The old manor was still holding up after months of occupation. It was located on 7 Calle del Marqués del Duero and had been expropriated from the Marqués Heredia Spínola’s heirs in order to be converted into the Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals’ main office. The building creaked at all of its seams; it was ugly, overly stately, decorated with funereal furniture and thick velvet curtains, but it harbored an entire hidden city within. The Alliance’s salons were constantly overflowing with actors, journalists, artists, writers, both foreign and Spanish, and, most important, poets, such as Rafael Alberti, who served as its secretary. In the months between winter and spring that year, several figures passed through: Pablo Neruda, who still remained Chile’s consul in Madrid; César Vallejo, a Peruvian open-form poet; Luis Cernuda, always elegant with his freshly groomed hair and trimmed beard; León Felipe, who kept count of the number of dead from aerial bombings; Miguel Hernández, the pastor poet from Orihuela, his face blackened by the sun upon returning from the front with his shaved head and peasant’s gait, barely lifting his feet off the ground.
In the dim light of the hallways, Gerda passed eighteenth-century murals on the walls in silence. When she arrived at her room on the second floor, she opened the door to a walnut wardrobe and discovered a collection of period pieces, just hanging there on the rod, which had belonged to several generations of Spanish nobles: austere frock coats, lace gowns, admiral uniforms with blue fabric and gold buttons, muslin dresses that smelled of camphor.
“It’s fantastic!” she said to Capa, her eyes big, like a little girl’s.
Around four or five of them all had the same idea. They removed those dusty relics from the wardrobe and slid them down the polished mahogany banister, releasing a flurry of moths. Shortly after, the main hall of mirrors had become an improvised theater, with everyone in their costumes interpreting the part they’d been given to play. Capa was dressed as an academic, in a frock coat and dress shirt with lace cuffs. Gerda swayed her hips beneath a red ruffled dress and a Spanish mantilla. Alberti wrapped himself in a white sheet and placed escarole on his head as his laurel crown. The photographer Walter Reuter smoked his pipe in a lieutenant’s Cuirassier uniform. The poster designer José Renau posed as a bishop, with his hairy legs showing beneath his robe. Rafael Dieste acted as the evening’s master of ceremonies, pulling all the strings. They were so completely engrossed in a childlike battle, armed with nutcrackers and paper balls, that when the nightly air-raid siren sounded, it caught them all by surprise. Everywhere they went, they were surrounded by death. This was their way of defending themselves from the war.
The entire city was a huge trench of barricaded streets filled with bomb craters. One wasn’t allowed to walk down Calle de Alcalá, Calle de Goya, Calle Mayor, or Gran Vía. And on streets like Calle de Recoletos or Calle de Serrano, which ran north-south, one had to follow the arrows on the sidewalks pointing east. People were also warned not to cross plazas from their opposite ends but to travel around them, staying close to the doorways in case they needed to run inside for cover. Rules that were adopted by General Miaja when he stood in front of Madrid’s Defense Council. That were stuck onto a bulletin board beside the entrance to the Alliance for everyone to see. Although several weeks had passed since the city had begun its evacuation to Valencia, its problems with provisions supplies still persisted, and the Madrileños had to stand in long lines for rations and groceries. But at the theaters and movie houses, it was business as usual. The Rialto, Bilbao, Capitol, the Avenida … A city under attack could not lose hope. They all went to see China Seas at the Bilbao, without knowing that the worst was waiting for them on Calle de Fuencarral on their way out. But after the typhoons, Malaysian pirates, the coolies, and the faraway gunfire of that celluloid China, the real war was not as impressive. Jean Harlow was somewhere near a yellow river of muck, and her only hope was the distant sound of a horn from a mysterious ship. Dreams.
The Alliance was the front’s cultural center. In the late afternoons, the rooms on the first floor became the improvised offices for the magazine El Mono Azul, which aimed to lift the combatants’ morale, while in the game room, the theater company Nueva Escena, directed by Rafael Dieste, staged plays set in wartime. Dinner was served at nine o’clock at a grand table lit by candelabras. The menu rarely included anything but the miserable ration of beans that was allowed, but the silverware, Bohemian crystal, and Sevres porcelain were exquisite.
At night they’d stay up late, listening to live music and to poets with feverish eyes reciting verses until the dawn began to color the bombarded nights of that heroic city pink. Gerda and Capa soon became everybody’s favorite couple. They started to feel at home in the world within the Alliance, while in Paris they had never stopped being refugees, foreigners living on borrowed time. Even with their strained Spanish, they’d join the chorus to sing, with more bravado than anyone in the room, the songs of the Resistance:
They laugh at the bombs
They laugh at the bombs
They laugh at the bombs
Mother of Mine
the Madrileños
the Madrileños…
With deep voices and their hearts in the right place, they’d become immersed in Spanish humor, which could be so crude at times. Capable of laughing when their dinner plate was empty, or when Santiago Ontañón told them that the beans had worms that looked you straight in the eye, or when the poet Emilio Prados felt like singing “La Marseillaise” with an Andalusian accent, or when Gerda would say she smoked yerbos instead of yerba, the correct way to say “grass” in Spanish, or when Capa, in all seriousness, would start a conversation with one of the marquesas in the paintings.
“And why, if I may ask, did you become a revolutionary, Señor Capa?” asked María Teresa León, Alberti’s wife, imitating the dusty voice of one of those Old Regime ladies adorning the walls.
“For decorum, señora marquesa. For decorum,” he responded.
The Alliance was his Spanish home, his only family.
Sometimes the North American writer Ernest Hemingway would drop by, wearing his beret and the metal-rimmed glasses of an intellectual. He was working on a novel about the Civil War, and everywhere he went, he’d bring an old typewriter. He was usually accompanied by the New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews, one of the most perspicacious reporters in Spain in those days, and Sefton Delmer, from London’s Daily Express, who was close to six-foot, corpulent, ruddy-complexioned, and who looked like a British bishop. The three formed a curious trio of musketeers that Capa would soon join, after the time he arranged a paella dinner for everyone at Luis Candelas’s caverns beneath the Arco de Cuchilleros.
In turn, Gerda was the Alliance’s star. Her magnetism seduced everybody. That radiant smile and her capacity to imitate any accent and speak five languages, including Capanese, as Hemingway liked to call Capa’s strange lingo. She’d leave the Alliance early in the morning on foot, leaving the martyrized remnants of the National Library behind her so she could walk in the direction of Cibeles. From there, she’d continue by car from Alcalá or Gran Vía on her way to the front. She’d work all day, leaning over those who were on the verge of death and who had arrived in the trenches of the Hospital Clinico, just a few hundred yards away from the bars on the edge of Madrid. Gerda, working her camera like an assault weapon. Capa saw how she changed the script that was their lives, leaning up against a barrier while shots were being fired in her direction, her nostrils flared, her skin moist with sweat, the adrenaline shooting out of every pore, her mouth shut, intensely looking around between each shot.
Each time they’d risk their lives more. But they were so young and good-looking and with a confident sportsmanship quality about them. Nobody ever thought to worry. They had a godlike aura around them. The soldiers would turn hopeful when Gerda arrived, as if her presence served as a talisman. If Little Blondie—the sobriquet they used for her—was around, things couldn’t turn out so bad for them that day. Months later, when they ran into Alfred Kantorowicz again in Madrid, he confessed that while he was in La Granjuela, he’d never seen his fellow brigadists as clean and fresh-shaven as they were when she was close by, roaming around with her camera. There would be a constant scuffle in front of the mirrors and the water fountains. The foreign correspondents would fight over who would offer her their seat or who could take her in their vehicle. André Chamson invited her to climb on board the confiscated limousine they’d allocated him. She would offer them all that peculiar smile of hers, both affectionate and ironic at the same time, but without abdicating a thing. While she strolled with General Miaja through the Alliance’s gardens, he presented her with April’s first rose. Sometimes she liked to chat with Rafael Alberti in the manor’s library. She showed the poet how to develop his first photos in the building’s basement, where they had set up a small lab. Even María Teresa León adored her with that mixture of motherly instinct and feminine rivalry.
In public, she had an enchantment that drew everyone to her. It was what Capa had admired about her from the beginning, but now he wasn’t so sure of himself. He began to doubt everything. Their relationship had gone back to being what it was when they first met. Soul mates, inseparable comrades, colleagues, partners. And sometimes—just sometimes—they’d sleep together. It was apparent that, as a couple, they had retreated to the innocence of a neutral territory. But he was much too proud to be anyone’s secret lover. He couldn’t stand it anymore. When she entrenched herself behind that wall of independence, or when in a large group she had a private conversation with someone else while he was at her side, he’d start telling jokes in a loud voice that even he didn’t find very funny, prisoner to a strange loquaciousness. Behaving the same way every time he felt ignored. He’d read into each and every one of her gestures as if it were a secret code. He suspected that she had replaced him with another. Once, he saw her standing in the vestibule, grabbing Claud Cockburn, the London Worker correspondent, by the lapels while she laughed and laughed about something he whispered in her ear. For days he’d do nothing but follow the journalist, trying to make his life impossible. But what in hell was she trying to pull? He no longer trusted Gerda’s shows of affection; stroking his hair when she passed by him or leaning on his shoulder when they happened to find themselves sitting next to one another. Either she’s with me or she’s against me, he thought.
But the more he fought it, the more obsessed he grew with her body, the flat surface of her stomach, the fine curve of her ankle, her protruding clavicle. That was his only geography. He didn’t need to sleep with her just one night but every night, throw her face-up onto one of those canopy beds, open her thighs, and enter her, tame her at her own pace, until she lost control, until he could soften the sharp arrises she’d sometimes get on her face, causing her to appear so distant. Just as the wind polishes the surfaces of bare rocks. That’s how it was the last time. Rough, violent. They both fell to their knees, his head beneath her shirt, the salty taste of her fingers in his mouth just before letting his desire take hold of him. He grabbed her by the hair and jerked her head back, his features contorted, furious, voracious, with kisses that turned into bites, and caresses that bordered on scratches. Making ferocious love to her, as if he hated her. But what he hated was the future.
“I’m leaving,” he said, eyes downward, not looking at her, just before leaving her room.
It was the only thing he could do. He was going mad.
Besides, she knew how to manage very well on her own.
She was more concentrated on her work than ever, accustomed to getting up early and coming home with the last flicker of light in the sky. In the mornings she’d travel through the Parque del Oeste and the intricate system of trenches dug up all around Ciudad Universitaria. Coming back from the front, she would walk along the grand Avenida del Quince y Medio, swerving around the pedestrians, automatically dodging the corpse of another unfortunate citizen. Desensitized to death, with a scab that had slowly formed without her knowing it, during the course of almost a year of war. She stopped short to stand in front of a movie poster. There was Jean Harlow, a woman half-bad, half-good, part-angel, part-vampiress, like any other character susceptible to surrendering. And beside her, Clark Gable, her savior, smiling, wicked, tender, the man who should put her to the test, split her in two, humiliate her a little, undervalue her, and at the same time respond to her love with a love as fierce and of the same nature. The same old story. All that interior violence and complication to defend themselves from the very tenderness. Cinema, and its tribute to dreams and shadows.
In mid-March the rebels launched a new attack on Madrid from the northeast. But the Italian troops sent by Mussolini were met with a large counteroffensive that resulted in a Republican victory in Guadalajara. Gerda visited those conquered territories, traveling through narrow roads full of mud and activity, surrounded by a large caravan of trucks and combat cars. That day she returned to the Alliance looking drained and tired, her tripod bag full of holes from Fascist gunfire.
When Rafael Alberti saw the danger she’d been in, he became alarmed, and she responded to him by pointing to her tripod stand and saying:
“Better here than in my heart.” Though she wasn’t too sure about that.
She ate with everyone downstairs, as she normally did, and when they were finished, they turned on the radio and listened to Augusto Fernández’s report on the war. It was undoubtedly all good news. The Battle of Brihuega had been one of the Republicans’ clearest victories up until then. They decided to throw a party in the hall of mirrors, but Gerda didn’t want to go. Everyone insisted: Rafael Dieste; Cockburn, who never missed an opportunity to try and woo her; Alberti; María Teresa León; everyone … But she refused with a tepid smile. She went up to her room, staying up late to carefully mark her negatives instead. Her style wasn’t like Capa’s, using a wedge-shaped cutout, but using a sewing thread, just like film directors. Working with her hands helped relax her. She felt an unsettling feeling in her soul, like a yellow river of muck shrinking in the night. Since Capa had left, she was no longer interested in socializing.
Jean Harlow in China Seas.