For a person with my biographical and literary background, a novel about Robert Capa, the most legendary of all war correspondents, was only a matter of time. His photo albums have always taken pride of place in my library, next to Ulysses, Captain Scott, the mutineers of the Bounty, John Reed and other worn-out heroes. On more than one occasion, I had given serious thought to writing about his life, but that moment never arrived. These are things that one can never choose; they just happen.

The origin of this story has to do with the discovery in Mexico of a suitcase full of rolls and rolls of negatives and photos of the Spanish civil war, belonging to Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Saymour (Chim). Waiting for Robert Capa starts off in one of those photographs. I’m referring to a picture of a very young Gerda Taro, who is asleep in a narrow bed and wearing Capa’s pajamas. Behind all my novels there is always an image that haunts me. That is how I work; that is my “Mark of Zorro”.

Capa’s real name was André Friedman. At the age of 17, while still a high-school student, he was arrested in Budapest during a student march against the dictatorship of Admiral Horthy and had to flee the country. His mother bought him a couple of shirts, some baggy trousers and a pair of boots with double soles and put him on a train. From then on, he wandered from hotel to hotel, from country to country and from war to war… He was a survivor. As his friend Cartier-Bresson said, “Capa was not a theoretical thinker or an intellectual, but an incredibly intuitive photographer who saw things before they happened; a born player.” He himself explained this during his participation in the Allied landing on the beaches of Normandy with the E Company of the 116th Regiment, “A war correspondent has the ultimate wager in his hands; his own life, and he will gamble on one horse or another, or put it back in his pocket at the last moment. I’m a player. I decided to come with the first wave.”

He was courageous, of that there is no doubt, rather cocky, ambitious, seductive and of course, quite vain, wild and with an inborn ability to always land on his feet. Or almost always. His soul was broken by the Spanish civil war and the death of Gerda Taro, the love of his life. He was never the same afterwards and became more nihilistic, more desperate and more lonesome. He swore to himself that he would never fall in love like that again. And he kept his promise. There were other women, of course, some of them truly beautiful, such as Ingrid Bergman. He was gallant to all of them and lived up to his reputation as a seducer, whilst at the same time avoiding any form of tie or commitment. Flirting was his way of staying alive, treating life as a joke when nothing was of consequence to him. However, he never loved anyone the same way he loved the Jew, whose mocking smile could not be erased, not even by a battery of double whiskies.

Gerda Taro was run down by a tank in the summer of 1937, after surviving the worst battle in the war. Capa was never the same after her death and never forgave himself for not being at her side at the end. In his book Death in the Making, he wrote the following dedication: “For Gerda Taro, who spent one year at the Spanish front and who stayed on.” Robert Capa lived long enough to photograph many more wars, including the Second World War and the horror of the postcolonial conflicts. He died in May 1954 after treading on a landmine during the Indochina war. Before the ground exploded beneath his feet on the Tai-Binh road, he might have had time to turn his gaze back to Spain for a split second, to that part of his memory in which he and Gerda, both very young, were returning together from the front along a dirt track, their cameras at their sides and a tripod slung from his shoulder. Smiling.