I’m twenty-five years old and I know this war is the end of a part of my life. The end, perhaps, of my youth. Sometimes it seems it’s going to do away with the entire world’s youth. Spain’s war has done something to all of us. We’re no longer the same. This era we’re living in is so full of change that it’s difficult to recognize who we were just two years ago. I can’t even imagine what’s ahead…” She was wrapped up in a blanket, with her red notebook resting on her knees and the last bit of light disappearing into the horizon. It was her favorite time of day. If she had been a writer, she would have chosen the twilight to begin working on her novels, as her special time to allow the mind to wander. No lover could ever cross over into that exclusive territory. From those heights and along the sloping rooftops, she could see areas that had been hit by the bombs, the acres of farmland destroyed. Contemplating the tormented place she now found herself in—within Spain—she placed her pen on the paper’s white surface and continued writing. “Over the last few months I traveled through this country soaking up all it has to offer. I’ve seen a sacrificed and broken people, women who remain strong, men with strange and tragic visions, and men with a sense of humor. This country is so mysterious, so theirs, so ours. I’ve seen it soften and crumble during an attack and rise again the next day with freshly formed scars. I still haven’t grown completely tired of seeing it, but I will one day. That I know.”
The field hospital occupied a section of the esplanade that was tucked away in the darkness so that it wouldn’t attract the attention of enemy planes. Many of the refugees slept beneath the trucks’ canvases, wrapped in blankets. Children whose feet were wrapped in bandages huddled together on top of the piles of sandbags. Starting from Almería, the government attempted to evacuate everyone who was in condition to travel via bus, train, or boat, but the situation had become overwhelming.
Capa arrived on February 14, when the worst had already passed. He’d flown in on a small plane from Toulouse to Valencia. Several of his colleagues had remained in the city, awaiting permission. With rows of tables packed with typewriters and untidy mountains of dirty carbon paper, the Press Office could not keep up with all the requests. Seeing how difficult it was to find another form of transportation, he decided to hire his own taxi and take the Sollana highway smack up against rice fields, and continue alongside the River Júcar to Andalusia. He wasn’t aware how much the war was rousing his emotions. Aside from the driver, he was all alone with his character, prepared to remain loyal to him under all circumstances, in a kind of limbo where life becomes the legend of what you make of it. His Leica on his arm, his eyes glued to the odometer. When he arrived, he saw Gerda standing against the light, extending a sheet over a clearing in the grass while Ted Allan prepared bandage strips with calamine on a tray.
“I didn’t know you had become a nurse,” he said with a touch of sarcasm to his tone. Half-smiling, somewhere between smooth and wary. He was mad at her, though he didn’t have a concrete reason to be, and that upset him even more.
“You’re too late,” she said, subtly crossing swords with him, not specifying whether she was referring to covering the refugees’ exodus or for the rest of her life.
Capa couldn’t handle it when she entrenched herself behind a wall of pride with her doublespeak. In her fatigues and with that pale face and the imperiousness of a medieval warrior, her beauty radiated with unbearable intensity for him. He looked at her, waiting for her to say something more. But there wasn’t anything else to say. For now.
The ice began to melt as the days went by, despite the chilling frankness of the Canadian camaraderie of Ted and Norman. When projectile missiles began falling over the city, they decided to move with the trucks and their tents to an old farmhouse. The building was nearly in ruins. There were steps missing in the stairwell, and the banisters had become dismantled. Some of the rooms in the east wing had no roofs, which made it feel as if they were in an aviary. When you opened a door, there was the landscape, but the kitchen had remained intact. That’s where Dr. Bethune prepared his mixtures of sodium citrate in order to conserve the blood he used for transfusions. Capa liked to joke around with the children, creating shadow-plays on the walls, moving his fingers with a white handkerchief. Gerda watched him as he clowned around, and smiled.
The second night, she removed her boots and entered his tent crouched on all fours. When, without further ado, she felt his hand caressing her skin, she knew that what was about to happen was exactly what she had wished for. The masculine taste of his lips, his mouth whispering words that were both sweet and obscene, down below, between her legs, moving slowly, confidently, prolonging each caress to its limit, driving her mad until she’d surrender all her principles. At the last minute she looked up toward the roof of the tent, searching for a place to grab on to but not finding a single handle. She felt more vulnerable than ever. Be free, defend your independence, belong to no one, fall in love so that you can’t bear it. Everything was so complicated.
Gerda had already heard it from that Camila woman, a mindblower of a Gypsy fortune-teller, who was part-deaf, straightbacked, and had arrived from Cádiz.
“Niña, loving a man is more work than blowing up a train.”
The woman knew what she was talking about. She had blown up a few of her own. She was in her fifties, sporting a black skirt and long, dark, straight hair that was parted in the middle and held up in the back with a gold comb. A woman as hardy as a mule and with hands like granite. She would tie her little ones with cords to her waist, and when they reached the point of exhaustion and started to complain, saying they couldn’t go on walking, she’d whip them with the ends of the cords, like goats, forcing them to keep going. Afterward, when she noticed that they really couldn’t go on, she’d carry them in pairs up the side of the mountain, climbing up and down to fetch them as many times as was necessary. Capa would always tease her when he saw her drinking from a wineskin like a road worker. They got along well despite her thick Andalusian accent and her being hard of hearing. The Gypsy soul.
Feeling playful, Gerda extended her hand out in front of her. The woman opened it, passing her thumb carefully over her palm. She held it in her hands for a while, then shut it without saying a word. They sat drinking coffee beside a campfire. Gerda and Capa had planned to leave very early the next morning and wanted to say good-bye. They’d decided to continue to the bridge in Arganda where violent combat had recently broken out.
“So what did you see, Camila?” asked Capa, with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
“Your girl’s a reasonable one, Hungarian, but watch out for her bites.” Capa’s neck still showed signs of their recent love tussle, an eggplant-colored hickey just below his left ear.
“She should have been a vampire,” he joked, flapping his arms like a bat in flight, “a vampiress, probably the most dangerous of their kind. Tadarida Teniotis.”
“She’ll be a good wife if you can get her to stay on course.”
“Por los cojones!” said Gerda in perfect Spanish.
They laughed at her comeback. It was amusing to them to hear a charming foreigner swear like a mule-driver but with such elegance. She could strip away the original meaning of any rude interjection and provoke you with it. It was like watching an Angora cat hunt down a mouse with the street smarts of a stray.
“And what do you see in her future?” asked Ted, who had already experienced just how precise the Gypsy’s fortunes could be. He was sitting next to Gerda with his knees bent and his head propped on top. Though being in Gerda’s presence sometimes caused him to blush, he adored Capa like an older brother. Not so long ago, in Paris, on a gloomy, cloudy day, the two of them, very drunk, comforted one another with alcohol and conversation, while one of the harshest sunrises of their lives awaited them. The Canadian was frank and loyal. He would have preferred to kill himself rather than betray either of them. Deep down, the war was tearing at the delicate weaving of his affections. His question was of value, a guardian angel’s question based on the many things that perhaps he’d foreseen or intuited were about to happen. “You’re not going to offer us anything?”
“Nothing.”
“Please say whatever you wish,” said Gerda, attempting to encourage her while showing her respect. “I don’t believe in these things.”
“So what do you believe in, girl?”
“In my ideas.”
“Ideas, ideas…” that Camila woman repeated to herself as if she were praying.
“You’ve left us intrigued,” protested Capa, winking at the Gypsy. He was sure she was trying to withhold a certain disillusion of the heart.
“Go on,” insisted Gerda, “tell me what you saw from reading my palm. I’d like to know.”
“Nothing.” This time her tone was sharp and her face serious; shaking her head as she was getting up to leave. “I saw nothing, little one.”
They left at the dawn of a cloudy day, surrounded by whitewashed puddles, a sky of indecisive tones that said its good-byes with the sadness of a hotel room, still blurry from last night’s cigarettes and to which one knows they’ll never return.
The trip might have been peaceful if it wasn’t for the potholes and the constant bumps to the head. Along their entire journey west, they came upon several rows of military trucks carrying old Packards, combat cars, and cargo under worn-out canvases. The highway grew more chaotic as they approached the front of Jarama. On both sides of the gravel path, you could see columns of smoke floating between the earth and the sky. The rebels had attempted to block the Madrid-Valencia highway and leave the capital without its main supply route. But the Republicans fought tooth and nail along the Arganda Bridge and were able to salvage the roadway. By nightfall, Gerda and Capa had arrived at the International Brigades’ headquarters in Morata de Tajuña, a plain that was surrounded by wheat fields that would soon be reaped by shrapnel. But at that hour, the camp was quiet.
There are voices that can rustle the trees in the same way a rifle can when it’s fired. On the night they arrived, the voice Gerda and Capa heard was precisely one of those.
Ol’ Man River
That Ol’ Man River…
More than two hundred people were sitting in a large circle with their legs crossed Indian-style. Practically ceremonial.
“Shit, it’s the black man…” exclaimed Capa, completely moved by whom he saw. It was Paul Robeson, a six-foot-three son of an escaped slave from New Jersey, with a football player’s broad, sloping chest that allowed his grand voice to resonate like a pipe organ. He was standing in the middle of that plain surrounded by an audience of shadows that broke out into a standing ovation when the grandson of slaves concluded with a last deep note that elevated itself over all borders.
Hundreds of faces that remained still and tense, overcome with emotion, holding their breaths, listening to the spiritual black man who seemed as if he’d been plucked right out of the cotton fields along the Mississippi. Gerda could feel that music, not hitting her over the head the way the Psalms could, but in her gut. There was something profoundly Biblical in that solitary music. The darkness, the smell of the fields, the gathering of people from so many places. All of them so young, practically kids, like Pati Edney, an eighteen-year-old British woman who fell in love riding on an ambulance’s running board on the front at Aragón. Or John Cornford, a twenty-year-old Englishman with a leather jacket and a boyish smile, who smoked one filterless cigarette after another, and who would have been an excellent poet if a bullet hadn’t exploded in his lungs in the mountains of Córdoba. Gerda and Capa had met up with some of them in Leciñena or in Madrid, when the Fascists arrived at the edge of the Manzanares and they joined General Lukacs’s brigade. Gerda could still see the writer Gustav Regler’s face as he was being carried out of the rubble on a stretcher by two militiamen after an attack. He was a very tall German fellow whom Capa had gotten drunk with during the time of the battles in Casa de Campo, and who had confessed he’d fallen head over heels in love with a married woman much older than he. The American Ben Leider, in his aviator glasses, posing with his entire squadron in front of the Policarpov I-15 in which he had defended Madrid until the aircraft was eventually shot down. Every time a biplane fighter took off on a mission, they’d pass over his grave in Colmenar de Oreja cemetery and say hello from the air. Frida Knight, who fed the pigeons bread crumbs in the Plaza Santa Ana and would become furious when Fascists’ howitzers blew them away. Ludwig Renn, his left arm covered in pink scars from machine-gun wounds. Through the lenses of her round spectacles, the cruelty of the fight and the disconcerted look in Simone Weil’s eyes. Charles Donnelly, with a carpenter’s pencil tucked behind his ear, who liked writing poems by candlelight in the plains of Morata. Alex McDade, clever and blunt, who could make everyone laugh with his typically Scottish humor, sitting on the sidewalk eating tuna from a can while Franco’s planes bombed every inch of the Gran Vía. Americans from the Lincoln Brigade, Bulgarians and Yugoslavians from the Dimitrov Battalion, Poles from the Dombrowski Battalion, Germans from the Thälmann Brigade and from the Edgar André Battalion, French from the Marseillaise Battalion, Cubans, Russians … Gerda thought she might run into Georg somewhere. She knew from his last letter that he’d spent the past three months fighting in Spain, but chance did not choose to lower the bridge for them to meet.
“I love black music,” said Gerda.
Paul Robeson’s singing had enlivened the group with such a charge of emotion that they raised their fists to their temples and shouted: “Cheers! Cheers!…”
Afterward, they walked toward their tents, the plain becoming more visible as their eyes grew accustomed to the dark, a breeze from the wheat fields causing the tents to undulate slightly, a night that was cold and flat, that could purify all sounds and smells. And as if it had been covered by a bell jar, the murmur of the camp suddenly faded away. Holding hands, a special kind of harmony between them, almost geological, nocturnal. Capa found those lands beautiful enough to die there.
“If I offered you my life, you would reject it, right?” It was neither a complaint nor a reproach.
She didn’t answer.
Capa had never loved anyone as much, and it made him think about his own mortality. The more she demanded her independence, the more unattainable she appeared, and the more his need to have her grew. For the first time in his life, he felt possessive.
He hated her self-sufficiency, or when she chose to sleep alone. It was impossible to get her out of his head; he was thinking obsessively about every centimeter of her skin, her voice, the things she’d say when she argued over the slightest matter, the way she crawled into his tent and pressed up against his body, pouting softly like a saint or an Andalusian virgin.
Turning toward her, in order to touch her wrist gently, he said:
“Marry me.”
Gerda did a double take when she heard his words. It wasn’t confusion. Just that she was a bit moved. Months ago, she would have happily accepted.
Facing him, she looked directly and gently into his eyes, holding back the consolation of a caress, as if she doubted him or owed him an explanation. She felt the powerlessness of all that she could not say, searching for any word that could save her. She remembered an old Polish proverb: “If you clip a lark’s wings, it will be yours. But then it couldn’t fly. And what you love about it is its flight.” She preferred not to say anything. Lowering her eyes so that her pity wouldn’t humiliate him more, she let go of him and continued to walk toward the tent, aware of the powerful density of the earth below her feet, with a deep shame inside tearing at her soul, thinking about how difficult it would be to love someone else as much as she loved that Hungarian who had looked at her with resignation, as if he could read her thoughts, a smile with hints of sadness and irony to it, knowing that it was the pact they had made. Here, there, nowhere…