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maximum aperture, but I had the shakes and the image was out of focus. But fuck, it was beautiful, I took some Fujicolors and some 400 ASAs, really pushing them, they looked like something by De La Tour, you know, his
Nativity
. They didn’t want to run it in the paper. ‘Your picture’s out of focus,’ they said, ‘you can’t see a thing.’ What did the assholes want? For me to use a flash?”
    Antonio was almost shouting. Tourists were giving us sideways glances, not quite daring to stare. Some were growing impatient, hovering around us, waiting for us to leave so they could get a photo of the whole convent.
    “In the end they ran it with such a fucking dumb caption …”
    Antonio took out a cigarette, which he didn’t succeed in lighting because of the wind and because he couldn’t get his fingers to work the lighter.
    “In the end, the kid died, and when he did David was fast asleep beside him. Exhausted. He didn’t see it happen. And I wasn’t there either. When David woke and realized it was all over, he closed the boy’s eyes and called me. I took the picture, afterward. Bombinha looks like he’s sleeping in that shot, he looks restful. Really skinny, but restful. The other kids told us that just before he went,he whispered that he wanted his mother, he was delirious, asking for watermelon. David didn’t say anything, he gave a few cruzeiros to the guards for permission to bury him himself, with all the kids there. He dug a little grave, planted a little cross, said a little prayer …”
    Antonio stopped talking, his chin was wobbling, his eyes shining, and I stood there, not knowing what to do. One of the tourists gave a smile, made a gesture to ask us to move aside, to get a picture. Antonio stood up, then he just looked at the high white arches and said, “Come on … We’re off.”

    IT MUST HAVE BEEN one o’clock in the morning, I was reading the paper to try and get to sleep. The world was full of Bombinhas. Full of photographers too, framing the vulture behind the dying little girl, because sometimes death can be photogenic. “There were hundreds of little girls like her,” some guy from Gamma told me. “If we’d had to save her, we’d have ended up doing only that.” Only: adverbial part of speech implying restriction.
    I couldn’t find it in me to feel sorry for him.
    Someone once told me a good photographer had to take a pin with him. “Do you know why? To prick the baby in its mother’s arms. Because a picture with the baby crying is always worth an extra ten dollars.”
    Who was it who told me that? Oh yes, Harry, that was one of Harry’s stories. At the time I laughed so much, it was terrible, but perhaps Harry wasn’t joking.
    Harry was eighteen in 1944. He claimed to have been the youngest soldier at Omaha Beach, the youngest to come out of it alive, at least. He lied about his age to bring his call-up forward, so much so that when he reached Meaux in northern France he was barely nineteen and already a corporal. That may be a lie. With Harry, how do you know the truth from the lies? Either way, he got through dozens of rolls of film at Arromanches and Amiens, and in the Ardennes. He developed them at night, with developing fluid in GIs’ helmets. In his New Jersey apartment he still had pictures of Patton at Malmédy, kneeling before the bodies of American prisoners machine-gunned down by the Germans. Those were the first photos he ever sold, in March 1945, to
Life
. The ones that made him famous.
    I knew of another one, published around the same time. A simple grenade explosion near a bridge in Frankfurt. The picture was taken from very close quarters, it’s a miracle he didn’t leave his life there. It looks like a firework, for the Fourth of July. Except for an American soldier frozen in a peculiar, aerial motion, he was obviously already dead.
    But there was one he had never wanted to have published. He always had a copy of it on him, protected with transparent