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

by Vaill, Amanda

  “A perfect recipe for a Fascist victory,” Dos Passos had remarked.

  “A Fascist victory,” Blair echoed, “and it won’t be the last.”

  These two conversations, with Nin and Blair, had made Dos Passos think, if he didn’t already, that there might be some justification for Oak’s paranoia; so after allowing Oak to spend the night on the sofa in his hotel room he’d agreed to help get him out of the country the next morning. By then Dos Passos himself had begun to feel jumpy—no one would try to stop him leaving, would they?—and it was a relief to both of them when, on the afternoon of the first, the Generalitat’s Hispano-Suiza rolled up to the douane at Cerbère, where the border guards gave their documents a few thwacks with an official stamp and let them through. At Perpignan, they parted: Dos Passos was going to meet his wife, Katy, in Antibes for a few days, and Oak was headed to Paris and thence to the United States. Dos never saw Oak again.

  Two days later Barcelona exploded.

  The trouble started when Barcelona’s police chief decided to take over the telephone exchange in the Plaza de Cataluña, which until then had been operated by the anarchist union CNT. Arriving at the telephone building with several truckloads of Assault Guards armed with rifles, the police chief was met by machine-gun fire from the entrenched workers within; then, as if at a signal, all the political organizations in the city pulled out the arms they’d cached away, and barricades went up all over town. Shopkeepers pulled down their shutters and unarmed citizens bolted the doors on their houses. For nearly a week the streets of Barcelona echoed with gunfire—“like a tropical rainstorm,” said Eric Blair, who spent much of that time standing guard on the roof of the Poliorama, a movie theater across the street from the POUM headquarters—as Assault Guards, who had been taken away from the Jarama front for the purpose, fired on the CNT and the POUM, and the CNT and POUM fired back. The commandant of the air force, Inigo Hidalgo de Cisneros, brought four squadrons of planes to a nearby airfield in case they were needed to reimpose order. By the time the government forces prevailed, five hundred people had been killed and a thousand wounded.

  Within days the Communists, prompted by Alexander Orlov’s NKVD officers, were blaming the events of the May Days on “Trotskyist-Fascist” agents provocateurs, with whom, it was charged, the POUM was riddled. The POUM was outlawed and its leaders arrested; and Prime Minister Largo Caballero, who resisted this step vigorously—how could you outlaw a working-class party without any proof of wrongdoing?—was forced to resign. Juan Negrín, the multilingual socialist finance minister who had negotiated the transfer of the Spanish gold reserves to Moscow (and whom the Communists, seeking a friendly but nonpartisan candidate, had already approached about taking on the job), became prime minister. And Andrés Nin was spirited out of Barcelona by the NKVD—some said by order of Alexander Orlov, still others that the directive came from Stalin himself—and taken to an interrogation center at Alcalá de Henares, where he was pressured to confess that he’d passed military secrets to the Nationalists. He refused. So he was removed to a nearby country house owned by Hidalgo de Cisneros, the air force chief who was married to Liston Oak’s Propaganda Ministry supervisor, Constancia de la Mora, and tortured to death.

  Like many of the “disappeared” on both sides of the war, Nin was buried, secretly, in an unmarked grave. But not before a grotesque pantomime was staged at the house where he died: a “rescue” by costumed soldiers carrying fake Nationalist and German documents and insignia which were left behind as “clues.” Mundo Obrero, the PCE’s newspaper, soon reported that Nin had been freed by Falangists and was in Burgos, now the Nationalist capital; and thereafter, when POUM sympathizers scrawled graffiti on walls demanding, “Where is Nin?” someone else would scribble slanderously underneath: “In Salamanca [the former rebel capital] or Berlin.”

  May 1937: Paris

  Hemingway got to Paris the day the shooting started in Barcelona, his passage from Spain smoothed by a chartered plane laid on by Álvarez del Vayo. Although he hoped to rendezvous with Martha before they each went home to the United States, they had to do it clandestinely—we will both wear long beards and look strong—because in Paris Hemingway was in the public eye again, the kind of public eye that saw things and reported them to Pauline.

  When he arrived he gave an interview to a gaggle of newspapermen—he hadn’t expected the war would last this long, he told them, he was going home to finish a novel, he would return to Spain when the “big war of movement” began in the summer—and on the ninth he delivered a speech about Spain to the Anglo-American Press Club. He had a meeting with the Spanish ambassador, Luis Araquistáin, about the Loyalist army’s medical needs. And in the time before he was to sail for New York he turned out two more dispatches for NANA. One, a charming series of portraits of the various chauffeurs he and Martha had had in Madrid, read almost like one of his short stories—closely observed, tightly constructed, funny in the way the best of his letters were funny, as if he were telling the story to you, to amuse and touch you. It was also (as another writer would one day point out) a not-so-subtle allegory of the Republic’s change of leadership, from common-man Tomás to the quixotic anarchist David to the solid “union man” Hipolito. The other dispatch was an armchair analysis of the military situation in Spain as he saw it, with a preamble comparing the civil war there to civil wars in the United States and Russia, and prognostications about where new fronts would develop and when. Hemingway’s money was on renewed fighting in the Jarama Valley, or maybe along the Guadalajara road; Franco, he said, “must attack and he must attack Madrid”—but, warned Hemingway, “Madrid is a deathtrap to any attacking force.”

  He sent the typed story by pouch to NANA on May 9, and can’t have been happy to get a return cable from NANA’s London office manager, H. J. J. Sargint, saying that the New York editors “ASK YOU UNSEND ADDITIONAL STORIES.” Whether NANA was considering the expense—this piece, which was mailed in typescript, would earn Hemingway $1,000 instead of the $500 he got for cabled dispatches, bringing his total for his Spanish reportage to $7,500, or just under $120,000 in 2012 dollars—or whether they were reluctant to publish another lecture on military strategy, they ended by spiking the story. It was just one more reason for Hemingway to dislike and distrust them.

  Meanwhile, with one article about Spain accepted by Collier’s for publication and another under consideration at The New Yorker, Martha was writing to John Gunther, the bestselling author of Inside Europe, with whom she’d indulged in a mild flirtation before her Spanish trip: “There are practically no words to describe Madrid, it was heaven, far and away the best thing I have ever seen or lived through … I want to do a book on Spain fast and I want to go back.” Neither she nor Hemingway mentioned, or seemed to notice, what was going on in Barcelona while they were in Paris. Apparently they both thought, as Martha would say years later, that the POUM and what happened to it were “irrelevant to the great drama of the war.”

  On May 11, Hemingway went to the Gare St. Lazare, where John and Katy Dos Passos were watching a porter load their luggage onto the boat train for Cherbourg, where they’d board the Berengaria, a Cunard liner that had seen better days, bound for Southampton and New York. They looked up as Hemingway came down the platform toward them, and if either of them felt pleased to see him—if they thought he’d just come to bid his good old friends bon voyage—the pleasure evaporated with the first words out of his mouth. “What are you going to do about this Robles business?” Hemingway asked Dos, sharply.

  “I’ll tell the truth as I see it,” Dos replied, in that soft-spoken way that made Hemingway angrier than shouting would have. “Right now I’ve got to straighten out my ideas. The question I keep putting to myself is, what’s the use of fighting a war for civil liberties, if you destroy civil liberties in the process?”

  “Civil liberties shit,” growled Hemingway. “Are you with us or against us?” Dos Passos shrugged at this, and Hemingway balled up his fist as if he were goi
ng to punch his friend in the face.

  A whistle blew and the trainman came down the platform, calling out “En voiture, messieurs-dames!” Hemingway took a breath and let his arms fall to his sides. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said to Dos Passos in a cold, hard voice. “These people”—he meant New York book reviewers—“these people know how to turn you into a back number. I’ve seen them do it. And what they did once they can do again.”

  “Why, Ernest,” said his old girlfriend, now Dos’s wife, “I’ve never heard anything so despicably opportunistic in my life.” Hemingway said nothing, but turned and headed out of the station without looking back.

  The next evening he returned to his and Dos’s old haunt from a decade ago, Sylvia Beach’s English-language bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, where he and Stephen Spender, also newly returned from Spain, were to give a joint reading. Spender was in the process of being purged from the Communist Party for speaking out against the severe treatment meted out by the Loyalists to party “deviants,” among them his own lover, Tony Hyndman, who had deserted from the International Brigades; and some of the poems he read that evening sounded a note of disillusion with la causa, or at least with the idea of the war. Hemingway, who didn’t know anything about Spender’s romance and would have despised him if he had, read from his as-yet-unfinished Harry Morgan novel, in which Morgan, the narrator, breaks the neck of the Chinese refugee-smuggler, Mr. Sing, and drops him overboard in the Gulf. “What did you kill him for?” a companion asks, and Morgan answers, “To keep from killing twelve other chinks.”

  After the reading Hemingway went to the Select, in Montparnasse, with a handful of journalist friends including George and Helen Seldes. Over the boudin noir he groused to Seldes, “I had to go to Spain before you liberal bastards would believe I was on your side.”

  The following morning, alone, he left for New York on the Normandie.

  May 1937: Bilbao

  Because of the Nationalist blockade, the safest way to get to Bilbao was to fly in from Biarritz, to the east across the French border. Even that wasn’t foolproof; the rebels said they would shoot at French planes, and the consulate in St. Jean de Luz took them at their word. But there didn’t seem to be any alternatives, so when Capa at last got his assignments from Ce Soir and Regards to cover the Basque front, and the passes and reentry papers that came with them, he went to Biarritz and found a plane whose pilot said he could get him to Sondika, the airfield just outside Bilbao.

  By now the Nationalist lines had moved westward along the coast from San Sebastian almost as far as the postcard-pretty fishing village of Bermeo, just twenty-two miles from Bilbao, so the pilot set his course over the Bay of Biscay to avoid their guns, then banked south and flew high over the bare, scrub-covered hills—who knew where the front was today?—before dropping down onto the field at Sondika. Capa clambered out of the plane carrying an Eyemo movie camera, a rugged 35-millimeter that carried 100 feet of film, in addition to his still cameras. Maybe on the Basque front he’d be able to shoot some usable footage for MGM News, as he hadn’t been able to in Madrid in April.

  Bilbao—its residents affectionately if scatalogically nicknamed it el botxo, the hole—turned out to be a grimy industrial city, sprawling across the banks of the Rio Nervión where it flowed into the Bay of Biscay, surrounded by the chemical and steel works that brought it wealth as well as clouds of smog and soot. In peacetime the docks that lined the estuary had bustled with stevedores heaving ingots and crates onto the ships in Spain’s largest and busiest port; but today the cargo waiting to be boarded was children. As Nationalist troops came closer to the optimistically named “iron ring” of fortifications around Bilbao (whose blueprints had been smuggled to them in March by a disaffected Basque officer) and German bombers swept over the city as well as the Basque villages in the surrounding hills, British and French rescue organizations were arranging the evacuation of 22,000 children from the war zone; and today, May 5, a handful of rusty ships, the French freighter Carimare, the Spanish liner Habana, and others, were preparing to receive a number of them.

  In a tree-shaded square near the port a group of men, most in uniform, clustered around a notice detailing when and how the evacuations would be carried out; closer to the quays a line of women and children, dressed in somber black as if in mourning for what the war had done to them, waited to be told which group of evacuees they belonged in. Capa raised his camera, shot: as he did so, a solemn little girl, a white-clad apparition in the black line, tuned around and regarded him gravely from under her dark bangs, sucking her thumb. He went on. At the dock was an enormous crowd—men, women, and children—waiting to board tenders for the ships, or to kiss their loved ones goodbye. The Bilbainos were prosperous—one woman sported a luxurious fur collar, while the little girl next to her at the barrier was clutching a fur scarf as well as her proper English-style coat—and orderly; there were tears, but they were bitten back, dignified. In Madrid, Regler had said, Capa made himself tough to do his job; the job here was different, but it required just as much toughness.

  The next day Capa headed out of Bilbao to Mount Solluve, twenty miles to the northeast, where Basque Loyalists were dug in on the heights above Bermeo. German aircraft had been pounding the mountain since dawn, and the Nationalists’ general, Emilio Mola, had just brought in North African troops, the first ever deployed in the Basque country, to break through the Loyalist line. The North Africans were finding the spiky gorse bushes that covered the slopes made for hard going, and Mola had ordered a unit of Italian tanks to spearhead the attack, but the Basques had rolled logs across the road to stop them.

  Capa attached himself to a group of Loyalist infantrymen and dinamiteros defending positions on the mountain, some in stone farmhouses they had turned into improvised fortresses, some out in the open. It was cold for early May, and the soldiers were wearing gloves and woolen caps or leather helmets as they waited in the piney scrub for the tanks and trucks to come. At intervals they had to dive for cover as the German Heinkels and Junkers swooped low over the mountain, spraying machine-gun bullets at the trenches. Then came the grinding of gears as a staff car and a battered pickup truck rumbled along the road and stopped at the improvised barricade. From their hiding place by the side of the road the dinamiteros hurled grenades at the car, and the other soldiers opened fire. Capa got no shot of the attack, but he did get photographs of the soldiers walking out of cover to inspect their handiwork, and remove any useful supplies from the truck.

  Elsewhere other dinamiteros, with the help of an antiaircraft gun trucked in from Bilbao, were able to destroy a number of tanks, so that by nightfall the mountain—and its commanding position on the route to Bilbao—remained in Basque hands. But not all its defenders were lucky. Capa photographed one of the unfortunate ones, lying facedown in the coarse grass, and then, with his borrowed Eyemo, filmed a nearly identical shot. The only difference between the two was the contrast in the film footage between the motionless form of the dead man and the stalks of grass waving gently above him in the dusk.

  As darkness drew in, Capa left Mount Solluve in a big black Packard, the driver riding the accelerator all along the pitted road to the airfield at Sondika. There, a French plane like the one Capa had come in on—maybe even the very same one—was disgorging another load of passengers, one of them the tall, black-haired American newsman Jay Allen. Allen took in Capa’s grimy raincoat, the cameras dangling around his neck, and he saw the photographer thrust a package containing his film into the pilot’s hand. He heard the words Regards and urgent; then the plane roared off into the night. And Allen and the others got into the Packard with Capa and rode back into Bilbao.

  It wasn’t until a few days later, though, that Allen and Capa formally introduced themselves. Allen was an intrepid journalist, an old friend of Hemingway’s from prewar Madrid, the first man to interview Franco after the mutiny, the man who’d been smuggled in on the floor of a car to report the massacre at Badajoz at the beg
inning of the war; and for his pains he’d been fired by his pro-Nationalist employer, Colonel Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. He’d been freelancing since then, but had just been engaged by David Smart, the editor of Esquire, to help create a new “insider’s” newsmagazine, called Ken, for which he was gathering material in Bilbao. Like most reporters, he was wary of cameramen: they were grandstanders, he thought, who didn’t do the same kind of work real journalists did. Or he thought so until he found himself standing next to Capa on a busy street when the air raid sirens sent out the four short blasts that meant aircraft approaching. The crowds dispersed in panic, women clutching the hands of their children as they ran toward the nearest shelters. Capa stayed in the open, his camera trained on the figures and faces of the terrified civilians, chronicling what happens when ordinary men and women and children know they are in the enemy’s crosshairs. Only when a policeman with a rifle forced him into a bunker did he leave the street. And Allen recognized a kindred spirit.

  Over the next week Capa photographed more air raids, including one that turned the city’s petrol depot into a holocaust of flame and smoke; he shadowed the women sifting through the city’s refuse heaps in search of fuel; he watched the children and their mothers resting on sandbags in between enemy sorties, the black-clad grandmothers sitting on a bench and weeping at the news contained in the paper one of them held in her hand. It was grim but to him necessary work.