Never had she seen cafés so packed. Not even in Paris. It was normal to have to stand and wait until a seat was freed. Since the Republicans had moved to Valencia, many correspondents had been evacuated to the coastal city now populated by civilians who’d fled the bombings in Madrid. The highway to Puerto de Contreras was being guarded by men from the Rosal column. Dark-eyed, a country folk’s gait, sideburns, lively-colored capes, and a pistol on their hip; they were the real kind of anarchists. Spaniards from a fierce caste who helped their women with the children, carried them in pairs over their backs, but when it came to men who’d abandoned their barricades, they had no pity. Eyeing them furiously, with a bull’s disdain toward the tame lamb. Sheer brilliance. There was no excusing them for abandoning the capital to its own fate. Many were obliged to go back. But when sick and hungry children arrived by night from far away, the lights from the city high above, with their sacks over their shoulders, they showed themselves, smiling.
“Cheer up, my friends,” they’d say. “Here you’ll surely get sick of eating so much rice.”
Valencia, full of bright lights and a view of the sea. A dream.
Gerda had just arrived. She looked all around without being able to find one empty table. The Ideal Room café, with its large windows that opened onto Calle de la Paz, was the war correspondents’ favorite. The place was always packed with journalists, diplomats, writers, spies, and brigadists from all four cardinal points, milling around underneath its ceiling fans, with their leather jackets, “blond cigarettes,” and their international songs.
The sight of a woman entering alone caused a stir at the tables. Her beret tightly in place and a revolver on her hip.
“Gerda, what on earth are you doing here?” She heard the voice of a tall German man who had stood up to greet her from the other end of the café.
It was Alfred Kantorowicz, an old friend from Paris. They had spent many hours together at the Capoulade’s gatherings. He was attractive and wore the round glasses of an intellectual. With the help of Walter Benjamin and Gustav Regler, he had been able to establish the Association of German Writers in Exile. Along with Chim, Ruth, and Capa, Gerda had attended many of their events, which included poetry readings and short plays. Today, Kantorowicz was the political commissary for the Thirteenth Brigade.
She took a seat next to him at the table and introduced herself to the other brigadists as a special correspondent for Ce Soir.
“It’s a new publication,” she added humbly.
The magazine hadn’t yet released its first edition on newsstands, but they had all heard talk about it, since it was well known in the Communist Party’s circles and because it was run by Louis Aragon.
The café’s cosmopolitan atmosphere could be detected in the smoke: Gauloises Bleues, Gitanes, Ideales, Valencian stogies, Pall-Mall, and even Camel and Lucky Strike. That tribe could resemble a map with all the tributaries of a faraway river. French, German, Hungarian, English, American … So that borders were no longer important. Once in Spain, they removed their country’s clothes in order to change into the blue uniform or olive-green fatigues. Erase nations. That was the war’s lesson. For them, Spain was the symbol of all countries, a representation of the very notion of a universe ridiculed. There were metalworkers, doctors, students, typesetters, poets, scientists such as the biologist J. B. S. Haldane, deliberate and self-righteous, sporting an aviator jacket he bought at a store in Piccadilly Circus. Gerda felt right at home. Out of all the cigarettes being offered to her, she chose a Gauloises Bleues, and let the smoke pass through her lungs, the way all the words and sensations passed through her body.
“And Capa?” the German asked, puzzled, after a while. He was used to always seeing them together.
Gerda shrugged. A long silence. Kantorowicz couldn’t take his eyes off the warm triangle of her neckline.
“I’m not his babysitter,” she said proudly.
Valencia was courteous, generous, and aromatic. In those days, it was the war’s most amiable face. They were all passing through on the way to somewhere, and they rushed through the waiting as best they could. First thing in the morning, they’d cross the Plaza de Castelar, with its large circular openings to light and ventilate the underground flower market, toward Hotel Victoria, where the Republican government was staying, to see if there was any news. The correspondents usually ate at the restaurant in Hotel Londres, especially on Thursdays, when they served paella. The maître d’, dressed in a tux, would approach the tables remorsefully and say:
“Please excuse the service and the food … Since the Committee’s arrival, this is no longer what it used to be.”
Valencia’s people were kind lovers of life, slightly loud, and always telling sexually explicit jokes. Gerda, who was now more or less able to get by in the language, still found it hard to understand what they were saying. But she soon learned how to incorporate the Valencian che into her vocabulary, and people immediately wanted to adopt her. There are people who, without even trying, are automatically loved. It’s something you’re born with, like the way you laugh as you tell a joke in a low voice. Gerda was one of those people. Languages came easily to her. She could interpret each accent with the fluency of a musician improvising a new melody. Pronounce swear words with such elegant grace that she could seduce anyone. She listened with her head slightly tilted to the side, a complicit air about her, like a mischievous child. Within the feminine canon, she wasn’t especially pretty, but the war had given her a different kind of beauty; that of a survivor. Much too thin and angular, with eyebrows that were arched and ironic, always dressed in a blue uniform or a military shirt, and with a charm that tempted everyone. For her suitors, Capa’s absence signified an open season, and she began to enjoy the pleasures of being courted. The waiters reserving the best tables for her. The silent rivalry among the men around her, who competed to buy her drinks, offer her the latest news, make her laugh, or take her dancing to one of the salons on Calle del Trinquete de Caballeros.
DANCING IS THE ANTEROOM TO THE BROTHEL: LET’S SHUT IT DOWN, read a black-and-red poster on the door, endorsed by the acronym FAI.
“The owner can’t be an anarchist,” said Gerda after someone translated it for her.
“Of course he is. And a hard-core anarchist. He is one of the founders of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica.”
“So how does he manage to keep this place open then?”
“Well, since prohibition is an act of government, it’s his way of showing that no one gives him orders. You know: No Gods, No Masters.”
Anarchists! So independent, so loyal, so humane. Spanish to the core. Gerda smiled on the inside.
Other times, a group would go down to Malvarrosa beach to eat shrimp and watch the boats. That’s what she liked most. Sitting in the sand and watching the Grao fishermen use oxen to pull the sailboats to shore.
First, they’d make them go into the water until they were up to their knees, then they’d yoke the oxen and strap on the boats’ cables, and they’d tow them to the sand. Several pairs of oxen dragging a small sailboat out of the sea, with a line of shining waves that would break onto the sand. She’d stay there alone for hours, smoking and looking out into the distance, while the salty air refreshed her skin and her memories.
Not all of it was free time. She had to complete her assignments. Now she was a self-employed photojournalist. All her images were signed “Photo Taro.” She had never felt so in charge of her own life. She crouched below a cloister’s arch in the Instituto Luis Vives, her knees together, her pupils contracted to pinpoints. Right in front of her, a column lined up in a Popular Army formation. She set the foreground in focus, a vanishing point perspective. Click. As a contrast to photographs of war, she also liked to shoot images of everyday life: a couple in Santa Catalina drinking horchata in the afternoon, a band contest beneath a diptych with the portraits of Machado and García Lorca, young boys taking lessons in the bullring. Valencia had found a place in her heart. The city was open, sensual, and hospitable. For all the refugees that had arrived hungry from the fronts, that place was like a paradise of abundance, the promised land, with Barrachina’s shop window always filled with groceries and supplies. But every day, the front was getting closer, and from Plaza de Castelar’s balconies, one began to see other things: the arrival of crowds from Malaga fleeing the massive shootings. People in espadrilles, with raw feet and faces broken from fear.
She didn’t think twice about it. Her credentials were valid only in Valencia, so she went with her camera gear slung over her shoulder to the propaganda office, within the Municipality of Defense, to obtain permission to cover the exodus of the thousands of refugees arriving from Andalusia’s eastern coast. It wasn’t easy to get a pass. In order to turn down those who wanted to take advantage of the situation, the authorities were studying each petition with a magnifying glass. In certain European bohemian circles, the idea of taking a kind of “war tour” had become fashionable. They were people looking for thrills, trying to free themselves from the boredom of their pedestrian lives by checking into the best hotels in Valencia or Barcelona at the expense of the press office, as if they were there to see the bulls, standing behind the barricade, watching from the sidelines how the Spanish were killing one another. The Republican authorities would not stand for it. So, a majority of the correspondents had to wait for authorization and a space in a car while they rolled their cigarettes and compulsively typed up reports and telephoned, in foreign languages, claims that were never received.
However, Gerda was given her safe-conduct in less than ten minutes, in addition to having her pass validated, with the Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals’ stamp on it. She knew how to get by on her own: having a way with people, the ability to be understood in five languages, a killer smile, and a bureaucracy-proof obstinacy.
For days she watched refugees moving along the coastal highway. First, the mule-drawn carts, then the women and the elderly carrying bundles on their backs, followed by frightened children with dirty faces, then the rest. Desperate, barefooted, exhausted, with that faraway look in their eyes that people get when it no longer matters if they continue forward or head back. One hundred fifty thousand people who had abandoned their homes and their entire lives, running away from the terror toward Almería, and later to Valencia, searching for the closest Republican shelter without knowing that the worst was yet to come. Hell. Franco’s tanks following them overland and brutally mowing them down. Italian and German planes bombing them from above and gunboats intensifying their attack along the coast. It was a mousetrap. Cliffs on one side, a wall of rock on the other. There was no escape. Mothers blindfolding their children so they wouldn’t see the bodies in the ditches. One hundred twenty-five miles on foot without anything to eat. Every once in a while, one would hear the purr of motors and overloaded militia trucks would arrive with faded green canvases, covered in dust, falling apart, and devastated. Parents begging them on their knees to take their children, knowing that if the militia accepted, they’d probably never see their children again. The worst episode of the war. The majority of the refugees were in a state of shock. Others collapsed from exhaustion while the planes started up their next attack, weaving their intricate spiderwebs in the air. No one ran for cover. It didn’t matter anymore.
Gerda didn’t know where to look. To her, it was the end of the world. She saw a very tall woman transporting a flour sack on the back of a white horse, and like an automaton, she pressed the shutter button. She believed she could be delirious. No one buried the dead and there wasn’t enough strength to salvage the wounded.
At nightfall, she heard a strange murmur. Vibrations, rustling, banging, a set of headlights straightening themselves out in the darkness and coming around a curve. She walked toward the lights as if there was no longer a world left around her. It was a hospital’s mobile medical unit. A man dressed in a white robe stained with blood, like a butcher’s apron, was wrapping a bandage around an old man’s head. Norman Bethune, the Canadian doctor, looked as though he’d been brought back to life. Gaunt, bearded, bloodshot eyes. He had just returned from three long days of performing blood transfusions and picking up children along the way.
That sadness could be a feeling so close to hate was something Gerda had never realized until then. First, she lifted the oil lamp’s wick to expand the light’s diameter around her. Then she threw a blanket over her shoulders and walked in the direction of the ambulance. She could hear the complaints of the sick, the voice of a mother speaking softly to her child. In the back of the truck, there was a board that was used as an operating table. At any moment after sundown, if a vein is sliced in the darkness, the blood turns black as petroleum. The worst part was the smell. At that moment, she would have done anything to be with Capa. He’d know exactly what to say to calm her. He had a gift for making people smile during the worst moments.
She remained absorbed in her thoughts, finishing a cigarette, remembering the touch of his rough and confident hands, those loyal spaniel eyes, his way of breathing on her neck after lovemaking, his self-deprecating humor capable of also saying something presumptuous to make her furious and fixing it again with that look that erased everything. Gentle, witty, egotistical. Damn that Hungarian, she thought to herself again, almost saying it out loud so she could stifle the sob rising to her mouth. Pale, she walked alongside the ditches, among the piles of dead bodies, with a lost expression on her face.
Just as she thought she was going to die if she didn’t see a familiar face soon, she heard a snap, like when a candle extinguishes itself. Someone had just used their nail to break open a vial of morphine. Before he turned around, she had already recognized him from the back. His long legs, the rolled-up sleeves on his arms, currently digging inside a first-aid kit, an air of Gary Cooper.
“Ted.”
He turned around to look at her. They hadn’t seen each other since Cerro Muriano. Her nineteen-year-old guardian angel had aged. She walked over to him slowly, placing her forehead against his chest, and for the first time since she’d been in Spain, she let herself cry without worrying who might see her. Silently, without saying a word, unable to hold back the tears, while Ted Allan stroked her head gently, as confused and quiet as she was. His right hand between her blond hair and the fabric of his shirt. That physical contact was the only possible consolation in the midst of the river of bodies. If felt as though the tears were coming not from her chest but from her throat, and blocking her breathing. She remained like this a good while, crying her heart out, after seven months of war trying hard not to fall apart.
Hell.