The Angel of History

by Bruno Arpaia

  First published in Great Britain in 2006 by

  Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,

  Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  Originally published in Italian as L’Angelo della Storia in 2001

  by Ugo Guanda Editore SpA

  This digital edition first published in 2013 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Bruno Arpaia, 2001

  English translation copyright © Minna Proctor, 2006

  The right of Bruno Arpaia and Minna Proctor to be identified as respectively the author and translator of the work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  The publishers gratefully acknowledge subsidy from the

  Scottish Arts Council towards the publication of this volume

  This English translation was supported by

  The Italian Cultural Institute, Edinburgh

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78211 237 2

  www.canongate.tv

  To Iaia and Alfredo, the angels of my history

  It is, however, characteristic that not only a man’s knowledge or wisdom, but above all his real life – and this is the stuff that stories are made of – first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death. Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end – unfolding the views of himself under which he has encountered himself without being aware of it – suddenly in his expressions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him. This authority is at the very source of the story.

  – Walter Benjamin (from ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, English translation copyright Harcourt Brace Javanovich, Inc.)

  ‘Why the fuck are you asking questions up and down every street in town? What the fuck is all this gossip-collecting for?’

  ‘So I will know what I’m doing when I lie.’

  – Mario Vargas Llosa (from chapter 8 of The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, translation copyright by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.)

  Contents

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  PART TWO

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  PART THREE

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  PART FIVE

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  PART SIX

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Acknowledgements

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Before leaving the house, he pressed his forehead up against the window and looked out. Night pushed through Berlin on the backs of clouds and icy winds tossed the stripped, leafless branches of trees lining the boulevard. The Wilmersdorfer Luch clock across the way read six o’clock already. Benjamin set his glasses on his forehead and rubbed his eyes. He had to go. He was in a cold sweat, nailed into the shadow, numbed by pain and sadness, but he had to go. He adjusted his tie, looked lingeringly over the rows of books on the shelves, at the paintings on the walls and his threadbare old sofa. Then he grabbed his bags and went out into the stairwell. A bitter wind worked its way under his coat and cleared his thoughts. For a moment, he saw the coin of his life spinning in the air and hitting the ground with a false note – it fell the wrong side up. He had to go. In the courtyard the dim lights from the windows formed a trap and the ground was sprinkled with the recent rain. He turned the key in the lock, twice, then three and four times, struck by his last doubt, a final awareness of his habits and memories. After that it was done.

  Through the window of the tram he watched scattered pedestrians on the boulevard, eyes turned downward, the pavements slick with filthy sewer water, a reckless woman begging on the church steps. The square in front of the station was deserted except for a lone patrol, standing stiff and bored under the opaque illumination of the street lights. Benjamin couldn’t turn back now. With effort he lugged his suitcases to a checkpoint where two soldiers stood watch.

  ‘Papers,’ ordered the older of the two. He was SA, blond and thin, his uniform seemed to hang off his shoulders.

  Benjamin pulled them out of his coat pocket and handed them over the barrier. He wasn’t trembling but he still didn’t dare look him in the face. The blond soldier took his time. He showed the passport to his partner, turned it over, unconvinced, and then stared hard at the traveller – that pointy chin, those mean, chilly eyes boring into him.

  ‘Go on,’ he concluded.

  It was some time before Benjamin caught his breath. He didn’t feel right again until he got to the middle of the enormous atrium. Panting, he set his bags down on the ground. The silence around him was broken only by the puffing trains idling on the tracks and the wind sneaking in through the tunnels, the creaking of a sandwich cart. He moved forward, keeping some distance between himself and the soldiers with their rifles slung around their necks, staying away from the unpopulated waiting rooms. The train was practically empty and no one waved from the platform.

  Benjamin was still thinking of nothing when the train pulled out. Several hours later he looked out the window at the Cologne station. It was midnight. Standing right outside on the platform was Carl Linfert, a historian he’d met in the Frankfurter Zeitung offices.

  ‘Herr Benjamin, where are you headed?’

  ‘To Paris, and you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m staying right here,’ Linfert answered with a shake of his head. ‘I just came to see a friend off.’

  The conductor at the end of the platform swung his lantern and the train slowly started moving.

  ‘Have a safe trip and good luck!’ cried Linfert.

  Linfert was the last familiar face Benjamin saw on German soil. After that, just lights streaming past in the night through the dirty glass, and the clinging stubborn preoccupations that kept him from sleeping until he got to the border. It wasn’t until later, after the day had started breaking over the countryside and the listless French sunlight began to creep into the compartment, that Benjamin realised how much he had to lose. Perhaps he had already lost it forever.

  Chapter Two

  What’s that, my son? Still going on about your German, your philosopher? His name was Benjamin, wasn’t it now? He mus
t have really been someone – a very important person if you came all the way to Mexico from Italy, all those thousands of miles, just to talk to a poor old man like me.Yes, I’m very old. Do you know that this October 26, I’ll turn seventy-eight? Have I already told you that? You’ll have to forgive me. Andrés, my grandson, the boy who let you in, he’s always making fun of me because I can’t keep things straight. I never remember what happened yesterday or the day before. He says that I have diseased arteries and that I’m incurable. What can I do about it? I’m certainly not going to let it bother me. Let him talk. If I were really sick, people wouldn’t joke about it. Instead you’d all treat me with those pious little smiles that people reserve for jackasses. It’s better to play along.You want to know what I really suffer from? The affliction of time. Just like my grandfather, may he rest in peace. After a certain point, he’d answer questions that you’d asked him three days earlier. He’d mix up the before and after. But I remember things from fifty years ago as if they were happening now. That’s why I remember your philosopher perfectly.As I said, it must have been autumn 1940. I found myself at the top of the Pyrenees in the middle of the night, standing on the French–Spanish border on the Lister Trail.What was I doing up there? Well, that’s another story.You should know that I was born in Spain, in Asturias. I wasn’t born here in Mexico. But I’ve been living here for the last fifty years. I came here back in 1941 to save my skin and I stayed, because I couldn’t ever go back. At sixteen, in October 1934, I was in the middle of the Asturias revolution. I hardly need to explain that we were fighting for a lost cause. Two thousand dead, fifteen thousand prisoners tortured. There were the legionnaires, the Moors of the African army raping women and burning down houses. My mother died then, struck down by a bomb. It fell on us by accident. Maybe they just dropped it so that they wouldn’t have to carry it back to their base, which would make them look bad. It was rotten luck. I didn’t have a great time of it either. I spent a month in jail, being beaten and tortured like so many others, and then I made it out. I don’t even know how. I managed to escape to France in the hold of a ship carrying cider to La Rochelle. I stayed there for a year, living in squalid flea-traps, or in fields where we’d built barracks for ourselves, running from the cold. We went from Orléans to Dieppe and then to Saint Nazaire. In 1936, when we won the elections, I went home. We didn’t even have time to celebrate, not to mention catch our breath, and there I was with a rifle in my hands. I must have been almost eighteen when those bastards rose up again in July of ’36.War. That was the only life I knew. It was my trade. I didn’t like it but what could I do about it? There wasn’t any choice, we had to defend ourselves, fight back. I knew those men well. Giving up would have been the same as committing suicide. So I slung my rifle over my shoulder and set off again.

  I fought in Gijón, my city, and I then joined the offensive against Oviedo in February ’37. In July Colonel Aranda claimed he was with us, but he led the rebellion against us – the traitor. He laid siege to the city and wasn’t budging. More than thirty thousand of us mounted a counter–attack but those sons of bitches had cannons and fought us off. We lost. I don’t know how many men died. It was a disaster. In the meantime, General Mola launched an attack against the Basques and we had to go help them. In May I was made a sergeant and they sent me to Bilbao to protect the city in the cinturón de hierro against the raids by German Condor Legion and the Navarre and Italian armies with their carts and cannons. I thought I would never see anything more horrifying in my life. But there’s no end, my son, to the very worst.

  I was a socialist, even if my company was made up of anarchists. I’d fought with them – the CNT, the anarchists’ trade union – years before and I have to say that I was happy with them. They were good people; those guys had balls. And we were united by the fact that for both of us, getting along with the communists, well, let’s say it was never wine and roses. My lieutenant was also my friend, Mariano Peña. I’ve already told you about him. We grew up together, were toddlers together, went to school together, went snail hunting in the marsh along the banks of the Piles river. We started chasing the girls who went parading along the calle Corrida or out on the boardwalk. Then, little by little, we started going to party meetings; there were strikes, weapons, the elections, and then there we were, part of the revolution. I mean the 1934 revolution. I like to think we were well behaved, even if our combined age didn’t top forty. If you had seen him, standing on the Gijón barricades directing the men and the battle! How he did it. He seemed born to it; born to give orders. That’s why they made him a lieutenant in two years, even though he was so young. And even though he was shit as a person. He was a nun-chaser, a snake and a hothead. You could tell right away when he got agitated because he’d start twisting his curls with his fingers and look you right in the eyes. He had an icy stare. Lucky for me we were friends.

  All that aside, if it weren’t for him I don’t think I would have survived Bilbao. They came from the sky, fifty fighter planes, seventy three-motors, massacring us with machine guns and bombs. On the ground they deployed three brigades armed with heavy artillery. You didn’t shoot back, you hoped they didn’t hit you . . . hoped you’d be luckier than the guy next to you. The Basques prayed, but we didn’t even do that, because we were all atheists and had to make do with hand-gestures to ward off the bad luck. It was one o’clock on the eleventh of June – I remember it as if it were yesterday. The nationalists broke through our front, but it took them another week to occupy the entire city, and another two months before we got to Santander. Our men crumpled before those brutal cowards – some more, some less – we just let them come at us without realising that what we needed to do was buy some time. But Mariano knew that and he deployed our company the right way; they only got a few of us, who they could, and we’d stand, doing what we could to hold up another line of combat. It went on like that until September. Months of eating badly, sleeping with our eyes open, staring at the sky, ears perked up and our hearts in our throats.We were almost happy when the order came down to retreat back to Asturias – even if we knew that it had gone badly. Back to face our destiny, the cursed destiny of Asturias. Surrounded just like we were three years earlier, barely protected by the remnants of an army that had already lost Bilbao and Santander. We hardly had any provisions and only about twenty planes. Then it was October again. What a coincidence. The German planes came through Infiesto and Arriondas and left maybe four houses standing. Troops in Solchaga, our lines crushed in Ibarrola, and in the meantime the Italians were attacking Avilés. I asked Mariano, ‘Why do we keep going? It’s over. Shouldn’t we just try to save our asses before those bastards sink the only ships we have left?’

  We were standing on the front looking out towards Villaviciosa. There were twenty men and two machine guns guarding the bridge. It was drizzling that night but we hardly noticed. Mariano and I were going from one command station to another trying to get ammo.We only had a couple of boxes; just enough for half an hour of steady fire and that wasn’t enough. But no matter who we asked, no one wanted to give us supplies. That’s why I’d started talking like that . . . and because my stomach was howling for food . . . and because I could see that it was getting harder and harder for us to keep soldiers on the line. So many ran, they went home or went looking for a ship, even a fishing boat, to escape on.

  ‘I’m serious, Mariano,’ I said. ‘What are we fighting for now?’

  I knew he’d start twisting his hair, but I’d never imagined he’d get so pissed.

  ‘Bastard,’ he said, ‘cowardly bastard.’ And then he pointed his rifle at my chest and clenched his teeth. Then he calmed down. He wasn’t blind and he knew I wasn’t wrong. He just didn’t want to admit it.

  Chapter Three

  As Benjamin tried to get some sleep in the train for Paris, he watched the grey water of the Mosa slide past. The engine whispered through Reims; he could see the spires of the cathedral beyond the long stretch of buildings. Everything he l
eft behind churned in his mind; his memories all seemed to be trying to squeeze through a tiny opening, as if the blackboard of his past was already full. It was March 18, 1933 – six weeks before Marshal von Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor of the Reich. Though for months already the people Benjamin knew no longer slept in their own beds and spent their days out at the cinema or in department stores. He hardly ever put his nose out the front door. He felt safe in his shell, while the other Berlin intellectuals gathered at the Romanisches Café. ‘Sitting there,’ Hans Sahl would write many years later, ‘like animals petrified in the moment, untethered, waiting to be blown away. It was as if they’d lost their identities and were waiting for new ones to come and save them. They scoured over train schedules, hunched over maps, and wrote letters to relatives long since emigrated to America who had made their fortunes it seemed.’ It was a long funeral for Weimar Germany, a timid ritual conducted to the rhythm of the word escape.

  But Benjamin wasn’t on the run – at least not yet. He wasn’t well-known enough and his writing was too abstruse and esoteric to attract the attention of the Nazi censors or position him as an enemy of the state. And yet his life in Germany ended on January 30, 1933, with an ‘almost mathematical simultaneity’. Within just a few days’ time all his manuscripts were returned to him, his contacts disappeared, negotiations lapsed, all the letters he wrote asking for explanations were met with silence. Time was short. Benjamin never appeared to lose his calm during those weeks, even if what had befallen his friends should have filled him with terror. On January 20, the SA raided the houses of Horkheimer and Pollack. The night of February 27, Bloch, Brecht, Bentano, Dracauer and Speyer disappeared – all of them went abroad to escape. Ernst Schoen and Fritz Fränkel were captured and tortured.

  Those last days he spent in Berlin were a constant attempt to distance himself from this inevitable end that had only just begun. He would be leaving his language and leaving himself. He crept on tiptoe while history was moving in on him like a locomotive. History begged him to follow his friend Gretel’s advice and run. There was nowhere else to go but Paris. Over the last twenty years, Benjamin had spent many months there. He spoke the language fluently; he had translated Proust and Baudelaire into German; he knew French literature better than most; and he’d been working on a book, Passagen-Werk, about Paris. Where else would he go? Although this time around he wouldn’t be making another trip to a city that he thought of, perhaps even more than Berlin, as his own. He would never be able to live there again as he had in 1913 – his first visit – when he’d experienced it ‘intensely, the way only children know how to live’.