The Girl with the Leica

by Helena Janeczek

  He and Gerda had exchanged some letters that, because politics couldn’t be discussed, reinforced the confines of pure friendship. Then came the war in Spain, and finally the chance to meet in Naples and tell each other a thousand things, as she had written prudently. Eager to listen to her, Georg had found himself chasing a woman who, after smuggling a collection of militiamen, peasants with fists raised over collectivized lands, and children in anarchist berets, was now running up and down the salitelle, the steep alleys, with that hungry look in her eyes. It was all so interesting, she said, all so comparable with Spain—even if the Spanish people were liberating themselves. The kids sitting on the pavement playing cards, the bars crowded for the magic rite of lotto, the old women in black in the doorways, the Arab-influenced music. And Capa who would sneak in everywhere, like the mouse in the cheese. Yes, Capa seemed just like those people, as dark and wrinkled as he’d emerged from his Eastern cradle: a skillful operator, a sympathetic blowhard, a heavy-duty Casanova. No, not really a Casanova but with the itch to impress girls and an impudent face that helped. Great. You’re free, I’m free, we’re all free. But as soon as she went freely with someone else, he went bananas . . .

  Had she come to Naples for that? For an amorous insult? Or to give him a signal that the love was cooling? But why cite Capa at every step, why always call him by the name she boasted she’d given him, as if it were a title that invested her, too, with some unknown greatness? She considered him a colleague, a teacher, in short a photographer she couldn’t find fault with, except to complain that he had returned to Madrid while she at the moment was out walking around. Therefore did the interesting things she noted really not interest her at all?

  At home they listened to the Fascist radio for what it didn’t communicate. The “valiant progress to free the capital from Bolshevism” meant that Madrid hadn’t fallen at the first assault. The city must have put up a frenzied resistance, since, according to the booming voice, the offensive enjoyed the moral, physical, and military support of the great pact of friendship between Rome and Berlin, now extended to embrace General Franco. At that news Gerda stiffened, jumped up from the chair. “If they weren’t convinced that no one will lift a finger, those two criminals would never have announced the end of formal neutrality.” They would let all hell loose on Spain, from now on, considering that they had never tried too hard to hide their interventions. She was tense as a rat, her jaw trembled. Georg had taken her to Villa Floridiana in the funicular, but the park was a nice park, like so many (“Nothing like Gaudì’s garden of wonders in Barcelona!”), the bay was obscured, and Naples, with its reminders of Spain, its noisy indifference, was beginning to get on her nerves a bit.

  They decided to go to Capri.

  In the farmhouse where Soma had found a compromise between country idyll and saving on the rent, you had to get water from a well and there was no electric light. But Gerda was enthusiastic. She liked the host family of winemakers, the community of students who took the ferry to the university, the villa sheer over the cliffs where Gorky had received Lenin, and the other famous dwellings, with those paradisiacal gardens that protected what elsewhere was persecuted in the name of the law. A paradise for devils, according to the respectable, and you didn’t have to be a Krupp or anyway rich and homosexual (she learned from the locals) to live there! She fantasized about it, flushed by the fresh air and the homemade wine, getting in Georg’s bed with the simple explanation that a thin body would take forever to get the very damp covers warm: her feet, by experience, would unthaw around dawn. She no longer spoke of Capa, of Spain rarely, except when there was an audience to persuade about the cause.

  Georg preserved a threshold of vigilance, even if sleeping next to Gerda, kissing her two or three times, was anything but unpleasant. Until, one Sunday, his sister Jenny came to visit them, who in the house of the United States vice consul, where she had found a job as a Fräulein, could read the American newspapers. The New York Times reported massive bombings of Madrid, whose purpose was not military but to cause the civilian population to surrender. Even the Prado had been damaged. And if the capitalist press wrote it, the devastation must be unimaginable. “No pasarán!” they uttered, throwing Anurka apple cores into the pot that had been cleaned after the poached mackerel, with a rage as solid as it was futile. And then a last time, in a whisper, saying goodbye to Jenny at the wharf where she was getting on the five-o’clock ferry. It was urgent to go to Spain, the rest was foolishness. Gerda would leave in a few days, certain she could get an assignment and join Capa, who in the meantime had managed to capture an untold number of images of that heroic and criminal war.

  “Are you worried?” Georg had asked her.

  “For him? He can always get out of it, he’ll manage. But the Madrileños?”

  He hadn’t answered, only kicked a stone with the tip of his shoe. The path out of the town was barely visible, the rapidly fading light of the sun, which had already disappeared, seemed to bring the dance music behind them closer, along with the sounds of the boats in the Marina Grande.

  “Give me time to put together a group and I’ll join you.”

  “I knew it.”

  I also know something, he had said to himself: that you’re more attached to that man than you want to admit. I don’t know why, I don’t know if he deserves you. But here at least we can both surrender to circumstances, and everything will be as it should.

  They’ve arrived at Mario’s, and he’s gone to change his shirt, inviting Georg to get some water in the kitchen. Georg goes to the window, lights a cigarette, and looks down in the direction of the sea, metallic with reflections, dark, almost flat . . .

  Soma and Gerda are growing distant along the path, he puts away the matches and continues walking, without lengthening his stride, feeling that he has nothing to lose and that he would never lose Gerda . . .

  He takes a deep breath, blows the air out like a patient, tries to recover that boundless feeling that had the kindness to re-emerge and not suffocate him with dismay and tenderness. Then he returns to the table, where Mario is waiting for him, adjusts the chair, and concentrates.

  Together they go over the proofs of the article, reading aloud when necessary. By now there are only a few typos, and some lexical questions that he proposes directly to his friend the native speaker are quickly resolved. They finish in half an hour, and only because they’ve begun to reconsider some of the hitches in the experiment: the Wratten filters that couldn’t be found, the photostat machine in place of the single-lens camera with the image doubled by a prism, filtered in two different ways so the scene could be photographed twice at the same instant. Too bad, but they couldn’t do better, they don’t have the means of Polaroid.

  Georg remembers to get the letter to Mr. Land out of the folder retrieved from his office.

  “Avec Monsieur Mario Bernardo nous avons l’intention de réaliser un film publicitaire de vulgarisation scientifique sur la vision des couleurs en présentant vos expériences. Nous serions très honorés de connaître votre avis et d’avoir vos conseils en ce sujet,” he reads, marking the sentences with a finger and wondering again if the letter might be misunderstood as a discreet way of asking for money.

  “Georges, I see you’ve written four pages—are you sure our genius self-taught in French will manage it?” Mario inquires.

  “It’s just about the subject of his theories and his studies . . . ”

  “He’s a businessman, I’ve seen a lot of them at Cinecittà over the years when I was working my way up. It’s not the same as speaking to a member of the scientific community. Let’s wait for a couple of lines in response, or, since time is money, not even that.”

  They can put away the papers, freeing the dining table, and stick them in the envelope that Mario has ready. A messenger sent by the editorial office of Filmtecnica will come to pick up the proofs of Colore bidimensionale.

  “Anyway, lo
ok, we’ve shown that it just takes the right light to give color to black-and-white images,” says Mario, to console him in advance for a possible disappointment, and heads toward the balcony, where it’s pleasant to sit and talk, especially on an evening like this.

  His friend has said nothing new, and yet Georg is surprised. This is vision: to see the same thing again and project something different. Reconfirming that outside the circuit between the eye and the brain there’s nothing, and that the brain, charged with the activity of selection and transmission of impulses, sometimes plays strange tricks. It’s the side of the research that interests him, the impetus that originally led him to embark on this experiment. But to carry it out they used film, projectors, camera, and photographic images. Reproductions of abstract geometric paintings, it’s true, nothing that recalls the revolutionary photographs hidden in the pages of a German tourist guide, or the last shots taken in the trenches of Madrid, when Gerda showed him the movie camera she got from Life, claiming that she’d become better at using it than Capa.

  “Do you know Robert Capa?” he asks Mario.

  “You mean did I meet him in person? I did, when they were shooting The Barefoot Contessa with Ava Gardner and he came to Rome to photograph the shoot. I knew in passing his friend David (Chim) Seymour, I met him in Trastevere, at Checco er Carrettiere. He always stayed at the Hotel d’Inghilterra. He had the requirements of a gourmet, bizarre for a foreigner—they can’t usually even distinguish an overcooked pasta—and he cultivated an incongruous elegance, with the well-fed look of a teacher: the antithesis of a paparazzo, so discreet that you could understand how he was the preferred portraitist of divas—Loren, Lollo, Bergman, who at the time of the scandal gave him the exclusive—but so blind that he seemed improbable as a war photographer. Capa, on the other hand, was appealing because of his romantic fame, and rumors about a tormented liaison after which Bergman consoled herself with Rossellini. Did you know him in Spain? Maybe your face appears in those extraordinary photos of the farewell to the International Brigades?”

  “I was wary of him. It irritated me to see him perched like a bird of ill omen, arriving just in time, while we were ragged, desperate, forced to clench our fists and our teeth to hold back the tears in front of those who were looking at us, or, in fact, photographing. You can’t understand how much we who’d been disbanded detested not him but his Hemingway-style friends, who’d go on a heroism binge in Spain and then, as soon as they crossed the frontier, it was oysters and champagne, and they moved around as they liked with a driver or a plane. But it’s true, those images express exactly what we felt, Capa with his camera was really great: a stateless man like us in the International Brigades, a Hungarian who’d tasted the joys of fascism as a boy. Chim I didn’t know at the time, we were introduced later, in Paris, I don’t remember the year.”

  “It must have been terrible, not even the Italian comrades I know want to talk about it.”

  “We’ve seen, no?, how it ended. But at least you got them out of Italy . . . ”

  The chairs on the terrace of Mario Bernardo’s house let you sink back, one shoe against the railing, to face a courtyard too steep for billiards or marbles, but the children of this part of Monteverde, almost without space to make a course, meet there just the same. The roofs one on top of the other, the last cranes and cement mixers, the women coming out to get the laundry or shout down into the courtyard, the neighbors opposite who are doing what they’re doing: chatting, sending curls of smoke up toward the faded green screen of the awning. Being up high, in the life of a neighborhood—he likes it so much it makes him wish to get away from the chaos of Via Veneto, but he still considers himself too temporary to think seriously of moving.

  “We got them out, yes, but it wasn’t easy or pretty. What should I tell you, Georges? You know what civil war means. And lucky that today they remember again what we did, that to someone it matters . . . ”

  In July, with their friendship already consolidated by Sundays spent correcting the article at the table in Via Dezza, they had met in the crowd of demonstrators pouring toward Porta San Paolo. Right there, on that balcony, they’d discussed the events of Genoa, following the meeting of the sixth congress of the neo-fascist MSI, but they hadn’t yet had a chance to comment on the expansion of the revolt as far as Sicily, where the day before the police had used machine guns against the striking laborers and workers of Montecatini in Licata, killing a youth of twenty-five.

  Dr. Kuritzkes was entering the office, where he was supposed to collaborate on a project with Modrić, but, at the sight of the groups with flags walking along Viale Aventino, he had chained his bicycle to the gate and set off to follow the march. That the marchers were already appearing at the Circus Maximus wasn’t a good sign: maybe, after the prohibition of what was supposed to be only a ritual laying of wreaths, the metro stop at Piramide had been closed and access to the train station was blocked. Mario Bernardo therefore might also not be there. What gave him hope was that the demonstration had been called by the Council of the Resistance. On the other hand, an ex-partisan but current cinematographer, with various contracts signed, might not be disposed to risk arrest or a blow to the head. The atmosphere was unmistakable: like a planned clash, latent war, a popular movement that erupts on the surface, competing with a potentially opposite movement, underground and coup-like. It was that familiar feeling, so toxic and intoxicating, even before the tear gas, that impelled him to advance past the cordon, where his friend, behind the row of deputies from all the left-wing parties, had waved enough to be recognized. If he hadn’t arrived so soon, if Mario, surprised to see him, hadn’t found a way of getting out to greet him, a few minutes later they would have been caught in full by the horse charge launched against the deputies who were trying to get to the plaque at the Martyrs of the Resistance, near the Pyramid of Cestius. It wasn’t clear how they had managed to avoid the worst, to escape to the side, join a line of youths who, dragging away a companion who’d been kicked by a horse before a riot cop could pick him up, led them to the barricades of Testaccio. “I’m a doctor,” he announced, at which they’d taken them to a garage serving as an improvised infirmary. Outside the sounds of the fight and the incessant shouts continued: “Fascists, fascists, murderers!” A youth in skinny American jeans asked him what he was doing there with that nice cream-colored jacket and that Kraut accent. He heard the reply, in a Venetian singsong accentuated by agitation, that his companion Georges had been in the Resistance in France and the Spanish Civil War on the right side.

  “I don’t believe it! That guy is younger than my father: and all he kills off is a bottle of wine at dinner.”

  The boy just bandaged had started laughing, too, and Dr. Kuritzkes, stupidly flattered, stated the year of his birth and sang “Ay Carmela!,” “Los cuatro generales,” and “El quinto regimiento.”

  “Damn, that’s really Spanish, but we like our music better!”

  Later someone thought to get the partisan comrades out of the shambles, escorting them to the foot of Ponte Testaccio. On the Trastevere side they walked to Piazza San Callisto to have a glass.

  “Using horses against elected deputies I wouldn’t have expected,” Mario said, “but thank heaven we’re in a democracy . . . a Christian democracy!”

  “Let’s hope it’s not aperitivo time. Otherwise we’ll have to put the T-shirt and blue jeans uniform on over our tired limbs and resume the fight . . . ”

  “I see you’re worried.”

  “A little. Less than this morning.”

  People at the other tables were commenting on the news. Many wounded, many arrests, deaths avoided by a miracle. Georg claimed he’d seen a throng of all ages, true, which couldn’t be contained. The slogans, the Roman-style insults, the posters “WHAT ITALIAN MIRACLE? ROME ISN’T LA DOLCE VITA” proved it. They could close down the factories, bring everything to a halt: either the Christian Democrats really were ready for civil wa
r, which wasn’t a good idea for them or the Americans, or the Tambroni government would have to pack its bags in a hurry. But, Mario said, those youths didn’t have a political conscience, much less any discipline. They would soon go back to letting loose in their wild dances after the week at work.

  “We were like that, too,” he objected. “Agreed, we didn’t dance to such hysterical songs, but it was Katzenmusik for a good number of our adult comrades. Between one clash and the next we partied like lunatics. We were wild, I assure you.”

  The children in the courtyard have stopped playing hopscotch, which is a pity. The acrobatic jumps of some of the little girls, curls flying out from their hairbands, were a true delight. Now they’ve moved on to hide and seek, and have scattered to their hiding places, except for the boy who now and then runs at breakneck speed toward home base, in a garage that you can’t see from the balcony.