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

by Vaill, Amanda

  On May 15 the journalists remaining in the city were told to evacuate: the airfield had to be closed, and only one more plane would leave for Biarritz. The correspondents flocked to Sondika to get on board—all except Capa, who wanted to stay behind and document the fall of the city. Keeping only one Leica, he gave the rest of his equipment and all his exposed film to the Yiddish journalist S. L. Schneiderman, Chim’s brother-in-law, asking him to get it to Paris safely.

  But although the enemy was just outside the Iron Ring, and the Loyalist forces were all withdrawing within it, Bilbao didn’t fall. In fact, feelers were being extended to the Catholic Basques by the Pope, who hoped to arrange a separate peace between them and Franco. Without waiting to see what the result of such negotiations might be, Capa decided to run the blockade in a fishing boat. The little vessel put out to sea on the night of the seventeenth and safely skirted both the mines at the mouth of Bilbao’s harbor and the waiting ships, arriving in Bayonne on the eighteenth. Within days, Capa was back at the rue Froidevaux—but except for Csiki Weisz and a telegram from Gerda, the studio was empty. Gerda was in Valencia.

  May 1937: Madrid

  On May 1, the Madrid Foreign Press and Censorship Department moved from the Telefónica to the Foreign Ministry in the Palacio de Santa Cruz, near the Plaza Mayor, a massive stone-and-brick pile whose iron-barred windows made the building seem like a fortress. The Telefónica had become untenable—the correspondents had already insisted on moving the transmission room from its upper floors to the basement—and for Barea, now overcome with terror at every loud noise, it was torture. In the days before the move he’d been feverish, racked with convulsive nausea, and unable to cross the shell-racked Gran Via to the censorship; silent and shaking, he’d sat in a darkened corner of the hotel doing office busywork, leaving the transfer of all the censorship papers and files to Ilsa.

  The day after the move, a shell sailed through the windows of the deserted office and exploded in front of Ilsa’s old desk.

  The nightmare of what might have been tormented Barea. Unable to work, eat, or sleep, he went to see the ministry doctor, who prescribed an opiate that knocked him out but gave him hallucinations, horrifying visions of disintegrating bodies accompanied by the sensations of falling and being torn apart. When he awoke at last, trembling and drenched with sweat, he resolved to stay away from drugs: but that single dose, or maybe the experience of the past few weeks, had changed him. He felt both clearer about and more removed from the work he had been doing. And as he’d done in the aftermath of the Gran Via shelling a week earlier, he began to write. Instead of a phantasmagoria of apocalyptic images, however, what came out of his typewriter was a simple, unvarnished tale, told in the colloquial voice of Barea’s Lavapiés barrio, of a trench-bound miliciano who stays at his post for increasingly absurd reasons. Although Ilsa had been horrified by that earlier effort at fiction, she was moved by this one, and something at last clicked into place for him: he could exorcise his inchoate feelings by writing them down, giving form to them in fiction.

  Certainly he had to find some outlet for them, and the safer, the better. For now came the news of the events in the streets of Barcelona—and, Barea thought, All of us who stood at the barricades in November had better keep our thoughts to ourselves. Especially when those thoughts took the turn his were now taking. Dos Passos, who’d sat and talked with him in his office in the Telefónica, had understood what gnawed at the corners of his and Ilsa’s minds: it wasn’t just the shelling, Dos Passos said, it was “a fear that tortured every man or woman who was doing responsible work … They were being watched.” And the watchers didn’t like men like him to have doubts.

  But Barea had begun to doubt. Yes, he thought, the war had been started by a cabal of stiff-necked generals who’d joined forces with a reactionary elite to put the brakes on any progressive developments in the country; and yes, he and others like him had joined the fight against the generals to defend their dreams of a true republic of the people. But when outside aid started coming in, from Germany and Italy on one side and Russia on the other, this civil conflict between the forces of change and the forces of reaction had been transmogrified into something else. Suddenly Spain’s war had become an experimental exercise—which will prevail, fascism or socialism? Whose weapons are stronger, Germany’s or Russia’s?—that the rest of the world was watching with interest. Or worse: for although the powers-that-be in Europe and America hoped militant fascism might be weakened by the war, they actively didn’t want the Russian Communists and their de facto protégées, the Spanish government, to win it—that would make communism too powerful.

  We’re condemned in advance, Barea thought. We can’t win, but we have to fight. Maybe we’ll be saved if an antifascist war starts in Europe; maybe all we can do is carry on and give the other countries time to arm themselves. Either way, we pay in blood.

  It was a bleak and terrible epiphany. And it made him, and Ilsa, vulnerable in ways he could not then begin to imagine.

  * * *

  Sometimes, during this strange spring, Barea’s old friend Angel would come to visit during his furloughs from military duty, bringing with him some of the awkward, illiterate boys who fought alongside him in the trenches at Carabanchel. Holding out a threadbare, mud-spattered copy of the poems of the martyred Federico García Lorca, he would ask Barea, who had loved the poetry of Lorca since his youth, to read to them. And Barea would repeat Lorca’s chilling lines about the officers of the Guardia Civil, dark-cloaked specters on iron-shod black horses, or his poem about the Andalusian olive orchard that was alive with birdsong. “That’s right,” cried a boy from Jaén, who’d worked in the olive groves before he’d run away to join the militia. “The olive trees are full of cries and calls. The thrushes come in flocks and eat the olives and make a great noise … Go on.” Eagerly he waited for Barea to continue.

  That boy, thought Barea, had starved working in those orchards, orchards that belonged to someone else; now he was fighting for them. And Lorca, by the power of his words, had given those gray-green, bird-thronged olive trees to him. Forever.

  May 1937: Valencia

  When Capa left Paris for Bilbao, Gerda intended to travel to Catalonia, where one of her old SAP friends from Germany, Herbert Frahm, who’d been living in exile in Norway under the name Willy Brandt, was working as a liaison between the SAP and the POUM. Possibly he’d hoped to get her to do a photo session with Andrés Nin; maybe he had no agenda other than a meeting with a former comrade. On her side, she might have been looking forward to a chance to commiserate about what was going on in Germany, where her family, having lost both their business and their home, had been forced to emigrate to Yugoslavia. But by the time Gerda crossed the border the May Days had erupted and Brandt was on the run after trying to mediate between the government and the POUM. In hiding he ran across Eric Blair, the POUM militiaman who’d been so eager to talk to John Dos Passos; and Blair tried to persuade him to flee to England. But Brandt thought he’d be better able to fight fascism from Norway; he went back to Oslo.

  And Gerda, who might have found Barcelona hostile territory herself these days, went south, first to the wide, wildflower-spattered fields around Los Blazquez, northeast of Córdoba, where Alfred Kantorowicz, whom she’d met in February in Valencia, had been sent as information officer of the Chapaiev Battalion. Finding no action there, however, she retraced her steps to Valencia—and there the war caught up with her.

  At dusk on May 14, a wave of Nationalist planes rolled in from the sea and dipped low over the city, spraying it with bombs; the attack continued through the night and into the next day. A number of buildings were destroyed or damaged, including the British Embassy, and men, women, and children were killed and injured. By morning the toll stood at thirty dead and at least fifty wounded; and Gerda Taro, not content to photograph the wreckage-strewn streets and eviscerated apartment houses she’d taken too many pictures of in her short career, took her camera to the city mo
rgue.

  Somehow she argued her way past the guards at the gates; once through she stopped, turned back, and photographed the crowd pressed against the iron railings, sweeping her camera back and forth to capture the panorama of anxiety and grief she saw there. Then she went inside. There, on marble slabs, on the tiled floor, or laid out on makeshift beds of wooden stools placed next to one another, were the bloodied, broken bodies of the dead. A man in his business suit, blood pooling under his bald head; a black-clad woman, one arm flung up as if in sleep; a little girl with her bare legs akimbo. She and Capa had both come to Spain searching for—what? Romance? Excitement? Pathos? Danger? This is what she had found. Walking up and down between the rows of corpses, stepping carefully to avoid the puddled blood and stained sheets and tangled limbs, Gerda looked into the face of death; quietly, unsensationally, almost lovingly, she documented it. “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,” Capa used to say; that day Gerda was very close indeed.

  Afterward she went to the hospital where the survivors of the attack were being cared for. There she took pictures of the injured—despite his wounds, one young man, flanked pietà-like by his mother and his wife or sweetheart, glanced up at the pretty blond photographer and managed a faint smile for her—but after what she’d seen at the morgue she seemed barely able to click her shutter.

  Later she encountered a Danish reporter she knew from Madrid, Ole Vinding, the son of Politiken’s Andreas Vinding. The younger Vinding, whom the other journalists rather meanly referred to as the “Trembling Dane,” had been traumatized in Madrid, first by seeing a child killed in a bombardment and then, when Kajsa Rothman took him to Chicote’s to restore his morale with whiskey, by watching one soldier shoot another at point-blank range in a bar fight. Barea, as a fellow sufferer from combat nerves, had tried giving Vinding a pep talk; but finally he’d given up, and Vinding had left Madrid, hitching a ride to Valencia with Virginia Cowles and Sidney Franklin. Now he was flying back to Paris, couldn’t wait to get on the plane, actually; so Gerda gave her exposed film to him, and asked him to take it to Capa at the rue Froidevaux studio. She sent Capa a telegram: She wanted the Valencia and Córdoba photos she’d given to Vinding printed on ExtraDur Kodak photo paper, and would Capa please bring floodlights and reflectors for the movie camera when he came to Valencia? Also coffee and chocolate. Apparently the horrors she’d witnessed had only made her ready for more.

  June 1937: New York

  On the night of June 4, Carnegie Hall’s pillared galleries were packed with 3,500 people—another 1,000 had been turned away at the door—for the opening of the second congress of the League of American Writers, an earnest politico-cultural powwow about “the writer and fascism” that had been transformed into a must-see event by its headline attraction, the screening of footage from Joris Ivens and Ernest Hemingway’s new film, The Spanish Earth, and by a promised address from Hemingway himself.

  Hemingway had returned from Spain on May 18; and when Pauline had received the wire announcing his arrival date she’d thrown an impromptu dinner party on the patio in Key West from which the last guest left at 4 a.m. “Now I am cold sober,” she’d written to her husband the next day, “and missing you as much as ever.” He’d gone directly from the French Line dock to Key West, and thence, in the Pilar, to Bimini (Pauline and the boys flew from Miami); and Pauline hoped he’d settle back into his old routines—writing, fishing in the Gulf Stream in the summer, hunting in Wyoming in the early fall, then home to Key West. “I am sick and tired of all this,” she’d told him when he was in Spain; “I wish you were here sleeping in my bed and using my bathroom and drinking my whiskey.” But Hemingway had other plans.

  There was The Spanish Earth, for which Ivens had sent him a mission statement to edit; Hemingway cut it by half, although he kept its polemical tone: “We fight for the right to irrigate and cultivate this Spanish Earth which the nobles kept idle for their own amusement.” As soon as they had a rough cut of the film Ivens would want him to come to New York and work on the voice-over script; certainly neither of them had any intention of letting Dos Passos reinvolve himself in it, despite MacLeish’s rather timid request that they do so.

  There was Martha, who had sailed from France on the Lafayette and announced bracingly to the reporters who met her at dockside on May 23, “The Loyalists will win in Spain simply because they have an apparently unlimited supply of guts.” She’d seemingly waltzed from the pier straight to the publishing offices of William Morrow and Company, because on the basis of her month in Madrid she’d already negotiated a contract for a book on Spain, to be published in the fall, in which—said The New York Times—she’d use “the same technique” she’d employed in The Trouble I’ve Seen to “show what the millions of common men and women are thinking and doing in Spain.” When not writing she’d been working with Ivens on the film in New York, and peppering Hemingway with anodyne notes, addressed to “Hemingstein” and signed “Gellhauser,” that were designed to pass inspection if they fell into Pauline’s hands.

  And finally there was the congress of the League of American Writers, which he’d rashly agreed to address. An organization of left-leaning intellectuals whose members ranged from socially conscious liberals such as Archibald MacLeish, William Carlos Williams, and John Steinbeck to more committed leftists such as Josephine Herbst, Lillian Hellman, and even Earl Browder, the general secretary of the American Communist Party, the League was one of a number of Popular Front initiatives that sought to promote the cause of democracy against fascism. Its actual membership—you were supposed to actually be a writer to join—wasn’t large, but its appeal was broad. And a speech about the situation in Spain at its opening session would bring the issue of Spanish self-determination the kind of visibility no money could buy. Hemingway hated public speaking—he’d choked up just reading to the gang at Shakespeare and Company—but he said he’d go.

  New York was experiencing a day of premature summer heat when he landed at Newark Airport. For some reason he’d chosen to wear a tweed suit—perhaps to coordinate with Martha, whom he picked up on his way to the theater, and who was wrapped in her silver foxes—and as he stood in the wings the combination of the heavy fabric and whatever alcohol he’d consumed beforehand made him sweat heavily. Out in the audience and on the stage a throng of New York intellectuals waited, like seals at feeding time: Archie MacLeish, Gerald and Sara Murphy, the journalists John Gunther, Walter Duranty, Joseph North, and Vincent Sheean, the critics Van Wyck Brooks and Carl Van Doren, the playwrights and screenwriters Marc Connelly, Thornton Wilder, and Donald Ogden Stewart, the novelist Dawn Powell. John Dos Passos wasn’t among them; nor was the former secretary of the League of American Writers, Liston Oak, who had resigned from the organization on his return from Spain.

  The evening had opened with speeches by Earl Browder (brief, serious) and Donald Ogden Stewart (longer, funnier) about the role of writers in the struggle against fascism. Then Ivens stepped forward to introduce the clips from The Spanish Earth. “Maybe it is a little strange,” he said, in his slightly awkward English, “to have at a writers’ congress a moving picture, but … this picture is made on the same front where I think every honest author ought to be.” The clips were run without sound, so as footage of the Morata air raid and shelling in University City flickered on the screen, Ivens kept up a running commentary—“At this point you would hear machine guns”—to fill in what was missing.

  Shortly after 10 p.m. came the main event, when, as Dawn Powell somewhat acidly described it to Dos Passos later, “all the foreign correspondents marched on, each one with his private blonde, led by Ernest and Miss Gellhorn, who had been through hell in Spain and came shivering on in a silver fox cape chin-up.” Hemingway’s face was shining with sweat, his glasses were fogged, and he kept tugging at his tie as if it were choking him; but when Archie MacLeish, the master of ceremonies, introduced him, he bounded to the podium like a prizefighter. The hall thundered with appl
ause. Without waiting for it to die down, Hemingway launched into his speech.

  He began by framing what he said was “the writer’s problem”: “how to write truly and having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes part of the experience of the person who reads it.” This kind of writing, this kind of truth, was impossible under fascism, he said, because “fascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live under fascism.”

  Part of what they were all fighting for in Spain was the truth, he said, and to do that, to “quell” the bullies, they had to “thrash … the bully of fascism.” And by God, they were doing it. “In this war, since the middle of November,” Hemingway said, in the cadences of a politician or a revival preacher, the fascists “have been beaten at the Parque del Oeste, they have been beaten at the Pardo, they have been beaten at Carabanchel, they have been beaten at Jarama, they have been beaten at Brihuega, and at Córdoba, and they are being fought to a standstill at Bilbao.” That most of these victories were in fact failures seemed not to occur to him, or at least not to trouble him. Because what he was here for, regardless of all the fine talk about truth, was to dare the writers sitting in Carnegie Hall to rally to his cause.

  “It is very dangerous to write the truth in war,” he warned, “and whether the truth is worth some risk to come by, the writers must decide for themselves. Certainly it is more comfortable to spend their time disputing learnedly on points of doctrine.” Such ivory-tower esthetes, he sneered, could sit on the sidelines if they liked; “but there is now and there will be from now on for a long time, war for any writer who wants to study it … When men fight for the freedom of their country against a foreign invasion, and when those men are your friends … you learn, watching them live and fight and die, that there are worse things than war.”