Waiting for Robert Capa

by Susana Fortes

  In mid-March the rebels launched a new attack on Madrid from the northeast. But the Italian troops sent by Mussolini were met with a large counteroffensive that resulted in a Republican victory in Guadalajara. Gerda visited those conquered territories, traveling through narrow roads full of mud and activity, surrounded by a large caravan of trucks and combat cars. That day she returned to the Alliance looking drained and tired, her tripod bag full of holes from Fascist gunfire.

  When Rafael Alberti saw the danger she’d been in, he became alarmed, and she responded to him by pointing to her tripod stand and saying:

  “Better here than in my heart.” Though she wasn’t too sure about that.

  She ate with everyone downstairs, as she normally did, and when they were finished, they turned on the radio and listened to Augusto Fernández’s report on the war. It was undoubtedly all good news. The Battle of Brihuega had been one of the Republicans’ clearest victories up until then. They decided to throw a party in the hall of mirrors, but Gerda didn’t want to go. Everyone insisted: Rafael Dieste; Cockburn, who never missed an opportunity to try and woo her; Alberti; María Teresa León; everyone … But she refused with a tepid smile. She went up to her room, staying up late to carefully mark her negatives instead. Her style wasn’t like Capa’s, using a wedge-shaped cutout, but using a sewing thread, just like film directors. Working with her hands helped relax her. She felt an unsettling feeling in her soul, like a yellow river of muck shrinking in the night. Since Capa had left, she was no longer interested in socializing.

  Jean Harlow in China Seas.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  It was a clear day with few clouds. April 26. The temperature warm, not overly hot. A good market day with chickens, cornbread, children playing marbles, and bells ringing. The first plane appeared at four in the afternoon, a Junkers 52.

  After the Fascists’ defeat in Guadalajara, Franco turned his strategic focus on the Basque country’s industrial belt in order to ultimately take control of its iron and carbon mines. General Mola was stationed in Vizcaya with 40,000 men for the northern campaign. But then the Condor Legion’s aerial attacks began under the command of Lieutenant Günther Lützow of Hitler’s army.

  Four Junker squadrons in triangular formation, flying very low, backed by ten Heinkel 51s, along with other Italian reserve planes circling Guernica’s sky like phantoms. First, they released regular bombs, 3,000 aluminum projectiles that weighed two pounds each, followed by a cluster of 550-pound incendiary bombs. Then, to top it off, a pack of fighter planes grazing over the center of the city, shooting down anything that moved.

  It was impossible to see anything within that black smoke. In the end, they blindly bombed the entire area. For three intense hours, it rained iron, houses ablaze. An entire village burned down. “First Total Destruction of a Defenseless Civilian Target by Aerial Bombing,” declared L’Humanité’s headline. There had never been anything like it. Capa read the news at a kiosk in Place de la Concorde.

  He was there to meet Ruth for breakfast. He hadn’t seen her since his return from Spain and he needed to talk to her about Gerda. He was still haunted by lingering feelings from their last night at the Alliance. The way she avoided making any type of commitment, appearing detached. All those unanswered questions only amounted to the most intolerable feeling of uncertainty. Completely fragile, as if everything was on the brink of no return. The night before had been hard on his liver. In the beginning, he wandered through the quais of the Seine, his hands in his pockets, kicking stones, lost in his thoughts, and not understanding a thing. Later, he went into a bar by the pier and within the hour became completely drunk. Whiskey. No ice, no soda, without any foreplay. Each one of us has our own way of healing from a secret loss. Only when the bottle had reached the load line did he distance himself from it. His movements were slower, his heart and groin had stopped hurting him, and Gerda Taro went back to being just one more Polish Jew he could meet on any boulevard in that corner of the world that was Paris. Not any smarter, not any prettier, not any better. Just like his thoughts, the bar’s contours had begun to tilt to one side, little by little. Everything was slightly out of focus, as in his best photographs. The loneliness, the melancholy, the fear of losing her … He swore to himself never to fall in love that way again. And he stuck to it. Of course there were other women. Some of them very beautiful, and he always appeared attentive and enthusiastic in their presence, living up to his reputation of being a charmer, but never with any ties or commitments of any kind. He preferred to entrench himself in the memory, keep it far away from the rest of the world, as if allowing someone else to enter their secret grotto would be a terrible betrayal to himself. One night in the future, after many years had passed, and when Europe was starting to climb out of the hole of the Second World War, he was actually able to seduce Ingrid Bergman. He was in the Ritz’s lobby with his friend, the writer Irwin Shaw, and the two of them decided to send the actress a dinner invitation that no intelligent woman would be able to decline. They wrote it quickly, laughing all the while, on a cream-colored paper with the hotel’s letterhead:

  Att. Miss Ingrid Bergman

  This is a collective effort. The collective consists of Bob Capa and Irwin Shaw.

  We had thought about sending you flowers with this note inviting you to dine with us tonight, but after consulting the matter further, we realized that either we pay for the flowers, or pay for the dinner, but we could not pay for both. After the votes were cast, dinner won out by a wide margin.

  It has been suggested that if you were to care less about a dinner, we could send you the flowers. As of now, a decision has not been made on the matter.

  Flowers aside, we have a load of dubious qualities.

  If we continue writing, we won’t have anything to talk about, since our supply of charm is limited.

  We’ll ring you at 6:15.

  We don’t sleep.

  Signed:

  Expectants

  It was his way of staying alive, to take everything as a bit of a joke now that nothing really mattered to him. But what’s certain is that he would never love anyone as much as he loved that Polish Jew with the mocking smile that not even round after round of double whiskeys could erase. He had gulped them down in one shot, one after the other, without taking a breather, while the waiter set the chairs on the tables and swept up the floor.

  By now, the alcohol had worn off completely. He woke up that morning to urinate and was taken aback by his horselike spring. All he had left was a jackhammer inside his head, pounding at his temples. That’s why he called Ruth. A woman was always better at seeing the light at the end of the tunnel; women can see farther, know each other well, and know what has to be done, damn it.

  “Gerda’s like that. Since she was a little girl, she’s put up a protective shell around herself. Give her time,” advised Ruth, unaware that time was the only thing Gerda did not have left.

  With downcast eyes, Capa listened. Keeping quiet, imagining Gerda as an adolescent just as she had appeared in a photo he’d closely studied that she kept in a box of quince candy with other memories.

  She was sitting on a dock with her shorts on, with her blond braids, holding a fishing rod, her bare feet hanging off the wharf, with the same frowning obstinacy and arrogance and headstrong attitude between her eyebrows. “The mother who gave birth to her,” crossed his mind, and he had to hold his breath so that the tenderness wouldn’t win. Ultimately, he blew all that air out at once, the way someone would if they were annoyed or making a fuss.

  It was at that moment that he got up from his seat in a daze and crossed the square toward the newsstand. His face froze. When you’re completely absorbed in your own pain, you couldn’t care less about the rest of the world. Except that what he saw wasn’t the rest of the world, but Spain, flesh of his flesh. A city completely razed to the ground and covered in rubble. Guernica. Each projectile thundered within his entrails.

  “Jesus fucking Christ!”


  That same day he negotiated his trip with Ce Soir to Biarritz and from there took a light aircraft headed to Bilbao.

  Once again, that clear blue sky beneath the engine’s turbulence, but with a coastline below that was outlined in black. The German planes continued to bomb the trenches along the slope of Mount Sollube, and Francoist tanks relentlessly advanced along the highways. But the situation in the interior of the besieged city was worse. Capa could see women and children rising out of the ruins like dusty ghosts, the sun beating down on the disemboweled building stumps, and that smell of a city bursting with dead bodies, decaying under the debris, a smell that sticks to your skin for days although you try to scrub it away with soap. Impossible to forget. Like the faces of the mothers in the port of Bilbao. They were standing there, in a starving, bomb-ridden port, saying good-bye to their children with small suitcases while they prepared themselves to board French and British ships that had to break the blockade in order to evacuate them. Biting their lips so their little ones wouldn’t see them cry, re-combing their hair and buttoning their jackets all the way up so they’d look their best. They knew they would never see them again. Some of them were so young that their older brothers, five or six years old, had to carry them, still in diapers, in their arms.

  Capa looked from side to side, as if he could no longer shoot any more photos. His hands were tense. He sat down on a pile of sacks alongside the reporter Mathieu Corman. He preferred the battlefield a thousand times over. They remained there awhile, the two of them, smoking cigarettes, utterly speechless, contemplating the black water while the ships moved farther out to sea.

  He thought about the impossibility of transmitting what one feels in the presence of something like that. Death wasn’t the worst of it, but that strange distance that crawls inside your soul forever like an irreparable chill. He saw himself leaving Budapest when he was seventeen, a pair of shirts, double-soled boots, baggy pants, and nowhere to go. The Leica wasn’t big enough to photograph that. He needed a camera that could capture the movement, a film camera. A still camera wasn’t enough to transmit the children’s voices, the ships sailing off, the women standing on the piers until sundown, without there being a way to yank them out of there, still thinking they can see the tiny dots of the ships on the horizon. The dampness that caused the gangway to feel slippery. The immense, shadowy surface of the ocean.

  It was Richard de Rochemont, director of the documentary series March of Time, who gave him a chance to try out a movie camera the last time he’d been in Paris. He was a friendly and reasonable man, Harvard-educated, and he wound up teaching Capa the basics of working the camera. Which led to offering him a job, and a small cash advance, to go and film war scenes in Spain to include in the series. It was a small Eyemo camera, easy to work with. Plenty of film projects and documentaries were being made about what was really happening in Spain during those years. Geza Korvin, Capa’s childhood friend, was filming all of Dr. Norman Bethune’s blood transfusions in hopes of raising money in Canada. And Joris Ivens, married to a female friend of his from Budapest, had begun filming The Spanish Earth.

  In those days of mud and stars, movies were the big temptation.

  That’s how Gerda saw him when he appeared in Puerto de Navacerrada, wearing a thick, black cable-knit sweater, with the Eyemo on his shoulder. She also had something to show off: a shiny new Leica, bought during her last trip to Paris. Her most valued treasure.

  She walked slowly toward him.

  “How are you?” Her voice insecure, her heart pounding in the vein of her neck.

  “How do you want me to be?” He smiled, looking confused, running his fingers through his hair. “I feel like shit.”

  He moved closer to her. Causing her to think he was going to take her in his arms, but he limited himself to gently passing his index finger over her forehead, parting her bangs, then quickly removing his hand. A slight gesture. They remained standing there, inches apart, slightly smiling, a hint of slyness on their faces, then serious again, looking intensely into each other’s eyes with surprise and terror, witnesses to a simultaneous wonder that passed through them every time they found one another again.

  Outside of Segovia, the Republican army had just launched an offensive under the command of General Walter, and what Gerda and Capa wanted more than anything was footage of a major victory. They worked side by side, swapping her Leica and his Eyemo, accompanying the troops to the front line. Under a gray sky, the soldiers moved between the pine trees, stomping on the dense lumpiness of the earth with their boots, trying to rid themselves of the morning chill. They filmed the maneuvers of the combat vehicles, the armored cars shifting their cannons from left to right as they advanced, officials talking on the phone inside a military tent as they studied a topographical map splayed on a sawhorse table, sappers alongside a pile of shells marked with yellow chalk scribblings on their sides. But neither of them had any film experience. They used the Eyemo as if it were a photo camera. First focusing on an image, then a long sweeping shot over it, as if they were blowing up stills. In the end, very few shots could be used for the March of Time series, although a few excerpts turned out to be very helpful for the novel their friend Hemingway was writing, titled For Whom the Bell Tolls.

  The Republican troops weren’t successful, either. The attack was a failure, and Gerda and Capa returned to Madrid, once again, without the images they had wanted. But the environment had already taken hold of them: the light over the countryside beneath the last ray of sun, the handkerchiefs of the women repairing a path where a mine had blown, the dark blue light of the foothills, the smell of coffee in the camp at daybreak within the ring of enemy mountains in the background. Capa gazed at it with nostalgia, anticipating the day he’d have to leave the country for good. It had occurred to him to think of Spain as a kind of mood, a ghostly part of his memory where Gerda would remain forever fixed, and which he’d never be able to completely abandon.

  They were days of hard work and despair: losing battles, the death of friends, General Lukacs had just been defeated on the Aragon front, the struggles from house to house in the suburb of Carabanchel. They’d arrive at night at 7 Calle del Marqués del Duero exhausted, wanting nothing, and without time to think of themselves. Only a Republican victory could take them out of that rut they found themselves in.

  At the end of June they headed south of Madrid, toward an area close to Peñarroya, where the Chapaiev Batallion had their headquarters. When Alfred Kantorowicz saw Gerda approaching with her camera hanging from her neck and a rifle on her shoulder, he smiled and went inside his tent to change his shirt. He hadn’t forgotten about her since the day she made her grand entrance at the Ideal Room café in Valencia.

  Her presence had that immediate effect on men. She awakened their most basic instincts. That same day, before her camera, the soldiers re-created a small battle that had occurred a few days back in La Granjuela. They needed to record footage for the documentary, and with the Eyemo in their hands, it wasn’t so easy to choose between being a reporter or a film director. They didn’t see anything wrong with staging the maneuvers of a historical event. However, the rush they experienced from something live was still much stronger. The next day they followed the troops to the front line. Their position was extremely dangerous. Gerda threw her camera over her shoulder, and before the admiring eyes of the brigadists and Kantorowicz’s swearing in Aramaic, she covered those 180 yards that separated her from the trenches, in broad daylight, without anybody covering her.

  “I was no longer satisfied observing all that was happening from a safe place,” she wrote that night in her red notebook. “I prefer to experience the battles like the soldiers experience them. It’s the only way to understand the situation.”

  The situation. She worked and never took a break, traveling to Valencia soon after to cover the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals Congress. It was the first time that writers and artists had united in a country at war to express their solidarity. More th
an two hundred attendees from twenty-eight countries. The air-raid sirens sounded all through the night. André Malraux, Julien Benda, Tristan Tzara, Stephen Spender, Malcolm Cowley, Octavio Paz … But when she finished her report, she returned immediately to Madrid, back to the old manor on Calle del Marqués del Duero. Whatever it took, she had to photograph a Republican victory. She was risking her life more each time, bordering on irresponsibility. Capa saw her crouched next to a militiaman barricaded behind a rock, her tiny, agile body, her head slightly thrown back, her eyes shining very bright, the adrenaline of the war galloping through her veins. Click. Another time he photographed her next to a boundary stone on the highway marked “PC,” as in the Partido Comunista. The initials had nothing to do with the Communist Party, but they found the coincidence funny. She was sitting with her knees bent on top of his army jacket, leaning over the boundary stone, resting her head on her arm, her black beret, her blond hair radiant in the sunlight. Click. The war had released a new depth to her, tragic, no different from any Greek goddess. So beautiful that sometimes she almost didn’t appear real.

  A detailed map of Madrid was tacked up on the wall of his room. Capa was packing his bags with the radio on. According to their agreement with de Rochemont, he had to return to Paris to deliver the footage. A car was waiting for him outside the Alliance. Since he didn’t have a lot of things, he took his time organizing them in his luggage. A clean shirt; some dirty ones, placed into a side pocket with a zipper, along with a few pairs of underwear. Then his black wool sweater and a pair of khaki pants, followed by his shaving cream and razors packed inside a separate leather case. He picked up John Dos Passos’s book about John Reed so he could bring it as well, but at the last minute he reconsidered.