Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (31 page)

Hemingway looked at his watch, started to get to his feet. It was late, he had to go.

“Nonsense,” Quintanilla said, in the tone of one who was rarely contradicted. “No one goes.”
Twenty-two
.

“I must work,” Hemingway protested.

Quintanilla looked at him. “There is no work once you get hit,” he said. He turned and fixed Ginny Cowles with his bright marble-brown stare. “We will all go to my house,” he said, patting her knee, “and I will divorce my wife and marry you. My wife can be the cook. I have lived with her so long that it is just like mailing a letter, and my only worry is will the stamp get on.”

“I’m afraid when you get tired of me you’ll make me be the cook,” said Ginny.

Their laughter echoed hollowly in the empty basement.

After a little while the
Americanos
decided to risk escape. As they emerged into the glare of the Gran Via, Hemingway grabbed Ginny Cowles’s arm. “A
chic type
, eh?” he asked. “Now remember, he’s mine.”

*   *   *

At the very end of the month, just before Hemingway was due to leave Spain, he and Ginny Cowles were given clearance to go to the front in the Guadarrama, where Loyalist troops had been keeping the rebels at bay from a series of positions on the forested slopes, from time to time launching desperate surprise attacks in the hope of dislodging them or beating them back. The two journalists set out from Madrid in the morning and a few hours later their car was climbing through pines and meadows of wildflowers to brigade headquarters. Except for his day filming tank maneuvers in the Jarama, and his several visits to watch the abortive Casa de Campo offensive, it was the first time Hemingway had been to an active combat zone in Spain; and his soldier hosts, wanting to ensure that he and the lady comrade would have something dramatic to write about, put the two correspondents into an armored car and drove them to a forward position along a road that was under enemy fire. The car lurched and rattled over the rutted paving and bullets pinged against the steel plates on the sides, but its occupants arrived unharmed at the top of a hill to find that the soldiers they’d come to see were playing the guitar and singing while machine guns chattered in the distance.

As the soldiers finished their song their commander appeared, a lean, battle-hardened man in boots, breeches, a green turtleneck pullover, and a forage cap worn atilt over one eye, who called himself El Guerrero. He’d been a truck driver in Madrid before the war, but when the generals had risen against the Republic he’d volunteered for the militia. He told the correspondents that he’d been in the mountains all winter, and seen his battalion shot to pieces on more than one occasion; his wife had fought alongside him, he said, until she got pregnant. Then he had to send her back to Madrid.

Poorly fed, inadequately clothed, their feet shod in rope-soled canvas
alpargatas
instead of sturdy boots, El Guerrero’s fighters had proved their toughness throughout a grueling winter; but paradoxically most of them seemed touchingly young and enthusiastic: one picked a bouquet for Ginny Cowles; another showed her a poem he’d written about the woods and mountains; all of them were eager to demonstrate what would happen if they fired a trench mortar at the farmhouse down the hill, which was an enemy position. When the rebels fired back they mistook the direction of the assault, and instead of aiming at El Guerrero’s position they shot at another house in the distance, which apparently belonged to the brigade’s colonel. The soldiers couldn’t stop laughing. But they knew the war wasn’t a joke; they’d lost too many comrades for that. And they believed, passionately and optimistically, that the Republic would prevail.
You’ll see—by Christmas our flag will be flying in every village in Spain.

That night, back at the Hotel Florida, Hemingway wrote what he knew would be his last dispatch from Madrid. El Guerrero didn’t make it into this story; nor did his wife, or his men, or Ginny Cowles—although Hemingway did mention how well-disciplined and smart he thought the troops in the Sierra were, and described the armored car he’d ridden in and the machine guns that had fired at him. Instead, Hemingway treated his readers to a lesson on strategy and geography: although the insurgents were mounting a determined offensive against Bilbao in the north, he maintained, “Madrid is the key position on a front 800 miles long,” and because of its impregnable position its defenders had “a huge advantage”—even if the government decided to “allow Bilbao to fall.” To justify his credentials for making this sort of pronouncement, he said he’d “spent a hard ten days visiting four central fronts, including … climbing to important positions 4,800 feet high in the Guadarrama Mountains”; the implication that he’d just taken an arduous ten-day circuit ride around Spain, instead of making ten separate day trips over the course of the month, was both inescapable and (if necessary) deniable. Two days later, after a riotous farewell party at the Twelfth Brigade base hospital attended by Lukacs, Werner Heilbrun, Gustav Regler, Sid Franklin, Josie Herbst, and a host of others that ended with Hemingway passed out on Heilbrun’s operating table, he left Madrid for Paris. Standing in the courtyard at the Foreign Ministry as he waited for his car, he indulged in a little man-talk with Barea. “His jokes told me how near he was to understanding Castilian double meanings,” Barea said later—“and how far.”

When Hemingway wrote his last Madrid dispatch, one of the most horrific stories of the war had been unfolding in Guernica, the ancient spiritual capital of the Basques near Bilbao. The rebel drive on the Basque front wasn’t going as quickly as its commander, General Mola, wanted; and on Sunday, April 25, he broadcast the following warning over the Nationalist radio: “Franco is about to deliver a mighty blow against which all resistance is useless. Basques! Surrender now and your lives will be spared!” The next day, at 4:30 in the afternoon—market day in Guernica—a German Heinkel 111 bomber from the Condor Legion’s “experimental squadron” flew over the town center, dropped a load of bombs, and flew away. When the all-clear signal sounded people emerged from their shelters to help the wounded—at which point the sky suddenly filled with planes. First the full squadron, which dropped more bombs; then wave after wave of Heinkel 51 fighters, sweeping low to strafe and hurl grenades at men, women, children, farmers, nuns, even livestock. Finally, at 5:15, three squadrons of lumbering Junkers 52 bombers carpet-bombed the town—a technique the Condor Legion had implemented for the first time a few weeks before on Republican positions around Oviedo, two hundred miles to the west—with antipersonnel twenty-pounders and incendiaries. Cows and sheep, crazed and burning, ran in panic through the streets; whole families perished as their houses crumbled in upon them; people covered in third-degree burns lurched between the blazing buildings. By morning Guernica was a charred carapace.

Although the London
Times
’s correspondent, George Steer, arrived on the scene before dawn on the twenty-seventh and was able to take down eyewitness accounts of the destruction, his own paper refused to publish (as its editor said) “anything that might hurt [German] sensibilities”—leaving it to
The New York Times
to pick up the entirety of Steer’s story. The paper counterbalanced Steer almost immediately, though, with a report by their pro-rebel correspondent, William P. Carney: Guernica, he said—parroting the line of Luis Bolín, who’d arranged Franco’s escape from the Canary Islands and was now the insurgent propaganda chief—had been burned by the
Basques
, with help from Asturian
dinamiteros
; no insurgent planes had come near the town. That last, at least, was true—the planes themselves were German, and the order to bomb Guernica, a target of limited strategic significance, came from the German air minister, Colonel Hermann Goering, who wanted to demonstrate to the German general staff what the results of such an exercise would be.

In one sense, they were everything the rebel high command and their Nazi allies could have hoped: Guernica fell to the insurgents two days later, opening the way for their offensive against Bilbao, and two years later the Luftwaffe would employ the same tactics to conquer Poland. But despite the official denials of the Nationalist authorities, or perhaps because of them, the destruction of Guernica would inspire headlines for weeks afterward, and go on to become a central symbol of the civil war—especially after Pablo Picasso made it the subject of his eponymous painting for the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exposition in Paris, which opened that summer.

Why didn’t Hemingway cover what happened at Guernica? The story would have been a huge scoop for him, and for NANA—and neither Matthews nor Delmer could get it, because they’d both gone on leave ten days earlier. Traveling to the devastated town would certainly have been difficult, since it was on the northern coast, separated from Madrid by a huge swathe of rebel territory; but he didn’t even mention the bombing in his last dispatch from Spain. Perhaps Guernica didn’t seem important to the men he talked to—Durán, Walter, Lukacs, Hans Kahle, and the others in Madrid. Certainly the moderate and conservative French newspapers, such as
Le Temps
and
Le Figaro
, ignored it at first.

For some reason, though, it seemed to matter to Virginia Cowles, who despite her gold bracelets and high-heeled shoes was a very determined reporter; and when she left Madrid she headed to the Nationalist zone and visited Guernica, “a lonely chaos of timber and brick, like an ancient civilization in the process of being excavated.” When she asked what had happened there, a Nationalist staff officer told her, “We bombed it and bombed it and bombed it and
bueno
, why not?” At which her official escort interrupted, saying grimly, “I don’t think I would write about that if I were you.” She ignored the suggestion.

May 1937: Paris

It was May Day and Paris was
en fête
. The chestnut trees were blooming in the Bois and along the boulevards, the sun was shining, and the whole city was on holiday. Shortly after noon an enormous crowd—estimated by some as more than a million people—gathered in the Place de la République to march “for bread, peace, and liberty,” as
L’Humanité
, which suspended publication for the day, put it. Planned as a celebration of the achievements the French Popular Front had made in promoting workers’ welfare, the demonstration had taken on a darker tinge with the recent news from Spain, particularly the reports of what
L’Humanité
called “the horrible Fascist crime of Guernica.” As a light breeze fluttered the placards and banners of the demonstrators and the parade coursed down the broad avenues toward the Place de la Nation like a mighty river, an airplane traced the word
Bilbao
with its vapor trail in the pearly blue sky overhead and then flew low to scatter pamphlets urging aid for the Basque victims of the war. And on the speakers’ platform in the Place de la Nation the Spanish Republican flag flew alongside the
tricolore
and the banner of the CGT, the Confédération Général des Travailleurs.

Capa and Gerda moved along the margins of the crowd. Capa was snapping pictures of the demonstration for
Ce Soir
, but when they came to a street-corner flower stall they stopped in front of a display of
muguet
. It was Charles IX who in the sixteenth century first bestowed the lily-of-the-valley as a May Day talisman on the ladies of his court; now it was a traditional token of luck, love, and renewal—the
de rigueur
offering from any man to his sweetheart on this day. As the flower seller looked on indulgently, Gerda hovered over the flowers, a chic beret perched on her dark-gold hair, a long scarf knotted at her throat, posing prettily for Capa’s camera as she sought out the freshest and most fragrant bouquet.
This one, please
. Clasping the flowers to her, she pulled out a sprig and carefully pinned it to the lapel of his jacket.

May 1937: Barcelona

John Dos Passos left Barcelona’s Hotel Continental at dawn on the first day of May in a Hispano-Suiza supplied by the Catalan Generalitat. On the seat beside him, masquerading as his secretary until they had passed the guards at the French border, was Liston Oak, the American propaganda worker who had originally told Coco Robles that his father was dead.

Oak had appeared at Dos Passos’s hotel room door after midnight the night before, white-faced and stammering; he was on the run, he said, because he’d been denounced as a Trotskyist to the security services and was certain that what had happened to Robles would happen to him, too. This wasn’t necessarily paranoia. Earlier in the spring Oak had been transferred to Barcelona for the purpose of setting up a new English-language press office, and soon after his arrival he’d had lunch in a hole-in-the-wall off the Ramblas with Andrés Nin, the charismatic former teacher and journalist who was head of the POUM, the Catalan anti-Stalinist Marxist revolutionaries. Oak had been deeply impressed by Nin, and based on their conversation had written an article, which was now about to be published by London’s
New Statesman and Nation
, supporting Nin’s argument that the government could never win the war with Franco if in the name of solidarity it crushed the revolutionary spirit of 1936. When he’d first interviewed Nin this position might have seemed defensible; but the Communist Party’s congress in Valencia in March had demonized the POUM and urged that it be dissolved, and by now any article taking the POUM point of view would be viewed as subversive by many in the government, certainly his employers, Constancia de la Mora and the increasingly Communist-leaning Álvarez del Vayo. What would really get him in trouble, though, was his assertion that the anarchists and the POUM believed there was “a plot to eliminate them from the Spanish scene” and that Stalinists in the government had “organized a GPU [secret service] in Spain controlled from Moscow.”

Already nervous about the article’s publication, Oak had been sent into a real funk when, strolling along the Ramblas, he’d run into a Russian agent he’d known in New York who went by the name of George Mink. Mink had invited him for cocktails at his hotel, an invitation Oak had warily accepted, and over their scotch the agent had told him, as one warrior to another, that the Communists had finally persuaded the government to strike against the POUM and its sympathizers. People would die, and other people would be arrested and jailed, if they were lucky, or shot, if not. And after that things would certainly be different in Barcelona. All this was unsettling enough, but what made Mink’s warning (was it a warning?) particularly terrifying to Oak was that Mink—not his real name, of course—was a political assassin.