As soon as he climbed the crooked stone stairs of his building Dr. Kuritzkes looked for Ruth’s number to ask her for Willy Chardack’s address.
He would send him a letter with the most heartfelt compliments. It was hugely encouraging, he would write, to see that Newton’s apple continued to fall at random, and that, in spite of all the money that was spent to enslave it (that no, he shouldn’t write), that random fall was still the prime mover of science. Randomness had helped him, too, when, studying the orientation of fish guided by filtered indirect light, he had discovered Edwin H. Land’s theory of polarized light. Excited by that theory of color, which was so innovative compared to the classical theory, he had immediately talked about it with his friend Professor Somenzi, who had put him in contact with an experienced cinematographer. Having found a companion in adventure in Signor Mario Bernardo, he had redone the experiments described by Mr. Polaroid, but unfortunately the conditions had been too unstable to replicate his extraordinary results. Besides, their approach was novel in that they intended to reexamine the vision of color in relation to the new theory. They had gotten out of it an article for a specialized journal, something that he had taken pains to let the inventor of the Polaroid know.
Maybe Willy would send him just a couple of lines of thanks. But that wasn’t what mattered: the important thing was to reposition himself on the plane of possibility embodied by the Dachshund.
When Ruth advised him to telephone, he felt so relieved that he put on the Dave Brubeck record (gift from the neighbor for whom under the guise of friendship he looked after an epileptic granddaughter), tapping the rhythm of “Take Five” on the arms of his chair.
Now he’s about to leave the FAO building, with an already worn-out sense of detachment and, having just used the office telephone to mention his plans to Willy Chardack, he’s sure he’s really on the point of turning his back on the Circus Maximus. All he has to do is offer, along with some cigarettes (“Have a couple for later, I’ve got a whole carton”), to take the boy, who it seems has to be in a certain place at three. That matter would be resolved, too, as long as the porter lets him ride on the Vespa.
“Damn, I got my bike!” the person in question objects, before the father can ponder a response adequate to the implicit meaning of the offer.
They stare at the pot, now wrapped up, on the reception desk, until Oreste puts an end to the embarrassment. “You’ll come get the bike,” he orders his son, “if Dr. Giorgio is so kind . . . ”
Dr. Giorgio is so kind that heading toward the gate he asks the boy what his name is. “Claudio,” he says, and then nothing else. However, he observes him very carefully as he hangs the bundle on the handlebar, adjusts the chain, starts it up.
“Where are we going?”
“Viale di Trastevere, you know how to get there? We gotta make a stop, then I’ll explain.”
“Good. Hold on tight.”
At the end of Via San Francesco a Ripa the boy gestures to him to turn, so that suddenly they’re going against the traffic, but luckily they’re almost at the destination. The house is tall for a building in Trastevere, painted a muddy red, and affixed to it is a sign that seems inspired by a surrealist: VIA DELLA LUCE.
“I’ll be quick.”
The boy has left him to smoke a cigarette on the seat of the Vespa and guess the era of construction and the original use (lodging for the servants of some villa?). There are more cats around, not all of them mangy, than passersby or vehicles. Probably because it’s Sunday and the city has just finished lunch. Domestic noises, radios sing and talk, a sign that the championship game hasn’t yet begun.
A shutter opens, a woman with a considerable décolleté leans out. “You needn’t bother,” she shouts. “I wanted to come down and thank you, but Claudio’s already gone.”
The boy has just run down the stairs and emerges onto the street hot, his socks pulled up, a comb passed through his curls. “Mamma wants me to walk,” he says with a glance upward, “it’s nothing, just a few minutes to San Cosimato.”
The doctor would like to intercede, but the bells are ringing, out of sync as usual. And when the echo is silent, the window on the third floor also closes.
“It’s three, you’ll be late.”
“Don’t worry, doctor, the others will be late, too.”
The boy doesn’t make a move to go.
“You’re German, right?” he asks.
“You can tell from the accent?”
“It’s that thing of being on time . . . otherwise it wouldn’t seem like it,” he comments, and runs off, saying goodbye with a wave of the hand.
It’s three, time for Dr. Kuritzkes to head for Via Asiago. Mario Bernardo is waiting for him, he wants to show him some educational shorts made for television. They’re thinking about a short film on the vision of color, but finding someone to produce it won’t be easy. Is it possible that Mr. Polaroid suspects that he sought him out with the intention of asking for money? He wonders suddenly, stopping on the Tiber, along with troops of tourists and nuns lined up at the signal. He’d kick himself if so, if because of an absurd misunderstanding the correspondence with Land were to be cut off before it began. He has to talk to Mario about it and now not get lost, luckily in Prati it’s not easy to get lost. He leaves the Vespa in front of the RAI, where they inform him that Signor Bernardo has left him a message.
Georges,
Excuse the hitch. The usual movie thing: they call and you have to run. The call comes from Fellini’s producer, the place is much loved by the neorealists. Join me, if you feel like it. Otherwise see you tonight.
Mario
Directions: Go to Termini, continue through Piazza Vittorio, after Piazza di Porta Maggiore take the Prenestina. At a certain point you’ll see on the left an enormous cylinder, a Roman mausoleum. From there, follow my drawing.
Helped by the ancient monuments, Dr. Kuritzkes turns onto a side road that he hopes is the one drawn by his friend. Dubious, he brakes more than is required by the maze of densely inhabited narrow streets, sometimes to read the name of the street (Juvenal: they’ve relegated a poet like that to the middle of nowhere?), sometimes to stop someone, if necessary. He proceeds almost at a walking pace, his gaze attentive to everything he comes upon; the stagnant air between the houses envelops him in waves of heat, and even his breath slows to the drawn-out rhythm of bewilderment. Is he lost? Maybe. He’s disoriented by the familiarity of the feeling of being a stranger, an epidermal reaction to an urban landscape that rekindles a vigilance practiced in Naples, dusted off in Marseille, much milder in Barcelona and Madrid, where he was also fighting for the freedom of the thieves. He doesn’t recognize what he sees, he has no idea where to place it, but he seems to know it. Maybe it’s the recollection of a film. No. Here the vision of color is important, the substance of the color, the yellowish dust rising from the street. The mellow eroded plaster on the low structures. The deep-set bricks, the rust on the tin roofs. The torpid or noisy indifference of the inhabitants. Poor and working-class humanity that for a few cents a day certainly doesn’t scorn the tradition of the eternal Roman plebs, but asks for anything besides being crowded together in some kolossal. Forcibly urbanized, surrounded like the last fields, where the sheep are blackened by the traffic on the Prenestina. He’s supposed to turn right at the first intersection, proceeding very slowly. He’s not sure whether to turn then at the first side street or the second. A tree invades his line of vision, its roots raising the surface of the road: an oak. He could be on Sierra Morena, just as the entire inhabited area could belong to one of the abandoned villages where he went to work in the infirmary, strong word. Yes, Robert Capa had appeared, out of the blue, in a similar little house.
He was bundled up in a jumble of civilian and military clothes, so smoke-stained and dusty that Georg had immediately taken him for a soldier. The cold was tremendous in the first days of 1938, and the tow
n behind the front lines was at an altitude of over a thousand meters. In the room where he was stitching up wounds, the bitter cold was diminished by only a few degrees: they couldn’t stop up the window with paper and rags because they needed the light. He had sent him away with the sequence of phrases that he repeated automatically without even looking up from the table. “Para buscar a unos compañeros heridos vaya a la cocina, si eres herido tu mismo, camarada, busca a una enfermera.” “If you’re looking for wounded friends go to the kitchen, if you’re injured yourself, comrade, look for a nurse.” Someone else would take care of chasing him out, if he was only tired or in shock or looking for a little warmth. The man stayed in the doorway, but then left.
Usually darkness granted a respite during which the wounded were carried up there, the serious cases to be operated on in a circle of oil lamps reminiscent of a Caravaggio. Darkness also allowed a change of medical personnel, something not always possible, but that day Georg had been able to go off duty. At the entrance was the usual crowd of stretcher-bearers and soldiers who’d been treated, indistinguishable in the shadows. But the man from before had identified him: “Georg Kuritzkes!” He was frightened and turned reluctantly. There they called him only Jorge, doctor, or camarada, and he didn’t want to believe that someone had been sent to make trouble. He wasn’t the one who’d decided that the offensive was to take place without the International Brigades or that an exception had been established for medics.
“Was für eine wunderbare Überraschung! Und an einem solchen Tag!”
“Sind Sie Robert Capa?”—“Are you Robert Capa?” he had asked, with that form of courtesy that wasn’t used here. He had recognized him in part by the hyperbole (absolutely “marvelous” the surprise of meeting him!), but the comrades had entered Teruel that day, and the news dispelled the suspicion that the emphasis was ironic.
“A day that restores our strength,” he assented.
“You’ve done your job, I’ve done mine, now we can celebrate, no?”
“Naturally,” he answered, “but after that news all the more reason I can’t go far. In Teruel they’ll be organizing relief, they’ll come to get someone . . . ”
“Richtig,” Capa said. He had taken off his beret, stuck it in his pocket, and, without asking permission, gone back into the operating room.
Georg had imagined him bold (“Like those there,” Gerda said, pointing to the urchins on the cliffs), but younger. The war aged you, at least when you were up to your neck in it.
“Doktor Kuritzkes,” Capa resumed, unbuttoning the jacket under which he protected the camera. He apologized for stealing a few minutes of his time, even though the taking of Teruel was a joy to share with todo el mundo.
“But not this,” he added, taking an envelope of photographs from a pocket and putting the entire bunch in his hand.
The faint light didn’t help to look at them, but hid what it was better for Capa not to see: the cold burned his eyes as soon as they teared.
“Can I keep one?” he asked.
“All. We’re photographers, reprinting costs nothing.”
“We?”
He, Chim, and Gerda had rented an atelier: light, tranquil, spacious enough so that his friend and assistant lived there. Ruth Cerf came to help out, there was plenty of work, luckily.
Georg couldn’t understand how he could go on like that: invite him to Paris, offer him a bed in the studio, insist that it was better than a hotel—Gerda had furnished it, with her consummate taste, her remarkable practical sense. He was annoyed to the point of wondering if Capa had a screw loose. He worked under fire and was continuously in danger of getting killed, even if a photographer could always retreat, but maybe his equilibrium had been affected by it.
“Is Ruth well?” he asked. “When you see her, give her warm greetings from me.”
Among the photographs Georg had seen a posed portrait, illuminated by Gerda’s unmistakable smile. Capa immediately noticed.
“Don’t stand on ceremony, bitte,” he said.
Did the photographer know how many times he had taken off that leather jacket?
And then there was another one, in which Gerda, pulling up a stocking, made one of her grimaces. You saw everything: the thigh displayed, the unmade bed, the flowers on the wallpaper of the rundown hotel, a bottle of Pastis, a kimono-style bathrobe hanging behind the sink.
He shouldn’t have let him see that photo, but it was the other one that thrust his intimacy with Gerda under his nose.
When he gave back the bunch, Capa was weeping. He was weeping and nodding vehemently, approving his choice, while he struggled to put the rest of the photographs back in the envelope. Georg thought he had grown used to comrades who suddenly collapsed, gasping for breath or weeping in silence like broken faucets. But there was nothing to do about it: he began to cry, too.
“Entschuldigung, Georg, we don’t have time to waste . . . ”
“We should still have time for a cigarette,” he’d said, looking for his last ration, consoled by the thought that, with the end of the siege, the tobacco shortage would end.
Capa offered him one of his American cigarettes, promising to leave him the pack. He would depart right away for Paris and then for China, where he was supposed to have gone with Gerda. He couldn’t put it off any longer. But not to come to Teruel would have been a defection, a betrayal.
He talked with the butt in his mouth, sucking mechanically every time he breathed, then, fumbling inside his jacket, he pulled out a flask and offered him the first sip.
“You’ll have to make do with this Aragonese schnapps, the brandy supply is gone.”
From the way he continued to blather (about that homemade aguardiente which could melt rocks; about the great Ernest Hemingway, who drank like a sponge but was devoted to the cause with all his heart; about the infinite questions he would have liked to ask him if there had been time), he seemed to have recovered.
Whereas Georg, after the third round, felt dazed. He hadn’t slept, had eaten only some of the usual beans. After swallowing a last drop (he felt like an ethnologist forced to fraternize with the object of his studies), he handed the flask back to Capa with a gesture that meant enough.
“To Gerda,” he said softly. Not drunk, no, but perhaps thanks to that lethal aguardiente he’d swallowed he didn’t give a damn about possible reactions.
With a wide, conspiratorial smile, made almost sinister by the effect of the only lighted lamp on the white of his bared teeth, Capa returned the toast, auf unsere Gerda, lechaim, to life, and to freedom!
He drank noisily and after wiping his chin and mouth started talking again: about the engagement that had kept him in Paris, about being slapped at the funeral (you know them, right, the Pohorylle brothers?), about the unforgivable foolishness of having left her down there.
“Imagine,” he said to him. “I was convinced that if there was a decisive battle the entire militant press would rush to escort her! Hadn’t I seen them? In Madrid or at the writers’ congress in Valencia, like flies on prosciutto. The correspondent for the Daily Worker, the correspondent for Pravda, and I don’t have to tell you the others. Did I like it? No. Did I have another choice? No. I assure you that I had even thought of relying on that Canadian journalist she liked more than the others. Big good-looking guy, the way a twenty-year-old can be who’s been raised on beefsteak and milk, team sports, faith that good will triumph, poured all over Communism. I said to myself that he would die rather than abandon her, he had such a crush. You realize, Georg? So ein Idiot! ‘Teddie, please keep an eye on her.’ You know, like in a Hollywood film: he swears, turning all red, she smiles, all radiant, moving her eyes from one to the other. Gerda would have made him do what she wanted, and I, like an idiot, didn’t realize the danger. So she stayed there. He pulled through, poor fellow. Ted Allan: maybe you met him?”
Yes, in fact the last time he saw Gerd
a there was that journalist. Their relations seemed perhaps too close, but he preferred to keep silent about that to Capa. He said he’d met him on leave in Madrid, you had to admit that Gerda was very fond of introducing her old friends to her new acquaintances.
Capa had scrutinized him at length, then asked a peculiar question compared with what one might have expected, for example what sort of impression Ted Allan had made.
Instead he asked: “And how did she introduce you?”
“The exact words?”
“If you remember . . . ”
“Something like ‘Voilà, je vous présente mon très cher ami, le docteur Kuritzkes.’”
What, after a few seconds of silence, he had feared was a suffocated burst of tears, turned out to be a thin clucking laugh, held inside for the pleasure of nurturing it.
“You know what she told Teddie? She told him that she could no longer fall in love because Hitler had murdered her true love. Ah, how handsome and courageous, that great love, that doctor of Polish origin! Docteur Kuritzkes, mon cher ami, may you live as fit as a fiddle to the age of a hundred and twenty!”
Without leaving him time to react, Capa resumed talking nonstop. Better that way, since that confidence had shaken him.
Ted Allan had showed up in Paris, a wreck on crutches, and Capa looked after him, until he proposed that they go together to New York, and from there Teddie would return to Montreal. On the ship he dragged himself from the cabin to the dining room like the hunchback of Notre-Dame, but with the rough sea he was glad to hold on to his arm. Looking at him, beaten and penitent, Teddie got lost in love stories.
The Girl with the Leica Page 19