Waiting for Robert Capa

by Susana Fortes

  When you leave a bad port behind and you finally touch the ground, it’s good to curse, spit out a blasphemy with gusto, send the God of Sinai to hell with his damn Tablets of the Law and his fucking proverbial bullshit. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck … was the first thing André did. One feels a lot better afterward.

  “Were you frightened?” he asked, passing her a sip of whiskey directly from the bottle that had been offered to them. They were headed to Barcelona in a car that was being driven by a militiaman in a blue uniform with military suspenders crossed over his chest and two cartridges on his belt.

  “No,” she said, without intending to boast. And she wasn’t trying to appear brave; it’s just she didn’t have time. Fear needs a rested conscience. It wasn’t a foreign feeling to her. She knew all its symptoms, how it would take hold of her imagination when she had hours ahead of her to calculate all the terrifying possibilities one by one. She had experienced it in Leipzig hundreds of times, in Berlin, in Paris. Feeling it each time she remembered her family or had no idea where she was. But what she sensed had happened to her on the plane was something different. Something immediate and clean. A kind of vertigo that was useless to rebel against.

  Capa lit a cigarette and shook his head, softly trying to warn her, his expression serious, his tone paternalistic.

  “Fear isn’t a bad travel companion,” he said, unaware that he was giving her the best advice you could give someone in a war. “Sometimes, it saves your life.”

  Barcelona was no longer the bourgeois and stately city Capa had visited many years ago during his first trip to Spain in the spring of 1935. The anarchist union of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) had built its provisional camp right on Vía Layetana, while many churches had become garages or warehouses, and the parish churches had been moved to union offices. The main banks and grand hotels had been taken over by the workers. The Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), with its Trotskyist tendencies, was based at the Hotel Falcon, close to the Plaça de Catalunya, while the Ritz was now a popular dining hall with a sign at its entrance that read: UGT—HOTEL GASTRÓNOMICO NÚMERO I—CNT.

  The commissioner of propaganda for the Generalitat de Catalunya, Jaume Miravitlles, was a tanned, affable man in his thirties, who provided them with a boardinghouse to stay in along La Rambla and the press passes necessary for photographing the city.

  After the accident, the elation they felt being alive translated itself into their body language. It was as if they were celebrating every minute of being together in light of what could come. It showed in the way they made love, holding on to each other tightly, because one day in the near future one of them or both of them could die, and then there would be nothing, not a damn straw to clutch at. The amusing foreshortening of her lying across the bed with his pajamas on, tender and half-asleep. The good morning fights they had still half-asleep, over a sponge or because they lived together inside a small rectangle of a mirror. He, with half his face full of foam, trying to shave over her shoulder. She, trying to nudge him out with her elbows so she could put on her lipstick. Gerda’s strange green eyes looking at him mockingly, halfway between coquettish and innocent.

  The first few days, they walked the streets fascinated, among a multitude of armed men, children playing within the sandbags of the barricades, the militia dressed in blue uniforms with straps across their chests, from the CNT, the POUM, the PSUC. Female soldiers with black eyes and the tawny leonine manes, a newspaper in one hand and a Mauser in the other. Images that broke the traditional female codes of conduct; those women were another ilk. They weren’t the type to hide their heads under the pillow when the coyote howled but would lean out the window and shoot, scaring away the Fascists in one clean shot. The French and British magazines went head-to-head to feature them on their covers, not only for their courage but because they imagined these women to be an iconographic goldmine. “The Glamour of War,” Capa declared with a wry grin, while a confiscated car with the acronym of the UHP painted onto its doors cruised down the Paseo de Gracia at full speed toward Capitania.

  In just a few days, they were moving around that town as if they’d been raised in the neighborhood of Gracia. They combed the city bit by bit, living off every scrap of emotion, trying to interpret the world with their cameras. However, all of the photos were copyrighted by “Capa,” and in the beginning it was especially easy to distinguish whose work it was. He worked with a quick-shot Leica that could easily get up close to his subject. His frames tended to be tighter than hers, but they almost always included other elements that gave them a special life. Gerda used a Rolleiflex that she hung over her chest and that was slower. She took her time preparing a frame. From a technical point of view, her photographs were better executed but more conventional. She lacked spontaneity. As a beginner, she still wasn’t sure of herself. But she had the intuition to identify irreproducible moments. A couple sits in the sun. The man is wearing the militia’s hat and blue uniform and is holding a rifle that’s resting on the ground. The woman is very blond and wears a black dress. They are sharing a big laugh. Something about the couple drew Gerda’s attention. Perhaps it was because they looked like her and Capa. Similar age, certain physical characteristics that were interchangeable, the same intimacy, that air of coconspirators. She focused. Positioning herself in contrast to the light, she searched for a frontal frame. Their two silhouettes cropped against a background of trees. Click. At first glance, it was a happy photograph, though there was a tragic halo over it, something vaguely premonitory about it.

  But that wasn’t anything close to real war. Below a stainedglass ceiling, thousands of soldiers thronged the Francia Station, prepared to head off to the Aragón Front, while the Union Radio’s microphones continuously aired recruitment calls. Gerda and Capa photographed hundreds of young men saying good-bye to their girlfriends, grown men hugging their little ones, upright ladies urging them to hurry while helping them tuck their shirts into their pants correctly. There weren’t any tears or Andromaches on that platform. Below the transversing morning light, there was only a dense railway vapor. Train cars with their doors open, filled with volunteers whose backs were covered with slogans written in white paint, such as BETTER DEAD THAN TYRANT LED. Young people full of vitality, sticking their heads out the window with their fists in the air. They had no idea what was waiting for them. The majority never saw Barcelona again.

  In the Port of Cádiz, a freighter had just docked with the first shipment of Nazi ground troops and aircraft on Spanish soil.

  Chapter Thirteen

  A narrow highway. The light from the sun staining the roof of the car. A lit cigarette, an elbow resting over a rolleddown window. Capa was driving with caution, due to all the curves and consecutive checkpoints, Gerda leaning back in her seat, the arid wind of the olive groves blowing through her hair. She was whistling the tune of a song that could be heard everywhere in those days.

  I climbed up a green pine tree

  To see if … and I saw

  To see if … and I saw.

  And I only saw an armored train

  Its guns … blasting away…

  Its guns … blasting away.

  Come on shout, shout!

  The engine hisses

  As Franco … passes by

  As Franco … passes by

  Riding in an official press vehicle, Gerda and Capa traveled along the same highway that the motorized columns were using to get to the front. Her knee was on the gearbox, bumping up against it every time they hit a pothole. She enjoyed the closeness they had in that car while traveling over a land they hardly knew and didn’t love yet. Along the way, they came upon several trucks with the flying red-and-black flags of the CNT. They’d rumble every now and again, like faraway thunder or the roar of a missile.

  They had set up the front in Huesca. Everything moved at such a slow pace that the militia, after positioning their machine guns into place, still had enough time to help the local farmers in the surroundin
g areas with their crops and threshing wheat. Gerda would walk silently through the yellow fields with mountains of straw on the edges of their paths, photographing all the agricultural hard work around her as part of the overall defense of the Republic. But so much tranquility drove Capa crazy. The only thing he wanted to do was photograph a Republican victory already.

  They traveled several miles toward the southeast, where they’d been told the Thälmann Battalion was operating from. For the most part, it was made up of volunteers from the Communist Party, who were mostly Polish and German Jews. The battalion was a creation of the International Brigades. A majority had traveled to Barcelona in order to participate in the Workers’ Olympiad, an alternative to the Berlin Olympics, but the Olympiad had been suspended because of the war. Gerda and Capa thought it was a good opportunity for someone who spoke their language to bring them up to date on how things were going. The Spanish they spoke was limited to a few key phrases, and they tried following conversations without understanding a damn thing. But at least they were entertained by all the gesticulations and verbal outbursts. Salud. Camarada. Por los cojones. That was their basic vocabulary for getting by in that godforsaken land.

  When they arrived to Leciñena, some twelve miles from Zaragoza, they came upon a group of combatants in helmets and espadrilles reading Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung. The town was the center of operations for the POUM column, and one that George Orwell would pass through the following winter, before he was injured. It was a relief to be able to exchange impressions regarding the latest encouraging news from Madrid with them: an armed pueblo, the people, marching through Alcalá and Toledo, and resistance in Asturias … But it also seemed they weren’t going to find the action they were seeking there, either. The settlement had been achieved through a nighttime surprise attack, but since then, very few confrontations had been registered, and the soldiers limited themselves to awaiting word, bored and having to endure a scorching heat that tried the nerves of even the most resistant. Capa couldn’t take anymore. Those dead hours weighed on his shoulders like lead.

  Using his foot, he pushed open a garage-type door that led down a hallway to an old grocery warehouse converted into a makeshift tavern. Below the strings of garlic hanging from the ceilings, and in front of a billboard for Heno de Pravia soap, every afternoon the sweaty, bare-chested soldiers would kill time skillfully emptying wineskins in the Aragón tradition.

  “We don’t serve alcohol to women,” said the bartender—a short and stout man in civilian dress—when he saw Gerda, with her elbows on the bar, casually smoking Gauloises Bleues.

  “Can’t you see she’s a foreigner?” blurted out one of the seated POUM men from a nearby table. “If the Fascists can shoot her, then that means you can serve her red wine as well, coño.”

  But before she and Capa were able to realize the motive behind the argument, the bartender had already climbed up onto a platform to fill a wineskin.

  “International press,” said the corporal who had joined them, introducing himself to the pair.

  Before such a show of foreign allegiance and professionalism, the poor bartender didn’t know how to apologize. He dried his hands on his apron and planted a bottle of red wine along with two chipped cups on the bar for them.

  “You’ll have to pardon me, but the glasses end up breaking and since we’re no longer manufacturing them…”

  “It doesn’t matter, Paco. Don’t get overly refined on us now,” said the corporal. “They’re trustworthy.”

  However, the argument was still lingering in the air. Despite images of militiawomen with rifles sitting in cafés, the Communists were in favor of relegating their participation to the rearguard, and for the Republicans, the debate not only poisoned their words but divided them. In fact, only a month later, in the fall, the minister of war, Largo Caballero, prohibited militiawomen from being on the frontlines and would take away their uniforms if they disobeyed.

  “The bartender is right,” declared a volunteer from the Thälmann Battalion in German. He was a thin Communist who wore glasses and was an expert in logistics. “You bring your women to this war as if you were here on vacation. You have to be fucking kidding, getting them involved in this mess. If they want to help, they should work as nurses at the hospitals, like the colored women in North America, where there are plenty of bandages that need trimming.”

  It was just what Capa needed to release all that tension built up during his idle time. He turned to the man with the look of one possessed son of a bitch, his muscles tense, his arms slightly raised off his body.

  “And who gave you the right to butt into this conversation?” he asked. “Did someone ask your opinion? Did I perhaps mention your girlfriend waiting for you back home playing the piano and making strawberry jam? Well, now you know some women prefer to take photographs so the entire world can see what’s happening in this country, and if you don’t like it, you’re screwed.”

  “We’ll see who’s screwed when they put a bullet in her or when they fire at you because of her. You’ll see, in certain situations women are no more than trouble.”

  Feeling a bit uncomfortable, Gerda followed the argument without wanting to intervene. If there were men still living in the last century, it was them, even if they were Communists.

  “If they put a bullet in me, it’s my problem,” said Capa, staring at him with a very serious look on his face. “No one else’s. She’s risking herself like I am. So, she goes where I go. And if her presence bothers you, you already know where the door is.” Capa pointed to the jute cloth hanging over the archway leading to the back room.

  Gerda smiled at him. It was moments like this that made her love that proud Hungarian with his devilish character and lack of manners. Maybe on some occasions he was overly egotistical and ambitious, getting hotheaded over stupidities, like anyone else. But you could trust him and he had a burning temper that caused him to behave with more audacity than most men would in the same situation. Noble, somewhat cocky, and painfully handsome, she thought to herself, trying to secure him in her memory just as he was in that moment: his shirt open, his facial expression harsh, his fists clenched in his pockets, swearing at the German and the mother who gave birth to him.

  “Beauty draws more than five yoke of oxen,” said a local civilian, who, despite not speaking languages, and as drunk as he was, understood immediately what the fight was about.

  The German quietly placed his glasses in a cup and polished off his drink in one gulp. Hopefully those Nationalists will give you hell and you’ll have to swallow your words, you idiot, was what he was probably thinking, though he didn’t say a word.

  However, it was he who’d have to swallow them, one by one, only a short while after. On the twenty-fifth of the month, just a few miles away, in Tardienta, shrapnel would fly into his leg when his battalion tried blowing up a Francoist train carrying ammunition and a young English volunteer named Felicia Browne would rescue him off the train tracks. She dragged him by the shoulders for twenty-five yards until she could find a safe shelter for him behind an embankment, risking her life during the Fascist crossfire. But when she turned back to rejoin her comrades, one of Franco’s legionnaires blew her breastbone to pieces with a submachine gun. Thirty-two years old. Painter. Woman. The first British casualty. There are men who need indisputable evidence to fall from their high horse. Others never can.

  He had a point, thought Capa. The incident only helped reinforce something he had already learned about the country on his first visit. When you’re dealing with Spaniards, their rules of conduct are clear and impossible to confuse. You have to offer the men tobacco and leave the women alone.

  What could those arid plains that transmitted a suffocating sense of solitude mean for a pair of young photographers like them? Especially when contemplated beneath a motionless sky and through a camera’s viewfinder? At that point, they probably still weren’t sure what territory they had set foot on, but had begun to feel an affection toward it a
nyway. Mostly inspired by the admiration they had for its people’s austere order, their brash sense of humor, and the pueblo’s fierce determination to keep their feet firm on the ground. They both wanted to become a part of that scenery. And like that river that traverses countless countries along its course, they slowly began letting go of their origins. Wanting to remove the shackles of their respective homelands. That was the first lesson that Spain taught them. Sun and olive trees. Nations do not exist. Only the pueblos exist.