In 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.
I would have liked to have reflected the intensity and complexity of those convulsive years with the skill and passion that Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and David Seymour transmitted in their photographs. But I lack that kind of talent for working a camera. So I was left with no other choice but to attempt to travel the distance between images and words with my own weaponry and in the way I know best. Each does what they can.
Lastly, nobody is the same person when they start a novel and finish one. In a certain sense, as with any war experience, this book also represents a place of no return in my life as a novelist. There’s a part of me that will forever remain in those violent war years of bombarded dreams in which Gerda Taro awoke tender and in pajamas.