Free Waiting for Robert Capa by Susana Fortes Page A

and timid, with an innate sense of photographic composition. The fact that he was German, and a refugee, helped sway their initial resistance to letting him stay with them. On the other hand, it didn’t hurt to have someone else help them with the rent. After the incident with the Fascists from the Croix de Feu, they felt more secure with a man in the house, though they refused to admit it. Everyone suspected the leading anti-Semitic French groups were directly linked to Germany. And this wasn’t at all comforting, especially considering Gerta’s past.
    Fred had a distinct approach to photography, offering a fresh perspective for capturing the pedestrian moment, less intuitive perhaps but more sensorial. When he photographed one of the birds with the bright and colorful plumage, one could immediately understand the sequence; how it had been captured in a tropical jungle, placed into a bamboo cage for countless days so it could enter the river of commerce, until it arrived at a stall on Rue Lobineau.
    When it came time to frame her shots, Gerta also absorbed Fred’s distinct point of view, one that was different from the perspective that André had taught her but complementary, to a certain degree. Less exact yet more evocative. The fact that logic didn’t always work at the moment of truth was proven day after day in the news reports. She was trying to discover for herself what exactly she wanted to transmit in her photography. Her innocence hadn’t been completely lost yet. Despite everything, she was still the girl who liked to throw herself down on the rooftop in Galicia, face-up, breathing in the clean air of the stars, floating within the darkness, the coolness of her back inside her pajama top. How strange it was to swim afterward, as a woman, touched by the cold fingers of the lake. She was an excellent swimmer; able to cross from one side of the lake to the other in record time. That’s why they called her “Little Trout” at home.
    Every night, just before going to sleep in her Paris bedroom, she crossed the border toward those memories and returned to being that ten-year-old girl in a photograph she kept. Standing on a dock in a red bathing suit, her back wet, the blond points of her braids, dripping like paint brushes, very skinny legs, birdlike, and always thinking about her star. She imagined it to be lime-green, the color of mint candy. She kept the memory in her mouth until it dissolved, little by little, within the fresh breath of her dream. The following morning, when she went out early to take photos in the neighborhood, her muscles could feel the cold water’s concentrated energy in each stroke, as if she were swimming toward the future. Sometime after that, in the red half-light of her bathroom, while watching the lines and forms appear on the developing tray, she’d discover that the image can be deceiving. Just one false move, the slow configuration of a face, the foreshortening of a falling body, a shirt too clean for a soldier who has spent long hours struggling in combat. But those kinds of details and others, more or less evident, she still couldn’t have known. She lacked the experience and depth of field, that scab of time that can age the gaze of a twentysomething-yearold woman in just a few hours.
    Depth of field is something you can’t foresee. It appears when it appears. Some are never able to capture it in a lifetime. Others are born with their days numbered, and they have to hurry to get it, in the short time they have left. Gerta was one of the latter, a long-distance runner. She rushed through her days like cigarettes, waiting for the moment. She stood still, leaning on the windowsill, wearing a black spaghetti-strapped shirt, the sun on the skin of her shoulders. June 24, 1935. Summer solstice. Noon. Not a breath of air. Suddenly she saw a square of light on the far end of the street and felt a tingling in her stomach. She focused with