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

by Vaill, Amanda

  We can’t continue to be silent about Bilbao, he told Miaja; silence will hurt us more than defeat. It was the same message he’d been repeating since the beginning of the war: they had to tell the truth. He begged Miaja to let him report the story on the radio that night; grudgingly, Miaja assented. And late that same night, identified by the announcer only as La Voz Incógnita de Madrid (The Unknown Voice of Madrid), Barea sat down in front of a microphone for the first time in his life and read what he’d written: an open letter to one of the British blockade-runners who had been keeping Bilbao alive for the past months, a man nicknamed “Potato” Jones (his real first name was David) because he hid guns in his cargo of potatoes. Despite such heroic efforts, Barea told Captain Jones, Bilbao had fallen to the rebels; and although Spaniards would never forget the city and what it had meant to them, there was no time to weep for their loss, for they had to fight on. The engineers and security guards were wiping away tears when he finished, and it was decided that Barea would keep broadcasting every night, still using the sobriquet of the Unknown Voice and speaking directly to listeners in Europe and the Americas about what was going on in Madrid.

  As the shelling on the city intensified, the idea of the broadcast became a lifeline for Barea, a means of speaking out and a way to channel his fears. He didn’t want to be like the Trembling Dane, Ole Vinding, whose paralysis had made him useless to himself and others; and he didn’t want to play games like the German Communist journalist he knew as “George Gordon,” a hard-liner from Otto Katz’s Agence Espagne, who’d been complaining to his bosses in Valencia and Paris—and maybe Moscow—about Barea’s and Ilsa’s lack of political discipline. Instead Barea went around the city, collecting the stories told by the many voices of Madrid: the telephone girl who didn’t desert her post in the bombardments; the street cleaners on the Gran Via who mopped up the blood after the shelling stopped; his friend the saloon-keeper Serafín, who was sleeping in an improvised bed on the top shelf in a pawnbroker’s cellar, and banged his head every time an explosion startled him from his slumbers, and every time he roused himself to go patrol his neighborhood. “His fear and his courage both gave him bruises,” Barea wrote.

  Listening to these voices, and trying to reproduce their rough street argot in his own telling, carried him out of himself. Now, night after night, he was driven through the empty, silent streets from the ministry to the broadcasting studio in the Calle de Alcalá; the upper floors were bombed out and empty but the transmission center had been relocated to a tiny dank room in the basement, next to an evil-smelling lavatory. There Barea sat in front of the microphone and read, in the accents of his native barrio, the stories of the Unknown Voice of Madrid; and there he and his station manager read his fan mail—for to Barea’s and really everyone’s surprise, the Unknown Voice had begun to attract a following, and that following wasn’t limited to Spain, or even Europe. One letter came from a miner in the United States:

  When I was thirteen [the miner wrote] I went underground to dig coal in Peñarroya. Now I am sixty-three, and I am still digging coal in Pennsylvania. I am sorry I cannot write better, but the Marquis and the priest of our village did not grant us any schooling. I bless you who are fighting for a better life, and I curse those who do not want our people to rise.

  June 1937: Córdoba Front

  Valencia had given General Lukács a hero’s farewell, with muffled drums, lowered bayonets, black-plumed horses, parading ranks of khaki-uniformed soldiers, and grim-faced onlookers giving clenched-fist salutes, and Capa and Gerda covered it exhaustively, from the flag-covered bier to the solemn procession. It must have been a relief to get out of the funereal city and into the rolling country north of Córdoba, where they had first come at the beginning of their Spanish adventures a year ago, and where the Chapaiev Battalion of the Thirteenth Brigade, with Gerda’s friend Alfred Kantorowicz as political commissar, had been carrying on a long-running struggle with the Nationalists for control of the mining area around Peñarroya.

  When Gerda had been there earlier in the spring, the Chapaiev soldiers had just managed to retake the abandoned villages of Los Blazquez and Valsequillo; but since then the Córdoba front had dropped out of the headlines, and the Chapaiev soldiers had begun thinking of themselves as “the forgotten brigade.” Now Capa had come up with an idea that could cure that memory loss, and give him and Gerda a chance to shoot some film for “The March of Time”: they would use the deserted villages as stage sets for a dramatic re-creation of the earlier fighting, which he would film and Gerda would photograph; the results could put Capa and Taro on front pages, and the Chapaiev Battalion back in the public eye.

  When the two photographers arrived at the old farmhouse that served as battalion headquarters they found themselves instantly among friends—not just Kantorowicz but also Hans Schaul, a lawyer from Paris whom Capa had once instructed in how to use a camera. Schaul, Kantorowicz, and the battalion commander, Otto Brunner, brought out bottles of wine, plans were discussed, and Brunner insisted on sending a messenger immediately to outlying companies, telling them to be camera-ready by the following morning.

  The men took the order seriously: at dawn they were lined up by the nearest well or fountain, scrubbing like mad, and—Kantorowicz would remember—“You never saw so many neatly shaved faces.” It wasn’t Capa they were trying to impress: it was Gerda, who was looking particularly fetching on this trip, with her cropped gold hair under a black beret, the sleeves of her mono rolled up, and a neat little revolver tucked into her belt. One of the soldiers, Hans Quaeck, did a drawing of her for the cover of the battalion newspaper—a svelte and seductive blond movie director, her hands in the pockets of her jumpsuit and surrounded by eager soldiers in various stages of their toilette, all under the caption “Warning! Filming in progress.” (Achtung! Aufnahme.)

  The filming was going to take place in a deserted hamlet called La Granjuela, a collection of stone and stucco buildings surrounded by walled fields, that the battalion had successfully taken in the spring. Capa enthusiastically set up his forces: the soldiers, kitted out in helmets and rifles, were to storm supposed fascist positions in the village, while he filmed them and Gerda photographed. At his direction the men crouched in an overgrown field, burst out through the gate, and ran along the dirt road into the village, hurling grenades, firing their rifles, and shouting with blood lust as they came; then he made them repeat the whole thing. Finally Capa was satisfied with the result: “a real attack,” he confided to Kantorowicz, “wouldn’t have seemed as authentic as this.” Henry Luce, the man who wanted fakery in allegiance to the truth, would have been proud of him.

  While Capa was filming, Gerda had been photographing the same action with her Leica—the precisely choreographed running and shooting, the men’s cigarette break; but the next day she wanted to get pictures of actual fighting, so she and Capa went to visit her compatriots in a company named after the Polish nationalist poet Adam Mickiewicz, which was dug in close to the Nationalist lines. They arrived at lunchtime, when the noontime cease-fire was in force, and she merrily joked with the soldiers in Polish while she and Capa worked. But soon enough the shooting started again, and Gerda wanted to rush out of cover to get better pictures of what was happening. Hunkering down in a dugout next to one of the infantrymen, she squinted across at the enemy positions as if judging whether to run toward them; the soldiers had to forcibly restrain her and Capa until sunset, when it was safe for them to go back to the crossroads where they’d left their car.

  It wasn’t all fighting on the Córdoba front, however. In the abandoned village of Valsequillo some Anarchist refugees from another part of the province had settled and—as Loyalist propaganda was urging them and others to do—planted grain for a “Sacred Harvest,” the first since the collectivization of 1936, to help feed the defenders of the Republic. And for a short, blissful interlude, Capa and Gerda joined them. They spent the still, hot days filming and photographing the straw-hatted farmers, whose ranks had
been swelled by wounded and recovering soldiers, as they drove long-eared mules to and fro in the golden fields, tossed pitchforks of hay into heaps, lofted shovelfuls of grain to separate the wheat and chaff. Gerda admired a litter of snuffling pink piglets; Capa let a little boy look through the viewfinder of his Eyemo. At night they tumbled exhausted into sleep.

  Although Capa was leaving soon for Paris, while Gerda would stay behind in Spain to cover a writers’ conference in Valencia, during this trip they had been as close as they ever had been. No more talk of being just copains; both Szurek and Kantorowicz had assumed from their manner that they were married, as Capa still hoped they might be. So perhaps it was in Valsequillo, not in Paris, or Madrid, that—waking early while Gerda still slept—Capa photographed her, lying on her side, her legs kicked free of the sheets and bent like a runner’s, her cropped hair mussed from the pillow, her lips parted like a child’s. She was wearing his too-big, rolled-up pajamas, and her face, artless and bare of makeup, was pure and beautiful.

  As Capa’s shutter clicked Gerda stirred slightly, nestled her head more deeply into the pillow, like a kitten; and he took one more picture. He would keep it with him to remember these good times, to remember her, while they were apart.

  July 1937: New York/Washington/Los Angeles

  Hemingway had been back in Bimini for hardly more than a week before coming north again, like a homing pigeon. Martha’s string-pulling at the White House had had extraordinary results: an invitation to screen The Spanish Earth for the president and first lady after a small VIP dinner on July 8; and Hemingway wanted to see the finished version of the film—with all the added vocal tracks and sound effects, and the music, arranged by Virgil Thompson and Marc Blitzstein from Spanish recordings lent by Gerald Murphy—beforehand. He flew up from Bimini on the sixth, and two days later he, Ivens, and Martha went to Newark Airport to get a plane for Washington. As the three “trench buddies” (Martha’s term) waited for their flight, he and Ivens watched in astonishment as Martha went to the airport buffet and ordered—and ate—three sandwiches. Dinner was bound to be inedible, she told them, between bites; she’d stayed at the White House before and she should know. As it turned out, she was right; it was “the worst I’ve ever eaten,” Hemingway said—“rainwater soup followed by rubber squab, a nice wilted salad, and a cake some admirer had sent in.”

  The screening, for an audience of about thirty in the White House movie theater, pleased him better. Both Roosevelts seemed to feel that in some respects the film hadn’t gone far enough in underlining the causes of the Spanish conflict: the president in particular wanted more emphasis on the fight to cultivate fields that had been forcibly left barren by the latifundistas. But although he was sympathetic to the aims and needs of the Republic, he told the filmmakers, he couldn’t single-handedly lift the arms embargo enforced by the expanded Neutrality Act passed by Congress in May.

  From Washington, Ivens and Hemingway went on to Hollywood, along with Pauline, who had flown up from Bimini for the occasion; Martha (whom Hemingway had described to his in-laws as “the girl who fixed it for Joris Ivens and I to go [to the White House]”) tactfully stayed behind in New York, ostensibly to start work on her Spanish book for William Morrow. But she felt that what emerged from her typewriter was “lousier and lousier,” and was discouraged when people told her that it sounded just like Hemingway; perhaps, she began to suspect, it was too soon, and she didn’t have enough background, to write about what the millions of common men and women are thinking and doing in Spain.

  Martha’s “trench buddies,” though, were having a triumph in Hollywood. Lillian Hellman had helped to arrange an A-list screening at the home of the actor Fredric March and his wife, Florence Eldridge, with herself, Robert Montgomery, Errol Flynn, Luise Rainer, Fritz Lang, Joan Bennett, Dorothy Parker, King Vidor, Dashiell Hammett, and others in attendance, at which the organizers raised funds enough to buy and equip seventeen ambulances for the Spanish government. (Flynn, afraid he would be asked for money, hid in the bathroom and escaped through an open window.) Joan Crawford (and her then-husband Franchot Tone), John Ford, and Darryl Zanuck also hosted private screenings, and there was a sold-out showing at the 3,500-seat Paramount Theatre, with speeches by both Hemingway—wearing a dark blue suit and an expression of extreme anxiety—and Ivens. Reaction to the film was almost overwhelmingly positive; the only thing wrong with it, some people said, was that Orson Welles’s delivery of the narrative track was too mellifluous, too aristocratic-sounding, for the populist subject matter. There wasn’t much time, and there was certainly no money, to pay for a substitute narration; so with some persuading from Ivens, Helen Van Dongen, Lillian Hellman, and others, Hemingway himself recorded a new track at Paramount’s Hollywood recording room.

  “THE PICTURE WAS BEYOND PRAISE AND SO WAS YOUR ATTITUDE,” wired Scott Fitzgerald after the screening he saw, at which Hemingway had spoken about la causa and the loss of Lukács and Heilbrun. Fitzgerald sensed in his old and now distant friend an attachment to the film project, and to the war in Spain itself, that had “something almost religious about it.” As so often, he saw Hemingway more clearly than Hemingway saw himself.

  July 1937: Valencia/Madrid

  On July 4, the second International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture—the first had been held in Paris two years previously—convened in Valencia’s Ayuntamiento, the grand town hall on the Plaza de Emilio Castelar. Prime Minister Juan Negrín and Álvarez del Vayo, until recently the foreign minister, gave the welcome speeches, and among the delegates were André Malraux, Stephen Spender, Ilya Ehrenburg, José Bergamín, Anna Seghers, Malcolm Cowley, Pablo Neruda, Tristan Tzara, Alexis Tolstoi, and more—two hundred writers from twenty-six countries. (Ernest Hemingway cabled his regrets from New York, where he was completing work on The Spanish Earth; he planned to return to Spain in August and in the meantime sent “comradely greetings.”) Some of the attendees, unable to meet the visa requirements of the non-intervention pact, had entered the country with forged passports or by smugglers’ routes over the Pyrenees; but they had all come together to show their solidarity with the Spanish Republic, to speak out against fascism, and to discuss what the role of a writer should be in these dangerous and difficult times.

  Some of them had another purpose, too, although this wasn’t openly advertised: to blacklist André Gide for his “treacherous” book, Retour de l’U.R.S.S., which had dared to point out that all wasn’t perfect in the Workers’ Paradise that was the Soviet Union, and to denounce “Trotskyism,” or any deviation from Stalin’s party line, at a time when some on the left were beginning to ask questions about the purges and show trials that had been taking place in Moscow, not to mention the liquidation of the POUM in Catalonia.

  The keynote speech on this touchy question was given by Mikhail Koltsov, who’d returned from Russia, and his meetings with Stalin, in June, and now denounced Gide’s book as “a filthy slander.” He went further:

  There are some people who are wondering why we, the Soviet Union, support the vigorous and pitiless measures of our government against traitors, spies, and enemies of the people … why we do not interfere and simply keep quiet about it, not drawing attention to it in the pages of our publications. No, colleagues and comrades, for us this is a matter of honor. The honor of the Soviet writer consists precisely in being at the forefront of the battle against treachery … We support our government because … its hand does not shake when punishing the enemy.

  Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, just arrived in Valencia from Valsequillo, circled the hall of the Ayuntamiento with their cameras in hand, Gerda svelte and cool in an embroidered cream blouse and skirt, Capa darker than ever from the Andalusian sun, his hair long again. During a break in the proceedings they struck up a conversation with Elena Garro, the novelist wife of the Mexican writer Octavio Paz, who was entranced equally by Gerda’s musical voice and Capa’s black hair and violet eyes. There were more famous people at the conference, but
Capa and Taro were the ones she would remember later—“wrapped in the tragic, romantic aura of adventurers who were young, beautiful, and very much in love.”

  Capa left that afternoon for Paris to sell their pictures of the opening ceremony, as well as those from Segovia and Córdoba, and to take the “March of Time” film to Richard de Rochemont; Gerda was staying behind to cover the conference for Ce Soir. As he left Capa told Ted Allan, who had come to Valencia on one of his frequent errands, “I leave Gerda in your charge, Teddie. Take good care of her.” He must have noticed that a number of the conference delegates, from the Prussian journalist Bodo Uhse to the French writers Claude Aveline and André Chamson, were already giving her the eye. And Gerda was never one to discourage a little masculine attention.

  The conference moved en masse to Madrid on July 5—stopping en route, to the discomfiture of some of the conferees, to be fêted and fed in an impoverished village that could ill afford such generosity; in Madrid they were welcomed with a banquet featuring flamenco singers and a recitation by Rafael Alberti of a ballad he’d composed about Franco. The evening broke up when the Nationalists on Garabitas started firing shells over the city and most of the delegates scurried for cover to their hotel. André Chamson, in fact, was so alarmed that he wanted to leave Madrid directly, saying that if he were killed by a bombardment France would have no choice but to declare war on Franco at once. “I am the only one here who feels all this!” he proclaimed histrionically.