Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (41 page)

This situation bore awkward fruit: because they were
there
, in the building, just down the hall from where they’d been before, the foreign journalists continued to ask them for advice, or dropped by to gossip with them. Trying to be helpful—or maybe trying to force the issue—Rosario invited Barea to a banquet given by the civil governor; surely he could talk to his new superior, play the good civil servant, make the case for separate quarters for the radio censors, which would get them out of the Foreign Ministry for good. But Barea was in no mood to play the courtier. All the benefits of his holiday had vanished with the sound of the first shells over Madrid, leaving him shaky and nauseated. The day before the banquet he’d gone to the front at Carabanchel, where soldiers were dug into the same stinking rat-infested trenches they’d been in for a year, ever since he and Ilsa and their comrades had insisted on staying at their posts to defend the city and what it stood for. And now, as he and Ilsa entered the room, full of well-groomed bureaucrats, newly arrived from Valencia to get things back on a
professional
footing, he felt the old rage rise within him. He tossed off two glasses of wine, then confronted the civil governor.
There are people—kind, ignorant people, who think this war is being fought for them, for their happiness, their future. Do you care about them? Do you care about the soldiers in those trenches? Or do you just care about the well-fed, the well-behaved, the complacent—the people who won’t rock the boat?
Even Ilsa’s agonized expression couldn’t make him stop.

It was as if he were daring the government, Negrín’s new, regulated government—which the new premier had once described as “a dictatorship under democratic rules”—to regulate
him
out of existence. At first it seemed as if he wasn’t important enough for them to worry about. He was allowed to go on broadcasting, and the Unknown Voice spoke about those stinking trenches, and the rough, irreverent Madrileños who somehow made a life amid the shattered stones of their city. He spoke about these things in the unbeautiful
argot
of Lavapiés, with the directness, the immediacy, of one of Robert Capa’s photographs; and hundreds of letters poured in from listeners all over the world who had been touched, and sometimes shocked, by what he said. He even wrote a story, about a
miliciano
who makes a pet of the fly who buzzes around in his trench, which Tom Delmer helped to get published in London’s
Daily Express
.

But then came the hints: regrets from friends that Barea and Ilsa hadn’t joined the PCE, that they weren’t card-carrying civil servants; warnings that something dangerous might be brewing. Former associates crossed the street to avoid speaking to them. Soon there were more than hints: the German Communist George Gordon told Barea his days at the radio were probably numbered, and claimed to the other journalists that Ilsa was being investigated as a Trotskyist.
Better steer clear of her
. A friend in the Assault Guards sent Barea and Ilsa a message: the SIM, the new secret police force modeled on the NKVD, was interested in Ilsa, and might want to interrogate her. The friend offered her a bodyguard, one of his own officers—he’d watch her and make sure no one tried to pull her into one of the black SIM cars and take her away.

Barea went to Miaja, who told him his troubles would be over if he got rid of Ilsa; he went to Antonio Mije, who’d got him his censorship job in the first place and was now very high in the PCE organization. Mije repeated what Miaja had said, and went further: why had Barea gone overboard and asked for a divorce? Why couldn’t he just sleep with the foreign woman? She would bring him nothing but trouble. She was definitely some kind of Trotskyist but was too smart to have been caught at it—so far. Barea should save his own neck and get rid of her. Barea stared at him in astonishment. Was this the Party’s position? he asked; but Mije denied it. Just his own opinion, he said. Barea told him to go to hell.

Back at the Hotel Reina Victoria, in the long afternoons, Ilsa sat at the piano in the dining room and played Schubert
lieder
for the waiters and Barea, singing in her husky contralto the songs of her Viennese girlhood. It was eerily appropriate music for the situation they found themselves in—a situation straight out of one of the Goethe poems Schubert had set:

Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?

Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind;

Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm,

Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.

“Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?” –

“Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht?

Den Erlenkönig mit Kron und Schweif?” –

“Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif.”

Who’s riding so late, in the night and the wind?

It’s the father with his child.

He has the boy in the crook of his arm,

He holds him safe, he keeps him warm.

“My son, why are you hiding your face so fearfully?”

“Father, don’t you see the Elf-King,

The king of the elves, with his crown and his tail?”

“My son, it’s only a wisp of fog.”

Perhaps the hints and rumors that bedeviled them were only a wisp of fog. But in Schubert’s song the danger was real, and at its end the boy was dead.

September 1937: Aragon/Valencia/Teruel Front

Flying down from Barcelona to Valencia on September 6, Hemingway, Matthews, and Martha Gellhorn looked out the window of the plane and saw, in the blue Mediterranean, the black stain of a spreading oil slick where a blockading Italian submarine had sunk the British tanker
Woodford
—sailing under the Spanish flag—four days earlier. It was the kind of thing that made Martha (as she wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt) “sick with anger … against two men whom I firmly believe to be dangerous criminals, Hitler and Mussolini, and against the international diplomacy which humbly begs for the ‘continued cooperation’ of the Fascists.” In Valencia, however, the traveling companions had good news: the Loyalist forces in Aragon had
not
been surrounded and defeated, as
The New York Times
’s William Carney had claimed; they had actually advanced, taking two villages, Quinto and Codo, and the fortified town of Belchite, although they hadn’t managed to win the prize of Saragossa. And a parallel initiative in the mountains of the Sierra Palomera, in southern Aragon west of Teruel, had put government troops in position over the highway that led to Saragossa from Madrid. That they might have done even more if the Russian tank commander at Belchite hadn’t insisted on giving orders to his Spanish troops in Russian, or if the Anarchist CNT
milicianos
hadn’t been denied proper weapons by the Communists, who were determined to be the lead players in the war effort, wasn’t mentioned.

Leaving Valencia almost as soon as they arrived, Hemingway, Matthews, and Martha managed to get to Belchite three days after the surrender to find it little more than a smashed, smoking ruin, uninhabitable and deserted except for the stinking bodies of humans and animals that littered its ruined streets. About three miles outside what was left of the walls, camped in a streambed only slightly sheltered from the wind-blown yellow dust of Aragon, they came upon some old friends: soldiers of the Fifteenth Brigade, along with their chief of staff, the former Lincoln Battalion commander Robert Merriman, who had recovered from the wounds that had taken him out of action at Jarama. Tall, unshaven, with dust on his glasses and in his dark hair, he managed to look like the college professor he once had been as he diagrammed the battle with a stick on the dirt floor of his lean-to, showing the correspondents how he’d led his men through heavy house-to-house fighting to take Belchite’s domed sandstone cathedral. Both Martha and Hemingway were impressed, as much by Merriman’s quiet strength as by the victory. And Martha felt “proud as a goat,” she said, at the performance of the American
brigadistas
: “you can tell a brigade is fine,” she boasted, “when they move it from front to front, fast, to wherever the danger is.”

But the International Brigades, and the ragtag
milicianos
who had volunteered to defend the Republic in 1936, weren’t what the higher-ups at the Propaganda Ministry wanted to feature now. The big story, the story Hemingway and Matthews were encouraged to focus on, was the new, reorganized, Communist-dominated Army of the Levante; and on their return from Belchite, Constancia de la Mora’s office was only too happy to arrange a three-day tour of that army’s positions around Teruel for them. There wouldn’t be any inns to stay in, or even troop billets, because soldiers were occupying every bed; they’d have to bring their own food and provide for their own lodging for the two nights they would be on the road. They got hold of an open truck, equipped it with mattresses and blankets for sleeping, and packed enough food for the three of them and their drivers—Sara Murphy had sent lots of tinned salmon, not to mention ham,
poulet roti en gelée,
bouillon, coffee, and malted milk powder. They planned to park the truck under the overhanging roofs of farm courtyards for shelter, and cook their meals over villagers’ open fires.

They were still in Valencia, waiting for their safe-conducts to come through, when Hemingway got a call from Alexander Orlov, the NKVD’s Spanish station chief, who ran the government’s guerrilla warfare program from his headquarters at the Hotel Metropole on Calle Xátiva, just opposite the bullring. Ever since the previous spring, when Hemingway had met the guerrilla fighter Colonel Xanthé with Orlov at Gaylord’s Hotel in Madrid, he’d wanted to find out more about the
aktivi
, irregulars who worked behind the enemy lines, blowing up bridges and trains and carrying out other kinds of dangerous clandestine work; but despite his renown, he hadn’t then passed the tests that would make him
de confianza
, trustworthy. Now, though, he had made
The Spanish Earth
with Ivens, spoken out for the Republic at Carnegie Hall, raised thousands of dollars for ambulances; and he’d shown himself to have none of the skepticism, or apostasy, of a Dos Passos or an Orwell. From the rehabilitation hospital where he was recovering, Gustav Regler had begged Orlov to give Hemingway the access he craved. And now Orlov was inviting him to visit the training camp for
aktivi
at Benimamet, just outside Valencia.

At Benimamet Hemingway was met by Orlov’s lieutenant, Leonid Eitingon, who went by the name of Kotov. Three years later Kotov would direct the assassination of Leon Trotsky, in exile in Mexico; but today he was all welcoming smiles. He took Hemingway around the camp, gave him a lavish lunch, even allowed him to shoot target practice with one of the Russian-made Nagant sniper rifles the guerrillas were being equipped with, and sent him off with a bottle of rare Baczewski vodka, distilled from potatoes instead of grain. Everything was calculated to appeal to Hemingway’s love of being on the inside track, of knowing and having things that others don’t, and that he could never, ever talk about. Nor
did
Hemingway speak of his visit to Benimamet. But a few days later it would have an interesting sequel.

Hemingway, Matthews, and Martha set off from Valencia early on the morning of September 20, driving up the coast and inland to Sagunto, with its Roman walls that Hannibal had breached, before beginning the long climb through the Sierra Calderona. Coastal plain gave way to rolling pastures punctuated with pine and scrub, and the air grew noticeably cooler. They stopped at Segorbe to buy vegetables in the farmers’ market, loaded them in the truck, and kept driving, up and over the pass at Puerto Ragudo to Barracas, where they stopped for lunch. At Sarrión they turned north into the jagged limestone outcrops of the Sierra de Gúdar, where the tallest peaks were already streaked with white, and began a circuit of the high country that lay just to the east of the provincial capital of Teruel, passing stone villages that clung to the sides of the mountains. The roads here were rough, but they made good time: the late-model Dodge Hemingway had been given by the Propaganda Ministry was up to the job, built—and geared—like a bulldozer, and it was only midafternoon when they reached Mezquita de Jarque, a tiny village where the 1st Battalion of the newly formed Army of the Levante was encamped. Along the way they’d picked up the divisional commander, Colonel Juan Hernández Saravia, and now they paused long enough for him to review the battalion; then, following the route that Saravia’s troops had taken just weeks before, they pressed on to Alfambra, on the heights above Teruel.

Alfambra was the headquarters of a band of guerrillas commanded by a Pole named Antoni Chrost, whose job—one of whose jobs—was to blow up trains, such as the one that ran from Calatayud, north of Teruel, to Saragossa. And many years after the fighting in Spain was over, Chrost would remember coming in to his headquarters one afternoon and finding a stranger sitting at the table, chatting with one of the other officers. “
Me cago en la leche de la madre que te pario
[I shit in the milk of the mother who bore you],” Chrost overheard him saying. Who was this self-confident foreigner? Chrost wondered; introducing himself, he asked for the man’s documents (“revolutionary vigilance required it”). The stranger’s safe-conduct bore the name “Ernesto Hemingway.”

As Chrost would remember it, Hemingway was both fascinated by and knowledgeable about the activities of the guerrillas: he knew what weapons they used and how they used them, but he wanted to find out how they got to their targets (using relay teams of local guides, Chrost told him) and what happened when they got there. And Chrost, though initially cautious, was happy to tell him, in great detail. Later he would also swear that Hemingway not only questioned him but also ate and drank with him, talked about women with him, even went on a mission with him some days afterward. These romantic details never made it into Martha’s diary, nor into Hemingway’s dispatches. Did Chrost make them up? Was a purely speculative conversation—
What would you do if you had to blow up that section of railway track?
—transformed into reality? Did Hemingway even meet the guerrilla commander? Certainly he
was
in Alfambra on the afternoon of September 20; Martha, always careful about such details in her personal journals, noted it in her diary. That much, at least, was true, even if he and Chrost didn’t meet, even if he never promised (as Chrost recalled it) to write about the guerrilla captain, even if he didn’t say, when Chrost told him he was a Pole and not a Russian: “In my book, you’ll be an American.”