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

by Vaill, Amanda

  This insistence, and the manner of Kulcsar’s death, might easily have made Ilsa more anxious, if less guilty, than before. What if Kulcsar’s kidney failure wasn’t the natural consequence of overwork, but the result of intentional poisoning by agents of his own organization, the NKVD? What if he’d been targeted for liquidation because he, like the other “Trotskyists” he’d been hunting, had been a member of the Spark—and had given his former wife, also a member of the group, a safe-conduct from the SIM? What if the NKVD was trying to eliminate people with potentially damaging information about one of its assets—specifically, the supposed fascist journalist Kim Philby? Father Lobo had put the problem succinctly to Ilsa back in Madrid: You know too much, and too many people.

  If she wondered about these things, Ilsa said nothing, although her face was drawn and anxious and her green eyes more watchful than ever. And whatever her fears, Barea still didn’t want to leave Spain. Things would resolve themselves, surely, he felt; he would finish his book of Madrid stories; he and Ilsa could get married; he would find war work to do. On the day after the telegram arrived, he was going over the final typescript of his book when the air-raid sirens started up. Ilsa was out, acting as interpreter for a British peace activist friend of hers, Henry Brinton; and Barea was terrified for her safety. Then the ground began shaking, and Barea began to envision what could happen if the hotel were struck by one of the deadly fuse bombs, designed not to detonate on impact but to burrow deep into a tall building before blowing up and out and destroying the entire structure. Gagging as he crouched in the dark basement, he heard a sucking sound and then a deafening explosion that seemed to come from next door. The whole building rocked. Someone, somewhere, began screaming.

  When at last the all-clear sounded and he could leave the basement, Barea found the houses next door to the hotel and behind it reduced to rubble, the garden a surreal tangle of Venetian blinds, and Ilsa, safely returned from her duties, practically weeping with relief to discover him alive after a raid that had killed hundreds of people. It was all unreal to him; he felt as if, at last, some spring had snapped deep within him, so that the mechanism kept working, but he had no control over it. He realized he couldn’t stay in Barcelona, or in Spain, any longer. He felt he would certainly go insane.

  Somehow, over the course of the next few weeks, the rights to his book, which he was calling Valor y miedo (“Courage and Fear”), were sold to a small press, Publicaciones Antifascistas de Cataluña, for just enough money to pay their hotel bill; and with the help of friends he was granted the papers that would exempt him, on account of his broken nerves and ill-health, from the most recent military draft of older men and boys, and allow him to leave the country. And on a bright chill day smelling of spring, he and Ilsa were married by a sardonic Catalan judge. “One of you is a widow, the other divorced. What could I say to you that you don’t know?” the judge remarked dourly. “You’re aware of what you’re doing. Good luck.”

  On February 22, the day Barea’s exit permit was due to expire, he and Ilsa set out for the border crossing at La Junquera in a borrowed British diplomatic car. The news that day was bad: after months of back and forth battle in the bitter cold, and the loss of 60,000 men, Teruel had fallen finally and definitively to the Nationalists, causing an orgy of finger-pointing and blame among the Loyalist commanders that targeted Indalecio Prieto, the socialist defense minister. Now it seemed that the government’s bad luck was following Barea and Ilsa, for thirty miles from the border their borrowed car broke down. The roadside garage couldn’t repair it; they’d have to go back to Barcelona, which would mean that Barea would have to reapply for an exit visa. Barea was in despair: it had taken all his strength to get this far, and he knew he could never go through it all again.

  The garage owner looked at the threadbare couple with their three suitcases and their battered typewriter, took in the British flag on the car’s bonnet and Ilsa’s foreign accent. And he made a phone call to the police station: could someone come and drive these people to the border before it closed for the night?

  In the end they made it to the aduana just as the church clock was striking twelve. The customs official barely glanced at them before he stamped their passports, and they crossed over into France.

  March 1938: The North Atlantic

  On March 18, bareheaded and without an overcoat, Ernest Hemingway dashed up the gangplank of the Ile de France, en route from New York to Le Havre, Paris, and Barcelona. Three days before, in Key West, he’d read in the newspapers that Nationalist troops, aiming to cut the Loyalist zone in two, had rolled through Aragon, encircling an American brigade base and advancing to within forty-five miles of the Mediterranean; “the fate of Spain,” Herbert Matthews had intoned in The New York Times, “hangs in the balance at the front.”

  It was all the excuse Hemingway needed. Wiring Max Perkins to book him a stateroom at once on whatever ship was leaving soonest, he’d thrown clothes into a suitcase and got the clipper from Miami to Newark on the seventeenth. Either because he couldn’t stop her or because, in an effort to assuage his feelings of guilt, he didn’t want to, he’d allowed Pauline to accompany him to the dock. But although he’d been affectionate in the plane, calling her by his old pet name for her, “Poor Old Mama,” they both knew he was about to put more than the Atlantic between them. “Where I go now I go alone,” his alter ego, Philip Rawlings, had said at the end of The Fifth Column, “or with others who go there for the same reason I go.” For Hemingway, now, that other was Martha.

  He’d been busy in the days before he left. Despite Joris Ivens’s recommendation that he distance himself from Gustav Regler, he’d written an introduction to be read before each of Regler’s scheduled speaking engagements (“Gustav Regler has no right to be here; he should be in a cemetery in the outskirts of Valencia”). He’d dashed off a prefatory note for the catalog of Luis Quintanilla’s war drawings, which were being shown at the Museum of Modern Art. He’d churned out a piece for Ken, “The Time Now, the Place Spain,” which argued that fascist countries were moving boldly while democratic ones “talk, vacillate, connive, and betray,” and the only way to counter an inevitable fascist-led war was to attack Italy, “fascism’s weakest link,” in Spain “and beat her now.” Whatever reservations he, and Ivens, had had about Ken, he’d satisfied himself that it was sufficiently “leftwing anti-fascist” (as George Seldes, now acting as one of its editors, told him); they’d made him an offer of $200 every two weeks for a series of biweekly articles, and it seemed like the magazine would provide him with a platform for the kind of opinion pieces Ivens had urged him to produce and which, in his new role as public intellectual, he was eager to do. Certainly NANA wouldn’t want them. He’d managed to get a new six-week contract from them, saying he wanted to gather additional material for a book, but Jack Wheeler hadn’t been enthusiastic about it; they’d reduced his pay rate to $500 for every typed dispatch and $250 for every cabled one, and Wheeler told Hemingway he shouldn’t expect much in the way of compensation unless the war spread to the rest of Europe.

  Hemingway had another article due for Ken, and he’d stuffed his briefcase with the manuscripts of stories Max Perkins had agreed to publish in a collected edition in the autumn; but he didn’t make any headway writing the one or organizing the other on shipboard. Instead, sitting down one day to flip through the February issue of Redbook magazine that he’d brought for deck-chair reading, he found, somewhere between an article about “Guest-Proof Houses” and a short story called “An Instinct for Love,” an article by John Dos Passos entitled “Interlude in Spain.” It was Dos’s compressed, semifictionalized account of what he referred to as “The Fiesta at the Fifteenth Brigade”; and on its face there was nothing very upsetting about it: just the account of a military celebration in Spain. But the fact that Dos Passos, the “enemy” Ivens had warned him about, had identified the brigade in question as the Fifteenth, home of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, and that he had underlined the prese
nce at the fiesta of the “Russians,” among them the Polish-born, Soviet-trained Colonel Walter—for some reason these things goaded Hemingway into a fury. He sent Dos Passos an angry, nearly incoherent cable which accused him of “ratting” on the Loyalists “for money” and getting the story wrong. Then, not satisfied that he’d attacked Dos Passos aggressively enough, he sent him a follow-up letter as soon as the Ile de France landed.

  “I’m sorry I sent you that cable from the boat,” he began; then moved swiftly from apology to aggression. “A war is still being fought in Spain between the people whose side you used to be on and the fascists. If with your hatred of communists you feel justified in attacking, for money, the people who are still fighting that war I think you should at least try to get the facts right.” Dos, Hemingway said, had implied in his article that Communists were running the war in Spain, and “you name a Russian General you met. The only trouble about this, Dos, is that Walter is a pole. Just as Lucacz was a Hungarian, Petrov a Bulgarian, Hans a German, Copic a Yugo-Slav and so on.” Ignoring the fact, which he well knew, that all these officers had been trained at the Soviet war college and had been sent by Stalin to help replace Franco’s mutinous commanders, Hemingway mendaciously declared, “I’m sorry, Dos, but you didn’t meet any Russian generals.”

  Nor, he continued, was this the only thing Dos Passos had gotten wrong. He’d also, in an earlier piece, for Esquire, written sympathetically about Andrés Nin. “Do you know where Nin is now?” asked Hemingway belligerently, parroting the NKVD slander that the murdered Nin had fled to Berlin. “You ought to find that out before you write about his death. But what the hell.”

  By now, having been alone with his own thoughts for too long (“I know the way your mind works round and round … like a dog in cover going over and over the same track,” Archie MacLeish had once written him), Hemingway was in the claustrophobic grip of something close to paranoia. He began to wonder whether, if he was attacking Dos Passos this way, “the enemy” wouldn’t also attack him. “Now I am very easy to attack and if you want, instead of trying to get straight on Spain you can simply attack me too. But that won’t help you on the road you’re going.” Because, he said, the road his old friend was traveling was the road of betrayal. “Good old friends,” Hemingway wrote, and it sounded like he’d been drinking: “Always happy with the good old friends. Got them will knife you in the back for a dime. Regular price two for a quarter. Two for a quarter, hell. Honest Jack Passos’ll knife you three times in the back for fifteen cents and sing Giovanezza [the Italian black-shirt anthem] free.”

  For not repeating—as Hemingway himself was willing to—whatever the propagandists told him, Dos Passos was now (in Hemingway’s eyes) not only a liar but a fascist. It is very dangerous to write the truth in war, Hemingway had said at the Writers’ Congress, and the truth is very dangerous to come by. Honest Jack Passos could certainly tell you that.

  * * *

  As Hemingway was leafing through Redbook on the Ile de France, Martha Gellhorn was following him on the Queen Mary. She’d booked passage as soon as Hemingway told her his plans; as she wrote Eleanor Roosevelt, “The news has been terrible, too terrible, and I felt I had to get back … I don’t believe anything any of us does now is useful. We just have to do it … I have gone angry to the bone, and hating what I see, and knowing how it is in Spain, I can see it so clearly everywhere else. I think now the only place for us all is in the front lines, where you don’t have to think, and can simply (and uselessly) put your body up against what you hate.”

  Before leaving port on March 22, she’d cabled Hemingway to expect her in Cherbourg on the twenty-eighth; she’d also arranged to ship a car for them to use in Spain, which was traveling separately, on the Aquitania. And she’d got Collier’s to sponsor her trip. “IF ANYTHING EVER STOPS OUR WORKING TOGETHER,” the cable concluded, “THEN FUTURE NIX.” Was it a commitment or an ultimatum? No wonder Hemingway had told Perkins, in a letter in February, that he was in “such an unchristly jam of every bloody kind … that it’s practically comic.”

  March 1938: Paris

  It was just another narrow, grimy building on a narrow street lined with similarly grimy buildings near the Gare Montparnasse, the hallways smelling of old cooked food, the floorboards creaking. The hotelkeeper’s wife, a thin-lipped woman with jet-black eyes who still carried herself like the good-looker she’d been in her youth, told Barea and Ilsa that she could let them have the third-floor bedroom for less if they paid for a whole month in advance; so they gave her almost all the money they had, leaving only enough to buy meals for a few days. They could always pawn Barea’s watch, or Ilsa’s paisley shawl, they told themselves, as they followed Madame’s swaying bottom up the three flights of stairs to the bedroom with its stained cabbage-rose wallpaper. Later, while Ilsa was trying to put their few clothes away in the battered armoire, Barea tried to cheer her up. The Hotel Delambre, on the rue Delambre—if you said it in Spanish, it was Hotel del Hambre on the rue del Hambre, the Hunger Hotel on Hunger Street.

  They’d arrived in Perpignan to discover that, despite his assurances, Kulcsar had left no funds on deposit at the bank in Ilsa’s name. Maybe he’d forgotten; maybe he’d never intended to repay their loan. With only four hundred francs between them they had been lucky to get a lift to Paris from a friend of Sefton Delmer’s; the car wasn’t heated, and the drive had taken all night, with a predawn rest stop somewhere near Clermont-Ferrand, where a factory whistle set Barea’s stomach lurching. Now, in Paris, they looked for work—translating, writing, anything they could find—but it was 1938; the tide of émigrés from fascism was swelling; and there was little work to be had. A commercial translation agency threw a few jobs their way, and Barea managed to sell a handful of sketches from Valor y miedo to some leftist papers in France and abroad; but the sums involved were negligible and although the acceptance letters bought them some time from their landlady, soon they were behind on their rent. On some days they might be able to afford the seven francs for the set menu in one of the bistrots du quartier; more often they went hungry, fueled only by bread and black coffee. Meanwhile the stress of the past year had finally caught up with Ilsa, and she was suffering from rheumatic pains and exhaustion; but she dragged herself out of bed and went in search of work, or just friends from whom she could borrow a little money for food.

  They wrote to Ilsa’s parents, the Pollaks, in Vienna, saying that they were married, and had gone to Paris—as Kulcsar had urged them to—and were working, but their economic situation was “precarious”; Barea included a photograph of himself, and an attempt at self-explanation or self-justification, telling his new parents-in-law of his love and deep respect for their daughter. But they heard nothing. And then, on March 13, they found out why.

  Two days before, after a month of escalating threats and ultimatums that gave the Nazi Party greater and greater power in Austria, Hitler—claiming the alternative was to turn the country into “another Spain”—had forced the resignation of his nominal ally, the Austrian prime minister Kurt von Schuschnigg. On the night of the eleventh, 200,000 German troops had crossed the border, and on the twelfth, the dreaded head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, arrived in Vienna, followed—in a triumphal motorcade—by Hitler himself. No longer a sovereign nation, Austria was now only another part of Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich; the streets of Vienna, Barea and Ilsa read in L’Humanité, echoed with cries of “One People! One Reich! One Führer!” Within days the anti-Jewish laws of Germany were being enforced in Vienna, the city of Mahler, Schnitzler, and Freud; Jewish shops and homes were looted; Jewish factories, stores, and restaurants were designated by signs forbidding Aryans to patronize them; and Jews were forbidden to own property, to employ or be employed by others, or to practice their professions.

  What this meant to the Jewish headmaster Valentin Pollak and to his Gentile wife Alice, Barea and Ilsa could only guess.

  * * *

  Martha landed at Cherbourg on March 28. For he
r, and for Hemingway, it had been a long separation—more than three months. One day she would write a story about lovers who have been apart for a long time: “You’ve been gone so long I don’t know how to treat you.” They figured it out. Mr. Scrooby, as friendly as a puppy and as warm as fur.

  They had more than endearments to share: they were, as she’d declared at the beginning, members of the same union, and just now they were needed on the front lines. The situation in Spain was as terrible as Martha had envisioned: in the past week or so the insurgent juggernaut had swept across Aragon and the Loyalist defense line had “crumpled like paper,” as Herbert Matthews would say later. In Barcelona, horrific air raids were killing more than a thousand people a day in sorties that lasted for hours and were being used to test yet one more obscene weapon in the bombardier’s arsenal: antipersonnel bombs that exploded horizontally on impact, shearing trees off below the branch line and vaporizing any organism within range. Between the allies’ anti-intervention policy and the fact that the French government had sealed the border, Spain couldn’t acquire the ammunition or antiaircraft guns to defend itself against the weapons and planes sent by Germany and Italy; and factional fighting was immobilizing the government. It looked entirely possible that the Republic would collapse within a matter of weeks.

  John Wheeler at NANA had cabled Hemingway in Paris, asking him to report the developing news from the fascist side instead of returning to his comfortable berth among the Loyalists; but Hemingway wasn’t enthusiastic about following up the request. He had a Ken article to write—in which he excoriated the Catholic archbishop of New York, Patrick Cardinal Hayes, for supposed complicity in the Saint Patrick’s Day bombing of Barcelona that killed 118 children—and he was much more concerned about what would happen to the more than 500 wounded American brigaders in Loyalist hospitals in Spain if the Fascists won. On March 29, goaded by Martha to “see … the top people and yell at them,” he made a flying visit to the American ambassador to Spain, Claude Bowers, in the border town of St. Jean de Luz, where he extracted from the ambassador a promise to evacuate the wounded and the medical personnel looking after them.