Capa observed Gerda walking silently on the other side of the highway. She didn’t look back. Her camera on top of her chest, her hair falling over her forehead, short, very blond, burned by the sun, a gray shirt, her skinny legs sheathed in a pair of canvas pants tucked inside her military boots, the highway’s gravel crunching below her footsteps. So agile and slight, from behind she looked like a boy-soldier. Capa had seen her stop at the side of a ditch, looking all around her with the caution of a clever hunter, making her calculations, mentally preparing the photo. As they started getting closer to the front, she quickened her pace, as if she were late for an appointment. He was also making his own calculations, and according to his numbers, her period was already a week late compared to when it had arrived the month before.
Since the forced landing in Barcelona, she appeared quieter, closed off, as if something had really happened to her or she had suddenly understood that prodigious characteristic that certain places can have to transform people within. She was constantly reading everything that had to do with Spain’s history, its customs and geography … She was discovering the country at the same time she was discovering herself. Capa noticed her self-education process as well, seeing her change a little every day; her determined chin, her defined cheekbones, her eyes more translucent, like grapes within the light of the harvest, secretive, protecting something inside. Deep in her gaze, he feared the subtle changes that had occurred that didn’t involve him. He believed women had a much greater capacity for transformation than men did, and that was what, in his gut, he feared most: that those changes could wind up with her distancing herself from him. She didn’t need him anymore, no longer asking his advice as she did in the beginning. Even the photographs she took had begun emancipating themselves from him, acquiring their own approach. She always moved in relation to things, exploring their limits, the profile of a jaw, the plummeting edges of a precipice … More autonomous every day, more in charge of her actions. It was then that Capa knew, with the dry certainty of a revelation, that he would not be able to live without her.
They arrived at the top of Las Malagueñas hill by noon. During the next few days, the CNT militia had planned to launch an attack on the city of Córdoba, located eight miles to the south. However, they were completely disorganized. There was no chain of command. Their soldiers looked like fresh recruits with more courage than military training. A small group of militia from Alcoy fraternized with the journalists who had arrived to cover the attack in a relaxed atmosphere, playing cards and drinking with enthusiasm.
“The worst part of the war is tolerating the tedium of waiting, guy,” a veteran journalist said to him upon seeing the look of deception on his face. It was Clemente Cimorra, the La Voz correspondent whom they both had met at the Chicote, though now he wasn’t carrying his transistor radio attached to his ear.
But they didn’t have to wait long. A few minutes later, the combatants were ready to go. It was the first scuffle they’d witness from such a close distance. The group was made up of a few journalists and fifty militiamen, whose mission was to defend Murcia’s artillery regiment located behind the front line of Alcoy’s infantry column. Capa insisted that Gerda not remain on the hill.
“Too dangerous,” he said, as if it had already been decided.
“Don’t start with that now,” she said, looking offended. “We’ve already discussed this several times.”
She had gotten up to look for the lighter in her pants pocket and raised a rolled, filterless cigarette to her mouth.
Capa just stood looking at her with the same hardened expression, not allowing his arm to be twisted.
“No way.”
“And who do you think you are? My father? My brother? My babysitter? Or what?” Now she was looking him straight in the face, defiant, her eyes shining with fire.
“I don’t want anything to happen to you,” he said, this time in a conciliatory tone, and then added, with that half-smile of his that was part ironic, part gentle, “It’s not that I really care that much—it’s just that I don’t want to be left without a manager.”
“Well, you’ll have to get used to it.”
It sounded like the threat it was. Capa looked away. She was fast with her comebacks and she wasn’t the type to allow herself to be taken advantage of by anyone. Then he observed her for a minute and a half without opening his mouth. Resolute, firm, bold, able to drive him mad like no one else.
“Fine,” he said. “You’re on your own.” He loved that skinny Jew, obstinate, egotistical, and unbearable. He loved her through and through.
They began walking behind the column, over the ochre-colored stubble, past splashes of stones and trees amputated by the recent attack of pack howitzers, heading to the hill’s summit. In the distance, they could see the bluish crest of the Sierra. Capa walked, trying to maintain a bit of space between them to see if she could manage on the uneven terrain. When he offered his hand to help her climb a rock, she refused it.
“I can do it alone,” she said with that characteristic impulse of her personality.
He watched her out of the corner of his eye, climbing the steepest part of the hill, without opening her mouth. Not one complaint, not one comment; silent, shooting glances at her surroundings in between photographs.
“Do exactly what I do. Stay close behind me. Keep your eyes on the terrain. Always look for a protective slope. You have to hop along, in stages.” Capa gave her instructions without looking at her, as if talking to himself in a tone that was harsh and surly, illtempered. “And never raise your camera to the sun when there are planes flying close by, dammit!”
“Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936. Two very young kids … practically two children,” wrote Clemente Cimorra in his daily chronicle, converting the two into the day’s protagonists without them knowing it. “With nothing in their hands but their photo cameras, a Leica and a Rolleiflex. They spy the movements of a plane that tilts its wings vertically over their heads. He and she, these two kids who now accompany me, are able to take photographs of the very flame of the event. They drag themselves through the areas that have been worst hit by gunfire … This kind of intrepid journalism isn’t a myth, believe me. It’s the bravery of generous youth who seek to document [history]. They’re one of us. Gauche divine people … [The Divine Left].”
The attack was interrupted somewhere between the hours of one and three in the afternoon. They took advantage of the free time and went to rest at the camp’s base. As they sat together, Capa wouldn’t take his eyes off Gerda. Her shapely chest under that gray shirt caused him to suddenly feel a strong pang in his groin. It had begun to happen to him more frequently. As if the risks they were taking had fully awakened his physical reflexes, like the ones he used when he hid behind a slope, no different from the desire he had to hold her tight now. Because he never knew when his time would come. Like the French reporter for L’Humanité, Mario Arriette, who’d been gunned down on the Aragón front a few days after they had taken off from Leciñena. Or perhaps she’d be the one dead, and then he wouldn’t be able to handle it, and he’d die of anguish and despair and guilt and he wouldn’t be able to forgive himself for not giving her a good slap on the face while there was still time. It was what he longed to do the entire day. In the blink of an eye, a clean and neat slap on the face, nothing more. So she’d listen to reason. Because it was one thing was to cover the rearguard of the war, and he never gave her any trouble about that. And another thing was being on the front lines, which was very different. Throwing yourself into the open field, dragging yourself facedown on the ground so you can pass under the bullets, up to your ears covered in dirt, trying to advance with great difficulty to the next stone wall to try and see what was happening on the other side. But there she was, with the look of someone with few friends, frowning, scratches on her forehead, dirt on her pants, more distant than ever, certain she was right, with Kierkegaard’s crease between her brows, and the only thing that he could think of was kiss
ing her until that hard line disappeared from her face. He couldn’t help it. It was impossible to bear a grudge for even a second when she was in his presence. He wanted to squeeze her tight in his arms, make her forget all those impertinent words they’d said and all the ones they were capable of saying. Because the only thing that mattered in the end was that need of physical contact before battle. Without uttering a word, he cleaned his knife with a piece of bread and placed it back into his pocket. Lead on the horizon.
By the late afternoon, each of them went their own way. Capa decided to stay with the Alcoy militia in a trench by the hill, suspecting he’d have a better chance of taking the action shot he wanted over there. She preferred to travel a few kilometers more with the rest of the journalists, to be there just in case the advance party with Republican artillery launched their attack against General Varela’s troops in their barracks. Among the foreign journalists was a nineteen-year-old Canadian named Ted Allan, with whom she got along well, who was shy, long-legged, light-eyed, and who looked a bit like Gary Cooper in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer.
He was the first to hear the faraway blast on Las Malagueñas hill. Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta … Followed by a hollow silence. Then a shorter burst, ta-ta-ta-ta … and more silence. They were in a valley and the surrounding terrain only magnified the sound.
“It’s a Breda machine gun, Italian,” he said. “And it looks like a crossfire.”
He was young but had done his military service as a combat engineer and knew what he was talking about. He could detect where shots fired several miles away were coming from by the duration of their echo. Instinctively, he looked at his watch. Five o’clock in the afternoon. They all feared that the enemy troops had infiltrated the back of the Republican line and were shooting at them from behind, and applying a pincer maneuver on them from the front. The Alcoy militia were only equipped with Mauser rifles and light machine guns.
Gerda felt a sharp pain in her stomach. Everything had frozen in her interior, as if her blood and her heart were waiting in suspense. She had felt it before she began to reason with it, in fact, it was before she could mentally call upon her God: Yahweh, Elohim, Adonai, Roi … An instant reflex that couldn’t be restrained by her own will, like putting up your arms to protect yourself from a blow. She remained still, looking from side to side, not knowing what to do. Pale. Confused. Her mouth was dry and her hands were like icicles. Her first instinct was to run toward the hill. But Ted grabbed her by the shoulders.
“Take it easy,” he said. “We can’t cross the field that way. In order to get back, we have to wait until it gets dark and cut through the town.”
Gerda distanced herself a few paces in the direction of a large rock. She felt ill. She noticed she had a tight knot in the pit of her stomach; she held on to the rock and vomited everything she’d eaten.
Little by little, the blasts began to space themselves out. The waiting. The silence in the camps after combat. The dark sky. The somber silhouette of the sierra. She saw the first falling star from the grass, lying face-up as she did when she was a girl. Everything was so still around her it felt as though she were in a theatrical backdrop. Her friend was still at her side, quiet. The angel who remained silent.
They arrived at the camp when the sky was pitch-black, and at two hundred yards Gerda could already hear Capa’s voice, though it sounded as dry as a dormant volcano, and she couldn’t make out what he was saying. It turned out he was arguing with someone.
“Didn’t you want a photo?” said the captain of the brigades. “Well, now you have your damn photo,” he said, in a tone filled with more anger than disdain, the moment that Gerda, Ted, and everyone else arrived to their area of level ground. He was a wellbuilt man, with solid arms, his skin weathered from being outdoors. He stared at Capa deliberately. As if he didn’t want to ever forget his face or was making an effort to contain himself and not break it with a punch.
Capa eyed him evasively, rubbing his neck in a way that showed his disconcertment, like the boxer who ignores the bell, knocked out, with barely enough motor skills to face the situation with fortitude. Undoubtedly, he’d been drinking. He could barely hold himself up, and he had a strange look on his face that Gerda had never seen before, somewhere between crestfallen and vexed, as if he had gone to a place of no return. His shirt was unbuttoned and hanging out of his pants, his hair disheveled. Gerda had never seen him like this. Not even when his father died.
“But what’s all this about?” she wanted to know.
“Ask him,” answered the captain.
Chapter Sixteen
A militiaman runs down the edge of a hill covered in weeds. The sleeves on his white shirt rolled up to his elbows, his soldier’s cap thrown back, a rifle in his hand, and three leather cartridges fastened to a bandolier. The five-o’clock-in-the-afternoon sun casts its long shadow in the distance. One foot flying off the ground. His chest pushed out. Arms on a cross. A crucified Christ. Click.
Later on, in the red half-light of a Paris lavatory’s darkroom, this man’s face began to emerge from the bottom of the tray. His eyebrows bushy, his ears large, his forehead high, his chin tilted forward. The unknown militiaman.
The photograph was published in Vu, in a special September edition on the Spanish Civil War, and the following year in Regards, in Paris-Soir, and in a special edition of Life, with a caption that explained how Robert Capa’s camera caught a Spanish soldier the instant he is dropped by a bullet through the head on the Córdoba front. The image caused a sensation throughout the world due to its visceral perfection. Hundreds of shaken-up readers mailed letters to their newspapers. No European or North American middle-class home had ever seen an image like that.
“Death of a Loyalist Militiaman” contained all of the drama of Goya’s Third of May 1808 painting, all the rage that Guernica would later show, all the mystery that strangles the soul of men and obligates them to fight knowing what they’re fighting for. The danger, the melancholy, the infinite solitude, the broken dreams. The very moment of death on an abandoned Spanish plain. Its strength, like all symbols, didn’t lie in just the image but in what it was representing.
And who can remain impartial before barbarism? How does one pass through the dead with their eyes shut and their boots clean? How can one not take sides? There are photos that are meant not for remembering but for comprehending. Images that become symbols of an era, although no photographer is aware of this when taking them. A man is firing his gun while leaning up against a slope of a ditch; he hears the blast of machine-gun fire; he lifts his camera without even looking. The rest is a mystery. “The prize picture is born in the imagination of editors and [the] public who sees them,” said Capa before a microphone of New York’s WNBC radio station almost ten years later, when Gerda was already within the black outer limits of ether. And she listened to him millions of light-years away, out on the balcony of her star.
“One time I also shot a photo that was a lot more valued than the rest. And when I shot it, of course, I didn’t know it was special. It was in Spain. At the very start of my career as a photographer. At the very start of the Civil War…”
People have always wanted to believe certain things about the nature of war. It’s happened since the days of Troy. Heroism and tragedy, cruelty and fear, courage and defeat. All photographers hate those images that follow them like phantoms for the rest of their lives because of the mystery and scenic adversity it captures. Eddie Adams lived his entire life tormented by the snapshot he took in 1968, of a general from the Saigon police, at the precise moment he’s firing point-blank at the temple of a Viet Cong prisoner with his hands tied behind his back. Due to the impact, the victim involuntarily tightens his face a second before his body begins to collapse. The photographer Nick Ut, from the Associated Press, could never forget the image of a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl burned by napalm, running naked on a road close to the small village of Trang Bang. In 1994, Kevin Carter took a photograph in Africa of an emaciated Sudanese c
hild collapsed in an open field, less than a kilometer away from an ONU feeding center, while a vulture stalks her in the background. He won the Pulitzer for that photograph, and one month later he committed suicide. Robert Capa would never be able to overcome “Death of a Loyalist Militiaman”—the one they wound up calling “The Falling Soldier”—the best war photograph of all times.
Gerda was curled up on her side on top of the canvas blanket. She was facing in Capa’s direction, with her left arm bent underneath her head as a pillow, her eyes open and fixed on him.
“Guess what time it is,” she asked. It was a way, like any other, of breaking the ice.
“I don’t know … is it still yesterday?”
She saw him pass a hand over his head, confused, sounding as if the alcohol’s effluents still hadn’t evaporated from his brain or as if he were talking in his sleep.
She touched his shoulder and remained with her eyes open within the darkness of the tent, contemplating the sparks of electricity on his jet-black hair.
“André…” she said in a low voice.
The name caught him by surprise. It had been a while since she last called him that. The warm tone stirred something inside of him. Without warning, he felt himself become fragile, like when he was a boy, sitting on the stairs of his house, petting the cat until the yelling subsided and he could tiptoe back to his room with a heavy heart.
“Yes?”
“What was it that happened?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“It’s best you do it now, André. It’s not good to keep it inside. Did you ask the men to stage an attack?”
“No. We were just fooling around, that’s all. Perhaps I complained that everything was far too calm and that there wasn’t anything interesting to photograph. Then some of the men started to run down the slope and I joined in as well. We went up and down the hill several times. We were all feeling good. Laughing. They shot into the air. I took several photographs…” Capa remained still, his mouth had contorted itself, “… the damn photo.”
Waiting for Robert Capa Page 12
