Waiting for Robert Capa (24 page)

“Come on, you're really close now…”

The clean sky, the water snapping with every stroke, the smell of the cedar pier baking in the sun, the coolness on her back, the pressure of the swimsuit's red elastic straps over her shoulders, that way she shook her head from side to side to dry her hair, spattering water.

The nurse resoaked the sponge in the bowl and passed it over her forehead and neck to refresh her. She was at the El Goloso English hospital, El Escorial.

“And Ted?” she asked. “Is he all right?”

The nurse nodded with a smile. She was a blond woman with very blue eyes and a face as round as rustic bread.

“And very soon, you too will be all right,” she answered. “Dr. Douglas Jolly is going to operate on you. He's our best surgeon.”

In the distance, Gerda saw a rectangular light in one of the large windows of that old Jesuit monastery they'd brought her to. But the pain became unbearable again; the tank had destroyed her stomach, puncturing all her intestines.

“It would be nice to have my camera.”

They used two stretchers to bring her to the operating table, but she lost consciousness again before they arrived.

It was nighttime and the darkness up there was the color of prunes. She could feel her brothers' arms holding on to her shoulders as they walked along a road in Reutlinger. She could smell the wool from the sweater sleeves. Three little children, interlinking arms over shoulders, looking up at the sky. From there, they fell, two by two, three by three, like a handful of salt, those stars.

A star is like a memory—you never know if it is something you have stored or lost.

She came to with the whir of the ceiling fan, thinking it was Capa blowing onto her neck the way he did after lovemaking. They had brought her back to her bed. All she had on now was a gray shirt, her bare arm extended over the sheet. Looking extremely pale and a lot younger.

Gerda asked them to open the window so she could hear the night sounds. Her pulse rate was very low. She had seen far too many people die to feel any fear, but she would have liked to have had him close. Capa always knew how to calm her. He'd once expressed that same thought to her. At the start of the war, as they were lying on the grass in each other's arms.

“If I were to die at this very moment, here, just how we are right now, I wouldn't miss a thing,” he'd said. She was leaning over his chest and she could see the lump in the center of his neck, nutlike, rising and falling each time he swallowed saliva. She wanted to touch it with her fingers. She'd always loved that part of him, protruding out like a rocky peak. Within the light of the olive trees, the color of his skin had begun to slowly change, while his body had acquired the compact texture of the earth and its rocks. She liked that protrusion a lot, like a daisy's yellow center. She needed to sleep. Feeling so tired that all she wanted to do was rest her forehead over that part of his neck, as if she'd found an opening in a tree.

The blond nurse came over to her again with a first-aid kit. Then she tied a band around her arm and used her nail to break open the top of a glass vial. Click. It sounded just like a camera taking a shot. Gerda felt the prick of the needle going into her vein. She opened and closed her hand several times for the effect to work faster, and before she could rest her head back onto her pillow, the wrinkle of her brow had already disappeared. Her expression became sweeter, slower-moving. She did not have a world that she could go back to. Every absorption of morphine into her body opened another door through which she could drift toward the future. She discovered that she was gifted with three-dimensional vision, with a clear perception of time. As if life's every moment could be reduced to an intangible point lost in infinity. That's when she realized he'd always be at this point, without ever abandoning her. It wasn't something she understood through knowledge or beliefs, but with another part of her intact brain instead. Because perhaps it is dreams that can create the future or whatever it is that comes next. It was within this realm of clairvoyance that she saw him standing there, with his shirt open, holding his head in his hands, pressing down hard on his temples, while he read the article in
L'Humanité
that stated: “The first female photographer dies in a conflict. The journalist Gerda Taro was killed during a battle in Brunete.” She could suddenly see all of it, and just a few seconds later, she knew that when Louis Aragon confirmed the news in his office at
Ce Soir
, he'd clenched his fist exactly as he did, before smashing it against the wall with all his might and breaking his knuckles. And she saw him crumble at the Austerlitz Station when the coffin arrived, being cared for by Ruth, Chim, his brother, Cornell, and Henri, and continued to follow him along with tens of thousands of other people, a majority of the members of the Communist Party, who accompanied the procession in time to Chopin's “Funeral March” on an intemperate morning with a lead-colored sky, from the Maison de la Culture to the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

She also saw her father there, kneeling before the coffin, beginning the Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer dedicated to the souls of the deceased, in a deep voice, like the song of a ship's siren calling to her in the distance. Hebrew is an ancient language that contains the solitude of ruins within. Capa noticed a cramp in his back when he heard it. A type of tickling sensation over a part of his memory in which she was returning from the front covered in dust with the cameras to one side and the tripod slung across her shoulder.

He was finding it hard to keep his composure with that music of the Psalms. That's why he didn't try and defend himself afterward, when the ceremony had finished and Gerda's brothers confronted him. They blamed him for her death, accusing him, at the top of their lungs, of getting her involved in the war and of not knowing how to protect her. It was Karl who threw a vehement straight punch at his jawline. And he allowed himself to be punched, without lifting a finger, as if that beating helped redeem him of something. He also blamed himself for having left her alone, for not being at her side on that terrible last day. There was not a single minute that passed where he wasn't tortured by the guilt, so much so that he came to the point of locking himself in his studio for fifteen days, refusing food, without wanting to talk to anybody.

“The man who walked out of there at the end of those two weeks,” would later write Henri Cartier-Bresson, with his Norman shrewdness, “was a completely changed person, ever the more nihilistic and dry. Desperate.”

Nobody thought he'd come out of it. Ruth began to fear the worst when she saw him wandering through the Seine's quarters, drinking until he lost all sense of reality. But Gerda knew he'd recover, like a boxer up against the ropes, knocked out, who, at the last minute, finds the strength he didn't know he had, and he lifts himself up and grabs his camera again, and returns to the war because he no longer knows how to live any other way. He does not want to do it, either. And back to Spain, until the final defeat; the Allied landings on the beaches of Normandy, with Company E of the 116th Infantry Regiment, on the first wave, on Easy Red; the paths of death toward Jerusalem in the spring of 1948, when Ben Gurion read Israel's Declaration of Independence; columns of Vietnamese prisoners advancing with their hands tied behind their backs in the Mekong Delta, Indochina. Growing more tired, less innocent, thinking of her every night, although he meets other women, and even woos some as beautiful as Ingrid Bergman. After all, he was a man. From the darker side of her memory appeared the trace of a complicit smile on her face when she recognized him in the lobby of the Hotel Ritz next to his friend Irwin Shaw. The smile was so natural that the nurse thought Gerda was awake. That damn Robert Capa, she murmured in a low voice.

She saw all of it in less than a second, and she also lifted a glass of champagne with him one day in 1947, on the second floor of New York's Museum of Modern Art, when he and Chim and Henri Cartier-Bresson and Maria Eisner celebrated their founding of the Magnum Photos agency. How she wished she could have been there!

But the closest she felt to him was on that road in Doai Than, a few miles outside of Hanoi. Capa had already spent too much time destroying his liver, drinking until he was numb, doing the impossible so he'd get himself killed, sick of living without her. The heat, the humidity, dingy hotels full of bedbugs, the golden light over the rice fields during a late-day sun, a fisherman's fragile balancing pole teetering through a field, the mollusk-like hats of women on bicycles peddling barefoot over dirt roads, the youthful green of the mountains, a gold needle on top of a pagoda, a cold thermos of tea, the humming of planes, the ubiquitous Viet Minh soldiers, moving within the tall, overgrown reeds. He jumped out of the Jeep on his way to take the final shots for a report entitled “Bitter Rice,” like the film by Giuseppe de Santis. Slowly, without overstepping, he climbed a small hill of fresh grass so he could photograph a pack of men advancing from the other side of the dyke with the light in back of them. When suddenly, just as he was pressing down on the shutter, click, the world blew to pieces. In Doai Than. Hanoi.

Gerda felt the shards of shattered bone from his feet scattering like gravel through the air. Pure phosphorus. His skull resting on her ribs, the metacarpus of his left hand inside her right hand. His pelvic bone united to her trachea with the utmost intimacy. Calcium phosphate. It was then she realized that everything that lives fits into a thousandth of a flash across the firmament, because time does not exist. She opened her eyes again. It was five o'clock in the morning. Irene Goldin, the blue-eyed nurse, attentively went over to the foot of her bed.

“Have they found my camera yet?” Gerda asked with what remained of her voice.

The nurse shook her head no.

“Too bad,” Gerda said, “it was new.”

I
n January of 2008, three boxes filled with 127 rolls of film and unedited photos of the Spanish Civil War, belonging to Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David Seymour (Chim), appeared in Mexico. Some 4,500 negatives. The filmmaker Trisha Ziff came upon the boxes by way of the descendants of a Mexican general named Francisco Aguilar González, who had served as a diplomat in Marseille in the late 1930s, helping anti-Fascist refugees escape. The material is currently being studied at the International Center of Photography in New York. Practically every newspaper hailed it as a huge event in the history of photojournalism.

The story begins with the
New York Times
publishing one of those photographs found in Mexico. I'm referring to the one of a very young Gerda Taro asleep on a narrow hotel bed in Robert Capa's pajamas. If it weren't for those pencil-thin eyebrows, she could almost look like a boy. Her body sideways, her hand tucked under her chest, her hair short and tousled, her left leg bent back with the fabric gathered around her knee, as if she had been tossing and turning before falling asleep.

The figure of Robert Capa had already captured my attention long before. His photographs have always held an honorary place in my library, alongside Corto Maltese, Ulysses, Captain Scott, the rebels aboard the
Bounty
, Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, Count Almásy and Katharine Clifton, John Reed and Louise Bryant, and all my other tired heroes. On more than one occasion, I thought about writing something about his life. It seemed to me that Spain owed him at least a novel. To the two of them. And I was so certain of it that it felt like an outstanding debt. But sure enough, the time hadn't arrived to pay it off yet. One never chooses these things. They happen when they happen.

In addition to photo archives, there were certain books that were of great help to me during the research phase before the writing. The first was Richard Whelan's biography of Robert Capa, as well as Alex Kershaw's gripping essay
Blood and Champagne
. To recreate the atmosphere of Madrid, Valencia, and Barcelona in those days, with their political and romantic intrigues, I found Paul Preston's
We Saw Spain Die
to be a useful reference. With great precision and detail, Preston was able to show the transformation of all those who had arrived to watch the events. And who inevitably wound up trapped by their fascination for the last romantic war, so to speak, or at least the last in which you could still choose sides. The journalist Fernando Olmeda's magnificent nonfiction book on the life of Gerda Taro was also crucial.
Gerda Taro
,
War Photographer
, was published by Spain's Editorial Debate, and helped to partially offset the difficulty I had accessing direct source material on the photographer in German, due to my limitations in that language. Olmeda's book gathers a large amount of data and testimonies by the German writer Irme Schaber, the author of the only exhaustive biography of Gerda Taro to date, and that, lamentably, has not been translated into any other language. It is certainly she who deserves the credit for having rescued one of the twentieth century's bravest and most intriguing women from oblivion.

This novel also owes a lot to my journalist and war correspondent friends. Through their lives, their chronicles, and their books, I was, thankfully, able to comprehend that one-way airline tickets do exist, and that a war is a place from which nobody ever completely returns. They know who they are and the extent to which they appear in this story. With it, I also want to pay homage to all the deceased messengers, men and women, who have lost and continue to lose their lives each day to practice their profession. So that all of us can find out how the world woke up that morning, as we calmly enjoy our breakfast.

As for me, I tried to honestly portray all the episodes of lives that were lived to the limit, without overlooking the darker and more polemical periods, such as the one surrounding the famous photograph “The Falling Soldier.” All of the episodes that have to do with the Civil War are real, and are documented, as well as the proper names of the writers, photographers, brigadists, and militiamen that appear throughout the book. The rest—addresses, family memories, reading materials, etc.—have been re-created with the liberty that is the privilege of the novelist.