Waiting for Robert Capa (12 page)

They, on the other hand, felt confident with their brand-new press credentials and his fabulous persona. They were young, good-looking, unbeatable. As if everything that came before could be erased in one fell swoop. Robert Capa and Gerda Taro at the “Kilometer Zero” of their lives. Could it be possible to imagine a greater dream than this?

Just as had happened in Spain shortly before, on May 3 the Leftist coalition that formed part of the Popular Front arrived at the Élysée Palace, and Robert Capa was there to photograph every second of the euphoria. It had barely been three months since German troops had effortlessly occupied the Rhineland, going against the Treaty of Versailles. All of France shuddered. The Parisians began to mobilize. Thousands of anonymous citizens took to the streets, and their facial expressions were captured in every single one of his photographs: worried, tense, hopeful as they crammed into the Place de l'Opéra to see the electoral results projected on a big screen. Finally, there was a force strong enough to detain the Fascists' advancements. Two-thirds of the house seats were held by Socialists and their top candidate, León Blum, their hero who had survived an attempt on his life by the Fascists in February. Red flags flying over the ministries. Through all of Montparnasse's squares, accordions playing “
L'Internationale
.”

By July, Maria Eisner asked Gerda to negotiate a contract with Capa for a report on the twentieth anniversary of the Battle of Verdun, the bloodiest battle of the First World War. The photographs revealed a bleak scenario: vast areas of no-man's-land covered with charred trees and craters filled with stagnant water. The ceremony was especially emotional. Hundreds of reflectors lit up the military cemetery. Every veteran stood behind a white cross and left a bouquet of flowers over each tomb. In the midst of that silence, a cannon sounded, then the spotlights were turned off and the crowd was left in darkness. There weren't any speeches, either. Just the voice of a four-year-old boy asking for world peace. His appeal, which sounded over loudspeakers placed in all four corners of the cemetery, gave goose bumps to all who were gathered there that evening.

It was of no use. Shortly after their return from Verdun, Gerta and André—that is, Gerda and Capa—had plans to meet some friends for dinner to celebrate the salary increase that had been approved by the Popular Front. They were on the balcony at the Grand Monde, where the bartenders prepared the best cocktails in all the Rive Gauche. She was wearing a backless black dress that gave her a certain air of a Hollywood muse; he a beige jacket and tie. A light breeze rustled the trees along the Seine. July 17. Music, laughter, the clinking of glasses, and then suddenly, once again, in the midst of all that happiness, a raven wing.

From the restaurant's kitchen, through the tiny speaker of a radio device, the news made its way through: an uprising of the Spanish Legion in Morocco under the command of a man named Francisco Franco, a grim, second-rate general. The Spanish imitation of a Hitler or Mussolini.

The countdown had begun.

•   two pairs of pants

•   three shirts

•   underwear

•   socks

•   a towel

•   a comb

•   a bar of soap

•   razor blades

•   sanitary napkins

•   the red notebook

•   a map

•   surgical tape

•   aspirin

She was forgetting something, but she didn't know what. Gerda stood in front of her travel bag on top of the bed, placed a finger on her temple to think, and in an instant, she snapped her fingers. Of course. A bilingual Spanish dictionary.

Spain had become the eye of the world's great storm. It was the only topic of conversation. Even the surrealists, who were the least interested in politics, embraced the Republican cause. Gathering groups of friends at various homes around town at the last minute, so they could parse the news that was growing more contradictory and alarming by the hour. Military revolts in the Balearic and Canary Islands. Resistance in Asturias. Someone called Queipo de Llano and an uprising in Sevilla, killings and summary executions in Navarra and Valladolid. The imagery that each saw in their heads reminded them immensely of Goya's Black Paintings. Fiery red and hellish bitumen. That's why, when the systematic bombings began in Madrid, each shell that thundered would also shake the very foundation of Paris. A warning of the cataclysms that were still to come. The streets were buzzing. They all headed to La Coupole and Café de Flore, desiring to know more than what they were reading in the newspapers … Some breaking news, a reliable account, anything … While the governments of Europe had abandoned the young Spanish Republic, a giant army of men and women had appeared to defend it on their own will and initiative.

There were writers, metal workers, dockers from the Rhine and the Thames, artists, students, the majority of them without military experience but with a deep conviction that the world's greatest battle was brewing on the other side of the Pyrenees. There were also journalists and photographers, dozens of international special correspondents. Loads of refugees who had shared a table and cigarettes with Gerda and Capa many nights at Chez Capoulade and had joined the International Brigade … The poet Paul Éluard wrote in
L'Humanité
:

One gets used to everything

except these birds of lead

except his hatred for all that shines

except letting them take over
.

Gerda looked out the tiny window. She had never flown on an airplane before. Under the fuselage, the Pyrenees had a faded mauve color to them, like a washed-out shirt, and every hillside appeared to be digging a furrow of shadows as the sun began to set. Lucien Vogel, the editor of
Vu
magazine, had chartered the flight to Barcelona for a small expedition of journalists contributing to a special Civil War issue he was planning to publish. Pure sky, smooth as an aquarium, crystal-clear light with lime-green-colored parhelia. Gerda was absorbed in that space that would soon be covered in stars. “So magnificent,” she thought out loud. Capa observed her as if they'd just met. She never appeared more beautiful to him than she did at the moment, her neck resting on the leather of her seat, her bony chin, her dreamy eyes savoring an inexplicable hope.

Sometimes this happened with her, and it caused him to feel left out. He thought he had her, and then suddenly one word or a simple phrase made him realize that in reality, he didn't know what was going through her head at certain times. But he had learned to live with this. It was true that she was faraway, withdrawn. She had returned to Reutlingen when she was five years old, and she was walking back home with her brothers from Jakob's bakery with a poppy-seed cake and condensed milk in their hands for dinner. Three children in wool sweaters, interlinking arms over shoulders, looking up at the sky, while the stars fell, two by two, three by three … She had never been as close to them as she'd been back then. That proximity caused her to feel a sense of solitude and sadness. As if somewhere in the world a secret melody sounded that only she could hear. The message of the stars.

You could already see the city lights below, the triangle of Montjuïc getting larger by the minute, the inclined extension of houses, and then the engine delay, when she suddenly felt herself rising up on one side, as if someone had grabbed and pulled her shoulder up. The noise from the engine grew dense, and the five tons of metal began to rock. In the cockpit, the needles of the position indicators began oscillating faster. The fuel pressure decreased. The entire plane shook with furious tremors. Everyone looked at each other without saying a word. We're going to crash, she thought, but there wasn't enough time to feel fear or to ask her god to save them. They were level with the hills now, their eardrums aching due to the pressure change, their heart beating a hundred miles a minute, but silent. They were still alive. The tiny gardens that surrounded the Prat Airport began to shake outside their windows, first on one side, then on the other. The pilot, up in the cockpit, with his head lowered, could no longer distinguish between that big mass of sky and the earth. The man was fully concentrated on trying to control the airplane. He couldn't even see the gyroscope. He tried to avoid the hilltops as best he could, but they were right on top of the plane, and he came to the decision to try and land the plane anywhere he could, even if it risked slamming onto the ground. At five hundred horsepower revolutions per minute, the plane ran through the light path of its own head beams, directly toward the earth.
Adonai
,
Elohim
,
Yahweh
… Gerda didn't have time for more. Then the red lights of the runway beacon came on and she saw how the plane was trying to lift its nose, and then a wing tilted to one side, slamming against the wall of a shed. The roar was so intense that her ears began to bleed. She saw André gesticulating like a silent film actor. Moving his mouth, screaming something, but she couldn't hear what he was saying. There was a lot of smoke inside the cabin, and the exhaustion had stiffened her muscles. Soon after, firemen, militia, and a truck with a red cross painted on its canvas arrived … Vague sounds of voices in a language she didn't understand, confusing murmurs, arms that lifted the wounded. The pilot was taken out on a stretcher. Two reporters were also evacuated with various kinds of fractures; Lucien Vogel himself broke his right arm in three places. But Capa and Gerda were able to exit the craft on their own two feet. A bit stunned and disoriented but unharmed. It would have been better to cross the border through Irún on foot, as Chim had done.

When you leave a bad port behind and you finally touch the ground, it's good to curse, spit out a blasphemy with gusto, send the God of Sinai to hell with his damn Tablets of the Law and his fucking proverbial bullshit. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck … was the first thing André did. One feels a lot better afterward.

“Were you frightened?” he asked, passing her a sip of whiskey directly from the bottle that had been offered to them. They were headed to Barcelona in a car that was being driven by a militiaman in a blue uniform with military suspenders crossed over his chest and two cartridges on his belt.

“No,” she said, without intending to boast. And she wasn't trying to appear brave; it's just she didn't have time. Fear needs a rested conscience. It wasn't a foreign feeling to her. She knew all its symptoms, how it would take hold of her imagination when she had hours ahead of her to calculate all the terrifying possibilities one by one. She had experienced it in Leipzig hundreds of times, in Berlin, in Paris. Feeling it each time she remembered her family or had no idea where she was. But what she sensed had happened to her on the plane was something different. Something immediate and clean. A kind of vertigo that was useless to rebel against.

Capa lit a cigarette and shook his head, softly trying to warn her, his expression serious, his tone paternalistic.

“Fear isn't a bad travel companion,” he said, unaware that he was giving her the best advice you could give someone in a war. “Sometimes, it saves your life.”

Barcelona was no longer the bourgeois and stately city Capa had visited many years ago during his first trip to Spain in the spring of 1935. The anarchist union of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) had built its provisional camp right on Vía Layetana, while many churches had become garages or warehouses, and the parish churches had been moved to union offices. The main banks and grand hotels had been taken over by the workers. The Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), with its Trotskyist tendencies, was based at the Hotel Falcon, close to the Plaça de Catalunya, while the Ritz was now a popular dining hall with a sign at its entrance that read:
UGT—HOTEL GASTRÓNOMICO NÚMERO I—CNT
.

The commissioner of propaganda for the Generalitat de Catalunya, Jaume Miravitlles, was a tanned, affable man in his thirties, who provided them with a boardinghouse to stay in along La Rambla and the press passes necessary for photographing the city.

After the accident, the elation they felt being alive translated itself into their body language. It was as if they were celebrating every minute of being together in light of what could come. It showed in the way they made love, holding on to each other tightly, because one day in the near future one of them or both of them could die, and then there would be nothing, not a damn straw to clutch at. The amusing foreshortening of her lying across the bed with his pajamas on, tender and half-asleep. The good morning fights they had still half-asleep, over a sponge or because they lived together inside a small rectangle of a mirror. He, with half his face full of foam, trying to shave over her shoulder. She, trying to nudge him out with her elbows so she could put on her lipstick. Gerda's strange green eyes looking at him mockingly, halfway between coquettish and innocent.

The first few days, they walked the streets fascinated, among a multitude of armed men, children playing within the sandbags of the barricades, the militia dressed in blue uniforms with straps across their chests, from the CNT, the POUM, the PSUC. Female soldiers with black eyes and the tawny leonine manes, a newspaper in one hand and a Mauser in the other. Images that broke the traditional female codes of conduct; those women were another ilk. They weren't the type to hide their heads under the pillow when the coyote howled but would lean out the window and shoot, scaring away the Fascists in one clean shot. The French and British magazines went head-to-head to feature them on their covers, not only for their courage but because they imagined these women to be an iconographic goldmine. “The Glamour of War,” Capa declared with a wry grin, while a confiscated car with the acronym of the UHP painted onto its doors cruised down the Paseo de Gracia at full speed toward Capitania.