Waiting for Robert Capa (20 page)

Gerda had already heard it from that Camila woman, a mindblower of a Gypsy fortune-teller, who was part-deaf, straightbacked, and had arrived from Cádiz.

“
Niña
, loving a man is more work than blowing up a train.”

The woman knew what she was talking about. She had blown up a few of her own. She was in her fifties, sporting a black skirt and long, dark, straight hair that was parted in the middle and held up in the back with a gold comb. A woman as hardy as a mule and with hands like granite. She would tie her little ones with cords to her waist, and when they reached the point of exhaustion and started to complain, saying they couldn't go on walking, she'd whip them with the ends of the cords, like goats, forcing them to keep going. Afterward, when she noticed that they really couldn't go on, she'd carry them in pairs up the side of the mountain, climbing up and down to fetch them as many times as was necessary. Capa would always tease her when he saw her drinking from a wineskin like a road worker. They got along well despite her thick Andalusian accent and her being hard of hearing. The Gypsy soul.

Feeling playful, Gerda extended her hand out in front of her. The woman opened it, passing her thumb carefully over her palm. She held it in her hands for a while, then shut it without saying a word. They sat drinking coffee beside a campfire. Gerda and Capa had planned to leave very early the next morning and wanted to say good-bye. They'd decided to continue to the bridge in Arganda where violent combat had recently broken out.

“So what did you see, Camila?” asked Capa, with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

“Your girl's a reasonable one, Hungarian, but watch out for her bites.” Capa's neck still showed signs of their recent love tussle, an eggplant-colored hickey just below his left ear.

“She should have been a vampire,” he joked, flapping his arms like a bat in flight, “a vampiress, probably the most dangerous of their kind.
Tadarida Teniotis
.”

“She'll be a good wife if you can get her to stay on course.”

“Por los cojones!”
said Gerda in perfect Spanish.

They laughed at her comeback. It was amusing to them to hear a charming foreigner swear like a mule-driver but with such elegance. She could strip away the original meaning of any rude interjection and provoke you with it. It was like watching an Angora cat hunt down a mouse with the street smarts of a stray.

“And what do you see in her future?” asked Ted, who had already experienced just how precise the Gypsy's fortunes could be. He was sitting next to Gerda with his knees bent and his head propped on top. Though being in Gerda's presence sometimes caused him to blush, he adored Capa like an older brother. Not so long ago, in Paris, on a gloomy, cloudy day, the two of them, very drunk, comforted one another with alcohol and conversation, while one of the harshest sunrises of their lives awaited them. The Canadian was frank and loyal. He would have preferred to kill himself rather than betray either of them. Deep down, the war was tearing at the delicate weaving of his affections. His question was of value, a guardian angel's question based on the many things that perhaps he'd foreseen or intuited were about to happen. “You're not going to offer us anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Please say whatever you wish,” said Gerda, attempting to encourage her while showing her respect. “I don't believe in these things.”

“So what do you believe in, girl?”

“In my ideas.”

“Ideas, ideas…”
that
Camila woman repeated to herself as if she were praying.

“You've left us intrigued,” protested Capa, winking at the Gypsy. He was sure she was trying to withhold a certain disillusion of the heart.

“Go on,” insisted Gerda, “tell me what you saw from reading my palm. I'd like to know.”

“Nothing.” This time her tone was sharp and her face serious; shaking her head as she was getting up to leave. “I saw nothing, little one.”

They left at the dawn of a cloudy day, surrounded by whitewashed puddles, a sky of indecisive tones that said its good-byes with the sadness of a hotel room, still blurry from last night's cigarettes and to which one knows they'll never return.

The trip might have been peaceful if it wasn't for the potholes and the constant bumps to the head. Along their entire journey west, they came upon several rows of military trucks carrying old Packards, combat cars, and cargo under worn-out canvases. The highway grew more chaotic as they approached the front of Jarama. On both sides of the gravel path, you could see columns of smoke floating between the earth and the sky. The rebels had attempted to block the Madrid-Valencia highway and leave the capital without its main supply route. But the Republicans fought tooth and nail along the Arganda Bridge and were able to salvage the roadway. By nightfall, Gerda and Capa had arrived at the International Brigades' headquarters in Morata de Tajuña, a plain that was surrounded by wheat fields that would soon be reaped by shrapnel. But at that hour, the camp was quiet.

There are voices that can rustle the trees in the same way a rifle can when it's fired. On the night they arrived, the voice Gerda and Capa heard was precisely one of those.

Ol' Man River

That Ol' Man River…

More than two hundred people were sitting in a large circle with their legs crossed Indian-style. Practically ceremonial.

“Shit, it's the black man…” exclaimed Capa, completely moved by whom he saw. It was Paul Robeson, a six-foot-three son of an escaped slave from New Jersey, with a football player's broad, sloping chest that allowed his grand voice to resonate like a pipe organ. He was standing in the middle of that plain surrounded by an audience of shadows that broke out into a standing ovation when the grandson of slaves concluded with a last deep note that elevated itself over all borders.

Hundreds of faces that remained still and tense, overcome with emotion, holding their breaths, listening to the spiritual black man who seemed as if he'd been plucked right out of the cotton fields along the Mississippi. Gerda could feel that music, not hitting her over the head the way the Psalms could, but in her gut. There was something profoundly Biblical in that solitary music. The darkness, the smell of the fields, the gathering of people from so many places. All of them so young, practically kids, like Pati Edney, an eighteen-year-old British woman who fell in love riding on an ambulance's running board on the front at Aragón. Or John Cornford, a twenty-year-old Englishman with a leather jacket and a boyish smile, who smoked one filterless cigarette after another, and who would have been an excellent poet if a bullet hadn't exploded in his lungs in the mountains of Córdoba. Gerda and Capa had met up with some of them in Leciñena or in Madrid, when the Fascists arrived at the edge of the Manzanares and they joined General Lukacs's brigade. Gerda could still see the writer Gustav Regler's face as he was being carried out of the rubble on a stretcher by two militiamen after an attack. He was a very tall German fellow whom Capa had gotten drunk with during the time of the battles in Casa de Campo, and who had confessed he'd fallen head over heels in love with a married woman much older than he. The American Ben Leider, in his aviator glasses, posing with his entire squadron in front of the Policarpov I-15 in which he had defended Madrid until the aircraft was eventually shot down. Every time a biplane fighter took off on a mission, they'd pass over his grave in Colmenar de Oreja cemetery and say hello from the air. Frida Knight, who fed the pigeons bread crumbs in the Plaza Santa Ana and would become furious when Fascists' howitzers blew them away. Ludwig Renn, his left arm covered in pink scars from machine-gun wounds. Through the lenses of her round spectacles, the cruelty of the fight and the disconcerted look in Simone Weil's eyes. Charles Donnelly, with a carpenter's pencil tucked behind his ear, who liked writing poems by candlelight in the plains of Morata. Alex McDade, clever and blunt, who could make everyone laugh with his typically Scottish humor, sitting on the sidewalk eating tuna from a can while Franco's planes bombed every inch of the Gran Vía. Americans from the Lincoln Brigade, Bulgarians and Yugoslavians from the Dimitrov Battalion, Poles from the Dombrowski Battalion, Germans from the Thälmann Brigade and from the Edgar André Battalion, French from the Marseillaise Battalion, Cubans, Russians … Gerda thought she might run into Georg somewhere. She knew from his last letter that he'd spent the past three months fighting in Spain, but chance did not choose to lower the bridge for them to meet.

“I love black music,” said Gerda.

Paul Robeson's singing had enlivened the group with such a charge of emotion that they raised their fists to their temples and shouted: “Cheers! Cheers!…”

Afterward, they walked toward their tents, the plain becoming more visible as their eyes grew accustomed to the dark, a breeze from the wheat fields causing the tents to undulate slightly, a night that was cold and flat, that could purify all sounds and smells. And as if it had been covered by a bell jar, the murmur of the camp suddenly faded away. Holding hands, a special kind of harmony between them, almost geological, nocturnal. Capa found those lands beautiful enough to die there.

“If I offered you my life, you would reject it, right?” It was neither a complaint nor a reproach.

She didn't answer.

Capa had never loved anyone as much, and it made him think about his own mortality. The more she demanded her independence, the more unattainable she appeared, and the more his need to have her grew. For the first time in his life, he felt possessive.

He hated her self-sufficiency, or when she chose to sleep alone. It was impossible to get her out of his head; he was thinking obsessively about every centimeter of her skin, her voice, the things she'd say when she argued over the slightest matter, the way she crawled into his tent and pressed up against his body, pouting softly like a saint or an Andalusian virgin.

Turning toward her, in order to touch her wrist gently, he said:

“Marry me.”

Gerda did a double take when she heard his words. It wasn't confusion. Just that she was a bit moved. Months ago, she would have happily accepted.

Facing him, she looked directly and gently into his eyes, holding back the consolation of a caress, as if she doubted him or owed him an explanation. She felt the powerlessness of all that she could not say, searching for any word that could save her. She remembered an old Polish proverb: “If you clip a lark's wings, it will be yours. But then it couldn't fly. And what you love about it is its flight.” She preferred not to say anything. Lowering her eyes so that her pity wouldn't humiliate him more, she let go of him and continued to walk toward the tent, aware of the powerful density of the earth below her feet, with a deep shame inside tearing at her soul, thinking about how difficult it would be to love someone else as much as she loved that Hungarian who had looked at her with resignation, as if he could read her thoughts, a smile with hints of sadness and irony to it, knowing that it was the pact they had made. Here, there, nowhere…

T
he old manor was still holding up after months of occupation. It was located on 7 Calle del Marqués del Duero and had been expropriated from the Marqués Heredia Spínola's heirs in order to be converted into the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals' main office. The building creaked at all of its seams; it was ugly, overly stately, decorated with funereal furniture and thick velvet curtains, but it harbored an entire hidden city within. The Alliance's salons were constantly overflowing with actors, journalists, artists, writers, both foreign and Spanish, and, most important, poets, such as Rafael Alberti, who served as its secretary. In the months between winter and spring that year, several figures passed through: Pablo Neruda, who still remained Chile's consul in Madrid; César Vallejo, a Peruvian open-form poet; Luis Cernuda, always elegant with his freshly groomed hair and trimmed beard; León Felipe, who kept count of the number of dead from aerial bombings; Miguel Hernández, the pastor poet from Orihuela, his face blackened by the sun upon returning from the front with his shaved head and peasant's gait, barely lifting his feet off the ground.

In the dim light of the hallways, Gerda passed eighteenth-century murals on the walls in silence. When she arrived at her room on the second floor, she opened the door to a walnut wardrobe and discovered a collection of period pieces, just hanging there on the rod, which had belonged to several generations of Spanish nobles: austere frock coats, lace gowns, admiral uniforms with blue fabric and gold buttons, muslin dresses that smelled of camphor.

“It's fantastic!” she said to Capa, her eyes big, like a little girl's.

Around four or five of them all had the same idea. They removed those dusty relics from the wardrobe and slid them down the polished mahogany banister, releasing a flurry of moths. Shortly after, the main hall of mirrors had become an improvised theater, with everyone in their costumes interpreting the part they'd been given to play. Capa was dressed as an academic, in a frock coat and dress shirt with lace cuffs. Gerda swayed her hips beneath a red ruffled dress and a Spanish mantilla. Alberti wrapped himself in a white sheet and placed escarole on his head as his laurel crown. The photographer Walter Reuter smoked his pipe in a lieutenant's Cuirassier uniform. The poster designer José Renau posed as a bishop, with his hairy legs showing beneath his robe. Rafael Dieste acted as the evening's master of ceremonies, pulling all the strings. They were so completely engrossed in a childlike battle, armed with nutcrackers and paper balls, that when the nightly air-raid siren sounded, it caught them all by surprise. Everywhere they went, they were surrounded by death. This was their way of defending themselves from the war.

The entire city was a huge trench of barricaded streets filled with bomb craters. One wasn't allowed to walk down Calle de Alcalá, Calle de Goya, Calle Mayor, or Gran Vía. And on streets like Calle de Recoletos or Calle de Serrano, which ran north-south, one had to follow the arrows on the sidewalks pointing east. People were also warned not to cross plazas from their opposite ends but to travel around them, staying close to the doorways in case they needed to run inside for cover. Rules that were adopted by General Miaja when he stood in front of Madrid's Defense Council. That were stuck onto a bulletin board beside the entrance to the Alliance for everyone to see. Although several weeks had passed since the city had begun its evacuation to Valencia, its problems with provisions supplies still persisted, and the
Madrileños
had to stand in long lines for rations and groceries. But at the theaters and movie houses, it was business as usual. The Rialto, Bilbao, Capitol, the Avenida … A city under attack could not lose hope. They all went to see
China Seas
at the Bilbao, without knowing that the worst was waiting for them on Calle de Fuencarral on their way out. But after the typhoons, Malaysian pirates, the coolies, and the faraway gunfire of that celluloid China, the real war was not as impressive. Jean Harlow was somewhere near a yellow river of muck, and her only hope was the distant sound of a horn from a mysterious ship. Dreams.