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

by Vaill, Amanda

  He was less enchanted with Gerda, despite her charm and her crop of dark-gold, sunburnt hair. Maybe it was her knowing, foxy little face that irritated him; or her ability to jump effortlessly from German to French to Spanish to English; or her cool familiarity with the Spanish generals and battlefields Hemingway wanted to think of as his property. Maybe it was her fondness for the work of John Dos Passos, whose novels he’d just been dismissing to Martha as bogus and unreadable. Or maybe it was the way Capa looked at her, as if she were some magnificent present that he didn’t deserve. Whatever it was, Hemingway disliked Gerda on sight: enough to tell Ted Allan later that she was a “whore.”

  Fortunately, however, Capa had no inkling of Hemingway’s dislike that day; and later it wouldn’t matter. For now they were just having a marvelous party, as if they were sitting at the Dôme or the Deux Magots instead of less than two miles from the front lines in Madrid.

  * * *

  Just before dawn on April 22, two artillery shells smashed into the stone walls of the Hotel Florida. The hotel had been accidentally hit before by artillery fire aimed at the Telefónica, but this barrage was different. After the initial impact, blast after blast shuddered directly into the roof tiles and masonry, shattering skylights and windows, as if this morning the rebel battery on Garabitas was trying to send a message to the foreigners in the Florida—we can exterminate you. From inside the walls came the mad skittering of rats trying to escape; and from the back of the hotel, an ululation, as from a flock of birds, as the whores de combat (as Hemingway called them) awoke in terror.

  Doors were flying open around the Florida’s atrium. John Dos Passos, in bare feet and a plaid bathrobe, peered myopically into the hallway, then withdrew into his room like a snail into its shell. Hemingway, John Ferno, and Virginia Cowles, all fully dressed because they’d been planning to go to Fuentidueña to film, emerged into the corridor and headed for the stairs, Hemingway followed by Martha, who was wearing a coat over her pajamas, her blond hair still mussed from sleep like a child’s. As they passed Josie Herbst’s door she darted out from it, her face in a rictus of panic, her dressing gown askew. “How are you?” Hemingway asked her, but when she opened her mouth to reply no sound came out. She took a deep breath and went back into her room, emerging a few minutes later with her clothes on, if not much more composed.

  The shells kept coming—first that tearing sound, then a shattering primal roar—as the guests continued to stream down the stairs and congregate in the relative safety of the ground-floor lobby. There was Dos Passos, bathed and shaved now, but still wearing his plaid bathrobe; Claud Cockburn, pale as marble, holding a coffeepot in his hands as if it were a votive offering; and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in a vibrantly blue silk dressing gown, standing at the foot of the stairs with a box of grapefruit, asking, “Voudriez-vous une pamplemousse, madame?” to each woman who passed him. Someone brought coffee to put in Cockburn’s pot, and bread to toast on someone else’s hot plate; still another someone found chocolate to share around. Hemingway looked about and pronounced, “I have great confidence in the Hotel Florida,” and it turned out to be prophetic, because the shelling slowed, then stopped altogether, and the walls were still intact.

  By seven the sun was well up in the sky and the hotel staff began sweeping up broken glass and crumbled stone and plaster. Capa appeared—where had he been during the bombardment?—and photographed the clean-up effort. Hemingway went out to investigate the damage to the neighborhood and returned to report cheerfully that the Paramount Theatre across the plaza had taken a hit—including its giant sign advertising Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Martha, wrung out, announced she was going back to bed to sleep. And Josie Herbst sat on one of the wicker chairs in the lobby, looking angry and unhappy, like a wet owl, until Hemingway sympathetically offered to pour her a snifter of brandy before he went off to Fuentidueña for the day.

  It soon became apparent that Hemingway had more in mind than a drink, however. He and Josie and Dos had all been friends since their Paris days, had spent time fishing in Key West together, and so he felt he could tell her that he was getting fed up with Dos and his questions about Robles. Dos was going to get all of them in trouble. This was war, and you didn’t question the motives of the government, or the fate of anyone who might be suspected of wrongdoing. Couldn’t Josie talk to Dos and tell him to shut up?

  For a moment Josie seemed to be struggling with some decision. Then she put down her drink. “The man is already dead,” she said. “Quintanilla should have told Dos.”

  It turned out that Josie had been given the news, in confidence, in Valencia; her informant was someone official, and that person had supposedly been sworn to secrecy by someone else higher up. Maybe the official had been Constancia de la Mora, who—having been given the word by Álvarez del Vayo—had taken Josie aside for a little woman-to-woman chat. Maybe it was someone else. Josie named no names. She seemed not to question that she—a journalist almost without portfolio, a B-list novelist, a woman of no influence—had been entrusted with this sensitive secret; nor did she wonder if her informant had meant her to tell someone. Had counted on it, in fact: because what would a decent, kind woman, an old friend of both Dos Passos and Hemingway, do if she were confronted with Dos’s questions? She would spill the beans, of course; maybe not to Dos himself, which would be a direct betrayal of her confidant’s trust, but to Hemingway, their great mutual friend, and ask him to break the news to Dos Passos. That way both of them would know, and Hemingway would be bound to speak to Dos about the matter. And by now, after several weeks of patient handling by Joris Ivens, Gustav Regler, and others, Hemingway would certainly press the government’s case to his friend.

  They didn’t have the conversation that day, though: there was filming in Fuentidueña to attend to, and in the evening they all went to Chicote’s for drinks. The next day, and the one after that, were a blur of official events: There was a ceremony marking the integration of the International Brigades’ Martinez Barrio Battalion into the new Popular Army, and a fiesta to celebrate the four-month anniversary of the Fourteenth International Brigade, which was largely made up of soldiers from France and Belgium. Miaja, a stout figure in breeches and boots and a Sam Browne belt, spoke at both events; at the Fourteenth Brigade celebration its commander, Karol Swierczewski, otherwise known as General Walter, began his own speech in halting Spanish but switched to Russian (which an aide translated sentence-by-sentence for the crowd). And there was a lunch for the American journalists given by some of the Soviet military advisors at Aldovea, the former castle of the Dukes of Tovar, just east of the city near Alcalá de Henares, a get-together that had been arranged by Maria Teresa Léon and Rafael Alberti.

  When Dos Passos wrote about these events later that year he would conflate them all into one and call it “the fiesta at the Fifteenth Brigade”—the brigade that included the American fighters of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion. He would place the flamenco singer Niña de los Peines and the dancer Pastora Imperio at the festivities, although surely he was remembering their participation at a benefit gala the previous week. He would say that General Walter was replacing a French officer at the head of the brigade, which was wrong on two counts: if he was indeed talking about the Fifteenth Brigade, it had always been led (and continued to be) by a Yugoslav Communist, Colonel Vladimir Copic; as for the Fourteenth, Walter had been its commander from the beginning. Dos Passos wasn’t a sloppy journalist; maybe he was combining several events into one for simplicity, or to safeguard a source. Or perhaps his memory was clouded, or his reporting slanted, by what he had just learned—for at some point during those few April days Pepe Quintanilla told him that José Robles Pazos wasn’t waiting for a fair trial, or indeed for any trial. He had been shot. No reason was given. “These are terrible times,” Quintanilla said, by way of excuse. “To overcome them we have to be terrible ourselves.”

  Accusations would swirl around Robles for decades: he had been a Fifth Columnist, he’d
been helping his fascist brother escape from the Loyalist zone into Nationalist territory, he’d been blabbing about military secrets in the literary cafés, he’d been seen—this last, physically impossible suggestion came from Joris Ivens—“using a concealed light to flash signals to the fascist lines” that were eighty-seven miles away. Maybe Ivens was conflating Robles’s fate with what had happened in Madrid a few months earlier, when an inadvertent chink of light glimpsed through a faulty blackout shade touched off an armed assault on the offices of the newspaper El Socialista. But the probable truth about Robles was that, as Vladimir Gorev’s aide and sometime translator, he knew too much about the Soviet Union’s plans for its Spanish protégés, and had too many well-connected and crucially important friends to whom he might reveal them; or he had become collateral damage in a strike against the GRU and its representative, Gorev, by Russia’s civilian spy agency, the NKVD, just then extending its influence in Spain. Gorev had already been sent to Bilbao on a doomed mission to shore up Loyalist defenses there; and his former aide had become a very inconvenient person indeed.

  However much of this Dos Passos could have known or guessed (and it would have been very little), he was almost literally sickened by Quintanilla’s news. He kept imagining his friend’s last moments and replaying them in his mind: “They shove a cigarette into your hand and you walk out into the courtyard to face six men you have never seen before. They take aim. They wait for the order. They fire.” It didn’t help when, in the middle of the Russian lunch at Aldea, Hemingway—unaware of what Dos already knew—delivered the blow afresh. Watching the two men from the other side of the table, Josie Herbst saw Dos Passos’s face go slack; she thought it was from shock, but more likely it was bewilderment, and then suspicion. How the hell did Hem know?—and, looking around at the Russian advisors and their Spanish counterparts, with all of whom Hemingway seemed on intimate terms, Did they tell him? Were they all in on it? Dos’s feelings weren’t soothed by Hemingway’s implication that Robles was probably a traitor and had got what he deserved—and that even if he wasn’t and hadn’t, this was war, and you had to fall in line with whatever the leadership told you.

  By the evening of April 24, Dos Passos was clearly a man in turmoil. Although, he’d say later, he “felt a heartbroken admiration for the ordinary people of Madrid,” he now believed their cause had been taken over by Moscow-influenced hard-liners; that “the Party ha[d] climbed into the shell of the Republic and [was] eating it up the way a starfish eats an oyster.” Although he’d previously agreed to take part in a live radio broadcast to the United States that night—along with Josie Herbst, Hemingway, Joris Ivens, a Loyalist Catholic priest named Leocadio Lobo, the wounded commander of the Lincoln Battalion, Robert Merriman, and, improbably, Sidney Franklin—he was having second thoughts about it. What could he say? These are terrible times—we have to be terrible ourselves? That wouldn’t go down well with the Loyalist sympathizers in Washington and New York who were attending fund-raisers to listen in. No wonder that, as the Hotel Florida contingent gathered in Hemingway’s room for prebroadcast cocktails, Robert Merriman’s wife found Dos Passos “wishy-washy” and “scared,” while the cocky, confident Hemingway, holding forth in his corner of the room, “knew what the war was about” and “let you know by his presence … exactly where he stood.” Where he stood was with the men of action, which the tall, strong-jawed, handsome Merriman—the son of a lumberjack, with a degree in economics from the University of Nevada and a shoulder wound from the Battle of Jarama—emphatically was.

  Dos Passos managed to get through the cocktail hour, and the broadcast, which was moderated by Hemingway and the somewhat clueless Franklin; but by its end it was clear that, as Marion Merriman noticed, “he wanted out.” The very next day, after stopping in at the Telefónica to sign copies of the Tauchnitz paperback editions of his books for Barea, he drove out of Madrid, past the Sunday strollers on the Paseo de la Castellana and the now-shuttered café opposite the Post Office where he used to sit “late in the summer evenings, chatting with friends, some of whom are only very recently dead.”

  Joris Ivens left the same day, in a different car; and when he got to Valencia he sent Hemingway a carefully worded letter. Dos Passos, he reported, “is running here for the same cause as he did in Madrid—it is difficult. Del Vayo spoke to him about it. Hope that Dos will see what a man and comrade has to do in these difficult and serious wartimes.” Certainly Hemingway did, Ivens implied, so he wanted him, not Dos, to be responsible for writing the voice-over narrative for The Spanish Earth, to which Dos, apparently, had agreed. (“Aha!” Ivens added.) In addition, Ivens wondered if Hemingway would write “one of your articles about the great and human function of the political commissar on the front.” As a reward for such dedicated work, Ivens promised, “You will go to the front, comrade.”

  * * *

  Martha wasn’t at the fund-raising broadcast on April 24, or at the brigade fiesta with the other journalists. She was leaving Madrid two days later, and she spent the morning and afternoon making the rounds of tailors and furriers to pick up clothing she’d ordered (including that coveted fox wrap), dropping by the hospital to say goodbye to some of the wounded soldiers she’d befriended, and having Quintanilla’s little glass cup carefully packed for traveling. In the evening she went to dinner with Randalfo Pacciardi, the handsome commander of the Garibaldi Battalion, who had already singled her out for attention, flirting with her at a brigade party, squiring her around the front lines at “his” front, and generally making her feel like the belle of the ball at an Ivy League college weekend. Tonight he was gay and gallant during their meal—greasy lamb and potatoes in a tomato-scented sauce, rough cold red wine that tasted of the tin cups they drank out of—but afterward, hoping to make love to her, he insisted on taking her for a walk during which they got lost and nearly wandered into enemy lines. Then in the car coming back to the city he tried to put her hand on the front of his trousers. Furious and repelled, she pulled away—in silence because of the driver and orderly in the front seat; flirting was one thing, she thought, but seduction, and vulgarity, another. Pacciardi just laughed: So brave under fire, and so terrified of sex! When he dropped her off at the Hotel Florida, she raced up to the room she shared with Hemingway—but to her irritation Hemingway, who’d been at the broadcast until the small hours of the morning, seemed barely to realize she’d been away. “I hope this war lasts long enough for him to say something,” she thought, and almost immediately reproved herself: “What an awful thing to think! Maybe I’ve been here too long.”

  In the morning she was finishing her packing at the Hotel Florida when a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, Frederick Voigt, approached her for a favor. Voigt was something of a bad joke to the Americans, a tall, balding man with small childish features and a graying comb-over, who imagined leftist vigilantes around every street corner. “There is a terror here,” he’d told Hemingway when he’d arrived a few days previously. “Thousands of bodies are being found; you see them every morning.” Voigt produced no evidence for his sensational claim, and Hemingway had given him a hard time. “You haven’t even been out in the town and you tell those of us who are living here and working here that there is a terror,” he’d sneered, just barely restraining himself from throwing a left hook to Voigt’s jaw. And now here was that same Voigt, asking if Martha would take a sealed envelope across the border for him into France and mail it. There’s nothing to worry about. It’s just a carbon of a dispatch—it’s already been through the censor. She didn’t know how to say no—she hardly knew the man—so she accepted the envelope. But Claud Cockburn thought the whole thing seemed suspicious; she should steam the envelope open, he told her, and make sure it was what Voigt said it was. She and Hemingway put a kettle to boil on the hot plate in their room and, with her heart hammering in her chest, Martha held the envelope over the spout. The flap lifted to reveal, not a carbon, but a typed uncensored dispatch which began, “There is a te
rror here in Madrid.” Hemingway was furious. If it had been found in Martha’s papers as she tried to cross the border, he said, she could have been shot as a spy.

  That night, after Martha had left for Valencia, Hemingway stalked into the Gran Via restaurant and proceeded to tell anyone who would listen what Voigt had done. Maybe, he suggested, the man should get a taste of his own medicine. Voigt had previously been posted to Germany and was reputed to have had a £20,000 bounty placed on his head by the Nazis—why didn’t the journalists in the Gran Via shoot him and send his head to Berlin packed in dry ice? One of the reporters went over to discuss the matter with Voigt, and Hemingway was pleased to note that the man turned ghastly white. The reporter came back to Hemingway. “There isn’t any reward for his head,” he said. “That was just something his editor made up.” They got a good laugh out of that one.

  Voigt was nowhere to be seen the next day at lunch at the Gran Via, which was a pity, for he might have found the conversation instructive. Hemingway was just finishing his coffee at the correspondents’ table, in between Virginia Cowles, in one of her little tailored suits, and Josie Herbst, in her well-worn shapeless tweeds; outside, in the street, the noontime bombardment had started. There wasn’t much point in trying to leave just yet. Hemingway glanced over to the other side of the restaurant and saw Pepe Quintanilla seated alone at a table for two. “That,” Hemingway said to the two women, cocking his head in Quintanilla’s direction, “is the chief executioner of Madrid.”