THE CRUCIFIED CAPITAL, declared the front-cover headlines for Capa’s photo report in Regards. Gerda threw a thick gray wool jacket over her shoulders and sat next to Ruth on the couch of their apartment, like in the old days, just the two of them. On the other side of the window, the day was overcast, with that touch of fog that can sometimes cover Paris’s rooftops with sadness. Her friend was the mother rock to all those who returned late or early from battle. Capa, Chim, her … Ruth Cerf listened to them all with that generous attitude that only truly maternal people can have. Attentive eyes, an understanding forehead, with that protective instinct that women used to have when they buttoned up a coat properly and wrapped their children’s scarves around them on chilly mornings. Sitting on top of the Moroccan table, next to two cups of tea and a small plate of Breton cookies, the magazine was open to an image of aerial bombing. Gerda looked at the faces of women from the working-class neighborhood of Vallecas, captured only minutes after they had returned home to find their houses in flames and their neighbors buried beneath the rubble. A sloping street with skeletal trees and two militiamen sharing the same rifle, waiting for the opportune moment to shoot at the enemy. A young refugee mother with three small children on a platform in the metro station. Gray countryside and burning stables on the other side of the highway. Several brigadists with backpacks walking in a straight line with their heads down, one step in front of the other, staring at the footprints they were leaving behind in the mud, concentrated, like warriors before combat. A close-up of a militiawoman, nearly an adolescent, squatting, aiming her Mauser from a barricade in front of the School of Medicine. Gerda passed from one scene to another and her mind always returned to Madrid, to that well of memories that she couldn’t stop submerging herself in since she’d returned. After all the intensity she had experienced in Spain, she couldn’t bear the routine of Parisian life.
She took a sip of tea and the longing embraced her lips. She missed it. She remembered the Gran Vía during the last days of September, just before her return trip, and how it rained artillery shells day and night. Or how floodlights pierced the sky and the building’s facades on a revolving angle. The rooftops of Madrid de los Austrias; the Telefónica building that housed the government press office from where she had sent dispatches several times, hunched over, while the projectiles passed over her head. The Calle de Alcalá; the tall windows of the Círculo de Bellas Artes. Those blue intersections and geometrical formations on the ceiling of her hotel room where her mind had now wandered.
“We have to go down to the shelter,” she had said when it seemed the buzzing of the engines was only escalating, followed by the crisp and tight rattle of antiaircraft fire the day the Fascists launched their second deadly attack on the city.
They were in the Hotel Florida. They had just returned from Casa del Campo, in the western part of the city where the Republicans had entrenched themselves and built barricades with cushions, doors, and even suitcases they’d taken from the Northern Station’s lockers. They’d been able to get some great shots. Capa would review the images, looking at them up against the lamplight, his eye pressed up against the magnifying loupe, marking the best negatives with a cross. As she watched him work, from the foot of the door, Gerda felt an uncontrollable tenderness toward him. He was both a child playing with his favorite toy and a grown man completely dedicated to a job that was challenging, mysterious, essential, and for which he sometimes risked his life.
When he turned around, she surprised him with a kiss. And he just stood there for a few seconds with his arms open, more from shock than indecision, before unbuckling his belt and pushing her softly onto the bed so she could feel his hardness over her lower abdomen. She opened her legs, holding him prisoner inside, while she kissed his neck and the rough stubble on his face that tasted like sweat—masculine and pungent.
“We should head down,” she said in a mumbled voice lacking conviction, while the sirens wailed outside, and he entered deeper. Firm, serious, without ever taking his eyes off her, as if he wanted to store her forever in the camera obscura of his memory, just as she was in that moment, with her gathered eyebrow, her hungering mouth, half-open, moving her head slightly from side to side, as she always did when she was about to come. That’s when he held on tightly to her hips and entered her even further, slowly, deep down inside her, to release himself long and languidly, until letting out a groan and dropping his head onto her shoulder. The blue floodlights swirling across the ceiling. She had taught him to declare himself like that, noisily. She enjoyed hearing him express his pleasure in that animal-like manner. Though for reasons having to do with intimacy, modesty, and male shyness, he was hesitant to do it. He had never shouted during an orgasm as he did that day, with the deafening sounds of planes passing right over their heads and a series of air-defense explosions across the street. They remained in bed silent for a while in the midst of those bluish shadows circling the ceiling, while Gerda caressed his back, and Madrid breathed through its wounds, and he looked at her in silence, as if from a distant shore, with those eyes of a handsome Gypsy.
She placed her teacup back into the tray with the same dreamy expression on her face.
“I’m going back to Spain,” she told Ruth.
Capa had been in Madrid since November. Thanks to the success of his work, especially “The Falling Soldier,” he’d been offered a new assignment. All the French editors had already discovered a while back that the famous Robert Capa was none other than the Hungarian André Friedmann. But his photographs had greatly improved, and he went to such great lengths to risk getting them that they went along with his game. They felt obliged to pay him his going rate. His nom de guerre had completely devoured that ragged, if slightly naive man raised in a working-class neighborhood in Pest. Now he was Capa, Robert, Bobby, Bob … He no longer needed a costume; the world of journalism had accepted him as he was, and he’d done his part to take on the role, firmly believing in his character, remaining loyal to him until the very end. More than ever, he believed in himself and in his work. With hopes his photographs could help gain intervention from the Western powers in backing the Republican government, he had given up on that alleged journalistic impartiality, up to his nose in a war that would only wind up shattering his life.
In his letters, he’d tell Gerda how the Madrileños would risk themselves in front of the tanks, attacking them with dynamite and bottles filled with gasoline that they ignited with the tips of their cigarettes because matches were scarce. When modern German machine guns opened fire, they’d retaliate with their old Mauser rifles. David versus Goliath. The fall of the city seemed inevitable. Madrid, however, resisted the beatings with a courage that earned it mythical levels of coverage in publications such as Regards, Vu, Zürcher Illustrierte, Life, Weekly Illustrated, along with all the major newspapers of the world, whose print runs approached the 100,000 mark. The Spanish Civil War had become the first conflict to be photographed and transmitted on a daily basis. “A cause without images is not only a forgotten cause. It’s also a lost cause,” he wrote in a letter to Gerda, dated November 18, the same day that Hitler and Mussolini officially recognized Franco as the Spanish head of state.
She was proud of him, of course she was. The Robert Capa invention had also been her idea in the first place. But the fact that several of the best photographs she’d taken in Spain were published without her name, and credited to his, caused her a certain unease. Perhaps she’d been mistaken, or maybe the moment had come to rethink their professional relationship and convert it into one with more equal footing. The brand “Capa & Taro” sounded pretty good.
But war was the territory of men. Women didn’t count.
“I’m nobody, I’m nobody”—she remembered how he had once said this at the edge of the Seine, when his first report on Sarre didn’t appear with his name on it. It felt as though a thousand years had passed since then, and now it was she who felt neglected. She didn’t exist. Sometimes she’d look in the bathroom mirror and carefully observe each new wrinkle in bewilderment, as if she feared that time, life, or her own will would wind up destroying what was left of her dreams. A woman in a blind spot.
“Are you all right?” he had asked several hours after that airraid siren had sounded in their room at the Hotel Florida, and the dim, striped light of daybreak entered. She had shot up violently. Having awakened sweating, her hair soaked, her forehead clammy, and her heart galloping in her chest like a runaway horse.
“I had a nightmare,” she managed to say, when her breathing was finally back to normal.
“Fuck, Gerda, you look like you just went to hell and back.” It was as if she had suddenly aged ten years, her thin face, the violetcolored circles under her eyes, her worn expression. “Would you like a glass of water?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t know where in hell she’d gone, but from that point on, she found herself feeling profoundly, darkly uncertain. And it was hard for her to recover. Capa brought her the glass, but she wasn’t able to hold it. Her hands were shaking, as if out of nowhere she’d lost love’s protective shield. He brought the water up to her lips for her to drink, but a good portion of it ran down her chin, wetting her shirt and the top fold of the sheet. If everything she had learned would not remain inscribed somewhere, what would have been the purpose of her life? She rested her head on the pillow again but was unable to fall back asleep, watching how the morning light began to filter itself little by little over the ceiling of their room, thinking that death was probably a lot like the blackness from her nightmare. A nearby border to nonexistence.
His letters from the front plunged her into a contradictory state. A part of her feared for his life while the other deeply envied the sensations he described and that she knew very well: to have your back up against the slope of ditch swearing in Aramaic at those Fascist sons-of-bitches and the mothers that gave birth to them. That bone-chilling silence after the fire of the howitzers, a silence like no other, that smell of the earth’s proximity, that physical certainty that only the now matters, and afterward, less than two hundred yards from the front line, the bars on the Gran Vía with their delicious coffee with cream, served in a tall, tubular glass. Confectionery after the battle. He had already been poisoned by the war’s virus and he didn’t know it.
She couldn’t stop humming the songs she’d learned in Spain.
Madrid you’re so resistant,
Madrid you’re so resistant
Madrid you’re so resistant…
Little mama, the bombings
the bombings…
She sang them in the shower, as she cooked, while she looked out the window, and Paris felt too small for her, because the only world that mattered began on the other side of the Pyrenees. At last, she had found a terra firma that would not sink under her feet. Others called themselves Spaniards for a lot less than that.
Ruth knew her well. She knew that Gerda was not one to wait patiently, like Penelope, for her man to return, weaving and unweaving the tapestry of memory. With resignation, Ruth listened to her, like a mother or an older sister, her eyebrows raised, a wave of hair clipped up and hanging over one side of her forehead, her bathrobe sealed over her chest, interrupting only when necessary to offer a piece of advice already predestined to fall upon deaf ears. She watched Gerda smoke with that smile apparently devoid of intentions, and knew that she had already come to a decision.
Whether Alliance Photo offered her a contract or not, with credentials or without them, she was going to Spain.
She had always been like this. Take the first train, make a quick decision. It’s here or there. It’s black or white. Choose.
“No, Ruth,” she said in an attempt to defend herself from the comment her friend had made aloud. “The reality is I’ve never been able to choose. I didn’t choose what happened in Leipzig, I didn’t choose to come to Paris, I didn’t choose to abandon my family, my brothers, I didn’t choose to fall in love. Nor did I even choose to become a photographer. I chose nothing. Whatever came my way, I dealt with it as I could.” She got up and began playing with an amber bead, tossing it between her hands. “My script was written by others. And I have this sense of always having lived in someone else’s shadow, first Georg, then Bob … It’s time for me to take the reins of my own life. I don’t want to be anyone’s property. Maybe I’m not as good a photographer as he is, but I have my own way of doing things, and when I focus, and calculate the distance, and press the shutter release, I know it’s my vision that I’m defending, and no one in the world—not he, not Chim, not Fred Stein, not Henri, no one—could ever photograph what I see, since it comes naturally to me.”
“It sounds like you’re a little upset with him,” said Ruth.
Feeling uncomfortable, Gerda sank her hands into the pockets of her slacks and hunched her shoulders. It was true she felt betrayed when her name didn’t appear credited for the photos. Capa’s success had relegated her to the background. But it wasn’t easy for her to express the sensation that had taken hold of her in the last few weeks. The deeper her love, the bigger the gap she placed between them. She began to need a certain distance and felt that he should allow her the space she considered appropriate. Professional independence was the key to loving herself. How does one love and at the same time fight against that which one loves?
“I’m not upset,” she said. “Just a bit tired.”
Even though she rejected her religious beliefs, she couldn’t stop herself from being Jewish. Her vision of the world included a tangible line dating back to her ancestors. She had been raised on the stories from the Old Testament. Abraham, Isaac, Sarah, Jacob … The same way she loved family tradition she would have detested dying without a name.