What they wanted to make was love, not war

“What they wanted to make was love, not war” condenses a turning point for Jean-Claude Pelletier and Manuel Espinoza: while searching for Benno von Archimboldi, they recognize that scholarship cannot give them the human closeness they seek. The phrase recasts their intellectual pursuit as a conflict they no longer wish to wage, and directs their attention toward love as a shared need.

The Recognition in Sankt Pauli

The insight comes as Pelletier and Espinoza walk around Sankt Pauli. Their visit to Mrs. Bubis’s house, filled with photographs of her late husband and his writers but lacking a photograph of the one writer the two friends care about, has made Archimboldi’s distance palpable. Yet the recognition they have in the red-light district feels more important to them than anything they might have learned from the publisher’s revelations.

They understand that the search for Archimboldi can never fill their lives. They can read his work, study it, and dissect it, but they cannot laugh or be sad with him: he remains far away, and the deeper they enter his writing, the more it devours its explorers. The phrase answers that imbalance. It contrasts the exhausting struggle of pursuing and interpreting an absent writer with the reciprocal emotional life Pelletier and Espinoza want instead.

From Abstract Understanding to Action

The realization does not immediately become a confession between the friends. Sharing a taxi to the airport, they speak about love and the need for love while keeping their confidences strictly limited and abstract. Their restraint makes the phrase less a declaration of a specific relationship than a statement of what they have recognized they lack and want.

After Pelletier leaves, Espinoza’s thoughts turn to Liz Norton and his chances of courting her. He imagines them sharing an apartment in Madrid, working in the German department in offices separated by a wall, shopping, dining with friends, and returning home to an enormous bathtub and bed. The domestic detail gives concrete shape to the general need voiced at the airport: love means an imagined life lived alongside another person, not deeper possession of Archimboldi’s work.

The Phrase’s Narrative Function

The sentence’s sharp opposition between love and war makes the two friends’ recognition memorable without resolving what either will do. Their conversation remains abstract, but their separate journeys after the airport turn toward Norton: Espinoza imagines a future with her, while Pelletier gets there first, arriving in London unannounced three days after the meeting with Archimboldi’s publisher. He takes Norton to dinner, and she later invites him home on the stated pretext of discussing Archimboldi and what Mrs. Bubis revealed.

That immediate return to Archimboldi is part of the phrase’s irony. The writer remains the ostensible subject of the meeting and dinner, even as the friends’ earlier insight has identified love—not the investigation—as the deeper human stake. The phrase therefore marks a shift in their understanding, not an escape from the literary search: the work still draws them in, but it can no longer stand in for the life and emotional connection they desire.