by Jay Parini
I feel quite lucky to be in Spain, since France is crumbling: Revolutionaries clog the streets, and riffraff wander the back roads. A former schoolmate of mine who lives in Tours wrote to me only last week to say there is no end of trouble. “The trains are full of Gypsies and Jews,” she says. “No one is safe anymore.” You pay more for a loaf of bread today than you paid for a decent loin of beef in my childhood.
The world appears to hate the Germans, but they only want to restore order. Hitler and the National Socialists have tried to encourage in the citizens of Poland, Belgium, and France a sense of civic responsibility, which is always a good thing. General Franco holds many of the same goals for Spain, and one sees the improvements (although they occur slowly in a backward country such as this one). The streets of Madrid sparkle for the first time in decades, the train service is reliable and inexpensive, and most of the anarchists have been put in graveyards or jails, where they belong. The general has campaigned against drunkenness, and it has largely worked; at least one no longer stumbles over bodies on the sidewalks of the capital! A new spirit of vigilance is alive in Spain, and it will soon waken in France and elsewhere. It may even come to Port-Bou in time.
I do not like Hitler himself, not as a man. From what they say, he is a megalomaniac. This absurd goose-stepping of his troops is surely a bad sign: Pomp is one thing, preening another. In the newsreels, one sees a glint of insanity in the man’s eyes, and his little mustache twitches when he speaks. I am told that his accent is atrocious. But sometimes one has to endure a rude display of egotism, and petty vanities, in a politician, especially when times are bad. Hitler has surely done a lot of good for the Germans, and they seem to appreciate his efforts.
One day (if all goes well) I will sell the Fonda Franca and move back to the Riviera. It would be pleasant to end my days in a small hotel by the sea: a whitewashed cosmos, with gilded mirrors and nut-brown parquet floors. I’d fling open the tall wooden shutters of my bedroom each morning in summer to address the water, the bluest of skies, the orange sun. Flowers would droop and dangle from dozens of clay pots lined up like soldiers along the ivy-clad walls of my garden. And I would drink café au lait with a ruined Russian princess all morning on the terrace until it was too hot to stay outside a moment longer. For relief, I might swim in the sea or retreat to my library, where books and pictures would delight me throughout the afternoon. Later, after a deep siesta, I’d dine with a handful of distinguished guests, who would invite me to their houses in Paris, in Milano, in Munich. “I’m afraid I don’t have time,” I’d be forced to say. “I almost never leave the coast anymore. But you are so kind to ask.”
The Fonda Franca sits in the oldest garden in the village, on a limestone cliff, with sea views that rival those of Amalfi, where Claudio and I spent our honeymoon at the Hotel Luna. (The padrone told us that Richard Wagner lived in this hotel some years before and wrote Parsifal there. It is so peculiar how little details like this will stick in one’s brain like a fly in toffee.) As in Amalfi, the air is scented with lavender and thyme, and there are clusters of lemon and olive trees mixing with tall cypresses. The local wines are surprisingly good, especially the whites, which are dry and fragrant. I try to keep a small cellar well stocked, but it is not easy—everything is so expensive.
I occasionally play Parsifal on the gramophone these days. The music reminds me of a world elsewhere, a larger and grander place, where dignity and aspiration are respected, even revered, and where the mysterious elements of life are simply taken for granted. There is so little else to bank on, to lure one into the future.
I pity my poor Suzanne. She will inherit an indecent and impoverished world, unless some drastic cleansing occurs; this war may well provide such a cleansing, yet somehow I doubt it. The Great War did nothing of the kind.
The Fonda Franca was badly in need of repair when I took it over. It was dismaying at first, though I did the best I could with the small amount of capital at my disposal for refurbishing. There are two main floors, with four rooms to rent on each. Suzanne and I occupy a small flat on the ground floor, at the back, with French doors in our sitting room that open onto a small pool, which attracts wonderful birds.
The high ceilings in the public rooms give the hotel a certain elegance, although the plaster is cracked in many places; in one bedroom, a vast chunk has broken off, and the joists have been exposed. In another, the chandelier has recently come crashing to the floor; fortunately, it was occupied at the time by a soporific gentleman from Romania, who seemed not to notice. The crash woke everyone but him!
There is a toilet at the end of the corridor on each floor, and only in the past few months have they been brought up to standard. One sits in relative comfort on the wooden seats, which were made in England, and pulls a tasseled green rope to flush. The gurgle and sump is lovely to hear when the mechanism is working properly. “A good toilet is the beginning of prosperity,” my father used to say. He made sure that the Hôtel de Ville in Nice, where he worked, had toilets in perfect working order. (He would have hated most of the toilets in Spain, where the Arab tradition of a hole in the floor has prevailed, even at some of the good hotels in Madrid.)
The dining room still needs work. The table linen is shabby, and the room is far too dark, largely because it faces northwest. A southern exposure is crucial in a good dining room. The floor has been lacquered brownish black, and that poses a small problem: No matter how bright the day, the floor exudes a lugubriousness in keeping with itself. I fight back with potted plants, with flowers in season, and with colorful paintings, but there is only so much one can do about a dark room. A proper crystal chandelier would help, perhaps a Bavarian one, but I cannot afford one now, since fewer and fewer of my guests seem willing or able to pay their bills. It has become quite maddening, the way they all take advantage of me! My establishment should be called Madame’s Poorhouse.
My hospitality is often noted, but I have had it with scroungers and misfits, bohemians and wanderers. They flee France in droves, hiding in hay carts, tunneling like moles through the filthy dirt, scaling mountains like Alpine goats, tiptoeing like thieves past the Spanish customs, who cannot possibly cope with the numbers. Sergeant Consuelo has said he would like the people of Port-Bou to assist in small ways. “How can we do everything by ourselves?” he has said. “Our law-abiding citizens must cooperate!”
He could certainly do more than he does, but I will help when I can, as I can. Last week, I told him of the presence in my hotel of a man who was obviously destined for the hangman’s noose. He had apparently crossed the border on foot, although he reeked of fuel. His snarled beard and gap-toothed smile alerted me to the problem, and though he paid in cash upon arrival (as I insisted), I had good reason to suspect him. His papers did not seem in order, his French was foul, his Spanish nonexistent. I believe he spoke Hungarian or some such thing. “He is obviously a Bolshevik spy,” said Consuelo, after questioning him for twenty minutes or so in his room at the hotel. The man was turned over to the French border police, who have become less bungling in the past year or so.
A number of army officers from León made reservations this morning by telephone: four men for four nights. I am looking forward to their arrival, this weekend, since one of them knew my husband at the military academy. He has promised to bring a photograph of Claudio, aged twenty or so. It is a shame I never took pictures myself, but I just didn’t. The result is that Suzanne has virtually no idea of what her father looked like, so any photograph is welcome.
I must clear out the hotel before they get here. It will not please them to consort with the types who now seem my only clientele.
Three days ago, a couple of silly French girls arrived. They are only eighteen or nineteen, and I saw no need to question their stories. The papers they showed me were in order. I suppose they simply want to get away from France at this time, and I can understand their motives; nevertheless, one cannot
be too careful. The girls plan to stay here until tomorrow or the next day, before continuing on to Portugal—where everyone is headed. One of them has a sister who will arrive soon, perhaps tomorrow.
Another suspicious guest is an elderly gentleman from Belgium, Professor Lott. He has been staying here for the past week. If one can believe his story, he taught history in Brussels for some years. I quite like his manner, which is discreet, but there is something evasive about him. “This is certainly true, madame,” he says repeatedly, even when I have not asked him to verify a statement. I would distrust him were he any younger, but he is probably seventy-five or eighty. A man of that age deserves some credit and respect. Moreover, one cannot expect perfection in one’s guests. This is the wrong sort of business for a purist.
Three Germans stumbled into the hotel this evening. They are obviously Jews: a mother and her son, who say very little, and a rumpled little man called Dr. Benjamin, who appears to have injured his leg along the way. He hobbles about, groaning and wincing, with a briefcase that never leaves his sight. I do not think he has shaved properly in several days, and his rancid odor will be unwelcome in my dining room.
The evening buffet had just finished for the night by the time they got here, but they seemed terribly hungry, so I took pity. What else can one do? A human being is a human being, despite his or her passport, or lack thereof. I put out a plate of cold meat, olives, and cheese, with a loaf of bread, then tried not to look as they devoured everything within ten minutes. The boy, who is called José, ate like a pig, as boys of his age invariably do. I kept Suzanne well away from these people.
They grew quite talkative after a few bites of food, and produced an exotic array of travel documents. That they are forgeries is not in question: The color of the paper is all wrong, and the stamps are ludicrous. Even the photographs are blurred. But these people do not seem like criminals or spies. Just more Jews on the run. The world is overwhelmed by Jews, as usual. Hitler has sent many of them to work camps or deported them, and the French will soon follow suit. But where will they go? Spain does not want them now any more than it did in the fifteenth century. America will absorb them, perhaps; the Americans have a way of absorbing everything like a great putrid sponge. One will soon be able to smell them across the Atlantic.
Dr. Benjamin claims French citizenship, and he speaks the language well enough, with only the slightest rustle of an accent. I heard him whispering in the parlor with Professor Lott a while ago, and I wondered if this was a secret rendezvous of some kind. Why else the camaraderie? It would be too awful if the Fonda Franca became a well-known watering hole for spies, the sort of thing one reads about in cheap thrillers.
I have put Dr. Benjamin in the worst room, the one with the hole in the ceiling. His friends, the Gurlands, will stay in the next room, which has two beds. They are apparently intent upon leaving in the morning, on the Madrid train, and this is all well and good. It would be dreadful if they were here when the officers from Madrid arrived. It would make no sense to them that I, the widow of Claudio Ruiz, should be harboring such people.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Warmth is ebbing from the things of this world. The objects of daily use gently but insistently repel us, push us away. Day by day, in attempting to overcome our secret resistances to these objects, we are compelled to perform an immense, peculiar labor. We must compensate for the coldness of things with our own warmth if they are not to freeze us to death, to kill us with their alienation; we must handle their spines with infinite patience and care if we do not want to bleed to death.
14
“Where do you come from?” the little girl asked, the pupils of her eyes like opal beads. She wore a white blouse and a black skirt and spoke in strangely accented French. “You are not French, are you? You don’t sound French.”
“I’ve been living in Paris for many years,” Benjamin said.
“And before that? Where did you come from?”
It worried him that this girl, the daughter of the proprietress of the hotel, should be so inquisitive. There was something unnerving about her. She had crept up to him in the garden and begun her interrogation.
In his younger days, in Berlin, children did not speak directly to their elders; they rarely spoke at all, except among themselves. He still shuddered to recall an occasion in Berlin when he interrupted his parents while they were entertaining friends at a dinner party. The glare of displeasure in his father’s eyes was punishment enough, and he never made the mistake again.
Benjamin wished he could tell the girl where he came from. It would be lovely to tell her about Berlin: the smell of the clay soil in the parks, the dry grass beside the pavement, the tinsel clatter of the wind in dying trees; everything reminded him of his childhood walks to the Tiergarten, over the Herkules Bridge with its gently sloping embankment. After school, in early autumn, he would stagger down the slope and sit under a birch tree or lie on a mossy bank with a view across the stream; it was not unlike the atmosphere in this garden at the Fonda Franca.
The insistent nature of the girl, which masked a deeply ingrained petulance, brought back to him an image of his old schoolmate, Luise von Landau. The sassy, black-eyed daughter of a wealthy Berlin family, she had been the ringleader at this first school, where an energetic young schoolmistress, Fräulein Pufahl, presided over a feisty little group of bourgeois children. The tug-of-war for control of that classroom was epic, with Fräulein Pufahl caving in, always, to Luise, the indomitable Luise.
She lived in an elegant house of pink granite by the Zoological Garden, near the Lichtenstein Bridge, and on weekends he would be taken by his nanny into the garden itself, entering that terrifying world of gnus and zebras, of bare trees where vultures and condors nested, of reeking pens replete with wolves and bears. The wildness of the zoo and his memories of Luise blended in a peculiar, exhilarating way tonight. They had never been close friends, but Luise would nonetheless send him postcards throughout the summer holidays from exotic places like Tabarz, Brindisi, or Madonna di Campiglio. He could still visualize the postcards, their pale pastels evoking the steeply wooded slopes of Tabarz, with ferny undergrowth and blood-bright berries strewn along the way; he could see the yellow-and-white quays of Brindisi, even smell the salt spray as it turned to mist in the hot air below the pier; he could visualize the cupolas of Madonna di Campiglio, blue on blue. The world before the Great War was an anthology of these images, each lovely and remote, alluring.
“Why did you come to Port-Bou?” the girl asked. “My mother doesn’t like everyone who comes here.”
“Indeed,” he said, wiping his forehead with a damp handkerchief. He felt decidedly weak this evening, for good reasons. His bad knee was throbbing, and he had already felt several spasms of intense chest and neck pain: a sign he could read only too clearly. Even the veins in his wrists seemed to be swollen.
“She says that vagabonds are not good for the hotel,” the girl continued, chatting blithely.
“Does this establishment not require paying guests?” he asked so firmly that it surprised him.
“What do you mean by that?”
“This hotel…surely your mother needs paying guests.” It seemed odd, talking to a little child as though she were twenty. But this girl was eerily mature. He remembered a Latvian folktale about a race of demons who inhabited the bodies of small children; they could wreak massive psychological damage on susceptible adults, who refused to acknowledge their malevolence. He leaned forward to stare into her dark blue eyes.
“We have too many disreputable guests,” she said flatly. “My mother likes some of them, but I don’t.”
“Ah, it’s your opinion then! Your mother does not necessarily agree with everything you say.”
“My mother says you are smelly.”
Benjamin was alarmed by this imputation. “Me, in particular? I am…smelly?”
“You and
your friends. Have you been climbing mountains in those clothes? She says you have. It’s silly, you know. You should wear proper clothes.”
Benjamin did not know where to begin. “We have been walking in the country, yes.”
Suzanne’s cheeks seemed to implode, became prunelike. She said, “I wish you would all go away.”
Benjamin watched in dismay as she skipped along the gravel path to the hotel. Her hair was so pretty, so luxurious, and her eyes so devastating. She would grow into a beautiful woman of the sort who could destroy a passing stranger’s day with a single, solitary glance. He had lost many days to such women.
Benjamin felt panicky now about his smell and went up to his room to have a bath. He paused briefly in the doorway of the parlor, where the Gurlands were eating, then went upstairs. His body was so fatigued, it seemed impossible that he should be able to find the energy to digest food.
As he lay in the tub, dribbling hot water on his badly bruised kneecap, which had turned greenish-blue, he began to float in memory; a strong smell of disinfectant had triggered, for inexplicable reasons, a string of images. He and his family moved out of their Berlin apartment every summer to a house “with butterflies and grass,” as his father always said. They would go to Potsdam or Neubabelsberg or—best of all—to Lake Griebnitz. He especially enjoyed Lake Griebnitz, with its pellucid, emerald-green water and the willows that dipped their long braids into the shallows. There was a pine-tufted scarf of land in the middle of the lake, eponymously called Peacock Island, and it had afforded Benjamin the first great disappointment of his life. He had wanted badly to see the peacocks, so his father hired a rowboat and took Walter, Georg, and Dora to see them. “Even if they fly away, you will find their feathers in the grass,” Émile had said. They combed the island for a glimpse of the famous birds, but there were no peacocks to be found, and no feathers in the grass. When Benjamin complained about this, his father rounded on him: “You must not have expectations! It can only lead to unhappiness!”