Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (46 page)

He left Barcelona immediately. He might not have had the high-level contacts Hemingway did, but he’d spent enough time in the field to have friends in uniform who could tell him where things were likely to happen, and make sure he got there. While Hemingway and his comrades were waiting on the Sagunto road in the wintry dusk for the signal to move ahead, Capa, and his camera, were in the very front of the assault, with the first T-26 tanks that rumbled past the bullring, and with the
dinamiteros
, as they opened the way for the Army of the Levante to enter Teruel.

*   *   *

Late that night—after Hemingway, Delmer, and Matthews had received a hero’s welcome from a family of villagers who mistook them for high-ranking officers, perhaps Russians, and after Capa had shot a roll of photographs to send off to
Ce Soir
—they all met, like characters in a French bedroom farce, at the same hotel in Valencia. Instead of celebrating their joint scoop in the hotel bar, however, Matthews and Hemingway went to their rooms, where they stayed up past dawn writing their stories of the Teruel attack in order to send them by courier to Madrid. Hemingway, even more than Matthews, was so excited he couldn’t have slept anyway. At last he’d been not just a witness to but a part of an important assault, one of the most important in the war so far, one that he told himself he had been predicting
all along
; and (as he put it in the dispatch he was writing) he had “received the surrender of [the] town” as if he had been a Loyalist general. The experience was, he said, “very fine.” He thought enough of his account of it not to send it in cablese: because, he wired, in addition to “
COLOUR YOU ALSO BUYING STYLE
.” And he planned on sticking around to file at least one more dispatch, so he asked NANA to send correspondents’ credentials to Pauline, care of Guaranty Trust in Paris, so she could join him in Barcelona for Christmas.

As soon as everyone had had a few hours rest they all piled into Matthews’s battered old Ford and went back up into the mountains to Teruel. Although the walls had been breached the evening before, the Loyalist troops hadn’t tried to enter the city in the dark, and today Hemingway and his comrades could move in with them, Capa photographing the first wave of soldiers, wrapped in their greatcoats against the cold, marching up the steep street and peering warily about for resistance. They were right to be careful. There were six thousand Nationalist troops—many with civilian hostages, including women and children—holed up behind the pockmarked walls of Teruel’s houses and municipal and ecclesiastical buildings, and the town was riddled with underground passages through which the defenders could retreat and regroup. If they felt threatened in one building, the Nationalists would just blast a hole through its walls into the house next door so they could move about without exposing themselves to enemy fire. The Loyalist invaders fanned out through the rubble-filled streets, trying to clean up these knots of resistance; but it was drawn-out and dangerous work—as the journalists found out when they followed a tank towing a 6-inch gun to fire on the seminary, where Nationalist machine-gunners were barricaded and shooting from the windows. To get to cover you had to sprint across the street, doubled over to present as small a target as possible; Hemingway dropped to his knees to crawl, but Delmer, whose bulk didn’t lend itself to such an activity, was reluctant. “Do we
have
to crawl?” he asked. “I run faster when I’m standing.” They all laughed; but while they were watching, three of the men trying to get the gun into position were killed. And then the gun did its work on the seminary walls, and the façade crumbled like a sandcastle.

That day and the next, as the government troops tried to establish their hold over Teruel, Capa, Hemingway, Matthews, and Delmer shuttled back and forth between there and Valencia, Hemingway glorying in the
rot-pop-pop
(as he described it) of machine-gun fire, the dangerous chaos of the “godwonderful housetohouse fighting,” the back-slapping camaraderie with the Loyalist officers, the sense of being in on a Big Thing. Capa photographed him in a stocking cap and muffler, a huge grin festooned across his unshaven face, sharing American cigarettes with Loyalist officers, and elsewhere in the city, inspecting tanks, talking to soldiers who were digging graves for their fallen comrades. But “taking pictures of victory,” Capa would say later, “is like taking pictures of a church wedding ten minutes after the departure of the newlyweds.” He sought out other images in Teruel: the central plaza, its prosperous
modernista
houses shattered and the Doric column at its center stripped of the bronze statue of the
torico
, the little bull, that was the emblem of the city; the pitiful streams of refugees, many of them children, lugging their belongings in shapeless bundles as they boarded evacuation trucks or stumbled across the frozen fields; three bodies, now just crumpled heaps of clothing, lying on a flat terrace behind which the shadowed clefts of the Montes Universales loomed like a theatrical backdrop. And in a tree on the outskirts of the town, something that looked at first like someone’s coat that had been blown into the branches by the blizzard winds.

Capa knew what it was. He took one shot, then another, walking closer and circling the tree, pointing his camera up into the branches to frame his subject perfectly: a soldier, his tasseled cap still on his head, his hand still grasping the field-telephone wire he’d been stringing when a fascist bullet took him, his eyes staring, his face twisted in a grimace straight out of one of Goya’s antiwar engravings. Capa’s photos, and Hemingway’s and Matthews’s and Delmer’s stories, would soon be in all the world’s newspapers and magazines, proclaiming the news of victory in Teruel. And that would be, as Hemingway would say,
very fine
. But this is what such a victory came down to: just a body in a tree that could be anyone—fear in a handful of dust.

December 1937: Barcelona

Barea and Ilsa’s journey from San Juan de la Playa had been a kind of torture. The SIM agents had taken their time getting to Valencia, driving the long way around the lagoon of Albuféra—the dumping ground for bodies of those executed in the chaos of 1936—and Barea found himself slipping the safety catch off the gun in his pocket, ready to fire through his coat if he and Ilsa were ordered out of the car. Arriving in Valencia after dark, they’d been held briefly at the SIM office; then, in the small hours of the morning, transferred to another car for transport to Barcelona. In the shuffle—by accident or by design—the attaché case holding all the records of their work in Madrid, as well as Barea’s manuscripts, disappeared.

Unfed, sleep-deprived, anxious about their missing papers, they reached Barcelona just after sunrise, and were taken to a large stone mansion with modern stained-glass windows on the Calle de la Diputación, in the fashionable Ensanche district. The official who would question them wasn’t there, so they were put in a guarded room to wait, and passed the time wondering what sort of building this was. It was too big for a bourgeois Catalan’s house, they thought, but not quite a palace. It was just as well they didn’t know it was the former Seminario Conciliar, the Catholic seminary, now notorious as an SIM prison and interrogation center.

At length the door of the room banged open to admit a man of medium height, balding, with thinning light-brown hair, dark-smudged eyes, a tight-lipped mouth. The guard threw the newcomer a smart salute, spun on his heel, and left.

“Poldi!” cried Ilsa, flying to him. The man bent over her hand with exaggerated courtliness, and she broke into German: “Why did you have me arrested?”

He recoiled as if she had slapped him.

Barea struggled to his feet, and, in French, Ilsa introduced her estranged husband to her lover. Kulcsar bowed, like a figure in a comic opera, from the hips; Barea nodded curtly. Kulcsar took Ilsa’s elbow and led her to a velvet-covered bench where they could talk; Barea went to the stained-glass window and stared out at the porticoed courtyard. What was this all about? What was going to happen? Would this stranger take Ilsa away, have him imprisoned—or have
her
imprisoned, and brutally questioned? How could he protect her, here, where he knew no one, had no papers to prove anything? He still had the gun in his pocket—somehow no one had bothered to search him—but using it wouldn’t get him very far with guards outside and downstairs. Behind him he heard, but couldn’t understand, the buzz of German, first quiet, then agitated and angry, then quiet again, with Ilsa’s voice firm, Kulcsar’s muted.

Suddenly Ilsa was beside him, telling him to come with her. They were going to Poldi’s hotel, she said. She would explain everything later. Barea followed her out into the street, where they walked, three abreast, himself, Ilsa, and Kulcsar; Kulcsar tried to start a conversation with Ilsa in German, but when she insisted they all speak French together, there was silence. Along the Paseo de Gracia they went, under the plane trees and past the surrealistic stone façade of Gaudi’s Casa Batllo, to the Hotel Majestic, on the Calle Aragón; and there, in the lobby, Barea saw a clutch of journalists they knew. But, like a ghost, he couldn’t speak to them; and they didn’t speak to him. He followed Kulcsar and Ilsa into a waiting elevator, and the gate slammed shut.

*   *   *

Hemingway didn’t notice Barea and Ilsa in the lobby of the Majestic when he arrived from Teruel on Christmas Eve, along with Capa, Delmer, and Matthews. Instead he was buttonholed—almost the minute he walked in—by Jay Allen, just in from Paris, where he’d found a very distressed Pauline Hemingway. She’d been expecting her husband to turn up for Christmas, Allen said, and when he didn’t she’d tried to wangle a visa for Spain, begging Allen to help her. Hemingway seemed both stunned and flattered that Pauline had gone to such efforts, and blamed Allen for not making things work out. Certainly
he
had done all he could, asking NANA to get correspondents’ credentials for her; but, as in so many other things, NANA had disappointed him.

So Hemingway spent Christmas in Barcelona with Matthews, Capa, and
Izvestia
’s Ilya Ehrenburg, who was also in the Majestic on his way back to Moscow. On Christmas Day he went to the Ritz Hotel to serve, along with the government’s Interior minister, Julián Zagazagoitia, as host and commentator,
amistoso comentarista
, for the opening of an exhibit of war drawings by his friend Luis Quintanilla. It was a gala occasion—Prime Minister Negrín and the Catalan president, Luís Companys, were there, as well as other government and literary and artistic luminaries, some of them wearing frock coats and top hats—and the walls of the Ritz’s salon had been hung, either for symbolic or aesthetic reasons, with red fabric. But the subject matter of the drawings themselves seemed at odds not only with their sumptuous background and well-heeled audience, but also with the artist’s presentation: wrecked buildings, uniformed soldiers, corpses with distended bellies, all were limned with the lightest and most delicate of pencil strokes, and the result was both sculptural and surreally calm.

Since he was already late getting to Paris, Hemingway stayed around to celebrate what was being trumpeted as the great (if as yet incomplete) victory of Teruel with a parade and speeches by Negrín and Companys and the newly promoted General Hernández Saravia. It wasn’t until the morning of December 28 that, neatly barbered and wearing a dark shirt and sober striped tie, he dropped in at Ehrenburg’s room at the Majestic to say goodbye. “But we’ll be seeing each other again soon,” the Russian protested. “You’ll be here in June, won’t you?” Hemingway wasn’t so sure: NANA had been unhappy with his reporting from Teruel, which it said duplicated Matthews’s, and had canceled any further stories; he himself wasn’t feeling too well, what with the aftereffects of a grippe he’d had in Madrid and a painful liver from too much drinking; and then there was the question of what he would say to the wife who was waiting for him in Paris if he decided to return to Spain. He left Barcelona without making any promises.

His companions went back to Teruel.

December 1937: Teruel

As Matthews, Delmer, and Capa drove up the Sagunto road on December 28 they saw a ragged column of men trudging toward them, wrapped in blankets against the cold and chivvied along by government soldiers on shaggy-coated mules. The men were in the uniform of the Guardia Civil, and they were lugging suitcases, their eyes downcast. Their barracks had fallen to the Loyalists the night before, and now they were prisoners.

Inside the town the journalists found a crowd surrounding the Guardia barracks, where the real prizes, the officers, were being taken out. Capa pushed as close as he dared to the column, aiming his camera right into their determinedly vacant faces; the lieutenant colonel, whom Matthews would describe as a “heavy, flat-faced, brutish man,” tramped by impassively, but one of his lieutenants turned to look behind him and his face filled Capa’s viewfinder like an El Greco portrait, his brow creased, his mouth set in a bitter curl of defeat. He knew what was waiting for him: as Matthews thought of it,
in war you can shoot the people who deserve to be shot.

But even as Capa was photographing this sign of victory, the Nationalists—who still held a number of buildings in Teruel, including the Palace of the Civil Governor and the Santa Clara Convent—were beginning a counterattack. Franco had ordered an army to be put together to retake the city, and the Condor Legion was sent in to begin bombing the area in preparation. As usual the bombs fell on combatants and civilians alike. On a road on the outskirts of town, where pastures sloped steeply down to the river valley, Capa saw the results. A man came running toward him, cradling his young son, a boy of about eleven, whose trouser leg had been cut away and whose thigh was wrapped in a bloody bandage. Near them soldiers were helping other wounded, both military and civilians, to safety; and off the road, down a steep hill, a group of peasants, evacuees who had been leaving their homes in the battle zone, were stooping over something in the rock-strewn field. Capa didn’t have a telephoto lens, so he ran down the hill toward them. He found them bent over an injured man, loading him into a makeshift stretcher; and when they’d got him in it and started uphill, Capa started climbing with them. The crowd on the hillside were paying no attention to the rescue mission, however. They were scanning the sky in anxiety—and suddenly Capa, standing with the peasants in the open field, heard what they heard: the buzz of approaching aircraft. Looking up, he could see bombers, specks against the sky like so many malevolent wasps. Without even thinking he himself might be a target, he aimed his camera skyward.