Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (14 page)

In the morning, although the Nationalists were still at the city’s western boundary, they had got no farther. The convoys of journalists and diplomats and government employees left, and Barea paid off the couriers and Luis, as he’d been told to do; he was about to leave the Telefónica himself and go home when one of the switch censors—who listened in to the correspondents’ calls and switched off the line if anything forbidden was mentioned—asked him who was going to take over now. No one had given orders not to let the journalists’ calls go through, the man said; but now who would censor their stories? Barea started to repeat what Rubio had told him—
We’re done for, just get out while you can and leave the journalists to General Miaja
—and found he couldn’t do it. He’d started working as a censor not because it was just another job, but because he wanted to make a stand against fascism, and believed that the story of the government’s fight had to be told to the world. If he walked out now, he risked allowing lies or fabrications to be published, or having the stories silenced altogether by military censors.

Just months ago he’d been wrapped in a fog of professional ambivalence, political alienation, marital exhaustion, and sexual ennui; but today the fog had rolled away and was replaced with a strange clarity. “We can’t let things go,” Barea said to the switch censor. Rubio and the others could run, but he had work to do.

How much work was confirmed that evening, when Henry Buckley, the slight, sandy-haired, soft-spoken correspondent of London’s
Daily Telegraph
, telephoned his editor to report that despite Franco’s attack on suburban districts across the Manzanares, Madrid itself was calm and unvanquished.

“I say, Buckley,” the young man in London said, “do you know your copy does not tally with the other information we have? We have it quite definitely that Franco’s forces are now fighting in the center of Madrid.” Buckley, generally the politest of men, hung up on him.

*   *   *

Over the next two days, Barea stepped into the vacuum left by the departure of his chief and became a leader. He pulled the remnants of the censorship staff together and ordered them to start vetting all journalists’ reports for accuracy and confidentiality before allowing them to be transmitted; then he went to the Foreign Ministry, rounded up a few left-behind office employees to form a “Popular Front Committee,” and got an authorization from them (really just a piece of paper with an impressive-looking stamp on it) to assume the duties of head of the Press Office; finally he found someone at the newly established defense committee, the Junta de Defensa, to make the whole process official. He thought it entirely possible he’d be shot for insubordination, but he was too tired to care.

While Barea was knocking on doors in nearly empty ministries, however, something surprising was taking place. On Saturday, the day that the government convoys had set out for Valencia, they passed the first detachments of foreign soldiers from the recently formed International Brigades that had mustered at Albacete, 140 miles southeast of Madrid; by Sunday morning, November 8, a battalion of Germans, another of French and Belgians, and still another made up of Polish miners, as well as a section of British machine-gunners and two squadrons of French cavalry, were marching down the Gran Via toward the front. And incredulous Madrileños—who believed these multinational
dei ex machina
had been sent by their new Soviet allies—were cheering “
Viven los Rusos!
” and waving their handkerchiefs from the balconies along the avenue. By that evening the international battalions had joined the civilian volunteers and Loyalist troops in the Casa de Campo; by the next day the rebels’ advance there had been halted, and suddenly it seemed as if Madrid might not fall after all.

Barea had been sleeping in an armchair in one of the gilded reception rooms at the Foreign Ministry when just after dawn he was jolted awake by the scream of shells from enemy guns and the sound of explosions: first in the Puerta del Sol, then, even closer by, in the Plaza Mayor. Suddenly the walls of the ministry, the old Hapsburg Palacio de Santa Cruz, shuddered, and Barea braced himself for a crash. But none came: all he heard were shouts and running footsteps. Hurrying downstairs into the building’s courtyard, he found half-dressed staffers and a handful of Assault Guards standing in front of an unexploded shell the size of a large dog. An artillery technician was sent for to defuse the ordnance, and when he pulled out the fuse cap he found a piece of paper in the unexploded bomb. “Comrades,” it read, in German, “do not be afraid. The shells I charge do not explode.—A German worker.”
They’re paying attention to us after all
. Absurdly heartened, Barea fetched Rubio’s discarded photographs of the slaughtered children of Getafe and took them to his friend Antonio Mije to be turned into propaganda posters.

But any thoughts he might have had about patting himself on the back for his enterprise were dispelled by an unexpected visit from a stranger, a Russian journalist named Mikhail Koltsov. The chairman of the Soviet Writers’ Union’s foreign committee and correspondent for the official Soviet newspaper,
Pravda
, Koltsov had arrived in Madrid in August, but although he was staying in the Hotel Florida, in the Plaza de Callao just down the street from the Telefónica, his stories must have been filed through some back channel to Moscow, because Barea had never met him. Now he was confronted with a pale, shortish man with small soft hands, wearing round wire-rimmed spectacles that gave him the look of a barn owl. An angry barn owl, in this case: smacking a sheaf of press dispatches against the desk, Koltsov began haranguing him in bad Spanish, demanding to know who had been responsible for letting these reports through. He’d been at the War Commissariat, he said, when the Foreign Ministry had sent the dispatches over for forwarding to Valencia—and whoever had let the journalists who wrote them get away with such sensationalist sabotage deserved to be shot.

After his initial shock at Koltsov’s attack had subsided, Barea was less defensive than pleased that someone—anyone—actually
cared
about the foreign press coverage. He pointed out that the dispatches Koltsov was brandishing had all been sent the day the government left Madrid, before he himself had taken charge of things, while unsubstantiated rumors were flying all around the city. No wonder some of the reports declared that white flags had been seen fluttering from government buildings, or that Nationalist armies were marching down the Gran Via. Since then he’d been keeping such misinformation from being printed; but, he added, he didn’t have anyone’s authority to do so except that of his own ad hoc “committee.”

Koltsov’s response to this was to hustle Barea into his official car and take him along to the War Ministry, where after a series of conversations with various officials—more bad but emphatic Spanish, more insistence—a truly official document was produced that placed the press office in Madrid under the direct jurisdiction of Álvarez del Vayo, now “war commissar” as well as foreign minister, and definitively appointed Barea its head. If Barea found it at all peculiar that a mere foreign journalist could make Spanish government ministries do his bidding, he said nothing. For the word on the street was that Koltsov was far more than a
Pravda
correspondent: he was Stalin’s personal agent, his eyes and ears (some said) in Madrid, with a special line of communication direct to the secretary general. He was supposed to have attempted to shoot Republican
milicianos
to stop their retreat from Talavera back in September; and just days ago, it was whispered, he’d also been involved in—had even been responsible for—the removal and subsequent gunpoint execution of more than a thousand prisoners with Nationalist affiliations from the Carcel Modelo. So if he wanted something done, it would, in most cases,
get
done.

Within days Barea found out to what extent this was true: for Rubio Hidalgo hastily arranged to make a flying visit from Valencia to pass the baton of authority to his erstwhile deputy. Barea received him, awkwardly, in his own old office—really, where else could they have such a meeting?—and they agreed that while Rubio remained the head of the Foreign Ministry’s press department, and would continue to receive copies of outgoing dispatches, since he was now located in Valencia it made sense for Barea to be in charge of the Madrid foreign press office, and for day-to-day supervision of that office to pass to the Madrid War Commissariat. For safety and convenience, Barea would relocate their headquarters from the Foreign Ministry to the Telefónica; and Rubio would send him a new deputy from Valencia. No mention was made of Koltsov.

When their business was finished Barea came around the desk to shake Rubio’s hand in farewell.
You hate me more than I could ever hate you
, Barea thought; and Rubio turned on his heel and left.

*   *   *

It was nearly midnight. Ilse Kulcsar had just spent the better part of two days wedged into a hired car with three journalists—a large, rumpled, blustery Englishman named Sefton Delmer, who wrote for the
Daily Express
; a slender, sallow, impeccably groomed Frenchman, Louis Delaprée, correspondent for
Paris-Soir
; and Andreas Vinding, a rotund Dane from
Politiken
—and she was bone-weary, hungry, and aching with cold. At the roadblocks on their way from Valencia sentries wearing red-and-black Anarchist scarves had come out of their posts to stare at the crazy foreigners who wanted to drive to Madrid when everyone else was going the other way; now, as they got out of the car in front of the Telefónica, a fleet of motorcycles equipped with sirens were screaming off into the night to sound an air-raid alert. Soon Nationalist planes would be flying over, and the bombs would fall. But despite these ominous signals, and despite her discomfort, Ilse felt absurdly elated to be back in Madrid.

She’d first arrived there in October and had just been learning her way around when the government relocated to Valencia and Rubio Hidalgo insisted that—as an unattached woman correspondent with no embassy to seek refuge in—she be evacuated along with it. But she hadn’t wanted to be in Valencia among the bureaucrats and the orange groves; that wasn’t why she’d come to Spain. As a socialist journalist she wanted to
bear witness
, wanted to be where the fight was going on, and that was in Madrid. So as soon as it seemed as if the city might withstand Franco’s onslaught, she scrambled to get herself back. Delmer, Delaprée, and Vinding, whom she’d met when she’d first come to Spain, and who saw in the beleaguered city the journalistic scoop of a lifetime, had decided to return themselves, and they offered her typing and translating work if she wanted to go with them. All she needed were credentials and a place to stay. When she asked Rubio if he could arrange those for her, he’d replied sourly that the person she’d have to talk to was a man named Barea, one of the self-appointed heroes who’d stayed on when the government left. “He’s the master there now,” he said.

When Ilse and the journalists arrived at the Telefónica they discovered that conditions in Madrid were far more dangerous than they had realized. Yes, the
milicianos
and the International Brigades had stopped the Insurgent advance through the scrublands of the Casa de Campo; but in compensation the rebel forces had stepped up their bombing attacks on the city. And they’d added incendiary bombs, whose sheets of white fire gutted buildings and spread panic among the population, to their arsenal of destruction. So tonight, as the sirens wailed in the darkened streets, Ilse and the others had to make way for a crowd of women and children from the neighborhood who’d come to take shelter from the air-raid in the skyscraper’s deep basements. In silence they shuffled down the stairs, which were illuminated only by blue-painted blackout bulbs; the journalists got into the elevator, standing shoulder to shoulder in the cramped space. As the lift groaned upward Ilse found herself wondering what would happen if a bomb hit while they were in it—and looking at Vinding, the Dane, who’d begun to perspire profusely despite the cold, she knew he was thinking the same thing.

On the fifth floor they groped their way along the dark passages until they came to a windowless vestibule where the censor had taken refuge from the possibility of flying glass in the outside offices and was reading reports by the uncertain beam of his flashlight. Ilse saw a tall man with a long sallow face, sculpted cheekbones, arched brows, a full but sardonic mouth. His thin frame was wrapped in a shabby tweed overcoat against the cold, and he was wearing a black workingman’s beret with a five-pointed Russian star on it. He looked up at the journalists with impatience.
Couldn’t they keep quiet while a raid was going on?

Eventually the bombs stopped falling and the censor ushered the little group into his office. They all identified themselves and shook hands—
Andreas Vinding, Tom Delmer, Louis Delaprée, Ilse Kulcsar, Arturo Barea Ogazón
. Barea looked the newcomers over in the dim violet glow of his lamp. The men he knew by sight or reputation; the woman, whose name he couldn’t pronounce, was a stranger. Too round for his taste, he thought: big green eyes, like a cat’s, pointed chin—
stubborn
—lots of dark curly hair, broad shoulders. He dismissed her as no beauty, and unfashionably dressed to boot.
Why the hell did they send me a woman?
She’d have to wait to be assigned a billet, he said in his fluent but badly accented French, the only common language between him and the journalists; first he had to look over reports of the raid just past and clear them for transmission.

The men left and Ilse sat down on the other side of his table, watching in silence as he struggled to translate the unfamiliar words for the horrors the war was causing. He almost forgot she was there until he heard her husky voice: “Can I help you with anything,
camarade
?” she asked in French. He surprised himself by handing her the dispatch he was working on—he told himself it was to see what she’d do with it—and surprised himself again by taking her advice about some of the language in it. Then he endorsed her papers, gave her a room assignment at the Gran Via Hotel, just across the street, and rose to shake her hand. But he addressed her formally as
señorita
, and when he did so her face broke into a mischievous, little-girl grin. He shouldn’t call anyone
señorita
, she said: “We’re all comrades here.” And marched off down the hall, her shoulders squared in her severely cut coat.