Fifty Years Later: Cerbère and Portbou and Walter Benjamin

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

     Embarking on a life behind the wheel, I have set myself progressively longer and longer drives to build up my capacity to travel by car through Europe.  The longest drive I made before today was to Collioure, about three and a half hours total. Today I drove for five.

     When I was in the vicinity of Collioure last time, I saw signs for Cerbère, the last village on the French-Spanish border by the Mediterranean, 20 kilometers away.  Also for Portbou, the first village on the Spanish side, 7 kilometers further away.  My heart skipped a beat when I saw the signs because fifty years ago, my parents, my sister Jazmin and I were stranded in Portbou's train station overnight, when what was supposed to have been a day's jaunt from Barcelona to the border went awry.

     The trip to the border was supposed to be four hours, but the train broke down mid-route and we arrived in Cerbère nine hours later, with no possibility of returning the same day.  I remember that my father urged me to use my French to ask a barman for a beer.  Unfortunately,  the French I was learning in elementary school did not include the word for "beer".  Fortunately, the Frenchman knew the Spanish word, "cerveza" --although at that moment, my father might have wondered what he was paying for French lessons for.

     We had no French francs to pay for accommodations in Cerbère, it was before the age of international credit cards, and we thought we would do best to return to Spain, so we took the train back to Portbou.  There was a hotel at the railroad station, but it was full up, and there was no other hotel with a free room --not that Portbou, a tiny village clustered around a little bay surrounded by mountains, had much to offer.  This was 1964, eleven years before Franco's death.

     Spain under Franco was such a far cry from the country Almodovar's films have made famous that, at the border, any long-haired young men trying to enter the country from France were peremptorily sent back, the Guardia Civil in their patent leather hats and the border guards in drab, shouting over the young men's protests, "Pa' Francia! Pa' Francia --Back to France! Back to France!"  We all witnessed this, that day.

     My parents, my sister and I spent the night in the railway station in Portbou, Jazmin and I sleeping on a large wooden table, my parents, seated on a bench opposite, doing their best to rest.  The mountains surrounded the train station: in the early morning, just before we left, I remember a sturdy-looking shepherdess, dressed all in black, standing on the mountainside opposite, her flock around her.  The difficulties of the trip notwithstanding, I never forgot how beautiful the bay of Portbou was.

     Aside from my experience in 1964, Portbou was also known to me because it is where the influential literary theorist, Walter Benjamin, committed suicide on September 25, 1940.  Benjamin was working in Paris during the Battle for France, which began in May, 1940.  The German authorities were ordered to arrest Benjamin at his flat when Paris fell, undefended, on June 14, 1940.  However, Benjamin and his sister had fled the city for Lourdes the day before, hoping to make it to the United States with the travel visas in their possession.  The plan was for the Benjamins to cross neutral Spain to neutral Portugal and take a ship to the United States there.  However, the Franco government had canceled all transit visas, ordering the Spanish police to return their holders to France.

     Benjamin and his sister were traveling with a Jewish refugee group and stopped in the Hotel de Francia in Portbou.  There Benjamin, fearing he would be turned over to the Nazis, took an overdose of morphine tablets.  Having already, as a Jew --a stateless person under the Nuremberg laws--  been incarcerated in a French prison camp near Nevers for three months; at the end of his financial resources (the Benjamins had been successful bankers in pre-Nazi Germany); Benjamin ended his life.  The official date of Walter Benjamin's death is September 26, 1940.  He rests in the Catholic cemetery in Portbou, his death having never been publicly announced a suicide.  Poignantly, the refugee group he and his sister joined was permitted to travel through Spain to Portugal, arriving safely on September 30, 1940.

      And Portbou, fifty years later? Just as beautiful, although the sight of the massive  Guardia Civil headquarters, still standing in the middle of town, gave me a chill.  

     Cerbère, on the other hand has been built up, salmon pink apartments and houses spread along its much longer coast, which is dominated by le Cap Cerbère.  The distance from Collioure to Cerbère may be only 20 kilometers, but they are 20 kilometers of sinuous, winding roads, to Portbou another seven of them.

     This border saw Spanish refugees spill into France during the Spanish Civil War.  A few years later, it saw Jews and other refugees crossing in the other direction.  Driving past, I saw the ruin of the customs and immigration checkpoint, high in the mountains between Spain and France; and the nearby memorial to the many refugees who crossed, fleeing Franco or Hitler.  Today, there are just two navy blue signs at each end of the borders of each country, each sign encircled with stars representing the 27 member states of the European Union --"France" printed on one, "España" on the other.  There's no one there to stop you from going freely from one country to the other.  May we call that progress?