The Girl with the Leica
Page 1
Europa Editions
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2017 by Ugo Guanda Editore S.r.l.
Via Gherardini 10, Milano
Gruppo editoriale Mauri Spagnol
First publication 2019 by Europa Editions
This book has been translated with generous support from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.
Questo libro è stato tradotto grazie a un contributo per la traduzione assegnato dal Ministero degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale italiano.
Translation by Ann Goldstein
Original Title: La ragazza con la Leica
Translation copyright © 2019 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
Cover photo © Robert Capa
© International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos
ISBN 9781609455484
Helena Janeczek
THE GIRL
WITH THE LEICA
Translated from the Italian
by Ann Goldstein
THE GIRL
WITH THE LEICA
“She was clearly . . . the pretty girl you couldn’t help following, like destiny.”
—GEORG KURITZKES
Radio interview, 1987
Despite your death and scant remains,
the hair that lay golden on your head,
your smile, soft flower in the wind
and the skip in your walk,
dodging the bullets to capture
scenes of battle,
all still give us breath, Gerda.
—LUIS PÉREZ INFANTE
From “To Gerda Taro, Killed on the Brunete Front”
PROLOGUE
COUPLES, PHOTOGRAPHS, COINCIDENCES #1
Ever since you saw that photograph, you’ve been gazing at them, spellbound. They seem happy, very happy, and they’re young, which is fitting for heroes. You couldn’t say good-looking, but you couldn’t deny it, whereas they don’t appear at all heroic. That’s because they’re laughing, a laugh that closes their eyes and exposes their teeth, a laugh that’s not photogenic but so frank it makes them glorious.
He has horse teeth, bared to the gums. She doesn’t, but her canine protrudes into the cavity where the next tooth should be, with the charm of a small, attractive imperfection. The light spreads over the white of his striped shirt, flows onto the woman’s neck. Her clear skin, the diagonal of the tendons molded by her profile against the chair back, and even the curved line of the armrests amplify the joyous energy released by that unison laugh.
They could be in a square, but, sitting in those comfortable armchairs, they give the impression of being in a park, where the background blends into a thick curtain of leafy trees. You wonder, then, if the frame they have all to themselves might be the garden of a grand bourgeois villa, whose residents fled over the border when Barcelona became a hotbed of revolution. Now that cool spot under the trees belongs to the people: to those two laughing with their eyes closed.
The revolution is an ordinary day on which you go out to stop the coup that intends to suppress it, but you pause anyway to celebrate. Wearing the mono azul like a summer suit, putting a tie on under the overalls, wishing to appear handsome in the eyes of the other. Of no use here the mastodon of a gun, which has passed through the hands of countless soldiers before getting to the anarchist militiaman, who now can’t touch the luminous neck of his woman.
Apart from that obstacle, they’re free of everything at this moment. They’ve already won. If they keep laughing like that, if they go on being so happy, knowing how to get a shot out of that old firearm doesn’t seem too urgent. Those who are in the right will win. Now they can enjoy the sun tempered by the broadleaf trees, the presence of the beloved.
The world should know. It must see in the blink of an eye that on one side is the centuries-old war, the generals disembarking from Morocco with fierce mercenary troops, on the other people who want to defend the lives they have, who want one another.
In that early August of 1936, a lot of people are arriving in Barcelona to join the first population in Europe to take up arms against fascism. They describe the city in chaos in the universal language of images, which leap from the pages displayed on the newsstands of half the world, hung up in party and union headquarters, waved by newsboys, reused to wrap eggs and produce—images that leap in the faces even of those who don’t buy or read newspapers.
The people of Barcelona welcome as brothers the foreigners who’ve come to fight by their side, and are getting used to that Babel of volunteers wandering all over the place, savoring the greeting compañero, compañera, then getting help from gestures, onomatopoetic sounds, pocket dictionaries. The photographers, who aren’t waiting for weapons and training, are part of that continual flow to the volunteer militias. They’re here for us, they’re like us, comrades: those who see them on the job understand and let them work.
But the two militiamen in the photograph, enthralled by their own laughter, don’t notice anything. Whoever is taking the picture moves, shoots again, risks giving himself away to take a closer shot of the couple united by the broad, intimate smile.
This photograph is almost identical to the first, except that here the man and woman are obviously so enraptured that they don’t care about the life around them. The scissor-like steps that cut the pavement behind them, revealing that they’re not in a park but maybe even on the Ramblas, where the city, mobilizing, gathers. The neighboring chair, where another woman is sitting.
Of her head you see only a tuft of curly hair, of her body only a covered arm. You’d need her gaze, the gaze of someone who has seen up close what you can deduce from the images but can’t see with your eyes.
The photographer who has captured the two comrades isn’t alone. There’s a man and a woman, positioned on the right side of the street, one beside the other.
Then you discover the photograph of a woman sitting in the same armchairs, and you find it hard to believe that such brazen good luck can exist. Until, in the upper right, you notice a sliver of the profile of the young militiaman who in the other photographs is smiling ecstatically at his blond girl.
This worker, holding a fashion magazine in her discordant hands and a gun between her legs, doesn’t really seem the type to be seized by gossipy curiosity about a couple of photographers who, after competing to capture the noisy laughter of the comrades in love, immortalize her as well. No, you say to yourself, someone like that sees and doesn’t see the things that don’t concern her. She remains slightly alert, because she’s been given a weapon, but mostly she wants to savor that moment of peace.
But a few days later—so you imagine—that militiawoman arrives at the beach where the training takes place and finds the two photographers. He looks almost like a Gypsy, or rough and ready anyway, she could be a model out of the magazine the woman was reading on the Ramblas, but with a cumbersome camera around her neck that hangs to her hips.
Now the woman is curious: Who are those two? Where do they come from? Are they having an affair, like the many that flourish in this climate of mobilization and high summer and freedom, or are they husband and wife?
Something like that, since, allies and colleagues, they speak to each other in a harsh language. She is smiling and
quick as a cat, but more poised when she instructs the comrades on how to position their weapons. They’re both working hard, they’re euphoric and lighthearted, and share their Gauloises as a gesture of brotherhood and thanks.
“I’ve seen them before,” the militiawoman intervenes, when the photographers go off and an excited exchange of comments begins, but no one listens to her. The interesting news comes from the journalist comrade who brought them here. They’ve just arrived from Paris and nearly got killed already when the twin-engine plane made an emergency landing on the Sierra. A big shot from the French press broke his arm, but the two of them not even a scratch, thank heavens. He—his name is Robert Capa—says that Barcelona is magnificent and reminds him of his native city, Budapest, except that he can’t go back as long as it’s in the hands of Admiral Horthy and his reactionary regime. Gerda Taro, his companion, must be an alemana, a German, one of those emancipated young women who didn’t submit even to Hitler.
“Can you tell us when the photos will be published?” the militiawomen press him.
The journalist promises to find out, but not from the photographers, who are about to leave for the areas where the fighting is: first they’re going to the front in Aragon and then south to Andalusia.
A year after those photographs came the first eighteen deaths in Barcelona, in the buildings gutted by artillery fire from the cruiser Eugenio di Savoia. The militias were disbanded, the militiawoman returned to the factory. Maybe she sews uniforms for the Ejército Popular, where the anarchists have to obey without protest, and women are no longer welcome. But in the factories they still listen to the radio, comment on the news, keep up their courage.
Then imagine that someone reads aloud from a daily with the date of July 27, 1937. It says that Madrid resists heroically, even though the enemy, with the criminal aid of German and Italian planes, is advancing toward Brunete, where a tragic event has occurred. A woman photographer who came from far away to immortalize the struggle of the Spanish people has fallen, such a great example of valor that General Enrique Líster bowed at her coffin and the poet Rafael Alberti dedicated solemn, heartfelt words to comrade Gerda Taro.
“Isn’t she the one who photographed us on the beach?” one worker exclaims, calling to the girls who have started talking of their own affairs at the factory door. Yes, it’s her: in the article it also talks about the “ilustre fotógrafo húngaro Robert Capa que recibió en París la trágica noticia”—“the illustrious Hungarian photographer Robert Capa who received the tragic news in Paris.”
The workers in the uniform factory are astonished, touched by their memories.
Sun on their shoulders, sand in their shoes, the laughter when one of them staggers on the shore, thrown off balance by the recoil of the weapon, the roar of triumph when another hits the target. And then that foreigner who—you knew immediately—had been a senyoreta with soft hands, and could have stayed in Paris photographing actresses and really elegant models, and instead came to photograph them, as they learned to shoot on the beach. She admired them, too; she even seemed to envy them a little. And now she’s dead, like a soldier, while they break their backs in the factory, and then have to scrounge for food, but they’re still alive. It’s not right. May the fascists die in hell.
Among those struck hardest by the news is the woman who was sitting with the fashion magazine on the Ramblas. The emotion that grips her at that moment—with the relighted cigarette butt blackening her fingers, the sewing machines firing behind her—is not only the emotion of someone shaken by gratitude for the sacrifice of a little thing from a cold country. An image caught distractedly a year earlier, when she looked up from her reading, has resurfaced, clearly: a dark-haired man and a blonde with a bob are photographing a blonde with a bob and a dark-haired man who are laughing happily. The blonde’s head is bent over a camera that conceals her forehead. The dark-haired man works with a camera so small it leaves his eyebrows exposed—they’re thick, like the militiaman’s. Then, as soon as they’ve finished shooting, they laugh too, exuberant and complicit. Even the eyes of a stranger like her can see that those two recognize themselves in the other two. And are just as much in love.
By a small coincidence the photographers, arriving in Barcelona, ran into a couple they resembled. Maybe it was also chance that allowed Gerda Taro to photograph a laugh at its peak, while Robert Capa may have lost a few seconds adjusting the wide-angle lens. If she’d been working with the camera he’d taught her to take pictures with—the Leica—her negatives, too, would have had the rectangular format that lets us attribute to Capa the second photo of the couple and the one of the woman with the magazine. Gerda would not have obtained the perfect centering of the square image if she hadn’t bought a cheap, medium-sized reflex, a Reflex-Korelle. But after six months their joint income was sufficient so that he could get a Contax and entrust the companion of his hungry years, the Leica, to the girl who had encouraged him to leave them behind.
They had no money when they left Paris—she at the start of her adventure as a photographer, he without a contract, although the newsmagazines were starting to ask for him—but they possessed an inexhaustible faith that they would make a name for themselves.
Living in Paris with nothing but a Leica was the art of getting by, day after day. They were even convinced that they—André Friedmann and Gerda Pohorylle—would find more work under pseudonyms. They invented the story of Robert Capa, who possessed what they lacked: wealth, success, an unlimited visa with the passport of a country that was revered thanks to a power not ravaged by wars and dictatorships. Joined in a secret society whose starting capital was an alias, they were even closer in life, with more audacious dreams to pursue in the future.
Then the fairy-tale time ended. As soon as the Spanish Republic came under attack, the only skill needed was to be in the right place at the right time, to capture a reality that was supposed to stir protest, keep it alive, force the intervention of the free world.
But if a photograph also reveals the photographer, the two snapshots of a couple in whom it was so easy to see themselves can’t not reflect the authors. In Taro’s photo, the man and woman share the space equally, connected by the laughter released into the air, in a composition so harmonious that that overflowing energy is heightened by contrast. Capa’s photo places the woman at the center, exalts her attractive physicality, but from the perspective of her radiant gaze as she leans toward her companion.
They were walking beside each other, they caught sight of the two militiamen so similar, so happy. But it wasn’t the taste for a game of mirrors that drove them to photograph the same subject, hoping that one of the two would get an image to send to the newspapers. It’s the promise that comes true on the faces and bodies transfigured by that happy laugh, the utopia lived in the space of a few instants that allowed that man and that woman to be free of everything. Free, yes, and united in ideals and feelings, but not equal. Robert Capa in fact caught the desire to yield to the other without restraint, Gerda Taro a shameless joy that is sent out to conquer the world.
They were different, they were complementary, on that day in August separated forever from what would happen later. They recount it themselves, involuntarily, as candid as the immortalized laugh, through those self-portraits stolen from their comrades in arms, and in love, in the brief summer of anarchy in Barcelona.
PART I
WILLY CHARDACK
Buffalo, New York, 1960
Who is this who comes and every man admires her,
who makes the air tremble with her brightness . . .
—GUIDO CAVALCANTI
Is something this beautiful supposed to be liked by only one guy?
The sun and the stars belong to everyone, after all.
I don’t know who I belong to.
I guess I belong to myself alone.
“Ich weiss nicht zu wem ich gehöre” (1930)
—FRIEDRICH HOLLAENDER a
nd ROBERT LIEBMANN
sung by MARLENE DIETRICH
Dr. Chardack woke up early. He washed and dressed, carried a cup of instant coffee and the weekend New York Times into his study, and leafed through the political coverage, which he intends to follow more closely now that the race for the White House is getting tight. Then he puts the newspaper facedown, takes out pen and paper, and gets to work.
Outside there’s not a sound apart from the sporadic cries of swallows and crows and the distant swoosh of a car looking for a gas station or heading somewhere. Later the neighbors, too, will be getting in their cars, to go to church, to visit relatives or restaurants for “Sunday’s Special Breakfast,” but fortunately Dr. Chardack has no such engagements.
Just after he’s drafted the beginning of an article, the telephone rings. He’s not surprised, and he calls out, “It’ll be for me!” to the rest of the house, more out of habit than to prevent his wife from stumbling sleepily toward the phone.
“Dr. Chardack,” he answers, as always, without any greeting.
“Hold on, sir, call from Italy for you.”
“Willy,” says a voice muffled by intercontinental telecommunications, “I didn’t wake you, did I?”
“Nein: absolut nicht!”
He realizes immediately who’s calling. There were still the old friends, stamped like the mark of a nasty fall from a tree in the Rosental Park, and the ones who were still alive could turn up at any time.
“Georg: did something happen? Some problem?”
At the time when he was Willy, he had been the friend you went to for practical help: money, essentially, since he always had more than the others. That’s why his interlocutor is laughing now, laughing hard, as he says he doesn’t need anything, but something, no doubt about it, has happened, and it’s something he did, over there in America, a thing so big that it was impossible to resist the impulse to call, rather than write a letter.