Waiting for Robert Capa (15 page)

Only a few hours before, the insurgent general Queipo de Llano had sworn over the radio that his men would soon be arriving to declare their right to
droit de seigneur
.

People believe that the most devastating part of a war are the corpses with their guts out in the open, the puddles of blood, and all that you can capture at first glance. But sometimes the horror is off to the side, in the lost look on the face of a woman who's just been raped, as she limps away alone within the ruins, trying to keep her head down. Gerda and Capa were not aware of this yet. They were too young. And that was their first conflict. They still believed war had its romantic side.

First thing in the morning, the German reporters Hans Namuth and Georg Reisner, who also contributed content to
Vu
magazine and Alliance Photo, along with the Austrian journalist Franz Borkenau, had managed to photograph the terrified exodus of Cerro Muriano's inhabitants under a sky filled with Francoist planes while Queipo de Llano continued to harass women over the radio. There was nothing that ticked Capa off more than arriving at places after others had already been there. But during wartime, it's never clear what came before or what came after.

They left their car in the town and continued walking along the highway, following the indications on the map to the place where they had been told a militiawoman from the CNT was camping out. Along the way, they took photographs of the last villagers that had lagged behind. Silent faces, women carrying their children in their arms, elderly couples with bloodshot eyes, constantly looking back. The look that Lot's wife wore before she turned into a pillar of salt. People who flee.

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 kissing 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.