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

by Vaill, Amanda

  * * *

  Although Herbert Matthews was reporting to The New York Times that the reorganized Loyalist army was becoming “stronger and stronger with the passing of time”—indeed, had to be considered “a powerful fighting force by any standard, especially if it came to a question of mere defensive warfare”—his confidence, and Hemingway’s, wasn’t completely shared by the Spanish government. Its former prime ministers, Azaña and Giral, and the current war minister, Prieto, were weary and pessimistic, afraid of what would happen if the Nationalists won the war, as it now appeared they might. (Prieto, in fact, had tried to resign, and had contemplated suicide, after the fall of Bilbao.) On October 21 the rebel army entered Gijón, completing the Nationalist conquest of the north, and initiating a bloody purge of thousands of government soldiers and sympathizers; days earlier, the Loyalist commanders and most of the Russian advisors had fled by plane, except for General Gorev, who had insisted on staying behind and who was now reported to be in hiding somewhere in the Asturian hills. What was next—Catalonia? Before that happened, wouldn’t it be better to negotiate peace with the rebels now and protect those who had stuck by the Republic? The wavering Loyalist ministers couldn’t know that Hitler had recently alarmed his inner circle by declaring, “We are most interested in the continuance of the war”—and that Spain’s nominal supporter, Stalin, had just said much the same thing. Or that Franco, in a memorandum to the Italian ambassador, had committed himself to the painful ritual purification of what he considered a contaminated country:

  I will occupy Spain town by town, village by village … [T]his civil war could still last another year or two, perhaps three. Dear ambassador, I can assure you that I am not interested in territory, but in inhabitants. The reconquest of the territory is the means, the redemption of the inhabitants the end. I cannot shorten the war by even one day …

  Prime Minister Negrín—whom Martha Gellhorn described to Eleanor Roosevelt as “a brilliant gay lazy man with strong beliefs and perhaps too much sense of humor … who surely never wanted to be prime minister”—was as much in the dark as Prieto and Giral, but more optimistic. He felt if he could just turn the tide of public opinion abroad in the government’s favor, he could negotiate for peace from a position of strength. In the meantime he was pursuing his vision of a democratic dictatorship “which would prepare the people for the future,” ruling more by decree than by consensus. And when he unilaterally decided to move the seat of government from Valencia to Barcelona—ostensibly to shore up Catalonia and ensure its supplies of manufactured goods for the Republic, but also to strengthen his control over it—it must have seemed more like dictatorship and less like democracy, at least to the dismayed Catalan authorities and the dissenters in his own government.

  Negrín had done something more ominous than move the government to Barcelona, though. Although he claimed to feel uneasy about the political purges that were convulsing Moscow (“This will do us a lot of harm,” he told his frequent confidant, the American journalist Louis Fischer), Negrín had created a purge instrument of his own: a powerful central security and counterespionage organization, the Servicio de Información Militar, or SIM. Established during the summer, the new service already had a network of thousands of agents, a payroll in the millions of pesetas, and a system of secret prisons and interrogation centers that would have been familiar to anyone who had any experience with the Soviet NKVD. In fact, it was partly staffed by NKVD officers. And one of them, sent from Prague to Barcelona in September with orders to “discover the possible ramifications of an international ring of spies and agents provocateurs,” was Leopold Kulcsar.

  * * *

  There was a man waiting to see Barea when he arrived at his office—a young, raw-boned Prussian Communist who called himself Felix Albin. Years later, under his real name, Kurt Hager, he would become the chief propagandist, or chefideologe, of the East German Politburo; today he carried an official letter informing Barea that he was relieved of his duties as radio commissioner and censor, effective immediately. These duties, the letter went on, would now be performed by Comrade Albin, who would also preapprove the texts of any and all broadcasts by the Unknown Voice of Madrid.

  Barea was only partly surprised when, within days of Albin’s arrival, the Unknown Voice’s radio talks were canceled. But he was both shocked and alarmed when, early one morning while Ilsa was still in bed, two police agents came to search her and Barea’s room at the Reina Victoria. Manuscripts, letters, photographs, Barea’s pistol and gun permit, and his autographed copy of Dos Passos’s 42nd Parallel—the work of a known Trotskyist, the agents muttered—all were dumped out onto the carpet and confiscated. The agents hinted that someone had denounced Ilsa; but in the end nothing could be found among their papers to make any accusation stick. She and Barea were free, for now at least; but they were under no illusions that things would ever return to normal, whatever that was. If there was a list of those under suspicion, they were on it—why, they didn’t know. Friends told them to get out of Madrid while they still could, go somewhere, anywhere, and lay low; but Barea couldn’t bring himself to take that step. Madrid was his home, it was what he knew and loved. It was also the source of his thinking and writing, the stories he had only just begun to tell and wanted to keep on telling. How could he leave? And yet, seeing the fear and pain in Ilsa’s eyes every day, how could he stay?

  Improbably, he sought counsel from a priest—but not just any priest, and not in a church. Strong-featured, with prematurely white hair, bright black eyes beneath dark brows, and a grizzled walrus mustache, Leocadio Lobo didn’t wear a cassock, or even a dog collar, but went about in an old, somewhat shiny dark suit and a tie. In the days before the war he had been a pastor to the poor, and after the rebellion broke out he had chosen to stay loyal to the government and to minister—even when it was dangerous to be a priest—to anyone who wanted to receive the Sacraments. He’d risked his life in the trenches alongside the milicianos; now, when the government had renewed the licenses of loyal priests, he was working for the Ministry of Justice to investigate cases of hardship among the clergy.

  He lived in the Victoria, and soon after Ilsa and Barea had moved in there he’d begun joining their table at lunch or dinner. Although Barea had made a point of telling him he was no longer a practicing Catholic, and was divorced and living with a woman not his wife, Father Lobo had been unimpressed; Barea and Ilsa were his friends, and that was that. Now he listened patiently over cups of weak ersatz coffee as Barea poured out his conflicted feelings. Only when the torrent of words stopped did he say anything at all, and then he was both tough and compassionate. What was Barea whining about? he asked. He wanted everyone to be as good and idealistic as he was, so things would be easy for him. Well, they weren’t, and if he wanted to stand up for his ideals, he’d better get used to it. As for Barea’s relationship with Ilsa, it had hurt people, and Barea was right to regret this; but their love was also an example to others of what was possible, and he should rejoice in that. And yes, the war was brutal and painful and destructive; but it had taught people what they could do if they tried—it had shaken them out of paralysis and into action. Even in this evil there was good. So. “We all have our work to do, so do yours instead of talking about the world which doesn’t follow you,” he said. “Talk and write down what you think you know, what you have seen and thought, tell it honestly and speak the truth. Let the others hear and read you, so that they are driven to tell their truth, too. And then you’ll lose that pain of yours.”

  Then he turned to Ilsa. She was a fish out of water in Madrid, he told her; she was too intelligent, she knew and talked to too many people, in Spain and abroad, for anyone in Spain to trust her. “We aren’t used to intelligent women yet,” he said. “You can’t help being what you are, so you must go away with Arturo because he needs you and you belong together. You will want to work. So go away.”

  She looked at him out of her big green eyes. “Yes, I know,” she responded.


  * * *

  On November 7, the anniversary of the International Brigades’ arrival in Madrid—and also, according to Russia’s Gregorian calendar, of the October Revolution—the weather was raw and blustery, the sky an even dove gray. At the old mill at Ambite, which was the Fifteenth Brigade headquarters, an hour’s drive southeast of Madrid, a festive lunch had been laid on for officers and visiting dignitaries: Robert Merriman, James Benet, nephew of the American poet Stephen Vincent Benet, the African American poet Langston Hughes, Herbert Matthews, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn.

  Despite the abundance of red wine and the fire blazing in the mill’s ornate tiled hearth, Martha was glad of her long woolen underwear as she sat through the toasts and speeches, and particularly afterward when they all had to line up in the courtyard for photographs to mark the occasion. On his way outdoors Hemingway stopped to comb his hair and remove his glasses, then stood, smiling, with the others as shutters snapped and someone filmed the proceedings with a movie camera. When all the posing was done, he and Martha walked to one of the waiting automobiles—Hemingway pausing to put his glasses on again—and then drove back to town.

  Things were merrier in Madrid, where the buildings were draped with banners and the trams and automobiles sported the Republican and Soviet colors. There was a big parade through the streets of the city, featuring a float on which rode the bear of Madrid, sitting on a model of Franco’s head, with the inscription, “Long live Madrid, the capital of the world.” That evening the Russians gave a party at Gaylord’s, where the Pravda correspondent, Boleslavskaya, a plump, maternal woman whose sharp eyes missed little, and Werner Heilbrun’s widow, Ailmuth, were dressed up in national costumes and the Bulgarian general Petrov, Soviet advisor to the Twelfth Brigade, was dancing with another man. Koltsov, and the Spanish commanders Modesto and Durán, flirted with Martha, to Hemingway’s annoyance, and everyone drank a lot of vodka. Then Koltsov changed into a traditional Russian overblouse and breeches, and they all went on to the Alianza, where Maria Teresa Léon and Rafael Alberti, not to be outdone, went upstairs and put on their own Russian costumes. Everyone drank a lot more, and sang, and danced sardanas, and it was three in the morning before the guests went home.

  The next day was Martha’s twenty-ninth birthday, and after she woke, somewhat the worse for wear, at one in the afternoon, Matthews gave her a huge basket of flowers and pulled together a lavish feast of caviar, pâté en croûte, Christmas pudding, and ham, to which Hemingway added bottles of Champagne and Chateau d’Yquem. She didn’t feel very celebratory, however; she’d just heard that the word was out in the United States about her relationship with Hemingway, and she dreaded the consequences for Pauline, for Hemingway, and for her own mother. Once again, it seemed, she’d found herself being the other kind of woman, just as her father had said.

  Anomie enveloped her like the November damp. With nothing happening she filled her days with shopping—ordering clothes from the dressmaker and tailor and furrier—and trips to the hairdresser, where hairs in the sink and used wads of varnish-stained cotton filled her with revulsion. “I am wasting everything and I am only twenty-nine,” she lamented to her journal. Going to the Victoria with the script for a radio broadcast that had to be approved by Albin, the new radio censor, she learned that Barea and Ilsa had made plans to leave Madrid, something that saddened and surprised her. When she’d first come to the city Ilsa had been “the power here,” the one who had showed her the ropes; now, although nothing had been proved against her, she was running away for reasons Martha didn’t want to guess at.

  Martha brought her a book as a parting present, and the two women, so seemingly unalike, sat and talked. Ilsa, Martha sensed, was “exhausted, nervous, and still immeasurably proud and dangerous in some way.” Where will you go, Martha asked her; what will you do? Ilsa said they would go to Alicante, on the coast; the mother of their friend Father Lobo had a place for them. There they would write, and wait. “Wait for what?” Martha didn’t say aloud, but thought; “and will Arturo stay and what does she hold him with except terror.” Make it work or make it end now.

  Ilsa wanted some practical literary advice, which Martha happily gave her, both of them solemnly pretending this was a normal conversation that professional women anywhere might have about editors and submissions and contracts. And then they said goodbye.

  The next evening, it was time for another farewell. Koltsov, who had been so high-spirited and flirtatious at the anniversary party, told her and Hemingway that the day before the party he’d received notice from Moscow: he was being recalled, effective immediately. Although his articles for Pravda, including one claiming that Andrés Nin was not dead, but had been spirited away by friendly Gestapo agents, had all hewed to the Party line, he knew how little protection that was these days. He’d got his mistress, Maria Osten, a job as the correspondent for the Deutsche Zentral Zeitung in Paris so that she wouldn’t be tempted to join him in Moscow. He didn’t want to risk it. On the eleventh, he came to dinner with Hemingway and Martha and was in his usual sardonic good form, regaling them with stories of the days of the siege of Madrid. Let me tell you about the two wounded Russian tank officers who were being treated at the Palace Hotel, he said. When it looked as if the fascists would take the city I was ordered to poison them before the rebels took them prisoner so their nationality wouldn’t be discovered. Wasn’t that difficult? Hemingway wanted to know; but Koltsov just laughed. Not when you always have the cyanide with you, he said, showing them the little vial tucked into his cigarette case. And laughed again.

  After that, the days all ran into each other and Martha began pulling back, her diary entries sketchily scribbled in pencil, noting little, as if she didn’t want to commit even her attention to people and places she would soon abandon. “And now the leaving, the dreadfulness of leaving,” she wrote.

  December 1937: Playa de San Juan

  The tiny village where Father Lobo’s mother lived was on a white swath of beach between the blue hills and the sea. The priest had told his mother that Barea and Ilsa were a married couple—why bewilder her, he’d said, when this was the essential truth; and she found them lodging with a cook who was famous in the region for his paella. In addition to renting them a room in his cottage by the shore he taught Barea how to make his signature dish, and Ilsa gave lessons to his little girls. During the still-warm days they swam in the Mediterranean, and tried to catch fish and the tiny crabs that burrowed into the sand when the waves receded; and at night Barea took the first steps toward writing.

  When they left Madrid he’d asked Sefton Delmer if he might have the journalist’s old broken typewriter, which Delmer had been on the point of throwing away; and now he disassembled the battered machine, carefully taking out all the type bars and laying them in order on the pine kitchen table, detaching the keys and the carriage, and cleaning every last part before putting it back together. It was slow work, but it calmed him. He told himself he was building his instrument, the way his uncle used to cut quills for pens. The night after he finally reassembled the typewriter, an Italian air strike hit Alicante, down the coast, but the only thing killed by it was a frog in someone’s back garden. Imagine, said the other boarder in the cottage the next day, laughing: all they could hit was a frog! It wasn’t a laughing matter to Barea, though. Even a frog’s death diminished him. And he sat down and started typing: “The frog lay on the edge of the crater, its upturned belly a white stain against the wet black earth.” Tap tap tappety tap. In the end he had four pages: the story of a ruined garden, a little Eden destroyed by war. Maybe he was becoming a writer after all.

  Then it happened, the thing they had been half expecting for months. In the darkness just before the dawn, a hammering on the door, two men brandishing fistfuls of paper, demanding to see Ilsa. Outside. Now. Hearts hammering, Ilsa and Barea threw on clothes and went out of the cottage. The sky and sea were gray and sullen. It was cold.

  “Have you a husband in Barcel
ona?” the agents asked Ilsa, and when she denied it, they waved the papers at her again. They had orders to take her to her husband, Leopold Kulcsar, in Barcelona, they told her; if she didn’t come voluntarily they would arrest her.

  Well, she did have a husband named Leopold Kulcsar, Ilsa said, but she was separated from him, and the last time she’d heard, he was in Prague; if he was in Barcelona the only way she was going there was if Barea went with her. And who was he? the agents wanted to know. Barea went back in the house, produced his own papers; the two strangers looked them over, then decided they might as well take him as well. Maybe he should be arrested, too. They gave Barea and Ilsa only enough time to pack a small suitcase before shoving them into the black car parked outside.

  “Don’t worry so much,” Ilsa said, as they bumped off down the dirt track toward the highway. It was just some stupid misunderstanding, she went on; Poldi would soon set it right. She seemed ready to treat the whole thing like an outing. But Barea, sitting silently beside her, knew better. He put his hand in his coat pocket to feel for the gun his friend Agustín had given him as a parting present when they left Madrid. For he’d looked at the papers the agents had handed him, even if Ilsa hadn’t. They were stamped SIM, Servicio de Información Militar.

  December 1937: The North Atlantic

  During the night of December 19 two ships, going in opposite directions, passed each other in the dark waters of the North Atlantic. One was the Normandie, the French Line’s luxury flagship, which had sailed from Le Havre the day before, its first-class cabins filled with celebrity passengers, including the film star Charles Boyer and the composer Richard Rodgers. Also on board were Joris Ivens and Martha Gellhorn. Martha had traveled to Paris in early December with Rubio Hidalgo, who had filled her full of political gossip; and on her arrival she’d got a royalty check from The Trouble I’ve Seen, which she promptly endorsed over to Hemingway to cover her share of expenses for the past few months—happy, as she wrote to him in a note, that “this book, which is the best thing I ever wrote, paid for Spain, which is the best thing I ever did.” She’d booked passage on the Aquitania, which was to sail on December 15, so she could be home in St. Louis in plenty of time for Christmas; but she’d had to make new, more expensive, and less satisfactory arrangements when Ivens, her intended traveling companion, didn’t turn up in Paris on time.