Waiting for Robert Capa (16 page)

Capa eyed him evasively, rubbing his neck in a way that showed his disconcertment, like the boxer who ignores the bell, knocked out, with barely enough motor skills to face the situation with fortitude. Undoubtedly, he'd been drinking. He could barely hold himself up, and he had a strange look on his face that Gerda had never seen before, somewhere between crestfallen and vexed, as if he had gone to a place of no return. His shirt was unbuttoned and hanging out of his pants, his hair disheveled. Gerda had never seen him like this. Not even when his father died.

“But what's all this about?” she wanted to know.

“Ask him,” answered the captain.

A
militiaman runs down the edge of a hill covered in weeds. The sleeves on his white shirt rolled up to his elbows, his soldier's cap thrown back, a rifle in his hand, and three leather cartridges fastened to a bandolier. The five-o'clock-in-the-afternoon sun casts its long shadow in the distance. One foot flying off the ground. His chest pushed out. Arms on a cross. A crucified Christ. Click.

Later on, in the red half-light of a Paris lavatory's darkroom, this man's face began to emerge from the bottom of the tray. His eyebrows bushy, his ears large, his forehead high, his chin tilted forward. The unknown militiaman.

The photograph was published in
Vu
, in a special September edition on the Spanish Civil War, and the following year in
Regards
, in
Paris-Soir
, and in a special edition of
Life
, with a caption that explained how Robert Capa's camera caught a Spanish soldier the instant he is dropped by a bullet through the head on the Córdoba front. The image caused a sensation throughout the world due to its visceral perfection. Hundreds of shaken-up readers mailed letters to their newspapers. No European or North American middle-class home had ever seen an image like that.

“Death of a Loyalist Militiaman” contained all of the drama of Goya's
Third of May 1808
painting, all the rage that
Guernica
would later show, all the mystery that strangles the soul of men and obligates them to fight knowing what they're fighting for. The danger, the melancholy, the infinite solitude, the broken dreams. The very moment of death on an abandoned Spanish plain. Its strength, like all symbols, didn't lie in just the image but in what it was representing.

And who can remain impartial before barbarism? How does one pass through the dead with their eyes shut and their boots clean? How can one not take sides? There are photos that are meant not for remembering but for comprehending. Images that become symbols of an era, although no photographer is aware of this when taking them. A man is firing his gun while leaning up against a slope of a ditch; he hears the blast of machine-gun fire; he lifts his camera without even looking. The rest is a mystery. “The prize picture is born in the imagination of editors and [the] public who sees them,” said Capa before a microphone of New York's WNBC radio station almost ten years later, when Gerda was already within the black outer limits of ether. And she listened to him millions of light-years away, out on the balcony of her star.

“One time I also shot a photo that was a lot more valued than the rest. And when I shot it, of course, I didn't know it was special. It was in Spain. At the very start of my career as a photographer. At the very start of the Civil War…”

People have always wanted to believe certain things about the nature of war. It's happened since the days of Troy. Heroism and tragedy, cruelty and fear, courage and defeat. All photographers hate those images that follow them like phantoms for the rest of their lives because of the mystery and scenic adversity it captures. Eddie Adams lived his entire life tormented by the snapshot he took in 1968, of a general from the Saigon police, at the precise moment he's firing point-blank at the temple of a Viet Cong prisoner with his hands tied behind his back. Due to the impact, the victim involuntarily tightens his face a second before his body begins to collapse. The photographer Nick Ut, from the Associated Press, could never forget the image of a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl burned by napalm, running naked on a road close to the small village of Trang Bang. In 1994, Kevin Carter took a photograph in Africa of an emaciated Sudanese child collapsed in an open field, less than a kilometer away from an ONU feeding center, while a vulture stalks her in the background. He won the Pulitzer for that photograph, and one month later he committed suicide. Robert Capa would never be able to overcome “Death of a Loyalist Militiaman”—the one they wound up calling “The Falling Soldier”—the best war photograph of all times.

Gerda was curled up on her side on top of the canvas blanket. She was facing in Capa's direction, with her left arm bent underneath her head as a pillow, her eyes open and fixed on him.

“Guess what time it is,” she asked. It was a way, like any other, of breaking the ice.

“I don't know … is it still yesterday?”

She saw him pass a hand over his head, confused, sounding as if the alcohol's effluents still hadn't evaporated from his brain or as if he were talking in his sleep.

She touched his shoulder and remained with her eyes open within the darkness of the tent, contemplating the sparks of electricity on his jet-black hair.

“André…” she said in a low voice.

The name caught him by surprise. It had been a while since she last called him that. The warm tone stirred something inside of him. Without warning, he felt himself become fragile, like when he was a boy, sitting on the stairs of his house, petting the cat until the yelling subsided and he could tiptoe back to his room with a heavy heart.

“Yes?”

“What was it that happened?”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“It's best you do it now, André. It's not good to keep it inside. Did you ask the men to stage an attack?”

“No. We were just fooling around, that's all. Perhaps I complained that everything was far too calm and that there wasn't anything interesting to photograph. Then some of the men started to run down the slope and I joined in as well. We went up and down the hill several times. We were all feeling good. Laughing. They shot into the air. I took several photographs…” Capa remained still, his mouth had contorted itself, “… the damn photo.”

“So what happened afterward?”

He remained silent far too many seconds for his pause to seem natural.

“What happened was that all of a sudden everything was real. We had a Francoist machine gun on the slope in front of us. Maybe we caught their attention with our voices. I didn't hear the shots … At first, I didn't hear them…” He looked at Gerda with his eyes fixed on hers, with loyalty and candidness, while at the same time on the defense.

That particular look she didn't have codified. And it caused her to feel a drop of fear, or, better yet, of apprehension. She didn't know how to interpret it. So she averted her eyes.

“That's enough. You don't have to go on if you don't want to.” Suddenly, she remembered something that she also preferred to forget. “It's not necessary that you tell me, really. Don't tell me.”

“You asked me. Now you must listen to me.” There was no recrimination in Capa's voice, nor was there any mercy.

“Where were you?”

“A little farther ahead, off to the side, on a hill they call La Coja. The second burst of fire was shorter. One of the militiamen went to cover the other men's retreat and the machine gun opened fire. I raised my camera over my head and began to shoot as well.” He didn't say anything for a few seconds, as if he were trying to fully analyze a thought that was difficult to grasp. To photograph people is to obligate them in some way to face things they weren't expecting to. You take them off their path, away from their plans, from their everyday routine. Sometimes it's also forcing them to die.

“It was nobody's fault, André. It happened. That's all,” said Gerda, and just as she said it, the coincidence caused her to freeze. In Leipzig, Georg had used those exact words for the incident at the lake. The same words uttered in a low voice. John Reed's book on top of the linen tablecloth, the vase with tulips, and the pistol. She had never said a word about it to anyone.

“I did it automatically, without thinking,” he continued. “When I saw him on the ground, I did not think he was dead. I thought he was faking it. That it was all a game. Then it turned silent. They all were looking at me. Two militiamen tried their best to drag him to the trench; another went to pick up his rifle and was shot in the act. That's when I realized what had happened. The Fascists had riddled him with bullets. But I killed him.”

“It wasn't you, André,” she consoled him, although, like him, deep down she knew if he hadn't been there with his camera, none of this would have happened.

“I'm not sure who he was. I've got the rattle of the machinegun fire stuck here,” he said, pointing to his forehead. “I don't even know his real name; he came as a volunteer from Alcoy with his little brother, who's about the same age as Cornell. I automatically pressed the camera's shutter release and he fell flat on his back, just as if I had fired a weapon that had reached his head. Cause and consequence.”

“That's war, André.”

Capa turned to face the wall. Gerda could not see his face. Just his back and his bare arms. As if he were trying to put a wall between them with that position. He was now on the other side of a collapsing bridge, where she could not get to him. He wasn't motionless or asleep. His back twitched in silence. The night's tremors on the body. Those who cry expend more energy doing that than with any other act. There were also things she was better off not thinking about. The sun had not yet risen. The blanket's dark canvas framed his body. At first, Gerda hesitated about whether or not to put her hand on his shoulder, ultimately deciding against it. There are times a man needs to fend for himself.

She remained on the other edge of the tent, covering his back from what was left of the night, without touching him. Calming him down when he awoke startled from a nightmare, until little by little the panic vanished, with Gerda at his side, her eyes wide open, also thinking in herself, of the solitude that penetrates your bones sometimes like an incurable illness, about the things that life shatters and that one cannot fix. That was the last time they'd ever discuss the photo. Nor did she ever call him André again.

T
he following morning, they set out for Madrid again. Gerda rolled down her window. She could hear the sound of the tires snapping over the arid land the entire way. She loved feeling the wind on her face: it helped her temporarily forget her need for a shower.

They arrived at Toledo at daybreak with kidneys aching from the potholes' constant jostling. September 18. A whitish light hovered over the olive groves, and in the distance, the massive silhouette of the Alcázar, bunker-like and impenetrable. They stopped to eat a breakfast of coffee and bread with olive oil at a roadway stand less than a kilometer away from the city. They needed to stretch their legs, smoke a cigarette. Words didn't come easy to Capa. He'd scratch his beard of several days and wrinkle up his entire face to think, as if trying to free himself of his thoughts, and only afterward could he say something. Gerda didn't look so good, either. She had her period and her stomach was in knots, along with a sharp pain she felt in her groin. Her shirt covered in several days' worth of dust, her hair greasy, her skin dry, trying to set up her camera, removing the lenses and cleaning them, one by one, with a look of complete concentration, the circles under her eyes accentuated by the clarity of the morning light.

A large group of photographers, journalists, news cameramen, and government officials arrived that same afternoon. From a nearby olive grove, they all awaited the destruction of the Alcázar's western wall. At six thirty, they heard a loud explosion. Five tons of dynamite. The black cloud of smoke covered the sun like an eclipse. A few minutes later, the fortress began to erupt like a volcano and its defenders gathered together on the opposite side to resist the sudden attack. Squashed together underneath a wall of pure rock were women and children, including a newborn baby named Restituto Valero, the son of a lieutenant from a band of Nationalists. The son of the Alcázar. After many years had passed—along with many battles, prisoners, and dead bodies—that child, now a captain of a paratrooper brigade, along with nine other of his armed comrades, would risk his hide and his career to defend democracy from the dictatorship of one General Franco, who had rescued him from the Alcázar while he was still in diapers. Paradoxes contain many cracks, and through one of them appeared a tiny head with live flesh and nerve endings. But none of this had happened yet. Back then, the baby's cries could be heard within the explosions, causing the hearts of the militia to shudder, because they were under strict orders to take over the fort however possible. Each time the militia poked their heads out from behind the wall's rubble, the insurgents would immediately attempt to drive them away. Gerda and Capa watched them climb that steep slope and fall almost instantly in the face of their gunfire. The wounded, dripping blood, were taken down in stretchers to the olive grove. They'd leave them there, lying face-up. Gerda kneeled down in a ditch and focused her camera. There was a handsome dead man with blond hair and a birthmark on his forehead. She was sure there had to be someone waiting for him. Since the Spanish married young, a woman, perhaps even a few children, who were good-looking and blond like him and who called him papa, not knowing that he was now just a slab of inert meat lying under the silvery olive trees, somewhere alongside the old road between Toledo and Madrid, in the middle of nowhere. She carefully untied the handkerchief from his neck and, with it, swatted away the flies around his face.