Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (27 page)

A few days later, though, it seemed like he might get a real taste of battle. Since the beginning of November, Franco’s soldiers had been lodged in the Casa de Campo, where from the heights of Cerro Garabitas they lobbed shells with impunity into the heart of Madrid and protected the rear flank of the Nationalist contingent still dug in at University City. But the Republican command hoped to drive the rebels from their position, and perhaps also distract them from a planned offensive in the Basque country, as an anniversary present to the government, which had been elected on April 14 a year earlier. They were planning a concerted attack on Garabitas for April 9, and Joris Ivens and his crew—including Hemingway, and a ringer in the form of the United Press correspondent Hank Gorrell—were going to be allowed to take long-range cameras to the Parque del Oeste to film the action.

Hemingway was excited, as much at the prospects for the government’s forces as for his own reportage. The night before, in celebration, he’d given expensive small leather goods to Martha and Sid Franklin and Ivens and Ferno and had drunk an awful lot of whiskey. And his head and guts were paying the price as he and the others hiked down the Gran Via in the chilly dawn to set up. At first they tried filming on a knoll in the park, from which they were rewarded by a near-diorama of the assault—the guns firing puffs of smoke, the infantrymen charging forward like the soldiers in
War and Peace
—as they peered through field glasses or the cameras, shielding the lenses so they wouldn’t catch the sun and betray their hiding place to any sharpshooters. But the threat of stray bullets drove them back across the Paseo del Pintor Rosales, a battered but still elegant avenue that ran along one side of the park, where they took shelter in one of the ruined houses.

By now the spring day had turned warm and they were sweating as they lugged their equipment up three flights of stairs to a deserted apartment with a balcony facing the park. Shielding the camera with old clothes they found in the abandoned armoires, they trained the lens on the action and filmed all through the afternoon: the tanks darting back and forth like beetles, and the tiny infantrymen looking like children’s toys as they ran and dropped to their stomachs and then ran again. Except for the daily (and sometimes nightly) shelling at the Hotel Florida, it was the closest Hemingway had come to battle since he’d arrived in Spain, and he was exhilarated: it had been “marvelous,” he thought, as they packed up their equipment. Then, as they walked up the Gran Via in the dusk, disillusionment set in. They’d been too far away, he told himself; worse, “any fool could see the offensive was a failure.” And when he got home to the Florida he found that Martha had spent the afternoon with the British biologist, Haldane, watching the very same action from another house on the periphery of the Casa de Campo—“like college kids on an outing,” she said.

But a college outing to a failed offensive wasn’t the sort of thing NANA was paying him $500 a dispatch ($1,000 if he mailed a manuscript copy) to write about; it wasn’t what he and Joris Ivens were making their movie about; and it wasn’t what he himself could bear to admit he’d been a party to, even in private. Never mind that, just by being in Madrid, he was running a risk of being killed every time he went outside his hotel. Never mind that men had died during the afternoon’s fighting. Never mind that Nationalist shells hit buildings on the Paseo del Pintor Rosales regularly and might have landed in the building they’d been filming in. Readers in New York, and Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco, would never believe you could be in a war zone where there were bars and functioning movie theaters and shops selling perfume; they needed to smell cordite and hear guns. So in chronicling the past few days’ events, Hemingway made them into a
better
story, as he’d done with his account of the bear hunt at the L Bar T. The attack in the Casa de Campo wasn’t a futile effort that he and his companions had observed from a distance, but the beginning of a “most important battle,” the launch of “a long-awaited Government offensive,” which they’d been in the thick of. The hours he and Ivens and Ferno had spent shooting at Morata weren’t an exercise in cold and gritty monotony, but a dramatic attack by tanks and infantry, in which, “as you flopped at a close one and heard the fragments sing over you on the rocky, dusty hillside, your mouth was full of dust.”

He wrote the dispatch out in longhand before typing it in “cablese”—the journalists’ patois he’d been using since his days as a Paris correspondent for the
Toronto Star
—in which, to reduce expensive word count, articles were left out, modifiers run in to the words they modified, “do not want” was rendered as “unwant,” “from Madrid” was “exmadrid.” Then he gave the manuscript to Martha to proofread; afterward Sidney Franklin would take it to the Telefónica for Barea or Ilsa to vet before telephoning it to the NANA bureau in London, from which it would be cabled to New York. His last dispatch, about his visit to the blind soldier Raven at Morata, had been sent by mail—albeit through a diplomatic pouch—and it still hadn’t reached NANA; this one would hit U.S. newspapers in two days, at most.

The following morning, at the Telefónica, there was a cable for Martha from NBC; they had scheduled a broadcast time for her talk on Madrid, but now they were changing it—and, by the way, they wanted her to concentrate on the “human interest” angle, not on the war. Was this because she was a woman, and “human interest” was a woman’s bailiwick, or did NBC want to soft-pedal the war itself? Furious, Martha told the broadcasters to forget it—they would get no report from
her.
Storming out of the building, she went to buy perfume in one of the shops on the Gran Via. That afternoon, as a kind of consolation prize, Hemingway took her to the building he’d been filming in the previous day, which he’d begun calling the “Old Homestead,” after his grandfather’s house in Oak Park. Martha tiptoed through the ruined rooms, peering into the medicine cabinet—she found a douche and hair curlers and bottles of peroxide—and looking at the former owners’ wedding pictures. Hemingway called to her to come pay attention to the fighting across the river in the Casa de Campo, so she went to his balcony observation post: but the tiny soldiers, and the miniature tanks spurting little tongues of flame, all seemed unreal to her. The only reality, she felt, was in the house behind her, with its detritus of interrupted lives; the only beauty in the white peaks of the Guadarrama shining coldly, unchangeably in the distance.

*   *   *

When they returned from their visit to the Old Homestead that evening, Hemingway and Martha noticed a pile of suitcases on the pavement in front of Hotel Florida, next to a gleaming Hispano-Suiza whose chauffeur was listening uneasily to the still-crackling gunfire from the Casa de Campo and looking as if he would rather be anywhere else than where he was. Walking past him into the hotel lobby, they ran straight into John Dos Passos and two Frenchmen with whom he’d driven up from Valencia in the fancy car outside: Lucien Vogel, the editor of
Vu
, and Philippe Lamour, an antifascist lawyer and journalist who was a close friend of Bertrand de Jouvenel—the man to whom, until very recently, Martha had been all but married.

The encounter could have been a scene from a boulevard comedy: raised eyebrows, a flurry of greetings—swift
bisou-bisous
, first on one cheek, then on the other—then awkward introductions, during which the inevitable conclusions could be drawn, and comparisons made between Hemingway, in his beret and grimy trousers and shabby tweed jacket, and the invariably soigné and elegant Bertrand. Tongues would certainly wag in Paris.

At last Martha and Hemingway were able to break away; and while Sid Franklin—who had magically appeared in the lobby—took care of getting Dos Passos’s bags up to his room, Dos followed the two of them to their suite. The old comrades’ reunion left something to be desired. Not only had Dos brought insufficient contributions to the Hemingway larder—a few measly bars of chocolate and four oranges—he also seemed less interested in the progress of
The Spanish Earth
, the project that after all had brought him to Spain, than in the disappearance of his translator and friend José Robles Pazos. It was all he wanted to talk about.

No one in Valencia had been able to tell him anything, Dos complained; not Robles’s wife, Márgara, nor his teenaged son, Francisco (nicknamed Coco), who was working part-time as a translator in Rubio Hidalgo’s propaganda office, nor even Álvarez del Vayo, to whom he’d appealed for information. All Dos knew was that one night in December Robles had been taken away by a group of men in civilian clothes, shut up in the Foreigners’ Prison on the Turia River, and charged with treason against the Republic. When Márgara had visited him in prison he’d reassured her that it was all a misunderstanding and everything would be cleared up—but in January he’d simply vanished, and no one seemed to want to say where or why. At the end of February, or maybe the beginning of March, Liston Oak—an American Communist working in the propaganda office—had apparently told Coco that his father was dead. But there was no confirmation, and Robles’s family hoped that the news of his death might just be a false rumor. Especially when Álvarez de Vayo—who should know, shouldn’t he?—told Dos Passos that Robles was “quite all right.”

Dos showed all the signs of being ready to take his inquiries to anyone in Madrid who might know something, and the idea of his blundering like a bull into Hemingway’s carefully assembled china shop of connections caused immediate alarm. “Don’t put your mouth to this Robles business,” Hemingway told him brusquely. “People disappear every day.” Certainly Dos could not be allowed to start making trouble with Ivens, or the army men, or Pepe Quintanilla, or the Russians. It would make Hemingway look bad, and screw up his access to them for sure. Not only that, but Dos’s questions made it seem he didn’t trust the government he was supposed to be making a propaganda film for, which wouldn’t go down well with donors to the cause. Hemingway went on the offensive, like a boxer, the better to upset Dos’s equilibrium. “Just suppose,” he said, “your professor took a powder and joined the other side?”

“That could not be,” Dos Passos protested. “I’ve known the man for years. He’s absolutely straight.”

His insistence irritated Martha, who was already suspicious of him because of his affection for Pauline. Didn’t he understand the situation in Spain? His questions, she told him pointedly, “have already caused us embarrassment.”
Us
. Suddenly it seemed as if there were two sides, and she and Hemingway were on one, Dos Passos on the other.

After an uncomfortable drink in Hemingway’s suite they all went to dinner at the Gran Via, where by a potentially uncomfortable coincidence they found Pepe Quintanilla already dining. But he greeted Dos Passos effusively—
Dos, que tal?;
apparently they’d known each other in their student days, had even gone mountain-climbing in the Guadarrama together. And when dinner was over Quintanilla invited Dos to the Telefónica, where his office was. He showed his old climbing buddy around the building, stopping on the fifth floor to introduce him to Barea (“underfed and underslept,” thought Dos Passos) and Ilsa, and afterward the two men sat down for a conversation. Dos Passos wasted no time in bringing up Robles; but alas, it was the same old story: Quintanilla was unable to shed any light on Robles’s disappearance. He would find out, though; he promised. But Dos Passos should remember: there were dangerous people out there, anarchists, Trotskyists, “uncontrollables”—who knows what they might have done or might do to such as Robles. Or what would happen to Robles if it turned out that he was one of them.

There was really nothing more Dos Passos could do. He might, if circumstances had been otherwise, have gone to see Robles’s former boss, General Vladimir Gorev, to ask
his
help in finding out what had happened to his friend; but in a move some saw as a power play by the NKVD against the military-intelligence GRU, Moscow had just removed Gorev from his post in Madrid and sent him north to the Basque country, ostensibly to help mobilize resistance to a major new Nationalist offensive. There really were no more doors in Madrid to knock on.

Meanwhile, back at the Hotel Florida, Hemingway and Martha were having a conversation of a different kind. In the weeks since he had been in Madrid, Hemingway had sent Pauline a few cables, and only one letter; none gave her any hint of what was now public knowledge to everyone in town—his relationship with Martha Gellhorn. In the alternate reality of the war it had been possible for Hemingway, and Martha too, to pretend that their former lives existed in some other universe; but suddenly here was Dos Passos, who had known Hemingway for decades, who was married to Hemingway’s old girlfriend, and who was friends with Hemingway’s wife. And here were those Frenchmen, Vogel and Lamour, friends of Bertrand de Jouvenel, “to whom,” Martha reminded herself, “God knows how many memories attach.” The outside world was about to make demands on Hemingway, and on Martha.

Whatever drove him—and perhaps it was only the rumble of Time’s chariot wheels in Madrid’s daily bombardments—Hemingway chose this moment to ask Martha to marry him. He wasn’t really free to court her, which Martha, having been in this situation before, with Bertrand, knew all too well. But she gave him an answer, of a sort. “Note to H.,” she wrote in her diary before going to bed that night: “I love you very much indeed.”

Perhaps she meant it. Perhaps she
wanted
to mean it. But left to herself she knew that (as she’d written in that same diary only a few days previously) she’d never found
anyone
who didn’t ultimately exhaust her, anyone of whom she could say that she could “go away and if I never see them again it will not matter.” People palled for her, she was discovering; only writing did not. A few days after Dos Passos’s arrival her amended radio report finally aired, and she felt encouraged to start a magazine piece for
Collier’s
about life in the besieged city. She wasn’t sure how she felt about the story itself, but the process of composing it was, she said, “the only thing which does not bore or dismay me, or fill me with doubt.” It was even a cure for the terror that still gripped her when the shells screamed overhead. Although she continued to visit hospitals to cheer up sick or wounded soldiers (unlike Hemingway, who seemed uncomfortable when confronted with them), and shopped for clothing and handmade shoes and those alluring silver foxes, although she flirted with correspondents and soldiers and shared Hemingway’s bed, none of these things was as important as what happened between her and her typewriter. Writing, she found, gave her a sharp, hard focus, a cocaine-like rush, that made everything else in her life seem beside the point.