Storming the Gates of Paradise (11 page)

Apple Computer, which is headquartered in six buildings, indistinguishable but for their security levels, on Infinity Loop in Cupertino, is a key landscape for Silicon Valley, one that apparently displaced real orchards. When I was there, the Olson orchard across Highway 280 in Sunnyvale was selling Bing and Queen Anne cherries, and Latino workers were cutting up apricots to dry. But a third of the orchard was bulldozed this past spring [1994] for housing, and the rest of the Olson orchard is on its way out. What does it mean, this rainbow-colored apple with the bite taken out of it, which appears everywhere on Apple computers and on the many commodities (mugs, key rings, t-shirts) Apple markets, this emblem that seems to sum up the Santa Clara Valley’s change from agriculture to technology? It seems to have been appropriated to connote simplicity and wholesomeness, though apples aren’t rainbow colored in anything but the sloppiest association
of positive emblems; and the bite also recalls temptation in Eden: the emblem is denatured, reassuring, and threatening all at once. But more than that, it is forgettable, dead in the imagination, part of nowhere—it has been a decade since I last pondered the Apple logo, which has become part of a landscape of disassociation in which the apple image connotes neither sustenance nor metaphor, only a consumer choice, the fruit of the tree of information at the center of the garden of merging paths.

The incomparable writer-philosopher Walter Benjamin long imagined that his life could be drawn as a map, but never imagined that the map would come to an abrupt termination in Port Bou, Spain, in 1940. In 1939, when the dictator Francisco Franco declared an end to the Spanish Civil War, tens of thousands of refugees walked north over the Pyrenees, seeking shelter in France. They expected to be welcomed as defenders of democracy, but many were forced into camps. A year later, the tide had turned, and refugees from the Third Reich and the Vichy regime began trickling into Spain, seeking passage out of Europe altogether through Spanish or Portuguese ports. Benjamin, a Berlin Jew who had been living in Paris for many years, was one of them, and the tale of his walk from France to Spain has acquired something of the aura of a legend in the academic and intellectual circles where he matters most, for at the end of it he died.

A map of an altogether different sort fell into my hands when I went to Port Bou to retrace Benjamin’s final walk. I had expected that my task would be an obscure one, but as soon as we arrived in the town, my companion and I found a kiosk by the little beach bearing maps of the region and an unfolded brochure on Benjamin and the monument to him that stands on the edge of town. The brochure contains a greatly reduced topographical map on which his final walk is marked with a thick orange line. There were other surprises. Most accounts say that he “walked across the Pyrenees,” but by the time the Pyrenees meet the Mediterranean, they are only steep hills, not the mountains I had always pictured.

Port Bou and the nearest French town of Cerberes (Portbou and Cervera are the Spanish spellings) are separated by a range of hills and connected by a tunnel. The French trains run on a different gauge track than the Spanish, so each town represents the terminus of a foreign system. It would’ve taken us two trains and several hours to get from Port Bou, where we woke up, to Banyuls, the second-to-last French town on the Mediterranean, where Benjamin began his walk, so we gave up halfway and took a taxi from Cerberes. The young man who drove us was affably multilingual, chatting to us in French and broken English and asking directions in Catalonian of a gaunt old man rearranging the stones on one of the terraces of a vineyard. At our request, he took us up into the steep amphitheater of grape terraces behind the town and left us in what to him looked like the middle of nowhere. We wouldn’t have minded walking there, but we weren’t sure we could have found the right road out of town.

The Mediterranean was blue, the unripe grapes were the same green as the leaves of the vines, and the ground was covered with the same deep-brown shale that the terraces, culverts, and occasional huts were made from, a stone that broke up into flat tablets and shards. I’d never been anywhere remotely nearby, but it all looked strangely familiar, the terraced vineyards like a leaner, steeper version of Sonoma or Napa, the hillsides above like the coast north of San Francisco where I hike all the time, even down to the live oaks, rattlesnake grass, and fennel growing in the hills. After we climbed above the vineyards, we walked for a long time on a road, alone, except for the insects.

There were huge grasshoppers with the wingspans of dragonflies when they took to the air, and small ones whose scarlet wings made them look like butterflies, though they vanished into drabness again when they landed. And there were many species of butterflies, small white ones, a yellow one that folded its wings to look like a green leaf, and a pair of swallowtails that chased and courted each other in the breeze. My companion remarked that butterflies have four basic wing motions that occur in so random a sequence that predators cannot predict where they will be; their erraticness makes them elusive. I answered that this sounded like Benjamin, who in his work was a historian, a theorist, a lyrical writer, creating writing as uncategorizable as it is influential. Though his most famous essay is
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he devoted himself at far greater length to elucidating the meaning of Paris, labyrinths, cities, walks—a series of ideas that spiral around, double back, open into each other, metamorphose, and make endless connections, a map of the world drawn as much by poetic intuition as by rational analysis.

On his walk to Spain, he carried a heavy briefcase containing, he told his companions, a new manuscript more important than his life; and it was part of what made the walk so arduous for him that he had to stop one minute out of ten to catch his breath. There is a steep ascent up to the plateau between Banyuls and the slopes east of Cerberes, during which the route is due south. It then rises to loop around the ridgeline, which is also the international border. Finally, the route heads due east again along the south-facing slopes above Port Bou. The route looks like a giant inverted question mark, like the ones at the beginning of questions in Spanish. There’s a Paul Auster novel,
City of Glass
, that Benjamin would have loved, in which one character takes walks across a city whose routes trace the outlines of letters of the alphabet and another character has to figure out what the walks spell; but he probably never knew that his last walk was in the form of a question.

Benjamin succeeded in leading a largely uneventful life until history at its most virulent intervened. Mostly he read, wrote, talked, and walked, activities that blurred together in his thinking, where the city was a magnificent labyrinthine mystery to be read by walking, a musing, meandering kind of walking. Though he had grown up in Germany when climbing mountains was so established a part of sentimental-romantic culture that he was photographed with an alpine background and alpenstock as a child, he was devotedly, unathletically urban in adulthood, nearsighted, with heart trouble, wandering his Paris labyrinths slowly. He was supremely unequipped for what even the foothill walk from France to Spain would require of him, though he was fortunate in his guide.

Lisa Fittko is one of the countless heroes who rise to confront disaster. Active against the Nazis, she had fled Germany years before and was living in Paris when the French government began sending foreigners, regardless of affiliation, into camps. As France surrendered and the Nazis moved south, Fittko, like Benjamin,
like myriad Jews, foreigners, and resisters, fled south, looking for a way out of the noose. Fittko came to the southeast corner of France alone to look for escape routes and was given enormous assistance by the socialist mayor of Banyuls and, during the months she lived there, the townspeople. The mayor, Monsieur Azema, told her about a smuggler’s route that had also been used by the communist General Enrique Lister in the Spanish Civil War. This was the route she was exploring for the first time when she guided Benjamin, a woman called Frau Gurland, and Gurland’s teenage son over the mountains, turning back herself once she had gotten them to Spain and within easy reach of Port Bou. Over the next six months, she helped hundreds more escape along this route. She survived to flee to Cuba and then the United States [where she died in 2005, in her mid-nineties].

Perhaps because of the taxi ride, perhaps because of the roads and paths incised into the hills since 1940, perhaps because we had no fears other than the ferocious heat of midday, we found the route remarkably easy, so easy that we could have done their nine-hour route in three, until I made a navigational mistake. Thinking we were looking down at Cerberes, the southernmost French town, and had another ridgeline to ascend, I took us straight up a steep slope, where a couple of guys with chainsaws were cutting brush, a nasty hike through sharp stubs of bushes and piles of debris, until we hit the trail for the two-thousand-foot peak called Querroig on which stands a ruined tower. From there, I could see Cerberes and Port Bou, lying together like mirror images of each other, each with its small bay and huge train yard, and realized we had gone too far. Since we were most of the way there, we decided to go ahead and reach the summit. Thus it was that we were indeed tired when we walked down into Port Bou six and a half hours after we started.

For refugees in 1940, there was a labyrinth of international paperwork to wade through as well. Fittko, in her memoir
Escape over the Pyrenees
, recounts the nightmares of scrambling for money to buy exit visas and destination visas, fake papers and real ones, the appeals to consuls and smugglers and forgers, amid a constantly shifting set of opportunities, risks, and rules. Having survived the walk, Benjamin fell into one of those traps: though he had a U.S. visa issued in Marseilles and a
Spanish visa, he did not have a French exit visa, and in Port Bou the Spanish authorities told him he would be sent back. It was a tragedy of timing. When he left Marseilles, the regulation had not existed; a few weeks later, the regulation would have lapsed. That day, however, Benjamin saw no way out, though it’s still unclear whether he died of a cerebral hemorrhage, took an accidental overdose of his heart medicine, or committed suicide. Though the nature of his death is unresolved, it is certain that Benjamin died in Port Bou, in a hotel that no longer exists, on September 26, 1940, at age forty-eight. Moved by the tragedy, the authorities allowed his companions to continue their journey to Portugal.

They paid the first five years of rent on a grave for Benjamin and fled. Benjamin’s remains were put into a common grave after the rent on his resting place expired. The death certificate, says Fittko, recorded the briefcase with
“unos papeles mas de contenido desconicido”
—“with papers of unknown content”—but case and manuscript vanished. In recent years, the town has begun to remember him, with the brochure I found, with a new grave (which is unlikely to contain his body), with a museum that is just a large room of photographs and photocopies (closed when we were there), and with a brilliant monument by the Israeli artist Dani Karavan. On the same steep slope as the cemetery, it consists of a long walled flight of stairs down toward the sea, a portion of it passing under the surface of the hillside. When you enter, the view through the slot of solid rusted steel the same color as the local stone frames a view of the blue ocean; when you look up, it shows pure sky.

It’s acutely attuned to the tragedy of Benjamin and the tides of refugees pushed by violence and intolerance across borders then and now. For neither the sea nor the sky is an attainable place—both are only beautiful beyonds. And when you descend, you find that a thick slab of clear plexiglass bars your way before you fall into the ocean. Etched on it, in several languages, are words of Benjamin’s: “It is more arduous to honor the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the nameless.” Benjamin doesn’t need a memorial in Port Bou, for his real memorial is his influence on writers ranging from Susan Sontag to Mike Davis, his presence on college reading lists across the North American and European continents, and his books, still
being read. If he deserves one, it’s for his commitment to what Karavan singled out in his monument, “the memory of the nameless.”

For me, there’s always been a question mark inscribed across Europe, one that asks what that culture would have looked like without the persecutions and exterminations of the Second World War, a Europe with six million more Jews and their descendants, along with dissidents, Gypsies, and the other exterminated. For the Europe Benjamin came from is as vanished as he is; many of his friends—Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, many other poets, scientists, philosophers, painters—were more successful and got to the United States, never to return. Many more went to Israel in the years and decades since, a country whose intolerances are all too clear a mirror of the intolerances of the left-behind lands. In Europe, towns from Salonika, Greece, to Krakow, Poland, lack the Jews who were central to their cultural life. In France, Jewish emigration to Israel has nearly doubled of late, perhaps in response to a new wave of anti-Semitism. I remember hearing a decade earlier that the four thousand Jews who lived in Ireland in 1904, the Ireland memorialized in James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, with its Benjaminian wanderer Leopold Bloom, had become two thousand.