Beautiful Exiles

by Meg Waite Clayton

  Instead, I found Ernest playing poker in a back room, smoking and dirty and drunk.

  “Hemingway, someone locked me in my room,” I said.

  He looked up from his cards. Someone whistled, and I realized I was still in my nightclothes. I wrapped my arms around myself, but didn’t turn from Ernest’s gaze, his expression much as it had been when he’d walked in on Ted Allan and me, vulnerable and betrayed and a little sheepish.

  “Daughter,” he said, “this hotel is full of pimps and drunks. I didn’t want any of the men here to bother you. I didn’t want you to be taken for a whore.”

  The word stung like my father’s hand on my cheek, like “capitalizing on your yellow hair.” But I wasn’t Ted Allan who was really Alan Herman. I wouldn’t wither, and I wouldn’t have Hemingway think I would.

  “A whore, Ernesto?” I said as lightly as I could manage. “You screwball. I don’t wear enough makeup to be mistaken for a cigarette girl.”

  The Hotel Florida, Madrid, Spain

  MARCH 1937

  I followed the delicious odor of fried ham and eggs the next morning to find the gang from the poker table and then some crowded into Ernest’s rooms. Herb Matthews of the New York Times arrived just as I did, wearing peasant trousers that accentuated his long limbs and espadrilles on impossibly long, thin feet. He had shy, deep-set eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, a generous chin, and a barrage of questions for me.

  “Did I sleep well?” I repeated, thinking his face belonged above a starched white collar in a starched white office.

  “Oh, that,” he said. “I suppose I ought to ask whether you’re the variety of gal who packs her suitcase after such an enticing night, or one who takes a good old-fashioned shelling as a warm welcome.”

  “I didn’t bring a suitcase. I brought a duffel bag full of canned goods with a change of clothes.” And a bar of soap, but I didn’t advertise that.

  Herb laughed warmly. “A duffel full of canned goods? Come sit by me and be my friend.”

  He tendered a tin of sausages to Sidney, who, with a disapproving look at me, tucked it into a tall wardrobe already overloaded with ham and coffee and marmalade.

  “Ernie’s typewriter, Sid’s kitchen,” Herb whispered as Sidney returned to a pan over the gas stove on the dresser. “Sidney does Hemingway’s typing and cooking, and bunks here as well. Ernest will spot anyone anything, but old Sid isn’t wild about folks showing up without something to contribute. That’s what that look was about.”

  Ernest, still in the filthy trousers and torn shirt he’d worn the prior night, held forth from a settee, educating a Swedish gal who wore men’s clothes (which I rather liked) on the situation in Guadalajara. He slid over to make room for me, and introduced me to the assembled gang, including two other writers: a strong-jawed German novelist named Gustav Regler, who was fighting with the International Brigades, and a General Lucasz, who was better known as the Hungarian short story writer Máté Zalka.

  I said, “Imagine that: someone here going by a name other than his own.” But all of us in Spain were trying to be something other than what we’d been born.

  A maid brought me breakfast while Ernest said, “Job number one that I’ve got to do today is take Stooge to the Telefónica.”

  “The Telefónica is where just about everything in Madrid is managed, Marty,” Herb Matthews explained. “These luxury accommodations. The occasional fuel voucher.”

  “Safe-conduct passes,” Ernest said.

  Herb said, “Which have nothing to do with safety or our conduct, for what it’s worth.”

  After I’d gobbled a bit of breakfast, Ernest shepherded me to the door, stopping to tell Sidney we were headed to the government offices to get me those safe-conduct papers.

  “Sidney, do you think I might have a tin of that marmalade so I won’t have to get up for breakfast?” I asked.

  Ernest laughed. “Don’t do it, Stooge. Don’t dangle the red cape in front of old Sidney. He always beats the bull.”

  “Are you calling me a bull, Ernest?”

  “Bullheaded,” Ernest said. “Not the long, lovely rest of you. But the head, yes.”

  The Telefónica was nearly as busy as Ernest’s hotel room, with journalists begging for fuel vouchers, collecting mail, and sharing gossip. Ernest introduced me to a skeletal man with slick dark hair, darting black eyes, and an improbably sensuous mouth who, as Madrid’s foreign press chief, vetted anything any journalist wrote before it could be transmitted out of Madrid.

  “And this is Ilsa Kulcsar,” Ernest said. “Ilsa left Austria on false papers years ago, and she speaks eight languages, and she keeps this guy straight on what the press should be allowed to print, never mind that he’s the boss.” Ilsa shared a bed with her boss too; neither one’s spouse was with them in Spain.

  To Ilsa and me, Ernest said, “I expect you two beautiful troublemakers will get along splendidly.” He put a friendly arm around my shoulders. “This is Marty Gellhorn. Be nice to her. She writes for Collier’s, that’s a million readers.” As if it were as true as the fiction he wrote.

  A few minutes later I had my safe-conduct papers.

  Ernest and I left the hotel with Herb and “our ruddy English bishop,” Sefton Delmer—a big, balding fellow in round black glasses of the type I imagined when I imagined myself disguised in a funny mustache.

  “Del has a great wine cellar in his room, compliments of the Spanish king,” Ernest said. “But he got it from an anarchist bartender friend rather than from looting the royal cellars himself. Don’t let him tell you otherwise.”

  Del was a fine reporter too. He’d just gotten the cover of Time.

  Ernest opened the passenger door for me on a car flying the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack, his chest threatening the buttons of his coat, from which he drew out a canvas hunter’s cap. He’d picked up some weight or some pride or both since leaving New York. I climbed in the front while Herb and Del took the back. Ernest took the wheel and we set off.

  Elsewhere, journalists were heading off on foot or catching the tram out toward the university to the north and walking to the front from there, few graced with Ernest’s car and full tank of gas. I wrapped a green chiffon scarf around my head and neck as we left the shoe-shine boys and the market lines, the crowded downtown streets. Past the barricades, we bumped along on increasingly badly rutted roads, the repair crews that smoothed new asphalt into the damaged downtown having given up among the bombed-out roads farther out. In a few minutes, we arrived at a park on the southwest side of Madrid, Casa de Campo, where, in the distance, men in slacks and white shirts stood behind a stone wall and sandbags, rifles poised. Beyond the wall, trees were just beginning to show the tiny green promise of spring. I felt terrified, inhaling air that smelled of blooming explosives, listening to the birdsong of firing guns.

  Herb and Del set off for the soldiers at the front, while Ernest stayed back to help me get the lay of the land.

  “The first thing you ought to know, Stooge, is how to take cover,” he said, and he gave me a useful little lecture on what to do if the shooting got too close. “It won’t from here, though,” he said, and he launched into an explanation of the Republicans’ strategy for holding the line against the Fascists, how long the stalemate had lasted, and why. We moved closer but not too close, hanging back in an area where men were eating or resting, one reading a book as if there weren’t men shooting just yards away.

  “Everyone says the ‘pop’ or the ‘rattle’ of gunfire,” Ernest said, “but that’s not it, is it? There isn’t one sound. The machine gun has its sound and the rifle has another. Rong cararong rong rong—that’s a machine gun.”

  “Like church bells,” I said, wanting to laugh but not yet comfortable enough with war to laugh in its presence—although that would come soon enough. Laughter is the only real way to express how glad you are to be alive when you know too much of death.

  “And the rifles, Ernest?” I said.

  “Racrong caro
ng carong.”

  “I don’t know, Nesto. It makes it sound romantic, all those round sounds. Melodic. It’s more brutal than that.”

  “Racrong carong carong,” he repeated. “That’s the true sound of it. The sound. It is round. It is melodic.”

  He made a note in his notebook, satisfied.

  There, standing at the edge of the war, I watched Hemingway, and I listened, and I tried to imagine what it would be like to have my brothers living in holes in the earth dug around St. Louis, shooting across the fields at the boys from Illinois. I didn’t speak a word of Spanish, and I had no idea what these soldiers were calling to each other over the gunfire, but that’s the way they seemed to me: just like the boys I knew at home, regular boys who liked to tinker with car engines and smoke cigarettes and kiss girls.

  When I lit a cigarette, the soldiers eyed it so hungrily that I opened the pack and handed out what I had left. I’d be sorry later, but right then I wished I’d brought more. I wished I had a better memory, that I would be able to remember every line of every face of every soldier, every touch of finger to finger. I tried to fix in my mind the exact tone of the voices saying “gracias,” the tilt of their heads and the slant of their shoulder blades as they curved against the wind to let the tobacco catch the flame, the indent of cheeks at the first inhale, and whether they exhaled through their noses or mouths, whether they blew rings of smoke and how high the rings went into the air before they became nothing at all. And when the pack was empty and the men still watched me, I took my own half-smoked cigarette and handed it to a tall, good-looking fellow with eyes as deep set as Dad’s had been.

  “Take it.”

  His buddies jostled him, jabbering words I couldn’t begin to understand, and laughing.

  “Si le gusta su pelo,” Ernest said to them, “espere a ver sus piernas.” And he too laughed.

  Much later, when the sun was low and the gunfire quieting, I asked Ernest what he’d said to them.

  He opened the car door for me, then kissed my forehead the way I sometimes kissed his. “Daughter, I’m afraid you’re going to cause a stir every time those poor shits see you. It’s not often they set eyes on a girl with yellow hair and legs like yours. There’s a war on, you know.”

  The Hotel Florida, Madrid, Spain

  APRIL 1937

  Josie Herbst arrived in Madrid a couple days after I did, entering the Hotel Florida lobby with exploded-shell dust powdering her curly hair. She hadn’t set down her gigantic suitcase and folding typewriter before Ernest—looking dapper in a swanky uniform and shiny boots that morning, having managed to source a change of clothes after all—spotted her and scooped her up into a big lugging hug.

  “Josie, I’ll never forgive you for letting that sixty-pound kingfish off your line!” he said.

  “And here I am in a war zone with that old fish looking me straight in the eye,” Josie answered, the nasal tone of Iowa in her voice despite the years of Berkeley, Berlin, and Paris.

  They’d been friends since she’d worked at H. L. Mencken’s Smart Set, where she was publishing short stories while Ernest was being rejected and Spain was a place you went to eat pipas and cheer the bulls. They caught up as old friends often do, skipping the stone of shared moments over the pond of friendship.

  “Max is disgusted with us all, you know, and it has nothing to do with that fish,” Josie said, meaning Max Perkins at Scribner. “‘What’s gotten into the lot of you?’—that’s what he asked me. ‘Hemingway. Dos Passos. Gellhorn.’” She nodded in recognition to me, although we’d not met before. “‘Everyone rushing off like fools to have Spanish bombs dropped on them.’ That’s what Max thinks of us all being here.” She brushed the dust from her hair as she continued. “Is that shelling supposed to convince anyone of anything? I half expect raindrops and a good old-fashioned Iowa thunderstorm, don’t you?”

  “Josie here wrote a fine series for the New York Post about Nazi Germany,” Ernest said.

  “‘Behind the Swastika,’” I said. “You told a helluva truth about that pig Hitler, if only someone would listen.”

  Josie had reported from Germany in the early 1920s before marrying John Hermann, and found her way back there after he left her. I liked that she wrote the ugly truth about Hitler even though no one wanted to hear it. I liked that work might be a fine solution to a husband who left. But she frowned at me even on that first introduction, and seemed forever to be frowning in my direction that spring. Mornings, while I was still in my bed—too early even to be thinking of my marmalade—she would ignore Ernest’s imploring that Sidney had a very fine omelet just for her and instead settle in the first-floor lobby, with nothing more than tea and a bit of stale bread, to chat with the soldiers on leave. She did the responsible thing always, sometimes with Dos Passos, who could be as maddeningly virtuous as Josie when he wasn’t carrying on about the disappearance of his left-wing activist friend José Robles, who was presumed to be awaiting trial not by the Fascists but by his own duly elected government. Josie couldn’t very well leave her visitors just for a bit of marmalade when the boys might be dead before the end of the day, she said. She always said “marmalade,” too, judging my reclusive mornings more harshly even than she judged Ernest’s breakfast parties. I wasn’t writing; I wasn’t steeped enough in Spain to write the real gen. It was all too much that I didn’t know well enough yet to capture in words. But Josie disapproved of a journalist in a war zone who didn’t turn in her thousand words by nine o’clock each night.

  If Josie didn’t much care for me, I did strike up a friendship with Ilsa Kulcsar. Ilsa, who as Ernest had said controlled the whole journalist show from her office at the Telefónica, assigned me a guide and interpreter, the Swedish gal in men’s clothes who’d been sitting beside Ernest that first morning. She was exactly the kind of tall, red-gold-headed beauty to make any woman feel dull, even if you were dressed in a silk gown and she in the men’s trousers, but she spoke seven languages and knew her way around, and I adored her.

  Another I soon counted as a friend was Randolfo Pacciardi, a dashing Italian with a broad, big chest and an imposing nose and eyes that would not let go. Randolfo had come to Spain to lead the Italian faction of the International Brigades fighting with the Republicans, which was called the Garibaldi Brigade. Back home in Italy, he’d been sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for having founded an anti-Fascist party, but he escaped first to Austria, then to Switzerland, then to France, and from there brought his battle against Fascism to Spain. Randolfo and I first met at a Brigade party, where he flirted with me, and I had the good sense to flirt back even before learning who he was. There was nothing to it; he was in it for the publicity I could give his troops. But he could give me access to the war, and he was great fun to flirt with too, the way intelligent, intense men with whom you have no future whatsoever can be. He liked to squire me around the quieter parts of “his front” in Madrid on his motorcycle, where I shared cigarettes and stale bread with his troops, and flirted with them even more enthusiastically than I did with Randolfo. But it was only when the front was quiet that he would collect me to show me around.

  It was my beautiful Swedish interpreter who got me my first close peek at the front in full battle. She introduced me to the blood-transfusion fellow to whom Ted Allan who was really Alan Herman had been delivering blood that first night, and he, in turn, introduced me to a British biologist who knew of a planned Republican assault at Cerro Garabitas. Ernest, going to observe it with Joris Ivens, was all in a twist about this first real assault, but he hadn’t invited me along. So when the British biologist suggested I observe with him from a house on the periphery of the Casa de Campo, I went.

  We had a pretty good view, and field glasses to bring it closer: the tanks dashing about; the soldiers running and dropping to the ground when the firing began, and getting up and running again; the big guns flaring and the smaller ones popping, the machine guns alive with Ernest’s rong cararong rong rong. I couldn’t bear to
watch, nor could I turn away. If these boys could fight this war, then surely I could focus and remember, and someday find the words that might make others understand what I could not understand myself. How does an eighteen- or twenty- or twenty-four-year-old boy rush ahead with his life held up for target practice, in defense of something as nebulous as the right to govern oneself? Or not even that much, really. Only the right to elect those who will govern.

  Hemingway returned the evening of the assault at Cerro Garabitas complaining of having been too far away, but saying still it had been exhilarating. I agreed about the exhilaration. The taste of that battle left me wanting to get closer too.

  Ginny Cowles, who would become one of my dearest friends, joined us a few days later, walking Madrid’s busted-rubble streets in gold jewelry and spiky heels as if she were Coco Chanel on the Champs-Élysées. She’d made a name for herself in an interview with Mussolini just after the Italian leader invaded Abyssinia, when every accomplished journalist on the Continent was begging for the chance. “I had the opportunity to smile at the minister of propaganda at a party when I was in Rome,” she explained. She was the kind of swanky Bostonian who was invited everywhere, and she had the voice and vocabulary to prove it, along with long-lashed eyes in a heart-shaped face. If Dad would have said she was capitalizing on her smooth brown hair, well, she was just doing what we all did, using whatever advantage we had to get to a story that ought to be told.

  Most days, Ginny and I went visiting at the nearest front, a good brisk walk in the rain, or I took the tram out to University City with my interpreter or went out with Ernest in his car. Madrid was surrounded on three sides by the Fascists, so almost everywhere you went was a front. I walked to the stone barricade where I showed my papers to a Republican guard in corduroy slacks and a sweater, who allowed me to get close enough to sop up the mud of communication trenches with my shoes and to burn my thigh muscles with crouching. We forever found funny people in the trenches, new faces, something to talk about, someone to write about. But still I didn’t write.