Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (28 page)

April 1937: Moscow

On April 2, Mikhail Koltsov crossed the border from Spain to France, on his way to Moscow for what he hoped was a brief visit. He was apprehensive about the trip, not without reason. The previous month, Genrikh Yagoda, formerly people’s commissar for internal affairs (and thus supervisor of the NKVD), had been arrested by his successor in the post, Nikolai Yezhov, a diminutive, swarthy, and sadistic man whom Stalin nicknamed “the blackberry.” The charges were corruption, diamond smuggling (Yagoda was a Jew, son of a jeweler from Nizhniy Novgorod—
obviously
he had connections with those thieving Antwerp diamond brokers), and espionage; it was alleged that he’d been spying for the Germans since he’d joined the Communist Party in 1907. His real offense, which no one would mention but everyone knew, was that he’d told Stalin that arresting, trying, and executing his old associates, men such as Grigori Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, and moving to purge the Red Army’s commander in chief, Marshal Mikhail Tukaschevsky, was bad for business; that both within and without the Soviet Union public reaction to show trials was unfavorable. To Stalin this was insubordination, even opposition, and Yagoda must pay for it with his life. As Yezhov put it, “We are launching a major attack on the Enemy; let there be no resentment if we bump someone with an elbow. Better that ten innocent people should suffer than that one spy get away. When you chop wood, chips fly.” And lest anyone doubt who was doing the chopping, he added, “I may be small in stature but my hands are strong—Stalin’s hands.”

The atmosphere in Moscow was dangerous, but Koltsov believed he had an ally in the “poison dwarf,” Yezhov—or at least some kind of relationship. He was, in fact, sleeping with the new security chief’s wife, Yevgenya Feigenberg—she might put in a good word for him with her husband. And he had written warmly of Yezhov in
Pravda
, calling him “a wonderful unyielding Bolshevik.” Surely that should count for something.

Nonetheless he cannot have been comfortable when he was summoned to the Kremlin on April 15 for two hours of cross-examination by Yezhov, Defense Minister Voroshilov, Prime Minister Molotov, and Stalin himself about the progress of the war in Spain. Fortunately, when Koltsov had answered all their questions, the general secretary proclaimed himself pleased with the performance of the Soviet mission to the Republic—such a comfort in these grim times, he said, when he was beset by traitors lurking in the Party’s bosom.

Thinking himself dismissed, Koltsov rose to take his leave; but Stalin wasn’t finished with him yet.
Not so fast, Comrade Koltsov.
“What are you called in Spanish?” he asked. “Miguel?” Incredibly, he bowed to Koltsov in what he must have believed was the Spanish fashion, right arm across his chest. (The left, withered in a childhood accident, hung uselessly by his side.)

“Miguel, Comrade Stalin,” Koltsov said.

“Very well, Don Miguel. We, noble Spaniards, thank you cordially for your most interesting report. We’ll see you soon, Comrade Koltsov. Good luck, Don Miguel.”

“I am entirely at the service of the Soviet Union, Comrade Stalin,” murmured Koltsov; and as that seemed the end of the conversation, he started for the door. But Stalin called him back.

“Do you possess a revolver, Comrade Koltsov?”

Koltsov wasn’t sure what to say. “Yes, Comrade Stalin,” he replied.

“You aren’t thinking of committing suicide, are you?”

“Of course not,” Koltsov said.
Was that the right answer?
“It has never occurred to me.”

“Excellent. Excellent,” said Stalin. “Thank you again, Comrade Koltsov. We’ll see you soon, Don Miguel.”

April 1937: Madrid

April had brought a change in the air, Barea thought. Not just the sudden warmth, which brought the leaves out on the trees along the Paseo del Prado and beckoned the news vendors and shoeshine boys and the old women selling shoelaces to set up their stands on the streets, never mind the shells. No, the bureaucrats in Valencia—Álvarez del Vayo, and Rubio, and Rubio’s new deputy, Constancia de la Mora—were paying Madrid increased attention, scrutinizing requests, asking questions. An unspoken and unbroken tension had crept into relations between the temporary capital and the besieged city. And now, here was the Comintern’s smooth propagandist, the wily Otto Katz, this time using the alias André Simone and acting as
cicerone
for a gathering of Englishwomen, including three members of Parliament, Ellen Wilkinson, Eleanor Rathbone, and Katharine Stewart-Murray, Duchess of Atholl, who had come on a fact-finding mission to Spain. It was to be hoped that the facts they found would help them persuade Parliament to abandon the Non-Intervention Agreement, so it was of the utmost importance that they be handled expertly; and apparently Rubio and de la Mora felt this task was beyond the talents of Barea and Ilsa.

Barea arranged the ladies’ itinerary—bomb ruins, a hospital, a visit to an artillery post in a relatively safe part of the front, tea with Miaja—Ilsa translated, and Katz/Simone hovered over their every footstep. After a morning of sightseeing, thinking it would be more pleasant than the raucous, smoky depths of the Gran Via canteen, Ilsa and Barea invited the Duchess and her companions to lunch in their quarters upstairs; but the visitors insisted on joining the crowd in the basement. They didn’t want any special treatment, they protested. So they shared beans and watery soup and desiccated sausage with the correspondents and International Brigaders in the canteen, where the bursts of lunchtime shellfire were drowned out by the buzz of conversation and the clatter of crockery.

They had just finished their coffee and followed Barea to the lobby when the hotel manager appeared. Could Barea come upstairs, please? There had been a fire in his and Ilsa’s room. With the Englishwomen at their heels, Barea and Ilsa followed the manager upstairs to find their quarters a sodden wreck. A shell fragment had burst through the window, setting fire to the curtains and immolating Ilsa’s shoes, which had been arranged on a shelf under the sill; it had then landed on the table, smashing the dishes laid out for Ilsa and Barea’s lunch, and now lay there, still smoldering, as firemen coiled up the hoses they’d used to spray the room. Ilsa bent over the shoes, mourning her favorite blue pair—brand new, too!—and the Englishwomen clustered around her, patting and cooing. Just think, if she and Barea had come upstairs to lunch instead of going to the canteen with them, she or he might have been killed! Or if they’d all come to the Bareas’ room, they might have been killed as well! Not a bit of it, Ilsa maintained stoutly; it wasn’t as serious as all that. Just a little piece of metal. Look, there were some eggs, sitting unbroken in a bowl on a side table! And now they really
must
get going, they were scheduled to visit Ortega’s artillery observation post.

Going outside to round up the party’s cars, Barea found the street littered with debris from the shelling. Then he caught sight of something else, on the glass expanse of a ground-floor shop window full of records and Victrolas: a pulsating gray lump about the size of an apricot, veined with red, surrounded by gray spatters. It took him a minute to understand that it was a fragment of someone’s brain. Time seemed suddenly suspended, like music at a fermata. As if in a dream he put out his hand to stop one of the Englishwomen from going closer to look at it, turning her instead toward where he thought the car must be; but he himself couldn’t move. He heard Ilsa’s voice nearby, hoarse, insistent: “Arturo! Come away from here!” But he still stood motionless. His feet, he realized, were stuck in a puddle of blood.

With effort he tore himself away, allowed Ilsa to push him into one of the cars, wiped his feet on the matting on the floor. In silence he rode with the group to Ortega’s artillery lookout, where the Englishwomen peeped excitedly through the lens of a rangefinder at the University City trenches and the puffs of smoke issuing from the mouths of government artillery. When it was Barea’s turn he looked into the rangefinder at the target Ortega’s forces were shelling: it was the chapel of the cemetery whose office Barea’s uncle had been in charge of, and where as a boy he’d played, chasing butterflies and lizards through the sunlit alleys of cypresses, waiting for his uncle to finish his business and go home. Now, he saw, the cypresses and rose trees were gone and the thick brick walls of the chapel were pocked with shells.

*   *   *

Martha and Hemingway missed the noontime appearance of the British delegation at the journalists’ canteen and the carnage that followed the shelling on the Gran Via because they had been invited to lunch with Luis Quintanilla’s brother, the man some called “The Executioner of Madrid”—Pepe Quintanilla, chief of Madrid’s secret police.

Quintanilla lived in an opulently furnished flat—crystal chandeliers,
savonnerie
carpet—in a new apartment building on the north side of the city, with broad terraces commanding a view of the Casa de Campo; and the luncheon party, which included his wife and small son, seemed to take place in a very different Madrid than the one Martha had come to know. With his impeccable dove-gray suiting, his high forehead, slender hands, and bright brown eyes framed by horn-rimmed glasses, Quintanilla looked less like an executioner than an intellectual or an aristocrat; his manner was all graciousness, his voice like silk. But Martha was naggingly conscious of the steel beneath the smooth exterior, the gap between this elegant luncheon party and what Quintanilla actually
did
.

Somewhere between when the butler served the soup and when he poured the coffee, either Hemingway or Quintanilla brought up the matter of José Robles and Dos Passos’s inquiries about him. Dos should really stop asking awkward questions, Quintanilla said; it could only lead to trouble. Whatever Robles’s situation was, whatever had happened to him, he would get a fair trial. Hemingway should tell Dos that. And
that
—he fixed his interlocutors with his bright nutmeg-brown stare—should be the end of it. There was, or there should have been, no mistaking what Quintanilla meant.

As Hemingway and Martha prepared to go, Quintanilla asked if he might be permitted to bestow a small gift upon Martha, as a token of esteem and admiration, something to remind her of her time in Madrid. He held it out to her in his long fingers: an exquisite little cup of antique Limoges glass, as fragile as a bird’s egg. She should treat it carefully, Quintanilla said. Such a shame if it were broken.

*   *   *

It was balmy, almost hot, when Hemingway and Martha left the Quintanillas’ flat. Unless they wanted to watch the Englishwomen watch the shelling at the artillery post, there was nothing to do; so Martha went shopping with Ginny Cowles, whom she had decided to like. First they priced some pretty silver fox furs—such a bargain in Madrid just now—then they stopped at a linen shop, where Martha bought handkerchiefs for Hemingway, and went to the coiffeur to get their hair washed. (“Come what may,” she wrote in her journal, “one washes one’s hair, has one’s nails tended, sends out the laundry.” Edna Gellhorn had schooled her well.)

Returning to the hotel, they found the usual evening drinks party in full swing in Hemingway’s room: Norman Bethune had turned up, sweaty and dirty from a day at the front, to take advantage of Hemingway’s bathtub and the Florida’s plentiful hot water, and Dos Passos and Hemingway were working on Hemingway’s whiskey. None of them were feeling any pain when they went on to the Gran Via, where they found to their fury that the Duchess of Atholl’s party had eaten all the spinach (and, depending on who you talked to, had been given a
chicken
for dinner as well). Heated things were said about class distinction and Anglo-American relations, but in the end some aged whitings were produced by the kitchen, and the Americans washed them down with more drinks before going out into the moonlit night.

Upstairs in the Gran Via, Barea and Ilsa had come back from work at the Telefónica to discover that their belongings had been moved to new rooms. They were both exhausted from the events of the day, and all Ilsa wanted to do was crawl into bed; but Barea couldn’t bear to be alone with silence or his thoughts. André Simone was having a party on another floor of the hotel, and Barea went in search of distraction: what he found was bad liquor and worse gramophone music, and a smoky room full of International Brigade officers and American correspondents. In one corner Hemingway’s Guadalajara battlefield guide, Colonel Hans Kahle, was holding forth to an American film critic; in another Simone was fondling one of the censorship employees, a white-blond Canadian girl called Pat who had very fair skin, like a child’s, and a moll’s hard mouth. Everyone there seemed to be posing—
look at us, how tough and jaded we are
—and suddenly something inside Barea snapped. All of these people—the ones here, the ones downstairs in the restaurant, the ones in Chicote’s and the Miami Bar—were behaving as if
they
were the main actors in the war; none of them understood that this was
Spain’s
war, Spain’s agony.

He began shouting at them over the din of the dance music: they were all self-satisfied posers, playing at helping the war effort; they didn’t really care what happened to Spain, they were just here for themselves. But no one except the film critic paid him any attention. Disgusted and dispirited, he left and went back to his and Ilsa’s room.

When the bombardment started again the next morning, he crept out of bed carefully so as not to wake Ilsa. He wanted a bath, a shave, a fresh start; but he’d left his soap and shaving things in their old room, and went to get them. Although the room still smelled of smoke the sun was streaming in the windows, and he paused a moment to look out at the Gran Via, where a few people had started on their morning rounds. One of them, a woman in a green suit, looked uncannily like Ilsa from behind. Had she suddenly got dressed and gone out?

Suddenly there was a sound like ripping fabric, then the explosion as a shell hit a theater down the block; the woman in green crumpled to the pavement. In an unreasoning panic Barea raced down the hall to the room he’d left minutes ago. But Ilsa was there, awake, looking out the window. Seeing his face, she asked, worriedly, “What’s the matter with you?” and he just had time to say “Nothing” when another shell struck the Telefónica just across the street. Pale and shaking, he sank to his knees. The smell of the dead he remembered from his army service in Melilla, so many years ago now, filled his nostrils, and a wave of nausea passed over him. Ilsa managed to get him downstairs, where he drank a couple of brandies, and somehow he got through the day until the afternoon. But then, as he and Ilsa were putting books into shelves beside the window, they saw two more women killed on the Gran Via—one of them had been carrying a parcel wrapped in pink paper, and after the police came to take away the bodies the parcel lay forgotten in the street. Looking at it, Barea felt the bile rise in his throat, the sweat break out on his forehead and upper lip.