Waiting for Robert Capa

by Susana Fortes

  Knock-knock … someone tapped lightly on the door. It had been a while since she last heard the pounding of the typewriter keys in the room next to hers. It must have been around one in the morning. When Ruth peeked in, she saw Gerta sitting with a notebook on her knees, all wrapped up in a blanket, with her third cigarette of insomnia hanging from the edge of her mouth.

  “You’re still awake?”

  “I was about to go to sleep.” Gerta apologized like a little girl caught doing something wrong.

  “You shouldn’t keep a diary,” said Ruth, pointing to the redcovered notebook that Gerta had placed on top of her nightstand. “You never know into whose hands it may fall.” She was right: this went completely against the basic norms of keeping a low profile.

  “Right…”

  “Then why do you do it?”

  “Don’t know,” Gerta said, shrugging. Then she put out her cigarette in a small, chipped plate. “I’m afraid of forgetting who I am.”

  It was true. We all have a secret fear. A terror that’s intimate, that’s ours, differentiating us from the rest. A unique fear, precise.

  Fear of not recognizing your own face in the mirror, of getting lost on a sleepless night in a foreign city after drinking several glasses of vodka. Fear of others, of being devastated by love or, worse, by loneliness. Fear as extreme consciousness of a reality that you only discover at a given moment, although it’s always been there. Fear of remembering what you did or what you were capable of doing. Fear as an end to innocence, rupturing a state of grace. Fear of the lake house with the tulips, fear of swimming too far from the edge, fear of dark and viscous waters on your skin when there’s no longer a trace of firm earth beneath your feet. Fear with a capital F. F as in Fatal or to Finish Off. Fear of the constant fog of autumn over those remote neighborhoods through which she has to pass on Thursdays, with its deserted plazas and scant faces, a beggar here, a woman pushing a cart full of wood over on the other corner. And the sounds of her own footsteps, their tone soft, quick, and moist … as if they weren’t hers but those of someone following her from a distance, one, two, one, two … that relentless, threatening feeling you carry with you in your neck all the way home, beret tightly in place, hands in pockets, that pressing need to run. Like when she was a little girl and had to cross the alleyway from the bakery to Jakob’s house, holding her breath as she climbed the stairs, two by two, until she rang the doorbell and the light went on, and she was in safe haven. Easy, she’d say to herself while trying to slow down her pace. Take it easy. If she stood still for a moment, the echo would stop, if she started up again, the rhythm would pick up again, repeating itself: one, two, one, two, one, two, one two … Once in a while she turned her head to look and there was nothing. Nothing. Maybe it was all in her head.

  Chapter Six

  She sat for a while, contemplating the page she finished typing. Engrossed in it, unaware of its content but conscious of the porosity of the paper, the impression each character had left. Black ink. Alongside the typewriter, there was a stack of handwritten pages with green blotting paper between them. Gerta twisted the roller, removed the sheet, and began reading it closely: “In the face of Nazism spreading itself throughout Europe, we are left with only one solution: uniting Communists, Socialists, Republicans, and other Leftist parties, into one anti-Fascist coalition that will facilitate the formation of wide-ranging political groupings (…). The alliance of all democratic forces into one Popular Front.”

  “What do you think, Captain Flint?” she said, looking up at the shelf where they set up the trapeze for the bird to do its stunts. Since André had left for Spain, she found herself talking more to the parrot. Another of her tactics for combating loneliness. Just like her return to being her old militant self. She felt the urgent need to help, be useful, serve a purpose. But in what? Not a clue. She tried to find out by going back to the gatherings at Chez Capoulade, which had only grown more popular with time. Woman-echo, Woman-reflection, Woman-mirror. Inside, there was always too much cigarette smoke. Too much noise. Gerta grabbed her glass of vodka, still half-full, and went outside to sit on the edge of the sidewalk and smoke a cigarette. She sat there, hugging her knees, looking up at the patchy sky, a star here, another there, between eave and eave, with a faint orange glow toward the west. She felt good like this, breathing in the aroma of lime trees during spring’s recent debut. The silence of that city appealed to her, with its labyrinth of stoned promenades creeping down to the river. That calm brought her peace. It allowed her to organize her thoughts. She remained like this awhile, until someone placed their hand on her shoulder. It was Erwin Ackerknecht, her old friend from Leipzig.

  “We need someone to type the text to the manifesto in French, English, and German,” he said, taking a seat next to her on the pavement. “The more intellectuals we can gather the better. We have to make this congress a success.” He was referring to the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, which was to be held in Paris in the early fall. Erwin took his time rolling a cigarette between his fingers, then wetting the paper with his lips to seal it. “Aldous Huxley and Forster have already confirmed their attendance,” he added, “as well as Isaac Babel and Boris Pasternak from the USSR. Representing us will be Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Mann, and Robert Musil, from Austria. The Americans still haven’t confirmed … It’s important that this document reaches everyone, Gerta, each one of them, in their own language. Can we count on you for this?”

  “Of course,” she said. She took a sip of her vodka drink, allowing the alcohol to find its way into her veins, passing through her heart and up to her brain. She found it tasted harsh, mixed with the tobacco. Brushing a patch of hair off her forehead, she looked out into the sky. Like just another sentry in the night, Saint-Germaindes-Prés’ thousand-year-old abbey and its Romanesque bell tower stood tall, framed in black.

  In recent weeks, the surrealists’ controversies had shifted away from poetic boundaries to concentrate instead on the reality that was being reported in the media. Their desires grew dim, and the small group from the Left Bank temporarily abandoned the astral heights of Mount Olympus and muses with green-colored eyes, so they could take part in the world’s grand whirlwind. While they awaited further news, a latent conflict persisted between those who accepted the revolutionary party’s plans and those who still aspired to unite the revolution with poetry. It was not a trifling matter. Walking down the boulevard one afternoon, André Breton, on his way to buy tobacco at the shop next to Dôme, bumped into the Russian Stalinist Ilya Ehrenburg, just as the latter was leaving. Neither chose their words carefully. The poet took a deep breath and, on the same impulse, punched Ehrenburg in the nose with a crack that sounded as if a chair had broken. It wasn’t a premeditated act. It simply happened. Caught by surprise, the Russian didn’t have time to react. Weakened by the blow, he fell to his knees, dripping a scandalously red-colored blood over the gray pavement. Afterward, as if they were all possessed, it turned into a messy battle with everyone against everyone. There were insults; some people got up to help the wounded man, while others tried to calm the poet’s fury. They tried to lift the Russian, get him out of there, until someone shouted something about calling the police, and in that moment they all decided to walk away from the boxing match between mastiffs until the next time. A few days later, René Crevel, the poet in charge of trying to make peace between the surrealists and the Communists, committed suicide in his kitchen by opening the gas valve.

  “It’s always necessary to say good-bye,” he wrote, having lost hope. “Tomorrow, you will return to the fog of your origins. To a city, red and gray, your colorless room, its silver walls, and with windows that open directly onto the clouds to which you are sister. To search for the shadow of your face throughout the sky, the gestures of your fingers…”

  That was the state of things when Gerta found herself obliged to choose between two options she didn’t like. It was no secret how dissidents in the Soviet Union wer
e repressed, but in that small Montparnasse community, the sacred dwelling of the gods, many were unsure whether to denounce Stalin’s abuses or keep them quiet in order to preserve the unified band of anti-Fascists.

  She thought for a while, as if floating over an abyss, with the manifesto in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She wasn’t reading the words, just smoking and looking at the white fabric covering the sofa, and the shelf with the clay figurines that Ruth bought from a peddler. Despite all their efforts to convert that place into a home, it never stopped being a temporary camp: the taped-up glass on the kitchen doors, a map of Europe in the living room, the hallways lined with stacks of books on the floor, a small bottle with lilacs in the window, random photographs tacked onto the wall … André, with the sleeves of his blazer rolled up, waving good-bye from the Gare de l’Est. She missed him, of course she did. But it wasn’t something irreparable; more like a gentle sensation untangling itself imperceptibly. Without a loud roar, but with a kind of familiarity. Nothing serious. She had opened up the window and propped her elbows on the windowsill when a breeze came her way, refreshing her skin and memory: mornings spent running around the neighborhood with the Leica; André’s teachings, his way of installing himself in time without ever looking at a watch, as if it was up to everyone else to adapt to his rhythm; the day he arrived with Captain Flint on his shoulder; the false negligence with which he kept his developing liquids on the top shelf of the bathroom; his way of always showing up at the last minute with a bottle of wine under his coat and a basket of trout, fresh off the boat; the way he laughed while turning on the kitchen stove, while Chim spread out the tablecloth and Ruth removed the plates and glasses from the cupboard and arranged the silverware on the table in pure gala style. The quick carelessness in all his gestures. His arrogance at times, fused with a peculiar aptitude to be what he didn’t seem to be and to appear as he wasn’t. Behind which mask was he hiding? Which was he? The happy bohemian and seducer or the lonely man who could sometimes fall into silence on the other side of a collapsing bridge? “I’m nothing, nothing.” Gerta remembered how he told her this near the edge of the Seine. He used his fragility to hide his pride. Perhaps all his charm was rooted in his ability to pretend: in the shyness he instinctively hid his courage within, his way of smiling, or shrugging his shoulders, as if nothing was wrong, when in reality he was furious. So many contradictions: his blazer hanging open, those strong hands, his worldly air, and that rare ingenuity of an obedient child when he allowed someone to counsel him on his wardrobe. But that costume game brought results. If it wasn’t for that respectable new image that wearing a jacket and tie gave him, Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung magazine would never have given him that assignment he was now on in Spain. At first he was hesitant about accepting the offer, because the magazine, like all German publications, found itself part of Goebbels’s iron-fisted propaganda machine. But he wasn’t exactly in a position to be able to choose or reject his projects. All he was asked to do was interview the Basque boxer Paulino Uzcudun, scheduled to fight the German heavyweight champion Max Schmeling in an upcoming match in Berlin.

  André’s fascination with Spain was instantaneous. There were days when he returned to his pensión, and as big as he was, he’d throw himself on the bed listening to La Niña de Marchena or to Pepita Ramos, and it reminded him of home. The country reminded him a great deal of Hungary, those rowdy streets, the tavern scene with its strings of garlic hanging from the ceilings, wineskins filled with red wine, stages for flamenco … The Gypsy within him did not hold back. He joined right in, taking portraits of those around him with such a penetrating intensity it was as if he were trying to rob them of their souls. When he was finished with his sports assignment in San Sebastián, he continued onto Madrid to cover the huge protest on April 14, the fourth anniversary of the Republic’s proclamation. There was a charge in the air, and André could feel the tension in the streets. How they hated the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA), the right-wing coalition that, less than a year ago, government-led, had launched an attack on the miners rebellion in Asturias. The wounds were still fresh, but the political issue did not stop the Spaniards from celebrating their holidays and religious festivals as they wished. Sevilla’s Holy Week, for instance, where André had arrived by train, along with a thousand other visitors, to soak up the imagery: women with mantillas and pinned carnations cheering on the passage of Jesús del Gran Poder, singing songs of devotion to all the passing brotherhoods, the Nazarenos dressed as Ku Klux Klan, zigzagging through the narrow streets and the firecracker smoke until dawn. He had never imagined a festival where the sacred and the profane were so intertwined. Observing it all objectively, with a look that still hadn’t been fully adjusted, still a bit raw and superficial but forming a new layer of skin to it all: dancers in frilly dresses stomping furiously in the April wind, young men on horseback, Premier Alejandro Lerroux touring the city in a carriage whose horses were adorned à la Andalucia, fun-loving drunks, tourists, cats perched on undulating tin-plated rooftops. An old man in his doorway sharpening a knife, next to him a small bundle covered in cloth with an opening on one side revealing the dark-skinned little face of a sleeping Gypsy girl. The war was about to begin.

  “You have to experience this country,” he wrote Gerta in a letter, not knowing that in a short while she’d be traveling through it, under fire from antiaircraft weaponry, still alive within the dead lights of the cities. How strange life can be. But André couldn’t have known this as he described his impressions of the trip in an awkward German, from the American Bar at the Hotel Cristina, with a three-day-old beard, shirtless, and moneyless, after having spent the entire night drinking. “Sometimes I wish you were here” was how he finished the letter.

  That he tempted everyone around him was part of his charm, as was his lack of discipline, his way of appearing self-centered and slightly conceited. A touch of womanizer in him. This, Gerta could not ignore.

  Sometimes … she repeated to herself, rereading the letter. What an imbecile.

  Chapter Seven

  She remained standing in front of her door for a while, house key in hand. The door’s strike plate had been forced and little bits of wood were scattered on the floor. Before she had time to think, she noticed how the blood throbbed in her left temple, a vague, discomforting feeling similar to sensing footsteps behind her while walking home. Her entire body tensed up like an arc, the instinctive precaution of the hare who can smell its hunter. She had imagined this scenario so many times in her head that she no longer recognized it. It was seared into her memory the moment she first stepped foot into that jail cell in Wächterstrasse. There was a muffled pounding in her eardrums, consistent, like waves. She had experienced something similar at the lake, several meters below the water. When you swim under water, you can even hear the blood run through your veins, though not a single sound from the outside world can reach you. If someone were to have called her name in that moment, she would not have been able to hear them. Nor the sound of a gunshot, perhaps.

  Instinctively, she held on to the camera bag resting over her stomach and opened the door slowly with her foot.

  “Ruth?” she called out. “Are you there?”

  As she entered the hallway, her imagination began registering the chain of events bit by bit: the broken lock, torn-up pieces of paper, a load of gutted books all over the hallway, the photographs torn from the wall, the little glass vase in smithereens, overturned drawers, a bead from her amber necklace rolling across the floor, those equilateral crosses painted on the wall. “Filthy Jews.” The same old story … She detected a strange odor in the house. The sound of boiling water coming from the kitchen. A second before she uncovered the pot, she already knew what she’d find. Captain Flint floating on the surface with a broken neck and his tongue sticking out. She didn’t scream. All she did was turn off the flame and close her eyes. A pang of shame and humiliation galloped up her throat, causing her to retch. She needed
a cigarette and sat down on the floor to smoke it, her back against the wall under the swastika. Knees bent, her forehead in her hand. Suddenly it became clear that this was never going to end, that it would always be like this. Either black or white. Or this or that. Who you’re with, in what you believe, who you hate. Who will kill you. In her head, she could hear the faint echo of a handsaw: “Je te connais, je sais qui tu es.”

  All the metaphysical anguish she experienced during those gatherings at Chez Capoulade were now transformed into pure hate. Specific. Clear. It had nothing to do with ideology but rather with instinct, along with the need to break open somebody’s head. To fight knowing precisely why you’re fighting, to revive the reflexes, the basic elements of defense and self-preservation, tense the muscles, learn how to load and unload a weapon, improve your aim…

  “It’s either you or them, Little Trout.” She recalled Karl’s voice on the rooftop, trying to instruct her in case the moment should ever come.

  The memory stirred up something inside. She missed her brothers. She noted a soft tickling on her side before the tears began clouding her vision.

  Damn it, she said. Stupid damn Jew. Are you going to give those sons of bitches the satisfaction of bringing you to tears? She slammed the floor with her fist, brusquely, with a desperate rage aimed more at herself than anybody else, and on the same impulse she stood up, took the camera out of its bag—placing her eye on the viewfinder, adjusting the focus, then the diaphragm, first framing the parrot’s limp head, closing in on its tongue—and began to shoot. Hardened look, her nostrils dilated, her hands steady, white knuckles each time she pressed the shutter. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click…

  When Ruth and Chim arrived, they didn’t need to ask what had happened. They found her leaning on the kitchen table, her shirtsleeves rolled up above her elbows, frowning, concentrated on gluing back together the books that could still be salvaged. She was pale and wore a tense expression, obstinate, disciplined, as if that manual task was the only thing that could help her control her emotions. She didn’t move when they arrived or say a word. Chim weaved through the debris so he could hug her, but she put the brakes on him with her hand. She didn’t need comforting from anyone.