Waiting for Robert Capa

by Susana Fortes

  “So what happened afterward?”

  He remained silent far too many seconds for his pause to seem natural.

  “What happened was that all of a sudden everything was real. We had a Francoist machine gun on the slope in front of us. Maybe we caught their attention with our voices. I didn’t hear the shots … At first, I didn’t hear them…” He looked at Gerda with his eyes fixed on hers, with loyalty and candidness, while at the same time on the defense.

  That particular look she didn’t have codified. And it caused her to feel a drop of fear, or, better yet, of apprehension. She didn’t know how to interpret it. So she averted her eyes.

  “That’s enough. You don’t have to go on if you don’t want to.” Suddenly, she remembered something that she also preferred to forget. “It’s not necessary that you tell me, really. Don’t tell me.”

  “You asked me. Now you must listen to me.” There was no recrimination in Capa’s voice, nor was there any mercy.

  “Where were you?”

  “A little farther ahead, off to the side, on a hill they call La Coja. The second burst of fire was shorter. One of the militiamen went to cover the other men’s retreat and the machine gun opened fire. I raised my camera over my head and began to shoot as well.” He didn’t say anything for a few seconds, as if he were trying to fully analyze a thought that was difficult to grasp. To photograph people is to obligate them in some way to face things they weren’t expecting to. You take them off their path, away from their plans, from their everyday routine. Sometimes it’s also forcing them to die.

  “It was nobody’s fault, André. It happened. That’s all,” said Gerda, and just as she said it, the coincidence caused her to freeze. In Leipzig, Georg had used those exact words for the incident at the lake. The same words uttered in a low voice. John Reed’s book on top of the linen tablecloth, the vase with tulips, and the pistol. She had never said a word about it to anyone.

  “I did it automatically, without thinking,” he continued. “When I saw him on the ground, I did not think he was dead. I thought he was faking it. That it was all a game. Then it turned silent. They all were looking at me. Two militiamen tried their best to drag him to the trench; another went to pick up his rifle and was shot in the act. That’s when I realized what had happened. The Fascists had riddled him with bullets. But I killed him.”

  “It wasn’t you, André,” she consoled him, although, like him, deep down she knew if he hadn’t been there with his camera, none of this would have happened.

  “I’m not sure who he was. I’ve got the rattle of the machinegun fire stuck here,” he said, pointing to his forehead. “I don’t even know his real name; he came as a volunteer from Alcoy with his little brother, who’s about the same age as Cornell. I automatically pressed the camera’s shutter release and he fell flat on his back, just as if I had fired a weapon that had reached his head. Cause and consequence.”

  “That’s war, André.”

  Capa turned to face the wall. Gerda could not see his face. Just his back and his bare arms. As if he were trying to put a wall between them with that position. He was now on the other side of a collapsing bridge, where she could not get to him. He wasn’t motionless or asleep. His back twitched in silence. The night’s tremors on the body. Those who cry expend more energy doing that than with any other act. There were also things she was better off not thinking about. The sun had not yet risen. The blanket’s dark canvas framed his body. At first, Gerda hesitated about whether or not to put her hand on his shoulder, ultimately deciding against it. There are times a man needs to fend for himself.

  She remained on the other edge of the tent, covering his back from what was left of the night, without touching him. Calming him down when he awoke startled from a nightmare, until little by little the panic vanished, with Gerda at his side, her eyes wide open, also thinking in herself, of the solitude that penetrates your bones sometimes like an incurable illness, about the things that life shatters and that one cannot fix. That was the last time they’d ever discuss the photo. Nor did she ever call him André again.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The following morning, they set out for Madrid again. Gerda rolled down her window. She could hear the sound of the tires snapping over the arid land the entire way. She loved feeling the wind on her face: it helped her temporarily forget her need for a shower.

  They arrived at Toledo at daybreak with kidneys aching from the potholes’ constant jostling. September 18. A whitish light hovered over the olive groves, and in the distance, the massive silhouette of the Alcázar, bunker-like and impenetrable. They stopped to eat a breakfast of coffee and bread with olive oil at a roadway stand less than a kilometer away from the city. They needed to stretch their legs, smoke a cigarette. Words didn’t come easy to Capa. He’d scratch his beard of several days and wrinkle up his entire face to think, as if trying to free himself of his thoughts, and only afterward could he say something. Gerda didn’t look so good, either. She had her period and her stomach was in knots, along with a sharp pain she felt in her groin. Her shirt covered in several days’ worth of dust, her hair greasy, her skin dry, trying to set up her camera, removing the lenses and cleaning them, one by one, with a look of complete concentration, the circles under her eyes accentuated by the clarity of the morning light.

  A large group of photographers, journalists, news cameramen, and government officials arrived that same afternoon. From a nearby olive grove, they all awaited the destruction of the Alcázar’s western wall. At six thirty, they heard a loud explosion. Five tons of dynamite. The black cloud of smoke covered the sun like an eclipse. A few minutes later, the fortress began to erupt like a volcano and its defenders gathered together on the opposite side to resist the sudden attack. Squashed together underneath a wall of pure rock were women and children, including a newborn baby named Restituto Valero, the son of a lieutenant from a band of Nationalists. The son of the Alcázar. After many years had passed—along with many battles, prisoners, and dead bodies—that child, now a captain of a paratrooper brigade, along with nine other of his armed comrades, would risk his hide and his career to defend democracy from the dictatorship of one General Franco, who had rescued him from the Alcázar while he was still in diapers. Paradoxes contain many cracks, and through one of them appeared a tiny head with live flesh and nerve endings. But none of this had happened yet. Back then, the baby’s cries could be heard within the explosions, causing the hearts of the militia to shudder, because they were under strict orders to take over the fort however possible. Each time the militia poked their heads out from behind the wall’s rubble, the insurgents would immediately attempt to drive them away. Gerda and Capa watched them climb that steep slope and fall almost instantly in the face of their gunfire. The wounded, dripping blood, were taken down in stretchers to the olive grove. They’d leave them there, lying face-up. Gerda kneeled down in a ditch and focused her camera. There was a handsome dead man with blond hair and a birthmark on his forehead. She was sure there had to be someone waiting for him. Since the Spanish married young, a woman, perhaps even a few children, who were good-looking and blond like him and who called him papa, not knowing that he was now just a slab of inert meat lying under the silvery olive trees, somewhere alongside the old road between Toledo and Madrid, in the middle of nowhere. She carefully untied the handkerchief from his neck and, with it, swatted away the flies around his face.

  She didn’t like focusing on things that were still; it caused her to feel apprehension. But it was better to look at the dead through the viewfinder than directly at them. It made it more bearable. While she was squatting, she could feel the grass tickling her ankles. There’s nothing as solitary as a dead person, she thought, as she calculated the depth of field for the shot. And it was true. She remembered the book of Job: “Behold, this is the joy of his way; And out of the earth shall others spring.” She thought of touching him, of closing his eyes. But she didn’t do it.

  Days later, Franco’s a
rmy entered Toledo and rescued the Alcázar, clearing for the Fascists the path toward Madrid. The Republican combatants’ morale plummeted to the ground.

  Afterward, Gerda and Capa joined the Twelfth International Brigade, made up of German and Polish Communists from the Thälmann Battalion, whom they’d already met in Leciñena on the Aragón front. The battalion was under the command of the writer Máté Zalka, widely known as General Lukács, a very handsome Hungarian who sported a leather jacket, had a foul-mouthed and cutting sense of humor, and was also a great strategist. The brigade had to get to the Manzanares River in order to join the other regiments that were also headed to Madrid for the first major attack on the capital by Franco.

  What neither of them expected to find there was Chim. Though the three of them had left Paris at the same time, the Pole had gone his own way. He was a lone hunter. He was sitting on top of a large rock, checking his equipment with the concentration of an erudite Talmudist when he saw them approaching from the other side of the road. With his index finger, he pushed his glasses up along the bridge of his nose as if to adjust his vision. He also didn’t expect to see them there.

  There are embraces that don’t need words. A good slap on the back that can transmit all the damn words needed. A contact that’s close, hard, and of rough-and-tumble men. Capa and Chim’s embrace was just that. Gerda threw her arms around her friend’s neck, kissing him on the forehead, on the eyes, repeating his name without end. Slightly embarrassed, he allowed himself to be loved, and joked as if all that show of emotion bothered him.

  “Enough, enough, enough already…” he said, trying to separate himself with the shyness of a hermetic Jew. But deep down, he was happy.

  It was one of those moments of extreme fulfillment that can occur sometimes in the midst of war. Two men and a woman walking along a tree-lined path, their cameras over their shoulders, twilight, a cigarette … At that point, each had their clocks set to their hour, their hour of death, and perhaps, in some way, the three of them knew it.

  There are images that simply float through our memories, waiting for time to put them in their proper place. And though nobody can know beforehand, there’s always a vague premonition, an omen, something we’re not certain of, but that’s there. Many years later, that would be the last image that David Seymour, Chim to his friends, would remember before he was struck down by an Egyptian sniper. It was November 10, 1956, at a border crossing, where he’d arrived with another photographer from France on an assignment to cover a prisoner exchange in the Suez Canal while peace negotiations were already underway. Dying is always a tragic event that is made more incomprehensible when it occurs during overtime, when the war has already ended. Suddenly, the rattle of machine-gun fire, and everything collapsed around him, and he found himself on the ground, vomiting blood. But before closing his eyes for good, for a split second he returned to that white point of memory: Capa, Gerda, and he, three young people walking along a trail. Smiling.

  No one can choose what they remember, and Chim had no way of knowing that chance meeting would be the last vision he’d leave behind. The Twelfth Brigade made their way through the weeds of no-man’s-land. The explosions caused the trees to shake.

  The only good thing about close combat was the way it caused any metaphysical anxiety to vanish before an infantry weapon. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Schopenhauer can all just take a hike. Philosophy was something you felt in your vitals, so that all you could think about was saving your hide, getting to a wall, reaching a crest as quickly as possible, a church, a house in ruins … And if the machine guns started up again, throw yourself on the ground, embed yourself within it, so you could pass under the bullets, over uneven terrain, a hole in the ground, a dugout, a mine crater, a puddle, and lap through a swamp like a buffalo up to your ears in mud, trying to advance. It was a contradictory sensation that was strangely addictive because of the incredible surge of adrenaline that’s released in the act. Like removing the muscles from your body and tying them tightly along a rope. Transforming conviction into action. Awaken latent instincts. Take careful aim. A vertigo similar to what athletes must experience before a race. Reflexes. Strength. Concentration. All war correspondents have felt this sensation at least once, like Troy’s warriors did, though the war Homer sung was made up of men who never would have dreamed of being characters in The Iliad. It’s not that they had begun to like it, it was that they had never felt more alive. The Achilles syndrome. Gerda, Capa, and Chim had begun to show symptoms, though they were unable to fully understand what was happening to them. It was their first conflict.

  A road full of debris, a mule ripped open and lying in a ditch; Chim went ahead to mentally prepare the photograph. Lukács talking and gesticulating a lot with his hands; Bob at his side with a camera over his shoulder, arguing, with a frown on his face. Gerda a few paces behind, smoking and laughing quietly. Click.

  They shared the same attitude about danger: a kind of challenge. Something that was hard to explain that perhaps had to do with the courage and passion of one’s twenties, and its way of devouring a plate of rice and a bottle of wine before heading to the front, its desire for love in any corner, with that anger and loyalty and those ideas. And with life. Or a certain way of living it.

  They were convinced that Europe’s future was at stake in Spain, and they were fully committed to it, taking sides, abandoning any professional distance, everyone fighting the best they could, with the weapon that was closest to them, becoming more involved each day. Half-reporters, half-combatants. A camera in one hand and a pistol in the other.

  Capa felt at home speaking in Hungarian with Lukács, except for a few words here and there that he preferred to say in Spanish. Gerda, on the other hand, didn’t speak much. She liked to listen. And she did so by paying lots of attention, her head slightly tilted, that knowing look on her face, never missing a detail, a certain hint of arrogance, marking the necessary distance you need when living with men. Chim supplied the common sense, the fundamental criterion of any serious and cultured Jew, though perhaps he was too thin for that way of life and not one to flatter often, though cautious and as trustworthy as an old seaman.

  The three learned a lot from the general. How to recognize a bullet’s caliber; distinguish between an entrance and exit wound; prepare a withdrawal before entering a high-risk area; move blindly in the fog, like ghosts, with water up to their waists, watching the ripples as they advance, with their hands in the air, holding up their cameras or guns; and to fully train their ear for orientation so that they wouldn’t mistakenly head in the direction of enemy lines. But when they finally arrived at the place where the river split, the trenches were deserted. None of their people were waiting for them. They were on their own.

  In the distance, Madrid was a white rabbit at the mercy of hunting hounds.

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE CRUCIFIED CAPITAL, declared the front-cover headlines for Capa’s photo report in Regards. Gerda threw a thick gray wool jacket over her shoulders and sat next to Ruth on the couch of their apartment, like in the old days, just the two of them. On the other side of the window, the day was overcast, with that touch of fog that can sometimes cover Paris’s rooftops with sadness. Her friend was the mother rock to all those who returned late or early from battle. Capa, Chim, her … Ruth Cerf listened to them all with that generous attitude that only truly maternal people can have. Attentive eyes, an understanding forehead, with that protective instinct that women used to have when they buttoned up a coat properly and wrapped their children’s scarves around them on chilly mornings. Sitting on top of the Moroccan table, next to two cups of tea and a small plate of Breton cookies, the magazine was open to an image of aerial bombing. Gerda looked at the faces of women from the working-class neighborhood of Vallecas, captured only minutes after they had returned home to find their houses in flames and their neighbors buried beneath the rubble. A sloping street with skeletal trees and two militiamen sharing the same rifle, waiting for the
opportune moment to shoot at the enemy. A young refugee mother with three small children on a platform in the metro station. Gray countryside and burning stables on the other side of the highway. Several brigadists with backpacks walking in a straight line with their heads down, one step in front of the other, staring at the footprints they were leaving behind in the mud, concentrated, like warriors before combat. A close-up of a militiawoman, nearly an adolescent, squatting, aiming her Mauser from a barricade in front of the School of Medicine. Gerda passed from one scene to another and her mind always returned to Madrid, to that well of memories that she couldn’t stop submerging herself in since she’d returned. After all the intensity she had experienced in Spain, she couldn’t bear the routine of Parisian life.

  She took a sip of tea and the longing embraced her lips. She missed it. She remembered the Gran Vía during the last days of September, just before her return trip, and how it rained artillery shells day and night. Or how floodlights pierced the sky and the building’s facades on a revolving angle. The rooftops of Madrid de los Austrias; the Telefónica building that housed the government press office from where she had sent dispatches several times, hunched over, while the projectiles passed over her head. The Calle de Alcalá; the tall windows of the Círculo de Bellas Artes. Those blue intersections and geometrical formations on the ceiling of her hotel room where her mind had now wandered.

  “We have to go down to the shelter,” she had said when it seemed the buzzing of the engines was only escalating, followed by the crisp and tight rattle of antiaircraft fire the day the Fascists launched their second deadly attack on the city.