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

by Vaill, Amanda

  Unfed, sleep-deprived, anxious about their missing papers, they reached Barcelona just after sunrise, and were taken to a large stone mansion with modern stained-glass windows on the Calle de la Diputación, in the fashionable Ensanche district. The official who would question them wasn’t there, so they were put in a guarded room to wait, and passed the time wondering what sort of building this was. It was too big for a bourgeois Catalan’s house, they thought, but not quite a palace. It was just as well they didn’t know it was the former Seminario Conciliar, the Catholic seminary, now notorious as an SIM prison and interrogation center.

  At length the door of the room banged open to admit a man of medium height, balding, with thinning light-brown hair, dark-smudged eyes, a tight-lipped mouth. The guard threw the newcomer a smart salute, spun on his heel, and left.

  “Poldi!” cried Ilsa, flying to him. The man bent over her hand with exaggerated courtliness, and she broke into German: “Why did you have me arrested?”

  He recoiled as if she had slapped him.

  Barea struggled to his feet, and, in French, Ilsa introduced her estranged husband to her lover. Kulcsar bowed, like a figure in a comic opera, from the hips; Barea nodded curtly. Kulcsar took Ilsa’s elbow and led her to a velvet-covered bench where they could talk; Barea went to the stained-glass window and stared out at the porticoed courtyard. What was this all about? What was going to happen? Would this stranger take Ilsa away, have him imprisoned—or have her imprisoned, and brutally questioned? How could he protect her, here, where he knew no one, had no papers to prove anything? He still had the gun in his pocket—somehow no one had bothered to search him—but using it wouldn’t get him very far with guards outside and downstairs. Behind him he heard, but couldn’t understand, the buzz of German, first quiet, then agitated and angry, then quiet again, with Ilsa’s voice firm, Kulcsar’s muted.

  Suddenly Ilsa was beside him, telling him to come with her. They were going to Poldi’s hotel, she said. She would explain everything later. Barea followed her out into the street, where they walked, three abreast, himself, Ilsa, and Kulcsar; Kulcsar tried to start a conversation with Ilsa in German, but when she insisted they all speak French together, there was silence. Along the Paseo de Gracia they went, under the plane trees and past the surrealistic stone façade of Gaudi’s Casa Batllo, to the Hotel Majestic, on the Calle Aragón; and there, in the lobby, Barea saw a clutch of journalists they knew. But, like a ghost, he couldn’t speak to them; and they didn’t speak to him. He followed Kulcsar and Ilsa into a waiting elevator, and the gate slammed shut.

  * * *

  Hemingway didn’t notice Barea and Ilsa in the lobby of the Majestic when he arrived from Teruel on Christmas Eve, along with Capa, Delmer, and Matthews. Instead he was buttonholed—almost the minute he walked in—by Jay Allen, just in from Paris, where he’d found a very distressed Pauline Hemingway. She’d been expecting her husband to turn up for Christmas, Allen said, and when he didn’t she’d tried to wangle a visa for Spain, begging Allen to help her. Hemingway seemed both stunned and flattered that Pauline had gone to such efforts, and blamed Allen for not making things work out. Certainly he had done all he could, asking NANA to get correspondents’ credentials for her; but, as in so many other things, NANA had disappointed him.

  So Hemingway spent Christmas in Barcelona with Matthews, Capa, and Izvestia’s Ilya Ehrenburg, who was also in the Majestic on his way back to Moscow. On Christmas Day he went to the Ritz Hotel to serve, along with the government’s Interior minister, Julián Zagazagoitia, as host and commentator, amistoso comentarista, for the opening of an exhibit of war drawings by his friend Luis Quintanilla. It was a gala occasion—Prime Minister Negrín and the Catalan president, Luís Companys, were there, as well as other government and literary and artistic luminaries, some of them wearing frock coats and top hats—and the walls of the Ritz’s salon had been hung, either for symbolic or aesthetic reasons, with red fabric. But the subject matter of the drawings themselves seemed at odds not only with their sumptuous background and well-heeled audience, but also with the artist’s presentation: wrecked buildings, uniformed soldiers, corpses with distended bellies, all were limned with the lightest and most delicate of pencil strokes, and the result was both sculptural and surreally calm.

  Since he was already late getting to Paris, Hemingway stayed around to celebrate what was being trumpeted as the great (if as yet incomplete) victory of Teruel with a parade and speeches by Negrín and Companys and the newly promoted General Hernández Saravia. It wasn’t until the morning of December 28 that, neatly barbered and wearing a dark shirt and sober striped tie, he dropped in at Ehrenburg’s room at the Majestic to say goodbye. “But we’ll be seeing each other again soon,” the Russian protested. “You’ll be here in June, won’t you?” Hemingway wasn’t so sure: NANA had been unhappy with his reporting from Teruel, which it said duplicated Matthews’s, and had canceled any further stories; he himself wasn’t feeling too well, what with the aftereffects of a grippe he’d had in Madrid and a painful liver from too much drinking; and then there was the question of what he would say to the wife who was waiting for him in Paris if he decided to return to Spain. He left Barcelona without making any promises.

  His companions went back to Teruel.

  December 1937: Teruel

  As Matthews, Delmer, and Capa drove up the Sagunto road on December 28 they saw a ragged column of men trudging toward them, wrapped in blankets against the cold and chivvied along by government soldiers on shaggy-coated mules. The men were in the uniform of the Guardia Civil, and they were lugging suitcases, their eyes downcast. Their barracks had fallen to the Loyalists the night before, and now they were prisoners.

  Inside the town the journalists found a crowd surrounding the Guardia barracks, where the real prizes, the officers, were being taken out. Capa pushed as close as he dared to the column, aiming his camera right into their determinedly vacant faces; the lieutenant colonel, whom Matthews would describe as a “heavy, flat-faced, brutish man,” tramped by impassively, but one of his lieutenants turned to look behind him and his face filled Capa’s viewfinder like an El Greco portrait, his brow creased, his mouth set in a bitter curl of defeat. He knew what was waiting for him: as Matthews thought of it, in war you can shoot the people who deserve to be shot.

  But even as Capa was photographing this sign of victory, the Nationalists—who still held a number of buildings in Teruel, including the Palace of the Civil Governor and the Santa Clara Convent—were beginning a counterattack. Franco had ordered an army to be put together to retake the city, and the Condor Legion was sent in to begin bombing the area in preparation. As usual the bombs fell on combatants and civilians alike. On a road on the outskirts of town, where pastures sloped steeply down to the river valley, Capa saw the results. A man came running toward him, cradling his young son, a boy of about eleven, whose trouser leg had been cut away and whose thigh was wrapped in a bloody bandage. Near them soldiers were helping other wounded, both military and civilians, to safety; and off the road, down a steep hill, a group of peasants, evacuees who had been leaving their homes in the battle zone, were stooping over something in the rock-strewn field. Capa didn’t have a telephoto lens, so he ran down the hill toward them. He found them bent over an injured man, loading him into a makeshift stretcher; and when they’d got him in it and started uphill, Capa started climbing with them. The crowd on the hillside were paying no attention to the rescue mission, however. They were scanning the sky in anxiety—and suddenly Capa, standing with the peasants in the open field, heard what they heard: the buzz of approaching aircraft. Looking up, he could see bombers, specks against the sky like so many malevolent wasps. Without even thinking he himself might be a target, he aimed his camera skyward.

  December 1937: Barcelona

  Neither Barea nor Ilsa had any papers entitling them to be in Barcelona at all; but for Kulcsar this was not a problem. He settled them among the tarts and war profiteers at the Ritz, on the Gran
Via, in a room with a balcony overlooking the garden—where I can find you, he explained—and took them to lunch.

  The story he had told Ilsa was that he’d heard she was living with a dangerous and dissolute man and had got herself into trouble with the authorities, and he’d planned to take her out of Spain—forcibly, if necessary—and get rid of Barea. He had ways of making people disappear for good. But now he’d seen, and she had told him, how happy she was; and he would try to help them. He said. Barea was still suspicious.

  Over lunch he learned more, and not all of it made him feel better. He could see that Kulcsar really did seem to love Ilsa, and want to protect her even if he could no longer possess her; and he began to wonder if Kulcsar’s imperious brusqueness didn’t compensate for a sort of vulnerability. He didn’t, for example, know how to ask their waiter nicely to go and find them some hard-to-come-by cigarettes: instead he was rude and peremptory, and the waiter just shrugged at him. But when Barea interceded, and made soothing small talk with the waiter, who then conjured up not only cigarettes but also a really first-class lunch and a bottle of wine, Kulcsar was chagrined: I wish I knew how to do that. He looked almost like a shamefaced small boy. It would have been touching, if he hadn’t seemed to offset the vulnerability with ruthlessness.

  Kulcsar was also insistent, now that he could see Ilsa would never leave Barea, that the two of them had to get out of Spain. Why? thought Barea. It was his home, it was where his family was, it was where the war was being fought—leaving all this was crazy and wrong. And as an adult male of fighting age he couldn’t leave without an exit permit. Kulcsar, however, seemed to think they were both in danger here, whereas if they left they might be able to work against fascism in the bigger war that was almost certainly coming. He told them he would try to get them safe-conducts from the SIM that would allow them to stay in Barcelona unmolested until Barea could arrange for an exit permit. As for a divorce, he was willing to give Ilsa one; but since they were both fugitives from Austria, where the marriage was registered, it might be difficult.

  For the next ten days Kulcsar hustled Barea and Ilsa in and out of government offices all over Barcelona, trying to pull the right strings to free them from their entanglement with the SIM. He seemed almost obsessed with this mission; and at last he appeared to have accomplished it. They just needed to come to the SIM headquarters in Paseo San Juan and submit to a few questions from the chief officer, a youngish man with a humorless smile named Ordoñez. Under his watchful guidance they went over old ground—who they had worked for in Madrid, what they had done, how long they had done it—expecting at any moment for some trap to be sprung at them; but in the end Ordoñez scribbled his signature on their documents, and they should have been free to go. Except that Kulcsar wanted them to see something first.

  They had barely seated themselves in his office when a deep, rumbling vibration shook the building—bombs were falling on Barcelona. The lights flickered and went out, and Barea felt a cold wave of nausea, an echo of the terror that had gripped him in Madrid. Someone lit candles, throwing the room into deep chiaroscuro; and guards brought in a tiny, dark-haired woman whose wide black eyes darted back and forth like those of a cornered animal before taking in Kulcsar’s two visitors.

  “You’re Ilse,” she said, in recognition. “Don’t you remember me? Twelve years ago in Vienna?” Tentatively, Ilsa rose to shake her hand. The woman’s name was Katia Landau, and a dozen years earlier she and her husband, Kurt, had been members of Ilsa and Leopold Kulcsar’s underground Social Democratic group, the Spark. What was going on here? Was Kulcsar trying to use Ilsa as a tool to frighten information out of the Landau woman, or was it something else?

  Kulcsar was speaking in his prosecutor’s voice—cold, hard, insistent. The NKVD had sent him to Spain on a special, historic mission, he began: to prove that out of twenty Trotskyists in Spain, eighteen were fascists, agents of Hitler and Franco. “Perhaps subjectively you are a good revolutionary, but you are convinced that the victory of Franco would be more favorable to the realization of your Trotskyist ideas than the victory of Stalinism.” He had proof of her activities, he said, waving pieces of paper at her that he said contained “plans” that she had drawn and was planning to send to the French. She’d been spying for the Austrian fascists, also, he continued. And he knew that she and her husband, Kurt, who had been arrested in Barcelona on September 23 and had subsequently disappeared, had been in contact with the British intelligence service. Kurt should be careful, wherever he was, warned Kulcsar: “If he falls into my hands one day, I will make him pay dearly for it.”

  Ilsa was sitting rigid in her chair, as if she could not bear to listen; whatever game Kulcsar was up to, Barea didn’t want any part of it. He managed to make their apologies and get them both out of the room as fast as he could. He thought Ilsa must be as horrified as he was by the pleasure Kulcsar was taking in his show of power—and certainly this demonstration of his instinct for domination, which had destroyed her marriage, was distasteful to her. But was that all? Or was she wondering why Kulcsar, or his superiors at the NKVD, were so interested in the former members of the Spark? And why Kulcsar should have wanted to make that interest, and its consequences, so clear to her? Was there something about their old group, or the people who had belonged to it, or Ilsa’s knowledge of them, that was mortally dangerous to her? Barea had no idea that the GRU’s renegade former rezident, Walter Krivitsky, was—or was about to be—telling all his secrets to the Sûreté, MI5, and the FBI. And he probably had never heard Ilsa mention the name of her and Katia Landau’s former colleague from Vienna, the undercover Soviet agent Kim Philby, whose history with the Spark, if revealed, would have threatened his cover as a pro-fascist journalist covering Generalísimo Francisco Franco. If Barea had known either of these things he would have been a great deal more anxious than he already was, for such knowledge was dangerous, possibly even fatal.

  A few days after the scene in the SIM headquarters, Kulcsar came to bid Barea and Ilsa goodbye: his work in Barcelona was done, at least for the time being, he told them, and he was summoned back to Prague. Not a moment too soon—he hadn’t been feeling at all well and the hours he’d been keeping didn’t help—but he found himself short of cash and wondered if they could lend him some. He’d leave the repayment in an account in Ilsa’s name in Perpignan; when they left Spain, as he urged them to, it would be waiting for them. He hoped they would all meet again. Despite his and Ilsa’s philosophical differences—her belief in the individual, and his in ideology, meant they were “spiritually divorced”—he would always love her, and, he said, “if it weren’t for Ilsa, blast her, you and I would have been friends.” Barea was dubious about that; but for Ilsa’s sake he was happy to pretend.

  December 1937: Moscow

  On December 25, Georges Luciani, a French journalist who had been covering Moscow for both the sobersided Le Temps and the slightly racier Le Petit Parisien for the last six years, made his way across a wintry Dzerzhinsky Square. Passing the red stone walls of the Lubyanka Prison, the NKVD’s headquarters, he entered a ramshackle building next door, the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, where he had been summoned to an interview with the Soviet foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov.

  For some time, Litvinov, a portly former arms smuggler with a staunch belief in the power of collective security—the theory that the security of one state is the concern of all—had been troubled by the spineless response of France and Britain to Germany’s increasingly bellicose behavior. He’d watched in dismay as Hitler marched into the Rhineland, and engineered a Nazi putsch in Austria, without raising so much as an eyebrow in Paris or London. He’d listened in disgust to French and British hand-wringing about nonintervention in Spain while Germany and Italy shipped arms and men to the insurgents. Now Nazi provocateurs were starting riots in Czechoslovakia, in the Sudetenland, close to Germany’s border, and Hitler was wondering aloud if he would have to intervene to “protect” the German minority there. And L
itvinov (and, it might be inferred, Stalin) had had enough. He wanted to make a few things clear to Luciani—not the kind of things that could be said, formally, by the people’s commissar for foreign affairs to the French ambassador; that might create difficulties. But if M. Luciani wished to share them with the French ambassador, Robert Coulondre, no objection would be raised. M. Luciani could even take notes, if he wished.

  He did.

  Litvinov was brusque, even testy, about the extent to which he felt his concerns had been ignored by Russia’s supposed allies in Paris. They had allowed the balance of power in Central Europe to be unsettled, and Russia could not countenance that, he said.

  Where was this conversation going? Luciani tried conciliation: surely something could be done to remedy the situation, he murmured. After all, their countries’ long shared history …

  Litvinov interrupted him. “Other arrangements are possible,” he said, elliptically. Luciani thought for a moment.

  “With Germany?” he asked.

  “Why not?” Litvinov responded. Hitler, he reminded Luciani, had renewed the old 1926 Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact in 1931; by its terms, Hitler and Stalin were each bound to come to the other’s aid in the event of attack by a third party. And of course, since Russia hadn’t signed the Versailles Treaty ending the Great War in 1919, Stalin wasn’t obligated to maintain French security. Recently the Kremlin had “established contacts” to initiate a German-Russian rapprochement. M. Luciani surely understood what this meant.