The Girl with the Leica

by Helena Janeczek

  You can imagine the things to do before leaving for Le Havre. Pay the hotel, get in touch with the Americans for confirmations, send a telegram to Julia. A rapid goodbye to the relatives in Paris, a last glass with friends. The embrace of Cartier-Bresson, like the plasticine model for a Giacometti bronze, when he lowers himself toward Capa, who’s sweating anxiety and alcohol. The fraternal recommendation to Chim (“Mon vieux, follow my example, quickly!”), the first to sign a contract with a Communist newspaper. A last night with a daughter of Paris, parting with little French kisses on the side of the cheeks, love corresponding to banknotes, too many, c’est bien, chérie, have fun, you’re O.K.

  No flowers for Gerda. Not even a pebble to place on the tombstone watched over by a Horus commissioned from Alberto Giacometti by the Party. Père Lachaise is out of the way, the dead take care of themselves, the Hebrew prayers learned carelessly at thirteen for one who is “soltero” and “religión: no tiene,” single and has no religion, threaten tremendous outbursts.

  But he takes the photos of Gerda. They’re in the room, on the untidy desk or in the drawer of the night table. Ready for two years, returned from China, brought safe from the Republican lines, sliding always upward, toward the border, toward defeat. Gerda sleeping, Gerda putting on her stockings, Gerda collapsed on an Iberian mile marker. Gerda choosing lilies of the valley to celebrate May 1st, stuck in his suede jacket, the one he’s wearing in the picture at the Dôme, when it was still almost new.

  Did he take only the photos he had at the hotel and was Fred’s double portrait among them? Or in view of that conclusive crossing did he add some, when the last rolls were delivered to Csiki, the accounts still open, the instructions for the period when he would be unreachable? Instructions of barely a few sentences, sentences based on the understanding that his comrade in thefts and fishing frauds, the friend who escaped with him from Budapest to Berlin and from Berlin to Paris, would take care of business, as he had the other times Capa was traveling.

  While he wanders through the only place he possesses where everything responds to his name (Atélier Robert Capa, 37 Rue Froidevaux, Paris (XIV), Tél: Danton 75-21) and the time until his departure for Le Havre expands, perhaps the classic demand crossed his mind: “What have I forgotten?” And, dumped on Csiki, maybe it was translated into “Will you find that photo of me and Gerda?” Then enough, a fleeting exchange of farewells (“Take care.” “You, too.”) and the relief, as soon as he gets in the taxi for the station, of having done everything, at last.

  Anyway, if he’s forgotten anything, Csiki is still there, the assistant there’s no reason to worry about. He isn’t profiled as a Communist sympathizer and isn’t yet a citizen of an enemy country, even if Hitler and Horthy are in fact allies on the eastern fronts. With the money that Cornell sends from New York, and the various contacts, apart from the friends who have been interned, evacuated, or have left, like Ruth, for a more secure country, Csiki Weisz doesn’t live badly.

  Things change suddenly with the blitzkrieg. The Germans, arriving in Paris, will cancel out any distinction between Jews of whatever provenance. Lilo Stein doesn’t even attempt another evacuation. In the rays of a flashlight she looks again at the negatives, while Marion turns over in her sleep, kicking a little foot at her. Having to prepare for everything, perhaps she confides to a trustworthy person the photographic hiding place. In any case—so you imagine—she starts packing the suitcase long before closing it for the last time.

  Thus, as the Nazis advance, Csiki, too, chooses the material that should be kept safe from their clutches at all costs. He builds three flat rectangular boxes, covers them with different colors (red, green, ochre), installs cardboard dividers. They resemble the packages of a maître chocolatier, too large for the means of someone who has a small stipend sent from America. But in place of the handmade pralines he places in the grid the most crushing evidence of what happened in Spain—a selection of Capa, Chim, and Taro’s negatives—labeling the frames on the inside cover in very clear handwriting in pencil. When the work is done, he puts the boxes in a knapsack and, loading it on his back, gets on the bicycle. On wheels weighted by his minimal personal possessions, he makes his way along the routes nationales clogged by Parisians in flight, pedaling to Bordeaux or Marseille. Maybe he pedals to Bordeaux and continues without the bike to Marseille, but it’s a fact that he’s also pedaling for his life, the life of a Jew from Budapest burdened by baggage that would betray him as an accomplice of those who fought, with photography, the first Nazi-Fascist war on the continent.

  Why did Csiki flee so late? So as not to make trouble for his friend, who when it was still calm in Paris was beginning to fear extradition to Budapest? Robert Capa walked the promised land of the United States without a visa, so in March of 1940 he was condemned to six months of expulsion. Life could send him far from the prison countries, but to be able to return to the USA he had to act on his own initiative. The first available New Yorker (“Can you do me a big favor, honey?”), a honeymoon shared with a couple of photographer friends in the same situation. A doctor testifies to two fake pregnancies, a minister of God celebrates the Christian bond of marriage paid for by the brides. The return from Elkton, Maryland, in the rain, in a stunned nervous silence. The next day the men would be sent to Latin America.

  As the Germans march toward the Atelier Robert Capa, the owner is serving his six months of expulsion in Mexico City. He is following the presidential campaigns of two generals, one with a mustache, the other with a double chin, who at rallies puff up the bellies and the rhetoric of those who fought beside Zapata. He wanted to become an American photographer, so he practices playing Robert Capa. He goes out with colleagues “for drinks and chicks,” and swallows, along with swigs of bad whiskey, the bitter pills of the way Life uses his images (“Nazi Fifth Column and Communist Allies Active in Mexico”)—photographs he was able to get thanks to the Spanish Civil War veterans, who greeted him with open arms. Sometimes he disappears, takes a leave from himself, goes to the friend who is comfortable in that absurd country. Kati, who already in Spain was calling him a sellout, picks up on his disgust, although she doesn’t believe the outbursts when he says he’d like to give it all up. But those Hungarian friends were inseparable, and while Kati and André recall their youth in Budapest, the last of the trio is pedaling on his bicycle in search of safety for himself and the photographs.

  Csiki, too, went to Spain as a photographer, although for a shorter period than his friends. So as soon as he arrives in Bordeaux he looks for a Spaniard leaving for Mexico, which welcomes the Republican refugees much more generously than any other country in the world. Finally, unable to get around too much while the Germans are advancing, he contents himself with a Chilean comrade, entrusting him with the three boxes to be carried to the safety of a consulate. From there the traces of Csiki Weisz are lost until, probably in Marseille, he is arrested by the collaborationist gendarmes and deported to Morocco.

  It must have been in that period that his close friend receives a letter from a concentration camp full of Republican veterans who enlisted in the Foreign Legion and a good number of Jews who’d taken refuge in Casablanca. The visa, the documents, the place on a ship: getting them is a task that requires the levers of Robert Capa. Disappointed that the wait for permission to stay in the United States made him miss the Battle of Britain, Capa is living at the Dorchester in London, which functions as an anteroom (with a view over Hyde Park), waiting for someone to have the courage to send him to the war that he wants to cover at all costs. Ever since Hungary entered the conflict, even The Greatest War Photographer in the World has become an “enemy alien.” So he goes to the Mexican Embassy, where he appeals to his acquaintanceship with the former president Lázaro Cárdenas and his commitment to anyone who contributed to the Republican struggle. Once the visa is obtained, the problem of the ship remains.

  The boat that emerges, the Serpa Pinto, was acquired by the Comp
anhia Colonial de Navegação to increase the transoceanic crossings that in the forties only Portugal’s neutrality could still guarantee. Returning from Rio de Janeiro, it carried a few German colonists eager to fight for the Führer, but the inexhaustible demand was in the other direction. In its twenty crossings, the Serpa Pinto transports Marcel Duchamp, Simone Weil, a stunted Berlin child who becomes the manager of the Grateful Dead, even the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who, arriving in Brooklyn, was supposed to reveal himself as the messiah—a jumble of saints and iconoclasts with the addition of a sort of scarecrow who gets on in September of ’42.

  Csiki Weisz boards the Serpa Pinto without a suitcase. He has only an overcoat, a toothbrush, and the false passport (Hungarians are not accepted even in Mexico) that Capa managed to get him, along with the necessary money. When he disembarks at Veracruz he doesn’t have enough to pay for the train, but one of the Spaniards he hung out with on the ship gives him a ticket. He arrives in Mexico City, Kati Horna opens the door to him, feeds him in order to reconnect him to the clothes that are falling off him, helps him find a job. Csiki Weisz photographs for the press, hangs around Kati’s artist friends cautiously, even though he’s already met many of them. Nazi-Fascism has created a boundless refugee camp that a monstrous current of air transports from one country to another. In Mexico, however, that community of exiles is transformed. Impotence, which is the reverse side of safety, measures thousands of kilometers, and the discussions sink into the ancient myths of the new world. Now Kati, too, produces surrealist photographs that, according to her, are truer than the ones taken by Csiki.

  Before the end of the war brings him the news that his mother and siblings have gone up in smoke, something happens to the orphan of Budapest that is as fantastic as the place where he has found asylum. He meets a woman: married, enveloped in a legendary fame (she was the companion of Max Ernst), beautiful, like the heroine of a fairy tale escaped from a lugubrious mansion in England into the boundless world that she paints. Csiki has nothing to offer her, and he doesn’t know how to act with women, he reminds Kati, who, however, shakes her head: Leonora Carrington isn’t wrong about what she sees and what she’s seen in Csiki isn’t a whim. Maybe she also said to him that when they marry (“You’ll see, you’ll get married”) they won’t have to look for a photographer. Kati Horna in fact will photograph them on their wedding day as if they were a couple suspended in time and space. Csiki with that enormous beret that is like an homage to Leonora’s art, not to mention an expedient to lend grace to the protrusion of his nose. But not enough to hide how happy he is at that moment.

  They have two children, who grow up with the daughter of Kati and José Horna in houses very near each other, full of cats and furniture created by the artist-mothers. They won’t live happily and contented forever, but they’ll die at a very old age. Csiki at ninety-five, in 2007. Leonora almost at the same age, in 2011, having spent the preceding years with a man who was losing sight, mobility, and, finally, speech.

  Leonora Carrington was, on the other hand, perfectly lucid accepting, with her upper-class-rebel sense of humor, a coup de théâtre equal to her surrealist imagination: the reappearance of the three boxes of negatives in the attic of a general, the former Mexican ambassador to Vichy, that her husband would have been able to walk to when, to let her paint in peace, he took the children to the Parque México. Or when, with the general dead and in ’95 the general’s heir dead, the artifacts are passed down to a grandson who finally understands what he has inherited, but puts the boxes back in a closet whose doors he keeps closed for twelve more years: years of negotiations with the International Center of Photography and Cornell Capa, who, anxious to bring the “Mexican suitcase” to New York, somehow or other achieves, the exact opposite.

  In the documentary The Mexican Suitcase, by Trisha Ziff, Leonora Carrington sits next to her son like a maternal divinity to be placated with cups of tea and cigarettes, rummages in her purse, and doesn’t say a word. The excitement about the forty-five hundred negatives brought to light after Csiki’s death doesn’t concern her. She has already told her story: a shark-zeppelin that, avoiding a tornado, ferries in its belly a chosen few, among them a small man with a beret—bent over the page of a newspaper, alone.

  Tiburón is a drawing auctioned by Sotheby’s in 2008. Comparing the date attributed by the auction house (ca. 1942) to the dates reported in an obituary for the husband of the artist (“En 1944, en una reunión en casa de José y Kati Horna, Chiki conoció a Leonora Carrington”), imagination crashes head-on into the chronological order. But then one trusts in Leonora and tries to invent a fantastic leap.

  In 1944 Leonora Carrington had the feeling that she had already seen Kati’s timid friend, who was beginning to interest her. In Montparnasse, probably, when she was with Max Ernst, but how many people do we meet who aren’t worth remembering. It was she who had seen him, she alone. The “hasard objectif” that André Breton spoke of had inspired her when drawing a gift for a friend (“Remedios, I told you I made you a charm—last night I had a fever of 38, autosuggestion, perhaps . . . ”) who also had an escape from death in her bones. Remedios Varo, a Spanish Republican and surrealist painter, had fled from Barcelona to Paris, from Paris to Marseille, to sail from Casablanca in late 1941 on the Serpa Pinto. That is to say that while Leonora inserted her future husband into the belly of the apotropaic shark, he was waiting to get on the ship that had brought her friend to safety—proving that the truer reality travels in leaps, spirals, anticipations, halts invisible to the empirical eye. But Csiki, too, who never went out into the Mexican sun without his beret, had included a gift in his boxes.

  When the “Mexican suitcase” is officially opened, seventy-four negatives come out that have nothing to do with the Spanish Civil War, among them the one of the photo at the Café du Dôme and the series of Gerda at the typewriter, which reveals another game of mirrors. The model is having fun acting like a diva being fought over by two photographers. Fred Stein captured the other photographer from behind, one shoe on the table, and in profile, while he was shooting. His dark hair is pulled back, he has an imposing nose. Csiki saved Fred Stein’s stills, and Fred saved the image of Csiki Weisz photographing Gerda. Of that rescue Gerda was the moving force—like the shark with the rosy propellers that cuts through the turbine of death, because love is a propellant drawn from the past and you don’t know where it will carry you.

  What’s left to imagine is the moment when Fred Stein decided to separate the negatives of every image—posed, casual, even blurred and out of focus—in which Gerda appears.

  The Steins had seen André during the days of the funeral march: drained of the strength to hold himself upright, spectral, unrecognizable. They had gone home, run the water (“Will you pour me a glass?”), taken off their shoes, lain down on the bed, perhaps embraced, perhaps not. It wasn’t then that the idea of the gift surfaced but later, when he happened to ask “How’s Capa?” and the acquaintance met at the café didn’t know what to say. Fred mentions this exchange, Lilo looks at him: “What can we do?” Shrug.

  You imagine that after the funeral they offered André their support, you always hypothesize backward, starting with the negatives that have reappeared. But they didn’t see one another as much as they used to, and the fact that they had been friends of Gerda and then friends of a couple that was broken in that unspeakable way made that sincere offer a sequence of words without result.

  Fred isn’t resigned. At the time he had given Capa the photo at the Dôme and the best photographs of Gerda, but now they had another value. And it was now that Capa had to have them, have them all.

  At that point Fred and Lilo get to work in the laboratory. But the closed door brings back the time when André and Gerda worked in their bathroom, the wait for the photos to surface duplicates the sensation of sinking, the alchemy that’s good only for extracting the past that returns but doesn’t come back to life.

  “Eno
ugh, Fred. I don’t think it’ll do him any good if we’re already upset.”

  There’s a silence in which—maybe—Fred’s eyes redden more than his wife’s, but in the darkness of the laboratory you can’t see. They don’t move, they don’t touch, for an instant they wait for a signal that arrives like a faint sigh from one of them.

  “Let’s give him all the negatives. We just have to find the ones with ‘Gerda’ written on them. He doesn’t have to look at them now.”

  “Sure?”

  “What’s the difference if they’re here or in Rue Froidevaux?”

  “Not much,” says Lilo. “Csiki Weisz is a reliable fellow.”

  And they take care of it very quickly.

  It’s true that Stein gave Capa a certain number of prints as well, because some reappear in 1979, just after the death of Franco. The new Spanish foreign minister receives from the Swedish ambassador a Louis Vuitton trunk found in Sweden that contains documents and letters belonging to Juan Negrín, the head of the Spanish government in exile, along with a hundred or so photographs by Capa, Chim, and Taro, plus some portraits of Taro at her typewriter. A journalist reaches Csiki on the phone, who confirms that he gave them to Negrín, begging him to deliver them to the Republican archives in Mexico. Where? In Bordeaux, shortly before the politician boarded a boat direct to London.