Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (29 page)

He couldn’t work that afternoon, or that evening. Instead he scrolled a piece of paper into the typewriter and almost automatically began to write. What emerged was a phantasmagoric story full of images: the pulsating brain matter on the shop window, the black discs of the phonograph records in the shop display behind it, the frisky little RCA terrier, cocking his head to listen for a command that never came—and a woman, dressed in green, lying on the shop floor with a hole in the middle of her forehead. As he typed, Ilsa came into the room and almost automatically he handed the pages to her to look at; her response cut through the fog surrounding him. “But that’s
me
you’ve killed here,” she said in alarm. He took the pages back and tore them to shreds.

*   *   *

Fuentidueña de Tajo lay forty miles southeast of Madrid, just off the main road to Valencia: a village of 1,500, with unpaved streets running between the tile-roofed cracked stucco houses that seemed to spring organically from the parched fields surrounding it. Some of the houses had been bombed by Nationalist aircraft and now many villagers preferred to live in the cave dwellings carved into the terraced hillsides along the river—dwellings whose cone-shaped chimneys, seen from afar, looked as if they’d been built by elves in some children’s story. But to Martha Gellhorn, arriving there on the sunny April morning after the shelling on the Gran Via, Fuentidueña was “only picturesque because it is not Bearcreek, Kansas.”

Possibly Martha was in a bad mood because she and Hemingway had driven to the village with Josie Herbst, whose gentle frumpiness and harsh Midwestern vowels grated on her; or because Dos Passos was with them, since they’d all come to Fuentidueña to shoot footage for
The Spanish Earth
. It was Dos who had argued loudest and hardest for the documentary to portray the social background to the war, and now he’d got his way. As recently as the beginning of April, Joris Ivens had been lobbying for
two
films, one a compendium of the battle footage he and Ferno had completed at that point and sent to New York, which he thought could be readied for release by midmonth, the other a human-interest documentary focusing on village life, which would take longer to shoot and could be released sometime in the summer, perhaps. But when Archibald MacLeish screened the combat footage Ivens had sent to New York, he’d cabled that it was too good to be chopped up and presented as a short film. With both Hemingway and Dos Passos to help frame the story, MacLeish said, Ivens could surely combine the two narratives in such a way as to make a compelling feature. And here they all were, with two cars and a lot of camera equipment—Martha and Hemingway, Josie Herbst, Sid Franklin, Dos Passos, and Joris Ivens and Johnny Ferno.

Ivens and Ferno had discovered Fuentidueña during their explorations of the Jarama Valley, and it turned out to suit their purpose better than they could ever have hoped. Poor and feudal, the village had been controlled for centuries by a handful of landowners—descendants of the hidalgos whose shields still adorned the houses clustered around the main square—who’d taken all the proceeds from the surrounding vineyards and forbade the villagers to plant gardens of their own. But the landlords had been killed or had fled at the start of the war, the villagers had collectivized the vineyards, and had invested the income from them in a pump to bring water from the Tajo to irrigate the fields, so that for the first time they would be able to grow their own food, and maybe even to provide some for hungry Madrid. This was perfect material for Ivens, the man who had made such social-realist documentaries as
Saarland
and
Zuyderzee
. And Dos Passos, by interviewing the village elders, discovered a young man he called Julián (it might even have been his real name) who had been serving with the army outside Madrid and might serve as a link between Fuentidueña and the front.

Dos Passos discovered more than Julián, as it turned out: Walking down a little dirt track to the new pumping station with the village mayor, a socialist UGT member, he noticed men and boys sitting on the bank, fishing. All anarchists, CNT men, said the mayor: you wouldn’t see
socialists
loafing around when there was spring plowing to do. “We’ve cleaned out the fascists and the priests,” said one of the other UGT men. “Now we must clean out the loafers.”

“Yes,” the mayor responded. “One of these days it will come to a fight.” By the time Dos Passos got back to the United States and published an account of this conversation, other events would lend it an unsettling resonance; but for Hemingway and Ivens the mayor’s comments, and Dos’s interest in them, were at best an irritant, at worst malign. For Ivens, the only fight he wanted to cover was that between the villagers, united with Loyalist soldiers under a common banner, and the forces of fascism; for Hemingway, Fuentidueña and its politics held little interest. If he thought about them at all, observed Josie Herbst, he “naively” adopted whatever the simplest party line was—especially if “at the very moment Dos Passos was urgently questioning” it.

That kind of
aperçu
wasn’t going to endear Josie to her old friend Hemingway, however. And not surprisingly, when the day’s filming was over, he and Martha somehow managed to forget Josie was with them, and drove back to Madrid leaving her behind.

*   *   *

Capa had been trying to get back to Spain for almost a month, begging magazines for an assignment that would justify a visa, until at last, at the beginning of April, he’d gotten
two
: one from
Ce Soir
and one from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer News, for whom he was supposed to shoot newsreel footage even though his experience with a film camera was next to nonexistent. Unfortunately, before his visa came through,
Ce Soir
had sent him on an infuriating trip to Brussels to cover a parliamentary by-election between a fascist and a liberal candidate; but finally, in the middle of the month, he and Gerda were able to travel to Madrid.

By the time they arrived, though, the Casa de Campo offensive had all but petered out; and except for the daily ordeal by artillery shell there seemed nothing new to report from the beleaguered capital. The important action was all in the north, where rebel forces were moving to encircle the isolated Loyalist enclave in the Basque country and in Asturias, whose iron and coal, respectively, were vital resources for either side. But since Nationalist territory lay between the northern provinces and the government-held center of the country, there was no way to get there except by sea or air; and in any case Capa’s travel documents were only good for Madrid and Valencia. To get new ones meant going back to Paris and starting all over again.

While he and Gerda were trying to figure out a way around this problem they came across Geza Korvin, who was still in Madrid working on his film about Norman Bethune. And Korvin, it turned out, had just discovered someone else with a Budapest connection, the Dutchman John Ferno, who was married to Capa’s childhood friend Eva Besnyö, and was working with Joris Ivens on a documentary with two renowned American writers, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. Why didn’t they all get together?

Capa, who would always seize any excuse for a party, immediately made a plan. He and Gerda and Korvin and Ivens and Ferno, and the Americans, would have a festive meal together. They would go to Botín, a very old, very famous, very good restaurant near the Plaza Mayor where the specialty was suckling pig. Maybe, because of the war, there would be no suckling pig; but there would be something, and Botín’s cellar was reputed to be excellent. Hemingway had written about Botín’s
rioja alta
in
The Sun Also Rises
, and he would certainly be happy to revisit it.

Which he was; although, depending on who told the story later, they didn’t eat suckling pig but paella—and Hemingway (probably with most of a bottle of
rioja alta
inside him) insisted on going into the kitchen to help prepare it.
Less skillful in the kitchen than at the typewriter
, said the
padrone
, Emilio Gonzales, tactfully. Although Capa’s English was rudimentary at best, he and Hemingway could communicate in French, and he immediately recognized in the older man an appetite for life, what Josie Herbst called “a splurging magnificence,” that he found irresistible. And Hemingway liked this impetuous young photographer, who ran after combat the way a child would chase butterflies, and annexed him as a kind of adopted son.

He was less enchanted with Gerda, despite her charm and her crop of dark-gold, sunburnt hair. Maybe it was her knowing, foxy little face that irritated him; or her ability to jump effortlessly from German to French to Spanish to English; or her cool familiarity with the Spanish generals and battlefields Hemingway wanted to think of as
his
property. Maybe it was her fondness for the work of John Dos Passos, whose novels he’d just been dismissing to Martha as bogus and unreadable. Or maybe it was the way Capa looked at her, as if she were some magnificent present that he didn’t deserve. Whatever it was, Hemingway disliked Gerda on sight: enough to tell Ted Allan later that she was a “whore.”

Fortunately, however, Capa had no inkling of Hemingway’s dislike that day; and later it wouldn’t matter. For now they were just having a marvelous party, as if they were sitting at the Dôme or the Deux Magots instead of less than two miles from the front lines in Madrid.

*   *   *

Just before dawn on April 22, two artillery shells smashed into the stone walls of the Hotel Florida. The hotel had been accidentally hit before by artillery fire aimed at the Telefónica, but this barrage was different. After the initial impact, blast after blast shuddered directly into the roof tiles and masonry, shattering skylights and windows, as if this morning the rebel battery on Garabitas was trying to send a message to the foreigners in the Florida—
we can exterminate you
. From inside the walls came the mad skittering of rats trying to escape; and from the back of the hotel, an ululation, as from a flock of birds, as the
whores de combat
(as Hemingway called them) awoke in terror.

Doors were flying open around the Florida’s atrium. John Dos Passos, in bare feet and a plaid bathrobe, peered myopically into the hallway, then withdrew into his room like a snail into its shell. Hemingway, John Ferno, and Virginia Cowles, all fully dressed because they’d been planning to go to Fuentidueña to film, emerged into the corridor and headed for the stairs, Hemingway followed by Martha, who was wearing a coat over her pajamas, her blond hair still mussed from sleep like a child’s. As they passed Josie Herbst’s door she darted out from it, her face in a rictus of panic, her dressing gown askew. “How are you?” Hemingway asked her, but when she opened her mouth to reply no sound came out. She took a deep breath and went back into her room, emerging a few minutes later with her clothes on, if not much more composed.

The shells kept coming—first that tearing sound, then a shattering primal roar—as the guests continued to stream down the stairs and congregate in the relative safety of the ground-floor lobby. There was Dos Passos, bathed and shaved now, but still wearing his plaid bathrobe; Claud Cockburn, pale as marble, holding a coffeepot in his hands as if it were a votive offering; and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in a vibrantly blue silk dressing gown, standing at the foot of the stairs with a box of grapefruit, asking, “
Voudriez-vous une pamplemousse, madame?
” to each woman who passed him. Someone brought coffee to put in Cockburn’s pot, and bread to toast on someone else’s hot plate; still another someone found chocolate to share around. Hemingway looked about and pronounced, “I have great confidence in the Hotel Florida,” and it turned out to be prophetic, because the shelling slowed, then stopped altogether, and the walls were still intact.

By seven the sun was well up in the sky and the hotel staff began sweeping up broken glass and crumbled stone and plaster. Capa appeared—where had he been during the bombardment?—and photographed the clean-up effort. Hemingway went out to investigate the damage to the neighborhood and returned to report cheerfully that the Paramount Theatre across the plaza had taken a hit—including its giant sign advertising Charlie Chaplin’s
Modern Times
. Martha, wrung out, announced she was going back to bed to sleep. And Josie Herbst sat on one of the wicker chairs in the lobby, looking angry and unhappy, like a wet owl, until Hemingway sympathetically offered to pour her a snifter of brandy before he went off to Fuentidueña for the day.

It soon became apparent that Hemingway had more in mind than a drink, however. He and Josie and Dos had all been friends since their Paris days, had spent time fishing in Key West together, and so he felt he could tell her that he was getting fed up with Dos and his questions about Robles. Dos was going to get all of them in trouble. This was war, and you didn’t question the motives of the government, or the fate of anyone who might be suspected of wrongdoing. Couldn’t Josie talk to Dos and tell him to shut up?

For a moment Josie seemed to be struggling with some decision. Then she put down her drink. “The man is already dead,” she said. “Quintanilla should have told Dos.”

It turned out that Josie had been given the news, in confidence, in Valencia; her informant was someone official, and
that
person had supposedly been sworn to secrecy by someone else higher up. Maybe the official had been Constancia de la Mora, who—having been given the word by Álvarez del Vayo—had taken Josie aside for a little woman-to-woman chat. Maybe it was someone else. Josie named no names. She seemed not to question that she—a journalist almost without portfolio, a B-list novelist, a woman of no influence—had been entrusted with this sensitive secret; nor did she wonder if her informant had
meant
her to tell someone. Had counted on it, in fact: because what would a decent, kind woman, an old friend of both Dos Passos and Hemingway, do if she were confronted with Dos’s questions? She would spill the beans, of course; maybe not to Dos himself, which would be a direct betrayal of her confidant’s trust, but to Hemingway, their great mutual friend, and ask
him
to break the news to Dos Passos. That way both of them would know, and Hemingway would be bound to speak to Dos about the matter. And by now, after several weeks of patient handling by Joris Ivens, Gustav Regler, and others, Hemingway would certainly press the government’s case to his friend.