Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (33 page)

Bilbao—its residents affectionately if scatalogically nicknamed it
el botxo
, the hole—turned out to be a grimy industrial city, sprawling across the banks of the Rio Nervión where it flowed into the Bay of Biscay, surrounded by the chemical and steel works that brought it wealth as well as clouds of smog and soot. In peacetime the docks that lined the estuary had bustled with stevedores heaving ingots and crates onto the ships in Spain’s largest and busiest port; but today the cargo waiting to be boarded was children. As Nationalist troops came closer to the optimistically named “iron ring” of fortifications around Bilbao (whose blueprints had been smuggled to them in March by a disaffected Basque officer) and German bombers swept over the city as well as the Basque villages in the surrounding hills, British and French rescue organizations were arranging the evacuation of 22,000 children from the war zone; and today, May 5, a handful of rusty ships, the French freighter
Carimare
, the Spanish liner
Habana
, and others, were preparing to receive a number of them.

In a tree-shaded square near the port a group of men, most in uniform, clustered around a notice detailing when and how the evacuations would be carried out; closer to the quays a line of women and children, dressed in somber black as if in mourning for what the war had done to them, waited to be told which group of evacuees they belonged in. Capa raised his camera, shot: as he did so, a solemn little girl, a white-clad apparition in the black line, tuned around and regarded him gravely from under her dark bangs, sucking her thumb. He went on. At the dock was an enormous crowd—men, women, and children—waiting to board tenders for the ships, or to kiss their loved ones goodbye. The
Bilbainos
were prosperous—one woman sported a luxurious fur collar, while the little girl next to her at the barrier was clutching a fur scarf as well as her proper English-style coat—and orderly; there were tears, but they were bitten back, dignified. In Madrid, Regler had said, Capa
made himself tough to do his job
; the job here was different, but it required just as much toughness.

The next day Capa headed out of Bilbao to Mount Solluve, twenty miles to the northeast, where Basque Loyalists were dug in on the heights above Bermeo. German aircraft had been pounding the mountain since dawn, and the Nationalists’ general, Emilio Mola, had just brought in North African troops, the first ever deployed in the Basque country, to break through the Loyalist line. The North Africans were finding the spiky gorse bushes that covered the slopes made for hard going, and Mola had ordered a unit of Italian tanks to spearhead the attack, but the Basques had rolled logs across the road to stop them.

Capa attached himself to a group of Loyalist infantrymen and
dinamiteros
defending positions on the mountain, some in stone farmhouses they had turned into improvised fortresses, some out in the open. It was cold for early May, and the soldiers were wearing gloves and woolen caps or leather helmets as they waited in the piney scrub for the tanks and trucks to come. At intervals they had to dive for cover as the German Heinkels and Junkers swooped low over the mountain, spraying machine-gun bullets at the trenches. Then came the grinding of gears as a staff car and a battered pickup truck rumbled along the road and stopped at the improvised barricade. From their hiding place by the side of the road the
dinamiteros
hurled grenades at the car, and the other soldiers opened fire. Capa got no shot of the attack, but he did get photographs of the soldiers walking out of cover to inspect their handiwork, and remove any useful supplies from the truck.

Elsewhere other
dinamiteros
, with the help of an antiaircraft gun trucked in from Bilbao, were able to destroy a number of tanks, so that by nightfall the mountain—and its commanding position on the route to Bilbao—remained in Basque hands. But not all its defenders were lucky. Capa photographed one of the unfortunate ones, lying facedown in the coarse grass, and then, with his borrowed Eyemo, filmed a nearly identical shot. The only difference between the two was the contrast in the film footage between the motionless form of the dead man and the stalks of grass waving gently above him in the dusk.

As darkness drew in, Capa left Mount Solluve in a big black Packard, the driver riding the accelerator all along the pitted road to the airfield at Sondika. There, a French plane like the one Capa had come in on—maybe even the very same one—was disgorging another load of passengers, one of them the tall, black-haired American newsman Jay Allen. Allen took in Capa’s grimy raincoat, the cameras dangling around his neck, and he saw the photographer thrust a package containing his film into the pilot’s hand. He heard the words
Regards
and
urgent;
then the plane roared off into the night. And Allen and the others got into the Packard with Capa and rode back into Bilbao.

It wasn’t until a few days later, though, that Allen and Capa formally introduced themselves. Allen was an intrepid journalist, an old friend of Hemingway’s from prewar Madrid, the first man to interview Franco after the mutiny, the man who’d been smuggled in on the floor of a car to report the massacre at Badajoz at the beginning of the war; and for his pains he’d been fired by his pro-Nationalist employer, Colonel Robert R. McCormick of the
Chicago Tribune
. He’d been freelancing since then, but had just been engaged by David Smart, the editor of
Esquire
, to help create a new “insider’s” newsmagazine, called
Ken
, for which he was gathering material in Bilbao. Like most reporters, he was wary of cameramen: they were grandstanders, he thought, who didn’t do the same kind of work
real
journalists did. Or he thought so until he found himself standing next to Capa on a busy street when the air raid sirens sent out the four short blasts that meant
aircraft approaching
. The crowds dispersed in panic, women clutching the hands of their children as they ran toward the nearest shelters. Capa stayed in the open, his camera trained on the figures and faces of the terrified civilians, chronicling what happens when ordinary men and women and children know they are in the enemy’s crosshairs. Only when a policeman with a rifle forced him into a bunker did he leave the street. And Allen recognized a kindred spirit.

Over the next week Capa photographed more air raids, including one that turned the city’s petrol depot into a holocaust of flame and smoke; he shadowed the women sifting through the city’s refuse heaps in search of fuel; he watched the children and their mothers resting on sandbags in between enemy sorties, the black-clad grandmothers sitting on a bench and weeping at the news contained in the paper one of them held in her hand. It was grim but to him necessary work.

On May 15 the journalists remaining in the city were told to evacuate: the airfield had to be closed, and only one more plane would leave for Biarritz. The correspondents flocked to Sondika to get on board—all except Capa, who wanted to stay behind and document the fall of the city. Keeping only one Leica, he gave the rest of his equipment and all his exposed film to the Yiddish journalist S. L. Schneiderman, Chim’s brother-in-law, asking him to get it to Paris safely.

But although the enemy was just outside the Iron Ring, and the Loyalist forces were all withdrawing within it, Bilbao didn’t fall. In fact, feelers were being extended to the Catholic Basques by the Pope, who hoped to arrange a separate peace between them and Franco. Without waiting to see what the result of such negotiations might be, Capa decided to run the blockade in a fishing boat. The little vessel put out to sea on the night of the seventeenth and safely skirted both the mines at the mouth of Bilbao’s harbor and the waiting ships, arriving in Bayonne on the eighteenth. Within days, Capa was back at the rue Froidevaux—but except for Csiki Weisz and a telegram from Gerda, the studio was empty. Gerda was in Valencia.

May 1937: Madrid

On May 1, the Madrid Foreign Press and Censorship Department moved from the Telefónica to the Foreign Ministry in the Palacio de Santa Cruz, near the Plaza Mayor, a massive stone-and-brick pile whose iron-barred windows made the building seem like a fortress. The Telefónica had become untenable—the correspondents had already insisted on moving the transmission room from its upper floors to the basement—and for Barea, now overcome with terror at every loud noise, it was torture. In the days before the move he’d been feverish, racked with convulsive nausea, and unable to cross the shell-racked Gran Via to the censorship; silent and shaking, he’d sat in a darkened corner of the hotel doing office busywork, leaving the transfer of all the censorship papers and files to Ilsa.

The day after the move, a shell sailed through the windows of the deserted office and exploded in front of Ilsa’s old desk.

The nightmare of what might have been tormented Barea. Unable to work, eat, or sleep, he went to see the ministry doctor, who prescribed an opiate that knocked him out but gave him hallucinations, horrifying visions of disintegrating bodies accompanied by the sensations of falling and being torn apart. When he awoke at last, trembling and drenched with sweat, he resolved to stay away from drugs: but that single dose, or maybe the experience of the past few weeks, had changed him. He felt both clearer about and more removed from the work he had been doing. And as he’d done in the aftermath of the Gran Via shelling a week earlier, he began to write. Instead of a phantasmagoria of apocalyptic images, however, what came out of his typewriter was a simple, unvarnished tale, told in the colloquial voice of Barea’s Lavapiés barrio, of a trench-bound
miliciano
who stays at his post for increasingly absurd reasons. Although Ilsa had been horrified by that earlier effort at fiction, she was moved by this one, and something at last clicked into place for him: he could exorcise his inchoate feelings by writing them down, giving form to them in fiction.

Certainly he had to find
some
outlet for them, and the safer, the better. For now came the news of the events in the streets of Barcelona—and, Barea thought,
All of us who stood at the barricades in November had better keep our thoughts to ourselves
. Especially when those thoughts took the turn his were now taking. Dos Passos, who’d sat and talked with him in his office in the Telefónica, had understood what gnawed at the corners of his and Ilsa’s minds: it wasn’t just the shelling, Dos Passos said, it was “a fear that tortured every man or woman who was doing responsible work … They were being watched.” And the watchers didn’t like men like him to have doubts.

But Barea had begun to doubt. Yes, he thought, the war had been started by a cabal of stiff-necked generals who’d joined forces with a reactionary elite to put the brakes on any progressive developments in the country; and yes, he and others like him had joined the fight against the generals to defend their dreams of a true republic of the people. But when outside aid started coming in, from Germany and Italy on one side and Russia on the other, this civil conflict between the forces of change and the forces of reaction had been transmogrified into something else. Suddenly Spain’s war had become an experimental exercise—which will prevail, fascism or socialism? Whose weapons are stronger, Germany’s or Russia’s?—that the rest of the world was watching with interest. Or worse: for although the powers-that-be in Europe and America hoped militant fascism might be weakened by the war, they actively
didn’t
want the Russian Communists and their
de facto
protégées, the Spanish government, to win it—that would make communism too powerful.

We’re condemned in advance
, Barea thought.
We can’t win, but we have to fight. Maybe we’ll be saved if an antifascist war starts in Europe; maybe all we can do is carry on and give the other countries time to arm themselves. Either way, we pay in blood
.

It was a bleak and terrible epiphany. And it made him, and Ilsa, vulnerable in ways he could not then begin to imagine.

*   *   *

Sometimes, during this strange spring, Barea’s old friend Angel would come to visit during his furloughs from military duty, bringing with him some of the awkward, illiterate boys who fought alongside him in the trenches at Carabanchel. Holding out a threadbare, mud-spattered copy of the poems of the martyred Federico García Lorca, he would ask Barea, who had loved the poetry of Lorca since his youth, to read to them. And Barea would repeat Lorca’s chilling lines about the officers of the Guardia Civil, dark-cloaked specters on iron-shod black horses, or his poem about the Andalusian olive orchard that was alive with birdsong. “That’s right,” cried a boy from Jaén, who’d worked in the olive groves before he’d run away to join the militia. “The olive trees are full of cries and calls. The thrushes come in flocks and eat the olives and make a great noise … Go on.” Eagerly he waited for Barea to continue.

That boy, thought Barea, had starved working in those orchards, orchards that belonged to someone else; now he was fighting for them. And Lorca, by the power of his words, had given those gray-green, bird-thronged olive trees to him. Forever.

May 1937: Valencia

When Capa left Paris for Bilbao, Gerda intended to travel to Catalonia, where one of her old SAP friends from Germany, Herbert Frahm, who’d been living in exile in Norway under the name Willy Brandt, was working as a liaison between the SAP and the POUM. Possibly he’d hoped to get her to do a photo session with Andrés Nin; maybe he had no agenda other than a meeting with a former comrade. On her side, she might have been looking forward to a chance to commiserate about what was going on in Germany, where her family, having lost both their business and their home, had been forced to emigrate to Yugoslavia. But by the time Gerda crossed the border the May Days had erupted and Brandt was on the run after trying to mediate between the government and the POUM. In hiding he ran across Eric Blair, the POUM militiaman who’d been so eager to talk to John Dos Passos; and Blair tried to persuade him to flee to England. But Brandt thought he’d be better able to fight fascism from Norway; he went back to Oslo.