Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (15 page)

She came back the next morning to get her safe-conduct, which would allow her to go freely about the city as long as she gave the password of the day to the sentries, and Barea asked her a little about herself. She told him of her hatred of fascism, her work in Vienna, her flight to Brno with Poldi, her university background, her travels, the eight languages she knew; and Barea felt both dismissive and resentful of her erudition and her passion.
Who needs a bluestocking like this in a war zone?
Ilse, however, had a proposition for him: wouldn’t it be useful to have someone working in his office who could read the correspondents’ reports in their native languages and talk to them about what cuts or changes were needed? Wouldn’t it save time? Wouldn’t it serve the cause better to have a spokesperson who could speak directly to journalists?

Somewhat unwillingly—after all, who did she think she was, barging in with all these suggestions?—Barea called Rubio in Valencia to ask him what he thought of the idea. To his surprise the normally cautious Rubio enthusiastically endorsed it. “Ask her to join the censorship,” he said. “Ask her today.” And by that evening Barea and Ilse—whose name he Hispanicized to “Ilsa”—were working across from each other at the big desk in his office. He began explaining the rules: that anything negative had to be suppressed, that no mention could be made of defeats, setbacks, catastrophes, shortages, or anything that would give a picture of what life was really like in a besieged city where aircraft rained destruction every night. And Ilsa, who wasn’t used to being coy or deferential to male colleagues if she disagreed with them, told him flat-out that such a strategy was wrong—“catastrophically wrong,” she said. It made the government’s losses inexplicable. What they should be giving the foreign press was
more
information, not less: if a bomb falls, tell them the make and give them the factory identification number, if possible. Put as much into the dispatches as you can, so people understand what is really happening here. Make them see the true collective spirit in Madrid’s struggle; make a propaganda for the new out of the dirt and blood.

Instead of resenting her insubordination—her assumption, which a Spanish woman would never have made, that she had as much right to speak as he did—Barea was perversely exhilarated. What she was saying was what he’d felt all along, and had so often repressed: and now, it seemed, he might have an ally, and a coworker, agreeing with him. Excitedly, they pushed the idea this way and that: perhaps, together, they might have a chance to persuade their superiors to change their tactics. They could try, anyway.

Ilsa didn’t go back to the Gran Via Hotel that night. She’d hated lying in bed listening for the sound of the Junkers and Capronis in the sky overhead, and watching her window light up with the glare of incendiary bombs; so Barea offered her the third camp bed in the office (Luis, the young orderly who ran the censors’ errands, was snoring in the other one), and she and he took turns sleeping and censoring until morning. They spent all day working and listening to the rumble of firing from the trenches, only a tram ride away at the northwest of the city; after midnight they dozed on the camp beds. Suddenly, during what was normally a quiet time between three and five, they heard the insidious purr of a bomber directly overhead. Ilsa sat up. “What are we going to do?” she whispered. Luis wasn’t there; probably he’d gone down to the shelter. “Nothing,” Barea replied. Seconds ticked by.

The explosion seemed to take place within the room itself: the furniture jumped, the floor swayed, and there was a sucking roar, then a tinkling arpeggio as the windows shattered and the blackout curtains were blown inward by the draft. The bomb had fallen on a building twenty yards away, in the Calle de Hortaleza, and completely demolished it; outside, in the street, there was a flurry of cries, and the sound of bricks and plaster falling. Neither Barea nor Ilsa could speak for a moment; then Ilsa came and sat on Barea’s bed and they began talking, talking about anything, as if by doing so they could prove to themselves that they were still alive.

The next day they moved their desks and camp beds to an office on the fourth floor. To Barea’s intense discomfort, both Aurelia and Maria came looking for him and were openly curious, and jealous, to find him with Ilsa. There were scenes with each of them: Where had he been? Who was this foreign woman? What was she to him? Any response seemed inadequate, self-serving; he felt ashamed, in front of Ilsa, of the evident mess he’d made of his personal life, and defensive that he should feel that way at all. In fact, he
didn’t
know what Ilsa was to him. A colleague, certainly; a woman he could really talk to, which was something he had never known. But she was married. And she wasn’t at all the sort of woman he’d usually been attracted to.

For the next day and a half, like an automaton, he censored reports, dealt with journalists’ questions, fell into exhausted slumber, rose and worked again, all the while watching himself and his interactions with this mysterious foreigner, trying to explain them to himself. Day wore on into night, and finally the last reports had been checked and sent out; Luis was already curled up in his corner of the room, and Barea and Ilsa stretched out exhausted on their own camp beds. Perhaps emboldened by the darkness, they talked softly of her life, his life, their marriages, their hopes and fears. At length, and at last, they fell silent. Barea got up, carefully and noiselessly moved his own cot close to hers, lay down, and reached out for her hand. And like that they slipped into sleep.

In the morning, when Luis was out of the room, he kissed her for the first time, and they both started laughing. But then Barea brought himself up short—what was he getting himself into? This wasn’t a feeling like any he’d ever known. Exasperated and confused, he barked to Ilsa, “
Mais, je ne t’aime pas!
” But she just smiled back at him. “No, my dear,” she replied.

She had her own puzzle to work out: She was in a war zone, in a country where she didn’t speak the language, in a culture unlike any she’d ever known. She had only just met this man, and it was obvious that he was already entangled, disastrously, with two other women. She couldn’t fall in love with him, when his relationships with women were everything she hated and had worked against. She tried to make herself think about Poldi: once he’d been comrade, lover, and husband to her, but now he seemed like a character in a book, distant and unreal. Nothing was right in her marriage anymore, she thought. But somehow
this
felt right, and real. Looking at Barea, she felt she knew already exactly how things would unfold between them. As Barea himself would write, much later: “It did not seem worthwhile to pretend; there were so few things that mattered.”

November 1936: Paris/Madrid

Capa’s and Gerda’s photographs from Spain were all over the European—and even the American—press: in
Vu
, in the Communist-backed newsweekly
Regards
, in the Dutch
Katholieke Illustratie
, the German
BIZ
, the
Illustrated London News
,
Time
, and elsewhere. Suddenly there was money in their pockets for food and drinks and cigarettes and clothes; and there were, for Gerda at least, bragging rights in the Spanish conflict, which for her SAP friends at the Dôme and the Capoulade was the greatest thing to happen to the left since the October Revolution. But when they’d left Madrid the government’s prospects had seemed dim; and in the intervening weeks Capa had gone to cover regional political events in France rather than seek another Spanish assignment, while Gerda had planned a trip to Italy to see her old beau Georg Kuritzkes, now studying medicine in Naples.

After November 8, however, things seemed to change overnight. The headlines in
L’Humanité
told the story: “MADRID HOLDS!” “MADRID RESISTS FIERCELY!” and—over one of Barea’s rescued images of the murdered children of Getafe—“‘
NO PASARAN
’—MADRID, LIBERTY’S VERDUN.” Madrid was still a big, big story, bigger than ever; and if you wanted photos of actual combat all you had to do was take a tram to University City or the Parque del Oeste and get off right at the front.

Gerda didn’t change her Italian plans. She had, after all, just bought herself a new travel wardrobe, including a very pretty lacy brassiere that she gaily modeled for Capa and the Hungarian photographer Kati Deutsch—Capa’s first teenage crush in their Budapest days—who’d dropped by the Hotel de Blois to reminisce and talk shop. But Capa immediately set about trying to get assigned to go to Madrid on his own. He’d just cut his ties to
Vu
, which had been losing advertisements because of its outspoken support of the Spanish government, and had been sold to a rightist businessman who promptly fired Lucien Vogel. Now Capa had a contract with
Regards
, whose stance on the Spanish war was made clear by the cover of the October 26 issue, showing a French soldier in a gas mask against the backdrop of a spookily realistic air-raid simulation: “P
ARIS
B
OMBED
: SPAIN DEFENDS OUR LIBERTY,” it said.

On Saturday the fourteenth
Regards
gave him a letter to take over to the Spanish Embassy in the Avenue George-V, asking that Capa be fast-tracked for a visa; by Monday, visa in hand, he was packed and ready to go. He picked up a letter of introduction from his editors that stated he was their exclusive correspondent in Madrid and took the night train to Toulouse, where he stopped only long enough to send Gerda a postcard before boarding a flight to Valencia and getting a ride to Madrid. If he was anxious about Gerda’s trip to Italy, or jealous of Kuritzkes, he apparently knew better than to say so.

In Madrid he was assigned quarters at the Hotel Florida. At its opening a dozen years before, the Florida had been a posh hostelry in a swank location—a ten-story marble-clad jewel box with centrally heated, opulently furnished rooms surrounding a glass-roofed atrium, around the corner from the smart shops of the Gran Via, face to face with the modern picture palaces of the Plaza de Callao, and just down the street from the Telefónica. Now it was a target for the same shells and bombs that were aimed at its neighbor; and it had become a haven—not for successful business travelers or wealthy tourists, but for a polyglot collection of journalists, French and Russian pilots, and opportunistic ladies of the evening. The pilots and the tarts (and some of the journalists) spent their evenings getting roaring drunk in the little bar, and when shells weren’t whistling over the building the night was punctuated by shrieks and slamming doors and running feet.

Such antics would certainly help keep his mind off whatever Gerda was up to in Italy; but Capa had barely slung his bag into his room before he had to go get his papers from the foreign-press censors in the Telefónica—which is probably where, on November 19, he met Gustav Regler. Blond, fine-featured, and pale from nerves and lack of sleep, Regler was a German Communist writer, a refugee from the Reich, who’d originally come to Spain bringing a printing press, film projector, and propaganda films as gifts from the International Union of Authors to the Loyalists, and had then stayed on to become the political commissar of the Twelfth International Brigade. He had known Ilsa Kulcsar “from before,” as Barea put it, from their years in European leftist journalism, and since his regiment was stationed on Madrid’s northwest perimeter he liked to come to the Telefónica when there was a lull in the fighting, to talk about old times and flirt mildly with her, to Barea’s concealed fury. So it would have been natural for Ilsa to pass the eager young photographer from
Regards
along to Regler—particularly given that Regler’s commander, a chunky, jovial, mustached former Red Army officer whose
nom de guerre
was General Pavol Lukács, was a compatriot of Capa’s, a Hungarian novelist named Máté Zalka.

Regler was instantly charmed by Capa, describing him as “this small beautiful boy whom everybody loved.” He immediately whisked his new acquaintance off to Lukács’s headquarters in the outlying suburb of Fuencarral, where the general was trying to plot maneuvers with the inadequate help of a map torn out of an old Baedeker guidebook. Introductions took place in German; then Lukács broke into Hungarian. “What do you really want?” he asked Capa. “To see the enemy,” Capa said. “We haven’t found him yet,” Lukács responded tersely. Turning to his political commissar he muttered, “How do you know he’s not a spy?” Capa overheard him and was indignant. “Are you discussing my reliability?” he asked. He extended his Leica toward the general. “Here’s my passport.”

Disarmed, Lukács agreed to let him go out on a patrol with Regler and another officer: word had come that some of Franco’s Moors were bivouacked in the barns of an old estate, the Palacita de Moncloa, on the Manzanares, and Lukács wanted confirmation. The patrol should try to determine the enemy’s positions, he said, but on no account should they fire at them. Capa was perfectly amenable. “If shooting can be avoided, I don’t mind,” he confided to Regler.

The three men set out for the river and were soon making their way cautiously along its eastern bank. Suddenly firing broke out, and Capa, Regler, and the other officer threw themselves down in the frost-rimed underbrush and waited for it to be over. Finally the guns fell silent; but when the men rose to continue their reconnaissance, Capa said he needed a minute to change his trousers: “My guts aren’t as brave as my camera,” he explained.

He made himself tough to do his job, however, Regler said later. In the next few days Capa went out with other patrols from the Twelfth International Brigade’s Thaelmann Battalion, a force mostly made up of German Communists with a smattering of English and Scandinavians, as they set up machine-gun positions in farm buildings along the western perimeter, or by the North Station, where they pulled suitcases out of the left-luggage office to form makeshift barricades. Another time, he followed Asturian
dinamiteros
as they used slingshots to lob grenades over the city’s former slaughterhouses and into the insurgent lines. And he and Louis Delaprée both went to cover the battle that had been playing out in the recently completed Bauhaus-style buildings of Madrid’s university.