The Angel of History

by Bruno Arpaia

  There it was done. He carefully folded up the paper and wrote on the outside ‘For Henny Gurland’, and then set it on the nightstand with a glance at his watch. It was almost seven. A beam of pale light floated hesitantly in the room, like in an aquarium. As he looked for a position to relieve some of the pain, Walter removed his glasses, cleaning them meticulously with a handkerchief. He was surprised by the enormous weight of his arm when he tried to pull it back. There was very little time. The sound of his fist against the wall echoed loudly and sombrely in his head until he heard the footsteps of Frau Lippmann in the hall and her knock at the door.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Come,’ he stuttered from the bed.

  ‘My god,’ said the woman. ‘What have you done?’

  In the shadow she saw instantly his swollen face, the phial abandoned on the covers by the wall. She went silent and dropped her face in her hands, not daring to ask more.

  ‘Good morning,’ spluttered old Benjamin. ‘Would you be so good as to call Frau Gurland for me?’

  Eyes shut from the effort, and his throat parched, Walter thought about what he might tell her. Not much. Just to keep going. To make it through. And then there she was next to him, her pale hair hanging down over one shoulder. Frau Lippmann stood in the doorway behind her chewing her fingers. She was crying while Benjamin explained about the pains and the pills – and his decision.

  ‘Frau Gurland, you must forgive me,’ he whispered. ‘I would have only been a burden. Without me you might make it.’

  ‘You’re going to make it too. You’ll see,’ she replied in a husky voice. ‘I’m going to call the doctor.’

  Benjamin didn’t have the strength to shake his head. He said no with his eyes.

  ‘It’s useless,’ he added as soon as he found some strength. ‘Will you instead promise me that you’ll keep the pills a secret? It could be a problem. Say that I was sick. Okay?’

  Henny nodded, frightened, then reached out for the phial and hid it in her pocket. The bells outside struck seven. The day was struggling to emerge from behind the gathering storm clouds – the sun never came through that wan grey.

  ‘Something else,’ resumed old Benjamin. ‘I wrote you a letter, it’s on the nightstand. You should let Teddy Adorno and my son Stefan know what happened.’

  That was it. He couldn’t manage any more. His sickness moved into his eyes. Henny picked up her letter and bit her lips so she wouldn’t cry. She didn’t know what to do. With a nervous gesture she rearranged her hair, then looked at him, shaking her head with disbelief. This was the last image of the world that Walter saw before his eyes closed and he plunged into stillness, broken up by voices, footsteps on the stairs, all of it distant like his life – a sudden shock of pain, like a punch. And he knew that there was no coming back; he’d taken himself beyond the limits of repairable. Kafka, he thought without irony, and then he let himself be consumed by sleep, by the storm of images that he would never be able to recount.

  ‘Everyone,’ wrote Eduardo Galeano, ‘goes into the death as they lived. Some go in silence on tiptoe, others go fighting, others ask permission and forgiveness. Some go in arguing and making excuses, and there are some who raise their fists and cuss. Some embrace death. Some close their eyes and others cry.’ Benjamin faced death with dignity, with courtly manners – he walked her streets as if he’d been walking them his whole life, following his destiny, limping and trying to hide his ineptitude at dying. For years he’d imagined that moment as a kind of seismic explosion, a moment of light that would have clarified his existence. But instead it was a slow-moving canal, a loop in a long river, where you can barely perceive the memories that bob together to the surface, the heart that slows its beat, the stretch at the end that grabs you by the throat and drags you out of time.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  So that’s how it was with your philosopher. Unlucky. If he had crossed the border a day earlier, he would have been able to get on a train to Lisbon without a hitch. If he’d stayed one more day in France, he would have heard about the Spanish police’s new orders, and then he and the Gurlands would have waited before climbing over the Pyrenees. You see? It was a matter of one day, just one damn day that brought your philosopher to disaster. And in fact his friends – the ones he’d met up with along the way – were brought to the border in a flood of a rainstorm – and then, it’s not clear what happened. Maybe it was the storm or maybe the guards wanted to make a little money. Maybe the orders changed again. They were released and went on to Lisbon, safe and sound. What luck. Destiny dealt Benjamin a bad hand; the deck was stacked against him. Fuck it. He did the right thing. I agreed with him. It was better to have it over and done with in that hotel than to be killed by the Germans. But his bad luck followed him, even after death.

  When the doctor got there, soaked from the rain, thunder and lightning close on his heels, Benjamin was already in a coma. A strange light like steel pushed weakly in through the window, stippled by fat raindrops on the glass and dissipating as soon as it hit the opaque silence of the room. The only thing that Vila Moreno could do for him was call the priest to give last rites. They assumed he was a Catholic! They’d found that famous letter for the Dominicans in his bag. Frau Gurland ended up on her knees praying next to don Andrés and the altar boys trying to hide the fact that she didn’t know a word of the liturgy. She watched the priest with the holy oil and tried to follow his gestures mumbling confusedly in Latin.

  Your philosopher died in the afternoon. The rain had already become a steady downpour – a monotonous, dense litany gathering in the sky like time. I don’t even know if Vila Moreno understood or not – maybe he was pretending – but he certified the death as being caused by a cerebral haemorrhage. Committing suicide back then was a crime, you know? Think about the trouble Frau Gurland would have got in if the real story ever came out. But thanks to Vila Moreno they let her and her son leave for Lisbon the next day.

  Benjamin was left alone in that damn hotel. The judge came in that night just before eleven and the corpse was already dressed and laid out on the bed. He set the funeral for the next day and rented a plot in the cemetery with money they’d found in the black bag. Instead of a ticket for the States, Benjamin bought himself a grave in Spain. He had francs and dollars on him. Not much, but it was enough back then in Port Bou. The priest, the doctor and the carpenter who built the casket made out fine. Juan Suñer, the hotel owner, actually presented the judge with a bill for five days in the hotel and the expenses for disinfecting the room. What a son of a bitch. Mercedes and I got these details from doña Pepa. She went out and asked around. People in town knew things and she didn’t mind sharing.

  ‘Ay pobre,’ she said, making the fat under her chin wobble. ‘They steal from him and then they bury him like a dog.’

  ‘When?’ I asked.

  ‘Today at three,’ she answered.

  That was the first time I went out in the light of day. I took advantage of the lunch hour when everyone was inside eating to creep out of town and climb the hill opposite the cemetery. I had my binoculars, the only relic of war that I hung on to. The rain the day before had cleaned the air. The sky and sea that I saw from up there was dizzying. And those white tombs sticking out of the hillside, motionless in the wind, teetering over the transparent water – it made you want to die. There was a lone woman among the graves, changing the water in the flower vases, weeding, and polishing her loved ones’ headstones. Eventually don Andrés appeared on the road leading up to the hill, followed by two altar boys with their incense and six men carrying the casket on their shoulders.

  Machado. Don Antonio’s poem came to mind. He was dead now too, betrayed by his heart and lungs, by the terrible sadness of exile. Died not a month after I’d seen him, just a few kilometres from there at the end of the war. Damn border. Now I watched don Andrés offer benedictions, and the gravediggers lower the casket, the altar boys bow their heads, and Machado’s verse came to mind: ‘It struck
the bottom with a sharp sound, solemnly, in the silence. The sound of a coffin striking the earth is something unutterably solemn.’

  And do you know the final mockery, the last low blow destiny dealt your philosopher? The priest, judge and doctor all believed that his name was Benjamín and that Walter was his surname. In the town hall and even on the death certificate, there’s no trace of Doctor Benjamin. Even the corner where he’s buried is marked Mr Walter. And so no one will ever find the grave. When they shut him in there, they sealed away his name, his legacy, the only thing we leave behind. Luckily I still had his manuscript and I thought that it was up to me to restore to him a little of the legacy he deserved.

  They quickly recited the requiescat. A quarter of an hour later the only person left in the cemetery was the woman dusting her relatives’ headstones, a black shape moving slowly under the blazing sun. I stayed until nightfall. It would have been too risky to go back into town during the day. What else was there to do in the bright light, surrounded by those odours, under the clouds spinning in the sky so fabulous you couldn’t even follow them? I thought. That’s what I did – about Mercedes and me and about Benjamin and how I didn’t want to ever end up in his shoes. I never wanted to have to make that kind of decision. I realised that I didn’t have much time. I couldn’t really stay there in Port Bou, buried alive in Mercedes’ house. I only had one life and I shouldn’t waste a moment of it. I know. Those are the kinds of things you say, but it’s true that life is like a freight train: it passes so slowly, you watch it, and it seems like it’s endless, and then all of a sudden you’re staring at the red brake light of the last car as it’s disappearing. Then for the first time with dismay I recognised that I would have to go into exile. I might have to go to Mexico, Cuba or Argentina. If I wanted to live, I would have to resign myself to the fact that I couldn’t go back to Spain for a long time. I went home late that night with a long face. I couldn’t even smile or talk to María who was dancing around me, wanting to play.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Mercedes.

  So I told her: I said that I had to leave and that I would go to Mexico and I wanted her and María to join me once I got settled. Mercedes agreed. She didn’t argue, she didn’t ask for explanations, she didn’t cry. Nothing. It was as if my declaration was made of soap bubbles. She even smiled. And she was good – because it had taken me two months to come to that decision. It’s as if women don’t have to learn how some things have to go. They just know things and that’s that – they just hang on, like fish on a hook. So I prepared my backpack with my few things and put it by the bed. One day passed and then the next and there was always a reason to put off leaving, even if it was heavy to have to stay in the house all the time and even though with every trip I made over the border I could feel the cops’ breath on my neck closer and closer. Until it happened one December morning so quickly that I didn’t have time to think about it. I’d come back from a trip in the middle of the night. I was freezing and dog-tired and I lay down on the bed without bothering to undress. But I stayed awake, as if I knew. I tossed under the covers and cursed at the fact that I couldn’t fall asleep. But that’s how I heard them at dawn. I heard their footsteps under the window, their breath condensing in the cold dry air, the whispered orders. Shit, it was Enrique. I jumped up and Mercedes complained in her sleep, ‘What’s wrong? What happened?’

  The time it took to put on my coat, grab my backpack and fetch the manuscript from its hiding place under the mattress and I was out the door in the courtyard. Mercedes put a hand on my shoulder and held out something to me in the darkness.

  ‘Here. This might help,’ she said.

  It was only after I was already running frantically up into the mountains and I had the chance to shoot a glance backward and see how much of a lead I had on the cops that I stuck my hand in my pocket and saw that she had given me a picture of herself. Mercedes, I thought, shaking my head. But I couldn’t stop longer, it was more important to keep moving, watch my back, keep out of the open and cover my trail. At noon, I stopped on a ledge, sheltered by a clump of locust trees and took out my binoculars. Very far down, where the path coasted a little stream, I saw three policemen in a row. Enrique Viadiu and his moustache was in the lead. He must have realised that I was more than just a regular smuggler, that I was a Red son of a bitch because he’d set after me as if I were worse than Jack the Ripper. The chase lasted two days. I headed west to avoid passing through France and they stuck behind me the whole time as if catching me were the most important thing in the world. The farther I got from the sea, the colder it got; the higher I climbed, the fiercer the wind, getting under my clothes and whipping at my face. By nightfall I was walking between ice puddles embedded into the north-facing ground. I was hungry, cold, sleepy, thirsty and the bag was heavy on my back. The worst of it was the second night. By then I was walking through snow almost a metre deep. Before, when there was still some light, I’d seen the shadow of the cops on the other side of the valley behind me. I had a couple of hours’ advantage but no more, so I stopped to rest against a pine tree. Just ten minutes I promised myself. Just enough time to catch my breath.

  I didn’t pay much attention to the first gust of wind whistling through the gorge, but then the wind started building. The branches were bending over my head and a fog like cotton rolled up from the bottom of the valley covering the moon. Then came the whirls of heavy snow, coating my face with icy dust. It must have been ten or twenty degrees below zero. I had to get moving or I would freeze, but that was easier said than done. The gusts threw me back to the ground. I was exhausted and gave up. I found shelter under an overhang. It’s not worth it, I said. Why should I go on? I can’t make it. There. I’d become just like Benjamin. There was no room for flattery in a situation without remedy. I really thought my time had come up on that mountain. I’m going to die, I said to myself, but I also remember being calm, as if I was ready. I only had one regret. I put my hand in my pocket and pulled out Mercedes’ picture. I lit a match in the crook of my hand to look at it; it was one of my last matches. I stared at her high cheekbones and her eyes when it suddenly occurred to me in a flash that I could light a fire. I was sheltered and with that fog the cops would never see me. I just had to gather a little wood – nothing easier you say. I crawled out into the dark and started looking desperately in the snow around my shelter, digging with bare hands through the snow until I’d gathered a handful of branches but when I tried to light them I realised I would die first – they were too wet and useless. The effort of gathering them had taken my last strength. I was finished. I felt my eyes closing, treacherous sleep wrapping slowly around me with its false peace. With a last burst of awareness I reached out for the backpack and pulled out the manuscript. I only hesitated a moment before spreading the blue cover out under the circle of branches. The cover will work, I thought. Instead it curled in the faltering flame and faded into the snow. There was nothing else to do, I thought, it was Benjamin or me. My future against his memory. I began with the first three pages, then another five, six, a stack of pages, and more until finally one of the thinner twigs sparked to life. By the light of the fire I could see well enough to collect more wood, which at first just smoked and finally started burning. My hands were slowly warming; the ice melted, the water dripped over my eyebrows. I was saved. It was all thanks to your philosopher. What greater gift could he have given me?

  When the sun rose, the blizzard had passed. No one was chasing me any more. All I could see around me in the clear, brisk air was the brilliant whiteness of the landscape. The trees listing under the weight of the snow, the drop into the valley where four little houses perched on a crag overlooking a plain. The backpack was light on my shoulders now, and I walked more quickly. But it became evident that my lot in life was to travel Europe by foot, all the way to Lisbon. I never did manage to get on a train or bus, or get a lift with anyone – nothing to save me even a hundred feet of heel-toe. There was always some danger lurking
, a guardia civil, policing the trains, the blue shirt of a Falangist behind the wheel of a truck. I cut across fields, followed streams, secondary roads, trails cut into the side of the mountain range. It was just like when I was in France a few months before except that there was no Mercedes waiting for me at the other end. Now I was leaving my home for ever.

  I got to the sea in the middle of March by following the Tagus River down to Lisbon. But it was another month before I could get on a boat. It wasn’t until I saw the Torre di Belém disappearing in the distance, and the river and white houses cluster on the hills – only then I started breathing easily. Although there was only so easily I could breathe when thoughts of Mercedes clogged my throat. It was a crystal clear evening in April. The water was murky and still, the stars were thick in the sky. I was out on the bow, the wind whipping my clothes and blowing the hair of a woman leaning on the parapet. Her hair was black as pitch. She leaned over, twisted, folded in two – struggling to light a cigarette.

  ‘May I?’ I offered, a match already lit in the crook of my hand.

  The woman inhaled and stood back to look at me.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said in French. ‘My name is Hannah, Hannah Arendt. You are Spanish.’

  I nodded yes while I lit a cigarette of my own.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Port Bou, near the border.’

  I don’t know why I answered that way but it was the first thing that came to mind. Deep down I really didn’t know where I was from anymore. I vaguely, but vaguely had a sense of where I was going.

  ‘Port Bou . . . I’ve been there,’ she slowly said. ‘A friend of mine died there. I even went to the cemetery. It’s lovely, but I couldn’t find his grave.’