Waiting for Robert Capa by Susana Fortes

new perspective. A modern one, along the lines of the architectural vanguard that had been born on the sixth floor of a building on Rue de Sevres, where Le Corbusier established his canon with the frigidness of a Swiss watchmaker. They sought the strange, with a desire to break away from lines and volumes and show reality from a rarely seen perspective. And Gerta had that, along with the advantage of speaking several languages and a sixth sense for business. In less than a month, she learned how to present the material and negotiate the highest price with an aggressive sales technique. The law of supply and demand. She was shrewd when it came to balancing the books, and that proved essential for a company that lived on supplying content to the leading French, Swiss, and North American magazines. It was her big break.
    It was as if they had been shipwrecked. She and André, two castaways who had finally found a ship to board and could feel the vibrations of the motor below deck. That thrill of the open-sea journey that awaited them. Their coffee’s aroma mixing with the salty breeze, as they bent over to look at a nautical chart freshly spread out over the table. With all the time in the world ahead of them to decide—with enthusiasm, precision, and luck—the exact path, thereafter, to take their lives on.
    They moved to a small studio on Rue de Varenne, which barely fit a bathroom, a bed, and a cooking stove. But when they opened their window at night while having dinner, they could see the lights of the Eiffel Tower, and all of Paris’s air entered their home with its bridges, tangled-up streets, and autumn plazas.
    The afternoon had gone dim, and an aquamarine shade of an American night illuminated the buildings’ cornices hanging within the clouds, and the mansard roofs in the distance. An orange glow from the streetlamps lit up their room. A round table, an open newspaper, a sofa covered with a gray cloth, and Gerta’s profile, with all of its arrises, beneath the floor lamp. Silent, pensive.
    André did not like seeing her like this. It was as if she had escaped to her past world, where he couldn’t make her happy. As if, deep down, her Polish-Jewish skepticism was still wary of all that happiness. There was something strange about the way she looked at you, something evasive about it, as if one eye was looking back and the other at the path she was considering taking. He knew there had been other men in her life, of course he did. He had heard talk about Georg hundreds of times when they were just friends. And he had seen a photo of him she stored in a box of quince candy. Blond and much taller than he was, with an aviator’s or a polo champion’s attitude that wore on André’s nerves. He had also had other women. But now he couldn’t stand the idea that she’d think back upon her days with the Russian, not even for a second. As if life could cut itself into pieces, as with a knife and a Camembert cheese. Before and now. Of course he freely expressed his jealousy, and often. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely jealousy, but complete animal possessiveness. A need to erase the past, an absurd macho pride, a thousand-year-old instinct dating back to when men in hordes howled at the moon at midnight alongside their tribe’s campfire. Selecting their female, separating her from the rest to make her exclusively his. So he could bring her to one of those huge prairies of grain and nail a child into her entrails.
    â€œWouldn’t you like to have a baby Gypsy?” he asked softly, trying to take her out of her abstraction. “A screaming, misbehaving child, like me?” He half-smiled, with a touch of slyness at the edge of his lips, but his eyes were serious and loyal, like a cocker spaniel’s.
    â€œAnd as hairy?” she teased, wrinkling up her nose. She shook her head no and laughed loudly, as if she had just heard something completely ludicrous. But