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

by Vaill, Amanda

  “Oh, come in,” said Martha redundantly. “This is, uh, Ted.”

  “Hi,” said Allan awkwardly, scrambling to his feet. Hemingway stared at him.

  “I’ll see you later, okay?” Martha prompted.

  “Okay. Yeah,” said Allan, and left. Outside in the hall he discovered Sidney Franklin, who seemed much bigger at the Hotel Florida than he had in the car. Franklin made it clear that if Allan tried to see Martha again, he would be sorry; and Allan, who knew what Franklin could do to a bull weighing more than a thousand pounds, swore to keep his distance. He left the hotel in a hurry.

  That night—really in the small hours of the next morning—Martha was awakened by a bombardment. She was alone in the bed, alone in the room. Feeling forsaken and uncharacteristically terrified, she went to the door and found it locked from the outside. She hammered on it and shouted for help, but no one came; at last, after the shelling had stopped, someone—a hotel employee—arrived with a key. Wondering what had happened to Hemingway, Martha ventured out into the hall and, following the sound of men’s voices, went into one of the neighboring rooms. There was Hemingway, playing poker with a bunch of International Brigaders on leave. He was sorry if she’d been frightened, he said; he’d locked her into the room so no one would bother her while he was gone.

  The next day was taken up with arranging passes and getting oriented, with a quick trip to the by-now-obligatory University City front—like a walk in Central Park, thought Martha, until she heard the ping of bullets on the other side of the wall she was standing against. At midnight Hemingway came in—covered with mud from the Guadalajara battlefield, where he’d been all day—in company with Gustav Regler and the Twelfth Brigade’s medical officer, a German named Werner Heilbrun, and the four of them sat up talking until three. The next morning she was brushing her teeth when she heard the sickening whine of a shell approaching, then a noise “like granite thunder” as it hit just outside the hotel. At first she stood rooted to the still-shuddering floor; then, going downstairs to find out what had happened, she discovered that the shell had decapitated a man standing on the corner. Ivens and Ferno went out to film the corpse: it would make effective footage in the documentary. Breathe in but don’t inhale, Martha told herself, because there were lyddite explosive fumes and granite dust everywhere. Now breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. As Hemingway reminded her, “The dead man wasn’t you or anyone you know.” That was one way to see it, certainly—to think of the conflict as something separate from yourself.

  After breakfast the two of them drove, in one of the two cars the Propaganda Ministry had assigned to Hemingway, to the Jarama front, where the opposing armies had gone to earth in lines of trenches from which they fired intermittently at each other and staged brief, sometimes bloody sorties in an attempt to break through somewhere. If you weren’t in the line of fire, however, it was quite peaceful, and Hemingway and Martha picnicked by a stream before going on to Morata. There, at the hospital run by the Friends of Spanish Democracy, one of the patients, a Lincoln Brigader named Robert Raven, asked to speak to Hemingway. He was a social worker from Pittsburgh who’d been blinded during the fighting a month ago when a grenade exploded directly in front of him. Hemingway could hardly bring himself to look at the burned, ruined face, which “looked like some hill that had been fought over in muddy weather and then baked in the sun”; but Raven bore the injury with fortitude. He claimed only to regret that he might not be able to be useful to the cause he’d come to fight for.

  “Listen, Old Timer,” Hemingway told him heartily, “you’re going to be fine. You’ll be a lot of good, you know. You can talk on the radio.”

  “Maybe,” said Raven. As Hemingway rose to go, he asked, “You’ll be back?”

  “Absolutely,” Hemingway assured him, and perhaps even meant it. For with his soft voice and his ravaged face, the Pittsburgh social worker had suddenly brought the war close in a way that even the shells slamming into the Hotel Florida had not done. “It still isn’t you that gets hit,” Hemingway would write later that day, in a kind of twentieth-century iteration of John Donne’s famous meditation beginning “No man is an island”—“but it is your countryman now.”

  April 1937: Madrid

  In the weeks after Guadalajara, Barea thought, the atmosphere in Madrid had begun to change. There were still artillery barrages, and bombings, and the correspondents still queued anxiously for the two long-distance phone lines if something important seemed to be brewing; but suddenly there were more correspondents, some of them barely more than day-trippers popping in with a prewritten story they wanted to file in the Telefónica just to get the now-coveted Madrid dateline, others coming as if on a pilgrimage to a shrine. Spain was still news, and now it seemed safe to cover it; nobody was talking about “the fall of Madrid” anymore. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the debonair French writer-aviator, came to write a series of articles on the war for Paris-Soir. Virginia Cowles, a darkly glamorous, well-connected twenty-seven-year-old who (she herself admitted) “had no qualifications for a war correspondent except curiosity” arrived—with “three wool dresses and a fur jacket”—to cover both sides of the conflict for the Hearst newspapers in the United States. The decidedly unglamorous Iowa novelist Josephine Herbst, armed with little more than her Communist sympathies and some vague letters of interest from magazines, wanted to cover what was happening to the man—or the woman—on the street. The swashbuckling Hollywood actor Errol Flynn, star of Captain Blood and The Charge of the Light Brigade, appeared on some kind of vague fact-finding trip. And of course now there was Hemingway, who blew in to the Telefónica press room one day with a beautifully groomed blonde on his arm.

  “That’s Marty—be nice to her,” Hemingway said. “She writes for Collier’s—you know, a million circulation.” Or maybe, thought Barea, dazed by Martha Gellhorn’s aura, it was half a million, or two million—the numbers were unimaginable.

  The new correspondents, along with the aid workers and off-duty International Brigaders, made a kind of expatriate colony that drifted from watering hole to watering hole along the Gran Via and the Calle de Alcalá—from the Miami Bar, with its collection of American jazz records and its frescoed murals of Bright Young Things disporting themselves on the beach, to the Café Molineros, or the Aquarium, or Chicote’s, Hemingway’s favorite, where an American girl who worked in the press office performed a striptease she called “The Widow of General Mola,” and an inebriated miliciano got himself shot dead for spraying guests with a Flit gun filled with lavender water. “We were a jokey bunch,” Martha would recall later.

  Barea and Ilsa, however, didn’t join in any of these hijinks. Perhaps the jokes didn’t seem very funny to either of them. Instead, Barea took Ilsa back to his old neighborhood, to the narrow lanes of Lavapiés and Serafín’s bar on Calle Ave Maria, past the streets and squares he’d known as a boy and a young man, the landmarks of his life. Aurelia had agreed to a divorce and he had filed the papers necessary to begin the process; a future with Ilsa now seemed not only possible but attainable, and he wanted to share with her not only his present but his past. He pointed out where his mother had laundered shirts in the Manzanares, or where he had waited for the stagecoach to take him to Brunete to stay with his father’s family, and Ilsa’s curiosity and enjoyment nourished him. Under her eager gaze he became a storyteller, weaving a tale of another Madrid, as different from the one they traversed—or from the one in Hemingway’s dispatches—as Goya’s pictures were from Capa’s. And for the first time, but not the last, Barea knew what it was to have an audience hang on his every word.

  * * *

  Although she’d originally thought this trip was going to be a great adventure, Martha was having a hard time in Madrid.

  To begin with there was the noise: the rifles and machine guns that yammered all night in metallic bursts—tacrong, crong, cararong, as Hemingway, who liked sound effects, put it; the shells; the loudspeakers on the Casa de Campo through which each si
de bombarded the other with music (“Kitten on the Keys” was a bipartisan favorite) and propaganda. She was cold at night, despite hot-water bottles and an electric heater that blew the fuses at the Florida; hungry all the time or disgusted by what food was available (“horrible” was a frequent note in her diary); and disdainful of most of the people she met. George Seldes and his wife were “unpleasant,” Koltsov’s mistress, the German journalist Maria Osten, “ominous,” Ehrenburg and Georges Soria self-important, Errol Flynn both “dumb” and a “shit,” Virginia Cowles (for coming to Madrid with only high-heeled shoes) frivolous, and Josie Herbst—an old friend of Hemingway’s, to make matters worse—was “ugly and vulgar and has a voice like scratching one’s fingernail on a blackboard.”

  Finally, despite their shared quarters and pet names—he called her “Mookie” as well as “Rabbit” and “Daughter,” she called him “Scrooby” (for “screwball”) or “Bug” or “Rabby”—Martha was confused and ambivalent about her relationship with Hemingway. She’d run off to Spain to be with him, but he was hardly ever around. Most days he was away playing grip for Joris Ivens and Johnny Ferno, kitted out like them in a black workman’s beret and ratty old cardigan; in the evenings, he was drinking or talking—either in their suite at the Florida, or down the hall in Tom Delmer’s rooms, or at Chicote’s or Gaylord’s—with the circle of cronies he’d acquired since coming to Madrid. Many were military men: Hans Kahle; Pavol Lukács; the scarred, thin-lipped, shaven-headed Pole who went by the name “General Walter”; the handsome Spanish composer-turned-soldier Lieutenant Colonel Gustavo Durán, his acquaintance from Paris days; the charismatic colonel Juan Modesto, who liked to flirt with Martha; or the police commander José “Pepe” Quintanilla, the brother of the painter Luis Quintanilla. Others—Koltsov, Regler, or Ehrenburg—were Communist intellectuals; or, like Matthews, Delmer, or Cockburn, journalists. And again there was Ivens, in his self-appointed role as Hemingway’s tutor, helping him “to understand the anti-fascist cause.” Hemingway, Martha was learning, “was able to sit with a bunch of men for most of a day or most of a night, or most of both day and night though perhaps with different men, wherever he happened to have started sitting, all of them fortified by a continuous supply of drink, the while he roared with laughter at reminiscences and anecdotes.” And unless she wanted to sit with them, too, she wouldn’t see much of him.

  It was almost worse when he wasn’t surrounded by his mates. Then she had to endure Sidney Franklin’s disapproving eye, or Hemingway’s caresses, which she dealt with awkwardly. Despite her coolly flirtatious manner and seductive appearance, Martha had never found sex easy, not even during her long liaison with Bertrand de Jouvenel; with Hemingway, most of the time, she found herself wishing “that it would soon be over.” But—and this was the damnable thing—she also found herself falling in love with him, in a way she never had with anyone before. Part of it was his paradoxical vulnerability: his need for approval, coexisting, in what he called his “skyzophrenia,” with his need for dominance, and his childish anxiety about sleeping alone. And then he seemed so heroically, romantically wrapped up in Spain’s struggle. “I think it was the only time in his life,” she would say afterward, “when he was not the most important thing there was. He really cared about … that war. I believe I never would’ve gotten hooked otherwise.”

  Stopping by the Telefónica one evening, when the sandbagged windows and shaded lights of the censor’s office made the place seem to her like “a dugout or a watchtower … a place for conspirators,” Martha unburdened herself to Ilsa—who, after all, had left her husband and her old life and come to Spain and was now living with Barea as his wife, and working alongside him. How old are you, my dear? Ilsa wanted to know; and when Martha told her twenty-eight, asked—not unkindly—if she thought she was perhaps spoiled. “Folk are odd,” Martha commented to her journal afterward.

  Paradoxically, given that Ilsa was superficially so unlike herself, she was drawn to this “small, dark, square-faced” Austrian—to her courage under fire, her calm authority in a job so often handled by men (“note the role of women in this mess,” Martha reminded herself), and especially her journalist’s understanding of and respect for accurate and thorough reporting. “She demanded facts,” Martha noted, “[and] she understood that the Loyalist cause did not need propaganda, it could stand on truth.”

  Ilsa had assigned her a guide and interpreter, Kajsa Rothman, a tall Swedish Valkyrie with red-gold hair cut in a Greta Garbo bob, who dressed in men’s clothes, spoke seven languages fluently, and had been first a nurse for and then the lover of Norman Bethune. Martha wasn’t sure she liked Kajsa, with her “conceit of a beautiful woman” and her pride in her contacts and sources of confidential information (sins Martha herself could be equally guilty of). But Kajsa took her, not only to the usual war-tourist sights but also to others less celebrated but more revealing: the grand hotels, the Ritz and the Palace, which had become hospitals, with stretchers being carried up and down the grand staircases and people giving blood under the chandeliers in what had been the dining room; a shoe store where the girls trying on strappy sandals were urged by the salesman to move to seats farther back in the store, lest they be cut by flying glass from a shell; a coiffeur (“dirty as only places that deal with hair can be,” Martha noted) where she queried the proprietor in detail about the economics of his business in a besieged city where permanent-wave fluid and hair dye had become precious commodities, and peroxide was requisitioned for surgical disinfectant.

  Kajsa also introduced her to Bethune, and to the recently arrived Cambridge biologist J. B. S. Haldane, with both of whom she went to Morata on April 5. There had been a skirmish—shelling and inconclusive infantry attacks—on the Jarama front and a number of wounded had been brought in to the first-aid station there; Bethune was taking blood for transfusions and asked if she wanted to come along. Bouncing along the rutted road she was excited—at last she really was going to war with the boys. But when they got to the old mill where the field hospital was she was taken aback by the suffering she found, even as she found herself noting its particulars: how peroxide foamed in a wound, for example, or the way the hospital smelled.

  Back in Madrid, she tried to draw on some of what she had seen for the first writing she had done in months: a radio talk about her impressions of Madrid and the war. With powerful transmitters in Madrid and in rebel territory sending out news and propaganda that could be picked up by foreign relay stations as well as by radio sets in Spain, radio was playing a bigger and bigger part in the national, and international, conversation about the war. In the south, in Seville, the Nationalist general Gonzalo Queipo de Llano broadcast a nightly rant against targets such as France’s premier, “the Jew Blum,” and gleefully detailed (among other things) what Moorish mercenaries might do to Republican women in the cities they captured; in Madrid, station EAQ, officially under the control of the Loyalist government, transmitted pro-Republican dispatches by different speakers in different languages, among them Bethune and Haldane. And someone—possibly her sometime confidant Ilsa Kulcsar, whose job it was to arrange for press coverage of the war—suggested that Martha try her hand at one. As it turned out, she was not only game but also, thanks to her and Hemingway’s press connections, able to get a tentative commitment from America’s National Broadcasting Company to transmit her talk over their network as well.

  On a borrowed typewriter in her room at the Hotel Florida, she began. “Living here is not like anything you ever knew before,” she wrote; and gradually a portrait of Madrid as she experienced it came into focus, full of the kind of detail and sharp-edged irony that animated her best work. Although she’d been making careful notes each day of everything she saw and heard in Madrid, Martha felt a wave of relief at simply writing again. And she was thrilled when, after she showed it to Hemingway, he said, “Daughter, you’re lovely,” because he thought it was good.

  * * *

  Although he liked to talk about stra
tegy and tactics with the military men who had become his friends, Hemingway’s only combat experience had been in the last year of the Great War, when as a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old Red Cross driver, delivering chocolate, cigarettes, and postcards to the trenches, he’d been wounded by an exploding shell, then shot in the knee, but had refused evacuation until soldiers hurt in the same attack were tended to. Despite this grim memory, and despite his promises to Pauline to keep himself out of danger, he desperately wanted—or he told himself he wanted—to see action in Spain. But Joris Ivens and Johnny Ferno had already filmed most of the combat sequences for their documentary by the time he arrived in Madrid. He accompanied them back to the area around Morata around the time of the April 5 sortie, but the closest Hemingway got to actual combat was the evacuation point where the injured men were being picked up for transport to Bethune’s hospital. The rest of the footage they shot that day was of tanks lumbering around the dusty hills.

  A few days later, though, it seemed like he might get a real taste of battle. Since the beginning of November, Franco’s soldiers had been lodged in the Casa de Campo, where from the heights of Cerro Garabitas they lobbed shells with impunity into the heart of Madrid and protected the rear flank of the Nationalist contingent still dug in at University City. But the Republican command hoped to drive the rebels from their position, and perhaps also distract them from a planned offensive in the Basque country, as an anniversary present to the government, which had been elected on April 14 a year earlier. They were planning a concerted attack on Garabitas for April 9, and Joris Ivens and his crew—including Hemingway, and a ringer in the form of the United Press correspondent Hank Gorrell—were going to be allowed to take long-range cameras to the Parque del Oeste to film the action.