Portbou and the Belitres Pass
The path in the Pyrenees between Banyuls-sur-Mer and Portbou is, at times, unrecognizable. These are trails on the edge of steep slopes, difficult to traverse, especially in winter. Benjamin’s traces blend with those left by thousands of refugees desperately fleeing from war and death. The traces, like memory, are fragile: Benjamin knew that.
One of the mountain border crossings between France and Spain is called Coll de Belitres. In Catalan, “belitre” means undesirable, vile. The irony of history notes that Spanish refugees passed through there at the end of the Civil War in 1939. Later, in September 1940, Walter Benjamin would cross that same border, fleeing from Nazi barbarism.
From my years of studying sociology, then during my time in prison and in my first years as an exile, I was fascinated by Benjamin’s texts: the city, the trace of history, the dialogue between barbarism and civilization, his works on Kafka and his interest in the microcosmic. His texts gave me scattered and multifaceted images, and yet deeply connected to one another.
His “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” partially published two years after Benjamin’s death, is not a finished text: it’s a project. These are writings made at different times, between late 1939 and early 1940, a collection of notes deposited in his notebook or on papers of very different formats, in the margins of newspapers. There lies the tiny handwriting of a man on the run, pursued by Nazi forces. Much has been fantasized in an attempt to elucidate whether these notes were the ones Benjamin carried in his suitcase during his journey through the Pyrenees, before committing suicide. No one knows for certain.
In Stockholm, I began to read about Benjamin’s life, about his fate as an exile, his non-belonging, his escape to Paris and his flight through the Pyrenees to Spain. Benjamin died in a border town, opting for suicide in the face of the impossibility of any other escape from persecution. He wanted to end the feeling of being a pariah, a “homo sacer,” as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben would call it.
Benjamin’s last days and his flight through the Pyrenees became, over the years, an obsession for me. What difficulties did Benjamin encounter in his passage through the mountains? What ideas dominated him in his last hours? Which path did he use? The smugglers’? The Spanish refugees’? How did he arrive in Portbou? What Portbou did he find? Did he speak with people from the village? What are the details of his death? Was he induced to commit suicide? Where did his documents and the briefcase he carried on the journey end up? His writings and his notebook? Were the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” what he carried in his briefcase? Where did his body end up?
The path used by Benjamin was full of traces of other exiles fleeing from the horror of the Civil War in Spain or the Nazi invasion in France. The trace and its analogy with the path of history is evident. Benjamin was aware that every historical journey leaves cultural traces, microcosms for which he had a great weakness. His constant observation of the minute, the traces of all past creation that denotes the historicity of an object, became his fascination.
For three winter months in 2015 and three weeks in the spring of 2016, I dedicated myself to investigating the details of his journey. For this, I settled in Banyuls-sur-Mer and in Portbou, and crossed the mountain several times on both sides of the border. It wasn’t always possible, as the hurricane-force wind – the tramontana – sometimes prevented me from covering the route. In Portbou, I found a desolate, decadent city, almost without a future. A town that lives on memories and past customs. The imposing railway station, which in past times played a role as a customs office, was a vital hub in the traffic of goods and passengers to both sides of the border. Today it’s dying. If it weren’t for some passengers traveling to Cerbère, in France, no one would notice the existence of Portbou.
To the cemetery where Benjamin’s remains are found comes the occasional student, researcher or lost tourist who stumbles upon Portbou by chance. Benjamin’s supposed tomb looks solitarily towards the sea.
Patricio Salinas A, May 2016