Ol’ Man River
That Ol’ Man River…
More than two hundred people were sitting in a large circle with their legs crossed Indian-style. Practically ceremonial.
“Shit, it’s the black man…” exclaimed Capa, completely moved by whom he saw. It was Paul Robeson, a six-foot-three son of an escaped slave from New Jersey, with a football player’s broad, sloping chest that allowed his grand voice to resonate like a pipe organ. He was standing in the middle of that plain surrounded by an audience of shadows that broke out into a standing ovation when the grandson of slaves concluded with a last deep note that elevated itself over all borders.
Hundreds of faces that remained still and tense, overcome with emotion, holding their breaths, listening to the spiritual black man who seemed as if he’d been plucked right out of the cotton fields along the Mississippi. Gerda could feel that music, not hitting her over the head the way the Psalms could, but in her gut. There was something profoundly Biblical in that solitary music. The darkness, the smell of the fields, the gathering of people from so many places. All of them so young, practically kids, like Pati Edney, an eighteen-year-old British woman who fell in love riding on an ambulance’s running board on the front at Aragón. Or John Cornford, a twenty-year-old Englishman with a leather jacket and a boyish smile, who smoked one filterless cigarette after another, and who would have been an excellent poet if a bullet hadn’t exploded in his lungs in the mountains of Córdoba. Gerda and Capa had met up with some of them in Leciñena or in Madrid, when the Fascists arrived at the edge of the Manzanares and they joined General Lukacs’s brigade. Gerda could still see the writer Gustav Regler’s face as he was being carried out of the rubble on a stretcher by two militiamen after an attack. He was a very tall German fellow whom Capa had gotten drunk with during the time of the battles in Casa de Campo, and who had confessed he’d fallen head over heels in love with a married woman much older than he. The American Ben Leider, in his aviator glasses, posing with his entire squadron in front of the Policarpov I-15 in which he had defended Madrid until the aircraft was eventually shot down. Every time a biplane fighter took off on a mission, they’d pass over his grave in Colmenar de Oreja cemetery and say hello from the air. Frida Knight, who fed the pigeons bread crumbs in the Plaza Santa Ana and would become furious when Fascists’ howitzers blew them away. Ludwig Renn, his left arm covered in pink scars from machine-gun wounds. Through the lenses of her round spectacles, the cruelty of the fight and the disconcerted look in Simone Weil’s eyes. Charles Donnelly, with a carpenter’s pencil tucked behind his ear, who liked writing poems by candlelight in the plains of Morata. Alex McDade, clever and blunt, who could make everyone laugh with his typically Scottish humor, sitting on the sidewalk eating tuna from a can while Franco’s planes bombed every inch of the Gran Vía. Americans from the Lincoln Brigade, Bulgarians and Yugoslavians from the Dimitrov Battalion, Poles from the Dombrowski Battalion, Germans from the Thälmann Brigade and from the Edgar André Battalion, French from the Marseillaise Battalion, Cubans, Russians … Gerda thought she might run into Georg somewhere. She knew from his last letter that he’d spent the past three months fighting in Spain, but chance did not choose to lower the bridge for them to meet.
“I love black music,” said Gerda.
Paul Robeson’s singing had enlivened the group with such a charge of emotion that they raised their fists to their temples and shouted: “Cheers! Cheers!…”
Afterward, they walked toward their tents, the plain becoming more visible as their eyes grew accustomed to the dark, a breeze from the wheat fields causing the tents to undulate slightly, a night that was cold and flat, that could purify all sounds and smells. And as if it had been covered by a bell jar, the murmur of the camp suddenly faded away. Holding hands, a special kind of harmony between them, almost geological, nocturnal. Capa found those lands beautiful enough to die there.
“If I offered you my life, you would reject it, right?” It was neither a complaint nor a reproach.
She didn’t answer.
Capa had never loved anyone as much, and it made him think about his own mortality. The more she demanded her independence, the more unattainable she appeared, and the more his need to have her grew. For the first time in his life, he felt possessive.
He hated her self-sufficiency, or when she chose to sleep alone. It was impossible to get her out of his head; he was thinking obsessively about every centimeter of her skin, her voice, the things she’d say when she argued over the slightest matter, the way she crawled into his tent and pressed up against his body, pouting softly like a saint or an Andalusian virgin.
Turning toward her, in order to touch her wrist gently, he said:
“Marry me.”
Gerda did a double take when she heard his words. It wasn’t confusion. Just that she was a bit moved. Months ago, she would have happily accepted.
Facing him, she looked directly and gently into his eyes, holding back the consolation of a caress, as if she doubted him or owed him an explanation. She felt the powerlessness of all that she could not say, searching for any word that could save her. She remembered an old Polish proverb: “If you clip a lark’s wings, it will be yours. But then it couldn’t fly. And what you love about it is its flight.” She preferred not to say anything. Lowering her eyes so that her pity wouldn’t humiliate him more, she let go of him and continued to walk toward the tent, aware of the powerful density of the earth below her feet, with a deep shame inside tearing at her soul, thinking about how difficult it would be to love someone else as much as she loved that Hungarian who had looked at her with resignation, as if he could read her thoughts, a smile with hints of sadness and irony to it, knowing that it was the pact they had made. Here, there, nowhere…
Chapter Twenty-one
The old manor was still holding up after months of occupation. It was located on 7 Calle del Marqués del Duero and had been expropriated from the Marqués Heredia Spínola’s heirs in order to be converted into the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals’ main office. The building creaked at all of its seams; it was ugly, overly stately, decorated with funereal furniture and thick velvet curtains, but it harbored an entire hidden city within. The Alliance’s salons were constantly overflowing with actors, journalists, artists, writers, both foreign and Spanish, and, most important, poets, such as Rafael Alberti, who served as its secretary. In the months between winter and spring that year, several figures passed through: Pablo Neruda, who still remained Chile’s consul in Madrid; César Vallejo, a Peruvian open-form poet; Luis Cernuda, always elegant with his freshly groomed hair and trimmed beard; León Felipe, who kept count of the number of dead from aerial bombings; Miguel Hernández, the pastor poet from Orihuela, his face blackened by the sun upon returning from the front with his shaved head and peasant’s gait, barely lifting his feet off the ground.
In the dim light of the hallways, Gerda passed eighteenth-century murals on the walls in silence. When she arrived at her room on the second floor, she opened the door to a walnut wardrobe and discovered a collection of period pieces, just hanging there on the rod, which had belonged to several generations of Spanish nobles: austere frock coats, lace gowns, admiral uniforms with blue fabric and gold buttons, muslin dresses that smelled of camphor.
“It’s fantastic!” she said to Capa, her eyes big, like a little girl’s.
Around four or five of them all had the same idea. They removed those dusty relics from the wardrobe and slid them down the polished mahogany banister, releasing a flurry of moths. Shortly after, the main hall of mirrors had become an improvised theater, with everyone in their costumes interpreting the part they’d been given to play. Capa was dressed as an academic, in a frock coat and dress shirt with lace cuffs. Gerda swayed her hips beneath a red ruffled dress and a Spanish mantilla. Alberti wrapped himself in a white sheet and placed escarole on his head as his laurel crown. The photographer Walter Reuter smoked his pipe in a lieutenant’s Cuirassier uniform. The poster designer José
Renau posed as a bishop, with his hairy legs showing beneath his robe. Rafael Dieste acted as the evening’s master of ceremonies, pulling all the strings. They were so completely engrossed in a childlike battle, armed with nutcrackers and paper balls, that when the nightly air-raid siren sounded, it caught them all by surprise. Everywhere they went, they were surrounded by death. This was their way of defending themselves from the war.
The entire city was a huge trench of barricaded streets filled with bomb craters. One wasn’t allowed to walk down Calle de Alcalá, Calle de Goya, Calle Mayor, or Gran Vía. And on streets like Calle de Recoletos or Calle de Serrano, which ran north-south, one had to follow the arrows on the sidewalks pointing east. People were also warned not to cross plazas from their opposite ends but to travel around them, staying close to the doorways in case they needed to run inside for cover. Rules that were adopted by General Miaja when he stood in front of Madrid’s Defense Council. That were stuck onto a bulletin board beside the entrance to the Alliance for everyone to see. Although several weeks had passed since the city had begun its evacuation to Valencia, its problems with provisions supplies still persisted, and the Madrileños had to stand in long lines for rations and groceries. But at the theaters and movie houses, it was business as usual. The Rialto, Bilbao, Capitol, the Avenida … A city under attack could not lose hope. They all went to see China Seas at the Bilbao, without knowing that the worst was waiting for them on Calle de Fuencarral on their way out. But after the typhoons, Malaysian pirates, the coolies, and the faraway gunfire of that celluloid China, the real war was not as impressive. Jean Harlow was somewhere near a yellow river of muck, and her only hope was the distant sound of a horn from a mysterious ship. Dreams.
The Alliance was the front’s cultural center. In the late afternoons, the rooms on the first floor became the improvised offices for the magazine El Mono Azul, which aimed to lift the combatants’ morale, while in the game room, the theater company Nueva Escena, directed by Rafael Dieste, staged plays set in wartime. Dinner was served at nine o’clock at a grand table lit by candelabras. The menu rarely included anything but the miserable ration of beans that was allowed, but the silverware, Bohemian crystal, and Sevres porcelain were exquisite.
At night they’d stay up late, listening to live music and to poets with feverish eyes reciting verses until the dawn began to color the bombarded nights of that heroic city pink. Gerda and Capa soon became everybody’s favorite couple. They started to feel at home in the world within the Alliance, while in Paris they had never stopped being refugees, foreigners living on borrowed time. Even with their strained Spanish, they’d join the chorus to sing, with more bravado than anyone in the room, the songs of the Resistance:
They laugh at the bombs
They laugh at the bombs
They laugh at the bombs
Mother of Mine
the Madrileños
the Madrileños…
With deep voices and their hearts in the right place, they’d become immersed in Spanish humor, which could be so crude at times. Capable of laughing when their dinner plate was empty, or when Santiago Ontañón told them that the beans had worms that looked you straight in the eye, or when the poet Emilio Prados felt like singing “La Marseillaise” with an Andalusian accent, or when Gerda would say she smoked yerbos instead of yerba, the correct way to say “grass” in Spanish, or when Capa, in all seriousness, would start a conversation with one of the marquesas in the paintings.
“And why, if I may ask, did you become a revolutionary, Señor Capa?” asked María Teresa León, Alberti’s wife, imitating the dusty voice of one of those Old Regime ladies adorning the walls.
“For decorum, señora marquesa. For decorum,” he responded.
The Alliance was his Spanish home, his only family.
Sometimes the North American writer Ernest Hemingway would drop by, wearing his beret and the metal-rimmed glasses of an intellectual. He was working on a novel about the Civil War, and everywhere he went, he’d bring an old typewriter. He was usually accompanied by the New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews, one of the most perspicacious reporters in Spain in those days, and Sefton Delmer, from London’s Daily Express, who was close to six-foot, corpulent, ruddy-complexioned, and who looked like a British bishop. The three formed a curious trio of musketeers that Capa would soon join, after the time he arranged a paella dinner for everyone at Luis Candelas’s caverns beneath the Arco de Cuchilleros.
In turn, Gerda was the Alliance’s star. Her magnetism seduced everybody. That radiant smile and her capacity to imitate any accent and speak five languages, including Capanese, as Hemingway liked to call Capa’s strange lingo. She’d leave the Alliance early in the morning on foot, leaving the martyrized remnants of the National Library behind her so she could walk in the direction of Cibeles. From there, she’d continue by car from Alcalá or Gran Vía on her way to the front. She’d work all day, leaning over those who were on the verge of death and who had arrived in the trenches of the Hospital Clinico, just a few hundred yards away from the bars on the edge of Madrid. Gerda, working her camera like an assault weapon. Capa saw how she changed the script that was their lives, leaning up against a barrier while shots were being fired in her direction, her nostrils flared, her skin moist with sweat, the adrenaline shooting out of every pore, her mouth shut, intensely looking around between each shot.
Each time they’d risk their lives more. But they were so young and good-looking and with a confident sportsmanship quality about them. Nobody ever thought to worry. They had a godlike aura around them. The soldiers would turn hopeful when Gerda arrived, as if her presence served as a talisman. If Little Blondie—the sobriquet they used for her—was around, things couldn’t turn out so bad for them that day. Months later, when they ran into Alfred Kantorowicz again in Madrid, he confessed that while he was in La Granjuela, he’d never seen his fellow brigadists as clean and fresh-shaven as they were when she was close by, roaming around with her camera. There would be a constant scuffle in front of the mirrors and the water fountains. The foreign correspondents would fight over who would offer her their seat or who could take her in their vehicle. André Chamson invited her to climb on board the confiscated limousine they’d allocated him. She would offer them all that peculiar smile of hers, both affectionate and ironic at the same time, but without abdicating a thing. While she strolled with General Miaja through the Alliance’s gardens, he presented her with April’s first rose. Sometimes she liked to chat with Rafael Alberti in the manor’s library. She showed the poet how to develop his first photos in the building’s basement, where they had set up a small lab. Even María Teresa León adored her with that mixture of motherly instinct and feminine rivalry.
In public, she had an enchantment that drew everyone to her. It was what Capa had admired about her from the beginning, but now he wasn’t so sure of himself. He began to doubt everything. Their relationship had gone back to being what it was when they first met. Soul mates, inseparable comrades, colleagues, partners. And sometimes—just sometimes—they’d sleep together. It was apparent that, as a couple, they had retreated to the innocence of a neutral territory. But he was much too proud to be anyone’s secret lover. He couldn’t stand it anymore. When she entrenched herself behind that wall of independence, or when in a large group she had a private conversation with someone else while he was at her side, he’d start telling jokes in a loud voice that even he didn’t find very funny, prisoner to a strange loquaciousness. Behaving the same way every time he felt ignored. He’d read into each and every one of her gestures as if it were a secret code. He suspected that she had replaced him with another. Once, he saw her standing in the vestibule, grabbing Claud Cockburn, the London Worker correspondent, by the lapels while she laughed and laughed about something he whispered in her ear. For days he’d do nothing but follow the journalist, trying to make his life impossible. But what in hell was she trying to pull? He no longer trusted Gerda’s shows of affection; stroking his
hair when she passed by him or leaning on his shoulder when they happened to find themselves sitting next to one another. Either she’s with me or she’s against me, he thought.
But the more he fought it, the more obsessed he grew with her body, the flat surface of her stomach, the fine curve of her ankle, her protruding clavicle. That was his only geography. He didn’t need to sleep with her just one night but every night, throw her face-up onto one of those canopy beds, open her thighs, and enter her, tame her at her own pace, until she lost control, until he could soften the sharp arrises she’d sometimes get on her face, causing her to appear so distant. Just as the wind polishes the surfaces of bare rocks. That’s how it was the last time. Rough, violent. They both fell to their knees, his head beneath her shirt, the salty taste of her fingers in his mouth just before letting his desire take hold of him. He grabbed her by the hair and jerked her head back, his features contorted, furious, voracious, with kisses that turned into bites, and caresses that bordered on scratches. Making ferocious love to her, as if he hated her. But what he hated was the future.
“I’m leaving,” he said, eyes downward, not looking at her, just before leaving her room.
It was the only thing he could do. He was going mad.
Besides, she knew how to manage very well on her own.
She was more concentrated on her work than ever, accustomed to getting up early and coming home with the last flicker of light in the sky. In the mornings she’d travel through the Parque del Oeste and the intricate system of trenches dug up all around Ciudad Universitaria. Coming back from the front, she would walk along the grand Avenida del Quince y Medio, swerving around the pedestrians, automatically dodging the corpse of another unfortunate citizen. Desensitized to death, with a scab that had slowly formed without her knowing it, during the course of almost a year of war. She stopped short to stand in front of a movie poster. There was Jean Harlow, a woman half-bad, half-good, part-angel, part-vampiress, like any other character susceptible to surrendering. And beside her, Clark Gable, her savior, smiling, wicked, tender, the man who should put her to the test, split her in two, humiliate her a little, undervalue her, and at the same time respond to her love with a love as fierce and of the same nature. The same old story. All that interior violence and complication to defend themselves from the very tenderness. Cinema, and its tribute to dreams and shadows.
Waiting for Robert Capa Page 16
