Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (60 page)

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Robert Capa was in Paris in 1939 when World War II was declared. Both
Ce Soir
and
L’Humanité
, as Communist-affiliated media, had been closed by the French government when the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed; although Capa applied for accreditation as a war photographer to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, his request was turned down because of his former association with
Ce Soir
, and it seemed possible he would be rounded up for internment as a Communist sympathizer and a former German resident. With the help of
Life
he managed to emigrate to the United States; when it appeared he would lose his visa a young woman he’d met through John Ferno suggested he marry her so he would become a citizen. He did, although the marriage was never consummated, and ended in divorce some years later. In 1941 he went to England, where he collaborated with Dinah Sheean on a photographic book about a London family surviving the Blitz; and after America entered the war he went first to North Africa, then to Sicily and Italy to cover the Allied invasions there. In 1944, landing with the first wave of troops at Omaha Beach on D-Day, he took some of the most brutal and terrifying war photographs ever shot (even though the prints were distorted by a careless darkroom assistant), then went on to chronicle the liberation of Paris (which he claimed to have witnessed from a tank driven by émigré Spanish soldiers), the Allied drive into Belgium, and the Battle of the Rhine, where he parachuted into combat with the 17th Airborne Division. In 1947, with his old friends Chim, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Maria Eisner, and two other photographers, he established Magnum, a cooperative that became perhaps the premier photographic agency in the world.

When he wasn’t risking his life taking pictures Capa spent his time seeing friends, playing poker, and chasing women. But after Gerda, he never again wanted to settle down with any of them. A two-year romance with Ingrid Bergman—whom he met in 1945, after she had starred in
Gaslight
and, following strenuous lobbying by Ernest Hemingway, as Maria in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
—foundered on his unwillingness to abandon the peripatetic and sometimes dangerous life of a photojournalist for marriage; the same thing happened with a longer-lived (though less monogamous) relationship with Jemison McBride Hammond, the ex-wife of the record producer John Hammond. Capa was always leaving to cover a war in the Middle East, the antics of jet-set skiers in Klosters or Val d’Isère, the daily lives of Picasso and Henri Matisse on the Riviera. In 1954 he accepted an assignment from
Life
to go to Indochina, where the Communist Vietminh had just taken the city of Dienbienphu from the French. “This is the last good war,” Capa commented. “Nobody knows anything and nobody tells you anything, and that means a good reporter is free to go out and get a beat every day.” He was out getting a beat on May 25, taking pictures of the evacuation of a fort at Dongquithan, when he stepped on a land mine and was killed.

Just over fifty years later, three cardboard boxes containing more than 165 rolls of film, shot by Capa, Gerda Taro, and Chim during the Spanish Civil War and missing ever since, were discovered in Mexico City. They had been spirited out of Paris by Capa’s darkroom assistant Csiki Weiss when the Germans invaded France in 1940, and had found their way into the hands of the Mexican ambassador to France’s Vichy government, who took them back to Mexico at the war’s end. Somehow every one of the rolls had miraculously survived in good condition, although it took a further dozen years for arrangements to be completed for their return to Capa’s and Taro’s archives at the International Center of Photography, the institution founded by Cornell Capa as a memorial to his brother and his fellow photojournalists. But in September 2011, after four years of conservation work and cataloguing, ICP’s exhibition
The Mexican Suitcase
made these images of the Spanish Civil War public at last.

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Arturo and Ilsa Barea landed in England in February 1939 and settled in a series of rural villages—Puckeridge, Fladbury, Mapledurham—whose very names must have seemed exotic to Barea (as resident aliens, he and Ilsa were not permitted, once war had been declared, to live in London). With her knowledge of languages Ilsa found work at the BBC Monitoring Service, which eavesdropped on radio broadcasts from around the world, including hostile powers; Barea frequented the local pubs, learning English and dart-playing, tended his garden, and cooked paellas for his wife and her parents, who had managed to emigrate from Vienna at the last available moment. And he wrote—short stories, articles, a critical volume on Lorca, a short book about the Civil War entitled
Struggle for the Spanish Soul
, and most of the second and third parts of the autobiography he had begun in Paris, which would be translated by Ilsa and published as
The Track
and
The Clash
, in 1943 and 1946, respectively. Meanwhile, the first volume,
The Forge
, had been brought out in 1941 by Faber and Faber, where its editor was T. S. Eliot, and had earned Barea praise from Stephen Spender and George Orwell, among others.

In October 1940 he began broadcasting a series of fourteen-minute talks about his experiences in England over the BBC’s Latin American Service, using the name Juan de Castilla, a pseudonym that both protected his family in Spain from reprisals and affirmed his identity as a son, if an exiled one, of “hard Castile,” the country of his childhood. He would have preferred to broadcast over the network’s Spanish Service; but the BBC, anxious to keep fascist Spain neutral during the war, didn’t want to hire someone with an anti-Franco background. “We do not employ Reds,” they proclaimed. The sound studio was in London, to which Barea was driven by a BBC car—a journey that filled him with anxiety and sometimes terror, especially during the Blitz and the later buzz-bomb attacks, which brought on a recurrence of what he referred to as “
mi
shell-shock.”

In 1947 the Bareas moved to a spacious (if unelectrified) house in rural Oxfordshire owned by Gavin Henderson, a Labour politician and second Baron Faringdon, where their coterie of mostly left-leaning and literary friends, including T. S. Eliot, Cyril Connolly, Gerald Brenan, J. R. Ackerley, and George Weidenfeld, were always informally welcome. Ilsa collaborated with Barea on a study of Miguel de Unamuno, and wrote a novel called
Telefónica
, closely based on her experiences in Madrid during the siege, which was serialized in Vienna’s
Arbeiter-Zeitung
in 1949. Both Barea and Ilsa enjoyed fishing in Lord Faringdon’s private lake and Barea liked to go pheasant shooting in his landlord’s woods; but he felt both worried and guilty about the family he had left behind in Spain. Aurelia and his children were living in straitened circumstances that improved only in the postwar years, when Adolfina and Victor emigrated to South America, leaving the older Carmen and Arturo behind with their own new families; his beloved brother Miguel, whom he’d disguised as Rafael in his autobiography, was imprisoned after the fall of Madrid and died after his release in 1941 or 1942. In his novel
The Broken Root,
published in 1951, Barea created a portrait of an exile whose son curses him as “the man who had left them to starve on charity lentils and on slops of water and sawdust, and had never once spared them a thought”; and writing to a friend, Ilsa spoke of the “heartbreaking” situation of Arturo’s children, “double victims, of the Civil War, which interrupted their schooling, and Arturo’s desertion. Surely you understand that I have to go to great lengths to help Arturo make up for it?” Barea tried hard to reestablish a connection with his children, sending them letters and monthly checks wrung from his own meager income, and cherishing the many little notes to “Querido Papa” that he received in return; but he never saw them again.

After the war he continued writing and broadcasting; the autobiography was published in one volume, entitled
The Forging of a Rebel
, in the United States and was translated into ten languages, and Barea was mentioned as a possible recipient of the Nobel Prize. In 1952 he was given a six-month visiting professorship at Pennsylvania State University, an ironic achievement for someone whose formal schooling had ended at the age of thirteen. But although his students admired him, the American Legion and other organizations labeled him a Communist and at the end of his stay his contract wasn’t renewed. He had better luck on a BBC-sponsored trip to South America in 1956, where enormous audiences attracted by his books and broadcasts made him—in the words of a British consular official—“the most successful visitor we have had for many years.”

In December 1957, Barea began complaining of stomach problems, and on Christmas Eve had to miss a BBC broadcast (something he almost never did) due to illness. Ilsa, too, was down with bronchitis, and during the afternoon the two of them lay on their bed, exhausted, “like a crusader and his wife on a tomb,” as Ilsa described it. But she got up to do the Christmas baking with her niece Uli, who was visiting from Austria and was a great favorite of Barea’s, and to decorate their Christmas tree. That night, in bed, Barea suddenly complained of pressure in his chest, then excruciating pain. He clutched at Ilsa and went limp in her arms: undiagnosed cancer had put pressure on his lungs and helped to touch off a fatal heart attack. His body was cremated, and Ilsa intended to scatter his ashes on the graves of her parents, Valentin and Alice Pollak, who were buried in Faringdon churchyard. But when she went to do this, her hands, by now crippled with arthritis, proved unable to open the urn. She had to go back to Middle Lodge and get her niece Uli to help her prise up the lid.

Moving to London, Ilsa struggled on alone, writing, translating, editing, working as an interpreter for international conferences, and publishing and promoting Barea’s work in England and abroad. In 1963, Kim Philby, her former colleague from her and Leopold Kulcsar’s Viennese cell, who had been working for British intelligence under cover as a journalist, was unmasked as a Soviet double agent and fled to Moscow. News accounts of his defection mentioned his service with Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War; if she hadn’t realized it before, Ilsa now understood how vulnerable her knowledge of his socialist past, which would have betrayed him to Franco, had made her to those whose job it was to protect him at all costs.

But by now she had left politics behind. For some years she’d been researching a social and cultural history of her native Vienna, a graceful and lively book that was published to admiring reviews in 1966; two years later, when she retired, she returned to the city she’d left as an exile so long ago, intending to write a biography of Schubert and to work on her memoirs. Neither project came to fruition: in 1972, she died of kidney failure, and all of the papers she had with her in Vienna disappeared. In some ways she had never recovered from the loss of her husband fifteen years earlier. “It is meaningless to say he is dead,” she wrote then. “Nobody can take away from me what I had. And what I know he had. It is beautiful after all. I am grateful.”

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By the time Franco’s troops entered Madrid on March 27, 1939, the Hotel Florida was virtually empty. The foreign correspondents, the International Brigaders, the fliers of Malraux’s Escuadrilla España, Hemingway’s “
whores de combat
”—probably even Don Cristóbal and his stamp collection—were all long gone.

During the Franco years, however, the Florida stayed open, even as its end of the Gran Via became a little shabbier, a little less elegant, with the passage of time. In 1955, Hemingway returned to the hotel, bringing his new wife, Mary, to the room he had shared with Martha Gellhorn; but the Florida’s days as the center of a universe of danger and excitement were over. And no one in Franco’s Spain—where the official Civil War memorial was the gigantic stone cross and underground mausoleum, built by imprisoned Loyalists, at the Valley of the Fallen near the Escorial—was interested in preserving this monument to the Siege of Madrid. In 1964 the wrecker’s ball accomplished what Nationalist shells could not: the Florida was demolished to make way for a department store, Galerias Preciados—named for a nearby street, and not for anything valued or precious. Today that building is occupied by a branch of Spain’s largest retail chain, El Corte Inglés.

If the Hotel Florida is gone, the Telefónica remains, just up the Gran Via, tall and white as a wedding cake. The wires and cables and switchboards have disappeared: in their places are the sleek exhibition rooms and offices of the Telefónica Foundation, showcasing art, culture, and technology of the twenty-first century. Instead of correspondents filing stories, there are concerts and art shows and lectures. But the view from the Telefónica’s tower terrace is remarkably unchanged, despite the new construction of the past seventy-five years. You can still look across the Manzanares at the Casa de Campo and the hill of Garabitas where the Nationalist guns hurled their shells into the Gran Via. And on a bright autumn day the shining peaks of the Guadarrama seem so close you feel you could put your hand out and touch them.

NOTES

The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.

Unless otherwise noted, translations in these pages are those of the cited source.

PROLOGUE

On July 18: Luis Bolín,
Spain: The Vital Years
, pp. 20–46.

“This young and eager Spain”: Hugh Thomas,
The Spanish Civil War
(henceforth
SCW
), p. 32.

Although the government managed: Nigel Townson,
The Crisis of Democracy in Spain
, p. xiv.

“The war in Morocco”: Paul Preston,
The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge
(henceforth
SCW
), p. 79.