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

by Vaill, Amanda

  From the Hotel Dinard, Hemingway filed his first NANA dispatch, a jokey tongue-in-cheek story about the difficulties over Franklin’s visa, and got down to more serious business: a rendezvous with his new filmmaking colleague Joris Ivens. Ivens had arrived in Paris late in February for a brief visit to screen early footage of the Contemporary Historians film for an invited audience of Popular Front journalists and filmmakers, including the Russian émigré and spy Vladimir Pozner and the director Jean Renoir; and perhaps the warm reaction to his rushes had gone to his head. For, over copious drinks at the Deux Magots, Ivens came on a little patronizingly to his scenarist. Hemingway probably didn’t understand what the stakes were in Spain, he implied—how important it was to make a stand against fascism there, using whatever means were necessary and not worrying, the way a journalist might, about the strict accuracy of one’s reporting. Usually quick to flare up at any suggestion that he didn’t know exactly what was what, Hemingway let Ivens talk; something about this magnetic Dutchman with the deep-set blue eyes mesmerized him. He even found himself trying to impress Ivens by boasting about the “beautiful girlfriend” who would be coming to join him in Spain. “She has legs that begin at her shoulders,” Hemingway said.

  A few days after their drinks at the Deux Magots, leaving Sidney Franklin—still awaiting the final resolution of his visa problems—to finish shopping for their provisions, Hemingway and Ivens took the night train to Toulouse, where they’d get a flight across the Pyrenees into Spain. A major Nationalist offensive, which included 35,000 Italian troops, was taking place near Guadalajara, northeast of Madrid; and although at first it had seemed the rebel forces would prevail, the Republicans were now fighting back tenaciously. This was news in the making, and NANA would want it covered.

  Hemingway didn’t leave France immediately, however; first he wanted to see his old friend the Spanish painter and muralist Luis Quintanilla. Not just for old times’ sake, but for background: Quintanilla was an engagé artist who’d been jailed for his support of the Asturian miners’ revolt in 1934, had taken part in the attack on the Montaña Barracks at the outbreak of the war, and had fought in the Madrid outskirts and in the Guadarrama. And since the previous November he’d been director of the Spanish government’s intelligence services in southwest France, gathering information about the various refugee groups seeking shelter there.

  As they generally did when they met after a long separation, the two men went out for an evening of dedicated drinking (la gran borrachera, Quintanilla called it). How was it in Madrid, Hemingway wanted to know; and Quintanilla told him it was pretty bad. His studio had been bombed; and his monumental frescoes at University City and in the Casa del Pueblo had all been smashed to bits. “Let’s not talk about it, Ernesto,” he said. “When a man loses his life’s work … it is much better not to talk about it.” They had more drinks and still more; and then someone had the idea of driving to the frontier to see what the border security was actually like. How serious were they about this visa business?

  Very serious, it turned out. Twenty miles from the French border control point at Le Perthus two armed guards with bayonets stopped Hemingway’s car. Only when he and Quintanilla produced their impeccable papers were they allowed to proceed, up and up a winding road through the budding almond orchards that hugged the lower slopes of the Pyrenees, until at last they reached the guardhouse at the frontier, where a police officer told them that since February 20, when the new visa rules had been put into effect, no one had crossed the border here except for a few diplomats. “Even you,” the officer admonished Hemingway, “no matter what papers you have with you, you could not pass that line without the new visa.” On the other hand, Quintanilla told Hemingway on the drive back to Toulouse, there were now 88,000 Italian troops in Spain—including 12,000 who had just landed in Málaga and Cadiz—and between 16,000 and 20,000 Germans; in Germany recruitment posters were offering bonuses of a thousand reichsmarks to volunteers who would fight for Franco’s rebels.

  “No matter on which side of the Spanish war people may be on,” Hemingway sarcastically cabled back to NANA, “they all agree on one thing—the Spanish border is closed up and airtight.”

  A week later, two other journalists tried to gauge the airtightness of the border: Capa and the reporter Charles Réber from Ce Soir drove the length of the frontier from the Mediterranean to the mountains near the Andorran border to the fascist “embassies” in the posh precincts of Biarritz and Hendaye on the Atlantic coast. Capa wore a miliciano’s jacket against the mountain cold, and had brought with him a box of flashbulbs that looked awfully like tiny bombs; his appearance was so suspicious that the pair were repeatedly hauled in for questioning by guards who were certain they were arms smugglers, or at the very least illegal volunteers trying to cross the border to enlist. It took all of Capa’s charm to keep them out of jail.

  Unfortunately he didn’t get very interesting pictures for his trouble, unless you counted the one of the Basque refugee children the French border patrols had arrested. In a circle on a windswept beach, they were all holding hands and dancing.

  March 1937: Madrid/Valencia/Madrid

  The Casa de Alianza de Escritores Antifascistas—the Madrid headquarters of the antifascist writers’ union—was a grand brick mansion, formerly the palace of the Marques del Duero, on a quiet street near the Parque del Retiro. Although it had been taken over by the government when its aristocratic owners fled the city, its walls were still hung with tapestries and Old Master paintings, its windows draped in purple velvet, and the antifascist intellectuals ate their beans and rice off the Marques’s ancestral silver, crystal, and china while being waited on by his self-effacing servants, all of whom had stayed on in the house. The secretary of the Alianza, the vivacious, well-connected writer Maria Teresa Léon, and her husband, the distinguished poet Rafael Alberti, ran the place like a twenty-four-hour salon: putting up visiting intellectuals, staging readings, plays, and cultural events, and publishing a journal, El mono azul, featuring work by José Bergamín (the Alianza’s president), Antonio Machado, Ramón J. Sender, and foreigners such as André Malraux, Pablo Neruda, and John Dos Passos. And when Gerda Taro was left on her own in Madrid after Capa went back to Paris, the Albertis asked her to come and stay there.

  The Casa de Alianza could not have been more unlike the raffish quarters she’d shared with Capa at the Hotel Florida. Instead of shells whistling over the roof you heard birds chirping in the spacious garden; the people you passed in the halls were writers and artists—including Ilsa Kulcsar’s former connection from her Viennese cell, the English poet Stephen Spender—not newsmen, soldiers, and prostitutes. Of course Gerda accepted the invitation, especially when Alberti and Maria Teresa offered to help her set up a darkroom on the ground floor, where she could develop and enlarge her own prints and teach Alberti, an aspiring photographer, to do the same.

  She’d been taking pictures almost nonstop all month. Before Capa left, she and he had chronicled the forlorn, often bizarre detritus left behind by the rebel bombers: empty facades through whose windows sunlight streamed as if from a lighted interior; a dining table—suddenly visible in an apartment without walls—set for a meal to which no one would come; the burned, battered shell of the residence of the Chilean consul, Pablo Neruda, in the once-leafy suburb of Argüelles; the rubble-filled courtyard of a convent children’s shelter; a little girl gathering firewood that was evidently the remains of someone’s house. “Le bombardement de Madrid,” wrote Gerda on a page in one of the notebooks where she pasted contact prints—and then, in parentheses: “Surréalisme.” On a trip to Valencia she’d shot a roll of film in the plaza de toros where a group of men and women, citizen volunteers, were being drilled by Loyalist soldiers: lyrical photographs, in which the idealistic young trainees were lit like dancers in a ballet as the sun moved across the bullfighting arena. Someone would buy them—the young people looked so fervent and committed, and it made a nice message. Citizens learn to defe
nd their own hearths and homes. (A few weeks later Regards did indeed run a page of those photos.) But with so much happening all around her in Madrid, she wanted to shoot breaking news. Herself. Over her own byline, not one she shared with Capa.

  For Gerda had begun to feel ever more sharply the professional limitations, not to mention the personal ones, of her relationship with her now-famous lover, and she was looking for ways to proclaim her independence. She wasn’t sure she saw a future with Capa, she confided to Ruth Cerf; and despite what some people might think, she wasn’t his property, especially if he wasn’t around. If anyone asked, she started saying that they were really just “copains”—buddies—not lovers.

  Certainly she said that to Ted Allan, the young Canadian she called “the kid,” who’d been following her around like a puppy since her arrival in Madrid. Of course she loved Capa, she told him, but she wasn’t in love with him—she didn’t want to be in love, not ever again. She’d been in love once, desperately, with a boy in Prague who was killed by the Nazis. But no more. “It’s too painful,” she said. Allan believed this invented romantic fable, but her protestations of unavailability made him more eager to be with her rather than less. And he offered to drive her to the still unsettled Jarama front, where she could take pictures of battle sites and maybe, even, of combat. He was going there with Geza Karpathi and the screenwriter Herbert Kline to scout locations for their film on Bethune’s blood transfusion unit, and he hoped to be able to find some of his old International Brigades mates, whom he hadn’t heard from since the bloody fighting of the previous month. Why didn’t Gerda come along?

  The German photographer Walter Reuter saw her setting out for her trip to the front and couldn’t help noticing she was wearing stockings and high heels more appropriate to the Ritz than the battlefield. When he teased her about her outfit, Gerda just laughed. Wouldn’t it make those boys happy to see a woman? she wanted to know. Well, that’s what they were going to get.

  The sun was shining as the little group drove south toward Morata de Tajuña, where the Brigades headquarters were. She and Allan were lighthearted; they sang Brigade songs, and she taught him the words to “Freiheit” (“Freedom”) and “Los Cuatros Generales,” which ridiculed the four rebel commanders:

  Los cuatros generales,

  Mamita mia,

  Se han alzado …

  Para la Nochebuena,

  Mamita mia,

  Seran ahorcados.

  The four generals,

  Dear little mother,

  They tried to betray us.

  By Christmas,

  Dear little mother,

  They’ll all be strung up.

  When they crossed the Jarama north of Arganda, Gerda got out and photographed the bridge that the Nationalists had claimed they took, and—for good measure—the road sign that pointed to Madrid one way and Valencia the other. The road’s still open! See? Near Morata, although the front seemed quiet, the officers in charge were reluctant to allow “the lady comrade” to go into the trenches; but Gerda talked her way past the authorities, and the soldiers smilingly posed for her, their arms draped loosely around one another’s shoulders, cigarettes—a quantity of which she and Allan had had the foresight to bring along—dangling from their mouths. They showed her their bivouacs, and pointed out “Suicide Hill,” the heights of Pingarrón, where half the British battalion had fallen in February. Then, suddenly, just as thick gray clouds rolled in over the ruined olive groves, there was firing from the Nationalist lines to the west, and Gerda—seemingly impervious to the idea she might be in danger—darted from cover like a gazelle so she could photograph the brigade artillery being brought into position to fire back. There was no further action, however; the front settled back into that state of armed deadlock it had been in since the end of February, and eventually Gerda and Allan, and Karpathi and Kline, headed back to Madrid. In her camera bag Gerda had two rolls of what she thought would be good and saleable pictures. But Allan had nothing but sadness: in Morata he’d learned that twenty of his comrades, the boys he’d shipped across the Atlantic with and left behind when he went to take his political commissar’s job in Madrid, had been killed in the assault on Pingarrón.

  * * *

  The springlike weather that had smiled on Gerda’s trip to the Jarama front didn’t last. In its place came freezing rain—in the midst of which, at dawn on March 8, the Black Flames, a motorized division of Italian troops fighting under the rebels’ flag, broke through government lines northeast of the provincial capital of Guadalajara, on the road from Saragossa to Madrid. Over the next two days, despite the fog and sleet that reduced visibility to as little as a hundred yards in some places, the Nationalists, including another Italian division, the Black Arrows, continued the onslaught in an effort to encircle, and perhaps capture, Madrid before the winter’s end. The poor visibility produced one opera buffa moment, when the Black Flames cried out to another group of Italian speakers, telling them to stop firing on their own countrymen. “Noi siamo italiani di Garibaldi!” (“We’re Garibaldi Italians!,” Loyalist supporters), their supposed allies yelled back. But the rebels’ strategy otherwise appeared to be devastatingly successful: by the evening of the tenth, the rebel forces had overwhelmed the old walled town of Brihuega and were advancing toward Madrid.

  On the fifth floor of the Telefónica, where the sleet rattled at the windows, the reporters were queuing up for the available telephone lines. “Better announce a retreat for tonight,” Ilsa told them all, grimly. “Prepare for the worst.” At dinner at the Gran Via restaurant, she found her Vienna colleague Stephen Spender, who’d recently joined the British Communist Party and had come to Spain as a journalist. How had Madrid’s Republican defenders done today, he asked anxiously; and was shocked when Ilsa gave him the unvarnished truth: “Sie läuften wie Hasen!”—they ran like hares. When she and Barea had their nightly briefing with General Gorev at the War Ministry, he was cool and unruffled—as if we had all the space of the Russian steppes to maneuver, Barea thought; but back in the press room The New York Times’s Herbert Matthews was more pessimistic. He’d seen what the Italians had done in Abyssinia, he told his comrades. And now they were here in Spain, in open violation of the Non-Intervention Agreement, and probably on the verge of entering Madrid. Sitting at the telephone, with a line censor listening in, he tried to send that story to the Times’s Paris office. Hold it, the man on the other end kept saying; stop saying these are Italians. You and the Commies are the only people who use that kind of propaganda tag. Normally a calm, patient man with the mournful features of Erasmus in a drypoint etching, Matthews exploded in a fury; then, pinching his lips into a severe line, sat down and typed out a cable: If the Times had no confidence in his reporting, they could have his resignation instead.

  The Times tried to cool Matthews down—they weren’t accusing him of propagandizing, they said; they just worried that he was parroting one of Barea’s press releases; and by the twelfth, as a heavy storm system moved slowly over the Castilian meseta, the winds of fortune miraculously changed direction. Republican bombers, taking off from permanent concrete runways at Albacete, were able to pummel the Italians, whose tanks were bogged down in the mud, and government and International Brigade troops began pushing back along the road to Brihuega. There were many casualties—very nearly including Ted Allan and Geza Karpathi, who’d been in a station wagon with Norman Bethune, attempting to get blood to the front lines, when enemy bullets shattered their windshield. But they, and the blood they carried, were saved by a Loyalist tank; and the enemy began to fall back, leaving incriminating evidence behind. Mikhail Koltsov, rushing to the front, found abandoned Fiat tractors and Lancia trucks jamming the highway, which would make interesting reading in his next communication to Moscow (how was Mussolini going to deny helping the rebels now?); and Pietro Nenni, the Garibaldis’ soft-spoken political commissar, showed up in the censors’ office with a mailbag his men had seized from one of the Nationalist battalions.
It was crammed with mail and postal orders with Italian addresses and bloodstained diaries, handwritten in Italian, which Ilsa and Barea could give to any reporters who needed proof of the travesty these documents made of the Non-Intervention Agreement.

  Then, a few freezing, sodden days later, the weather cleared; and the Republicans, who had managed to nearly encircle the Italians under cover of the wintry brume, went on the attack in earnest. At that point, machine-gunned from the air by Russian Chatos, overrun with T-26 tanks, freezing in the tropical uniforms they hadn’t had time to exchange for winter battle dress, the Italians turned and ran. Eight months into the civil war the government finally had a decisive victory, and in the streets of Madrid people were buying newspapers, with their red banner headlines that screamed ¡Victoria a Guadalajara!, and throwing them into the air in celebration.

  In the days leading up to the battle Gerda had been frantic to get to the field, and Allan’s and Karpathi’s tales of their narrow escape can only have sharpened her desperation. Finally, she was able to commandeer a car with the Humanité correspondent Georges Soria, who at twenty-three had been covering the war, alongside Chim and Capa, since the beginning; and together the two journalists scrambled over the muddy fields where machine guns still chattered erratically, Soria with his notebook, Gerda with her Leica. Everywhere you looked there were the trucks, mortars, rifles, machine guns, and boxes of ammunition the Italians had left behind in their flight; and among them, strewn like broken toys in the rain-filled craters and the ditches beside the rutted roads, were the bodies of the dead, hundreds of them, their faces gray under the pallid sun. It was the first time Gerda had seen slaughter on this scale. When she returned to Madrid that evening, at dinner with Ted Allan and Herbert Matthews and others in the restaurant at the Gran Via, she seemed exhausted and pale; the sight of so much carnage had shaken her. “It was terrible,” she kept repeating. “A hand here. A head there … They were so young. Young Italian boys.” But she had taken “wonderful pictures,” she was sure of it: pictures that would help establish her as a combat photographer in her own right. Eager to get them into the hands of editors in Paris, she headed for Valencia the next morning.