The Angel of History
Page 27
I went white like a coward – as if the evil beast itself had appeared before me. What luck. But of course I would meet her, this friend of his. She might well have thought that manuscript was worth more than my life.
‘Maybe, if you looked harder,’ I stuttered.
But she had already turned away. A man was coming toward her, smiling.
‘So long,’ I said and breathed again.
For the rest of the trip I did nothing but try to avoid her and I managed to do that. But once the ship docked and I set foot in Veracruz, I realised that I had stopped running, that I would be here my whole life. I would stop now, and wait. But for what? Have you ever felt that sensation that you are waiting for something but you don’t know what? I do. I’ve felt that way for more than fifty years. At first I thought I was waiting for Mercedes, but when she and María joined me two years later, I discovered that I was happy and at the same time that feeling I was waiting for something never left me. I thought of Franco. I thought maybe I wanted to go back to Spain as soon as he fell. But no. When that old son of a bitch died I realised that I was happy here and too old to go back – exile had become a part of me. Over all these years I’ve thought often of your philosopher. We couldn’t be more different but there was something that linked us. I guess that we were each in our own way two hairs off the same dog, two faces of the same Europe. Then everything fell apart. They say that the world won’t end for a long time yet. But ours already collapsed in a heap. Since then there’s been no place for people like us. Time killed him; his moment in time killed him. Who knows why I got lucky. I got lucky but I’ve been condemned to survival and little by little I have had to absorb all of the defeat and wait, and wait some more. But I’ve seen things that maybe I’m the only person who’s seen them left to talk about them. And fuck if I won’t talk about it. At least as long as I am here, I’ll keep at it, keep going, even if it’s not always easy. Memory isn’t like a dog; it doesn’t come whenever you want it to. It hardly ever comes when you call. I know this is probably useless, all this storytelling and taking up so much time, boring nice people like you. But you can forgive an old man for that, right? Later, you’ll make your own peace with the memories, decide what you want to do with them. That’s your business. When it’s all done, I’ve won one against time. And this, my son, doesn’t seem like a small thing.
Acknowledgements
Like all of its counterparts, this book is also a son and brother to other books. I am naturally indebted to Walter Benjamin, the critical work on his thinking (especially Agamben,Tiedemann, Solmi, Arendt and Adorno), his biographers (notably Scholem, Brodersen and Witte, as well as the worthy research provided by Scheurman), and to numerous historical works about Spain and France in the 1930s. I’d also like to make mention of several novels and accounts that have proven invaluable to my work. I drew extensively on Arthur Koestler’s Scum of the Earth, Anna Seghers’s Transit, Lisa Fittko’s memoir Escape Through the Pyrenees, and the work of Max Aub. But I also ‘stole’ a great deal from Mariano Constante’s Los años rojos, Franciso Pérez López’s Españoles en los campos Nazis and El Mexicano, Jay Parini’s Benjamin’s Crossing, from Exil im Exil by Hans Sahl and El Pasajero Benjamin by Ricardo Cano Gaviria as well as from the testimonials collected by Eduardo Pons Prades in Republicanos españoles en la segunda Guerra mundial. Pillaging these texts made it possible to bring times I didn’t live through and places that I’ve never visited to readers. Is this not also the purpose of literature?
I owe Paco Ignacio Taibo II for introducing me to a great deal of this writing of Spain, as well as for additional information, and much much more. I’d like to thank Giuseppe Russo for several tremendously useful photocopies, Gabriella Catalano for her patience helping me translate from German, Cristina Guarinelli for her technical generosity and Manuel Cussò-Ferrer for having agreed to meet up with me in Barcelona and providing me with invaluable suggestions for my scouting in Port Bou.
It’s almost necessary to emphasize the fact that this is fiction, albeit based on actual events. Thus I have taken many liberties with history, convinced that, as Manzoni once said, ‘the writer must benefit from history, not be in competition with it.’Which is why some of the characters who appear in the book are entirely made up and others bear the name of historic figures – even those, however, are ultimately products of my imagination.
I’d also like to thank, my little ‘circle of readers’ (Antonio C. and Antonio F., Giovanni, Laura, Mariano, Paolo, Pietro, Silvio and, of course, Marco Tropea), that private institution, formed out of respect and affection, without which no book and no writer would be what they are. Finally, the greatest thanks are due to Iaia: only she and I know deep down why.