Waiting for Robert Capa

by Susana Fortes

  Gerta was also familiar with this way of thinking. It’s either this or that. Here or there. Dead or alive. When it comes down to it, life is a game of chance. She walked by the bars across from the Petit Pont and saw his back through the window. She knew she’d find him there. He was alone, standing there, motionless, wearing a coat that looked like it was made for someone a lot more corpulent, his arm crossed on top of the counter, his head lowered, lost in thought. Breaking his stillness only to lift a glass to his lips. It was still before eleven in the morning. As sad as a tree from which they had just shot down a robin, she thought to herself, feeling the tears begin to cloud her vision. She cursed herself, as she always did when this happened, though she wasn’t sure for whom she was crying. She was about to start running in the direction she’d come from. But a force greater than her will kept her there, and so she waited for the air to dry her eyes. Then took a deep breath, resorted to all the haughtiness that her father had taught her, and went to find her man with her head held high and in her peculiar manner of walking. Relieved to have found him, but also determined not to yield an inch of her territory before him.

  “It’s so cold,” she said, hunching her shoulders, just standing there next to him with her clenched fists in her pockets.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Where were you?” he asked in a tone somewhat guarded.

  “Around,” she said. And she remained silent.

  That’s how it happened. Without one overly surprising the other, without big declarations or an unnecessary show of emotion. In a certain way, it was natural, as if they had simply resumed a dialogue that had been temporarily interrupted. Each had traveled their stretch of the road.

  “It’d be better if we headed back home, right?” she said again after some time had passed. And they slowly began walking along the sidewalk. He, glued to the walls, trying to walk a straight line. She, discreetly guiding him, so as not to humiliate him.

  They began living together again. Moving out of the Eiffel Tower apartment and into the Hôtel de Blois on Rue Vavin. They could see Le Dôme Café from their window. All they had to do was poke their head out to see who had gathered and go downstairs if the clientele was to their liking. Although the truth was that between the electoral campaign and the reports for Alliance Photo, they no longer had too much time to sit around talking.

  In February, the French authorities conceded special work permits that would assure journalists residency. Gerta believed it was the only way to legalize her status. She obtained her very first press accreditation signed by the head of the ABC Press Service of Amsterdam. In her identity card photo, she appears happy, wearing a leather jacket, her chin slightly raised, her hair blond, short, and falling over her forehead on one side. A proud smile. February 4, 1936. To Gerta, that document was far more than a legal safeguard. It was her passport as a journalist.

  Though she began publishing her first chronicles and selling a few photographs, she never stopped thinking as the manager she had promised to be. They needed the money. And selling pieces solely on political matters wouldn’t have allowed them to pay the rent. So they combined it with other kinds of assignments, small ones, about Parisian life in the budding springtime, when everything was waiting to happen. Street markets and places located on the outskirts of the city were where André most liked to go. It was where he felt the most comfortable. Marginal venues like the Crochet Theater, an open-air performance place run by two unscrupulous talent scouts. People would act out scenes in front of a camera and a live audience. There were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers impersonators who’d sweat their guts out when they danced. Ambitious young People who wanted to conquer the world, and cabaret entertainers on military reserve, broken by life and looking for a way out. André sympathized with them. At the end of every performance, the implacable audience would show their approval or rejection by their applause or booing. As always, he limited himself to photographing emotions. He knew what he was looking for and he always found it. In Paris or Madrid. In Normandy or Vietnam. During Bastille Day celebrations or on the outskirts of the Crochet Theater. His objective was directed at the interior of each face. His camera captured the emotion and held it within. It didn’t matter if it was a tired old man walking off the stage with his head hung low in times of peace or a militia woman with a ladle in her hand serving soup from a pot in the midst of war. It was the same style. To go where no one else was able to go: a couple greeting each other euphorically from the stage; two children sitting on the pavement playing marbles, a house behind them destroyed by the bombings. A dark-eyed ballerina’s Gypsy dance of fire through the air; two elderly British men drinking tea at a shelter on Waterloo Road during a German attack in 1941. The head and the tail of a coin. Emotions.

  It was months of hard work. The days were long and draining, and they arrived at their hotel exhausted. On a few occasions, they fell right to sleep still fully dressed. Lying diagonally over their bed, embracing, one side of her face on his stomach, like two children who had just arrived home from a long trip. Somewhere a war was approaching like a raven wing that would enter through the attic window.

  There were too many debts to pay off, photographic materials were expensive, and newspapers took forever to pay. There was also Cornell. After André’s father died, his younger brother, Cornell, came to live with them in Paris. He was a shy and skinny sixteen-year-old with bony shoulders and a squirrel face. He had arrived with the idea of studying medicine but ended up like all of them, developing photos in the bathroom bidet. Somehow they had to find a new way of making money. Gerta couldn’t stop thinking about it. And then, it suddenly came to her. It was exactly what they needed. A stroke of genius.

  They invented a character, a man named Robert Capa, a supposed American photographer, who was rich, famous, and talented. The dreamer in André loved the name. Sonorous. Short. Easy to pronounce in any language. As well as reminding him of the movie director, Frank Capra, who had made a sweep at the Oscars with It Happened One Night, starring Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable. It was a cinematic pseudonym, cosmopolitan, difficult to determine a specific territory, hard to classify within any ethnic or religious group. The perfect name for a nomad without a country.

  She also changed her identity. My name is Taro. Gerda Taro. The same vowels as her favorite actress, Greta Garbo. The same syllables. The same music. While it could equally be a Spanish name, Swedish, or Balkan. And it was anything but Jewish.

  “What kind of world do we live in if you can’t even choose your own name,” she’d say.

  Once more, it was all a game. An innocent imposture that came from the heart. Divide yourself in two, become someone else, act. Just like she did as a little girl in her house in Stuttgart when she imitated silent film actresses in her attic.

  The actors were clear. All they needed was a good argument for making the movie, and they found it. André would take the photos, Gerda would sell them, and this so-called Robert Capa would bring with him the fame. But because he was supposed to be this highly sought-after professional, Gerda would not sell his negatives for less than 150 francs. Three times the going rate. What her mother had taught her proved to be prophetic once again. As was Dezső Friedmann’s advice. An air of success begets success.

  Sometimes problems would arise, naturally, tiny adjustments to the script, which they managed to cleverly solve. If André wasn’t able to get a good shot at the Popular Front rally or the latest Renault strike, Gerda had him covered.

  “That Capa bastard took off again with some actress to the Côte d’Azur. Damn him.”

  But no game is completely harmless. Or innocent. André fully threw himself into the role of Capa. And he wore Capa like a glove. Working hard to be the bold, triumphant American photographer that she wanted him to be. Although somewhere deep down in his soul there was always a trace of melancholy. He wondered which of the two she was truly in love with. André loved Gerta. Gerda loved Capa. And in the end, Capas, like all idols,
only love themselves.

  His camera was always at all the events, up in the attic at Galeries Lafayette, at the Renault factories, in the stands of the Buffalo arena, or on the sidewalks with more than 100,000 French citizens celebrating the metal workers’ victory in the strike. Whether hidden within the masses, at a political meeting, or in the middle of the street, he searched for new perspectives that would allow him to better understand that time of his life that was slipping through his fingers.

  Days that moved at a speed of a swallow in flight. They were gulping down the present without realizing it. Feeling so much a part of the world they were living in that they began to let their guard down. Nonetheless, there were people who followed their movements step by step: their first coffee of the day at Le Dôme Café; her hand underneath his shirt on a bus from Saint-Denis; love in a hurry during a taxi ride from the Pont Neuf to the Mac-Mahon club; the sun filtering through Gerta’s fingers in the stairwell of Hôtel de Blois, when she covered his face with her hands as he undressed as quickly as he could, a shining look of delirium in his eyes, panting, his mouth searching for hers with urgency, impatience, her fingers struggling tenaciously to unbutton his shirt, his tongue licking the tip of her arrogant chin, as they climbed the stairs toward their third-floor room embracing, pressing up against each other on every landing, out of breath, when finally they were able to stick the key in the lock. An entire network of spies was hovering over them, but love can’t see a thing. It’s blind. Only Chim, with his experienced Talmudic insight, noticed strange coincidences now and again, an excessive repetition of faces in the same places, discreet convolutions that most likely would not bode well for them.

  They, on the other hand, felt confident with their brand-new press credentials and his fabulous persona. They were young, good-looking, unbeatable. As if everything that came before could be erased in one fell swoop. Robert Capa and Gerda Taro at the “Kilometer Zero” of their lives. Could it be possible to imagine a greater dream than this?

  Just as had happened in Spain shortly before, on May 3 the Leftist coalition that formed part of the Popular Front arrived at the Élysée Palace, and Robert Capa was there to photograph every second of the euphoria. It had barely been three months since German troops had effortlessly occupied the Rhineland, going against the Treaty of Versailles. All of France shuddered. The Parisians began to mobilize. Thousands of anonymous citizens took to the streets, and their facial expressions were captured in every single one of his photographs: worried, tense, hopeful as they crammed into the Place de l’Opéra to see the electoral results projected on a big screen. Finally, there was a force strong enough to detain the Fascists’ advancements. Two-thirds of the house seats were held by Socialists and their top candidate, León Blum, their hero who had survived an attempt on his life by the Fascists in February. Red flags flying over the ministries. Through all of Montparnasse’s squares, accordions playing “L’Internationale.”

  By July, Maria Eisner asked Gerda to negotiate a contract with Capa for a report on the twentieth anniversary of the Battle of Verdun, the bloodiest battle of the First World War. The photographs revealed a bleak scenario: vast areas of no-man’s-land covered with charred trees and craters filled with stagnant water. The ceremony was especially emotional. Hundreds of reflectors lit up the military cemetery. Every veteran stood behind a white cross and left a bouquet of flowers over each tomb. In the midst of that silence, a cannon sounded, then the spotlights were turned off and the crowd was left in darkness. There weren’t any speeches, either. Just the voice of a four-year-old boy asking for world peace. His appeal, which sounded over loudspeakers placed in all four corners of the cemetery, gave goose bumps to all who were gathered there that evening.

  It was of no use. Shortly after their return from Verdun, Gerta and André—that is, Gerda and Capa—had plans to meet some friends for dinner to celebrate the salary increase that had been approved by the Popular Front. They were on the balcony at the Grand Monde, where the bartenders prepared the best cocktails in all the Rive Gauche. She was wearing a backless black dress that gave her a certain air of a Hollywood muse; he a beige jacket and tie. A light breeze rustled the trees along the Seine. July 17. Music, laughter, the clinking of glasses, and then suddenly, once again, in the midst of all that happiness, a raven wing.

  From the restaurant’s kitchen, through the tiny speaker of a radio device, the news made its way through: an uprising of the Spanish Legion in Morocco under the command of a man named Francisco Franco, a grim, second-rate general. The Spanish imitation of a Hitler or Mussolini.

  The countdown had begun.

  Chapter Twelve

  • two pairs of pants

  • three shirts

  • underwear

  • socks

  • a towel

  • a comb

  • a bar of soap

  • razor blades

  • sanitary napkins

  • the red notebook

  • a map

  • surgical tape

  • aspirin

  She was forgetting something, but she didn’t know what. Gerda stood in front of her travel bag on top of the bed, placed a finger on her temple to think, and in an instant, she snapped her fingers. Of course. A bilingual Spanish dictionary.

  Spain had become the eye of the world’s great storm. It was the only topic of conversation. Even the surrealists, who were the least interested in politics, embraced the Republican cause. Gathering groups of friends at various homes around town at the last minute, so they could parse the news that was growing more contradictory and alarming by the hour. Military revolts in the Balearic and Canary Islands. Resistance in Asturias. Someone called Queipo de Llano and an uprising in Sevilla, killings and summary executions in Navarra and Valladolid. The imagery that each saw in their heads reminded them immensely of Goya’s Black Paintings. Fiery red and hellish bitumen. That’s why, when the systematic bombings began in Madrid, each shell that thundered would also shake the very foundation of Paris. A warning of the cataclysms that were still to come. The streets were buzzing. They all headed to La Coupole and Café de Flore, desiring to know more than what they were reading in the newspapers … Some breaking news, a reliable account, anything … While the governments of Europe had abandoned the young Spanish Republic, a giant army of men and women had appeared to defend it on their own will and initiative.

  There were writers, metal workers, dockers from the Rhine and the Thames, artists, students, the majority of them without military experience but with a deep conviction that the world’s greatest battle was brewing on the other side of the Pyrenees. There were also journalists and photographers, dozens of international special correspondents. Loads of refugees who had shared a table and cigarettes with Gerda and Capa many nights at Chez Capoulade and had joined the International Brigade … The poet Paul Éluard wrote in L’Humanité:

  One gets used to everything

  except these birds of lead

  except his hatred for all that shines

  except letting them take over.

  Gerda looked out the tiny window. She had never flown on an airplane before. Under the fuselage, the Pyrenees had a faded mauve color to them, like a washed-out shirt, and every hillside appeared to be digging a furrow of shadows as the sun began to set. Lucien Vogel, the editor of Vu magazine, had chartered the flight to Barcelona for a small expedition of journalists contributing to a special Civil War issue he was planning to publish. Pure sky, smooth as an aquarium, crystal-clear light with lime-green-colored parhelia. Gerda was absorbed in that space that would soon be covered in stars. “So magnificent,” she thought out loud. Capa observed her as if they’d just met. She never appeared more beautiful to him than she did at the moment, her neck resting on the leather of her seat, her bony chin, her dreamy eyes savoring an inexplicable hope.

  Sometimes this happened with her, and it caused him to feel left out. He thought he had her, and then suddenly one word or a simple phrase made h
im realize that in reality, he didn’t know what was going through her head at certain times. But he had learned to live with this. It was true that she was faraway, withdrawn. She had returned to Reutlingen when she was five years old, and she was walking back home with her brothers from Jakob’s bakery with a poppy-seed cake and condensed milk in their hands for dinner. Three children in wool sweaters, interlinking arms over shoulders, looking up at the sky, while the stars fell, two by two, three by three … She had never been as close to them as she’d been back then. That proximity caused her to feel a sense of solitude and sadness. As if somewhere in the world a secret melody sounded that only she could hear. The message of the stars.

  You could already see the city lights below, the triangle of Montjuïc getting larger by the minute, the inclined extension of houses, and then the engine delay, when she suddenly felt herself rising up on one side, as if someone had grabbed and pulled her shoulder up. The noise from the engine grew dense, and the five tons of metal began to rock. In the cockpit, the needles of the position indicators began oscillating faster. The fuel pressure decreased. The entire plane shook with furious tremors. Everyone looked at each other without saying a word. We’re going to crash, she thought, but there wasn’t enough time to feel fear or to ask her god to save them. They were level with the hills now, their eardrums aching due to the pressure change, their heart beating a hundred miles a minute, but silent. They were still alive. The tiny gardens that surrounded the Prat Airport began to shake outside their windows, first on one side, then on the other. The pilot, up in the cockpit, with his head lowered, could no longer distinguish between that big mass of sky and the earth. The man was fully concentrated on trying to control the airplane. He couldn’t even see the gyroscope. He tried to avoid the hilltops as best he could, but they were right on top of the plane, and he came to the decision to try and land the plane anywhere he could, even if it risked slamming onto the ground. At five hundred horsepower revolutions per minute, the plane ran through the light path of its own head beams, directly toward the earth. Adonai, Elohim, Yahweh … Gerda didn’t have time for more. Then the red lights of the runway beacon came on and she saw how the plane was trying to lift its nose, and then a wing tilted to one side, slamming against the wall of a shed. The roar was so intense that her ears began to bleed. She saw André gesticulating like a silent film actor. Moving his mouth, screaming something, but she couldn’t hear what he was saying. There was a lot of smoke inside the cabin, and the exhaustion had stiffened her muscles. Soon after, firemen, militia, and a truck with a red cross painted on its canvas arrived … Vague sounds of voices in a language she didn’t understand, confusing murmurs, arms that lifted the wounded. The pilot was taken out on a stretcher. Two reporters were also evacuated with various kinds of fractures; Lucien Vogel himself broke his right arm in three places. But Capa and Gerda were able to exit the craft on their own two feet. A bit stunned and disoriented but unharmed. It would have been better to cross the border through Irún on foot, as Chim had done.