There remained, however, the problem of physically getting Ilse to Spain. She didn’t have the money for train fare, still less for an airplane ticket—and she apparently didn’t know her husband was being handsomely paid by the Spanish government for his intelligence work. But then fate intervened in the person of the Stendhalian novelist/adventurer André Malraux, whose résumé included stints as an editor of artistic dirty books (limited editions of Sade’s Le Bordel de Venise and Les amis du crime), smuggler of Khmer bas-reliefs from Indochina, and anticolonial propagandist. A nervous man with a furrowed brow, dark slicked-down hair, and a cigarette seemingly permanently affixed to the corner of his mouth, Malraux had recently conceived the notion of forming a kind of airborne Foreign Legion, the Escuadrilla España, to aid the Spanish Republic. He’d managed to hire a handful of pilots, most of them out-of-work rumrunners and bushwhackers, and scrounge together some outdated aircraft, mainly Dewoitine D372 fighters and poky Potez 54 bombers, in which he himself occasionally flew as copilot and tail gunner, wearing a uniform designed for him by the couturier Jeanne Lanvin. Although the Escuadrilla was based in Madrid, Malraux continually shuttled between there and Paris, where he came to raise money for more planes. And on one of these trips he found out about Ilse. Perhaps, it was suggested, she would like to fly down to Spain with him?
She would.
September 1936: Madrid
It was one of the many ironies of the war that the headquarters of the Communist Party in Madrid were now located in the Palacio de Liria, the grand residence of the Duke of Alba on the Calle de la Princesa, a place which under normal circumstances Arturo Barea would never have been privileged to visit. But today he had an urgent message from his friend Antonio Mije, whose office was—naturally enough—in Party headquarters; so he presented himself at the Palacio, where he found the formal gardens and their baroque fountains guarded by young militiamen and women, while inside the boiserie-encrusted rooms soldiers were polishing the parquet floors, dusting the stuffed crocodiles and suits of antique armor, and taking inventory of the palace’s collection of Goyas, Titians, and other old masters before packing them away for safekeeping.
Mije had a proposition for him. The inclusion of Communists in the government had given him some patronage power, and he might be able to suggest Barea for a post at the Foreign Ministry—that is, if he had any fluency in English. Although Barea’s other language was French, he could read English well enough, and translate it; so within minutes he was being hustled off to the Foreign Ministry, where a harried young assistant ushered him into the crepuscular office of Luis Rubio Hidalgo, the newly appointed chief of the ministry’s Press and Propaganda Department. Pale, bald as an egg, with a thin mustache on his upper lip and lashless eyes peering from behind round tinted lenses, Rubio sat impassively in the cone of light cast by his solitary desk lamp, his white hands folded in front of him, while Barea described his qualifications. Then he asked Barea if he would like to join the Propaganda Department as a nighttime censor for the foreign press—an important job, since most journalists wrote and wired their stories from Madrid at night in order to catch the morning editions of their newspapers in Europe and America.
The moment the words were out of Rubio’s mouth, Barea knew they were what he’d been waiting weeks to hear. Although he was personally repelled by his prospective chief, the work the man was describing was essential and interesting; unlike his frustrated efforts at the Toledo grenade factory, it might allow him to actually make a difference in the struggle for the Republic’s survival. It involved working with words and writers, something he had always longed to do. And the hours, far from being a disincentive for him, represented an opportunity for him to escape the twin demands of Maria and Aurelia. He accepted the job with alacrity; and broke the news to each of the women, separately, the next day. Aurelia, predictably, was vocally dismayed when he told her: why did he have to get mixed up in these things? Maria, on the other hand, was overjoyed: If duty kept Barea out of Aurelia’s bed, wouldn’t this be her chance at last? Barea didn’t have the courage to tell her how wrong she was.
That evening, just before midnight, he was driven through the dark, silent streets in a ministry car, pausing at checkpoints while the sentries shone their flashlights at his papers, until he reached the Telefónica, the white New York–style skyscraper that towered fourteen stories over the Gran Via. Built in the late 1920s as the headquarters for the Spanish subsidiary of the International Telephone and Telegraph Company, the Telefónica housed telegraph transmitters and connectors to underwater cables, as well as the main switching terminus of the Spanish telephone system, and was thus the nerve center for communications coming into or out of Spain. ITT technicians still worked in the building, but with the onset of war the Press and Propaganda Department had established an outpost there as well, with a newsroom for correspondents on the fourth floor (along with camp beds for those who had long waits for transmitting their stories) and censorship offices on the fifth.
After handing his credentials to the guard at the security desk in the entrance hall, Barea went up in one of the building’s five clanking elevators to the fifth floor, where he found the censors’ office at the end of a maze of passages. It was a narrow room, lit only by the purplish glow of a single desk lamp around which a sheet of carbon paper had been taped to form an improvised blackout shade. The wax on the paper, heated by the bare bulb, made the room smell like a church.
Barea introduced himself to the other censor on duty, a man named Perea, and they started dividing up their workload. In the first days of the war there had been no foreign-language censors—journalists had to translate their dispatches into Spanish before they could be approved; and the censors themselves were ITT employees with little idea of, and no direction about, what details constituted permissible news and what were breaches of security. Their standards varied wildly and randomly: sometimes a correspondent would send a story to his newspaper with no interference and a colleague, transmitting the same information a few minutes later, would find his report struck through with red pencil; no one was happy. But with the arrival of Rubio Hidalgo, a former journalist himself, things were going to be different: the censors would now be able to read the stories in the language they were written in, and there would be consistent standards for what to approve.
That, at any rate, was the way it was supposed to work. In practice, problems persisted. The big agencies—United Press International, Associated Press, Reuters, Havas—had teams of reporters filing almost around the clock; the major foreign newspapers all had their special correspondents; material poured out of them all. And the word from on high, to Barea and Perea, was that nothing, nothing should be passed that hinted at anything other than success for the Republican forces. Given what was going on from day to day, this seemed a near-impossibility: the rebels took San Sebastián, the country’s summer capital on the Bay of Biscay, extending their hold over the north; in the south they rolled, seemingly inexorably, toward Málaga; at Madrid’s threshold, they continued to press south from the Guadarrama and east from Talavera de la Reina. And the journalists, who often made daily trips to the front, knew what was happening and wanted to report it.
But when Barea went to the Foreign Ministry for his daily meetings with Rubio, his chief would complain about correspondents sneaking negative stories out in the diplomatic pouches of their embassies, or extremists who threatened him for letting through too much bad news. Not that he was frightened, of course. Opening his desk drawer, he showed Barea the pistol he kept inside it. “Before they get me, I’ll get one of them!” he said. He didn’t seem to be joking. “Take care, and don’t let anything pass!”
September 1936: Córdoba Front
In the first days of September, Robert Capa and Gerda Taro worked their way south from Toledo across the tawny plain of La Mancha, passing white stucco windmills Don Quixote might have battled against, toward the mountains of the Sierra Morena. Sometimes they stopped to stre
tch their legs and refill their canteens, and Capa snapped pictures of Gerda, in her worker’s coveralls, bending over a mountain stream and grinning flirtatiously back at him, or curled up like a sleepy child with her head resting on a stone boundary marker engraved with the letters P.C.—which meant partido communal, but which could just as easily stand for “Partido Comunista.” On the Sierra’s northern slopes, in the village of Almadén, they paused to photograph a mercury mine that had once been the property of the Rothschild banking family but had been—like so much else since the beginning of the war—taken over by a workers’ committee. Because mercury was an important element for munitions production the mine was good material for reportage; and the brutalist machinery and heroic laborers, the lead amphorae packed with mercury standing like so many soldiers in regimented lines, provided striking, resonant images for their cameras. But it still wasn’t enough, wasn’t combat. So they headed over the mountains, to Andalusia.
There, shortly after sunrise on the morning of Saturday, September 5, Nationalist Breguet bombers began attacking government troops encamped in the hills near the copper-mining village of Cerro Muriano, just north of Córdoba. By midmorning the rebel forces, which had launched their attack from Córdoba, had brought in artillery and were shelling both the village and the Loyalist encampment. By midafternoon, when the Nationalist infantry arrived with their machine guns, the place was in pandemonium. Men, women, and children were fleeing the village on foot, on horseback or on mules, in cars or trucks; the women sobbing, cradling their infants or leading mules or cattle; the men clutching forlorn bundles of clothing or household objects or valises. Nor were they the only fugitives: behind them came scores of the Loyalist milicianos—terrified volunteers whose previous experience of firearms probably involved no more than shooting small birds on their farms. Now, crying out that rifles were no use against shells and bombs, they fled on foot or in commandeered automobiles, in some cases threatening to use their weapons on anyone who got in their way. Others, however, remained at their posts, and they and the few regular infantrymen managed to hold position until evening. At that point the rebels—planes, artillery, infantrymen—retired to Córdoba for the night; but they would return the next day to finish what they started and send the remnants of the government detachment back to its base camp at Montoro, twenty-seven miles to the east.
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. After spending a month vainly firing at the rebel garrison in Córdoba along a line just east of the city, the Loyalist general, José Miaja, had planned a bold flanking maneuver in which a detachment from his Third Brigade would go to Cerro Muriano and stage a surprise attack, planned for September 5, on the rebels from the north. Miaja must have been very sure of success, because a handful of journalists—the photographers Hans Namuth and Georg Reisner, the Austrian writer Franz Borkenau, Clemente Cimorra from the Madrid daily La Voz, and Robert Capa and Gerda Taro—had been permitted to witness the action. In the event, what they saw was a table-turning rout.
The journalists were billeted in a 1920s country estate called La Malagueña, on a hill of the same name just south of the village; and Capa and Taro probably didn’t get there until early afternoon, when the two-hour lunch break that combatants on both sides customarily observed would have given them the all-clear. By that time the refugees from the village were in full flight, and Capa, who always remembered that behind his images were actual people with actual emotions, trained his camera on the straggling families on the road—on the barefooted children in their cotton dresses and shorts, and their exhausted, terrified parents. This is what war does. In the late afternoon, the fighting started up again in earnest; but it seems as if the only photographs he and Gerda were able to make of the combat were of government soldiers carrying machine guns on their shoulders, or unspooling telephone wire to hook up field communications devices—all taken behind the lines, on the wooded slopes around La Malagueña.
That was more than Namuth and Reisner were able to get, despite being in the thick of fighting with Borkenau in Cerro Muriano itself, where the journalists had to hide in a railroad tunnel from bombs and insurgent machine-gun fire. But Taro and Capa were still hungry for action, and seemingly exhilarated by what they’d tasted so far. “They were like young eagles,” their friend Chim said of them later, “soaring in this new brilliant clean air of Spain.” Coming upon them at La Malagueña that afternoon, Clemente Cimorra—a dashing playwright-journalist in his mid-thirties with a flair for the dramatic—was enchanted as much by this eagerness, the “naïve courage” of this couple in love, as by their youth. Just kids, he thought when he saw them, armed with their cameras and nothing else, running out fearlessly to look at a spiraling enemy plane, and when he heard their excited talk about how they wanted to capture on film what was happening in Spain, no matter the danger to them. Brave, generous kids who are searching for the truth, he wrote, in a dispatch he filed with his paper the next day.
Before Capa and Taro left the Córdoba front they also stopped at a Loyalist camp—possibly the Third Brigade headquarters in Montoro, east of Córdoba: there Capa photographed an officer in grimy coveralls standing on a barrel to talk to his men while Gerda stood to one side, listening; then he walked around the little group to catch their upturned faces: one bored, one inspired, one downhearted, one frowning in concentration. And either at this camp, or another, during the siesta hour, he wandered among the sleeping milicianos, sprawled on the bare ground like bodies on the field of battle, one of them cuddling one of the dogs the troops kept as mascots: in sleep even the older men looked innocent and defenseless, and all seemed to prefigure the grim destiny that awaited so many of them. But as poignant as these images were, they didn’t have the drama Capa was looking for—the drama he’d been unable to capture at Cerro Muriano.
So one morning he and Gerda drove thirty miles southwest of Montoro, across the Guadalquivir and through rolling hills covered by wheat fields, bare now after the harvest, until they reached the camp of a small detachment of CNT militia just outside the farming village of Espejo. The journey wasn’t without danger: just a few days earlier another journalist, Renée Lafont, had been fatally shot in an insurgent ambush nearby; but they reached their destination without incident. It was still early when they got there, and the sun made long, sharp shadows on the dry ground. The milicianos, men from the Murcian village of Alcoy, were happy to pose for the two young photographers, the dark, tousle-haired boy with the ready laugh and the pretty blond girl: they ran up one of the bare hills in a combat crouch, with their officer beckoning them on; knelt on the grass to aim their rifles at a distant target on the next hill; stood at the edge of a dusty trench and brandished their guns in a show of macho bravado. Then Taro and Capa squatted in the trench as the soldiers ran down the hill toward it and leaped across before taking up firing positions on its farther lip: the photographers closed in on them with both the Rolleiflex and the Leica as the men fired their guns into the empty air. The brightness of the sun, still low in the sky, lit the soldiers like a klieg light and threw every detail, from lumps of soil to the stitching on the men’s caps, into crisp relief.
Finally—it seems it must have been finally, given what happened next—either Capa or Taro asked if some of the milicianos would simulate being hit by gunfire. One, a dark mustached man in a khaki mono or boiler suit, ran down the hill toward Capa; then, pretending he’d been shot, he threw himself on the ground, hanging on to his rifle and breaking his fall with his left hand before coming to rest on his back, his gun across his body. Two others simulated corpses, lying on their sides in the stubble. Perhaps Capa wasn’t sure he’d got what he wanted, though; or maybe one of the other men wanted a turn in the limelight. However it was, another soldier, with a lean, creased face and heavy black brows, his shirt white under the straps of his leather cartridge boxes, came down the sunlit slope, his rifle in his right hand, the rope soles of his shoes crunching in the dry grass. And then—what? Was there a report, the sharp
crack of rifle fire? Because suddenly the man’s legs went slack, his hands limp; with his rifle flying away from his loosened fingers, he too dropped to the ground, just where his comrades had been moments previously. And in the seconds before the soldier fell Capa squeezed the shutter of his Leica and took what would become one of the most famous photographs in the world.
What really happened on that hillside? Capa himself maintained almost total silence about it; although a year later a friend, acting as his interpreter for an interview with a New York newspaper, would give a highly colored account that places Capa and the white-shirted soldier alone on a hilltop, hiding in a trench from enemy gunfire until the miliciano attempts to break away to rejoin his detachment and is felled by the blast of a machine gun. A thrilling story—but one belied by the presence of Gerda, and of the other soldiers, by the other militiamen lying on the grass, by the difficulty of machine-gun bullets pinpointing a single target more than a hundred yards away across the mown fields. Ten years later, in a radio interview, Capa embroidered the Telegram story slightly: there had been twenty milicianos in the trench with him, he said, facing machine-gun fire from a neighboring hill; one by one the soldiers had surged out of the trench, only to be felled by enemy bullets, and Capa had got the last lucky shot by holding the camera above his head, never actually seeing the image in the frame. This narrative, too, is hard to square with the details of the actual photographs he took.
Sometime in the 1940s, however, Capa would privately tell another friend, a fellow photographer from Stuttgart, Gerda’s hometown, that he and Gerda and the soldiers had all been actors in a tragedy of coincidence. They’d been fooling around, he said, running, firing their weapons, acting crazy, laughing—this is how we’ll shoot those fascist bastards—and he’d been taking pictures; he didn’t hear any shots, “not at first.” But as the soldiers played at combat for the benefit of his camera, a real bullet, fired perhaps from a fascist sniper’s high-powered hunting rifle, or by one of the rebel Guardia Civil active in those hills, had pierced a real man’s heart.
Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War Page 8