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

by Vaill, Amanda

  Barea arranged the ladies’ itinerary—bomb ruins, a hospital, a visit to an artillery post in a relatively safe part of the front, tea with Miaja—Ilsa translated, and Katz/Simone hovered over their every footstep. After a morning of sightseeing, thinking it would be more pleasant than the raucous, smoky depths of the Gran Via canteen, Ilsa and Barea invited the Duchess and her companions to lunch in their quarters upstairs; but the visitors insisted on joining the crowd in the basement. They didn’t want any special treatment, they protested. So they shared beans and watery soup and desiccated sausage with the correspondents and International Brigaders in the canteen, where the bursts of lunchtime shellfire were drowned out by the buzz of conversation and the clatter of crockery.

  They had just finished their coffee and followed Barea to the lobby when the hotel manager appeared. Could Barea come upstairs, please? There had been a fire in his and Ilsa’s room. With the Englishwomen at their heels, Barea and Ilsa followed the manager upstairs to find their quarters a sodden wreck. A shell fragment had burst through the window, setting fire to the curtains and immolating Ilsa’s shoes, which had been arranged on a shelf under the sill; it had then landed on the table, smashing the dishes laid out for Ilsa and Barea’s lunch, and now lay there, still smoldering, as firemen coiled up the hoses they’d used to spray the room. Ilsa bent over the shoes, mourning her favorite blue pair—brand new, too!—and the Englishwomen clustered around her, patting and cooing. Just think, if she and Barea had come upstairs to lunch instead of going to the canteen with them, she or he might have been killed! Or if they’d all come to the Bareas’ room, they might have been killed as well! Not a bit of it, Ilsa maintained stoutly; it wasn’t as serious as all that. Just a little piece of metal. Look, there were some eggs, sitting unbroken in a bowl on a side table! And now they really must get going, they were scheduled to visit Ortega’s artillery observation post.

  Going outside to round up the party’s cars, Barea found the street littered with debris from the shelling. Then he caught sight of something else, on the glass expanse of a ground-floor shop window full of records and Victrolas: a pulsating gray lump about the size of an apricot, veined with red, surrounded by gray spatters. It took him a minute to understand that it was a fragment of someone’s brain. Time seemed suddenly suspended, like music at a fermata. As if in a dream he put out his hand to stop one of the Englishwomen from going closer to look at it, turning her instead toward where he thought the car must be; but he himself couldn’t move. He heard Ilsa’s voice nearby, hoarse, insistent: “Arturo! Come away from here!” But he still stood motionless. His feet, he realized, were stuck in a puddle of blood.

  With effort he tore himself away, allowed Ilsa to push him into one of the cars, wiped his feet on the matting on the floor. In silence he rode with the group to Ortega’s artillery lookout, where the Englishwomen peeped excitedly through the lens of a rangefinder at the University City trenches and the puffs of smoke issuing from the mouths of government artillery. When it was Barea’s turn he looked into the rangefinder at the target Ortega’s forces were shelling: it was the chapel of the cemetery whose office Barea’s uncle had been in charge of, and where as a boy he’d played, chasing butterflies and lizards through the sunlit alleys of cypresses, waiting for his uncle to finish his business and go home. Now, he saw, the cypresses and rose trees were gone and the thick brick walls of the chapel were pocked with shells.

  * * *

  Martha and Hemingway missed the noontime appearance of the British delegation at the journalists’ canteen and the carnage that followed the shelling on the Gran Via because they had been invited to lunch with Luis Quintanilla’s brother, the man some called “The Executioner of Madrid”—Pepe Quintanilla, chief of Madrid’s secret police.

  Quintanilla lived in an opulently furnished flat—crystal chandeliers, savonnerie carpet—in a new apartment building on the north side of the city, with broad terraces commanding a view of the Casa de Campo; and the luncheon party, which included his wife and small son, seemed to take place in a very different Madrid than the one Martha had come to know. With his impeccable dove-gray suiting, his high forehead, slender hands, and bright brown eyes framed by horn-rimmed glasses, Quintanilla looked less like an executioner than an intellectual or an aristocrat; his manner was all graciousness, his voice like silk. But Martha was naggingly conscious of the steel beneath the smooth exterior, the gap between this elegant luncheon party and what Quintanilla actually did.

  Somewhere between when the butler served the soup and when he poured the coffee, either Hemingway or Quintanilla brought up the matter of José Robles and Dos Passos’s inquiries about him. Dos should really stop asking awkward questions, Quintanilla said; it could only lead to trouble. Whatever Robles’s situation was, whatever had happened to him, he would get a fair trial. Hemingway should tell Dos that. And that—he fixed his interlocutors with his bright nutmeg-brown stare—should be the end of it. There was, or there should have been, no mistaking what Quintanilla meant.

  As Hemingway and Martha prepared to go, Quintanilla asked if he might be permitted to bestow a small gift upon Martha, as a token of esteem and admiration, something to remind her of her time in Madrid. He held it out to her in his long fingers: an exquisite little cup of antique Limoges glass, as fragile as a bird’s egg. She should treat it carefully, Quintanilla said. Such a shame if it were broken.

  * * *

  It was balmy, almost hot, when Hemingway and Martha left the Quintanillas’ flat. Unless they wanted to watch the Englishwomen watch the shelling at the artillery post, there was nothing to do; so Martha went shopping with Ginny Cowles, whom she had decided to like. First they priced some pretty silver fox furs—such a bargain in Madrid just now—then they stopped at a linen shop, where Martha bought handkerchiefs for Hemingway, and went to the coiffeur to get their hair washed. (“Come what may,” she wrote in her journal, “one washes one’s hair, has one’s nails tended, sends out the laundry.” Edna Gellhorn had schooled her well.)

  Returning to the hotel, they found the usual evening drinks party in full swing in Hemingway’s room: Norman Bethune had turned up, sweaty and dirty from a day at the front, to take advantage of Hemingway’s bathtub and the Florida’s plentiful hot water, and Dos Passos and Hemingway were working on Hemingway’s whiskey. None of them were feeling any pain when they went on to the Gran Via, where they found to their fury that the Duchess of Atholl’s party had eaten all the spinach (and, depending on who you talked to, had been given a chicken for dinner as well). Heated things were said about class distinction and Anglo-American relations, but in the end some aged whitings were produced by the kitchen, and the Americans washed them down with more drinks before going out into the moonlit night.

  Upstairs in the Gran Via, Barea and Ilsa had come back from work at the Telefónica to discover that their belongings had been moved to new rooms. They were both exhausted from the events of the day, and all Ilsa wanted to do was crawl into bed; but Barea couldn’t bear to be alone with silence or his thoughts. André Simone was having a party on another floor of the hotel, and Barea went in search of distraction: what he found was bad liquor and worse gramophone music, and a smoky room full of International Brigade officers and American correspondents. In one corner Hemingway’s Guadalajara battlefield guide, Colonel Hans Kahle, was holding forth to an American film critic; in another Simone was fondling one of the censorship employees, a white-blond Canadian girl called Pat who had very fair skin, like a child’s, and a moll’s hard mouth. Everyone there seemed to be posing—look at us, how tough and jaded we are—and suddenly something inside Barea snapped. All of these people—the ones here, the ones downstairs in the restaurant, the ones in Chicote’s and the Miami Bar—were behaving as if they were the main actors in the war; none of them understood that this was Spain’s war, Spain’s agony.

  He began shouting at them over the din of the dance music: they were all self-satisfied posers, playing at helping the war effort; they
didn’t really care what happened to Spain, they were just here for themselves. But no one except the film critic paid him any attention. Disgusted and dispirited, he left and went back to his and Ilsa’s room.

  When the bombardment started again the next morning, he crept out of bed carefully so as not to wake Ilsa. He wanted a bath, a shave, a fresh start; but he’d left his soap and shaving things in their old room, and went to get them. Although the room still smelled of smoke the sun was streaming in the windows, and he paused a moment to look out at the Gran Via, where a few people had started on their morning rounds. One of them, a woman in a green suit, looked uncannily like Ilsa from behind. Had she suddenly got dressed and gone out?

  Suddenly there was a sound like ripping fabric, then the explosion as a shell hit a theater down the block; the woman in green crumpled to the pavement. In an unreasoning panic Barea raced down the hall to the room he’d left minutes ago. But Ilsa was there, awake, looking out the window. Seeing his face, she asked, worriedly, “What’s the matter with you?” and he just had time to say “Nothing” when another shell struck the Telefónica just across the street. Pale and shaking, he sank to his knees. The smell of the dead he remembered from his army service in Melilla, so many years ago now, filled his nostrils, and a wave of nausea passed over him. Ilsa managed to get him downstairs, where he drank a couple of brandies, and somehow he got through the day until the afternoon. But then, as he and Ilsa were putting books into shelves beside the window, they saw two more women killed on the Gran Via—one of them had been carrying a parcel wrapped in pink paper, and after the police came to take away the bodies the parcel lay forgotten in the street. Looking at it, Barea felt the bile rise in his throat, the sweat break out on his forehead and upper lip.

  He couldn’t work that afternoon, or that evening. Instead he scrolled a piece of paper into the typewriter and almost automatically began to write. What emerged was a phantasmagoric story full of images: the pulsating brain matter on the shop window, the black discs of the phonograph records in the shop display behind it, the frisky little RCA terrier, cocking his head to listen for a command that never came—and a woman, dressed in green, lying on the shop floor with a hole in the middle of her forehead. As he typed, Ilsa came into the room and almost automatically he handed the pages to her to look at; her response cut through the fog surrounding him. “But that’s me you’ve killed here,” she said in alarm. He took the pages back and tore them to shreds.

  * * *

  Fuentidueña de Tajo lay forty miles southeast of Madrid, just off the main road to Valencia: a village of 1,500, with unpaved streets running between the tile-roofed cracked stucco houses that seemed to spring organically from the parched fields surrounding it. Some of the houses had been bombed by Nationalist aircraft and now many villagers preferred to live in the cave dwellings carved into the terraced hillsides along the river—dwellings whose cone-shaped chimneys, seen from afar, looked as if they’d been built by elves in some children’s story. But to Martha Gellhorn, arriving there on the sunny April morning after the shelling on the Gran Via, Fuentidueña was “only picturesque because it is not Bearcreek, Kansas.”

  Possibly Martha was in a bad mood because she and Hemingway had driven to the village with Josie Herbst, whose gentle frumpiness and harsh Midwestern vowels grated on her; or because Dos Passos was with them, since they’d all come to Fuentidueña to shoot footage for The Spanish Earth. It was Dos who had argued loudest and hardest for the documentary to portray the social background to the war, and now he’d got his way. As recently as the beginning of April, Joris Ivens had been lobbying for two films, one a compendium of the battle footage he and Ferno had completed at that point and sent to New York, which he thought could be readied for release by midmonth, the other a human-interest documentary focusing on village life, which would take longer to shoot and could be released sometime in the summer, perhaps. But when Archibald MacLeish screened the combat footage Ivens had sent to New York, he’d cabled that it was too good to be chopped up and presented as a short film. With both Hemingway and Dos Passos to help frame the story, MacLeish said, Ivens could surely combine the two narratives in such a way as to make a compelling feature. And here they all were, with two cars and a lot of camera equipment—Martha and Hemingway, Josie Herbst, Sid Franklin, Dos Passos, and Joris Ivens and Johnny Ferno.

  Ivens and Ferno had discovered Fuentidueña during their explorations of the Jarama Valley, and it turned out to suit their purpose better than they could ever have hoped. Poor and feudal, the village had been controlled for centuries by a handful of landowners—descendants of the hidalgos whose shields still adorned the houses clustered around the main square—who’d taken all the proceeds from the surrounding vineyards and forbade the villagers to plant gardens of their own. But the landlords had been killed or had fled at the start of the war, the villagers had collectivized the vineyards, and had invested the income from them in a pump to bring water from the Tajo to irrigate the fields, so that for the first time they would be able to grow their own food, and maybe even to provide some for hungry Madrid. This was perfect material for Ivens, the man who had made such social-realist documentaries as Saarland and Zuyderzee. And Dos Passos, by interviewing the village elders, discovered a young man he called Julián (it might even have been his real name) who had been serving with the army outside Madrid and might serve as a link between Fuentidueña and the front.

  Dos Passos discovered more than Julián, as it turned out: Walking down a little dirt track to the new pumping station with the village mayor, a socialist UGT member, he noticed men and boys sitting on the bank, fishing. All anarchists, CNT men, said the mayor: you wouldn’t see socialists loafing around when there was spring plowing to do. “We’ve cleaned out the fascists and the priests,” said one of the other UGT men. “Now we must clean out the loafers.”

  “Yes,” the mayor responded. “One of these days it will come to a fight.” By the time Dos Passos got back to the United States and published an account of this conversation, other events would lend it an unsettling resonance; but for Hemingway and Ivens the mayor’s comments, and Dos’s interest in them, were at best an irritant, at worst malign. For Ivens, the only fight he wanted to cover was that between the villagers, united with Loyalist soldiers under a common banner, and the forces of fascism; for Hemingway, Fuentidueña and its politics held little interest. If he thought about them at all, observed Josie Herbst, he “naively” adopted whatever the simplest party line was—especially if “at the very moment Dos Passos was urgently questioning” it.

  That kind of aperçu wasn’t going to endear Josie to her old friend Hemingway, however. And not surprisingly, when the day’s filming was over, he and Martha somehow managed to forget Josie was with them, and drove back to Madrid leaving her behind.

  * * *

  Capa had been trying to get back to Spain for almost a month, begging magazines for an assignment that would justify a visa, until at last, at the beginning of April, he’d gotten two: one from Ce Soir and one from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer News, for whom he was supposed to shoot newsreel footage even though his experience with a film camera was next to nonexistent. Unfortunately, before his visa came through, Ce Soir had sent him on an infuriating trip to Brussels to cover a parliamentary by-election between a fascist and a liberal candidate; but finally, in the middle of the month, he and Gerda were able to travel to Madrid.

  By the time they arrived, though, the Casa de Campo offensive had all but petered out; and except for the daily ordeal by artillery shell there seemed nothing new to report from the beleaguered capital. The important action was all in the north, where rebel forces were moving to encircle the isolated Loyalist enclave in the Basque country and in Asturias, whose iron and coal, respectively, were vital resources for either side. But since Nationalist territory lay between the northern provinces and the government-held center of the country, there was no way to get there except by sea or air; and in any case Capa’s travel documents
were only good for Madrid and Valencia. To get new ones meant going back to Paris and starting all over again.

  While he and Gerda were trying to figure out a way around this problem they came across Geza Korvin, who was still in Madrid working on his film about Norman Bethune. And Korvin, it turned out, had just discovered someone else with a Budapest connection, the Dutchman John Ferno, who was married to Capa’s childhood friend Eva Besnyö, and was working with Joris Ivens on a documentary with two renowned American writers, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. Why didn’t they all get together?

  Capa, who would always seize any excuse for a party, immediately made a plan. He and Gerda and Korvin and Ivens and Ferno, and the Americans, would have a festive meal together. They would go to Botín, a very old, very famous, very good restaurant near the Plaza Mayor where the specialty was suckling pig. Maybe, because of the war, there would be no suckling pig; but there would be something, and Botín’s cellar was reputed to be excellent. Hemingway had written about Botín’s rioja alta in The Sun Also Rises, and he would certainly be happy to revisit it.

  Which he was; although, depending on who told the story later, they didn’t eat suckling pig but paella—and Hemingway (probably with most of a bottle of rioja alta inside him) insisted on going into the kitchen to help prepare it. Less skillful in the kitchen than at the typewriter, said the padrone, Emilio Gonzales, tactfully. Although Capa’s English was rudimentary at best, he and Hemingway could communicate in French, and he immediately recognized in the older man an appetite for life, what Josie Herbst called “a splurging magnificence,” that he found irresistible. And Hemingway liked this impetuous young photographer, who ran after combat the way a child would chase butterflies, and annexed him as a kind of adopted son.