Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (32 page)

Dos Passos had his own reasons for believing Oak’s story. Since his arrival in Spain he’d been struck by the government’s increasing desire for central control; in Barcelona he’d seen at once that this was putting Valencia at odds with willfully independent, revolutionary Catalonia, where different factions—the anarchist CNT, the socialist UGT, the anti-Stalinist, Marxist POUM, the Communist PSUC, all suspicious of one another—had been arming themselves. What was it the mayor of Fuentidueña had said?
One of these days it will come to a fight
. Dos Passos had gone to interview Nin himself, late at night in a large bare office full of cast-off furniture; and at first Nin, who’d spent nine years in the Soviet Union, in the process becoming close to Lenin as well as Trotsky, seemed to make light of what was going on in Barcelona, the growing violence and lawlessness and the sense of foreboding that had replaced the fiesta spirit Robert Capa and Gerda Taro had rejoiced in less than a year ago. Yes, things are different, Nin said: people are wearing collars and ties on the streets again. And he laughed, flashing his white teeth. But then he spoke with concern about the way the Valencia government was taking over police services, and about the barricades being erected in the streets of the suburbs, as if in preparation for some kind of armed action. “Take a car and drive through the suburbs,” he suggested, then laughed again. “But maybe you had better not.”

In the corridor outside Nin’s office a thin, dark-haired militiaman in a baggy khaki jumpsuit was sitting on a bench, and jumped up when Dos Passos emerged. He was an Englishman named Eric Blair, a young writer who published under the pseudonym of George Orwell; he was desperate to meet the great American leftist novelist, and he’d begged his wife’s boss, who was arranging Dos Passos’s stay in Barcelona, to get him even a minute’s interview. This was the best the go-between could manage; but fortunately for Blair, Dos Passos was flattered and sat down for a chat.

Blair had enlisted in the POUM militia some months ago but was back in Barcelona on sick leave; now he was trying to arrange a transfer to a more active front, and he agreed with Dos Passos that there was an ominous change in the city, maybe in the whole country. “It’s this bloody Non-Intervention Committee that is the root of all evil,” he said: with Britain, France, and the United States refusing to support the government, the only friend Spain had was the Soviet Union, and Stalin was using that friendship as leverage. And now that the Russians were obsessed with purging Trotskyites at home, “they have to find Trotskyites to purge in Spain. Since they don’t happen to have any Trotskyites they pick on the independent working-class parties.”

“A perfect recipe for a Fascist victory,” Dos Passos had remarked.

“A Fascist victory,” Blair echoed, “and it won’t be the last.”

These two conversations, with Nin and Blair, had made Dos Passos think, if he didn’t already, that there might be some justification for Oak’s paranoia; so after allowing Oak to spend the night on the sofa in his hotel room he’d agreed to help get him out of the country the next morning. By then Dos Passos himself had begun to feel jumpy—no one would try to stop
him
leaving, would they?—and it was a relief to both of them when, on the afternoon of the first, the Generalitat’s Hispano-Suiza rolled up to the
douane
at Cerbère, where the border guards gave their documents a few thwacks with an official stamp and let them through. At Perpignan, they parted: Dos Passos was going to meet his wife, Katy, in Antibes for a few days, and Oak was headed to Paris and thence to the United States. Dos never saw Oak again.

Two days later Barcelona exploded.

The trouble started when Barcelona’s police chief decided to take over the telephone exchange in the Plaza de Cataluña, which until then had been operated by the anarchist union CNT. Arriving at the telephone building with several truckloads of Assault Guards armed with rifles, the police chief was met by machine-gun fire from the entrenched workers within; then, as if at a signal, all the political organizations in the city pulled out the arms they’d cached away, and barricades went up all over town. Shopkeepers pulled down their shutters and unarmed citizens bolted the doors on their houses. For nearly a week the streets of Barcelona echoed with gunfire—“like a tropical rainstorm,” said Eric Blair, who spent much of that time standing guard on the roof of the Poliorama, a movie theater across the street from the POUM headquarters—as Assault Guards, who had been taken away from the Jarama front for the purpose, fired on the CNT and the POUM, and the CNT and POUM fired back. The commandant of the air force, Inigo Hidalgo de Cisneros, brought four squadrons of planes to a nearby airfield in case they were needed to reimpose order. By the time the government forces prevailed, five hundred people had been killed and a thousand wounded.

Within days the Communists, prompted by Alexander Orlov’s NKVD officers, were blaming the events of the May Days on “Trotskyist-Fascist”
agents provocateurs
, with whom, it was charged, the POUM was riddled. The POUM was outlawed and its leaders arrested; and Prime Minister Largo Caballero, who resisted this step vigorously—how could you outlaw a working-class party without any proof of wrongdoing?—was forced to resign. Juan Negrín, the multilingual socialist finance minister who had negotiated the transfer of the Spanish gold reserves to Moscow (and whom the Communists, seeking a friendly but nonpartisan candidate, had already approached about taking on the job), became prime minister. And Andrés Nin was spirited out of Barcelona by the NKVD—some said by order of Alexander Orlov, still others that the directive came from Stalin himself—and taken to an interrogation center at Alcalá de Henares, where he was pressured to confess that he’d passed military secrets to the Nationalists. He refused. So he was removed to a nearby country house owned by Hidalgo de Cisneros, the air force chief who was married to Liston Oak’s Propaganda Ministry supervisor, Constancia de la Mora, and tortured to death.

Like many of the “disappeared” on both sides of the war, Nin was buried, secretly, in an unmarked grave. But not before a grotesque pantomime was staged at the house where he died: a “rescue” by costumed soldiers carrying fake Nationalist and German documents and insignia which were left behind as “clues.”
Mundo Obrero
, the PCE’s newspaper, soon reported that Nin had been freed by Falangists and was in Burgos, now the Nationalist capital; and thereafter, when POUM sympathizers scrawled graffiti on walls demanding, “Where is Nin?” someone else would scribble slanderously underneath: “In Salamanca [the former rebel capital] or Berlin.”

May 1937: Paris

Hemingway got to Paris the day the shooting started in Barcelona, his passage from Spain smoothed by a chartered plane laid on by Álvarez del Vayo. Although he hoped to rendezvous with Martha before they each went home to the United States, they had to do it clandestinely—
we will both wear long beards and look strong
—because in Paris Hemingway was in the public eye again, the kind of public eye that saw things and reported them to Pauline.

When he arrived he gave an interview to a gaggle of newspapermen—he hadn’t expected the war would last this long, he told them, he was going home to finish a novel, he would return to Spain when the “big war of movement” began in the summer—and on the ninth he delivered a speech about Spain to the Anglo-American Press Club. He had a meeting with the Spanish ambassador, Luis Araquistáin, about the Loyalist army’s medical needs. And in the time before he was to sail for New York he turned out two more dispatches for NANA. One, a charming series of portraits of the various chauffeurs he and Martha had had in Madrid, read almost like one of his short stories—closely observed, tightly constructed, funny in the way the best of his letters were funny, as if he were telling the story to
you
, to amuse and touch you. It was also (as another writer would one day point out) a not-so-subtle allegory of the Republic’s change of leadership, from common-man Tomás to the quixotic anarchist David to the solid “union man” Hipolito. The other dispatch was an armchair analysis of the military situation in Spain as he saw it, with a preamble comparing the civil war there to civil wars in the United States and Russia, and prognostications about where new fronts would develop and when. Hemingway’s money was on renewed fighting in the Jarama Valley, or maybe along the Guadalajara road; Franco, he said, “must attack and he must attack Madrid”—but, warned Hemingway, “Madrid is a deathtrap to any attacking force.”

He sent the typed story by pouch to NANA on May 9, and can’t have been happy to get a return cable from NANA’s London office manager, H. J. J. Sargint, saying that the New York editors “
ASK YOU UNSEND ADDITIONAL STORIES
.” Whether NANA was considering the expense—this piece, which was mailed in typescript, would earn Hemingway $1,000 instead of the $500 he got for cabled dispatches, bringing his total for his Spanish reportage to $7,500, or just under $120,000 in 2012 dollars—or whether they were reluctant to publish another lecture on military strategy, they ended by spiking the story. It was just one more reason for Hemingway to dislike and distrust them.

Meanwhile, with one article about Spain accepted by
Collier’s
for publication and another under consideration at
The New Yorker
, Martha was writing to John Gunther, the bestselling author of
Inside Europe
, with whom she’d indulged in a mild flirtation before her Spanish trip: “There are practically no words to describe Madrid, it was heaven, far and away the best thing I have ever seen or lived through … I want to do a book on Spain fast and I want to go back.” Neither she nor Hemingway mentioned, or seemed to notice, what was going on in Barcelona while they were in Paris. Apparently they both thought, as Martha would say years later, that the POUM and what happened to it were “irrelevant to the great drama of the war.”

On May 11, Hemingway went to the Gare St. Lazare, where John and Katy Dos Passos were watching a porter load their luggage onto the boat train for Cherbourg, where they’d board the
Berengaria
, a Cunard liner that had seen better days, bound for Southampton and New York. They looked up as Hemingway came down the platform toward them, and if either of them felt pleased to see him—if they thought he’d just come to bid his good old friends
bon voyage
—the pleasure evaporated with the first words out of his mouth. “What are you going to do about this Robles business?” Hemingway asked Dos, sharply.

“I’ll tell the truth as I see it,” Dos replied, in that soft-spoken way that made Hemingway angrier than shouting would have. “Right now I’ve got to straighten out my ideas. The question I keep putting to myself is, what’s the use of fighting a war for civil liberties, if you destroy civil liberties in the process?”

“Civil liberties shit,” growled Hemingway. “Are you with us or against us?” Dos Passos shrugged at this, and Hemingway balled up his fist as if he were going to punch his friend in the face.

A whistle blew and the trainman came down the platform, calling out “
En voiture, messieurs-dames!
” Hemingway took a breath and let his arms fall to his sides. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said to Dos Passos in a cold, hard voice. “These people”—he meant New York book reviewers—“these people know how to turn you into a back number. I’ve seen them do it. And what they did once they can do again.”

“Why, Ernest,” said his old girlfriend, now Dos’s wife, “I’ve never heard anything so despicably opportunistic in my life.” Hemingway said nothing, but turned and headed out of the station without looking back.

The next evening he returned to his and Dos’s old haunt from a decade ago, Sylvia Beach’s English-language bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, where he and Stephen Spender, also newly returned from Spain, were to give a joint reading. Spender was in the process of being purged from the Communist Party for speaking out against the severe treatment meted out by the Loyalists to party “deviants,” among them his own lover, Tony Hyndman, who had deserted from the International Brigades; and some of the poems he read that evening sounded a note of disillusion with
la causa
, or at least with the idea of the war. Hemingway, who didn’t know anything about Spender’s romance and would have despised him if he had, read from his as-yet-unfinished Harry Morgan novel, in which Morgan, the narrator, breaks the neck of the Chinese refugee-smuggler, Mr. Sing, and drops him overboard in the Gulf. “What did you kill him for?” a companion asks, and Morgan answers, “To keep from killing twelve other chinks.”

After the reading Hemingway went to the Select, in Montparnasse, with a handful of journalist friends including George and Helen Seldes. Over the
boudin noir
he groused to Seldes, “I had to go to Spain before you liberal bastards would believe I was on your side.”

The following morning, alone, he left for New York on the
Normandie
.

May 1937: Bilbao

Because of the Nationalist blockade, the safest way to get to Bilbao was to fly in from Biarritz, to the east across the French border. Even that wasn’t foolproof; the rebels said they would shoot at French planes, and the consulate in St. Jean de Luz took them at their word. But there didn’t seem to be any alternatives, so when Capa at last got his assignments from
Ce Soir
and
Regards
to cover the Basque front, and the passes and reentry papers that came with them, he went to Biarritz and found a plane whose pilot said he could get him to Sondika, the airfield just outside Bilbao.

By now the Nationalist lines had moved westward along the coast from San Sebastian almost as far as the postcard-pretty fishing village of Bermeo, just twenty-two miles from Bilbao, so the pilot set his course over the Bay of Biscay to avoid their guns, then banked south and flew high over the bare, scrub-covered hills—who knew where the front was today?—before dropping down onto the field at Sondika. Capa clambered out of the plane carrying an Eyemo movie camera, a rugged 35-millimeter that carried 100 feet of film, in addition to his still cameras. Maybe on the Basque front he’d be able to shoot some usable footage for MGM News, as he hadn’t been able to in Madrid in April.