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

by Vaill, Amanda

  Luciani understood it all too clearly, and communicated as much to his ambassador. Two days later Ambassador Coulondre sent the journalist’s notes to the French foreign minister, Yvon Delbos, along with a dispatch: “It is improbable,” he wrote, “that M. Litvinov would have dared upon such a point without having been authorized from on high, and his declaration appears to me as a sort of warning that the Soviet government wished to give in a roundabout way … If the Western powers should permit the strangulation of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet government would then break with [them] and turn to Germany, giving it a free hand in Europe.”

  What Coulondre didn’t spell out for Delbos was that in that case—having used the war to keep Germany, Italy, and everyone else occupied, and having secured the contents of the Spanish treasury in his own vaults—Stalin would cut the Spanish Republic loose and leave it for Franco to finish off. But Coulondre’s warning went unheeded, maybe even ignored, by Delbos and his premier, Édouard Daladier: the ambassador’s letter, and Luciani’s notes, were buried in the Foreign Ministry archives for decades. And Spain, as Arturo Barea had foreseen, had given gold, and would now pay in blood.

  PART III

  “LA DESPEDIDA”

  January 1938: Teruel

  At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, the city of Teruel—as the Republican Interior Minister, Júlian Zugazagoitia, would say later—“belonged to nobody.” A Nationalist counterattack over the past few days had retaken the fortified crest of La Muela, across the Turia south of the city, and Teruel’s new Loyalist commandant had panicked and ordered his troops to abandon their positions. By the next day the Republican army’s chief of staff, General Vicente Rojo, had countermanded the order and summoned reinforcements; but not before newspapers around the world were proclaiming Teruel recaptured by the Nationalists. And then a blizzard enveloped the mountains of southern Aragon, sending flakes slantwise across the whitened fields, crippling communications and making movement almost impossible.

  On January 2, Robert Capa and Herbert Matthews—dismayed by the news about Teruel and desperate to find out what was really happening there—were sitting in Matthews’s ancient Ford, forty-five miles north of Sagunto and 4,000 feet above sea level. In front of them snaked a ten-mile-long column of trucks, tanks, and cars, all carrying men and matériel bound for Teruel, that had been stuck in the snowbound pass for two days. Workmen were trying to break through two feet of ice pack on the road with pickaxes, and a tractor had been brought in to haul vehicles up the steepest stretch at the top of the pass; in the meantime, Capa and Matthews tried alternately driving and pushing their fishtailing car uphill, cursing as they slipped and fell on the slick surface. After eight hours of this punishment, bruised and freezing, they reached the top and let the car roll downhill toward Barracas, where they bunked for the night with a group of officers, sharing their meal of salt cod, bread, wine, and coffee in a peasant’s hut, and sleeping in bedrolls by the fire.

  Although the approach to Teruel was littered with burnt-out vehicles and dead mules, they found the city itself still nominally in Loyalist hands. But the Palace of the Civil Governor remained full of rebel soldiers and their hostages, and in an effort to clear them out the government sappers had mined the outside wall facing the Turia, planning to blast their way in. Capa and Matthews arrived there just as the wall collapsed into a heap of charred timbers and crumbled stone and cement, and when soldiers started swarming up the heap of wreckage to enter the palace, Capa unthinkingly scrambled up after them. He seemed, probably was, heedless of his own safety. Now Gerda is dead it is finished for me. Matthews followed him.

  The noise inside was deafening and chaotic: shouts and explosions, pistol shots and rifle fire, all coming from every direction. Keeping his camera going constantly, Capa made his way through a warren of bombed-out rooms, with no idea whether the footsteps he was straining to hear belonged to a friend or an enemy—or whether, around the next corner, he would find armed men or the hostages that had been imprisoned in the dungeons of the building. “The war correspondent has his stake—his life—in his own hands,” he would say later, “and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the last minute.” Capa wasn’t the back-in-the-pocket type, certainly not now. So he followed a group of government soldiers down a bombed staircase, where he and Matthews found the shell of a room in which a rifleman was aiming his weapon through a hole in the floor. “Here’s one for you and one for Franco!” the rifleman cried, and fired. The journalists could hear moans and the sound of weeping; looking through the hole, they saw a Nationalist on the floor below with a grenade in his hand—but before he could throw it the Loyalist fired four more bullets into him and finished him off. “Rather terrible, isn’t it?” murmured Matthews to the captain standing beside them. The officer shot him a look: “But he was right!” he replied.

  After a while, things seemed to quiet down, as if the building had indeed been cleared out, and Capa and Matthews crept cautiously down a wrecked stairway behind a group of helmeted soldiers until they reached the courtyard, where a group of prisoners was being brought out under guard. Then a door opened and the first of fifty hostages, mostly women and children, groped their way into the wintry sun. They were blinded by the light, their faces filthy and streaked with blood, their bodies emaciated from a weeks-long diet of table scraps. Some were so weak they had to be helped to hobble out of the dank cellars. Capa, who had negotiated the terrors of the palace’s shooting gallery without a second thought, broke down in tears at the sight.

  Then it was dusk, and there was only one more photograph to take: the spire of the cathedral, with the flag of the Republic flying from the lantern tower to its right, showing that the Loyalists had indeed conquered the city. With that in his camera, Capa headed back to Barcelona with Matthews; the next day he was in Paris, and on January 21, along with John Ferno, he left for China.

  January–February 1938: Key West

  At the house on Whitehead Street there was a new brick wall around the property to keep out the celebrity hunters, and the lawn had been dug up for the new saltwater swimming pool; there were piles of unanswered mail and children clamoring for Hemingway’s attention, and he was in no mood to deal with any of it.

  He’d arrived in Paris—bilious from his liver complaint and suffering from insomnia—to find Pauline on the edge of hysteria. Anything seemed to set her off: she even became jealous when he went off to spend afternoons in a café with Malraux, Capa, and Gustav Regler, talking about Spain. But what really fed her fury were her suspicions about Martha. In their suite at the Elysée, Pauline raged, remonstrated, wept, even threatened to jump off the balcony. It was almost a relief when their ship, the Gripsholm, encountered fierce storms in the Atlantic that kept her seasick and confined to their cabin. She’d booked the tickets for convenience, because the ship docked first at Nassau before going on to New York, enabling them to disembark there and fly to Miami; but in the event it was good not to have to meet throngs of reporters at the pier in New York. Mr. Hemingway, is there any truth to the rumors about you and Martha Gellhorn?

  Pauline’s agitation subsided when she reached Key West, but Hemingway was more and more unhappy. Still seething over the fact that NANA hadn’t wanted him to write more about Teruel (a subject he called “the best thing I’ve ever had I think”), he became enraged by a story in Time that seemed to imply that Herbert Matthews had been the only American reporter to cover that battle. What the hell, he fumed in a letter to his first wife, Hadley, he’d made it possible for Matthews to even be there. He’d engineered the passes from Constancia de la Mora, and persuaded her to let Matthews file more than just a rehash of the government’s communiqué, and he’d scooped Matthews by ten whole hours. “Matthews is a wonderful guy and I’m glad I could be of any use to him,” he said, with dubious sincerity. “But when you wait three months for something that you absolutely know is going to happen and then have your work absolutely and c
ompletely sabotaged … maybe I’d better change my name and start over.” He was only slightly mollified by the memory of the reverence with which he’d been treated by Ce Soir, which had interviewed him on his arrival in Paris and given the results (in which he’d boasted several times of having “fought in Europe” in the last war) front-page treatment: “Hemingway, the great American writer, tells of the victory at Teruel.”

  He continued to fret over the reviews of To Have and Have Not; disappointed that after its initial flurry of activity it had failed to become a major seller, he wondered aloud to Max Perkins whether Scribner’s had any plans for promoting it more aggressively. Then there was his connection to Ken. He’d gone along with advance publicity for the political glossy that named him one of the editors, but now he was waffling. He wired Arnold Gingrich a self-important disclaimer that he insisted the magazine run in its first issue: “Ernest Hemingway has been in Spain since Ken was first projected. Although announced as an editor, he has taken no part in the editing of the magazine or in the formation of its policies. If he sees eye to eye with us on Ken we would like to have him as an editor. If not he will remain as a contributor until he is fired or quits.” Gingrich and the publisher, David Smart, accepted the qualification; but Hemingway kept pestering them about Ken’s commitment to antifascism and how far it went. “I don’t think it necessarily follows,” Gingrich finally responded, “if Ken praises, as it should, the Communists in Spain, that it must equally laud the Communists in this country. Because Ken is avowedly anti-totalitarian it is against the seizure of the government by a dictatorship of either the left or the right.”

  Hemingway’s anxiety about Ken’s political stance wasn’t alleviated, and may have been stoked, by a long letter he got from Joris Ivens, in Honolulu on the first stage of his journey across the Pacific to start work on his Sino-Japanese war documentary. Ivens was unhappy with Smart and Gingrich for publishing (in Esquire) “dirty” articles by the “enemy” Dos Passos—the most recent of which had expressed some ambivalence about the way Spain was being led—and he wanted Hemingway to use his “influence” on Smart to rectify the situation. “He should print now some decent articles about Spain.” Maybe Hemingway should be the one to write them (“You know you are the propagandist!” Ivens joked), or maybe he should write another book or another play, like The Fifth Column, to “help us in [our] fight for Spain.”

  Despite its bracing, occasionally jocular tone, there was a certain heavy-handedness about Ivens’s letter. Although he praised Hemingway for being such a good “Commissar” to Herbert Matthews (“I could read it all the time in his dispatches!”) he wanted to make sure Hemingway understood the fine points of the “party and individual fights in Barcelona,” and urged him to be in touch with “our leading people” in New York for clarification. And Ivens had an agenda for him: writing projects, a campaign against Dos Passos, financial oversight of the complicated revenue streams connected with Contemporary Historians and The Spanish Earth.

  Hemingway was trying to get started on some short stories about Madrid—but they simply wouldn’t assemble themselves on the page. He wondered if he was too close to the material. It didn’t help that both Patrick and Gigi (Gregory) came down with measles and upset all the household routines; that Gustav Regler, newly arrived in the United States, would be coming to stay with the Hemingways on Whitehead Street on February 7, or that in the mail awaiting his attention was a clipping from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Capa’s photograph of him at Teruel, wearing his glasses and a stocking cap and a windbreaker over his shabby tweed jacket. On the clipping was written, “Just picked up the paper my dearest and there you were, stocking cap and all, listening so hard to the man. It will hurt me forever that I did not do Teruel with you.” The handwriting was Martha Gellhorn’s.

  “I am delighted to be back in Key West,” Hemingway told a reporter from the local paper, the Citizen, who came to interview him on the last day of January. “It is my home, and where my family is.” To Maxwell Perkins he was more honest. “I did not want to leave Spain,” he wrote, “and all I want to do now is get back.”

  January–February 1938: Post Agency lecture circuit, United States

  Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. We are fortunate to have with us this afternoon Miss Martha Gellhorn, correspondent for Collier’s Magazine and author of The Trouble I’ve Seen, who will be speaking on “Both Sides of the World.”

  Martha Gellhorn was barnstorming. From Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Des Moines, and Chicago to St. Louis, Louisville, Montclair, Newark, and places in between—twenty-two cities in less than two months, trying (as she wrote to H. G. Wells) “to save the damned in one hour.” At the University of Minnesota she told three thousand people that Spain was “a single cell where the body’s illness [spreading fascism] could be fought and arrested”; at the Sheldon Concert Hall in St. Louis, where she’d been invited by the League for Industrial Democracy, she “called Franco a butcher.” And instead of bridling at being lectured to (or at) by a twenty-nine-year-old bareheaded blonde in a short black dress, the overflow audiences at every whistle stop seemed to agree with the reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal, who said she had “the voice, the culture, the art of pose, the poise, gesture, diction which succeed upon the stage at its best.” On the basis of one article in The New Yorker and two in Collier’s—her piece about the brigadistas, “Men Without Medals,” had just been published in Collier’s January 15 issue, for the handy sum of $1,000—Martha had become a certifiable Expert, and a star.

  She wasn’t gratified. She felt disdain for her audiences: “idiotic lazy cowardly half baked flabby folk” who wondered why she didn’t wear a hat and whether she thought women should marry, and asked her, “Now which are the Loyalists, Miss Gellhorn, I just can’t keep them all straight.” She was depressed by the isolationism she encountered in her country, and by the inability of its leaders, including her revered Eleanor Roosevelt, to do anything to counter it. The travel and irregular meals had worn her out: she’d lost fourteen pounds in three weeks and was (she told Mrs. Roosevelt) “shaking with exhaustion.” And despite her considerable ambition, she was discovering that fame could be a relentless and consuming thing. “I cannot tell you how I loathe lecturing,” she complained to the First Lady: “the listening faces—I want people to talk back—the awful ‘celebrity’ angle which I have never met before and which makes me sick … I see these rows on rows of faces, often women and sometimes men, and think, ‘I have one hour to tell them everything I have painfully learned and to shout at them if they go on sleeping they are lost.’”

  Saying that her doctor had told her “either stop it or you will crack up,” she canceled the last stops on her lecture tour and went home to St. Louis to be fussed over by her mother and receive telegraphed expressions of concern from the White House. “If one is a writer, one should be a writer, and not a lecturer,” Martha wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt. “That’s about all I do know now.”

  January–February 1938: Barcelona

  Writing, Barea thought, was the only thing that was keeping him from going mad. The air raids were a constant threat now: the Italian Savoia bombers, based in Mallorca, had taken to cutting their engines while they were over the sea so they could glide silently in over Barcelona and release their cargoes of bombs without warning. Only then did the sirens, activated by sound sensors, start wailing. For Barea it was torture. Any loud noise made him panicked and nauseated, so that he had to concentrate to keep himself from vomiting; he couldn’t sleep, and he was drinking and smoking too much.

  Fortunately, he’d been able to bring Delmer’s old typewriter with him from Playa de San Juan, and he’d started taking it down to an unused room behind the bar in the Ritz’s basement, where he could work all day, and often all night, turning the radio talks of the Unknown Voice of Madrid into a series of stories—vignettes, really, or portraits, more like photographs than narratives—that recaptured the Madrid he had left behind. Sometimes he venture
d out, to one ministry or another, hoping to find some other work he could do to help with the war effort; but he met with nothing but discouragement, from friends and acquaintances, or—from the younger, ambitious Party members—hostility. It’s my own fault, he thought; if I’d been more accommodating, I might still be working in Madrid. But he didn’t see how he could put aside his dreams of equality and social justice even to fight Franco, still less to get ahead with government higher-ups. Maybe Kulcsar was right; he would never fit in with these people. Better just to write.

  He had nearly finished his manuscript when, on a Saturday evening at the end of January, the bar waiter at the Ritz told him that two agents of the SIM had come to talk to Ilsa. They were in the lobby, he said. Barea ran up the stairs.

  Ilsa was sitting next to one of the agents, her face ashen, a piece of paper in her hand. Wordlessly, she handed it to Barea. A telegram: “POLDI DIED SUDDENLY FRIDAY. LETTER FOLLOWS.”

  Ilsa was overcome with guilt. All that night she berated herself: He had looked so ill when he’d left Barcelona, she said—he hadn’t been taking care of his health, and if she had given him a chance, stayed with him, he might have rallied, gotten better. It was her fault he was dead. Barea could do nothing but sit beside her and hold her hand.

  The letter, when it came, seemed to exonerate her: it was from her mother, who had been summoned by Kulcsar to Prague when he was hospitalized with what was diagnosed as kidney failure. Kulcsar had been entirely reconciled to Ilsa’s relationship with Barea, her mother wrote; he thought the Spaniard a fine man with whom Ilsa would be happy. And that made him happy. However, her mother went on, Kulcsar had been adamant that Ilsa and Barea must get out of Spain and go to Paris. At once.