Waiting for Robert Capa (11 page)

“Fucking Christmas.”

I
t wasn't clear how he died, but all indications pointed to suicide. Gerta found out from Ruth. She knew André adored his father. Deep down, he and his father were one and the same. Dreamy, imaginative, capable of believing their own lies to the point of converting them into truths. In fact, many of the tales that André liked to entertain his friends with were simply new versions of the stories that, as a child, he had heard his father tell at the Café Moderno in Pest, when he was sent by his mother to go and bring him home before he spent all of the family's savings in one game of pinnacle.

Dezső Friedmann, like André, was an incurable romantic, who had grown up in the depths of rural Transylvania sheltered by folk tales and medieval legends. When he was barely an adolescent, without a duro to his name, he abandoned that place to see the world, surviving in his travels from city to city thanks to his picaresque ingenuity. Until one day he met Júlia, André's mother, and he decided to become a tailor.

André would listen to his worldly adventures with eyes as wide as saucers, feeling proud and amused, like when Dezső told him that he used a Budapest restaurant bill as his visa to cross the border. He tried to imagine him there, looking very serious, taking out the documents from the inside pocket of his jacket with an air of authority, and this would throw André into a fit of laughter. Many years later, André himself would use the same ruse to leave Berlin and it had also worked for him. One's luck is also inherited.

His father would always say that to be a good gambler, you had to always act as if you had an ace up your sleeve. If you play the part of the winner well, you end up winning the game. The bad part is that sometimes life calls your bluff ahead of schedule. Leaving no choice but to bet what's left on your last hand. Dezső lost it all.

Like hair color or belief in omens, gambling is a secret illness that's carried in one's genes. André had that gene in his veins. When things weren't going well for him, he'd spend his time drinking and placing bets. Henri Cartier-Bresson, with his infallible Norman eye, would often say: André was never the most intelligent of men. His talent was never pondering the intellectual root of a concept, but he was an incredibly intuitive player. He had an eye for details that the rest of us could not see. I suppose that experience also helped sharpen his sense of smell. Since the age of seventeen, he'd been on his own, moving from one hotel to the next, and later from one war to the next. He was born a gambler.

The man did not lack reason, as he would show many years later, on the morning of June 6, 1944, while the fog tore to shreds the sky over the English Channel.

Ocean. The sound of the ocean. It was impossible to focus with all that movement. Above, the rattle of the machines, the fear on deck. Below, the foaming abyss of the waves. André didn't think twice. He jumped into the landing craft with his two Contax cameras around his neck. Then he looked toward the beach and tried to calculate the depth and distance that they were planning. Up ahead, three miles of sand planted with mines. Omaha Beach. Nobody had explained to those boys what the hell they were supposed to do there. Only that they should save Europe from the clutches of the Nazis. As they approached the shore, he winked at a young American soldier from Company E of 116th Infantry Regiment. “See you there, kid,” he said, trying to lift his spirits.

Minutes later, the world blew to pieces. The majority of the boys hadn't reached their twenties yet. Shot down before setting one foot on the sand. In the focus, flashes of orange amid thousands of particles of water spray. An anti-tank trap. A mortar blast. A roaring sea. Orders given that were almost drowned out by the wind and the motorboats. He just kept shooting; there was no time to stop and adjust the focus. Snapshots, fast and fleeting.
Images of War
. Afterward, the Atlantic's whipped foam was dyed red in the worst bloodbath of D-Day. Two thousand dead in under two hours.

André was the only photographer to disembark during the first wave. Voluntarily, he enlisted with the 116th. In Easy Red. “The war correspondent has his stake—his life—in his own hands,” he wrote in his book
Slightly Out of Focus
. “And he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute. I am a gambler. I decided to go in with Company E in the first wave.” It's a miracle he survived while trying to advance in water up to his neck and, later, while dragging himself through 125 miles of sand that had mines. A game of cat and mouse. Of course, by then his name was no longer André Friedmann and she was no longer at his side. She'd been dead for seven years. Seven long years in which there was never a single day or a damn night that he didn't long for her. Perhaps the only thing he wanted was for someone to take pity on him and shoot him already.

Gerta was also familiar with this way of thinking. It's either this or that. Here or there. Dead or alive. When it comes down to it, life is a game of chance. She walked by the bars across from the Petit Pont and saw his back through the window. She knew she'd find him there. He was alone, standing there, motionless, wearing a coat that looked like it was made for someone a lot more corpulent, his arm crossed on top of the counter, his head lowered, lost in thought. Breaking his stillness only to lift a glass to his lips. It was still before eleven in the morning. As sad as a tree from which they had just shot down a robin, she thought to herself, feeling the tears begin to cloud her vision. She cursed herself, as she always did when this happened, though she wasn't sure for whom she was crying. She was about to start running in the direction she'd come from. But a force greater than her will kept her there, and so she waited for the air to dry her eyes. Then took a deep breath, resorted to all the haughtiness that her father had taught her, and went to find her man with her head held high and in her peculiar manner of walking. Relieved to have found him, but also determined not to yield an inch of her territory before him.

“It's so cold,” she said, hunching her shoulders, just standing there next to him with her clenched fists in her pockets.

He raised his eyebrows.

“Where were you?” he asked in a tone somewhat guarded.

“Around,” she said. And she remained silent.

That's how it happened. Without one overly surprising the other, without big declarations or an unnecessary show of emotion. In a certain way, it was natural, as if they had simply resumed a dialogue that had been temporarily interrupted. Each had traveled their stretch of the road.

“It'd be better if we headed back home, right?” she said again after some time had passed. And they slowly began walking along the sidewalk. He, glued to the walls, trying to walk a straight line. She, discreetly guiding him, so as not to humiliate him.

They began living together again. Moving out of the Eiffel Tower apartment and into the Hôtel de Blois on Rue Vavin. They could see Le Dôme Café from their window. All they had to do was poke their head out to see who had gathered and go downstairs if the clientele was to their liking. Although the truth was that between the electoral campaign and the reports for Alliance Photo, they no longer had too much time to sit around talking.

In February, the French authorities conceded special work permits that would assure journalists residency. Gerta believed it was the only way to legalize her status. She obtained her very first press accreditation signed by the head of the ABC Press Service of Amsterdam. In her identity card photo, she appears happy, wearing a leather jacket, her chin slightly raised, her hair blond, short, and falling over her forehead on one side. A proud smile. February 4, 1936. To Gerta, that document was far more than a legal safeguard. It was her passport as a journalist.

Though she began publishing her first chronicles and selling a few photographs, she never stopped thinking as the manager she had promised to be. They needed the money. And selling pieces solely on political matters wouldn't have allowed them to pay the rent. So they combined it with other kinds of assignments, small ones, about Parisian life in the budding springtime, when everything was waiting to happen. Street markets and places located on the outskirts of the city were where André most liked to go. It was where he felt the most comfortable. Marginal venues like the Crochet Theater, an open-air performance place run by two unscrupulous talent scouts. People would act out scenes in front of a camera and a live audience. There were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers impersonators who'd sweat their guts out when they danced. Ambitious young People who wanted to conquer the world, and cabaret entertainers on military reserve, broken by life and looking for a way out. André sympathized with them. At the end of every performance, the implacable audience would show their approval or rejection by their applause or booing. As always, he limited himself to photographing emotions. He knew what he was looking for and he always found it. In Paris or Madrid. In Normandy or Vietnam. During Bastille Day celebrations or on the outskirts of the Crochet Theater. His objective was directed at the interior of each face. His camera captured the emotion and held it within. It didn't matter if it was a tired old man walking off the stage with his head hung low in times of peace or a militia woman with a ladle in her hand serving soup from a pot in the midst of war. It was the same style. To go where no one else was able to go: a couple greeting each other euphorically from the stage; two children sitting on the pavement playing marbles, a house behind them destroyed by the bombings. A dark-eyed ballerina's Gypsy dance of fire through the air; two elderly British men drinking tea at a shelter on Waterloo Road during a German attack in 1941. The head and the tail of a coin. Emotions.

It was months of hard work. The days were long and draining, and they arrived at their hotel exhausted. On a few occasions, they fell right to sleep still fully dressed. Lying diagonally over their bed, embracing, one side of her face on his stomach, like two children who had just arrived home from a long trip. Somewhere a war was approaching like a raven wing that would enter through the attic window.

There were too many debts to pay off, photographic materials were expensive, and newspapers took forever to pay. There was also Cornell. After André's father died, his younger brother, Cornell, came to live with them in Paris. He was a shy and skinny sixteen-year-old with bony shoulders and a squirrel face. He had arrived with the idea of studying medicine but ended up like all of them, developing photos in the bathroom bidet. Somehow they had to find a new way of making money. Gerta couldn't stop thinking about it. And then, it suddenly came to her. It was exactly what they needed. A stroke of genius.

They invented a character, a man named Robert Capa, a supposed American photographer, who was rich, famous, and talented. The dreamer in André loved the name. Sonorous. Short. Easy to pronounce in any language. As well as reminding him of the movie director, Frank Capra, who had made a sweep at the Oscars with
It Happened One Night
, starring Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable. It was a cinematic pseudonym, cosmopolitan, difficult to determine a specific territory, hard to classify within any ethnic or religious group. The perfect name for a nomad without a country.

She also changed her identity. My name is Taro. Gerda Taro. The same vowels as her favorite actress, Greta Garbo. The same syllables. The same music. While it could equally be a Spanish name, Swedish, or Balkan. And it was anything but Jewish.

“What kind of world do we live in if you can't even choose your own name,” she'd say.

Once more, it was all a game. An innocent imposture that came from the heart. Divide yourself in two, become someone else, act. Just like she did as a little girl in her house in Stuttgart when she imitated silent film actresses in her attic.

The actors were clear. All they needed was a good argument for making the movie, and they found it. André would take the photos, Gerda would sell them, and this so-called Robert Capa would bring with him the fame. But because he was supposed to be this highly sought-after professional, Gerda would not sell his negatives for less than 150 francs. Three times the going rate. What her mother had taught her proved to be prophetic once again. As was Dezső Friedmann's advice. An air of success begets success.

Sometimes problems would arise, naturally, tiny adjustments to the script, which they managed to cleverly solve. If André wasn't able to get a good shot at the Popular Front rally or the latest Renault strike, Gerda had him covered.

“That Capa bastard took off again with some actress to the Côte d'Azur. Damn him.”

But no game is completely harmless. Or innocent. André fully threw himself into the role of Capa. And he wore Capa like a glove. Working hard to be the bold, triumphant American photographer that she wanted him to be. Although somewhere deep down in his soul there was always a trace of melancholy. He wondered which of the two she was truly in love with. André loved Gerta. Gerda loved Capa. And in the end, Capas, like all idols, only love themselves.

His camera was always at all the events, up in the attic at Galeries Lafayette, at the Renault factories, in the stands of the Buffalo arena, or on the sidewalks with more than 100,000 French citizens celebrating the metal workers' victory in the strike. Whether hidden within the masses, at a political meeting, or in the middle of the street, he searched for new perspectives that would allow him to better understand that time of his life that was slipping through his fingers.

Days that moved at a speed of a swallow in flight. They were gulping down the present without realizing it. Feeling so much a part of the world they were living in that they began to let their guard down. Nonetheless, there were people who followed their movements step by step: their first coffee of the day at Le Dôme Café; her hand underneath his shirt on a bus from Saint-Denis; love in a hurry during a taxi ride from the Pont Neuf to the Mac-Mahon club; the sun filtering through Gerta's fingers in the stairwell of Hôtel de Blois, when she covered his face with her hands as he undressed as quickly as he could, a shining look of delirium in his eyes, panting, his mouth searching for hers with urgency, impatience, her fingers struggling tenaciously to unbutton his shirt, his tongue licking the tip of her arrogant chin, as they climbed the stairs toward their third-floor room embracing, pressing up against each other on every landing, out of breath, when finally they were able to stick the key in the lock. An entire network of spies was hovering over them, but love can't see a thing. It's blind. Only Chim, with his experienced Talmudic insight, noticed strange coincidences now and again, an excessive repetition of faces in the same places, discreet convolutions that most likely would not bode well for them.