Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War

by Vaill, Amanda

  Barea had been sleeping in an armchair in one of the gilded reception rooms at the Foreign Ministry when just after dawn he was jolted awake by the scream of shells from enemy guns and the sound of explosions: first in the Puerta del Sol, then, even closer by, in the Plaza Mayor. Suddenly the walls of the ministry, the old Hapsburg Palacio de Santa Cruz, shuddered, and Barea braced himself for a crash. But none came: all he heard were shouts and running footsteps. Hurrying downstairs into the building’s courtyard, he found half-dressed staffers and a handful of Assault Guards standing in front of an unexploded shell the size of a large dog. An artillery technician was sent for to defuse the ordnance, and when he pulled out the fuse cap he found a piece of paper in the unexploded bomb. “Comrades,” it read, in German, “do not be afraid. The shells I charge do not explode.—A German worker.” They’re paying attention to us after all. Absurdly heartened, Barea fetched Rubio’s discarded photographs of the slaughtered children of Getafe and took them to his friend Antonio Mije to be turned into propaganda posters.

  But any thoughts he might have had about patting himself on the back for his enterprise were dispelled by an unexpected visit from a stranger, a Russian journalist named Mikhail Koltsov. The chairman of the Soviet Writers’ Union’s foreign committee and correspondent for the official Soviet newspaper, Pravda, Koltsov had arrived in Madrid in August, but although he was staying in the Hotel Florida, in the Plaza de Callao just down the street from the Telefónica, his stories must have been filed through some back channel to Moscow, because Barea had never met him. Now he was confronted with a pale, shortish man with small soft hands, wearing round wire-rimmed spectacles that gave him the look of a barn owl. An angry barn owl, in this case: smacking a sheaf of press dispatches against the desk, Koltsov began haranguing him in bad Spanish, demanding to know who had been responsible for letting these reports through. He’d been at the War Commissariat, he said, when the Foreign Ministry had sent the dispatches over for forwarding to Valencia—and whoever had let the journalists who wrote them get away with such sensationalist sabotage deserved to be shot.

  After his initial shock at Koltsov’s attack had subsided, Barea was less defensive than pleased that someone—anyone—actually cared about the foreign press coverage. He pointed out that the dispatches Koltsov was brandishing had all been sent the day the government left Madrid, before he himself had taken charge of things, while unsubstantiated rumors were flying all around the city. No wonder some of the reports declared that white flags had been seen fluttering from government buildings, or that Nationalist armies were marching down the Gran Via. Since then he’d been keeping such misinformation from being printed; but, he added, he didn’t have anyone’s authority to do so except that of his own ad hoc “committee.”

  Koltsov’s response to this was to hustle Barea into his official car and take him along to the War Ministry, where after a series of conversations with various officials—more bad but emphatic Spanish, more insistence—a truly official document was produced that placed the press office in Madrid under the direct jurisdiction of Álvarez del Vayo, now “war commissar” as well as foreign minister, and definitively appointed Barea its head. If Barea found it at all peculiar that a mere foreign journalist could make Spanish government ministries do his bidding, he said nothing. For the word on the street was that Koltsov was far more than a Pravda correspondent: he was Stalin’s personal agent, his eyes and ears (some said) in Madrid, with a special line of communication direct to the secretary general. He was supposed to have attempted to shoot Republican milicianos to stop their retreat from Talavera back in September; and just days ago, it was whispered, he’d also been involved in—had even been responsible for—the removal and subsequent gunpoint execution of more than a thousand prisoners with Nationalist affiliations from the Carcel Modelo. So if he wanted something done, it would, in most cases, get done.

  Within days Barea found out to what extent this was true: for Rubio Hidalgo hastily arranged to make a flying visit from Valencia to pass the baton of authority to his erstwhile deputy. Barea received him, awkwardly, in his own old office—really, where else could they have such a meeting?—and they agreed that while Rubio remained the head of the Foreign Ministry’s press department, and would continue to receive copies of outgoing dispatches, since he was now located in Valencia it made sense for Barea to be in charge of the Madrid foreign press office, and for day-to-day supervision of that office to pass to the Madrid War Commissariat. For safety and convenience, Barea would relocate their headquarters from the Foreign Ministry to the Telefónica; and Rubio would send him a new deputy from Valencia. No mention was made of Koltsov.

  When their business was finished Barea came around the desk to shake Rubio’s hand in farewell. You hate me more than I could ever hate you, Barea thought; and Rubio turned on his heel and left.

  * * *

  It was nearly midnight. Ilse Kulcsar had just spent the better part of two days wedged into a hired car with three journalists—a large, rumpled, blustery Englishman named Sefton Delmer, who wrote for the Daily Express; a slender, sallow, impeccably groomed Frenchman, Louis Delaprée, correspondent for Paris-Soir; and Andreas Vinding, a rotund Dane from Politiken—and she was bone-weary, hungry, and aching with cold. At the roadblocks on their way from Valencia sentries wearing red-and-black Anarchist scarves had come out of their posts to stare at the crazy foreigners who wanted to drive to Madrid when everyone else was going the other way; now, as they got out of the car in front of the Telefónica, a fleet of motorcycles equipped with sirens were screaming off into the night to sound an air-raid alert. Soon Nationalist planes would be flying over, and the bombs would fall. But despite these ominous signals, and despite her discomfort, Ilse felt absurdly elated to be back in Madrid.

  She’d first arrived there in October and had just been learning her way around when the government relocated to Valencia and Rubio Hidalgo insisted that—as an unattached woman correspondent with no embassy to seek refuge in—she be evacuated along with it. But she hadn’t wanted to be in Valencia among the bureaucrats and the orange groves; that wasn’t why she’d come to Spain. As a socialist journalist she wanted to bear witness, wanted to be where the fight was going on, and that was in Madrid. So as soon as it seemed as if the city might withstand Franco’s onslaught, she scrambled to get herself back. Delmer, Delaprée, and Vinding, whom she’d met when she’d first come to Spain, and who saw in the beleaguered city the journalistic scoop of a lifetime, had decided to return themselves, and they offered her typing and translating work if she wanted to go with them. All she needed were credentials and a place to stay. When she asked Rubio if he could arrange those for her, he’d replied sourly that the person she’d have to talk to was a man named Barea, one of the self-appointed heroes who’d stayed on when the government left. “He’s the master there now,” he said.

  When Ilse and the journalists arrived at the Telefónica they discovered that conditions in Madrid were far more dangerous than they had realized. Yes, the milicianos and the International Brigades had stopped the Insurgent advance through the scrublands of the Casa de Campo; but in compensation the rebel forces had stepped up their bombing attacks on the city. And they’d added incendiary bombs, whose sheets of white fire gutted buildings and spread panic among the population, to their arsenal of destruction. So tonight, as the sirens wailed in the darkened streets, Ilse and the others had to make way for a crowd of women and children from the neighborhood who’d come to take shelter from the air-raid in the skyscraper’s deep basements. In silence they shuffled down the stairs, which were illuminated only by blue-painted blackout bulbs; the journalists got into the elevator, standing shoulder to shoulder in the cramped space. As the lift groaned upward Ilse found herself wondering what would happen if a bomb hit while they were in it—and looking at Vinding, the Dane, who’d begun to perspire profusely despite the cold, she knew he was thinking the same thing.

  On the fifth floor they groped their way alon
g the dark passages until they came to a windowless vestibule where the censor had taken refuge from the possibility of flying glass in the outside offices and was reading reports by the uncertain beam of his flashlight. Ilse saw a tall man with a long sallow face, sculpted cheekbones, arched brows, a full but sardonic mouth. His thin frame was wrapped in a shabby tweed overcoat against the cold, and he was wearing a black workingman’s beret with a five-pointed Russian star on it. He looked up at the journalists with impatience. Couldn’t they keep quiet while a raid was going on?

  Eventually the bombs stopped falling and the censor ushered the little group into his office. They all identified themselves and shook hands—Andreas Vinding, Tom Delmer, Louis Delaprée, Ilse Kulcsar, Arturo Barea Ogazón. Barea looked the newcomers over in the dim violet glow of his lamp. The men he knew by sight or reputation; the woman, whose name he couldn’t pronounce, was a stranger. Too round for his taste, he thought: big green eyes, like a cat’s, pointed chin—stubborn—lots of dark curly hair, broad shoulders. He dismissed her as no beauty, and unfashionably dressed to boot. Why the hell did they send me a woman? She’d have to wait to be assigned a billet, he said in his fluent but badly accented French, the only common language between him and the journalists; first he had to look over reports of the raid just past and clear them for transmission.

  The men left and Ilse sat down on the other side of his table, watching in silence as he struggled to translate the unfamiliar words for the horrors the war was causing. He almost forgot she was there until he heard her husky voice: “Can I help you with anything, camarade?” she asked in French. He surprised himself by handing her the dispatch he was working on—he told himself it was to see what she’d do with it—and surprised himself again by taking her advice about some of the language in it. Then he endorsed her papers, gave her a room assignment at the Gran Via Hotel, just across the street, and rose to shake her hand. But he addressed her formally as señorita, and when he did so her face broke into a mischievous, little-girl grin. He shouldn’t call anyone señorita, she said: “We’re all comrades here.” And marched off down the hall, her shoulders squared in her severely cut coat.

  She came back the next morning to get her safe-conduct, which would allow her to go freely about the city as long as she gave the password of the day to the sentries, and Barea asked her a little about herself. She told him of her hatred of fascism, her work in Vienna, her flight to Brno with Poldi, her university background, her travels, the eight languages she knew; and Barea felt both dismissive and resentful of her erudition and her passion. Who needs a bluestocking like this in a war zone? Ilse, however, had a proposition for him: wouldn’t it be useful to have someone working in his office who could read the correspondents’ reports in their native languages and talk to them about what cuts or changes were needed? Wouldn’t it save time? Wouldn’t it serve the cause better to have a spokesperson who could speak directly to journalists?

  Somewhat unwillingly—after all, who did she think she was, barging in with all these suggestions?—Barea called Rubio in Valencia to ask him what he thought of the idea. To his surprise the normally cautious Rubio enthusiastically endorsed it. “Ask her to join the censorship,” he said. “Ask her today.” And by that evening Barea and Ilse—whose name he Hispanicized to “Ilsa”—were working across from each other at the big desk in his office. He began explaining the rules: that anything negative had to be suppressed, that no mention could be made of defeats, setbacks, catastrophes, shortages, or anything that would give a picture of what life was really like in a besieged city where aircraft rained destruction every night. And Ilsa, who wasn’t used to being coy or deferential to male colleagues if she disagreed with them, told him flat-out that such a strategy was wrong—“catastrophically wrong,” she said. It made the government’s losses inexplicable. What they should be giving the foreign press was more information, not less: if a bomb falls, tell them the make and give them the factory identification number, if possible. Put as much into the dispatches as you can, so people understand what is really happening here. Make them see the true collective spirit in Madrid’s struggle; make a propaganda for the new out of the dirt and blood.

  Instead of resenting her insubordination—her assumption, which a Spanish woman would never have made, that she had as much right to speak as he did—Barea was perversely exhilarated. What she was saying was what he’d felt all along, and had so often repressed: and now, it seemed, he might have an ally, and a coworker, agreeing with him. Excitedly, they pushed the idea this way and that: perhaps, together, they might have a chance to persuade their superiors to change their tactics. They could try, anyway.

  Ilsa didn’t go back to the Gran Via Hotel that night. She’d hated lying in bed listening for the sound of the Junkers and Capronis in the sky overhead, and watching her window light up with the glare of incendiary bombs; so Barea offered her the third camp bed in the office (Luis, the young orderly who ran the censors’ errands, was snoring in the other one), and she and he took turns sleeping and censoring until morning. They spent all day working and listening to the rumble of firing from the trenches, only a tram ride away at the northwest of the city; after midnight they dozed on the camp beds. Suddenly, during what was normally a quiet time between three and five, they heard the insidious purr of a bomber directly overhead. Ilsa sat up. “What are we going to do?” she whispered. Luis wasn’t there; probably he’d gone down to the shelter. “Nothing,” Barea replied. Seconds ticked by.

  The explosion seemed to take place within the room itself: the furniture jumped, the floor swayed, and there was a sucking roar, then a tinkling arpeggio as the windows shattered and the blackout curtains were blown inward by the draft. The bomb had fallen on a building twenty yards away, in the Calle de Hortaleza, and completely demolished it; outside, in the street, there was a flurry of cries, and the sound of bricks and plaster falling. Neither Barea nor Ilsa could speak for a moment; then Ilsa came and sat on Barea’s bed and they began talking, talking about anything, as if by doing so they could prove to themselves that they were still alive.

  The next day they moved their desks and camp beds to an office on the fourth floor. To Barea’s intense discomfort, both Aurelia and Maria came looking for him and were openly curious, and jealous, to find him with Ilsa. There were scenes with each of them: Where had he been? Who was this foreign woman? What was she to him? Any response seemed inadequate, self-serving; he felt ashamed, in front of Ilsa, of the evident mess he’d made of his personal life, and defensive that he should feel that way at all. In fact, he didn’t know what Ilsa was to him. A colleague, certainly; a woman he could really talk to, which was something he had never known. But she was married. And she wasn’t at all the sort of woman he’d usually been attracted to.

  For the next day and a half, like an automaton, he censored reports, dealt with journalists’ questions, fell into exhausted slumber, rose and worked again, all the while watching himself and his interactions with this mysterious foreigner, trying to explain them to himself. Day wore on into night, and finally the last reports had been checked and sent out; Luis was already curled up in his corner of the room, and Barea and Ilsa stretched out exhausted on their own camp beds. Perhaps emboldened by the darkness, they talked softly of her life, his life, their marriages, their hopes and fears. At length, and at last, they fell silent. Barea got up, carefully and noiselessly moved his own cot close to hers, lay down, and reached out for her hand. And like that they slipped into sleep.

  In the morning, when Luis was out of the room, he kissed her for the first time, and they both started laughing. But then Barea brought himself up short—what was he getting himself into? This wasn’t a feeling like any he’d ever known. Exasperated and confused, he barked to Ilsa, “Mais, je ne t’aime pas!” But she just smiled back at him. “No, my dear,” she replied.

  She had her own puzzle to work out: She was in a war zone, in a country where she didn’t speak the language, in a culture unlike any she’d
ever known. She had only just met this man, and it was obvious that he was already entangled, disastrously, with two other women. She couldn’t fall in love with him, when his relationships with women were everything she hated and had worked against. She tried to make herself think about Poldi: once he’d been comrade, lover, and husband to her, but now he seemed like a character in a book, distant and unreal. Nothing was right in her marriage anymore, she thought. But somehow this felt right, and real. Looking at Barea, she felt she knew already exactly how things would unfold between them. As Barea himself would write, much later: “It did not seem worthwhile to pretend; there were so few things that mattered.”

  November 1936: Paris/Madrid

  Capa’s and Gerda’s photographs from Spain were all over the European—and even the American—press: in Vu, in the Communist-backed newsweekly Regards, in the Dutch Katholieke Illustratie, the German BIZ, the Illustrated London News, Time, and elsewhere. Suddenly there was money in their pockets for food and drinks and cigarettes and clothes; and there were, for Gerda at least, bragging rights in the Spanish conflict, which for her SAP friends at the Dôme and the Capoulade was the greatest thing to happen to the left since the October Revolution. But when they’d left Madrid the government’s prospects had seemed dim; and in the intervening weeks Capa had gone to cover regional political events in France rather than seek another Spanish assignment, while Gerda had planned a trip to Italy to see her old beau Georg Kuritzkes, now studying medicine in Naples.