Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (23 page)

Arriving in Paris in the first rainy week of March, however, Robert Capa had reason to feel as joyful as Chevalier sounded. He had money and
Ce Soir
’s new contract in his pocket, and he was shopping for space for the studio he and Gerda wanted to set up. On the rue Froidevaux, just opposite the Cimetière de Montparnasse, he found what he was looking for: a 600-square-foot third-floor
atelier
in a recently remodeled five-story building at number 37. It had double-height windows all along one side of its lofty main room, and a spiral staircase leading to a narrow balcony, off of which was a little kitchen, so you could live in the studio as well as work. There were famous neighbors, past and present: Kertesz had lived in the building, as had Amedeo Modigliani, and Marcel Duchamp, and Hemingway had stayed in Gerald Murphy’s loft a few doors away at number 69 before his marriage to Pauline. The studio was even perfectly situated for access to Capa’s preferred watering holes—all you had to do was cross the street and walk along the tree-lined avenue that bisected the cemetery and you’d soon find yourself at Le Dôme or La Coupole.

He took a lease on it, hired Imre Weisz—a childhood friend from Budapest whom everyone called Csiki—to be the darkroom manager and another Hungarian émigré, Taci Czigany, to assist him, put in a telephone, and had stationery and a stamp made for his prints: “Atelier Robert Capa.” And he permitted himself to dream, just a little, of the life he and Gerda could make here as partners—in every sense of the word. He wanted very much to persuade her to marry him; but he wasn’t sure she would accept. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t be able to see her until she returned to Paris, or he got a formal assignment that would send him to Spain. Unlike Gerda, who had a passport, he was a stateless person; he could get special clearance to travel, but only with sponsorship. Infuriatingly,
Ce Soir
didn’t seem overeager to assign him a Spanish story—maybe they thought one photographer in Spain was enough—and instead they sent him to shoot the opening of the Salon des Indépendents, a costume ball at the Cirque d’Hiver, an agricultural fair, a parade of the Laurel and Hardy fan club. All Capa could do was collect his paycheck and hope something would come up that would allow him back across the border again.

*   *   *

On the other side of the Montparnasse cemetery, at the posh Hotel Dinard in the Sixth Arrondissement, Ernest Hemingway was assembling his forces for Spain. His friend the Associated Press reporter Lester Ziffren, who’d been in Madrid all the autumn and was now in Chicago nursing a case of whooping cough, had told him to bring plenty of canned goods with him (Ziff’s guts had suffered mightily from the alkaline diet of potatoes and beans) as well as warm clothes and as much currency as he could carry. So Hemingway had sent Sidney Franklin—who was staying in more modest lodgings in the rue St. Benoit—to buy tinned hams, prawns, pâté, bouillon cubes, and Nescafé, which Evan Shipman would transport to Spain in one of the ambulances he was delivering. Meanwhile, he himself telephoned everyone from the American ambassador to the State Department in Washington to the Spanish ambassador to France, Luis Araquistáin, trying to persuade them that Franklin, who still needed a visa to enter Spain, was “a bona-fide newsman” and not a would-be combatant in a war America had pledged to stay out of. When time hung heavy on their hands, Franklin would get out his bullfighting gear—the stockings, breeches, cape, sword, and embroidered “suit of lights”—and Hemingway would pretend to be a bull, waggling his hands over his ears and charging at Franklin as the matador called out “
Toro—huh—toro
” and practiced passes with his cape.

From the Hotel Dinard, Hemingway filed his first NANA dispatch, a jokey tongue-in-cheek story about the difficulties over Franklin’s visa, and got down to more serious business: a rendezvous with his new filmmaking colleague Joris Ivens. Ivens had arrived in Paris late in February for a brief visit to screen early footage of the Contemporary Historians film for an invited audience of Popular Front journalists and filmmakers, including the Russian émigré and spy Vladimir Pozner and the director Jean Renoir; and perhaps the warm reaction to his rushes had gone to his head. For, over copious drinks at the Deux Magots, Ivens came on a little patronizingly to his scenarist. Hemingway probably didn’t understand what the stakes were in Spain, he implied—how important it was to make a stand against fascism there, using whatever means were necessary and not worrying, the way a journalist might, about the strict accuracy of one’s reporting. Usually quick to flare up at any suggestion that he didn’t know exactly what was what, Hemingway let Ivens talk; something about this magnetic Dutchman with the deep-set blue eyes mesmerized him. He even found himself trying to impress Ivens by boasting about the “beautiful girlfriend” who would be coming to join him in Spain. “She has legs that begin at her shoulders,” Hemingway said.

A few days after their drinks at the Deux Magots, leaving Sidney Franklin—still awaiting the final resolution of his visa problems—to finish shopping for their provisions, Hemingway and Ivens took the night train to Toulouse, where they’d get a flight across the Pyrenees into Spain. A major Nationalist offensive, which included 35,000 Italian troops, was taking place near Guadalajara, northeast of Madrid; and although at first it had seemed the rebel forces would prevail, the Republicans were now fighting back tenaciously. This was news in the making, and NANA would want it covered.

Hemingway didn’t leave France immediately, however; first he wanted to see his old friend the Spanish painter and muralist Luis Quintanilla. Not just for old times’ sake, but for background: Quintanilla was an
engagé
artist who’d been jailed for his support of the Asturian miners’ revolt in 1934, had taken part in the attack on the Montaña Barracks at the outbreak of the war, and had fought in the Madrid outskirts and in the Guadarrama. And since the previous November he’d been director of the Spanish government’s intelligence services in southwest France, gathering information about the various refugee groups seeking shelter there.

As they generally did when they met after a long separation, the two men went out for an evening of dedicated drinking (
la gran borrachera
, Quintanilla called it). How was it in Madrid, Hemingway wanted to know; and Quintanilla told him it was pretty bad. His studio had been bombed; and his monumental frescoes at University City and in the Casa del Pueblo had all been smashed to bits. “Let’s not talk about it, Ernesto,” he said. “When a man loses his life’s work … it is much better not to talk about it.” They had more drinks and still more; and then someone had the idea of driving to the frontier to see what the border security was actually like. How serious were they about this visa business?

Very serious, it turned out. Twenty miles from the French border control point at Le Perthus two armed guards with bayonets stopped Hemingway’s car. Only when he and Quintanilla produced their impeccable papers were they allowed to proceed, up and up a winding road through the budding almond orchards that hugged the lower slopes of the Pyrenees, until at last they reached the guardhouse at the frontier, where a police officer told them that since February 20, when the new visa rules had been put into effect, no one had crossed the border here except for a few diplomats. “Even you,” the officer admonished Hemingway, “no matter what papers you have with you, you could not pass that line without the new visa.” On the other hand, Quintanilla told Hemingway on the drive back to Toulouse, there were now 88,000 Italian troops in Spain—including 12,000 who had just landed in Málaga and Cadiz—and between 16,000 and 20,000 Germans; in Germany recruitment posters were offering bonuses of a thousand reichsmarks to volunteers who would fight for Franco’s rebels.

“No matter on which side of the Spanish war people may be on,” Hemingway sarcastically cabled back to NANA, “they all agree on one thing—the Spanish border is closed up and airtight.”

A week later, two other journalists tried to gauge the airtightness of the border: Capa and the reporter Charles Réber from
Ce Soir
drove the length of the frontier from the Mediterranean to the mountains near the Andorran border to the fascist “embassies” in the posh precincts of Biarritz and Hendaye on the Atlantic coast. Capa wore a
miliciano
’s jacket against the mountain cold, and had brought with him a box of flashbulbs that looked awfully like tiny bombs; his appearance was so suspicious that the pair were repeatedly hauled in for questioning by guards who were certain they were arms smugglers, or at the very least illegal volunteers trying to cross the border to enlist. It took all of Capa’s charm to keep them out of jail.

Unfortunately he didn’t get very interesting pictures for his trouble, unless you counted the one of the Basque refugee children the French border patrols had arrested. In a circle on a windswept beach, they were all holding hands and dancing.

March 1937: Madrid/Valencia/Madrid

The Casa de Alianza de Escritores Antifascistas—the Madrid headquarters of the antifascist writers’ union—was a grand brick mansion, formerly the palace of the Marques del Duero, on a quiet street near the Parque del Retiro. Although it had been taken over by the government when its aristocratic owners fled the city, its walls were still hung with tapestries and Old Master paintings, its windows draped in purple velvet, and the antifascist intellectuals ate their beans and rice off the Marques’s ancestral silver, crystal, and china while being waited on by his self-effacing servants, all of whom had stayed on in the house. The secretary of the Alianza, the vivacious, well-connected writer Maria Teresa Léon, and her husband, the distinguished poet Rafael Alberti, ran the place like a twenty-four-hour salon: putting up visiting intellectuals, staging readings, plays, and cultural events, and publishing a journal,
El mono azul
, featuring work by José Bergamín (the Alianza’s president), Antonio Machado, Ramón J. Sender, and foreigners such as André Malraux, Pablo Neruda, and John Dos Passos. And when Gerda Taro was left on her own in Madrid after Capa went back to Paris, the Albertis asked her to come and stay there.

The Casa de Alianza could not have been more unlike the raffish quarters she’d shared with Capa at the Hotel Florida. Instead of shells whistling over the roof you heard birds chirping in the spacious garden; the people you passed in the halls were writers and artists—including Ilsa Kulcsar’s former connection from her Viennese cell, the English poet Stephen Spender—not newsmen, soldiers, and prostitutes. Of course Gerda accepted the invitation, especially when Alberti and Maria Teresa offered to help her set up a darkroom on the ground floor, where she could develop and enlarge her own prints and teach Alberti, an aspiring photographer, to do the same.

She’d been taking pictures almost nonstop all month. Before Capa left, she and he had chronicled the forlorn, often bizarre detritus left behind by the rebel bombers: empty facades through whose windows sunlight streamed as if from a lighted interior; a dining table—suddenly visible in an apartment without walls—set for a meal to which no one would come; the burned, battered shell of the residence of the Chilean consul, Pablo Neruda, in the once-leafy suburb of Argüelles; the rubble-filled courtyard of a convent children’s shelter; a little girl gathering firewood that was evidently the remains of someone’s house. “
Le bombardement de Madrid
,” wrote Gerda on a page in one of the notebooks where she pasted contact prints—and then, in parentheses: “
Surréalisme
.” On a trip to Valencia she’d shot a roll of film in the
plaza de toros
where a group of men and women, citizen volunteers, were being drilled by Loyalist soldiers: lyrical photographs, in which the idealistic young trainees were lit like dancers in a ballet as the sun moved across the bullfighting arena. Someone would buy them—the young people looked so fervent and committed, and it made a nice message.
Citizens learn to defend their own hearths and homes
. (A few weeks later
Regards
did indeed run a page of those photos.) But with so much happening all around her in Madrid, she wanted to shoot
breaking
news. Herself. Over her own byline, not one she shared with Capa.

For Gerda had begun to feel ever more sharply the professional limitations, not to mention the personal ones, of her relationship with her now-famous lover, and she was looking for ways to proclaim her independence. She wasn’t sure she saw a future with Capa, she confided to Ruth Cerf; and despite what some people might think, she wasn’t his property, especially if he wasn’t around. If anyone asked, she started saying that they were really just “
copains
”—buddies—not lovers.

Certainly she said that to Ted Allan, the young Canadian she called “the kid,” who’d been following her around like a puppy since her arrival in Madrid. Of course she loved Capa, she told him, but she wasn’t
in
love with him—she didn’t
want
to be in love, not ever again. She’d been in love once, desperately, with a boy in Prague who was killed by the Nazis. But no more. “It’s too painful,” she said. Allan believed this invented romantic fable, but her protestations of unavailability made him more eager to be with her rather than less. And he offered to drive her to the still unsettled Jarama front, where she could take pictures of battle sites and maybe, even, of combat. He was going there with Geza Karpathi and the screenwriter Herbert Kline to scout locations for their film on Bethune’s blood transfusion unit, and he hoped to be able to find some of his old International Brigades mates, whom he hadn’t heard from since the bloody fighting of the previous month. Why didn’t Gerda come along?

The German photographer Walter Reuter saw her setting out for her trip to the front and couldn’t help noticing she was wearing stockings and high heels more appropriate to the Ritz than the battlefield. When he teased her about her outfit, Gerda just laughed. Wouldn’t it make those boys happy to see a
woman
? she wanted to know. Well, that’s what they were going to get.