Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (18 page)

December 1936: Valencia

Barea’s trip to Valencia was a disaster. In the car on the way from Madrid, exhausted by stress and the conflicting pressures of work, he’d run off his mouth to his Anarchist companions about his difficulties with Rubio, and was alarmed when one of them, a tough named García, offered to take care of things for him: “People sometimes disappear overnight here in Valencia,” he said. “They’re taken to Malvarrosa, or Grau, or the Albuféra, get a bullet in the neck, and the sea carries them away.” Barea hastily assured García that such dark doings wouldn’t be necessary: things weren’t as bad as all that, he said, Rubio was really a patriot. “All right,” said García. “But one day you’ll be sorry … I know that type. We’re going to lose the war because of them. Or do you believe we don’t know about the many things the censors let through?” Not for the first time, Barea felt he was walking on a tightrope.

He went to see Rubio in the shabby but still grand palace the Press and Propaganda Department had taken over on the Calle del Mar; but when he got there his chief waved him off. He was far too busy to talk to Barea today. Maybe tomorrow. Barea emerged into the sunlit streets in a daze. He passed food stalls overflowing with fruits and vegetables, poultry, flowers, all the kinds of things no one in Madrid had seen for months; well-dressed people were hurrying along the pavement or laughing on the terraces of cafés. A band was playing in the middle of the Plaza de Emilio Castelar, in front of the Ayuntamiento; on the other side was a gigantic billboard showing photographs of the murdered children of Getafe superimposed with the silhouetted images of bombs. It all seemed unreal.

In the afternoon he took a poky little train to the outlying village where Aurelia and the children had been assigned space in a rambling old farmhouse with several other displaced families. The children were touchingly happy to see him; and Aurelia was glad to be able to show off the husband who “was something in the Foreign Ministry” to the other women. She wanted him to spend the night and he resisted. She wept, the children pled; and he ended up sharing Aurelia’s bed with the children nearby, unable to sleep because he felt like a liar—to the children, to Aurelia, to Ilsa, and to himself, for pretending to an intimacy he could no longer feel, would never feel again.

The next morning he returned to Valencia, only to be rebuffed again by Rubio; then came back to the village to visit his children, only to reject their mother and return to Valencia. It went on like that for more than a week—lying, being lied to. Hanging around the office in town, he heard unsettling and conflicting rumors: he was going to be punished for staying in Madrid (
playing the hero
, they called it); he was going to be sidelined as a postal censor in Valencia; Ilsa was going to be given his job; she was going to be fired for being too friendly with foreign journalists. Terrible news came: Louis Delaprée, flying back to France in an Air France plane, had been shot down—possibly by a Russian fighter—and had died of his wounds three days later; then Luis, Barea’s orderly, driving to Valencia from Madrid with a letter from Ilsa, was mortally wounded in a car accident. Barea managed to get to the hospital to see him before he died: his spine had been shattered and peritonitis had set in, but he knew Barea, and gave him a heartbreaking smile when he walked into the room. “Don Arturo,” he said, with difficulty, “don’t let that woman get lost. She’s a great woman. She’s in love with you, and you’re in love with her. Don’t let her go.”

When Ilsa arrived in Valencia on the day after Christmas, the pain of losing Delaprée and then Luis lifted a little: for a moment it seemed as if the jumbled pieces of Barea’s world had fallen into place. But then, the day after her arrival, she disappeared: a friend of hers, an Austrian journalist, told Barea that an agent of the Political Police had come to her hotel and taken her away. Frantic, Barea called Rubio Hidalgo; and this time he not only took Barea’s call but also came around to Ilsa’s hotel at once and started telephoning government ministries to see who could help. Barea barely paid him any attention: instead, he reached into his pocket for his pistol and laid it on the table in front of him. When he was told to calm down, he just took two filled cartridge frames and put them on the table next to the gun. “It doesn’t matter if she appears tonight or not,” he said. “Other people will die in Valencia, that’s all.”

Two hours later Ilsa returned to the hotel, laughing at her experience. It had all been a stupid mistake—a ridiculous little man, an Eastern European journalist, had denounced her as a Trotskyist spy. At first the police had seemed to believe him, but after all the telephone calls from government ministries they had changed their minds. Wasn’t it ridiculous? Everyone except Barea agreed that it was; they all had a good chuckle over it. All Barea could think of were the corpses he’d seen in Madrid in the early days, the
checas
and tribunals, the stories he’d heard from García about what might happen to you when they came for you. But he had her back now, and he wouldn’t leave her again. Ever.

That night they became lovers.
The most natural thing in the world
, thought Ilsa, as he lay in the crook of her arm; and her knowledge of him, his openness to her, made her feel like crying. In the morning they took the tram to the seaside district of El Cabanyal and walked past the tiled and whitewashed houses to the beach. They told each other they wanted to be together forever. But: “You know,” Barea said to her, “it will be a lot of pain for the others, and pain for ourselves as well as happiness. One’s got to pay, always.”

“I know,” she replied.

December 1936: Key West

It was Martha’s mother who saw the sign—“Sloppy Joe’s Bar,” painted on the white stucco wall—and suggested the three of them go in out of the sun for a drink. Having an afternoon cocktail in a conch bar was the furthest thing imaginable from the way they’d always spent the Christmas holidays back in St. Louis; but on this Christmas, the first since Martha’s father had died, they
wanted
to do something different. And sleepy, shabby Key West, as far south as you could get in the continental United States, was certainly different.

The café was dim and cool, with sawdust on the floor and a long, curving bar presided over by a 300-pound African American barkeep, “Big Jimmy” Skinner. At one end of the bar, reading his mail, was a burly dark-haired man in a T-shirt and dirty white shorts held up by a length of rope. He looked up as the trio came in: the earnest young man, Martha’s brother, Alfred, on vacation from medical school; the silver-haired, still-beautiful Edna Gellhorn; and Martha, tanned and tawny-maned in a little black sundress that showed off her racehorse figure to advantage. Later he would say he’d figured that Alfred and Martha were a couple, and that given three days he could win the beautiful blonde away from “the young punk”; but that turned out not to be necessary.

Because the blonde came over to him, hand outstretched, and introduced herself and her companions to Ernest Hemingway. He had been her writing lodestar forever, her “glorious idol”—hadn’t she kept his photo tacked to her dorm room wall at Bryn Mawr? Hadn’t she taken her epigraph for
What Mad Pursuit
(“Nothing ever happens to the brave”) from
A Farewell to Arms
? And hadn’t her clear, taut prose in
The Trouble I’ve Seen
been compared with his? So imagine how thrilled she was to just walk into a bar in Key West and stumble over him this way.

The social preliminaries were quickly dispensed with. Hemingway charmingly pointed out that his wives had both gone to school in St. Louis, and he’d spent considerable time there himself in his youth; he would be delighted to show these St. Louisans around Key West, and make sure they found all the best beaches and watering holes. Drinks came as they talked, then more drinks and more talk. At length a friend of Hemingway’s, Charles Thompson, appeared in the bar, sent by Pauline, who had laid on a splendid crayfish dinner for the Thompsons at the house on Whitehead Street and was wondering why her husband hadn’t shown up for it. He’d have to skip dinner, Hemingway said; Thompson should just tell Pauline to meet up with him later, at Pena’s Garden of Roses, a beer garden and former speakeasy in the Old Town. Thompson looked around Hemingway’s table, took in the blond hair and the black dress, and did as he was told.

Over the next weeks Hemingway made good on his offer to the Gellhorns; and, when Alfred’s medical school vacation ended and mother and son returned to St. Louis, Martha remained at the Colonial Hotel on Duval Street for nearly a fortnight and became, as she herself described it in a thank-you note to Pauline, “a fixture, like a kudu head,” in the Hemingways’ house. Hemingway took her swimming and barhopping, but mostly they just talked: about her writing (she was too careful and cautious, he said—she should just
write
her novel and if it didn’t turn out the way she wanted she could tear it up), about
his
writing (he was a great craftsman, she said, and he knew more about writing dialogue than anyone), about the conflict in Spain (“the Balkans of 1912”) and the situation in Europe (“war is nearer than even the pessimists thought”), and about the nature of storytelling (“In a writer this is imagination,” Martha asserted; “in anyone else it’s lying. That’s where the genius comes in”). She began calling him “Ernestino”; he called her “Daughter,” a moniker he frequently bestowed on women even slightly younger than himself, and one that seemed more than usually apt for Martha, who with her long blond bob and coltish limbs looked even less than twenty-eight.

The two of them cut a striking figure around the sleepy little fishing town, she in her Riviera resort clothes and he in his scruffy shorts and rope-soled shoes; and the effect wasn’t lost on Pauline Hemingway—or “Pauline cutie,” as Martha addressed her in her thank-you note, a salutation that must have set Mrs. Hemingway’s teeth on edge. “I suppose Ernest is busy again helping Miss Gellhorn with her writing,” Pauline said drily to a friend who had remarked on Hemingway’s absence from some occasion. Once, Hemingway was driving Martha around the island and, seeing Pauline walking along the sidewalk, pulled over and told her to get into the car. “She was very grumpy,” Martha noticed, and affected not to know why.

But Pauline knew what had come into her and Hemingway’s perfectly constructed life. Later Hemingway himself described it: “the oldest trick there is … [A]n unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married … and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband.”
Pauline cutie.
Martha Gellhorn was the literary girl of the moment, with her sharp new book whose style was being compared with Hemingway’s; she was pretty, well educated, well connected (those White House overnights, those dinners with Colette, those sojourns
chez
H. G. Wells); and she was conversant, in a way no one else in their circle was, with the European political situation that Hemingway was more and more obsessed with. When the two of them started talking about the Spanish war, which Martha said she was “desperate” to experience at first hand, the possibility that Hemingway would actually go over to cover it—something Pauline was both politically and personally opposed to—became worryingly acute. Worse, the probability was extreme that he would act, perhaps was already acting, on his evident attraction for this new girl. “I’m a fool with women,” he confessed sheepishly to a friend in a conversation of which Martha was the subtext; “I always feel I have to marry ’em.”

And Martha? Martha herself was dangerously entranced. Hemingway’s attentions were so flattering that she couldn’t help boasting about them just a little in her letters to Mrs. Roosevelt. He had let her read his manuscript, and she’d been “smart” about it! Unlike the cerebral, even effete men she’d previously been involved with, he was a paradigm of machismo: seeing battle in Italy, steering his boat through hurricanes, running with the bulls in Pamplona, shooting sharks with machine guns. He didn’t just talk about his antifascist principles: he’d already put his money where his mouth was, paying the passage for two volunteers who were going to Spain to join the International Brigades, and borrowing $1,500 to buy ambulances for the Medical Bureau of the American Friends for Spanish Democracy. And now, when they discussed the news from Europe, he agreed with her (she told the First Lady, who must have wondered what to do with these confidences) that suddenly “there seemed terribly little time to do anything,” that they had to “work all day and all night and live too … and love as many people as one can find … and do all this terribly fast, because the time is getting shorter and shorter every day.”

When Martha finally left Key West for St. Louis, Hemingway—having somewhat hastily arranged a business trip to New York to talk to John Wheeler of NANA and also John Dos Passos and Archibald MacLeish, who had a Spanish film project they wanted to involve him in—followed her. They met up in Miami, where he took her out for a steak dinner and they boarded the northbound sleeper together. Although Martha changed trains along the route to go west, they stayed in close touch by mail and telephone: Hemingway, lonely for her and excited about the adventures he wanted them to have together, called her from New York, often several times a day. He’d decided to accept NANA’s offer to do reportage from Spain, and he thought he could help her get an assignment there too. Of course, there might be problems obtaining visas because of the non-intervention pact, which forbade civilian travel to Spain, but they could find ways around
that
.

Martha had finally found the fresh start she’d been yearning for, and she entered into these plans with gusto. “This is very private,” she said to Hemingway in a letter about their arrangements: “We are conspirators and I have personally got myself a beard and a pair of dark glasses. We will both say nothing and look strong.” Her pacifist novel was finished but on rereading it she was unhappy with the result and buried the manuscript in a desk drawer. She didn’t care about it, anyway—she had other things to do now. “Me, I am going to Spain with the boys,” she wrote to a friend. “I don’t know who the boys are, but I am going with them.”