In the afternoon he took a poky little train to the outlying village where Aurelia and the children had been assigned space in a rambling old farmhouse with several other displaced families. The children were touchingly happy to see him; and Aurelia was glad to be able to show off the husband who “was something in the Foreign Ministry” to the other women. She wanted him to spend the night and he resisted. She wept, the children pled; and he ended up sharing Aurelia’s bed with the children nearby, unable to sleep because he felt like a liar—to the children, to Aurelia, to Ilsa, and to himself, for pretending to an intimacy he could no longer feel, would never feel again.
The next morning he returned to Valencia, only to be rebuffed again by Rubio; then came back to the village to visit his children, only to reject their mother and return to Valencia. It went on like that for more than a week—lying, being lied to. Hanging around the office in town, he heard unsettling and conflicting rumors: he was going to be punished for staying in Madrid (playing the hero, they called it); he was going to be sidelined as a postal censor in Valencia; Ilsa was going to be given his job; she was going to be fired for being too friendly with foreign journalists. Terrible news came: Louis Delaprée, flying back to France in an Air France plane, had been shot down—possibly by a Russian fighter—and had died of his wounds three days later; then Luis, Barea’s orderly, driving to Valencia from Madrid with a letter from Ilsa, was mortally wounded in a car accident. Barea managed to get to the hospital to see him before he died: his spine had been shattered and peritonitis had set in, but he knew Barea, and gave him a heartbreaking smile when he walked into the room. “Don Arturo,” he said, with difficulty, “don’t let that woman get lost. She’s a great woman. She’s in love with you, and you’re in love with her. Don’t let her go.”
When Ilsa arrived in Valencia on the day after Christmas, the pain of losing Delaprée and then Luis lifted a little: for a moment it seemed as if the jumbled pieces of Barea’s world had fallen into place. But then, the day after her arrival, she disappeared: a friend of hers, an Austrian journalist, told Barea that an agent of the Political Police had come to her hotel and taken her away. Frantic, Barea called Rubio Hidalgo; and this time he not only took Barea’s call but also came around to Ilsa’s hotel at once and started telephoning government ministries to see who could help. Barea barely paid him any attention: instead, he reached into his pocket for his pistol and laid it on the table in front of him. When he was told to calm down, he just took two filled cartridge frames and put them on the table next to the gun. “It doesn’t matter if she appears tonight or not,” he said. “Other people will die in Valencia, that’s all.”
Two hours later Ilsa returned to the hotel, laughing at her experience. It had all been a stupid mistake—a ridiculous little man, an Eastern European journalist, had denounced her as a Trotskyist spy. At first the police had seemed to believe him, but after all the telephone calls from government ministries they had changed their minds. Wasn’t it ridiculous? Everyone except Barea agreed that it was; they all had a good chuckle over it. All Barea could think of were the corpses he’d seen in Madrid in the early days, the checas and tribunals, the stories he’d heard from García about what might happen to you when they came for you. But he had her back now, and he wouldn’t leave her again. Ever.
That night they became lovers. The most natural thing in the world, thought Ilsa, as he lay in the crook of her arm; and her knowledge of him, his openness to her, made her feel like crying. In the morning they took the tram to the seaside district of El Cabanyal and walked past the tiled and whitewashed houses to the beach. They told each other they wanted to be together forever. But: “You know,” Barea said to her, “it will be a lot of pain for the others, and pain for ourselves as well as happiness. One’s got to pay, always.”
“I know,” she replied.
December 1936: Key West
It was Martha’s mother who saw the sign—“Sloppy Joe’s Bar,” painted on the white stucco wall—and suggested the three of them go in out of the sun for a drink. Having an afternoon cocktail in a conch bar was the furthest thing imaginable from the way they’d always spent the Christmas holidays back in St. Louis; but on this Christmas, the first since Martha’s father had died, they wanted to do something different. And sleepy, shabby Key West, as far south as you could get in the continental United States, was certainly different.
The café was dim and cool, with sawdust on the floor and a long, curving bar presided over by a 300-pound African American barkeep, “Big Jimmy” Skinner. At one end of the bar, reading his mail, was a burly dark-haired man in a T-shirt and dirty white shorts held up by a length of rope. He looked up as the trio came in: the earnest young man, Martha’s brother, Alfred, on vacation from medical school; the silver-haired, still-beautiful Edna Gellhorn; and Martha, tanned and tawny-maned in a little black sundress that showed off her racehorse figure to advantage. Later he would say he’d figured that Alfred and Martha were a couple, and that given three days he could win the beautiful blonde away from “the young punk”; but that turned out not to be necessary.
Because the blonde came over to him, hand outstretched, and introduced herself and her companions to Ernest Hemingway. He had been her writing lodestar forever, her “glorious idol”—hadn’t she kept his photo tacked to her dorm room wall at Bryn Mawr? Hadn’t she taken her epigraph for What Mad Pursuit (“Nothing ever happens to the brave”) from A Farewell to Arms? And hadn’t her clear, taut prose in The Trouble I’ve Seen been compared with his? So imagine how thrilled she was to just walk into a bar in Key West and stumble over him this way.
The social preliminaries were quickly dispensed with. Hemingway charmingly pointed out that his wives had both gone to school in St. Louis, and he’d spent considerable time there himself in his youth; he would be delighted to show these St. Louisans around Key West, and make sure they found all the best beaches and watering holes. Drinks came as they talked, then more drinks and more talk. At length a friend of Hemingway’s, Charles Thompson, appeared in the bar, sent by Pauline, who had laid on a splendid crayfish dinner for the Thompsons at the house on Whitehead Street and was wondering why her husband hadn’t shown up for it. He’d have to skip dinner, Hemingway said; Thompson should just tell Pauline to meet up with him later, at Pena’s Garden of Roses, a beer garden and former speakeasy in the Old Town. Thompson looked around Hemingway’s table, took in the blond hair and the black dress, and did as he was told.
Over the next weeks Hemingway made good on his offer to the Gellhorns; and, when Alfred’s medical school vacation ended and mother and son returned to St. Louis, Martha remained at the Colonial Hotel on Duval Street for nearly a fortnight and became, as she herself described it in a thank-you note to Pauline, “a fixture, like a kudu head,” in the Hemingways’ house. Hemingway took her swimming and barhopping, but mostly they just talked: about her writing (she was too careful and cautious, he said—she should just write her novel and if it didn’t turn out the way she wanted she could tear it up), about his writing (he was a great craftsman, she said, and he knew more about writing dialogue than anyone), about the conflict in Spain (“the Balkans of 1912”) and the situation in Europe (“war is nearer than even the pessimists thought”), and about the nature of storytelling (“In a writer this is imagination,” Martha asserted; “in anyone else it’s lying. That’s where the genius comes in”). She began calling him “Ernestino”; he called her “Daughter,” a moniker he frequently bestowed on women even slightly younger than himself, and one that seemed more than usually apt for Martha, who with her long blond bob and coltish limbs looked even less than twenty-eight.
The two of them cut a striking figure around the sleepy little fishing town, she in her Riviera resort clothes and he in his scruffy shorts and rope-soled shoes; and the effect wasn’t lost on Pauline Hemingway—or “Pauline cutie,” as Martha addressed her in her thank-you note, a salutation that must have set Mrs. Hemingway’s teeth on edge. “I suppose Ernest is
busy again helping Miss Gellhorn with her writing,” Pauline said drily to a friend who had remarked on Hemingway’s absence from some occasion. Once, Hemingway was driving Martha around the island and, seeing Pauline walking along the sidewalk, pulled over and told her to get into the car. “She was very grumpy,” Martha noticed, and affected not to know why.
But Pauline knew what had come into her and Hemingway’s perfectly constructed life. Later Hemingway himself described it: “the oldest trick there is … [A]n unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married … and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband.” Pauline cutie. Martha Gellhorn was the literary girl of the moment, with her sharp new book whose style was being compared with Hemingway’s; she was pretty, well educated, well connected (those White House overnights, those dinners with Colette, those sojourns chez H. G. Wells); and she was conversant, in a way no one else in their circle was, with the European political situation that Hemingway was more and more obsessed with. When the two of them started talking about the Spanish war, which Martha said she was “desperate” to experience at first hand, the possibility that Hemingway would actually go over to cover it—something Pauline was both politically and personally opposed to—became worryingly acute. Worse, the probability was extreme that he would act, perhaps was already acting, on his evident attraction for this new girl. “I’m a fool with women,” he confessed sheepishly to a friend in a conversation of which Martha was the subtext; “I always feel I have to marry ’em.”
And Martha? Martha herself was dangerously entranced. Hemingway’s attentions were so flattering that she couldn’t help boasting about them just a little in her letters to Mrs. Roosevelt. He had let her read his manuscript, and she’d been “smart” about it! Unlike the cerebral, even effete men she’d previously been involved with, he was a paradigm of machismo: seeing battle in Italy, steering his boat through hurricanes, running with the bulls in Pamplona, shooting sharks with machine guns. He didn’t just talk about his antifascist principles: he’d already put his money where his mouth was, paying the passage for two volunteers who were going to Spain to join the International Brigades, and borrowing $1,500 to buy ambulances for the Medical Bureau of the American Friends for Spanish Democracy. And now, when they discussed the news from Europe, he agreed with her (she told the First Lady, who must have wondered what to do with these confidences) that suddenly “there seemed terribly little time to do anything,” that they had to “work all day and all night and live too … and love as many people as one can find … and do all this terribly fast, because the time is getting shorter and shorter every day.”
When Martha finally left Key West for St. Louis, Hemingway—having somewhat hastily arranged a business trip to New York to talk to John Wheeler of NANA and also John Dos Passos and Archibald MacLeish, who had a Spanish film project they wanted to involve him in—followed her. They met up in Miami, where he took her out for a steak dinner and they boarded the northbound sleeper together. Although Martha changed trains along the route to go west, they stayed in close touch by mail and telephone: Hemingway, lonely for her and excited about the adventures he wanted them to have together, called her from New York, often several times a day. He’d decided to accept NANA’s offer to do reportage from Spain, and he thought he could help her get an assignment there too. Of course, there might be problems obtaining visas because of the non-intervention pact, which forbade civilian travel to Spain, but they could find ways around that.
Martha had finally found the fresh start she’d been yearning for, and she entered into these plans with gusto. “This is very private,” she said to Hemingway in a letter about their arrangements: “We are conspirators and I have personally got myself a beard and a pair of dark glasses. We will both say nothing and look strong.” Her pacifist novel was finished but on rereading it she was unhappy with the result and buried the manuscript in a desk drawer. She didn’t care about it, anyway—she had other things to do now. “Me, I am going to Spain with the boys,” she wrote to a friend. “I don’t know who the boys are, but I am going with them.”
PART II
“YOU NEVER HEAR THE ONE THAT HITS YOU”
January 1937: Madrid
A lot can change in a month. When Barea left the new capital of Valencia to come back to Madrid in mid-January, it wasn’t as a suspect, renegade temporary appointee of an emergency junta, but as the newly designated and official head of foreign press censorship, with Ilsa as his deputy. He and she—their liaison seemingly stamped with government approval—were to be given quarters in the Hotel Gran Via (no more camp beds in the press office), a raise in pay, and a living allowance; and they were whisked from Valencia in an official car with all safe-conducts and fuel vouchers laid on. Barea was mystified by this alteration in his circumstances; but apparently Rubio Hidalgo, fearful of potential competition from unknown Foreign Ministry appointees, had decided to back the devil he knew, and that was Barea.
Leaving the coast and driving north and west through the suddenly wintry hills, Barea found even the road transformed. The ragtag pickets and patrols that used to stand outside each village had disappeared, to be replaced by uniformed detachments of Assault Guards at the major crossroads; and as they neared Madrid their car passed convoys of trucks and tanks rolling toward the capital. In the Telefónica there were other differences: under Ilsa’s temporary tenure the journalists, and some of the foreign brigades, had begun to treat the censors’ office as a kind of clubhouse where they could exchange information, get letters mailed, and hear gossip, as well as receive hotel assignments, fuel vouchers, and passes for restricted areas of the front. Now, as Barea and Ilsa had dared to hope in the first hours of their meeting, the censorship seemed less an emergency news blackout than a machine for getting out information.
Everywhere, in fact, the impromptu crisis arrangements of the first months of siege had been superseded by more professional organization: instead of a city surprised by war, Madrid had become a city at war. The courtyard of the former Finance Ministry had been swept clean of the litter of old loan certificates and economic reports that had been dumped there when the government fled in November; now trucks and Russian tanks and official cars were parked on the paving stones, and in his office in the building’s underground bunker General Miaja, the Defense Junta chief, was less and less involved in the administration of the city because he had been made commander of a reorganized regular army corps charged with attacking the rebels on the city’s northwest front.
The paunchy, red-faced general still sped around Madrid in an armored motorcade, luxuriating in the adulation of the (mostly female) crowd—“¡Soy la vedette de Madrid!” (“I’m the star of Madrid!”), he told a visiting President Largo Caballero—but more and more the real power in the city seemed wielded by Vladimir Gorev, the Soviets’ special military attaché and Madrid station chief of the GRU, Russian military intelligence. Forty years old—he was the youngest general in the Red Army—tall, lean, with high cheekbones, thin lips, and pale blue eyes, Gorev took a dim view of the Spanish army’s commanders, and a dimmer one of Largo Caballero. The Loyalist prime minister, complained Gorev in the secret dispatches he sent, under his code name of SANCHO, to the GRU’s directorate, was “playing a complicated and dangerous political game, pandering to the anarchists” to “avoid strengthening the Communists.” If Moscow wanted to defeat the rebels, or just hold them indefinitely at bay, Gorev thought that he and his fellow advisors should break off official contact with the Red Army, which would free them to take greater control of the war effort since they wouldn’t be hindered by fear that their foreign military status might “dirty [their] laundry.”
During the time that Barea had been away in Valencia, Gorev had begun to show great interest in the work of the censorship office, and in the unflappable Austrian woman who was in temporary charge of it. He’d started sending for Ilsa in the early hours of the morning, after the correspo
ndents’ dispatches had been vetted and sent; he’d fill his pipe and settle back to talk with her about theories of propaganda, and about certain press coverage of the war in particular. Now that Barea was back in Madrid and in command, he started accompanying her to these late-night sessions, whether he was invited or not, and listening while Ilsa and Gorev talked—mostly in French, for Barea’s benefit, although the general spoke fluent English, the fruit of three years’ residence as an undercover operative in New York. Sometimes the Russian had explicit advice for the two censors, which he expected them to follow even though, strictly speaking, they didn’t work for him; but mostly he seemed to focus less on the content of the dispatches they had passed than on the question of Ilsa’s political allegiance. On the one hand he was puzzled that she’d renounced her Party membership (“I could not live without my Party membership card,” he told her); on the other, he was diverted by her feistiness and lack of orthodoxy. Barea he dismissed as a romantic, not worth bothering about. And Barea, on his side, was unsettled by the general’s watchfulness and air of steely determination. Not a man to cross.
He’d have felt more at ease with the general’s former aide José Robles Pazos, a Spaniard who for the past few years had been teaching in America, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The Republican black sheep of a well-connected conservative family, Robles had returned to Spain to offer his services to the Republic when war had broken out, and because he had a reading knowledge of Russian—and both he and the general spoke fluent English—he had seemed a useful temporary interpreter for Gorev, who spoke no Spanish, until an official replacement could be trained and sent from Moscow. Robles was both literate and literary, and before the war he’d been an initiate in the tertulias, the writers’ café discussions, around whose fringes Barea had hovered as a starstruck boy; one of his best friends in Spain, in fact, was Barea’s idol, the white-bearded novelist and playwright Ramón del Valle-Inclán. So the two of them would have had much to talk about; but although Robles had been working for Gorev when Barea took over the censorship, he’d been reassigned to Valencia by the time Barea returned to Madrid.
Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War Page 14