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

by Vaill, Amanda

  Barea went to Miaja, who told him his troubles would be over if he got rid of Ilsa; he went to Antonio Mije, who’d got him his censorship job in the first place and was now very high in the PCE organization. Mije repeated what Miaja had said, and went further: why had Barea gone overboard and asked for a divorce? Why couldn’t he just sleep with the foreign woman? She would bring him nothing but trouble. She was definitely some kind of Trotskyist but was too smart to have been caught at it—so far. Barea should save his own neck and get rid of her. Barea stared at him in astonishment. Was this the Party’s position? he asked; but Mije denied it. Just his own opinion, he said. Barea told him to go to hell.

  Back at the Hotel Reina Victoria, in the long afternoons, Ilsa sat at the piano in the dining room and played Schubert lieder for the waiters and Barea, singing in her husky contralto the songs of her Viennese girlhood. It was eerily appropriate music for the situation they found themselves in—a situation straight out of one of the Goethe poems Schubert had set:

  Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?

  Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind;

  Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm,

  Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.

  “Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?” –

  “Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht?

  Den Erlenkönig mit Kron und Schweif?” –

  “Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif.”

  Who’s riding so late, in the night and the wind?

  It’s the father with his child.

  He has the boy in the crook of his arm,

  He holds him safe, he keeps him warm.

  “My son, why are you hiding your face so fearfully?”

  “Father, don’t you see the Elf-King,

  The king of the elves, with his crown and his tail?”

  “My son, it’s only a wisp of fog.”

  Perhaps the hints and rumors that bedeviled them were only a wisp of fog. But in Schubert’s song the danger was real, and at its end the boy was dead.

  September 1937: Aragon/Valencia/Teruel Front

  Flying down from Barcelona to Valencia on September 6, Hemingway, Matthews, and Martha Gellhorn looked out the window of the plane and saw, in the blue Mediterranean, the black stain of a spreading oil slick where a blockading Italian submarine had sunk the British tanker Woodford—sailing under the Spanish flag—four days earlier. It was the kind of thing that made Martha (as she wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt) “sick with anger … against two men whom I firmly believe to be dangerous criminals, Hitler and Mussolini, and against the international diplomacy which humbly begs for the ‘continued cooperation’ of the Fascists.” In Valencia, however, the traveling companions had good news: the Loyalist forces in Aragon had not been surrounded and defeated, as The New York Times’s William Carney had claimed; they had actually advanced, taking two villages, Quinto and Codo, and the fortified town of Belchite, although they hadn’t managed to win the prize of Saragossa. And a parallel initiative in the mountains of the Sierra Palomera, in southern Aragon west of Teruel, had put government troops in position over the highway that led to Saragossa from Madrid. That they might have done even more if the Russian tank commander at Belchite hadn’t insisted on giving orders to his Spanish troops in Russian, or if the Anarchist CNT milicianos hadn’t been denied proper weapons by the Communists, who were determined to be the lead players in the war effort, wasn’t mentioned.

  Leaving Valencia almost as soon as they arrived, Hemingway, Matthews, and Martha managed to get to Belchite three days after the surrender to find it little more than a smashed, smoking ruin, uninhabitable and deserted except for the stinking bodies of humans and animals that littered its ruined streets. About three miles outside what was left of the walls, camped in a streambed only slightly sheltered from the wind-blown yellow dust of Aragon, they came upon some old friends: soldiers of the Fifteenth Brigade, along with their chief of staff, the former Lincoln Battalion commander Robert Merriman, who had recovered from the wounds that had taken him out of action at Jarama. Tall, unshaven, with dust on his glasses and in his dark hair, he managed to look like the college professor he once had been as he diagrammed the battle with a stick on the dirt floor of his lean-to, showing the correspondents how he’d led his men through heavy house-to-house fighting to take Belchite’s domed sandstone cathedral. Both Martha and Hemingway were impressed, as much by Merriman’s quiet strength as by the victory. And Martha felt “proud as a goat,” she said, at the performance of the American brigadistas: “you can tell a brigade is fine,” she boasted, “when they move it from front to front, fast, to wherever the danger is.”

  But the International Brigades, and the ragtag milicianos who had volunteered to defend the Republic in 1936, weren’t what the higher-ups at the Propaganda Ministry wanted to feature now. The big story, the story Hemingway and Matthews were encouraged to focus on, was the new, reorganized, Communist-dominated Army of the Levante; and on their return from Belchite, Constancia de la Mora’s office was only too happy to arrange a three-day tour of that army’s positions around Teruel for them. There wouldn’t be any inns to stay in, or even troop billets, because soldiers were occupying every bed; they’d have to bring their own food and provide for their own lodging for the two nights they would be on the road. They got hold of an open truck, equipped it with mattresses and blankets for sleeping, and packed enough food for the three of them and their drivers—Sara Murphy had sent lots of tinned salmon, not to mention ham, poulet roti en gelée, bouillon, coffee, and malted milk powder. They planned to park the truck under the overhanging roofs of farm courtyards for shelter, and cook their meals over villagers’ open fires.

  They were still in Valencia, waiting for their safe-conducts to come through, when Hemingway got a call from Alexander Orlov, the NKVD’s Spanish station chief, who ran the government’s guerrilla warfare program from his headquarters at the Hotel Metropole on Calle Xátiva, just opposite the bullring. Ever since the previous spring, when Hemingway had met the guerrilla fighter Colonel Xanthé with Orlov at Gaylord’s Hotel in Madrid, he’d wanted to find out more about the aktivi, irregulars who worked behind the enemy lines, blowing up bridges and trains and carrying out other kinds of dangerous clandestine work; but despite his renown, he hadn’t then passed the tests that would make him de confianza, trustworthy. Now, though, he had made The Spanish Earth with Ivens, spoken out for the Republic at Carnegie Hall, raised thousands of dollars for ambulances; and he’d shown himself to have none of the skepticism, or apostasy, of a Dos Passos or an Orwell. From the rehabilitation hospital where he was recovering, Gustav Regler had begged Orlov to give Hemingway the access he craved. And now Orlov was inviting him to visit the training camp for aktivi at Benimamet, just outside Valencia.

  At Benimamet Hemingway was met by Orlov’s lieutenant, Leonid Eitingon, who went by the name of Kotov. Three years later Kotov would direct the assassination of Leon Trotsky, in exile in Mexico; but today he was all welcoming smiles. He took Hemingway around the camp, gave him a lavish lunch, even allowed him to shoot target practice with one of the Russian-made Nagant sniper rifles the guerrillas were being equipped with, and sent him off with a bottle of rare Baczewski vodka, distilled from potatoes instead of grain. Everything was calculated to appeal to Hemingway’s love of being on the inside track, of knowing and having things that others don’t, and that he could never, ever talk about. Nor did Hemingway speak of his visit to Benimamet. But a few days later it would have an interesting sequel.

  Hemingway, Matthews, and Martha set off from Valencia early on the morning of September 20, driving up the coast and inland to Sagunto, with its Roman walls that Hannibal had breached, before beginning the long climb through the Sierra Calderona. Coastal plain gave way to rolling pastures punctuated with pine and scrub, and the air grew noticeably cooler. They stopped at Segorbe to buy vegetables in the farmers’ market, loaded them in the truck, and kept driving, up and over the pass at Puerto Ragudo
to Barracas, where they stopped for lunch. At Sarrión they turned north into the jagged limestone outcrops of the Sierra de Gúdar, where the tallest peaks were already streaked with white, and began a circuit of the high country that lay just to the east of the provincial capital of Teruel, passing stone villages that clung to the sides of the mountains. The roads here were rough, but they made good time: the late-model Dodge Hemingway had been given by the Propaganda Ministry was up to the job, built—and geared—like a bulldozer, and it was only midafternoon when they reached Mezquita de Jarque, a tiny village where the 1st Battalion of the newly formed Army of the Levante was encamped. Along the way they’d picked up the divisional commander, Colonel Juan Hernández Saravia, and now they paused long enough for him to review the battalion; then, following the route that Saravia’s troops had taken just weeks before, they pressed on to Alfambra, on the heights above Teruel.

  Alfambra was the headquarters of a band of guerrillas commanded by a Pole named Antoni Chrost, whose job—one of whose jobs—was to blow up trains, such as the one that ran from Calatayud, north of Teruel, to Saragossa. And many years after the fighting in Spain was over, Chrost would remember coming in to his headquarters one afternoon and finding a stranger sitting at the table, chatting with one of the other officers. “Me cago en la leche de la madre que te pario [I shit in the milk of the mother who bore you],” Chrost overheard him saying. Who was this self-confident foreigner? Chrost wondered; introducing himself, he asked for the man’s documents (“revolutionary vigilance required it”). The stranger’s safe-conduct bore the name “Ernesto Hemingway.”

  As Chrost would remember it, Hemingway was both fascinated by and knowledgeable about the activities of the guerrillas: he knew what weapons they used and how they used them, but he wanted to find out how they got to their targets (using relay teams of local guides, Chrost told him) and what happened when they got there. And Chrost, though initially cautious, was happy to tell him, in great detail. Later he would also swear that Hemingway not only questioned him but also ate and drank with him, talked about women with him, even went on a mission with him some days afterward. These romantic details never made it into Martha’s diary, nor into Hemingway’s dispatches. Did Chrost make them up? Was a purely speculative conversation—What would you do if you had to blow up that section of railway track?—transformed into reality? Did Hemingway even meet the guerrilla commander? Certainly he was in Alfambra on the afternoon of September 20; Martha, always careful about such details in her personal journals, noted it in her diary. That much, at least, was true, even if he and Chrost didn’t meet, even if he never promised (as Chrost recalled it) to write about the guerrilla captain, even if he didn’t say, when Chrost told him he was a Pole and not a Russian: “In my book, you’ll be an American.”

  * * *

  The correspondents spent their first night on the road back in Barracas—an unlovely town whose name means “The Shacks”—and early the next morning set out for a lookout post over Teruel, which the rebels had been occupying since the beginning of the war. Teruel was an unlikely target for an offensive: the mountain-rimmed capital of a poor province, it had no mineral or agricultural wealth and no important industry. But, located at the apex of a salient driven deep into government territory, it provided a perch from which the Nationalists could pounce down on Valencia and cut the Republican zone in two. On a map, it looked like a threat, and Hemingway wanted to check it out.

  Leaving their cars, the scouting party walked uphill to a dugout and crawled the last few yards on their hands and knees over the straw on its earthen floor until they could peer in safety at Teruel, perched on its rock in the valley below them. The early morning sunlight slanted across the sugar-beet fields, picking out the five brick Mudéjar towers rising from the city walls and throwing into strong relief the prow-shaped mass of the Mansueto, a rock formation enhanced with Nationalist fortifications that dominated the approaches to the town like a natural bulwark. “You see it?” their guide asked, meaning the Mansueto. “That’s why we haven’t taken Teruel.” It didn’t help, he added contemptuously, that the Anarchists who used to patrol this sector thought that contact with the enemy was playing football with them. As Martha peered down through the field glasses and saw “a few soldiers, very leisurely, loading up their donkeys with blankets from the empty houses, for the winter,” Hemingway scanned the scene, noting the tactical problems it presented. Yes, it was impossible to take Teruel from any direction but the northwest, but once winter filled the mountain passes behind the town with snow, that wouldn’t matter. The rebels would be stuck up here. They wouldn’t try anything. The Teruel front would be out of bounds until the spring.

  The journey after Teruel was rougher, through wild upland where villages were few and far between, and small and primitive when they found them; the roads were rougher, too, some of them newly cut by the army, in places where no roads had been before—indication, if you were looking for it, that the government had plans for this part of the world. The journalists spent the night parked in a farmer’s courtyard in a tiny hamlet called Salvacañete, in Cuenca province, where the braying of the donkeys woke them at dawn; the next day, abandoning the car and truck, they got a cavalry escort and went on horseback up to mountain positions on Monte San Lazaro before coming down toward Cuenca, in a steep ravine between two rivers, the Júcar and Huécar. Hot and dusty from the ride, Hemingway went swimming in one of the streams that fed the Júcar, near rebel lines; there were fat trout in the clear, cold water, and Hemingway threw them grasshoppers, the bait Nick Adams had used in his story “Big Two-Hearted River,” watching as they lunged for the insects and made deep swirls in the current. It was, he thought, “a river worth fighting for.”

  That night he and Martha slept in Madrid, at the Hotel Florida.

  September 1937: New York

  In the lounge of the Bedford Hotel, a modest establishment on East Fortieth Street in Manhattan, a reporter from the New York World-Telegram took out his pad and pencil and prepared to interview Robert Capa.

  Capa had had a harrowing few months. After the macabre carnival of Gerda’s funeral he’d begun drinking heavily and talking wildly: what had happened to Gerda was all his fault, he should have stayed with her, he didn’t deserve to live and without her he didn’t want to. One day he disappeared—stopped answering his telephone or his doorbell—and his friends were afraid he’d killed himself; but he had only left Paris, where Gerda’s ghost haunted every street corner and café, and taken refuge with old Berlin comrades in Amsterdam.

  When he felt stable enough he’d ventured back to Paris, planning to stay a short while and then sail to New York to see his mother and Kornel, who had finally emigrated in June; but sometime in August he had an unexpected visitor: Ted Allan, patched up by the doctors in Madrid, standing on his threshold in dark glasses and on crutches. He’d been released from duty in Spain and had come to Paris to see Capa, to tell him he had tried to take care of Gerda, that he wasn’t to blame for her death; but Capa seemed not to pay any attention to his protestations—only took his hand and asked about his leg. Allan didn’t want to let the subject of Gerda alone. “Don’t you realize I loved her?” he asked, to which Capa replied, “So what? How could you help it?” It was just as well he didn’t know what Allan had thought when the doctor brought him the news that Gerda was dead: Capa won’t get her now.

  Capa insisted that Allan stay with him; the Canadian was, after all, one of his only remaining contacts with Gerda, one of the last people to see her alive. And when Capa was getting ready to leave for New York, Allan impulsively decided to come with him; the two of them sailed on the Lafayette on August 20. It turned out to be a good arrangement. Capa couldn’t say shit or sheets in English—what Allan had observed when he first met him was still true, and this way Allan could be his interpreter. When the man from the Telegram showed up, therefore, it was Allan who played go-between.

  Capa’s photo of the falling militiaman, the one he’d
taken at Espejo, had recently been republished in Life, splashed like an emblem across the editorial page to mark the anniversary of the war in Spain; and that was what the interviewer wanted to talk about with the “handsome” and “bashful” young Hungarian. Who was the soldier, and how had Capa managed to capture him just at the moment he fell? The reporter asked the questions in English, but Ted Allan translated them—into German, the reporter thought, though it could as easily have been French.

  To answer, Capa would have to relive that hillside in Espejo: the men laughing and running, the hot sun in their faces, Gerda in the trench beside him, frowning into the viewfinder on her Rolleiflex. Remembering it would hurt. And what kind of a story would those memories make for this eager reporter, scribbling earnestly on his notepad? My girlfriend and I were fooling around with the soldiers and they were shooting guns, and I asked one of the guys to pretend he got shot, and then he was, for real.

  He said something, in German—or French, it was all foreign to the reporter—to Allan, and Allan told the man from the Telegram that the picture had been taken when Capa and a soldier had been stranded, just the two of them, in a trench; and that after waiting an interminable time the miliciano had got up to make a run for it and was shot, with Capa “automatically” snapping his shutter to capture the image. “No tricks are necessary to take pictures in Spain,” Capa said—or Allan said he said. “You don’t have to pose your camera. The pictures are there and you just take them. The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda.”

  They spoke of other things as well: Capa’s youth in Budapest; his coming of age on his own in Berlin; his arrival in Paris, where—he, or Allan, said—he had married Gerda Taro, who accompanied him to Spain. But then Capa excused himself, and after he left it was Allan who told the interviewer about Gerda’s death, which he said happened while he and Capa were both riding in a car with her. It was “a thing Capa did not talk about,” Allan murmured, sotto voce.