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

by Vaill, Amanda

  Confiding this story all those years later, Capa—his friend would say—seemed stricken: “dejected and defensive, like a beaten puppy.” No wonder. I do not wish to hurt, a woman he knew recalled him saying; even at twenty-two, he was tender and compassionate, and he had never seen death, especially not a death of his own making. Although he might have been an indifferent bar mitzvah student, never bothering to remember all the stories and rituals his family’s rabbi had tried to teach him at thirteen, he’d surely learned that when he became a man he took on responsibility for all his sins—and this would have been a heavy one.

  But what if the man in the photograph simply got up from the ground after the shutter clicked, dusted himself off, and went on his way, alive and well? Questioned about this possibility six decades after the fact, a homicide detective and forensics expert was dismissive: the slackened limbs and fingers looked like death to him, not mimicry. The other men lying on the ground might have been playacting; but this, the detective maintained, was the real thing.

  Whether it was or not, however, a conundrum remained: Capa had come to Spain to capture the truth—to take the truest, best pictures, pictures that would show how the Spanish people were fighting for their ideals, pictures he would pursue without regard for personal risk. If the photographs from Espejo were staged, even though one of them might have been transformed by dreadful irony into reality, then the only one who had been at risk when they were taken was the man who had stopped a bullet. After Espejo neither Capa nor Taro let that happen again.

  Shortly after the two photographers left Espejo they gave their rolls of film to a pilot who carried them from a nearby airfield and thence by stages to Paris, where they were developed and the strips of images cut up for easier submission to newspaper and magazine editors. On September 23 Vu ran a spread of six of Capa’s photos from the Córdoba front—along with one of Georg Reisner’s—and gave pride of place to the picture of the white-shirted miliciano. The caption had the cadence of an epic: “With lively step, their breasts to the wind, their rifles in their fists, they ran down the slope … Suddenly … a bullet whistled—a fratricidal bullet—and their native soil drank their blood.” Other magazines, in other countries, would publish other photographs from the sequence; and in July 1937, Life magazine would transform the image of the “Falling Soldier” into a symbol of the Spanish conflict by making it a visual epigraph to its editorial summary of the war. As Capa himself would describe it in his radio interview, “the prize picture is born in the imagination of the editors and the public.”

  In that sense, then, the picture more than fulfilled the intentions its photographer had had when he went to Spain: it had become a symbol, even the symbol, of Loyalist sacrifice. For now, though, it was just one frame on a strip of film Capa had sent off to Paris without seeing the results; and he and Gerda were on the road to Toledo.

  September 1936: Toledo/Madrid

  By September 18, when the Asturian dinamiteros finished mining its two eastern towers, the Alcázar at Toledo, the ancient citadel dating back to Roman times, had been under siege for a month, with the Nationalist commander refusing any terms for the surrender of the garrison, or for the release of the more than two hundred women and children who were their hostages. Despite the fortress’s lack of strategic importance the government had spent an enormous amount of energy and ammunition trying to capture it, and it had become an emblem of Nationalist resistance and an object of obsession to Prime Minister Largo Caballero. So as the dinamiteros prepared to ignite the fuse that would topple the two towers, the government had invited every war correspondent in Madrid to watch the event.

  Capa and Gerda were among them; but if they’d counted on getting dramatic photographs of the Alcázar’s liberation, they were disappointed. Although the northeast tower fell, the southeast one was undamaged by the blast and the wall still stood; the defenders, meanwhile, who had used stethoscopes to pinpoint the placement of the land mines, had escaped harm by gathering at the far side of the building, away from the explosion. No Loyalist troops were going to enter the Alcázar that day; worse, with the Nationalists grinding toward Madrid, it seemed unsettlingly possible that the capital’s survival—maybe even the republic’s—was in doubt. Suddenly Toledo, and Madrid, didn’t seem like safe places for two socialist photographers from France. So Capa and Taro left for Barcelona, and then Paris, not knowing if the cause in which they’d invested their hopes and energies in the past weeks would in fact survive.

  The other correspondents, meanwhile, were converging on Barea’s office in the Telefónica with stories reporting the rebel advance, and the failure of the Alcázar attack; and Barea was torn between his duty, his conscience, and his feelings. He knew what was happening and believed it was futile to deny it: on the road between Toledo and Madrid he’d seen the fleeing villagers and retreating milicianos, the ditches full of discarded weapons, equipment, blankets, clothing; he’d heard the sounds of rebel bombardment. But in their daily conferences Rubio continued to insist that no news be approved that didn’t parrot the official line: the Alcázar will surely fall tomorrow, the rebel troops have been stopped in their tracks, a few milicianos have stampeded, but all is well. And the correspondents, who also knew what was going on, were so certain the rebels were winning, and so eager to find sensational details to confirm it, that Barea perversely found himself hating them, hating their cynicism, the way they treated his country’s fight to the death as just another story. Alone in his blackout-shaded room—his colleague Perea, unable to stand the stress, had quit in panic—he slashed through their copy in a fury; and when one of the journalists, a snotty young Frenchman from Le Petit Parisien, tried to sneak an uncut dispatch through, Barea lost his temper. I’ll have you arrested, he shouted, waving his newly issued Star Modelo A pistol in the man’s face. The correspondent rewrote the story—just. The transmitted version led with the words: “A certain mystery persists on the subject of Toledo.”

  Denials, however, could only go so far. On September 26, making a detour from its advance on the capital, Franco’s army cut the main Madrid–Toledo road; by the next evening the rebels had entered Toledo’s medieval gates. They took no prisoners—even pregnant women were loaded onto trucks at the maternity hospital to be driven to the cemetery and shot—and the cobbled main street that ran downhill to the city gates flowed with blood. For the Nationalist forces, this was a major symbolic victory: Toledo, the religious capital of Spain, had been the first important Muslim-occupied city to be captured by the forces of Their Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella during the Reconquest of Spain in the fifteenth century, and by taking it from the Republican government Franco was equating himself with the Catholic heroes of the medieval struggle against the infidel.

  To underscore the point, the day after his troops entered the city, the general staged a reenactment of its “liberation” for the benefit of newsreel cameras, a gesture that undercut the grumblings of those who thought he should have pushed on to take Madrid and let the Loyalists abandon Toledo themselves. And on the last day of September, the rebels proclaimed Francisco Franco Bahamonde supreme commander of all the Nationalist armies, and—although the elected Republican government, inconveniently, still survived—caudillo, or head of government, of the Spanish state.

  September 1936: L Bar T Ranch, Wyoming

  In the three summers that he’d been hunting and fishing at the L Bar T, the Wyoming dude ranch owned by Lawrence and Olive Nordquist, Ernest Hemingway had never bagged a grizzly bear; but this year, he vowed, would be different. One of his new fishing buddies from Bimini, a wealthy young sportsman named Tom Shevlin, had come out to L Bar T with his wife, Lorraine, and to show them a good time, and maybe display his own prowess, Hemingway planned to take the couple grizzly-hunting. “I want to shoot one in the belly to see if I can make him come,” he wrote to Arnold Gingrich. So on September 10, to guarantee some sport for the new guests, the ranch’s owner, Lawrence Nordquist, killed a couple of mule
s and set out their carcasses to ripen on the slopes above the ranch, where they’d bring the bears to the hunters’ guns.

  While the would-be grizzly-slayers waited for the baits to acquire the requisite attractive pong, Hemingway busied himself with his novel. He’d written more than thirty thousand words since arriving at the ranch, despite taking time off for a couple of fishing and hunting expeditions, and he was pleased with the results—so pleased, in fact, that he offered to let Tom Shevlin have a look at the manuscript. Although he didn’t say so, it was important to Hemingway that Shevlin like what he read.

  Because just a few weeks ago the ranch mailbag had delivered a surprise: the August 10 issue of Time magazine, with a cover story devoted to Hemingway’s sometime friend, the writer John Dos Passos. Since their first meeting in a regimental mess hall in Italy during the Great War, the two men had argued over the future of fiction in Paris cafés, partied at the Gerald Murphys’ at Antibes, skiied in the Vorarlberg, gone to the bullfights in Pamplona, and fished in the Caribbean; and in their relationship, Dos (as everybody called him) had always been the beta male to Hemingway’s alpha. Shy, balding, nearsighted, with a rheumatic heart, Dos Passos was the illegitimate son of a distinguished Portuguese-American lawyer: he’d spent his childhood in European spas and hotels, not fishing camps in northern Michigan; he’d been educated at Choate and Harvard, not Oak Park High School and the newsroom of the Kansas City Star (Hemingway had declined to apply to college); and he’d married Hemingway’s boyhood girlfriend, Katy Smith, after Hemingway introduced them in Key West.

  For years their friendship had been held in balance by Hemingway’s success and Dos’s admiration; but lately, as Dos Passos had labored on the third installment of an epic trio of novels about social and political upheavals in twentieth-century America, that balance had shifted imperceptibly. The first two volumes of the trilogy garnered admiring reviews, although they still didn’t sell well, and Hemingway’s amour propre was unsettled. He sneered when “poor Dos,” who needed the money, wrote a screenplay for Marlene Dietrich, and he complained that a man who had defended Sacco and Vanzetti and supported striking Kentucky coal miners shouldn’t be “living on a yacht in the Mediterranean while he attacks the capitalist system.” That the yacht belonged to their mutual friends the Murphys, and that Dos Passos was there recuperating from a serious bout of rheumatic fever, made no difference to Hemingway. And as he often did when he had some private score to settle with someone, he put Dos Passos into the novel he was writing—as a sexually impotent phony-radical novelist named Richard Gordon who lives off loans from his wealthy friends.

  Now Dos was squinting out at him from the cover of Time, wearing a macho open-necked shirt and drawing deeply on a little cigar; and inside the magazine was an article, occasioned by the publication of The Big Money, the last novel in Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, calling the whole sequence “one of the most ambitious projects that any U.S. novelist has undertaken” and saying that to find its equal “one must look abroad, to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, to Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, to James Joyce’s Ulysses.” For someone with Hemingway’s overdeveloped sense of competition, this was a barb guaranteed to go straight to the heart. Damn it, he was the one who was supposed to write a new War and Peace; not poor, awkward, myopic Dos.

  So the stakes were high when he gave his work-in-progress to Tom Shevlin to read; and unfortunately Shevlin wasn’t impressed by what he saw. He liked the parts about the rumrunner Harry Morgan all right, he said, but not the portrait of the pseudo-engagé writer Richard Gordon, the character based on Dos Passos. And although he was hesitant to say so directly, Shevlin hinted that the disparate strands of the novel made for “lousy” reading. When he heard this, Hemingway erupted in a fury: grabbing the manuscript from Shevlin’s hands, he chucked it out the window of the cabin into a patch of early snow, and for three days neither man spoke to the other.

  But then the baits ripened, and Hemingway apologized for his outburst, and the Shevlins and the Hemingways rode their horses up to a camp near the timberline to find grizzlies. It was chilly, early fall on the mountain, and the days were drawing in. Late in the afternoon they arrived, Hemingway and Lorraine Shevlin were investigating one of the baited carcasses when three bears, attracted by the smell of meat, trotted out of the forest, their coats shining in the setting sun. As the largest bear approached the bait Hemingway stood up out of cover to shoot, and the bear, surprised, also reared up, its forepaws outstretched, claws extended. It was a magnificent and terrifying sight. Aiming his Springfield rifle at the bear’s chest, Hemingway fired; the grizzly fell to the ground, wounded, as the other two bears turned and ran for cover. Hemingway went after them and killed one, then returned and finished off the first bear with a shot to the neck. He was exhilarated—and seemed only a little disappointed when Shevlin killed another bear, bigger than either of Hemingway’s, two days later.

  After the hunting party returned to the L Bar T, Hemingway wrote to both Maxwell Perkins and his old friend from Paris days, the poet Archibald MacLeish, to boast about the expedition; and by then he’d arranged the facts more comfortably. He’d been up on the mountain, he wrote, and just “ran into” the grizzlies while looking for elk. He’d shot two of them—he could have killed all three, he told Perkins, if he hadn’t been deterred by how beautiful they were. Shevlin had bagged a third one two days later, he added; but, he said dismissively, using the same wording in both letters, the younger man “got his on a bait.”

  He’d been working very hard on his book, he reported; and he told Perkins that when he was finished with it he wanted to go to Spain if he wasn’t too late to get in on the action. Which is also what he said when—ignoring whatever bad feelings he’d had over the past months, and neglecting to mention the reception for The Big Money—he wrote a cheery letter to Dos Passos to say he was three-quarters finished with his new novel, and planned on going to Spain as soon as he was done, as long as there was still fighting. If not, they would have each missed the best novelistic material there ever was—material they, or at least he, was uniquely equipped to handle. But he doubted the war would be over that quickly, because the Spaniards, and the Moors, could really fight. If the battle was carried to Madrid, he hoped they’d spare the pictures in the Prado and elsewhere—though he didn’t care about the buildings themselves. “Anything looks better after being shelled,” he quipped.

  October 1936: Madrid/Cartagena/Moscow

  On October 13 Barea heard enemy guns for the first time.

  The rebel commander General Emilio Mola had announced that he would be drinking coffee on the Gran Via on the twelfth, and he seemed only a little behind schedule. His troops were pressing ever closer to Madrid, while rebel planes continued to bomb it. The city swarmed with refugees: on the broad tree-lined avenues of Castellana and Recoletos, where the wealthy had lived in spacious stone palacios, they slept outdoors and did their cooking on open fires; the lucky ones were given quarters in deserted private houses where they camped with their dogs and goats in formerly grand salons hung with tattered tapestries.

  The government had imposed a strict curfew and no one was permitted on the streets after eleven o’clock at night. Barea, who had to work into the small hours to censor reports going out to night desks at newspapers the world over, found himself confined to the Telefónica. He sent food, when he could get it, and money to Aurelia and the children, but going home was out of the question. Occasionally Maria called, pestering him for a rendezvous, and he found himself unable even to be civil to her on the telephone. His world had narrowed to one purple-shrouded cone of light in the censors’ office; soon, he felt, the darkness would engulf it altogether. Yet still the journalists came to him with their copy every night, trying to find ways to tell the truth of what they saw and heard on the streets; and still, despite the nagging feeling that it was wrong to do so, he had to cut that copy to order, until it was just a bloodless recital of old military news.

  Under t
he circumstances, then, it was just as well that neither he nor the reporters knew about the coded cable that had arrived at the Soviet embassy on October 12. Marked “Absolutely Secret” and ostensibly sent by Nicolai Yezhov, people’s commissar for internal affairs and overseer of the NKVD in Moscow, to General Alexander Orlov, the recently appointed NKVD station chief in Madrid, the cable was in fact signed “Ivan Vasilievich”—the code name of General Secretary Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin himself. And it ordered Orlov to make immediate and covert arrangements to ship to Russia all of Spain’s most valuable treasure, her gold and silver reserves, which were the fourth largest in the world: a huge store of ingots, Louis d’or, dollars, sovereigns, and other coins that had been accumulating since the days of the conquistadores and had hitherto been the guarantee of the nation’s currency.

  Until a few weeks ago this hoard had lain undisturbed in moated vaults under the Banco de España on the Paseo del Prado—vaults that were designed to flood in the event of a robbery. But a far greater danger than mere robbers had now appeared in the form of the rebel armies that were drawing ever closer to Madrid; and in mid-September the government had decided to move the reserves to a safer, more defensible place. The coins and ingots were crated and transported by truck to Cartagena, on the Mediterranean coast in Murcia, where they were hidden in the caves that the Spanish Navy used to store munitions; but this was only a temporary stopgap. For there were threats to the treasure’s security not only from the Nationalist insurgents but also from the anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti, who (it was feared) wanted to hijack it and take it to Barcelona.