They were in the Hotel Florida. They had just returned from Casa del Campo, in the western part of the city where the Republicans had entrenched themselves and built barricades with cushions, doors, and even suitcases they’d taken from the Northern Station’s lockers. They’d been able to get some great shots. Capa would review the images, looking at them up against the lamplight, his eye pressed up against the magnifying loupe, marking the best negatives with a cross. As she watched him work, from the foot of the door, Gerda felt an uncontrollable tenderness toward him. He was both a child playing with his favorite toy and a grown man completely dedicated to a job that was challenging, mysterious, essential, and for which he sometimes risked his life.
When he turned around, she surprised him with a kiss. And he just stood there for a few seconds with his arms open, more from shock than indecision, before unbuckling his belt and pushing her softly onto the bed so she could feel his hardness over her lower abdomen. She opened her legs, holding him prisoner inside, while she kissed his neck and the rough stubble on his face that tasted like sweat—masculine and pungent.
“We should head down,” she said in a mumbled voice lacking conviction, while the sirens wailed outside, and he entered deeper. Firm, serious, without ever taking his eyes off her, as if he wanted to store her forever in the camera obscura of his memory, just as she was in that moment, with her gathered eyebrow, her hungering mouth, half-open, moving her head slightly from side to side, as she always did when she was about to come. That’s when he held on tightly to her hips and entered her even further, slowly, deep down inside her, to release himself long and languidly, until letting out a groan and dropping his head onto her shoulder. The blue floodlights swirling across the ceiling. She had taught him to declare himself like that, noisily. She enjoyed hearing him express his pleasure in that animal-like manner. Though for reasons having to do with intimacy, modesty, and male shyness, he was hesitant to do it. He had never shouted during an orgasm as he did that day, with the deafening sounds of planes passing right over their heads and a series of air-defense explosions across the street. They remained in bed silent for a while in the midst of those bluish shadows circling the ceiling, while Gerda caressed his back, and Madrid breathed through its wounds, and he looked at her in silence, as if from a distant shore, with those eyes of a handsome Gypsy.
She placed her teacup back into the tray with the same dreamy expression on her face.
“I’m going back to Spain,” she told Ruth.
Capa had been in Madrid since November. Thanks to the success of his work, especially “The Falling Soldier,” he’d been offered a new assignment. All the French editors had already discovered a while back that the famous Robert Capa was none other than the Hungarian André Friedmann. But his photographs had greatly improved, and he went to such great lengths to risk getting them that they went along with his game. They felt obliged to pay him his going rate. His nom de guerre had completely devoured that ragged, if slightly naive man raised in a working-class neighborhood in Pest. Now he was Capa, Robert, Bobby, Bob … He no longer needed a costume; the world of journalism had accepted him as he was, and he’d done his part to take on the role, firmly believing in his character, remaining loyal to him until the very end. More than ever, he believed in himself and in his work. With hopes his photographs could help gain intervention from the Western powers in backing the Republican government, he had given up on that alleged journalistic impartiality, up to his nose in a war that would only wind up shattering his life.
In his letters, he’d tell Gerda how the Madrileños would risk themselves in front of the tanks, attacking them with dynamite and bottles filled with gasoline that they ignited with the tips of their cigarettes because matches were scarce. When modern German machine guns opened fire, they’d retaliate with their old Mauser rifles. David versus Goliath. The fall of the city seemed inevitable. Madrid, however, resisted the beatings with a courage that earned it mythical levels of coverage in publications such as Regards, Vu, Zürcher Illustrierte, Life, Weekly Illustrated, along with all the major newspapers of the world, whose print runs approached the 100,000 mark. The Spanish Civil War had become the first conflict to be photographed and transmitted on a daily basis. “A cause without images is not only a forgotten cause. It’s also a lost cause,” he wrote in a letter to Gerda, dated November 18, the same day that Hitler and Mussolini officially recognized Franco as the Spanish head of state.
She was proud of him, of course she was. The Robert Capa invention had also been her idea in the first place. But the fact that several of the best photographs she’d taken in Spain were published without her name, and credited to his, caused her a certain unease. Perhaps she’d been mistaken, or maybe the moment had come to rethink their professional relationship and convert it into one with more equal footing. The brand “Capa & Taro” sounded pretty good.
But war was the territory of men. Women didn’t count.
“I’m nobody, I’m nobody”—she remembered how he had once said this at the edge of the Seine, when his first report on Sarre didn’t appear with his name on it. It felt as though a thousand years had passed since then, and now it was she who felt neglected. She didn’t exist. Sometimes she’d look in the bathroom mirror and carefully observe each new wrinkle in bewilderment, as if she feared that time, life, or her own will would wind up destroying what was left of her dreams. A woman in a blind spot.
“Are you all right?” he had asked several hours after that airraid siren had sounded in their room at the Hotel Florida, and the dim, striped light of daybreak entered. She had shot up violently. Having awakened sweating, her hair soaked, her forehead clammy, and her heart galloping in her chest like a runaway horse.
“I had a nightmare,” she managed to say, when her breathing was finally back to normal.
“Fuck, Gerda, you look like you just went to hell and back.” It was as if she had suddenly aged ten years, her thin face, the violetcolored circles under her eyes, her worn expression. “Would you like a glass of water?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t know where in hell she’d gone, but from that point on, she found herself feeling profoundly, darkly uncertain. And it was hard for her to recover. Capa brought her the glass, but she wasn’t able to hold it. Her hands were shaking, as if out of nowhere she’d lost love’s protective shield. He brought the water up to her lips for her to drink, but a good portion of it ran down her chin, wetting her shirt and the top fold of the sheet. If everything she had learned would not remain inscribed somewhere, what would have been the purpose of her life? She rested her head on the pillow again but was unable to fall back asleep, watching how the morning light began to filter itself little by little over the ceiling of their room, thinking that death was probably a lot like the blackness from her nightmare. A nearby border to nonexistence.
His letters from the front plunged her into a contradictory state. A part of her feared for his life while the other deeply envied the sensations he described and that she knew very well: to have your back up against the slope of ditch swearing in Aramaic at those Fascist sons-of-bitches and the mothers that gave birth to them. That bone-chilling silence after the fire of the howitzers, a silence like no other, that smell of the earth’s proximity, that physical certainty that only the now matters, and afterward, less than two hundred yards from the front line, the bars on the Gran Vía with their delicious coffee with cream, served in a tall, tubular glass. Confectionery after the battle. He had already been poisoned by the war’s virus and he didn’t know it.
She couldn’t stop humming the songs she’d learned in Spain.
Madrid you’re so resistant,
Madrid you’re so resistant
Madrid you’re so resistant…
Little mama, the bombings
the bombings…
She sang them in the shower, as she cooked, while she looked out the window, and Paris felt too small for her, because the only world that mattered began on the other s
ide of the Pyrenees. At last, she had found a terra firma that would not sink under her feet. Others called themselves Spaniards for a lot less than that.
Ruth knew her well. She knew that Gerda was not one to wait patiently, like Penelope, for her man to return, weaving and unweaving the tapestry of memory. With resignation, Ruth listened to her, like a mother or an older sister, her eyebrows raised, a wave of hair clipped up and hanging over one side of her forehead, her bathrobe sealed over her chest, interrupting only when necessary to offer a piece of advice already predestined to fall upon deaf ears. She watched Gerda smoke with that smile apparently devoid of intentions, and knew that she had already come to a decision.
Whether Alliance Photo offered her a contract or not, with credentials or without them, she was going to Spain.
She had always been like this. Take the first train, make a quick decision. It’s here or there. It’s black or white. Choose.
“No, Ruth,” she said in an attempt to defend herself from the comment her friend had made aloud. “The reality is I’ve never been able to choose. I didn’t choose what happened in Leipzig, I didn’t choose to come to Paris, I didn’t choose to abandon my family, my brothers, I didn’t choose to fall in love. Nor did I even choose to become a photographer. I chose nothing. Whatever came my way, I dealt with it as I could.” She got up and began playing with an amber bead, tossing it between her hands. “My script was written by others. And I have this sense of always having lived in someone else’s shadow, first Georg, then Bob … It’s time for me to take the reins of my own life. I don’t want to be anyone’s property. Maybe I’m not as good a photographer as he is, but I have my own way of doing things, and when I focus, and calculate the distance, and press the shutter release, I know it’s my vision that I’m defending, and no one in the world—not he, not Chim, not Fred Stein, not Henri, no one—could ever photograph what I see, since it comes naturally to me.”
“It sounds like you’re a little upset with him,” said Ruth.
Feeling uncomfortable, Gerda sank her hands into the pockets of her slacks and hunched her shoulders. It was true she felt betrayed when her name didn’t appear credited for the photos. Capa’s success had relegated her to the background. But it wasn’t easy for her to express the sensation that had taken hold of her in the last few weeks. The deeper her love, the bigger the gap she placed between them. She began to need a certain distance and felt that he should allow her the space she considered appropriate. Professional independence was the key to loving herself. How does one love and at the same time fight against that which one loves?
“I’m not upset,” she said. “Just a bit tired.”
Even though she rejected her religious beliefs, she couldn’t stop herself from being Jewish. Her vision of the world included a tangible line dating back to her ancestors. She had been raised on the stories from the Old Testament. Abraham, Isaac, Sarah, Jacob … The same way she loved family tradition she would have detested dying without a name.
Chapter Nineteen
Never had she seen cafés so packed. Not even in Paris. It was normal to have to stand and wait until a seat was freed. Since the Republicans had moved to Valencia, many correspondents had been evacuated to the coastal city now populated by civilians who’d fled the bombings in Madrid. The highway to Puerto de Contreras was being guarded by men from the Rosal column. Dark-eyed, a country folk’s gait, sideburns, lively-colored capes, and a pistol on their hip; they were the real kind of anarchists. Spaniards from a fierce caste who helped their women with the children, carried them in pairs over their backs, but when it came to men who’d abandoned their barricades, they had no pity. Eyeing them furiously, with a bull’s disdain toward the tame lamb. Sheer brilliance. There was no excusing them for abandoning the capital to its own fate. Many were obliged to go back. But when sick and hungry children arrived by night from far away, the lights from the city high above, with their sacks over their shoulders, they showed themselves, smiling.
“Cheer up, my friends,” they’d say. “Here you’ll surely get sick of eating so much rice.”
Valencia, full of bright lights and a view of the sea. A dream.
Gerda had just arrived. She looked all around without being able to find one empty table. The Ideal Room café, with its large windows that opened onto Calle de la Paz, was the war correspondents’ favorite. The place was always packed with journalists, diplomats, writers, spies, and brigadists from all four cardinal points, milling around underneath its ceiling fans, with their leather jackets, “blond cigarettes,” and their international songs.
The sight of a woman entering alone caused a stir at the tables. Her beret tightly in place and a revolver on her hip.
“Gerda, what on earth are you doing here?” She heard the voice of a tall German man who had stood up to greet her from the other end of the café.
It was Alfred Kantorowicz, an old friend from Paris. They had spent many hours together at the Capoulade’s gatherings. He was attractive and wore the round glasses of an intellectual. With the help of Walter Benjamin and Gustav Regler, he had been able to establish the Association of German Writers in Exile. Along with Chim, Ruth, and Capa, Gerda had attended many of their events, which included poetry readings and short plays. Today, Kantorowicz was the political commissary for the Thirteenth Brigade.
She took a seat next to him at the table and introduced herself to the other brigadists as a special correspondent for Ce Soir.
“It’s a new publication,” she added humbly.
The magazine hadn’t yet released its first edition on newsstands, but they had all heard talk about it, since it was well known in the Communist Party’s circles and because it was run by Louis Aragon.
The café’s cosmopolitan atmosphere could be detected in the smoke: Gauloises Bleues, Gitanes, Ideales, Valencian stogies, Pall-Mall, and even Camel and Lucky Strike. That tribe could resemble a map with all the tributaries of a faraway river. French, German, Hungarian, English, American … So that borders were no longer important. Once in Spain, they removed their country’s clothes in order to change into the blue uniform or olive-green fatigues. Erase nations. That was the war’s lesson. For them, Spain was the symbol of all countries, a representation of the very notion of a universe ridiculed. There were metalworkers, doctors, students, typesetters, poets, scientists such as the biologist J. B. S. Haldane, deliberate and self-righteous, sporting an aviator jacket he bought at a store in Piccadilly Circus. Gerda felt right at home. Out of all the cigarettes being offered to her, she chose a Gauloises Bleues, and let the smoke pass through her lungs, the way all the words and sensations passed through her body.
“And Capa?” the German asked, puzzled, after a while. He was used to always seeing them together.
Gerda shrugged. A long silence. Kantorowicz couldn’t take his eyes off the warm triangle of her neckline.
“I’m not his babysitter,” she said proudly.
Valencia was courteous, generous, and aromatic. In those days, it was the war’s most amiable face. They were all passing through on the way to somewhere, and they rushed through the waiting as best they could. First thing in the morning, they’d cross the Plaza de Castelar, with its large circular openings to light and ventilate the underground flower market, toward Hotel Victoria, where the Republican government was staying, to see if there was any news. The correspondents usually ate at the restaurant in Hotel Londres, especially on Thursdays, when they served paella. The maître d’, dressed in a tux, would approach the tables remorsefully and say:
“Please excuse the service and the food … Since the Committee’s arrival, this is no longer what it used to be.”
Valencia’s people were kind lovers of life, slightly loud, and always telling sexually explicit jokes. Gerda, who was now more or less able to get by in the language, still found it hard to understand what they were saying. But she soon learned how to incorporate the Valencian che into her vocabulary, and people immediately wanted to adopt her. There
are people who, without even trying, are automatically loved. It’s something you’re born with, like the way you laugh as you tell a joke in a low voice. Gerda was one of those people. Languages came easily to her. She could interpret each accent with the fluency of a musician improvising a new melody. Pronounce swear words with such elegant grace that she could seduce anyone. She listened with her head slightly tilted to the side, a complicit air about her, like a mischievous child. Within the feminine canon, she wasn’t especially pretty, but the war had given her a different kind of beauty; that of a survivor. Much too thin and angular, with eyebrows that were arched and ironic, always dressed in a blue uniform or a military shirt, and with a charm that tempted everyone. For her suitors, Capa’s absence signified an open season, and she began to enjoy the pleasures of being courted. The waiters reserving the best tables for her. The silent rivalry among the men around her, who competed to buy her drinks, offer her the latest news, make her laugh, or take her dancing to one of the salons on Calle del Trinquete de Caballeros.
DANCING IS THE ANTEROOM TO THE BROTHEL: LET’S SHUT IT DOWN, read a black-and-red poster on the door, endorsed by the acronym FAI.
“The owner can’t be an anarchist,” said Gerda after someone translated it for her.
“Of course he is. And a hard-core anarchist. He is one of the founders of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica.”
“So how does he manage to keep this place open then?”
“Well, since prohibition is an act of government, it’s his way of showing that no one gives him orders. You know: No Gods, No Masters.”
Anarchists! So independent, so loyal, so humane. Spanish to the core. Gerda smiled on the inside.
Other times, a group would go down to Malvarrosa beach to eat shrimp and watch the boats. That’s what she liked most. Sitting in the sand and watching the Grao fishermen use oxen to pull the sailboats to shore.
Waiting for Robert Capa Page 14
