Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (39 page)

By evening on the twenty-sixth, though, she hadn’t arrived, and she hadn’t wired to say her plans had changed. Capa was concerned enough to put through a call to the Alianza in Madrid, but no one he talked to there seemed to know where she was.

The next morning he got up early and went to an appointment at the dentist. On the way he picked up a copy of
L’Humanité
. The front-page story was almost entirely devoted to war news—the Japanese had attacked Peking, and the rebels appeared to have retaken the town of Brunete. “The war photographer’s most fervent wish is for unemployment,” Capa would say later; but on this evidence it didn’t look like he, or Gerda, was going to be out of work anytime soon. Sitting in the dentist’s waiting room, he turned to the newspaper’s third page, where the international news was. Air raids in China, the Non-Intervention Committee voicing platitudes in London, the British offering a partition plan for Palestine; in Spain, the Republicans trying to hold on at Brunete, the Cortes planning to convene a session in August, and so on and so on. Then, at the very end of the column, a subheading:

A FRENCH JOURNALIST,

MLLE. TAROT,

IS REPORTED TO HAVE BEEN KILLED IN THE COURSE OF A BATTLE, NEAR BRUNETE

Maybe it was a mistake: the lines underneath said only that there were rumors of Mlle. Tarot’s death on the twenty-sixth, but that they could not be confirmed. It was Louis Aragon—having spoken by telephone to Gerda’s colleagues Georges Soria and Marc Ribécourt in Madrid—who had to tell him the terrible truth. When the reality sank in Capa collapsed in despair; nothing Aragon said could stop his tears.

His first, nearly obsessive thought was that he had to retrieve Gerda’s body; but almost as soon as she died others were trying to lay claim to it for their own purposes. First Maria Teresa Léon and Rafael Alberti had taken it to the Alianza in Madrid, where her coffin was displayed, a stream of artists, journalists, politicians, and soldiers (including the divisional commander Enrique Líster) passing before it. Then it had been transported to Valencia, where Constancia de la Mora placed on the flag-draped bier the faded bouquet of flowers Gerda had brought her ten days earlier. And then Louis Aragon, saying that Gerda was “a daughter of Paris” who should be buried in that city, prevailed on the Spanish Republic to relinquish what was left of her. Although Gerda was not in fact a Party member, the French Communist Party bought a hundred-year lease on a burial plot near the wall commemorating the executed Communards of 1870 at Père-Lachaise cemetery, the resting place of Paris’s
gratin intellectuel
, and started planning a funeral for her like that given to a head of state. And
Ce Soir
and other journals began a days-long barrage of tributes and reminiscences—illustrated sometimes with Gerda’s photographs, sometimes with Capa’s, but credited to her—by a Who’s Who of antifascist intellectuals: Mikhail Koltsov, Claud Cockburn, André Chamson, José Bergamín, Gustavo Durán, and more.

Desperate to reclaim Gerda for himself, and hearing that Louis Aragon had arranged for Gerda’s remains to be flown from Valencia to Toulouse, Capa insisted on traveling there immediately; and since he was in no state to make the trip by himself, Ruth Cerf, Gerda’s old friend and flatmate, and the novelist Paul Nizan, who was
Ce Soir
’s foreign affairs specialist, went with him. But when they got to Toulouse they discovered that international law forbade the air transport of the dead across an international border; so Capa had to return with Ruth to Paris, while Nizan met the casket, which had been driven to Port Bou, and accompanied it on the train northward.

When the locomotive pulled in to the echoing glass train shed of the Gare d’Austerlitz at 8:39 on the morning of July 30, a crowd of more than a hundred people was waiting outside the station, alerted by a notice of the arrival time in
Ce Soir
. Six uniformed employees of the Societé National des Chemins de Fer carried Gerda’s coffin, still blanketed in the flowers placed on it in Valencia, onto the platform; waiting to receive it were Capa, Louis Aragon and his wife, Elsa Triolet, Capa’s Japanese friend Seichi Inouye—and Gerda’s father, Heinrich, and one of her brothers, who had managed to make the journey from Belgrade. They had never met Capa, and now, when they were introduced, Gerda’s brother turned on him. It was Capa’s fault Gerda was dead, he shouted; he’d introduced her to photography, taken her to Spain, and then he’d left her there to be killed. Wild with grief and anger, he punched Capa in the face. Capa, for whom Pohorylle’s accusations were nothing he hadn’t reproached himself with, was too numb to fight back, and Aragon, Elsa Triolet, and Inouye had to step between the two men. Heinrich Pohorylle, meanwhile, hardly noticed what was happening. Instead he wrapped himself in his
tallis
, approached the coffin, and standing before it began to recite the words of the mourner’s kaddish:
May His great name be magnified and sanctified in the world that He created … May His kingdom come in your lives and in your days and in the lives of all the house of Israel, swiftly and soon
.… Hearing this prayer, in the Hebrew of his childhood, Capa broke down completely; and Aragon signaled to his wife and Inouye to take him home. For the next two days he remained in seclusion, refusing to eat or drink, only emerging, red-eyed, for the funeral two days later.

By then Gerda had become a symbol, a Joan of Arc of the left, an antifascist martyr, and enormous floral tributes from “young athletes” or “the seamstresses of Paris” banked her coffin at the PCF’s black-draped Maison de la Culture in the rue d’Anjou, where an exhibition of her photographs—her first—included Capa’s now eerily prescient portrait of her with her head resting on the stone marked
P.C.
There were still more flowers in the funeral procession, which set out for Père-Lachaise accompanied by an honor guard that included Pablo Neruda, Lucien Vogel, Tristan Tzara—founder of Dada, but also correspondent for
Ce Soir
—André Chamson, and the leaders of the Young Communist Women of France. Down the rue d’Anjou they went, past the Opéra, the offices of
Ce Soir
in the rue du Quatre-Septembre, the Bourse, the Place de la République, preceded by a band playing Chopin’s funeral march and trailed by a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands; it took hours to reach their destination. Almost unnoticed amid the spectacle were Heinrich Pohorylle, accompanied by Ruth Cerf, and Capa, who wept uncontrollably and hid his face in Louis Aragon’s shoulder whenever the cortège came to a stop. “He was just a great boy, crazy with courage and overflowing with life,” Aragon said of the twenty-four-year-old Capa; “now war had murdered his youth.”

At Père-Lachaise there were speeches and more speeches; finally the coffin was lowered into the grave. Afterward, Capa went back to the rue Froidevaux, barricaded himself in his studio, and proceeded to drink himself into oblivion. “Now Gerda is dead,” he told his old friend Eva Besnyö, John Ferno’s wife, “it is finished for me.” It was Sunday, August 1, Gerda Taro’s twenty-seventh birthday.

August 1937: Madrid/Valencia

With the coming of August the light and heat made Madrid close to unbearable. A strange lassitude had settled on the city in the aftermath of Brunete. Although government communiqués and the news accounts of the pro-Loyalist correspondents like Herbert Matthews tried to maintain that the nineteen-days-long engagement had ended in a victory for the Republic, the government had had 20,000 casualties (4,300 of them International Brigaders), lost a hundred aircraft, and—despite pushing a dent into the rebel line—had failed in the attempt to encircle and cut off the force threatening Madrid’s western boundary. In fact, the only thing preventing the Nationalists’ general, Varela, from pushing forward and taking Madrid itself was Franco’s order to hold off until the war in the north was won.

Relations between the press on the one hand and Ilsa and Barea on the other seemed to fray in the August sun. The journalists blamed them for the restrictions imposed by Valencia, and—ironically—complained about them to the press office there; even more ironically, the Valencia office, encouraged by the insinuations of the oily Agence Espagne agent “George Gordon,” took the complaints as evidence that Barea and Ilsa weren’t up to their jobs. Barea especially came under suspicion: his divorce from Aurelia was in its final stages, and suddenly people who hardly knew him were raising their eyebrows at his wanting to put aside his Spanish wife to marry a foreign woman. It was all of a piece with the rest of his peculiar recent behavior, they said—his nerves, his short temper, the problems in the censorship.

Barea was almost past caring about any of it, but for Ilsa’s sake he tried to pull himself together. And then Constancia de la Mora came to Madrid on a formal tour of inspection.

Tall, full-figured, with strong black brows over deep-set eyes and a flashing smile, Constancia de la Mora y Maura was, like Barea, Madrid-born; but there the resemblance ended. The granddaughter of a renowned prime minister, Antonio Maura, and daughter of the managing director of one of Madrid’s electrical companies, she had been educated by governesses and at St. Mary’s Convent in Cambridge, England, not at the Escuela Pía; while Barea was chasing rats through the attics in Lavapiés or swimming naked in the Manzanares, she was promenading with her nursemaid on the Castellana, where—she recalled—“no middle-class child ever walked.” And when she spoke to Barea he was uncomfortably aware of the gulf between them. “She grated on me,” he said, “as I must have grated on her.”

It wasn’t just their class difference that made relations difficult: Constancia was used to running things and it nettled her to have a satellite press office making its own rules, lobbying government ministers directly for exceptions to policy, giving journalists so much leeway, when
she
should be in charge. “She does things
this
way,” the war minister, Indalecio Prieto, said, emphatically thrusting his arm from side to side: “Bah, bah, bah.” And he added, “She is a Maura”—referring to her wealthy, well-connected family—“and she is brusque.” She was also, as a recent convert to communism, a zealot to whom Barea’s socialist agnosticism—and worse, Ilsa’s connection to the Social Democrats—was deeply suspicious. Her commitment to the Party, and to control of the press, had recently got her in trouble: In June, in an effort to depoliticize the armed forces, Prieto had ordered all political commissars to stop recruiting members for the Communist Party, and his decree had been published in all the Spanish papers. Constancia, however, had forbidden foreign journalists to mention it: “I had to suppress it,” she said; “it would have created a bad impression.” Furious, Prieto had demanded her resignation—who was she working for anyway, Spain or Stalin?—but a number of correspondents, including Louis Fischer, Herbert Matthews, and Ernest Hemingway, petitioned to have her reinstated. And here she was, in Madrid, in Rubio’s empty office, now used only for ceremonial occasions, sizing up her subordinates.

They sat across the desk from each other: Constancia sleek and perfectly groomed, Barea and Ilsa threadbare and anxious. Like the well-brought-up woman she was, Constancia tried to put them at their ease. Such hard work they’d been doing! And for such a long time, too. Surely they deserved a little holiday. Things were slow now in Madrid, they could go away for a while and let others take care of things. Yes?

Exhausted as much emotionally as physically, Barea wanted to agree with her, to believe in her; it was Ilsa who was skeptical. We’re dinosaurs, she told Barea later, when they were alone—our way of doing things, our independence, they don’t want them anymore. They think we’re dangerous, you because you don’t think like they do, and me because I’m a foreigner. They want us out of here.

Nonsense, Barea reassured her. Constancia might be a hard-liner but she was a woman of honor, and they could trust her. They would take their vacation. After all, they had been at their posts since November. They’d drive to Valencia, where Barea could see to the last details in his divorce proceedings; after that they’d go to Altea, on the Costa Blanca, and rest. And then they’d come back and pick up where they left off.

*   *   *

Valencia was muggy, but it was cool and dark in the café near their hotel; Barea could barely make out the features of the big man sitting with Ilsa at the table in the back. He’d just come from seeing his children and signing divorce papers at the local magistrate’s, and he wasn’t in the mood to socialize with strangers; however, when he got closer he recognized the policeman who’d arrested Ilsa when they had last been in Valencia, in January. His stomach gave a sudden lurch. But the big man signaled to him to sit down—this was a friendly visit.

It was not, however, a welcome one. The big man had friends in high places, and they’d let him know that Barea and Ilsa were being investigated. People had said things about them—Ilsa, in particular, was being spoken of as a possible Trotskyite, which these days was a dangerous thing to be—and they might not be allowed to return to Madrid. In his opinion, they should just get out of town. Now.

Barea and Ilsa looked at each other. What could they do? They couldn’t fight an enemy they couldn’t name, or deny charges that hadn’t been made. Stopping only to leave word with friends who might do something if they never made it to their destination, they took the car Miaja had given them and went to Altea. They spent a week, two weeks, in a tiny whitewashed inn by the sea, where they ate fresh-caught fish and slept through cool nights disturbed only by the susurration of the waves. And then came the letter from Rubio Hidalgo, registered: Barea and Ilsa were being granted indefinite leave, effective immediately; when (if?) they returned to work, it would be in Valencia, not Madrid. As for the car they’d taken to get to Altea, that belonged to the government and had been taken without a permit; it was to be returned to Valencia at once. Beneath the formal, neutral words, there was a vague sense of threat.

In response, Barea fired off his own letter: he and Ilsa refused to be put on leave, and instead were resigning from their censorship posts. They were returning to Madrid, to report to General Miaja. And they were taking the car—which Miaja, not the Foreign Ministry, had given them—with them. It was a challenge, Barea knew it; but he knew also that it was time, finally, to make some kind of stand against the reflexive, truth-smothering conformity that more and more seemed official policy. What he couldn’t know was where that challenge would lead.