Waiting for Robert Capa

by Susana Fortes

  At sunset, they strolled through the plaza, past walls plastered with last season’s yellowing bullfighting posters. Stopping to photograph the militia listening to a speech by Manuel Grossi, the leader of Asturia’s miners union, being given from the balcony of the town hall. Then sat down to drink from a bottle that someone had offered them from their doorstep while the bell tower rang seven times, its cement base still standing despite being eaten away by mortar shrapnel. Then, as if they were in the middle of the desert, they heard the faraway tinkling of a herd of goats returning home. The heat and distance distorted their images into undulating mirages. In fact, the POUM’s headquarters looked like a Bedouin camp, the strings of their tents securely tied. The news of Federico García Lorca’s assassination in Granada reached them one evening. That was the other face of Spain, the one that burned books and screamed: “Down with intelligence!” “Long live death!” The one that hated thinking and shot their best poet at daybreak.

  Gerda and Capa spoke little during those walks. As if each needed to react on their own while facing that land inhabited by skinny dogs and old women dressed in black, their faces chiseled by strong winds, weaving wicker baskets under the shade of a fig tree. Gerda began to realize that perhaps the real face of the war wasn’t just the price paid for the blood and disemboweled bodies that she would soon see but the bitter wisdom that lived in those women’s eyes, a dog’s solitude as it wandered through the fields limping, a hind leg broken by a bullet. The horror inside a wooden drawer containing a small bundle wrapped in cloth, about the size of a two-pound bag of rice. She was training her photographer’s eye, and little by little, she was developing an extraordinary talent for observation. Curious, she lifted the tip of the cloth with caution and discovered the dead body of a few-months-old baby dressed in a white shirt with lace trimming, whose parents were planning to bury their child that very afternoon. She kept quiet but went out walking by herself until she reached the edge of an embankment and sat down. Resting her head on her knees, she began to cry, hard and long, with tears that dripped onto her pants, unable to control herself, without really knowing why she was crying, completely alone, staring out into that horizon of yellow countryside. She had just learned her first important lesson as a journalist. No scenery could ever be as devastating as a human story. This would be her photography’s signature. The snapshots she captured with her camera those days were not the images of war that militant magazines such as Vu or Regards awaited. But those slightly inclined frames transmitted a greater sense of sadness and loneliness than the war itself. A low sky, soldiers along a highway, small clouds of smoke in the distance.

  At night they all sat around a campfire. For dinner, they cooked rabbit in a dark, red wine sauce, garnished with green peppers and chickpeas. It was well prepared, but she couldn’t eat a bite. Her head was somewhere else. That’s why when Capa proposed they continue on the road to Madrid the next morning, she felt as though he had cut the invisible cords that were keeping her from breathing.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Madrid, heart of Spain,

  beats with a fever’s pulse;

  if its blood boiled yesterday

  it boils with more fury today…

  The verses of Rafael Alberti sounded at all hours of the day on Radio Madrid. The city had already undergone two bombings, and although the Loyalist troops were able to detain the Fascists’ advancement through the Sierra of Guadarrama, there was further alarming news regarding a large Francoist contingency approaching from the southeast. The city prepared for the worst. It was on Calle San Bernardo, in front of the streetcar depot, where Capa heard for the second time a group of militia shouting the cry of Pétain in Verdun: “Ils ne passeront pas.” This time a little louder, and in Spanish: NO PASARÁN. They shall not pass. Wars also leave behind them a wealth of phrases that link one caste’s blood to another. It’s happened since the days of Troy. Unique to war is its ability to reverse time.

  Entire villages put to the sword, women raped and skinned to nothing, houses in flames. Waterloo, Verdun, the Inquisition’s stakes, Goya’s Disasters, Dos de Mayo…

  The sensation of being in a city under attack was much more evident than what Gerda and Capa had experienced in Barcelona. In Madrid, the neon lights were kept low and one had to keep their windows closed. When the sirens sounded, the entire electric current was interrupted. Nonetheless, the capital believed in itself and continued dreaming in its own manner. That’s what Gerda loved about it. Madrileños also liked going to the movies. Lining up for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, though on the way home they’d have to throw themselves on the floor of their streetcars in case a bullet came through. The women would stand there mesmerized by the couple in the movie poster that included a tiny frieze of American skyscrapers in the background. He, thin and tapping in tails. She, smiling and with those transparent eyes of a working-class girl who’s arrived. A tad naive, gullible like all women, watching him twirl around her like an angel with wings. After the movie, those same dreaming women would head to the fronts in Guadarrama or Ciudad Universitaria to fire their guns, while a large part of those ticket-holders would end up supplying the hospitals with enough blood on hand. Tap dancing was a way of blocking out the hammering of the machine guns arriving from across the border. While Capa was lost driving along Calle de Quevedo, looking for the Hotel Florida, Gerda stuck her camera out the window. Outside the entrance to the Proyecciones movie house, two dark-haired children with dirty knees were dancing on the asphalt. They’d stuck tacks on the tips and the heels of their shoes so they could imitate Fred Astaire. An acacia branch used for a cane, an invisible top hat. In the midst of all that hunger and fear, a graceful elegance had blossomed, like the world from the other side of the mirror. Click.

  Madrid was that. Golden skies before the battle. The workers placing a domed wall of bricks around Cibeles to protect it.

  They were stretched out on their hotel bed, completely nude. Rays of light filtering through the blinds. Their eyes staring at the ceiling.

  “Do you ever think to yourself that it can all just end one day?” asked Gerda. She spoke with a certain vagueness, her arms crossed and tucked under her head.

  “What can? This?”

  “Yes … I don’t know.” She remained silent as if she was thinking about something that was hard to express. “Everything.”

  It was the kind of observation that would cause Capa’s head to pound. Not because of its meaning, but for what he didn’t understand about her. When she said those things, he felt as if only her body was close to his. He turned over to look at her, like that, so thin, with her clavicle pressing up against her skin like a small chicken wing, her ribs aligned just like a ship’s logbook.

  “You women are complicated,” he said, gliding the palm of his hand over her stomach, still smelling of semen.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, Gerda, sometimes you can appear like a little girl and I enjoy watching you walk down the street with your hands in your pockets, swaying your hips a little, smiling…”

  “You only like my hips?”

  “No. I also like seeing you stick half your body out the window like you did this afternoon, taking shots of those children dancing in the streets. And I like that little space you have between your teeth,” he said, opening her mouth with one of his fingers. “I like all of you, even the pornography. And I love when you throw your head back when you roar with laughter. Or when you decide to cook something and there’s nobody who wants to eat it.”

  “Oh come on now, I’m not that bad,” she joked, hitting him in the face with a pillow.

  “And I especially like you when you’re sitting in Maria Eisner’s office, and, in a very serious tone, you let out a ‘That Capa bastard took off again with some actress to the Côte d’Azur. Damn him.’ ” He imitated her voice and mannerisms to perfection.

  Now both of them were laughing. The black clouds had passe
d again. Capa reached over to the night table to grab the cigarettes.

  “And I don’t like you at all, and I mean at all, at other times,” he said, placing a lit cigarette in her mouth.

  “Which times?”

  “Well, when you start saying strange things about being a German or Polish Jew, or whatever you are, in such a serious way that you frighten me, with that crease you get there, between your eyebrows, and with such a long face you look like Kierkegaard.”

  “That awful?” she complained.

  “Worse than awful, a hideous insect from hell,” he said, taking her head into his hands and lowering himself onto her, noticing how hard his sex was again. He slowly opened her thighs with his fingers so he could sink inside of her again, his breath faltering, trapping her in his arms, licking her chin, her clavicle bone, her ribs, one by one. “But I know the secret for making you beautiful again, like the princess in the stories,” he said, lowering himself slowly toward the concave slope of her stomach. Her mound curly and warm, beating like the heart of a wound within the shadow of her pubis. He separated her legs a little more, stroking her ankles, the smooth skin of her thighs, leaving a trail of saliva behind on her skin. Then, slowly heading higher and higher, he carefully spread her mound open, determined, lowering his mouth onto it, slow and deep, just as he would kiss her mouth, turning away slightly to catch his breath or remove a hair from his lips, delicate, brooding, his face moist, while she softly pushed his head lower, going beyond the offering or the shame, right before it all started again. The shortness of breath, the last of the sunlight through the gaps in the blinds, the sensation that you’re about to fall at any minute, and as she held on to his back and abandoned herself to that last unconscious pleasure, it suddenly occurred to her that this surely couldn’t last.

  But she didn’t feel sadness or fear. Just a strange feeling of melancholy, as if from that exact point forward she would no longer care if she died.

  A dark hotel room. A topographical map. An open travel bag. Two cameras on the night table and, every so often, the flash of an explosion in the Sierra de Guadarrama.

  Capa was smoking a cigarette now and peeking out the window, going against regulations. A blinded Madrid, without electricity.

  Two months later, she’d remember that cigarette, when the war wasn’t like it was now, an orange flash at nightfall but a shower of iron that intensified everywhere. Bullets, shards, and artillery shells ricocheting off the walls, fsssiaaang, fsssiaaang … Avenida del Quince y Medio was what the Madrileños called the Gran Vía in those days, a reference to the shells that were habitually dropped, delivered with their traditionally biting humor. By that point, the entire city was one big trench full of holes, where even the tobacco was rationed and all there was to eat was oatmeal and sweet potato. Tap, tap, tap, tap … The sound of Fred Astaire’s light and nimble tapping had been converted into a deafening rattle, mixed with sirens wailing, while people rushed down stairwells to get to the underground shelters, and howitzers opened fire on the Telefónica building itself. But not yet. Now they were nude by the window, holding each other close, looking out into the night. Gerda could see how Capa had wrinkled up his eyebrows rushing through the last drag of his cigarette. The shadow of his beard adding a look of obstinacy to his face. She knew him well enough to know what he was thinking. He was worried that he still hadn’t taken one single shot that was worth something.

  “We have to get closer,” he said.

  “I agree.”

  “We only have two options,” he said as he unfolded the map before her, illuminating it with a flashlight. “Toledo or Córdoba.”

  In Toledo, the seditious General Moscardó had taken over the city by enclosing himself within a castle-fortress with close to a thousand allied soldiers, along with their families, women, and children, in addition to having taken more than a hundred captives that included Leftists from the vicinity. The Republican forces had spent weeks besieging the Alcázar without success. It was an impregnable fortress. It was said that a group of Asturian dynamite experts from the carbon mines were excavating two tunnels where they planned to deposit explosives under its walls in order to create an opening.

  In Córdoba, the Republican government had launched a major offensive to reclaim the city from the clutches of General Varela. The authorities announced new advances every day, and the need for a victory had caused the false rumor that Loyalist troops had been able to enter the city to start circulating. After evaluating the situation carefully, Gerda and Capa arrived at the conclusion that the dynamite experts probably still had a ways to go in the tunnels.

  They chose Córdoba.

  The most important photo of his life was waiting for him there, though Capa didn’t know it. It was an image that would make him famous, that would circulate the world’s major magazine covers and convert him into an authentic twentieth-century icon. It was a photograph that would cause him to instantly feel a radical and profound hate for his occupation and perhaps for himself as well. For all that he stopped being from that moment on: a Hungarian boy who was raised in Pest, who could never go back to being a twenty-two-year-old.

  There were still three long years of war left to fight in Spain, an extended seven more during the world war, and a few more for its consequences: Palestine, Korea, Indochina … and plenty more nights filled with boredom and despair, leaning out the window of any hotel in the world. Remembering.

  Wars are full of people who can only look back. Because sometimes life twists itself so much that one is left to sort it out however they can.

  That night, the journalist Clemente Cimorra, a correspondent for the Madrid daily La Voz, walked into the Bar Chicote on Gran Vía with mountains of sandbags out in front to protect its large windows. Cimorra had one earphone plugged in and the other hanging below his chin. A journalist from the Herald Tribune had given him the latest crystal radio, and he went everywhere with it. In part, he was being pretentious, while the other part was about being on top of the latest news.

  The bar’s loyal clientele—made up of militia, writers, foreign correspondents, and the International Brigade with their leather jackets and “blond cigarettes,” female companions wearing fake pearls and the old-fashioned kind of rice powder on their faces—had arrived at the bar with the modernist decór and world-renowned cocktails to eventually all gather around the veteran journalist and anxiously await a verdict.

  “Those damn Frenchies!” he spat.

  The breaking news reported that France’s government had refused to supply arms to the Republic. No one had expected anything from Great Britain, but the French were their next-door neighbors, a sister government to the Popular Front. Everyone still recalled the words of Dolores Ibárruri, a woman raised in the mines of the Basque lands. At the last Communist meeting held in Paris’s Vélodrome d’Hiver, she had spoken up in her deep voice of a miner’s wife and daughter, and said: “You must help the Spanish people. Today it’s us, but your turn will come tomorrow. We need rifles and canons in order to defeat the Fascism on our common borders.”

  They decided not to listen to her.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Deserted roads. Abandoned homes. Windows barred and doors bolted shut. Herds of stray cows wandering aimlessly through the streets. A ghost town. The type of place where common sense would tell you to stop the car and head back the other way.

  They had left Madrid at the break of dawn, well prepared with their press identifications and documents of safe conduct, heading to the Republican headquarters in Montoro, not far from Córdoba, which took them three days by car. From there they continued onto Cerro Muriano. The day smelled of molasses, with a lukewarm sun that stewed the walls of the houses and the blood on the geraniums that decorated the balconies. It was one of those days when the war machinery stops for a few minutes before it starts up again at full force. Gerda and Capa also stopped to drink water from the fountain, taking advantage of the respite to sit down on a doorstep and ask themselves w
hat the hell had happened there that there was no one left. There weren’t any signs of violence. No broken windows. No burned crops. But in the plaza, the only thing you could hear were the disoriented bells of the goats. Everyone had fled. Men, women, and children. By foot, on the backs of mules, by car…

  Only a few hours before, the insurgent general Queipo de Llano had sworn over the radio that his men would soon be arriving to declare their right to droit de seigneur.

  People believe that the most devastating part of a war are the corpses with their guts out in the open, the puddles of blood, and all that you can capture at first glance. But sometimes the horror is off to the side, in the lost look on the face of a woman who’s just been raped, as she limps away alone within the ruins, trying to keep her head down. Gerda and Capa were not aware of this yet. They were too young. And that was their first conflict. They still believed war had its romantic side.

  First thing in the morning, the German reporters Hans Namuth and Georg Reisner, who also contributed content to Vu magazine and Alliance Photo, along with the Austrian journalist Franz Borkenau, had managed to photograph the terrified exodus of Cerro Muriano’s inhabitants under a sky filled with Francoist planes while Queipo de Llano continued to harass women over the radio. There was nothing that ticked Capa off more than arriving at places after others had already been there. But during wartime, it’s never clear what came before or what came after.

  They left their car in the town and continued walking along the highway, following the indications on the map to the place where they had been told a militiawoman from the CNT was camping out. Along the way, they took photographs of the last villagers that had lagged behind. Silent faces, women carrying their children in their arms, elderly couples with bloodshot eyes, constantly looking back. The look that Lot’s wife wore before she turned into a pillar of salt. People who flee.