Maria Eisner was an old acquaintance of André’s. She founded Alliance Photo, one of the most prestigious agencies of the time due to its specialization in art and travel but especially because of its photojournalism. She was efficient, a problem-solver, German through and through, with a good managerial sense and gifted nose for detecting who was fit for doing business. It was precisely this that caused her to take notice of Gerta when André introduced them one September afternoon at an outside table at Chez Capoulade. They had just returned from the island and were radiant. Their arms around one another, suntanned, their future awaiting them, and one that would not lack funds. A few of Gerta’s remarks on a recent feature in Europe magazine were enough for Maria to realize that the girl had vision. It didn’t matter if she lacked the technical skills. Those things are learned. What drew Maria was Gerta’s point of view. Alliance Photo had emerged with a clear artistic mission. And they were searching for a new perspective. A modern one, along the lines of the architectural vanguard that had been born on the sixth floor of a building on Rue de Sevres, where Le Corbusier established his canon with the frigidness of a Swiss watchmaker. They sought the strange, with a desire to break away from lines and volumes and show reality from a rarely seen perspective. And Gerta had that, along with the advantage of speaking several languages and a sixth sense for business. In less than a month, she learned how to present the material and negotiate the highest price with an aggressive sales technique. The law of supply and demand. She was shrewd when it came to balancing the books, and that proved essential for a company that lived on supplying content to the leading French, Swiss, and North American magazines. It was her big break.
It was as if they had been shipwrecked. She and André, two castaways who had finally found a ship to board and could feel the vibrations of the motor below deck. That thrill of the open-sea journey that awaited them. Their coffee’s aroma mixing with the salty breeze, as they bent over to look at a nautical chart freshly spread out over the table. With all the time in the world ahead of them to decide—with enthusiasm, precision, and luck—the exact path, thereafter, to take their lives on.
They moved to a small studio on Rue de Varenne, which barely fit a bathroom, a bed, and a cooking stove. But when they opened their window at night while having dinner, they could see the lights of the Eiffel Tower, and all of Paris’s air entered their home with its bridges, tangled-up streets, and autumn plazas.
The afternoon had gone dim, and an aquamarine shade of an American night illuminated the buildings’ cornices hanging within the clouds, and the mansard roofs in the distance. An orange glow from the streetlamps lit up their room. A round table, an open newspaper, a sofa covered with a gray cloth, and Gerta’s profile, with all of its arrises, beneath the floor lamp. Silent, pensive.
André did not like seeing her like this. It was as if she had escaped to her past world, where he couldn’t make her happy. As if, deep down, her Polish-Jewish skepticism was still wary of all that happiness. There was something strange about the way she looked at you, something evasive about it, as if one eye was looking back and the other at the path she was considering taking. He knew there had been other men in her life, of course he did. He had heard talk about Georg hundreds of times when they were just friends. And he had seen a photo of him she stored in a box of quince candy. Blond and much taller than he was, with an aviator’s or a polo champion’s attitude that wore on André’s nerves. He had also had other women. But now he couldn’t stand the idea that she’d think back upon her days with the Russian, not even for a second. As if life could cut itself into pieces, as with a knife and a Camembert cheese. Before and now. Of course he freely expressed his jealousy, and often. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely jealousy, but complete animal possessiveness. A need to erase the past, an absurd macho pride, a thousand-year-old instinct dating back to when men in hordes howled at the moon at midnight alongside their tribe’s campfire. Selecting their female, separating her from the rest to make her exclusively his. So he could bring her to one of those huge prairies of grain and nail a child into her entrails.
“Wouldn’t you like to have a baby Gypsy?” he asked softly, trying to take her out of her abstraction. “A screaming, misbehaving child, like me?” He half-smiled, with a touch of slyness at the edge of his lips, but his eyes were serious and loyal, like a cocker spaniel’s.
“And as hairy?” she teased, wrinkling up her nose. She shook her head no and laughed loudly, as if she had just heard something completely ludicrous. But afterward, while she looked at the lights of the Eiffel Tower, bright and promising for some, her smile transformed into an expression that was almost sad. It seemed that somewhere in those green eyes with yellow flecks, there lived the feeling that there wasn’t a lot of time left for that. As if she truly felt she’d be missing out on the serene pleasure of raising a dark-haired child with Hungarian eyes and pink fingers. Of hanging out his white diapers to dry on a terrace somewhere in the world and telling him a story about a pirate with a parrot on his shoulder, an authentic one from Guiana, that in her version would whistle the “Turkish March,” in honor of Captain Flint. And each night, watch him sleep peacefully with a pacifier, curled up in his crib. A dream.
She looked him straight in the face as if she had just returned from another world. Seeing him there, at her side, so close, looking right back at her with a mixture of tenacity and confusion that profoundly moved her, causing her to believe she was deeply falling in love with this man and had to make an effort to contain herself and not hold him tight and kiss him too many times on his eyes, on his forehead, his neck, behind his ears … Because she understood that one day, perhaps before she knew it, that love would make her weak and vulnerable. But back then, there was no way of knowing. She would not have been able to ever imagine that in just a few months she’d remember that conversation, word for word, gesture for gesture, while contemplating from afar not the elegant frame of the Eiffel Tower and its flashing bulbs but Madrid’s sky, pierced by the lights of reflectors intersecting, spinning at different angles, while the deafening wails of sirens and the engines of enemy planes roared in the nearby distance. The tight staccato of antiaircraft fire. How on earth was a baby to sleep with all that war racket?
It had barely been a month since Gerta and André had camped on Île Sainte-Marguerite, running barefoot on beaches, discovering the depths of their new love. In Paris, the French Popular Front had consolidated itself with support from the leading parties of the Left, the unions, and all of the groups that formed part of the National Joint Committee of the Popular Front. At the last demonstration commemorating July 14, thousands of workers, standing beneath portraits of Marx and Robespierre, gathered to shout out the lyrics to the “Marseillaise” at the top of their lungs. Radio Paris retransmitted the reconciliation between the Republic’s tricolored flag and the red flag of hope, for the entire world to listen. A unified action against Fascism had become the number-one priority.
Among intellectuals, l’Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires served as one of the front’s principal supporters since its unification. Some of the surrealists, who had grown tired of chasing their interior ghosts, had touched ground again in order to face the pressing reality of a world on the verge of collapse. Even the most idealistic of the poets began to seriously ask themselves if the time hadn’t come to join the Communist Party. Gerta wasn’t a Communist, but she was well versed in their politics. After all, she had learned it firsthand from an authentic Russian Bolshevik. Georg was the first to teach her the mysteries of Marxism-Leninism when she was still an adolescent who dreamt of being Greta Garbo. André, on the other hand, leaned toward Trotskyism or the ideas of the anarchists, which were far better suited to his independent nature, his propensity for walking on edges, his addiction to the dangers of raw nights.
More than ever, the old cafés had become forums for heated debate. Everyone was ready to lend a hand. Painters, writers, refugees, photographers … The naughty-eyed Pablo Picasso, ready to charge like a bull, and the always provocative Dora Maar on her eternal honeymoon; Man Ray, short, enigmatic, addicted to his work as well as to Lee Miller, the most beautiful American in Paris, ultra-tall, blond, and fickle, the woman who cleaved his soul in two; Henri Matisse and his very serious wife with a face as long as a horse’s; Luis Buñuel, born in Aragón, with that rock-hard head of his, listening to jazz at the Mac-Mahon, then meeting Jeanne Rucar, whom he would marry after forcing her to throw the little gold cross she wore around her neck into the Seine; Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, always on the brink of destruction, competitive, capable of battling against each other or both of them against the world, with their own style of guerrilla warfare. Complicated couples. A far cry from traditional marriages, where wide-hipped women were kept like caged prisoners in their wire corsets, patiently ironing their husbands’ shirts. Just left of the Seine River, a new concept of love had been born: conflicted, dangerous, like walking barefoot in a jungle. Gerta and André felt right at home in that scene. It was as if they were part of one big eccentric family.
The Left’s joint program, in turn, expressed itself with a few basic points: amnesty for the prisoners, the right to freely form unions, a reduction in the work week, the dissolution of paramilitary organizations, and promotion of peace within the League of Nations. But on October 3—a day like any other and without any prior war declarations—100,000 soldiers from the Italian army, led by General De Bono, attacked Emperor Haile Selassie’s Ethiopian troops. Tanks and mustard gas against bows and arrows. The League of Nations imposed small sanctions on Italy, but Great Britain and France continued selling them oil, even after they learned Italians had attacked Red Cross hospitals and ambulances.
“Europe is asleep.” André banged his fist on the table. His brow gathered, his voice firm, speaking from the platform at Chez Capoulade. Gerta had never seen him give a political speech before, but she decided she preferred him like this: furious, his eyes bright with indignation, fiery, charismatic, almost violent, with a large vein throbbing in his neck as he denounced Mussolini’s methods of lowering the morale of the people of Ethiopia. “They are violating the Geneva Convention.”
However, as strange as it may seem, the news of the world didn’t completely spoil that enchanting autumn of 1935, with its streets covered in yellow leaves and women as thin as reeds smoking in jazz clubs until dawn. It was filled with movie theaters and bookstores and storefronts, where on one afternoon, Gerta discovered Le Temps du Mépris by André Malraux, a writer who was also devoted body and soul to the anti-Fascist movement. On some nights, when André was asleep, or after she had read awhile, she would get up, throw one of his shirts over her shoulders, and sneak over to the window to smoke her last cigarette. Paris and its lights in the distance. That October climate of longing made it hard for her to sleep. It also happened to her when she was a child. Just as she was getting ready for bed was when she’d feel most alive. She’d recount the day’s events in her head and, using a pencil, write them down in a school notebook in her child’s handwriting, using the eraser when she made a mistake. She needed that structure. The day did not feel finished until she reached that moment. It was as if she put her thoughts to rest when she wrote. Trying to understand them. Needing to return to them in order to orient herself. It was a moment just for her, where no one else could enter, not friends, not lovers.
“There are those whom we cannot even embrace,” she wrote. “Or at least scratch or bite to keep your sanity in their company. There are times I’d like to grab André by the hair as if he were drowning and have him cling to me. Sometimes the dream is different. It’s a nightmare that happens in the moonlight. In the dream I’m walking toward him, along an unfamiliar street, and just as I’m about to reach him, smiling, my hand raised to greet him, something happens. I’m not sure what, something urgent and inexplicable that forces me to run as fast as I can, to even climb over the wall at the dead end, and disappear. I don’t know what it could mean. The street, the wall, a moonlight so white, like a cold star … Perhaps I should ask René. There is something about love that short-circuits. As if we have to read the same paragraph twice in order to find a connection between the sentences. It’s a wild feeling that bursts into the other’s routine like a gale wind, causing everything to fly all over the place, like a house being aired out in the midst of a storm. It wants to erase everything. Re-create it, as if the world didn’t exist before it.”
She shut the notebook and placed it in the drawer of her nightstand. She needed to rid herself of her thoughts.