Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (42 page)

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The correspondents spent their first night on the road back in Barracas—an unlovely town whose name means “The Shacks”—and early the next morning set out for a lookout post over Teruel, which the rebels had been occupying since the beginning of the war. Teruel was an unlikely target for an offensive: the mountain-rimmed capital of a poor province, it had no mineral or agricultural wealth and no important industry. But, located at the apex of a salient driven deep into government territory, it provided a perch from which the Nationalists could pounce down on Valencia and cut the Republican zone in two. On a map, it looked like a threat, and Hemingway wanted to check it out.

Leaving their cars, the scouting party walked uphill to a dugout and crawled the last few yards on their hands and knees over the straw on its earthen floor until they could peer in safety at Teruel, perched on its rock in the valley below them. The early morning sunlight slanted across the sugar-beet fields, picking out the five brick Mudéjar towers rising from the city walls and throwing into strong relief the prow-shaped mass of the Mansueto, a rock formation enhanced with Nationalist fortifications that dominated the approaches to the town like a natural bulwark. “You see it?” their guide asked, meaning the Mansueto. “That’s why we haven’t taken Teruel.” It didn’t help, he added contemptuously, that the Anarchists who used to patrol this sector thought that contact with the enemy was playing football with them. As Martha peered down through the field glasses and saw “a few soldiers, very leisurely, loading up their donkeys with blankets from the empty houses, for the winter,” Hemingway scanned the scene, noting the tactical problems it presented. Yes, it was impossible to take Teruel from any direction but the northwest, but once winter filled the mountain passes behind the town with snow, that wouldn’t matter. The rebels would be stuck up here. They wouldn’t try anything. The Teruel front would be out of bounds until the spring.

The journey after Teruel was rougher, through wild upland where villages were few and far between, and small and primitive when they found them; the roads were rougher, too, some of them newly cut by the army, in places where no roads had been before—indication, if you were looking for it, that the government had plans for this part of the world. The journalists spent the night parked in a farmer’s courtyard in a tiny hamlet called Salvacañete, in Cuenca province, where the braying of the donkeys woke them at dawn; the next day, abandoning the car and truck, they got a cavalry escort and went on horseback up to mountain positions on Monte San Lazaro before coming down toward Cuenca, in a steep ravine between two rivers, the Júcar and Huécar. Hot and dusty from the ride, Hemingway went swimming in one of the streams that fed the Júcar, near rebel lines; there were fat trout in the clear, cold water, and Hemingway threw them grasshoppers, the bait Nick Adams had used in his story “Big Two-Hearted River,” watching as they lunged for the insects and made deep swirls in the current. It was, he thought, “a river worth fighting for.”

That night he and Martha slept in Madrid, at the Hotel Florida.

September 1937: New York

In the lounge of the Bedford Hotel, a modest establishment on East Fortieth Street in Manhattan, a reporter from the
New York World-Telegram
took out his pad and pencil and prepared to interview Robert Capa.

Capa had had a harrowing few months. After the macabre carnival of Gerda’s funeral he’d begun drinking heavily and talking wildly: what had happened to Gerda was all his fault, he should have stayed with her, he didn’t deserve to live and without her he didn’t want to. One day he disappeared—stopped answering his telephone or his doorbell—and his friends were afraid he’d killed himself; but he had only left Paris, where Gerda’s ghost haunted every street corner and café, and taken refuge with old Berlin comrades in Amsterdam.

When he felt stable enough he’d ventured back to Paris, planning to stay a short while and then sail to New York to see his mother and Kornel, who had finally emigrated in June; but sometime in August he had an unexpected visitor: Ted Allan, patched up by the doctors in Madrid, standing on his threshold in dark glasses and on crutches. He’d been released from duty in Spain and had come to Paris to see Capa, to tell him he had tried to take care of Gerda, that he wasn’t to blame for her death; but Capa seemed not to pay any attention to his protestations—only took his hand and asked about his leg. Allan didn’t want to let the subject of Gerda alone. “Don’t you realize I loved her?” he asked, to which Capa replied, “So what? How could you help it?” It was just as well he didn’t know what Allan had thought when the doctor brought him the news that Gerda was dead:
Capa won’t get her now.

Capa insisted that Allan stay with him; the Canadian was, after all, one of his only remaining contacts with Gerda, one of the last people to see her alive. And when Capa was getting ready to leave for New York, Allan impulsively decided to come with him; the two of them sailed on the
Lafayette
on August 20. It turned out to be a good arrangement.
Capa couldn’t say shit or sheets in English
—what Allan had observed when he first met him was still true, and this way Allan could be his interpreter. When the man from the
Telegram
showed up, therefore, it was Allan who played go-between.

Capa’s photo of the falling militiaman, the one he’d taken at Espejo, had recently been republished in
Life
, splashed like an emblem across the editorial page to mark the anniversary of the war in Spain; and that was what the interviewer wanted to talk about with the “handsome” and “bashful” young Hungarian. Who was the soldier, and how had Capa managed to capture him just at the moment he fell? The reporter asked the questions in English, but Ted Allan translated them—into German, the reporter thought, though it could as easily have been French.

To answer, Capa would have to relive that hillside in Espejo: the men laughing and running, the hot sun in their faces, Gerda in the trench beside him, frowning into the viewfinder on her Rolleiflex. Remembering it would hurt. And what kind of a story would those memories make for this eager reporter, scribbling earnestly on his notepad?
My girlfriend and I were fooling around with the soldiers and they were shooting guns, and I asked one of the guys to pretend he got shot, and then he was, for real
.

He said something, in German—or French, it was all foreign to the reporter—to Allan, and Allan told the man from the
Telegram
that the picture had been taken when Capa and a soldier had been stranded, just the two of them, in a trench; and that after waiting an interminable time the
miliciano
had got up to make a run for it and was shot, with Capa “automatically” snapping his shutter to capture the image. “No tricks are necessary to take pictures in Spain,” Capa said—or Allan
said
he said. “You don’t have to pose your camera. The pictures are there and you just take them. The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda.”

They spoke of other things as well: Capa’s youth in Budapest; his coming of age on his own in Berlin; his arrival in Paris, where—he, or Allan, said—he had married Gerda Taro, who accompanied him to Spain. But then Capa excused himself, and after he left it was Allan who told the interviewer about Gerda’s death, which he said happened while he and Capa were both riding in a car with her. It was “a thing Capa did not talk about,” Allan murmured, sotto voce.

In the days after the
Telegram
interview, Capa took care of business. Unhappy with the efforts his previous agency had made to place his work in American periodicals, he negotiated a deal for U.S. representation with Léon Daniel of Pix, who wanted to sign Capa badly enough that he also agreed to hire Kornel (now going by the all-American name of Cornell) as a darkroom assistant. It was Daniel who did the translating when, later in the week, Capa met with the editors at
Life
, who offered him a contract that would pay him a regular advance against a guaranteed monthly minimum of pages in the magazine. It was a life-changing deal, the sort of thing he and Gerda could only dream of when they were making the rounds of Paris photo editors two short years ago. Now, whatever happened, Capa had an income to count on, and the backing of what was becoming one of the most powerful news media franchises in the world.

But he had something closer to his heart to accomplish in New York: to arrange for the publication of a book of his and Gerda’s Spanish photographs—something that would give permanence to Gerda’s work as well as his own, and be a kind of memorial to her. He persuaded the publisher Pascal (Pat) Covici, who had already made a name for himself by championing the writers Nathanael West and John Steinbeck, to take the book on at his imprint, Covici-Friede, and then enlisted his Bilbao acquaintance Jay Allen to write a brief introduction and translate the captions, and his onetime mentor André Kertesz, who had moved to New York, to do the layouts. Although both Gerda and Capa would be credited with the photographs, there was no distinction made between his pictures and Gerda’s in the images he handed over to Kertesz, any more than there had been in those the pair of them had made in the early days in Spain and sent to Maria Eisner under the byline “Robert Capa.” (In fact, it would later turn out that some of the photographs in the book were by neither of them, but had been taken by Chim.) When he’d signed the contract, selected the images, and written the captions, Capa went back, alone, to Paris.

The book would be published after the new year, under the title
Death in the Making
. On the dedication page was one of the pictures Capa had taken of Gerda—smiling, chic, and insouciant—hovering over her bouquet of
muguet
on their last May Day together; and underneath it was the legend: “For Gerda Taro, who spent one year at the Spanish front—and who stayed on.”

October–November 1937: Madrid

They had patched up the shell holes at the Hotel Florida, refurbished the lobby, and Don Cristóbal had moved his reception desk from the front, where flying glass from broken windows might hit him when the hotel was shelled, to the back. But otherwise things were much the same. True, Herbert Matthews and Tom Delmer had moved out, to a penthouse apartment overlooking the Parque del Retiro, a more prudent distance from the guns on Garabitas—Delmer’s quarters at the Florida had been destroyed during one of the attacks last spring, but fortunately he’d been on leave in London at the time. Incoming fire didn’t deter Hemingway; the rooms he and Martha now checked in to, numbers 113 and 114, were at the corner of the hotel, in what he was convinced was a “dead angle” impervious to Nationalist shells. Besides, he joked, “you never hear the one that hits you.”

The new, professional order—the “strict disciplinary basis” Hemingway had noticed, and praised, in the troops he’d just been visiting—was also evident at the Censura, where he and Martha discovered that Barea and Ilsa were no longer at their old posts. Stopping to talk to them despite their pariah status, Hemingway professed to be bewildered by the change. “I don’t understand the whole thing,” he told Barea, frowning, “but I’m very sorry. It seems a lousy mess.”

The air had turned cool and crisp, with sun shining on the shattered buildings and barricaded streets; the shops, astonishingly, were full of clothes and pictures and antiques and cameras; and although food was scarce, beer hard to find, and imported hard liquor virtually unobtainable, the bars and restaurants were crowded. Hemingway and Martha made the circuit of their old haunts, eating at the Gran Via and drinking at Chicote’s; afterward, in the evenings, the salon Hemingway had held in his room at the Florida the previous spring resumed. There were some new faces, among them Evan Shipman, who after delivering Hemingway’s ambulances in April had enlisted in the International Brigades and was now recovering from war wounds; Alvah Bessie, another fighter from the Lincoln Battalion, who called Hemingway “the Great Adolescent” and Martha “his long-legged moll”; and Bessie’s fellow Lincolns, Marty Hourihan, Freddy Keller, Phil Detro, and Milton Wolff. They and the old rotating cast of regulars—correspondents, army officers, Russian advisors—all drank Hemingway’s whiskey and ate whatever was left of Sara Murphy’s delicacies. When the shelling started they’d open the windows so the glass wouldn’t shatter in the blast, and play Hemingway’s Chopin records—the opus 33 mazurka, number 4, and the opus 47 A-flat minor ballade were favorites—at top volume on the Victrola to drown out the sound of the bombardment.

The gossip during these gatherings was that, as Hemingway repeated in his NANA dispatches, “sooner or later [Franco] must risk everything in a major offensive on the Castilian Plateau.” To get a feel for the territory, Martha and Hemingway went to Brunete one day with Delmer and Matthews, driving in Delmer’s Ford with American and British flags flying on its hood in a mistaken attempt to demonstrate neutrality—mistaken, because the Nationalists watching with binoculars mistook it for a high-ranking staff car and lobbed a few shells at the road. Hemingway was philosophical: “If they don’t hit you, there’s no story,” he said afterward; “if they do, you won’t have to write it.” But the correspondents switched to a camouflaged military vehicle for their trip to the battlefield. All four of them gazed solemnly at the treeless fawn-colored plain; Hemingway analyzing the terrain, Martha noticing—in addition to the open field of fire with “no cover anywhere”—the ruined houses, one with an empty birdcage hanging from what was left of a window, and a pink petticoat left to dry, forever, on the stone rim of a well. Like the ruined apartments on the Paseo Rosales, it was a place out of time; and Hemingway found himself thinking, “If Franco’s going to take the offensive, let’s have it soon and get it over with.”

Certainly precious little was going on in Madrid. It was calm enough that Dorothy Parker, persuaded by journalist friends in Paris that as a good leftist she was
obligated
to make a pilgrimage to Spain, had showed up in Madrid with Alan Campbell and a lot of canned goods, as well as a shocking-pink hat that she wore even while eating lunch at the Hotel Reina Victoria, to the puzzlement of the dining-room staff. She and Martha renewed their acquaintance at dinner at Herbert Matthews’s—Martha still thought she was nice—before she and her husband left for Valencia.