Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (20 page)

January 1937: New York

Hemingway got off the Florida Special in Pennsylvania Station and took a taxi to the Barclay Hotel, the Waldorf-Astoria’s smaller, more intimate, but no less elegant neighbor. He had a lot to do. His first stop was his publisher’s office, three blocks away on Fifth Avenue, where he had to tell Maxwell Perkins that the Key West novel wasn’t done yet. Yes, he knew he’d wired Perkins that the manuscript was finished; but Arnold Gingrich, who would be serializing part of it in
Esquire
, had asked a lot of pesky questions—some of them about the resemblance of characters in the novel to actual people (Dos Passos among them) who might get litigious if it were published in its present form. Hemingway could take care of Gingrich’s queries, he told Perkins, but not before June, because he had to honor his commitment to go to Spain, no matter what Perkins thought about it. (Perkins had confessed he believed “this Rightist general must be good” and had repeatedly urged his famous author to “give up” the idea of covering the war.) In the meantime, Hemingway said, Perkins should read a story called “Exile” by a remarkable young writer named Martha Gellhorn—it might be something for
Scribner’s Magazine
.

From Scribner’s Hemingway went to the offices of the North American Newspaper Alliance, where he signed a contract that would give him $1,000 per story—or $500 if it was cabled and had to be deciphered from shorthand “cablese” into prose—for dispatches sent from Spain, an extraordinary sum, but then, he was a very famous writer. He stopped at the Medical Bureau of the American Friends of Spanish Democracy, where he agreed to serve as chairman of their ambulance fund-raising drive. He visited his sister-in-law, Virginia Pfeiffer, at her new apartment, where the two of them got into an argument about Hemingway’s wandering eye, his disregard of Pauline’s feelings, and his decision to go to Spain.

But much of his trip to New York was spent on an unexpected writing assignment: the voice-over for the second half of
Spain in Flames
, the documentary pastiche that John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish, and Joris Ivens were putting together. Dos Passos was at work on the script for the historical first half, but wouldn’t be able to complete the second, which dealt with the first months of fighting, in time for the film’s release at the end of the month. Since Hemingway was actually here, in New York—and with his NANA and ambulance-drive credentials, so publicly committed to the cause—couldn’t
he
undertake the job? He’d have an assistant, a twenty-four-year-old Cuban-American writer, Prudencio de Pereda, whom they’d engaged to do a first draft; in fact, Hemingway already knew him. The boy had been sending him reverential fan letters for two years and finally, this past December, Hemingway had offered to loan him the money to go fight against Franco. “If you didn’t get killed you would get wonderful material,” Hemingway had told him, “and if you did get killed it would be in a good cause.”

De Pereda hadn’t taken him up on the offer; among other things, it would mean he might not get a chance to actually meet the writer he idolized. And now, for a brief two days in January, he came to the Barclay and fed Hemingway the raw material he could hammer into the commentary for
Spain in Flames
. Encouraged by proximity, de Pereda gave a manuscript of his short stories to his hero to read, and shyly suggested he might accompany Hemingway to Spain; but to his dismay Hemingway didn’t like the stories and was even more negative about de Pereda’s potential as a companion in arms. You aren’t a fighter, Hemingway said dismissively; “not even a good behind-the-lines man.”

Fortunately, however, de Pereda bore these snubs with good grace, claiming his time with Hemingway was “the highlight of my writing career”; and Dos Passos and MacLeish were so happy with the
Spain in Flames
script that they asked Hemingway the question they’d had on their minds since December. Would he like to be involved—really involved—in the original documentary they planned, the one Joris Ivens was going to direct? Ivens had already left for Spain to start preliminary work on it, but Hemingway was headed there himself shortly and could link up with Ivens then. What about it?

Hemingway said yes.

Before he could return to Florida to prepare for his Spanish assignments, however, he had another, sadder errand to perform. On January 16 he drove with Jinny Pfeiffer and Sidney Franklin, a Brooklyn-born matador who was one of his cronies, to Saranac Lake, a sanitarium resort in the Adirondacks, where Gerald and Sara Murphy were keeping a deathwatch over their youngest child, Patrick. He and the Murphys had had a complicated relationship over the years: they had been among the first people to take him up, in the days when they were the center of artistic expatriate society in postwar Paris and he was a struggling writer; and he had always been attracted to Sara’s beauty and charm, always been a little in love with her, and always mistrustful and uneasy around Gerald, scorning him for his bisexuality and his dandyism and perhaps envying him for the mysterious paintings he produced, as terse and clean as any of Hemingway’s own writing. But however he thought of the Murphys, he ached for their agony as they saw their son, whose name his
own
son bore, losing his seven-and-a-half-year struggle with tuberculosis, just two years after the sudden death of the boy’s brother, Baoth, from meningitis. And he knew if he went to Spain he might not have another chance to say goodbye—not just to Patrick, but to the life all of them had shared in the days when, as Sara put it, life was like “a great fair, and everybody was so young.”

He arrived at the huge half-timbered Adirondack lodge the Murphys had rented in Saranac to discover things were even worse than he expected: emaciated, bedridden, and on oxygen, Patrick was barely clinging to life. Going in to see him for a few moments that evening, Hemingway found himself promising the boy a splendid Christmas gift, one he knew would never be received: a skin from a bear he had shot himself.
It’s not ready yet, but it will be
, he said. Patrick was tremulously excited; and Hemingway, coming out of the room, broke down in tears, weeping perhaps as much for the lie he had told as for the boy’s fate.

He and Sidney Franklin left Saranac the next day; Jinny, with whom he’d been sparring more or less continuously since their argument at her apartment, stayed behind with the Murphys. When he got back to New York Hemingway had a fitting at the bespoke tailors Gray and Lampel, on East Fifty-third Street, which Gerald Murphy had recommended to him as a “very good reliable old N.Y. house, no chi-chi”; for despite his oft-expressed feeling that he “couldn’t stand” his old friend and sometime benefactor, no one could say that Murphy wasn’t always impeccably and elegantly dressed. And because he wasn’t the kind of man who would spend his wife’s money on another woman, he stopped at his bank to set up a special account, to be funded by his writing income, which he intended to use for any expenses associated with his relationship to Martha Gellhorn.

February 1937: Málaga Front

Although the Nationalist armies, professionally trained, augmented by Italian troops and outfitted with German and Italian munitions, had rolled over a huge swath of Spain during the autumn of 1936, the months of November and December had seen them halted by the government’s motley assemblage of trade-union militias, loyal soldiers, and International Brigaders. In the first months of the new year the front around Madrid, drenched by cold rain and swept by the bitter wind from the sierra, froze into deadlock; but fighting continued in the south. Republican forces attempted an offensive around Córdoba in the weeks after Christmas, but were beaten back (a number of British Brigaders, among them the poet John Cornford, were killed in that attack). And farther south, the Nationalists began eyeing the twenty-mile-wide strip of coastline to the east of Gibraltar—including the important port of Málaga—which had remained in Loyalist hands since the beginning of the war.

Sometime between February 3 and February 8, Robert Capa and Gerda Taro arrived in Cartagena, home port of the Spanish Navy, 391 kilometers to the east of Málaga, to take pictures of the Republican battle cruiser
Jaime I
. Christened after the great Aragonese king who had wrested Catalonia back from the French in the thirteenth century,
Jaime I
these days had a new nickname: the Spanish
Potemkin
—in homage to the vessel made legendary by Sergei Eisenstein’s film
The Battleship Potemkin
—because at the beginning of the war her Republican crew had mutinied against their rebel officers and commandeered her for
la causa
. The ship was a potent emblem, and indeed Capa’s friend and colleague Chim had published one reportage about her back in October; but perhaps because February 2 was the historic King Jaime’s birthday, or because February 5 was the ship’s twenty-fifth anniversary, she could be thought of as back in the news again.

So on a bright, balmy day Gerda and Capa clambered all over, from the bridge to the decks to the stygian engine room, shooting frame after frame; and Gerda’s photographs in particular had the heroic grandeur of Eisenstein’s cinematic epic. Here were the smiling sailors with their arms flung around each other—
click
; cannon mouths making a perfect line of O’s—
click
; brawny stokers shoveling coal in their undershirts—
click
. There was an atmosphere of fiesta on board and the crew had got up an impromptu band, with an accordion and a guitar and a Galician bagpipe; behind the players, the crew stood on bollards and risers, grinning and clapping for the music and for the pretty blond girl and her companion.

El cañón ruje, tiembla la tierra

Pero a Madrid … ¡NO PASARÁN!

[The cannon roars, the earth trembles—

But at Madrid … THEY SHALL NOT PASS!]

You could almost have forgotten there was a war going on, until Málaga was attacked.

The assault, by Nationalist troops joined by Italian Black Shirts, had begun on February 3; on February 5, rebel warships had started to bombard the city from the sea. Those who could flee began to do so, streaming eastward toward Almería, 130 miles away; by the time Málaga fell on February 8, and between two and four thousand people were rounded up and shot by the conquerors, the ribbon of coast road between the mountains and the sea had become packed with refugees—“seventy miles of people desperate with hunger and exhaustion,” as a British volunteer ambulance driver described it. A handful of them, mostly the city’s Republican high command, had automobiles; most were on foot, some leading mules or donkeys laden with their pitiful possessions. Many were children. All suffered from exposure to the sun by day and the cold by night; but worse was to come: Nationalist tanks followed them from Málaga and ran them down, Nationalist planes strafed them from the air, and Nationalist ships fired on them from the sea. Their only defense came from the now mostly decimated Escuadrilla España, André Malraux’s tatterdemalion air squadron; the effort brought most of his remaining planes down in flames, and marked the end of the squadron as an independent unit.

As soon as the two photographers heard what had happened they scrambled to get to Almería to document it, but by the time they arrived the Nationalist tanks and airplanes had finished their work. There would be no dramatic pictures here. Capa and Gerda were directed to a modest brick building with a sign over the door—“Refugio Lenin”; inside was a large bare room with tattered grimy mattresses and bedrolls pushed up against the walls. There the men, women, and children of Málaga sat, their faces showing the devastation of those who have seen the unimaginable: the father clasping a baby with a bandaged head, the toddler with her fat little legs swathed in bloody gauze, the family clustered like a modern
pietà
against the whitewashed plaster. Outside, isolated refugees were still trickling into the city, and on the outskirts some had found makeshift shelter in a roadside cavern.

The Nationalists had withdrawn westward to Málaga after their pursuit of the refugees, but there was still scattered fighting along the unstable front to the north of the coast: units of Loyalist militia, along with soldiers from the Polish Chapaiev Battalion, were pushing back against the rebels in the vicinity of Motril and Calahonda, and Capa and Gerda joined them. They found Calahonda a whitewashed shell, seemingly empty except for the corpse of a soldier curled up as if in sleep next to a bullet-pocked wall, and a live sentry sitting surreally at the entrance to the lifeless village, peering through binoculars at nothing; in the plaza, however, a heroic-looking young woman was preparing to ride her white horse up into the hills with provisions for the
milicianos
, and they followed her. It was wild country, strewn with boulders and prickly pears, and punctuated by massive limestone crags that dwarfed the soldiers they photographed; but although it made for striking pictures, the landscape wasn’t enough to keep them if they couldn’t find a story. So they made plans to return to Madrid, where there was disturbing news about a Nationalist drive to cut the road that lay between the city and Valencia.

Before they left, however, Capa had a surprise for Gerda. On a flying trip to Paris he’d bought himself a new camera, a 35mm Contax, so he could give her his speedy compact Leica—the camera she had coveted for so long—in place of her boxy Rollei. And there was something else. He’d had a new stamp made for the back of their prints. Up to that point their photographs had run with the credits “PHOTO CAPA” or “PHOTO TARO”—but now, even before they were sent out to magazines and newspapers for submission, their pictures could be stamped “REPORTAGE CAPA & TARO.”

February 1937: Madrid

Ilsa had returned to Madrid from Paris at the end of January, after browbeating the military governor at Alicante into giving her an official car for the journey, and telling the guards at all the filling stations along the road that she was the daughter of the Soviet ambassador so they’d sell her fuel. In Paris, she’d extracted a promise from Leopold Kulcsar that he would give her a divorce as soon as the war was over, and for now she and Barea would have to be content with that. At least Barea could stop drugging himself with brandy every night to get to sleep.