE ALL THE EMOTION. But who is he to question other people’s artificial paradises. He himself says in a letter that he must write a book in which he can take shelter. Even as the world crumbles around him in slow motion he never stops writing. During his years of exile, poverty, depression, loneliness, and panic, he writes better and more perceptively than ever. He would write even better if he didn’t feel obligated to share in the fashionably obscure philosophical abstractions that are so dear to his friends. Several generations of college professors and questionable experts will live comfortably and parasitically on what he wrote during those years of anguish. Each morning, as punctual as an office worker, Walter Benjamin combs his dark hair in front of a cloudy mirror; puts on his jacket and tie; places his books, his notebooks, and his pen in the satchel; and walks to the Bibliothèque Nationale, trying unsuccessfully to ignore the day’s newspapers that are already on display at the corner kiosks. At the entrance, he allows himself the humble satisfaction of showing the clerk his library card: name, address, photograph, some kind of credential or certificate; an official document allowing him, at least for now, free access to those warm, quiet reading rooms where he will spend the whole day and hardly notice it.

  * * *

  ALL YOU NEED AND MORE. His friend Gisèle Freund took several pictures of him at work in the library, surrounded by books and by pieces of paper and stacks of index cards. You don’t realize—as you think absentmindedly about an idea, then jot something down, then set it aside to attend to something else—that you have begun a task that will last the rest of your life, that will in fact remai
n unfinished when that life is over. In one of his former lives, when he still had a country and his future seemed certain, he thought of writing an article about the commercial arcades of Paris. Nothing too long, something he could finish in a day or two. It was a random thought, an idea that came to him as he read somewhat distractedly a book by Louis Aragon, Le paysan de Paris. It was an appealing project but nothing too elaborate, one of those pieces that he enjoyed writing so much, a shining fragment, to be read in a café in the crowded pages of a newspaper. He only thought of it again a few years later, in 1934, when he was once again in Paris, though now in exile. What five years earlier had been an idea for a short article seemed to be turning now into an essay, maybe ten or fifteen pages long. The main obstacle was not a lack of inspiration or of sources but a lack of paper, or rather of the exact kind of notebook on which he had written the first few drafts, and which was unavailable in Paris. A book does not exist in a writer’s imagination but in the blank pages of the notebook where it is yet to be written. He sent a letter to Gretel Karplus in Berlin asking that she go to a certain stationer’s, buy the kind of notebook he required, and send it to him in Paris as soon as possible.

  * * *

  I WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER. What had lain compressed in a first image, a simple seed that might have yielded its fruit in two or three pages, burst suddenly in his mind and his imagination like a chain reaction, a blaze of connections and possibilities that seemed to encompass the entire city where he lived in exile as well as the century of its growth, spreading before him as stunningly in time as it rose all around him in space. He had started by wanting to write about a certain commercial arcade in Paris and had found instead a treasure map, the map of the city itself, and of all the successive strata of time that lay in jumbled sediments within it. It was Paris and it was Berlin, which he would never see again. It was him, in the present, reading, writing, taking notes in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and it was the man he had been in his youth, when he first found Baudelaire and began to translate his poems, and then, through Baudelaire, found other explorers who had roamed the cities of Europe and the United States before him: De Quincey, Poe, Melville, Stevenson, their horror stories, their detective stories, the seedy world of crime in the yellow press. He walked down the same streets where Baudelaire had lived. Just like him, Benjamin had to change his address repeatedly and to accept the humiliation of working himself to the bone without ever being free of the most destitute need. Baudelaire had depicted the simultaneous rapture and horror of Paris as an ever-changing modern city: the gaslights, the omnibus, the risk of crossing an avenue on foot while dodging carriages and horses, the dull, relentless flood of advertising bills and posters everywhere. Benjamin studied the city just as carefully, his senses sharpened by his foreignness. Paris was an endless roar of automobiles, a dazzling glare, now that the gaslights were gone, with galaxies of electric lights spreading across the facades of the movie theaters. Like Baudelaire, Benjamin saw everything through a fog of illness, knowing himself to be as alone and destitute in Paris as on a desert island, scavenging for scraps and waste and cheap attractions like those drunken ragmen that Baudelaire had elevated to prophetic greatness.