Waiting for Robert Capa (19 page)

DANCING IS THE ANTEROOM TO THE BROTHEL: LET
'
S SHUT IT DOWN
, read a black-and-red poster on the door, endorsed by the acronym FAI.

“The owner can't be an anarchist,” said Gerda after someone translated it for her.

“Of course he is. And a hard-core anarchist. He is one of the founders of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica.”

“So how does he manage to keep this place open then?”

“Well, since prohibition is an act of government, it's his way of showing that no one gives him orders. You know: No Gods, No Masters.”

Anarchists! So independent, so loyal, so humane. Spanish to the core. Gerda smiled on the inside.

Other times, a group would go down to Malvarrosa beach to eat shrimp and watch the boats. That's what she liked most. Sitting in the sand and watching the Grao fishermen use oxen to pull the sailboats to shore.

First, they'd make them go into the water until they were up to their knees, then they'd yoke the oxen and strap on the boats' cables, and they'd tow them to the sand. Several pairs of oxen dragging a small sailboat out of the sea, with a line of shining waves that would break onto the sand. She'd stay there alone for hours, smoking and looking out into the distance, while the salty air refreshed her skin and her memories.

Not all of it was free time. She had to complete her assignments. Now she was a self-employed photojournalist. All her images were signed “Photo Taro.” She had never felt so in charge of her own life. She crouched below a cloister's arch in the Instituto Luis Vives, her knees together, her pupils contracted to pinpoints. Right in front of her, a column lined up in a Popular Army formation. She set the foreground in focus, a vanishing point perspective. Click. As a contrast to photographs of war, she also liked to shoot images of everyday life: a couple in Santa Catalina drinking
horchata
in the afternoon, a band contest beneath a diptych with the portraits of Machado and García Lorca, young boys taking lessons in the bullring. Valencia had found a place in her heart. The city was open, sensual, and hospitable. For all the refugees that had arrived hungry from the fronts, that place was like a paradise of abundance, the promised land, with Barrachina's shop window always filled with groceries and supplies. But every day, the front was getting closer, and from Plaza de Castelar's balconies, one began to see other things: the arrival of crowds from Malaga fleeing the massive shootings. People in espadrilles, with raw feet and faces broken from fear.

She didn't think twice about it. Her credentials were valid only in Valencia, so she went with her camera gear slung over her shoulder to the propaganda office, within the Municipality of Defense, to obtain permission to cover the exodus of the thousands of refugees arriving from Andalusia's eastern coast. It wasn't easy to get a pass. In order to turn down those who wanted to take advantage of the situation, the authorities were studying each petition with a magnifying glass. In certain European bohemian circles, the idea of taking a kind of “war tour” had become fashionable. They were people looking for thrills, trying to free themselves from the boredom of their pedestrian lives by checking into the best hotels in Valencia or Barcelona at the expense of the press office, as if they were there to see the bulls, standing behind the barricade, watching from the sidelines how the Spanish were killing one another. The Republican authorities would not stand for it. So, a majority of the correspondents had to wait for authorization and a space in a car while they rolled their cigarettes and compulsively typed up reports and telephoned, in foreign languages, claims that were never received.

However, Gerda was given her safe-conduct in less than ten minutes, in addition to having her pass validated, with the Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals' stamp on it. She knew how to get by on her own: having a way with people, the ability to be understood in five languages, a killer smile, and a bureaucracy-proof obstinacy.

For days she watched refugees moving along the coastal highway. First, the mule-drawn carts, then the women and the elderly carrying bundles on their backs, followed by frightened children with dirty faces, then the rest. Desperate, barefooted, exhausted, with that faraway look in their eyes that people get when it no longer matters if they continue forward or head back. One hundred fifty thousand people who had abandoned their homes and their entire lives, running away from the terror toward Almería, and later to Valencia, searching for the closest Republican shelter without knowing that the worst was yet to come. Hell. Franco's tanks following them overland and brutally mowing them down. Italian and German planes bombing them from above and gunboats intensifying their attack along the coast. It was a mousetrap. Cliffs on one side, a wall of rock on the other. There was no escape. Mothers blindfolding their children so they wouldn't see the bodies in the ditches. One hundred twenty-five miles on foot without anything to eat. Every once in a while, one would hear the purr of motors and overloaded militia trucks would arrive with faded green canvases, covered in dust, falling apart, and devastated. Parents begging them on their knees to take their children, knowing that if the militia accepted, they'd probably never see their children again. The worst episode of the war. The majority of the refugees were in a state of shock. Others collapsed from exhaustion while the planes started up their next attack, weaving their intricate spiderwebs in the air. No one ran for cover. It didn't matter anymore.

Gerda didn't know where to look. To her, it was the end of the world. She saw a very tall woman transporting a flour sack on the back of a white horse, and like an automaton, she pressed the shutter button. She believed she could be delirious. No one buried the dead and there wasn't enough strength to salvage the wounded.

At nightfall, she heard a strange murmur. Vibrations, rustling, banging, a set of headlights straightening themselves out in the darkness and coming around a curve. She walked toward the lights as if there was no longer a world left around her. It was a hospital's mobile medical unit. A man dressed in a white robe stained with blood, like a butcher's apron, was wrapping a bandage around an old man's head. Norman Bethune, the Canadian doctor, looked as though he'd been brought back to life. Gaunt, bearded, bloodshot eyes. He had just returned from three long days of performing blood transfusions and picking up children along the way.

That sadness could be a feeling so close to hate was something Gerda had never realized until then. First, she lifted the oil lamp's wick to expand the light's diameter around her. Then she threw a blanket over her shoulders and walked in the direction of the ambulance. She could hear the complaints of the sick, the voice of a mother speaking softly to her child. In the back of the truck, there was a board that was used as an operating table. At any moment after sundown, if a vein is sliced in the darkness, the blood turns black as petroleum. The worst part was the smell. At that moment, she would have done anything to be with Capa. He'd know exactly what to say to calm her. He had a gift for making people smile during the worst moments.

She remained absorbed in her thoughts, finishing a cigarette, remembering the touch of his rough and confident hands, those loyal spaniel eyes, his way of breathing on her neck after lovemaking, his self-deprecating humor capable of also saying something presumptuous to make her furious and fixing it again with that look that erased everything. Gentle, witty, egotistical. Damn that Hungarian, she thought to herself again, almost saying it out loud so she could stifle the sob rising to her mouth. Pale, she walked alongside the ditches, among the piles of dead bodies, with a lost expression on her face.

Just as she thought she was going to die if she didn't see a familiar face soon, she heard a snap, like when a candle extinguishes itself. Someone had just used their nail to break open a vial of morphine. Before he turned around, she had already recognized him from the back. His long legs, the rolled-up sleeves on his arms, currently digging inside a first-aid kit, an air of Gary Cooper.

“Ted.”

He turned around to look at her. They hadn't seen each other since Cerro Muriano. Her nineteen-year-old guardian angel had aged. She walked over to him slowly, placing her forehead against his chest, and for the first time since she'd been in Spain, she let herself cry without worrying who might see her. Silently, without saying a word, unable to hold back the tears, while Ted Allan stroked her head gently, as confused and quiet as she was. His right hand between her blond hair and the fabric of his shirt. That physical contact was the only possible consolation in the midst of the river of bodies. If felt as though the tears were coming not from her chest but from her throat, and blocking her breathing. She remained like this a good while, crying her heart out, after seven months of war trying hard not to fall apart.

Hell.

I
'm twenty-five years old and I know this war is the end of a part of my life. The end, perhaps, of my youth. Sometimes it seems it's going to do away with the entire world's youth. Spain's war has done something to all of us. We're no longer the same. This era we're living in is so full of change that it's difficult to recognize who we were just two years ago. I can't even imagine what's ahead…” She was wrapped up in a blanket, with her red notebook resting on her knees and the last bit of light disappearing into the horizon. It was her favorite time of day. If she had been a writer, she would have chosen the twilight to begin working on her novels, as her special time to allow the mind to wander. No lover could ever cross over into that exclusive territory. From those heights and along the sloping rooftops, she could see areas that had been hit by the bombs, the acres of farmland destroyed. Contemplating the tormented place she now found herself in—within Spain—she placed her pen on the paper's white surface and continued writing. “Over the last few months I traveled through this country soaking up all it has to offer. I've seen a sacrificed and broken people, women who remain strong, men with strange and tragic visions, and men with a sense of humor. This country is so mysterious, so theirs, so ours. I've seen it soften and crumble during an attack and rise again the next day with freshly formed scars. I still haven't grown completely tired of seeing it, but I will one day. That I know.”

The field hospital occupied a section of the esplanade that was tucked away in the darkness so that it wouldn't attract the attention of enemy planes. Many of the refugees slept beneath the trucks' canvases, wrapped in blankets. Children whose feet were wrapped in bandages huddled together on top of the piles of sandbags. Starting from Almería, the government attempted to evacuate everyone who was in condition to travel via bus, train, or boat, but the situation had become overwhelming.

Capa arrived on February 14, when the worst had already passed. He'd flown in on a small plane from Toulouse to Valencia. Several of his colleagues had remained in the city, awaiting permission. With rows of tables packed with typewriters and untidy mountains of dirty carbon paper, the Press Office could not keep up with all the requests. Seeing how difficult it was to find another form of transportation, he decided to hire his own taxi and take the Sollana highway smack up against rice fields, and continue alongside the River Júcar to Andalusia. He wasn't aware how much the war was rousing his emotions. Aside from the driver, he was all alone with his character, prepared to remain loyal to him under all circumstances, in a kind of limbo where life becomes the legend of what you make of it. His Leica on his arm, his eyes glued to the odometer. When he arrived, he saw Gerda standing against the light, extending a sheet over a clearing in the grass while Ted Allan prepared bandage strips with calamine on a tray.

“I didn't know you had become a nurse,” he said with a touch of sarcasm to his tone. Half-smiling, somewhere between smooth and wary. He was mad at her, though he didn't have a concrete reason to be, and that upset him even more.

“You're too late,” she said, subtly crossing swords with him, not specifying whether she was referring to covering the refugees' exodus or for the rest of her life.

Capa couldn't handle it when she entrenched herself behind a wall of pride with her doublespeak. In her fatigues and with that pale face and the imperiousness of a medieval warrior, her beauty radiated with unbearable intensity for him. He looked at her, waiting for her to say something more. But there wasn't anything else to say. For now.

The ice began to melt as the days went by, despite the chilling frankness of the Canadian camaraderie of Ted and Norman. When projectile missiles began falling over the city, they decided to move with the trucks and their tents to an old farmhouse. The building was nearly in ruins. There were steps missing in the stairwell, and the banisters had become dismantled. Some of the rooms in the east wing had no roofs, which made it feel as if they were in an aviary. When you opened a door, there was the landscape, but the kitchen had remained intact. That's where Dr. Bethune prepared his mixtures of sodium citrate in order to conserve the blood he used for transfusions. Capa liked to joke around with the children, creating shadow-plays on the walls, moving his fingers with a white handkerchief. Gerda watched him as he clowned around, and smiled.

The second night, she removed her boots and entered his tent crouched on all fours. When, without further ado, she felt his hand caressing her skin, she knew that what was about to happen was exactly what she had wished for. The masculine taste of his lips, his mouth whispering words that were both sweet and obscene, down below, between her legs, moving slowly, confidently, prolonging each caress to its limit, driving her mad until she'd surrender all her principles. At the last minute she looked up toward the roof of the tent, searching for a place to grab on to but not finding a single handle. She felt more vulnerable than ever. Be free, defend your independence, belong to no one, fall in love so that you can't bear it. Everything was so complicated.