Beautiful Exiles

by Meg Waite Clayton

  Sometimes we visited the makeshift hospital set up in the Ritz Hotel, where stretchers were carried up and down the grand staircase and blood was donated by chandelier light, or the one in the Palace, needles and bandages filling its Empire bookcases while a sign at the concierge desk still offered “Coiffeur on the First Floor.” I wondered, watching the nurses, if they bleached their hair and painted their nails the way they did to cheer the dying, or if that was the way they’d always looked, even before the war. Ernest never would go to the hospitals, so Ginny and I alone spoke with handsome soldiers who told us their wounds were of no importance, that they were alive and they would recover to walk with limps or they would see well enough with one eye, and the thing was the cause. Or they wouldn’t talk; they would be left with no lips to talk with, from a plane crash or a shell or having been caught in a fire. They would find us to tell us a boy in room 507 had a whole mimosa branch in bloom, had we ever seen anything so beautiful? And we would laugh with delight at the unfathomably bright yellow, and I would inhale the scent of the branch, which was not mimosa but rather acacia, the scent of the soap made from these flowers in the boy’s hometown of Marseille, which I took everywhere.

  Afterward, Ginny and I often went shopping together, our feeble attempt to shake off the climb up the blood-stained marble steps and the stink of all that pain and all that courage. I ordered shoes from a cobbler. I priced furs I never imagined I would buy. But there was no getting away from the war.

  One day, four women were killed in a shop’s doorway. Three men sat in the same chairs where, the prior morning, others had been reading the morning papers and drinking coffee when flying shell fragments ended their quiet lives. An old woman and a terrified little boy hurried through the square toward the imagined safety of home one afternoon as a shell crashed into shards of hot, sharp steel that pierced the boy’s neck. It happened, and because it could happen to any of us—anytime, anywhere—as long as it didn’t happen to us, we lived as best we could. Women with market baskets remained in line, never mind the new round of shelling. Customers might heed a shop owner’s suggestion to move back from a window, but they continued slipping on one sandal and then another, as if summer surely would come.

  Ginny and I went together to Chicote’s in the evenings, picking our way with a flashlight through the rubble to get a little tight with Ernest and Joris Ivens and Herb and Del and Josie and anyone else who would drink with us as we talked about the war and the world and what anyone with any sense was doing in Madrid in the spring of 1937. “Do our typewriters stand a ghost of a chance against machine guns?” we asked each other. “What good are words?” There was fear in the talk, and there was courage. You paid attention. You listened hard and you watched, always, and in the listening and the watching, you lived more fully than you ever had. Josie liked to say that security isn’t the heart’s true desire, that it’s the unknown we long for. Maybe she was right for everyone, or maybe she was right only for a certain kind of person who drank in a bar in Madrid in the middle of a war and was happy to do so with anyone else who showed up to drink.

  Ernest was at his braggart worst at Chicote’s. It was true that he got to places others didn’t because of Joris Ivens’s political contacts, but the way he told the stories . . . “I was walking the battlefields with the general, suggesting strategies.” “The kid aimed like a boy just learning to piss outside his diaper, so I took the gun and schooled him in how to shoot a Fascist.” No one could know anything about the war he didn’t already know. No one had maps like his. No one had food or booze or weapons that he didn’t have. And when he wasn’t telling the stories of his own bravery, he was pulling out his guitar and playing and singing loudly, and not very well.

  “Josie,” I said one night, loudly enough for Ernest to hear, “don’t you think Scrooby here ought to do a piece on the fellas in the hospital?” Scrooby, I’d taken to calling him, like screwball but rounded like the sound of gunfire. I suppose I meant it about the hospital, but I was trying to win Josie over as surely as if I’d brought my little jar of marmalade to the lobby and joined her chat with the soldiers on leave. “Don’t you think Ernest writing about the poor boys in the hospital would tell everyone as much as anything about what’s happening here?”

  Ernest laughed, which perhaps he didn’t mean as dismissively as I felt it.

  Josie said, “Ernest doesn’t do blood transfusions or sawing off limbs.”

  Ernest laughed again, and he made quite a stink about what they’d filmed that day for The Spanish Earth, in case anyone might have forgotten why he and his gang went tootling off in two cars every morning while most correspondents took the trolley or walked.

  The conversation turned, as it so often did then, to the number of shells that had fallen and the number of soldiers, packaging the war up in tidy numbers that could be boxed away.

  Josie leaned closer to me, saying, “Ernest is no good at returning to what hurts him.”

  I waited. I’ve found if you can leave a silence alone, someone else will fill it.

  Ernest pulled out his guitar and began to sing in Spanish.

  “Scrooby,” I said, “you know how much I love your singing, but here in public you’re going to make all the whores swoon, you know you are.”

  It was a little lovable—his veneer of bravado meant to hide the same fear we all felt, the fear only a fool would fail to feel. The doctors hadn’t been able to remove all the Great War shrapnel from Ernest’s leg, and I supposed it said something about him that he was willing to haul it around this new war in his funny lurching gait. I supposed it made us all feel better about ourselves to see our own brand of fear under the skin of a man as outsized as Ernest.

  “Scrooby,” I said, “the rong cararong rong rong of that guitar is worse than the machine guns and the rifles together, never mind the singing.”

  “Daughter, this is as fine a song as was ever written.”

  “That may well be, Scrooby, but it’s a bit hard to tell under the thick layer of booze.”

  Undeterred, he sang on.

  “That girl in Milan did hurt him,” Josie whispered to me. “What was her name? Maybe it’s great for the rest of us because Ernest made a story from that hurt.” Catherine in A Farewell to Arms, Ernest’s novel about a love affair between the nurse and an American who drove an ambulance in Italy in the Great War, as Ernest had. “He was in love with that girl.”

  “In love with the nurse?” I said. I knew Ernest had spent too much time in a hospital in Milan after being wounded in that war, not as a soldier but delivering cigarettes and chocolate to the Italian troops.

  “She gypped him, that’s as much as he’ll admit to. And nothing hurts like being in love and being jilted when you’re nineteen.”

  Ernest ended one song and began another, saying this one was particularly for me—no doubt something about some woman who never was good to her man.

  “The truth is he wanted to marry her,” Josie said. “The truth is he was just a kid and she was twenty-six. Agnes. That was her name.”

  I wondered if the sadness in her eyes was all from her husband leaving her even though they’d had a “free love” marriage, even though she’d tolerated all the other women he slept with when she was his wife, or if Hemingway had broken Josie’s heart somewhere along the way.

  She said, “The truth is she wrote Ernest a letter saying she was going to marry someone else, and she ought to have told him in person, but his arguing wore her out and, anyway, she was afraid he would do something desperate.”

  Madrid, Spain

  APRIL 1937

  Ernest’s cranky mood the morning we set off with The Spanish Earth film crew toward the Guadarrama front might have been the simple result of a night so cold that the hot water bottles at my feet made no difference, and the morning’s high explosive wake-up call. The sunrise view out my window, where a drunk had sung half the night (sometimes accompanied by music blaring from loudspeakers in the Casa de Campo), was of a
single man who lay dusty and headless in smashed cement, steam from a broken gas main enveloping him. Downstairs, two workmen in blue smocks helped a woman into the lobby, her arms wrapped tightly across her belly, but the blood still steaming through her fingers. Even on the worst mornings, though, Ernest tended toward chipper. His foul temper was on account of a cable from the North American Newspaper Alliance that I’d gotten a glimpse of while he was holding forth over eggs.

  We took provisions to stay out a few days, in case we found some action, and we traveled in two cars, Ernest and I in one, and Joris Ivens and the film crew in the other, the sun warming us as we made our way precariously through gorges and limestone mountains from which anyone might shoot. Ernest talked with soldiers we met in the road along the way, giving them cigarettes and telling them what fine, brave boys they were, asking them to show him how they used their weapons. He would lie in the mud to offer some improvement, not giving a thought to his own comfort. And when they balked at having me in their presence—a woman?—he responded, “Marty here is the bravest woman I’ve ever met. Sure, she hasn’t undergone a true baptism of fire yet. But she’s good for it. She’s as good for it as any of you.”

  The countryside between Madrid and the Guadarrama front was so quiet, though, that we stopped our car for lunch on a blanket by a stream while Joris Ivens and his crew carried on to scout filming locations. We ate bread and ham and drank a little wine from a collapsible cup Ernest seemed always to have with him, and he continued to tutor me in the ways of war: hopping up to show me how to do one thing or another, and explaining that if you understood the tactics of war, you would have some idea of what might happen and when and where, and how to cover it without getting yourself killed.

  “There’s the getting the story and there’s the living to tell it,” he said, “and the first is no good if you don’t have the second.”

  We lay on the blanket, looking up at the sky.

  “You must write, Daughter,” he said. “It’s the only way we have to serve the causa.”

  “But I’d need something gigantic to write about, Scrooby. What has happened to me that hasn’t happened to everyone here?”

  “You know Madrid now, even if you don’t know the war yet.”

  “Daily life doesn’t make a story.”

  “Daughter, daily life in Madrid is a different thing from daily life in St. Louis.”

  If daily life in Madrid was worth reading about, though, he’d already done as much writing of it as anyone wanted to print. The cable he’d received (which I had better sense than to mention) read: “ADVISE HEMINGWAY MAXIMUM ONE WIRE STORY WEEKLY. ONLY WORTHWHILE MATERIAL.” He’d wired off too many stories describing the politics and military tactics when, for $500 a pop, NANA wanted the war delivered right into their readers’ hearts.

  “I suppose I might write about the boys in the hospital,” I said, rolling over to face him, wanting to give back some of the attention he was forever giving me. He’d once been a wounded boy in a hospital. He could make readers feel that story. He was so like Bertrand, with such a thick crust of charm and success that no one looked more closely, no one saw the thin fissures through which the real stuff he was made of oozed. He had such a thick crust that must have started when he was that boy falling bad in love with a nurse who loved someone else.

  “The thing is to write something truly worthwhile, something they can’t possibly reject and don’t want to,” I said as if to myself. “But I don’t know how to write in cablese, Scroob.” Cablese, the bare-bones language of cablegrams, every noncritical word pulled from a piece for the sake of cheaper and faster transmission. “I don’t know how the spirit of a thing survives being reduced like that,” I said. “It’s the words that make you feel a thing in your heart. Not just the thing, but the way you tell about it.”

  As if I were speaking of my own writing. If you came out and said a piece Ernest had written had been the real gen until he boiled it down to cablese, he would give you what for about how wrong you were. You had to say it about yourself and let him loop it around his own neck, until it became something he thought to do himself.

  “Then just mail the whole damned thing so nothing gets lost in the cable,” he said. He reached up and tucked my hair behind my ear, repeating, “Write the whole thing and send it in, Daughter,” the beginning of the loop.

  A breeze kicked up, and I shivered, and he said, “You’re cold, Daughter,” and he pulled me to him. “I’ll keep you warm.”

  I tucked up in the crook of his arm, his body warm alongside me. It was the middle of the afternoon, and it wasn’t anything; it was just two friends helping each other, and if Pauline had read that cable criticizing Ernest’s writing, she wouldn’t have wanted him to have to bear it alone.

  The front, when we’d packed up our picnic and carried on, was so quiet that we might have spread our picnic blanket there. With no war to film, we all climbed back into the cars and returned to the Hotel Florida for the night.

  Ernest and I set out alone early the next morning toward the Jarama River, where the Fascists were trying to take the road to Valencia. We had lunch in a little nothing of a town—a church, a hall, a café, and a collection of stone homes in disrepair—and headed from there up through rounded hills of olive trees and grapevines to an old farmyard: wet and abandoned hay bales, a few chickens, a bony cat. The farmhouse—a supply station supporting the front but well behind it—was all whitewashed rooms and tidily made cots open to the day. In the kitchen, three International Brigade soldiers in baggy trousers and polished boots sat at a huge white table, peeling scrawny potatoes. They eyed me the way the soldiers in that war forever eyed any decent woman—hungry and confused.

  Hemingway yammered with them for a good long bit before asking about going up to the front. He’d have to have a pass, they told him, from their headquarters across the hill. I offered them cigarettes, making sure to connect hand to hand with these men who hadn’t had the touch of a woman in weeks or months. Moments later we were on our way to the house that was the headquarters, where my Italian friend Randolfo Pacciardi greeted us.

  Randolfo’s troops were fighting like hell to hold back a new assault, he told us. If the Fascists cut off the road from Valencia, the Republicans would have no way to supply Madrid. But it was too dangerous for journalists.

  “You need the press there,” Ernest argued. “You need the stories told so the world will see.”

  “The Fascists, from their position, can fire on the field you must cross just to get to the dugout and the trenches,” Randolfo said.

  “Their fire reaches behind the line?” Ernest said.

  “You see what I mean. It’s fine for you, Pops.” He turned to me, fixing me with that gaze that was so hard to turn from. “But Marty, dear, this will not be like our quiet little jaunts around Madrid.”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Randolfo,” I said. “If it’s as bad as you say, you need Hem and I both to go, so one of us will survive to write about it.”

  “But who would forgive me for losing the war’s prettiest correspondent?”

  “Really, Randolfo,” I said, “Ernest is not that pretty.”

  Randolfo laughed, and Ernest did too, and Randolfo conceded. He arranged for two little stamped cards that served as our passes, and a boy to drive us in an open car with excellent tires.

  We set off up a crooked, old donkey road, one widened to allow supplies and ambulances to reach the line but still a rotten road. It petered, finally, into nothing. We had to leave the car behind, to cross the open field on foot.

  The view behind us as we walked up the hill was stunning: the fields stretching down to the farmhouse and Randolfo’s headquarters, the olive orchards and grapevines, the church spire and the town, and, in the far distance, a man plowing another field. But the sounds ahead were of machine guns and rifles. Rong cararong rong rong. Racrong carong carong.

  As we crested the hill, the boy dove to the ground, and we did too. Ahead, the field gave way
to a chaos of craters and strewn earth, olive trees split open and circled with blackened branches.

  The boy set off again, keeping low and moving quickly.

  Ernest and I hurried after him, stooping as the rong cararong rong rong of machine guns began again, terrifying bullets whizzing around us.

  Holy Christ, holy Christ, holy Christ. My thighs burned from crouching so low so long and running at the same time. My heart shredded from the effort and the terror that I wouldn’t keep up.

  If I were the boy, I’d leave me behind.

  Up ahead, the boy flattened to the ground again.

  I dove behind him. Ernest was beside me, one hand forcing my head down.

  I lay hugging the muddy earth and praying to a god I wasn’t sure I’d ever believed in, tensing in readiness at the boy’s every twitch. I couldn’t think for the fear. I could only run when he ran, and flatten when he did, and try to keep from crying from the pain and exhaustion and fear.

  We moved from olive tree to olive tree, bullets rattling the branches and showering leaves down on us.

  It seemed forever before we reached a dugout, which opened to a room with a table, a single telephone, and soldiers—Italian and English and American boys who looked at me with such delight that I laughed and laughed, and Ernest did too. We laughed with relief at having made it to their little part of this war.

  “My sister would have wet herself before she made it here,” one soldier told me, and another said his mother would have fainted—which would have saved her.

  Ernest said, “Marty here is the bravest girl I’ve ever met, braver than I am.” And I didn’t believe it, not for a minute, but there’s a difference between believing a thing a man says and being moved to hear it, and it did move me to hear it. It made me want to prove him right.