Waiting for Robert Capa (22 page)

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 than 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.

“I'll leave it with you,” he told Gerda. He knew that Reed was her all-time hero.

When he was finished, he walked up to her and remained quiet, feeling awkward. With his hands in his pockets, he shifted quickly from side to side, eyeing her with those Gypsy eyes, with a defenseless seriousness on his face, similar to abandonment.

“I love you,” he said softy.

And then she observed him, silent and reflective, as if she were working out an idea in her head that was too complex. I hope something will suddenly happen that can save us, she thought. I hope we'll never have the time to betray one another. I hope we'll remain untouched by tedium, or lies, or deception. I hope I can learn to love you without hurting you. I hope habit doesn't cause us to deteriorate, little by little, comfortably, as with happy couples. I hope we'll never lack the courage to start again … But because she didn't know how in hell to express all those real and confusing and loyal and contradictory feelings that passed like flashes through her head, she limited herself to giving him a strong hug and she kissed him slowly, opening his lips, searching for his tongue deep inside, with her eyes half-shut and her nostrils quivering, stroking his disheveled hair, while he allowed himself to be delicate and sullen and the sunlight filtered in through the large window of the Marques Heredia's old manor, and on the radio someone sang an old
copla
: “Not with you, nor without you, do my ills have a remedy, with you because you kill me, without you because I'll die.”