Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao on the recorder, another place that Stéphanie thought sweet, like nearby Avignon Street where I like to think Picasso received Inspiration in a brothel, his demoiselles d’Avignon were frail prostitutes in a Barcelona whorehouse, now an inn for tourists — Stéphanie armed with Proust and Céline liked everything, the pretty neighborhoods with the wide avenues where characters from the Faubourg Saint-Germain or the Opéra might have strolled, and the somewhat downtrodden historic district where Bardamu’s Iberian colleagues must have exercised, between twilight and dinnertime we’d stay at the hotel, after making love we’d read, History of the Spanish War by Brasillach and Bardèche for me, which the old fascist had given me when I was still in high school and which seemed to me the best book, along with Orwell’s reminiscences, for an escapade in Catalonia, Stéphanie was beside herself, that makes me sick she said, you should be ashamed of lugging around those Nazi monstrosities here, I tried to explain to her that this version of history had been the official one in Spain until the end of Francoism, the bad ones were the Reds, the good ones the others, and that there were still a few “historians” who defended the argument according to which Franco had saved Spain from Stalin and the anarchists, who were even worse, Stéphanie wouldn’t budge, that’s no reason, she said, to read fascists and Nazis, so I’d use another argument, a low blow, I’d say and what about Céline? wasn’t Céline an anti-Semitic fascist? she’d get upset, would answer it’s not the same, it’s not that simple, I agreed completely, it’s not that simple, and we left it there, it wasn’t that simple, in fact it was quite complex, Stéphanie Muller brilliant French intellectual geopolitical analyst for our strange Service began tickling me in revenge, and the political argument would finish in feathers and mattress noises, I think she could have forgiven Brasillach if he had written one single great book, but for her he was a mediocre writer who didn’t deserve any leniency, he had been pumped full of lead at the Liberation, and voilà, purified — France was purified, Stéphanie tickled me and Barcelona shone with all its modern European festive Catalan lights, and didn’t want to remember that it had gotten richer especially in the 1960s, when Francoism was in full swing, that the local middle class had very quickly adapted to the dictatorship and had made a fortune exploiting tens of thousands of migrants from all over Spain: poor Orwell, in his hotel room near the Plaça de Catalunya, today a stone’s throw away from the Fnac store, the local Galeries Lafayette, and a cosmetics store, pursued by the Stalinists after the war in the war of May 1937 that pitted them against the POUM and the anarchists, forced to flee to avoid repression, the handsome Orwell in his room understands the battle is lost, and this was almost two years before the end, before the long route that will lead Boix to Mauthausen, terminus, the North — Stéphanie the gentle loved revolutionary myths, the raised fists and no pasarán slogans, she preferred Orwell’s memoirs to the ideological ravings of Bardèche and Brasillach, Brasillach the Catalan from Perpignan loved to go fishing by lamplight on the Collioure side, in his cousin’s boat, gleaming anchovies, pudgy sardines, was he already anti-Semitic, had he even met a Jew yet, had he already succumbed to the ease of paranoia and conspiracy, he who often passed by the Joffre camp in Rivesaltes, where, after the Spanish soldiers, a good part of the foreign Jews rounded up in unoccupied France were concentrated, Brasillach approved of these deportations, according to him Jews had to be gotten rid of down to the children, but that’s not why De Gaulle had him shot, that morning, February 6, 1945, in the freezing dawn of the Montrouge fort, Brasillach shouted Vive la France like the Resistants sent to the firing squad before him, De Gaulle the noble had rejected Brasillach’s appeal for clemency for obscure reasons, hatred of homosexuals maybe, maybe to appease the communists, maybe out of laziness, or maybe, as Stéphanie thought, because Brasillach wasn’t all that great a writer, but certainly not for anti-Semitism, if he had just been an anti-Semite Brasillach would have been pardoned, witness his brother-in-law Maurice Bardèche who was liberated after a few months in prison or Céline himself, repatriated after months freezing his balls in a cabin in Denmark: the bitter little doctor was a supporter of Zionism and the state of Israel, supposed to rid Europe of its cumbersome Jews, those hybrids, those unclean stateless people, and Stéphanie thought deep down inside that he was right, that actually exile was the only solution to the Jewish problem, the answer to the Jewish question and Israel was a practical closet to put away these cumbersome flotsam and jetsam from the Mediterranean, Central Europe, or France, these debates depressed me, I thought about Harmen Gerbens the Dutchman and about his apartment, about the Jews of Cairo and Alexandria who came through Spain in 1967, about all those movements in the Zone, ebb, flow, exiles chasing other exiles, according to the victories and defeats, the power of weapons and the outlines of frontiers, a bloody dance, an eternal interminable vendetta, always, whether they’re Republicans in Spain fascists in France Palestinians in Israel they all dream of the fate of Aeneas the Trojan son of Aphrodite, the conquered with their destroyed cities want to destroy other cities in turn, rewrite their history, change it into victory, in other places, later on, I thought about a page from the notebook of Francesc Boix, the Barcelona photographer, one of the pages of the lost manuscript of his memoirs,