Waiting for Robert Capa (18 page)

In his letters, he'd tell Gerda how the
Madrileños
would risk themselves in front of the tanks, attacking them with dynamite and bottles filled with gasoline that they ignited with the tips of their cigarettes because matches were scarce. When modern German machine guns opened fire, they'd retaliate with their old Mauser rifles. David versus Goliath. The fall of the city seemed inevitable. Madrid, however, resisted the beatings with a courage that earned it mythical levels of coverage in publications such as
Regards
,
Vu
,
Zürcher Illustrierte
,
Life
,
Weekly Illustrated
, along with all the major newspapers of the world, whose print runs approached the 100,000 mark. The Spanish Civil War had become the first conflict to be photographed and transmitted on a daily basis. “A cause without images is not only a forgotten cause. It's also a lost cause,” he wrote in a letter to Gerda, dated November 18, the same day that Hitler and Mussolini officially recognized Franco as the Spanish head of state.

She was proud of him, of course she was. The Robert Capa invention had also been her idea in the first place. But the fact that several of the best photographs she'd taken in Spain were published without her name, and credited to his, caused her a certain unease. Perhaps she'd been mistaken, or maybe the moment had come to rethink their professional relationship and convert it into one with more equal footing. The brand “Capa & Taro” sounded pretty good.

But war was the territory of men. Women didn't count.

“I'm nobody, I'm nobody”—she remembered how he had once said this at the edge of the Seine, when his first report on Sarre didn't appear with his name on it. It felt as though a thousand years had passed since then, and now it was she who felt neglected. She didn't exist. Sometimes she'd look in the bathroom mirror and carefully observe each new wrinkle in bewilderment, as if she feared that time, life, or her own will would wind up destroying what was left of her dreams. A woman in a blind spot.

“Are you all right?” he had asked several hours after that airraid siren had sounded in their room at the Hotel Florida, and the dim, striped light of daybreak entered. She had shot up violently. Having awakened sweating, her hair soaked, her forehead clammy, and her heart galloping in her chest like a runaway horse.

“I had a nightmare,” she managed to say, when her breathing was finally back to normal.

“Fuck, Gerda, you look like you just went to hell and back.” It was as if she had suddenly aged ten years, her thin face, the violetcolored circles under her eyes, her worn expression. “Would you like a glass of water?”

“Yes.”

She didn't know where in hell she'd gone, but from that point on, she found herself feeling profoundly, darkly uncertain. And it was hard for her to recover. Capa brought her the glass, but she wasn't able to hold it. Her hands were shaking, as if out of nowhere she'd lost love's protective shield. He brought the water up to her lips for her to drink, but a good portion of it ran down her chin, wetting her shirt and the top fold of the sheet. If everything she had learned would not remain inscribed somewhere, what would have been the purpose of her life? She rested her head on the pillow again but was unable to fall back asleep, watching how the morning light began to filter itself little by little over the ceiling of their room, thinking that death was probably a lot like the blackness from her nightmare. A nearby border to nonexistence.

His letters from the front plunged her into a contradictory state. A part of her feared for his life while the other deeply envied the sensations he described and that she knew very well: to have your back up against the slope of ditch swearing in Aramaic at those Fascist sons-of-bitches and the mothers that gave birth to them. That bone-chilling silence after the fire of the howitzers, a silence like no other, that smell of the earth's proximity, that physical certainty that only the now matters, and afterward, less than two hundred yards from the front line, the bars on the Gran Vía with their delicious coffee with cream, served in a tall, tubular glass. Confectionery after the battle. He had already been poisoned by the war's virus and he didn't know it.

She couldn't stop humming the songs she'd learned in Spain.

Madrid you're so resistant
,

Madrid you're so resistant

Madrid you're so resistant…

Little mama, the bombings

the bombings…

She sang them in the shower, as she cooked, while she looked out the window, and Paris felt too small for her, because the only world that mattered began on the other side of the Pyrenees. At last, she had found a terra firma that would not sink under her feet. Others called themselves Spaniards for a lot less than that.

Ruth knew her well. She knew that Gerda was not one to wait patiently, like Penelope, for her man to return, weaving and unweaving the tapestry of memory. With resignation, Ruth listened to her, like a mother or an older sister, her eyebrows raised, a wave of hair clipped up and hanging over one side of her forehead, her bathrobe sealed over her chest, interrupting only when necessary to offer a piece of advice already predestined to fall upon deaf ears. She watched Gerda smoke with that smile apparently devoid of intentions, and knew that she had already come to a decision.

Whether Alliance Photo offered her a contract or not, with credentials or without them, she was going to Spain.

She had always been like this. Take the first train, make a quick decision. It's here or there. It's black or white. Choose.

“No, Ruth,” she said in an attempt to defend herself from the comment her friend had made aloud. “The reality is I've never been able to choose. I didn't choose what happened in Leipzig, I didn't choose to come to Paris, I didn't choose to abandon my family, my brothers, I didn't choose to fall in love. Nor did I even choose to become a photographer. I chose nothing. Whatever came my way, I dealt with it as I could.” She got up and began playing with an amber bead, tossing it between her hands. “My script was written by others. And I have this sense of always having lived in someone else's shadow, first Georg, then Bob … It's time for me to take the reins of my own life. I don't want to be anyone's property. Maybe I'm not as good a photographer as he is, but I have my own way of doing things, and when I focus, and calculate the distance, and press the shutter release, I know it's my vision that I'm defending, and no one in the world—not he, not Chim, not Fred Stein, not Henri, no one—could ever photograph what I see, since it comes naturally to me.”

“It sounds like you're a little upset with him,” said Ruth.

Feeling uncomfortable, Gerda sank her hands into the pockets of her slacks and hunched her shoulders. It was true she felt betrayed when her name didn't appear credited for the photos. Capa's success had relegated her to the background. But it wasn't easy for her to express the sensation that had taken hold of her in the last few weeks. The deeper her love, the bigger the gap she placed between them. She began to need a certain distance and felt that he should allow her the space she considered appropriate. Professional independence was the key to loving herself. How does one love and at the same time fight against that which one loves?

“I'm not upset,” she said. “Just a bit tired.”

Even though she rejected her religious beliefs, she couldn't stop herself from being Jewish. Her vision of the world included a tangible line dating back to her ancestors. She had been raised on the stories from the Old Testament. Abraham, Isaac, Sarah, Jacob … The same way she loved family tradition she would have detested dying without a name.

N
ever had she seen cafés so packed. Not even in Paris. It was normal to have to stand and wait until a seat was freed. Since the Republicans had moved to Valencia, many correspondents had been evacuated to the coastal city now populated by civilians who'd fled the bombings in Madrid. The highway to Puerto de Contreras was being guarded by men from the Rosal column. Dark-eyed, a country folk's gait, sideburns, lively-colored capes, and a pistol on their hip; they were the real kind of anarchists. Spaniards from a fierce caste who helped their women with the children, carried them in pairs over their backs, but when it came to men who'd abandoned their barricades, they had no pity. Eyeing them furiously, with a bull's disdain toward the tame lamb. Sheer brilliance. There was no excusing them for abandoning the capital to its own fate. Many were obliged to go back. But when sick and hungry children arrived by night from far away, the lights from the city high above, with their sacks over their shoulders, they showed themselves, smiling.

“Cheer up, my friends,” they'd say. “Here you'll surely get sick of eating so much rice.”

Valencia, full of bright lights and a view of the sea. A dream.

Gerda had just arrived. She looked all around without being able to find one empty table. The Ideal Room café, with its large windows that opened onto Calle de la Paz, was the war correspondents' favorite. The place was always packed with journalists, diplomats, writers, spies, and brigadists from all four cardinal points, milling around underneath its ceiling fans, with their leather jackets, “blond cigarettes,” and their international songs.

The sight of a woman entering alone caused a stir at the tables. Her beret tightly in place and a revolver on her hip.

“Gerda, what on earth are you doing here?” She heard the voice of a tall German man who had stood up to greet her from the other end of the café.

It was Alfred Kantorowicz, an old friend from Paris. They had spent many hours together at the Capoulade's gatherings. He was attractive and wore the round glasses of an intellectual. With the help of Walter Benjamin and Gustav Regler, he had been able to establish the Association of German Writers in Exile. Along with Chim, Ruth, and Capa, Gerda had attended many of their events, which included poetry readings and short plays. Today, Kantorowicz was the political commissary for the Thirteenth Brigade.

She took a seat next to him at the table and introduced herself to the other brigadists as a special correspondent for
Ce Soir
.

“It's a new publication,” she added humbly.

The magazine hadn't yet released its first edition on newsstands, but they had all heard talk about it, since it was well known in the Communist Party's circles and because it was run by Louis Aragon.

The café's cosmopolitan atmosphere could be detected in the smoke: Gauloises Bleues, Gitanes, Ideales, Valencian stogies, Pall-Mall, and even Camel and Lucky Strike. That tribe could resemble a map with all the tributaries of a faraway river. French, German, Hungarian, English, American … So that borders were no longer important. Once in Spain, they removed their country's clothes in order to change into the blue uniform or olive-green fatigues. Erase nations. That was the war's lesson. For them, Spain was the symbol of all countries, a representation of the very notion of a universe ridiculed. There were metalworkers, doctors, students, typesetters, poets, scientists such as the biologist J. B. S. Haldane, deliberate and self-righteous, sporting an aviator jacket he bought at a store in Piccadilly Circus. Gerda felt right at home. Out of all the cigarettes being offered to her, she chose a Gauloises Bleues, and let the smoke pass through her lungs, the way all the words and sensations passed through her body.

“And Capa?” the German asked, puzzled, after a while. He was used to always seeing them together.

Gerda shrugged. A long silence. Kantorowicz couldn't take his eyes off the warm triangle of her neckline.

“I'm not his babysitter,” she said proudly.

Valencia was courteous, generous, and aromatic. In those days, it was the war's most amiable face. They were all passing through on the way to somewhere, and they rushed through the waiting as best they could. First thing in the morning, they'd cross the Plaza de Castelar, with its large circular openings to light and ventilate the underground flower market, toward Hotel Victoria, where the Republican government was staying, to see if there was any news. The correspondents usually ate at the restaurant in Hotel Londres, especially on Thursdays, when they served paella. The maître d', dressed in a tux, would approach the tables remorsefully and say:

“Please excuse the service and the food … Since the Committee's arrival, this is no longer what it used to be.”

Valencia's people were kind lovers of life, slightly loud, and always telling sexually explicit jokes. Gerda, who was now more or less able to get by in the language, still found it hard to understand what they were saying. But she soon learned how to incorporate the Valencian
che
into her vocabulary, and people immediately wanted to adopt her. There are people who, without even trying, are automatically loved. It's something you're born with, like the way you laugh as you tell a joke in a low voice. Gerda was one of those people. Languages came easily to her. She could interpret each accent with the fluency of a musician improvising a new melody. Pronounce swear words with such elegant grace that she could seduce anyone. She listened with her head slightly tilted to the side, a complicit air about her, like a mischievous child. Within the feminine canon, she wasn't especially pretty, but the war had given her a different kind of beauty; that of a survivor. Much too thin and angular, with eyebrows that were arched and ironic, always dressed in a blue uniform or a military shirt, and with a charm that tempted everyone. For her suitors, Capa's absence signified an open season, and she began to enjoy the pleasures of being courted. The waiters reserving the best tables for her. The silent rivalry among the men around her, who competed to buy her drinks, offer her the latest news, make her laugh, or take her dancing to one of the salons on Calle del Trinquete de Caballeros.