by Jay Parini
The boy blanched at his mother’s request, and Benjamin covered for him. “I was always weak in mathematics,” he said. “I still am.”
“How is the knee?” Frau Gurland asked. “You seem to be limping rather badly again.”
“It’s perfectly awful, if you must know. I hope you don’t mind if I complain?”
“Somebody has to do it,” said Henny Gurland, with a slight smile.
Thirst, hunger, and the prospect of a clean bed now drew them forward, even though they ached inside. Within half an hour, the path turned into a pink-pebbled road, and suddenly Port-Bou glistened like a mirage in the middle distance, a single church spire rising above the red-tiled roofs of houses. The sea wrestled with itself beneath the cliffs, its blood-bright sheen coloring the horizon.
“I smell the sea,” said José.
“Me, too,” said Benjamin, thinking how he loved the sea, even though it suddenly reminded him of a glorious but sad summer on Ibiza in 1933; until then, he had entertained hopes of returning to Berlin, the only place in the world where he was not a foreigner. But Gretel Karplus, his childhood friend, had urged him to stay away from Germany. “It is no place for Jews,” she had written. “You must certainly wait until Hitler is gone.”
Exile did not seem awful in those days. He had lived amply enough in an unfinished brick house near the beach. His friend Jean Selz lived nearby, and the idea was that they would work together on French translations of Benjamin’s work. Another friend who was still in Berlin managed to sell his autograph collection for enough money to pay for his rent and food, and Benjamin discovered that by submitting articles and reviews to German newspapers under a pseudonym, he could eke out a living.
During his second week on Ibiza he met an elusive young woman from Nancy on the beach one afternoon, and she flirted with him shamelessly. She was a dancer, and they spent long days beside the water on the hot, clean sand. Her tanned legs glistened with sweat as they lay, side by side, under a white sky. Their fingers would crawl toward each other like spiders, meet, and tangle. Sometimes she would run her palm along his arms, thrilling him, or—maddeningly—touch his thigh. Once or twice, her salty lips grazed his. Evening after evening, in the succulent orange grove behind his house, he begged her to come into his bedroom; but she resisted. She was a Catholic, she said, raised in a convent. She would say this while sitting on his lap, toying with his earlobes, rubbing her hand along his thighs. He was paralyzed by desire, breathless, groaning. One day she disappeared without notice, leaving no address. And Benjamin could not even recall her name now, only her salty lips, her opalescent knees.
Port-Bou arrived in small doses, the usual huddle of mud and stone houses, its streets a tangle of dirt or cobbled alleys. A few dusty palms turned lazily in the sea breezes, and runted junipers grew in random clusters. There was none of the neatness of most French villages. Indeed, it surprised him how untidy the landscape seemed as he stepped to avoid a yellow bit of unripe orange peel in the road.
A small, black-eyed boy in billowy trousers leading a goat was the first human being they encountered, though he showed no interest in them. He did not even turn his head in their direction. Minutes later, a leather-jacketed man on a motorbike passed, yet he, too, did not acknowledge the strangers.
“Remember what Frau Fittko said,” Henny Gurland whispered, “the less said, the better. Pretend you are out for a leisurely stroll—just taking in the air.”
Benjamin agreed that it was best to speak to no one and maintain an aura of leisure—a welcome idea, since his feet were badly blistered, and every step was agony; his injured knee had swollen so badly that he could bend it only slightly; shooting pains spread like a grass fire along his femur, and his left hip felt tight, as if rusted in place. In his head a hot wire threaded from temple to temple, and he noticed a lump at the back of his skull where he must have hit a rock when he fell off the path a few hours before. His breathing was shallow, raspy, and difficult. A line from Goethe sounded in his ear: “And I arrived, an old man in a strange city, wearing my suit of pain.”
They entered Port-Bou from the south, stopping at a checkpoint. The brick shed with instructions in Spanish and French on the door was deserted, although a few cats prowled the narrow streets like visitors from another world, wide-eyed and wary. Pigeons settled on the clay rooftops, cooing and billing. One could hear conversations in loud Catalan voices behind closed doors.
“We should wait here for the customs officer,” said Benjamin. “He is probably having his dinner.”
Henny Gurland shook her head. “We’ve been lucky again, Walter,” she said. “There’s nobody here, so too bad for them. Let’s just find our hotel.”
Benjamin could not believe it when they stepped, even glided, past the barrier.
An elderly woman in a black shawl appeared, shouting in Catalan. With her dark eyes and sharp nose, she seemed to Benjamin like a human bat, swishing around their heads with her wings outspread. Frau Gurland stared at her, and she withdrew into a dark doorway and watched, suspiciously, as they passed.
Benjamin felt an unfamiliar shudder in his stomach, and his heart began to thump and stutter. He turned pale and stopped, bending at the waist, exhaling slowly though clenched teeth.
“Are you all right, Dr. Benjamin?” asked Henny Gurland.
“Quite,” he said, drawing a long, slow breath. “I will perhaps need a moment to compose myself.”
“Have you got the map?”
Benjamin nodded, and eventually withdrew from his briefcase the mayor’s crude likeness in pencil of the town of Port-Bou, with an X marking the Fonda Franca.
They followed these instructions carefully, threading the labyrinth of small streets, empty now because everyone in town was having dinner. Their voices, muffled but loud, and the clatter of dishes mingled with the smell of garlic, fried fish, and onions.
“You will soon have your dinner, José,” Benjamin said, jolly in spite of his physical distress.
It surprised all of them that, within ten minutes, they stood at the gates of their hotel, the Fonda Franca—a pale pink villa on a cliffside overlooking the sea. It stood by itself at the end of a road lined with cypress trees. Well-kept gardens surrounded the main building.
The garden entranced Benjamin, and his eye went to a stone bench beside a mimosa.
“You stay here, Dr. Benjamin,” said Henny Gurland. “I will register for all of us.”
“That would be lovely,” said Benjamin. “I’ll come in soon. I would like to rest here for a few minutes.” He limped toward the bend and sat down while Frau Gurland and her son went inside.
The smell of the sea was strong, wafting up from below the nearby cliffs, and it brought Ibiza to mind again. Indeed, Benjamin found that he could not get his mind off Ibiza, or the young woman from Nancy, the lovely Catholic dancer. What was her name? Bella? Bernice? Belinda?
“Beatrice!” he said, aloud. The name seemed to echo in the garden.
He rose, on painful feet, and wandered to the edge of the garden, to where it dropped off steeply to the sea, a massive inky shadow welling up from below. The surf shattered against black rocks, and for a second, Benjamin thought of hurling himself over, into the blue-black water; it would not be a bad way to die. It surprised him that, somehow, he was ready to die now. Having made it to Spain, with the prospect of many years in America or Portugal ahead of him, he felt a certain weariness. His book, after all, was done, or nearly done. But he still had so many unfinished projects, including the book on Baudelaire, the one on Brecht, and the other about the effects of film on writing. Ideas for books and articles seemed to line up daily, like children in a poorhouse, undernourished, eager for attention.
“Are you sleeping?”
He turned to see José, who smiled sheepishly.
“Is everything all right, at the hotel?”
“I
t’s okay.”
“As long as the beds are clean and we can have hot baths, I’ll be happy.”
“My mother is lying down,” José said. “Her head is aching.”
“Ah,” Benjamin said. “I can understand this.” José sat beside Benjamin, who put his hand on the boy’s wrist.
The mimosa rustled, and the breeze was cool.
After a long pause, José said, “Sometimes I miss my father.”
“I’m sure you do. He must have been a lovely person.”
José nodded and began to cry. At first it was just a whimper, distant, stirred in a faraway depth, but soon enough the tears flowed freely, and the boy sobbed. His bony shoulders shook, and his lips trembled.
Benjamin pulled José close to him, his hand at the back of his warm neck. “The world is a dark place,” he said. “It is always in disrepair. But we—you and I, José—we have a little chance, an opportunity. If we try very, very hard, we can imagine goodness. We can think of ways to repair the damage, piece by piece.”
WALTER BENJAMIN
The power of a path through the mountains is different when one is strolling along it than when flying over in a plane. Similarly, the power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out by hand. The passenger in a plane observes only how the path pushes through the landscape, unfolding in accordance with the laws of the terrain. Only he who trudges the path on foot comes to understand the power it commands, and how, what for the flier is just unfurled terrain, for the walker calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings, prospects at each of its turns like a commander deploying soldiers at the front.
13
MADAME RUIZ
It is quite impossible, the way these vagabonds take my hospitality for granted. Day after day they troop through my hotel, assuming I owe them a holiday; that I, the mere proprietress of the Fonda Franca, was born to serve them. The situation has grown worse lately, although the police assure me that sooner or later they will put an end to this. Sergeant Consuelo stopped by recently to say he was coming to grips with the “refugee situation,” as he calls it, although I am less than convinced of his sincerity. (His breath was heavy with alcohol, and he kept forgetting my name.)
The rudeness of these people is miraculous to behold. I try to tell myself that they do not know any better. It is all a matter of breeding. They don’t know—or care—that my father was a member of the city council in Nice or that he was trained in law and accountancy at the University of Paris. I can still see him, the dear man, in his navy pinstriped waistcoat (unbuttoned), his collar staves (undone), his stocking feet propped on a velvet ottoman while he read the newspaper or the novels of Anatole France. There are few men around these days of my father’s caliber. The new men have no sense of civic pride, and duty means nothing to them. They sneer and scoff. It is not their fault, perhaps, given the general state of our culture. But whose fault is it? The blame must lie somewhere.
We had a large, sunny flat on the avenue Victor Hugo, with two bedrooms for servants. Huge plane trees shaded the building in summer, and one could buy warm chestnuts from a nearby vendor as the leaves turned yellow and swirled in small clouds along the curbside. My sisters and I wore dresses from Paris—almost all of them from Chanteque, where my mother had an account; we ate chocolates from Switzerland and learned how to play the viola and to dance. On two occasions we spent extended holidays with a distant relative in Besançon. The citadel in that jewel of a city stays with me, its image of impregnability.
My father’s fortunes dwindled in the late twenties, which was sad. Once I tried to get him to explain what was wrong, and he said, “Little girls know nothing of finance.” He had no gift for politics, I’m afraid, which is a bad thing for a politician. Nice was rife in those days with the worst sort of maneuvering and backbiting, and there were deceptive types in all branches of government. Someone accused my father of embezzling money, and he was put on trial. One of his so-called friends said the worst things about him, but the case was ultimately dismissed. It was groundless, of course. But my father never recovered from the shame (the local newspapers carried the story on the front page). Even worse, his investments on the Bourse were shortly thereafter sucked into a vortex by the collapse of the world economy; indeed, they were utterly worthless by 1930.
Mother could not weather the vicissitudes of life, and she died of a broken heart in 1933, but not before she and Father were forced to abandon the apartment where they had spent their married life together. They exchanged it for something infinitely smaller and less substantial, in a district where I as a young child had been forbidden to play. It was too frightful and humiliating. My lessons in art and music ground to a halt. All the goodness seemed to disappear from my life.
I met my husband, Claudio Ruiz, in a hotel in Nice. I had become desk manager at the Clarion, a pleasant hotel right on the water, and he was staying there on holiday. Like my father, he was a man of some distinction and education. He joined the Civil Guards during the war in Spain, when we were living in Barcelona, and soon rose to the rank of captain. General Franco himself once pinned a ribbon to his chest in Madrid, he was that heroic. But heroes have a way of dying young. Claudio was killed by a stray sniper bullet while crossing a square in Lérida, in Catalonia. If what they told me is true, he was assassinated by the POUM or some such group. I could never keep all the factions straight in that war, nor could Claudio. What he really preferred was a strong monarchy. Kings and queens, nobility and a tradition of honor. “You cannot have an ordered world without kings and queens,” he used to say. “Anarchy does not exist in the natural world. Look around you. Do you see the ants scattering a million different ways? Do the lakes try to rise above the mountains?”
My life became more difficult after Claudio’s death. Our daughter, Suzanne, was an infant, and I had to fight with his family to get my inheritance. It was quite humiliating. There is nothing worse than a family squabble over money. Two years ago, as part of the settlement, I was offered the Fonda Franca by Claudio’s great-aunt, an eighty-year-old crone who had obviously grown tired of Port-Bou. I saw here my opportunity and seized it. While not a lavish place, the Fonda Franca has its charms.
The thought of returning to Nice occurred, but I take some comfort in the distance that exists between my family and myself. My sisters, who have never seen the Fonda Franca, are apparently fond of bragging that I own a grand hotel on the Spanish Riviera. The Spanish Riviera!
If I were to speak objectively, I would call Port-Bou a dump. Its meager clutch of houses offers nothing in the way of social life. There is no gracious living, no supportive community of like-minded people. I quite enjoy the mayor, Señor López, who is radiantly senile, but the village physician, Dr. Ortega, grumbles about everything. Our priest, Father Murillo, is rumored to have a degree in philosophy from the university in Salamanca—an ancient and respectable institution—but one would never guess it from his conversation. He plays cards all day in the Café Moka, drinking vino con gas and making rude jokes about women. One hears terrible stories about him, but they are probably not true, or not completely true. (I dislike going to confession, nevertheless. One can smell the wine on his breath in the dark little cubicle, and one does not trust his penances.)
There is an elderly English duchess who lives in a spacious white villa just along the coast, though she never deigns to associate with people of the village. In her mind, we are all peasants, the hoi polloi, even savages. (You know what the English are like!) She has a shiny black Hispano and a Maltese chauffeur. General Franco will, I suspect, take care of her in good time. The English are not welcome here.
I am glad to say that life has not been devoid of color. My classmate and dear friend, Valerie Frunot, once had an apartment overlooking the old harbor in Antibes, and I spent many weekends there in summer as a young girl. It was lovely to see the yachts, with their crisp white sails skittering a
long the horizon. Valerie was later sent to a lycée in Paris, where she met and married an international banker. For reasons I cannot fathom, she does not respond to my occasional letters. I suspect she was troubled by my father’s declining fortunes. Bad luck rubs off.
It goes without saying that I have dined in many well-known restaurants in Paris, including Chez Lumiet and the St-Jacques. My mother’s second cousin by marriage, Madame Felice de Cluny, once lived on the Place des Vosges in a house with a frontal view of the King’s Pavilion—not far from where Victor Hugo himself used to live. She was driven into poverty, as it were, by a sudden change in her husband’s fortunes and is now living with her sister-in-law in Rouen. How the mighty have fallen!
Suzanne is seven now, with dark Spanish eyes like her father’s. Her chestnut-colored hair droops in ringlets over her collar, rather fetchingly. She is a wonderful girl, but it has not been easy to raise a child in this meager village; there is no one for her to play with, nowhere for her to go. I sometimes worry about her future, but that will have to wait.
When our material conditions improve, and the war is over, I will take her to Paris for a proper season. I must introduce her to her great-uncle, Dr. Maurice Berlot, who has a lucrative medical practice on the rue St-Denis. (His wife, I must confess, has never been welcoming. I tried to visit them once, several years ago, but she complained of headaches and refused to let me stay with them. It was excruciating, especially since I had Claudio with me. I had to invent the most appalling stories to protect Claudio from Madame Berlot’s utter failure of courtesy.)
Suzanne attends the local school, but she does not like it. The teacher, Señor Rodriguez, seems to lack the power to inspire his pupils. Though he has been teaching here for thirty-five years, he was never properly certified. “Señor Rodriguez is foolish,” Suzanne has told me. “His hands are always shaking, and he smells bad. The other children are hooligans.” I quite agree with her about the other children, but what is one to do?