Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (51 page)

It was dark when Hemingway and his companions drew up in front of the Majestic. Although they’d been working for fourteen hours with barely a letup, they still had dispatches to file; and Hemingway’s—which was accompanied by a request that NANA wire Pauline to tell her he was all right—marked the first glimmer of doubt in the hopeful story he had been trying to frame for so long. Good Friday, he said, marked “a bad night for the west bank of the Ebro.”

Exactly how bad he had yet to find out. For that afternoon, as he and his companions had been inching their way across the bridge at Tortosa, soldiers of the insurgent general Alonso Vega’s 4th Navarrese Division had waded, delirious with joy, into the Mediterranean at Vinaroz, while their commander dipped his fingers in the salt water as if into a baptismal font and crossed himself. “The victorious sword of Franco,” as one newspaper in insurgent Seville would put it, “had cut in two the Spain occupied by the reds.”

*   *   *

On April 24, after playing all over Europe, an edited version of
The Spanish Earth
opened in Barcelona with Spanish dubbed narration, new music, and different, less realistic sound effects. For weeks Barcelona had been papered with advertising posters for the film that carried a comment from Franklin Roosevelt (one of the remarks he’d made informally to Hemingway and Ivens at the White House screening), and the theater was crowded. But five minutes after the titles ran, just at the point where the narrator was asserting that, to win the war, the rebels
had
to cut the Madrid-Valencia road, the screen suddenly went dark. An announcement came from the back of the theater: “Gentlemen, there is an air raid alarm.” Instead of the clumsy sound effects, the audience could hear the real-life thudding of the ack-ack guns as bombs fell on the outskirts of the city. No one moved. After a while the manager played “The Hymn of Riego” and the Catalan anthem “Els Segadors” (
“Drive out these people, so conceited, so arrogant!”
) on the theater’s loudspeakers and everybody sang along and applauded; after about an hour the all-clear sounded, and the projectionist started up again.

At the picture’s end the lights went on and someone pointed out Hemingway in the audience, seated with Martha and his journalist buddies; he got a five-minute ovation. Then Jim Lardner, who had also been in the audience, came up to say goodbye: he was going from the theater to the International Brigades headquarters to enlist as a gun layer, the man who calculates the angle and trajectory of a gun, in the artillery corps. He’d talked about doing this before, and both Hemingway and Jimmy Sheean had tried to dissuade him. It was too late to enlist, they told him; there were rumors the brigades were going to be disbanded. Anyway his eyesight was bad, and he was a journalist, not a soldier. Why didn’t he go to Madrid, Hemingway wanted to know, and stay there until it fell to the Nationalists, and write about
that
? That was a story no one else would have. But Lardner was adamant. As the junior
Trib
correspondent in Spain he felt redundant, he said; he wanted to make a
real
contribution to the Loyalist cause, in which he’d come to believe “absolutely” and confidently, and action, not writing, was the way to accomplish that. Going to Madrid and waiting for it to be taken over so he could write about it seemed “defeatist” to him.

Hemingway—paradoxically for a man for whom action had always been a byword, and who had been so desperate to be a part of the Great War that he’d become a Red Cross ambulance driver when the army rejected him for his poor eyesight—seemed exasperated rather than sympathetic. Although he sent a short human-interest story about the new volunteer to NANA the next day, it was perfunctory and impersonal, and somehow managed to make its subject seem like a coddled Ivy Leaguer with an unrealistic idea of his own abilities. Privately, Hemingway was even more dismissive: Lardner, he said, was “pig-headed” and “a superior little snot.”

Something was eating at him. It wasn’t just anxiety over the course of the war: it was deeper than that, something that went to his essence, to the part of him that craved only to “write one true sentence.” For the past year, except for
The Fifth Column
and the stories he’d been unable to make progress on down in Key West, he had written nothing but propaganda. The
Spanish Earth
narration, the Carnegie Hall speech, the fund-raising talks, the articles for
Ken
, the preface to the book of Luis Quintanilla’s drawings, even the purportedly journalistic, highly compensated NANA dispatches, which he’d been churning out almost daily since he returned to Spain—they were all eloquent, vivid, often heartfelt. But they were in the service of something other than his own vision, and though he would loudly proclaim otherwise, he knew not all of them were truthful.
You are the propagandist
, Ivens had told him; but that wasn’t who he really was, who he wanted to be.
Just write one true sentence
. Sitting in the theater, he’d heard the real bombs and guns interrupt their filmed, manipulated avatars in
The Spanish Earth
; saying goodbye to Lardner, he’d been face to face with his younger, eager self. And the contrast must have unsettled him.

A week earlier, on Easter Sunday, he’d gone with Martha and Matthews to Amposta, in the Ebro delta below Tortosa, to see how far the rebel tide had reached: on the way they saw more cars, more carts, more refugees, a Breughel landscape of dispossession. A pontoon bridge had been put in place where the permanent one had been bombed by the Nationalists; and as Hemingway’s car went over the bridge, the journalists passed an old man in dust-covered clothes and steel-rimmed glasses like Hemingway’s, sitting on the ground. When they returned several hours later, having made certain that the rebel armies hadn’t yet made it to the banks of the Ebro, the retreat had passed on but the old man was still there. They stopped the car and Hemingway got out. He took one of the pieces of paper he used for note-taking out of his pocket—a letter-size sheet, folded in quarters marked 1, 2, 3, and 4, so he could write on it easily, unfolding and refolding it as he filled each numbered quarter. He’d already noted the gray sky and now-empty road, the detritus of flight, scattered corn kernels from a chicken coop tied to the back of a peasant’s cart; now he wanted to know something about the old man in glasses. The old man said he’d come from San Carlos, on the coast. He’d been taking care of a couple of goats, some cats, four pairs of pigeons, and hadn’t wanted to leave them; but the army captain told him the artillery was coming, so he’d walked, twelve kilometers since daylight. He was worried about the animals; and he was tired, too tired to go on. He could get a ride on a truck, Hemingway suggested; but the truck would take the old man to Barcelona, and he had no wish to go there, he said. He would stay by the bridge.

Hemingway wrote down enough to remember things: the sky, the road, the old man, the animals. And then, because he and Matthews had deadlines, and were still six hours from Barcelona, they left.

Back at the Majestic, Hemingway mulled over what to do with his notes from the trip to the delta. He could file a NANA dispatch about the Nationalist advance (imperceptible) and the Loyalist retreat (orderly), which would end up covering the same ground as Matthews, and run the risk of the
Times
spiking his story because of duplication. Or he could write something about the old man who had caught his fancy. It wouldn’t be something for NANA; but it would do for
Ken
, and he owed them a piece this week. He set to work.

What emerged wasn’t a polemic, like the other articles he had done for
Ken
, nor larded with military exegesis, like so many of his NANA dispatches. It was short, barely more than two pages long; and it was sharp and tight, the way his best fiction was—simply an account of his conversation with the old peasant at Amposta, a man claiming to be “without politics,” who has walked so far he doesn’t think he can go farther, who has had to abandon what was left in his care, and who in turn is abandoned by the narrator to the advancing fascists. The story’s last image is of the old man, sitting on the ground by the bridge, on an overcast day whose clouds has kept Nationalist bombers back at their bases: “That and the fact that cats know how to look after themselves,” the narrator explains, “was all the good luck that old man would ever have.”
That
was a true sentence; maybe the truest Hemingway had written in Spain.

Unlike Hemingway’s journalism pieces, but like his fiction, this story (as he would later write to Arnold Gingrich) “took charge of itself very quickly”; by 11:10 that evening he was cabling the finished version to
Ken
. And the next day Gingrich wired him that it was “marvelous,” adding: “
THESE SHORT PUNCHES HAVE DONE MORE GOOD FOR LOYALIST CAUSE THAN VOLUMES ORDINARY REPORTING
.”

*   *   *

Although she made copious notes as she and Hemingway and their companions chased the front along the Ebro, Martha wasn’t writing much for publication during this trip to Spain. She’d wanted to do a piece for
Collier’s
about the plight of the refugees she’d seen on the road and described in her journal; it would be like an account of “the last days of Pompeii,” she told her editors. But
Collier’s
wasn’t interested. “Stale by the time we publish,” they cabled back. The attention of the world had moved on to an increasingly probable European conflict, and the magazine wanted her to go to France, and England, and—now that Hitler was eyeing it so greedily—Czechoslovakia, and find out what was going on there. Rumors had begun to circulate that a German invasion—like the incursion into Austria in March—was imminent. If that happened a European war wouldn’t be far behind.

Martha was torn. On the one hand, as she wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, “What goes on here seems to be the affair of all of us who do not want a world whose bible is
Mein Kampf.
” Spain, she believed, was “fighting our battle”; and it should be “saved for decent people”—not fascists—because “it’s far too beautiful to waste.” But she sensed, even as Hemingway struggled
not
to, that the fight was over, that writing any more about Spain wouldn’t save it, that her work was elsewhere now. She begged off an excursion to the American brigade’s headquarters at Darmos for May Day celebrations because she couldn’t bear to listen to the hopeful and hortatory speeches that would be a part of it; and although Hemingway and Herbert Matthews were planning to travel to Madrid to report on conditions there she declined to accompany them, exasperated by the amount of red tape she’d have to cut through to get clearance.

“Maybe,” she wrote in her diary, making herself feel better about her choices, “history is just a big stinking mess and a big injustice anyhow, and the victory is always wrong. But one thing is sure: good men are as absolute as the mountains and as fine, and as long as there are any good men then it is worth while to live and be with them And one cannot feel utterly hopeless about the future knowing that such people exist, whether they win or not.”

At the beginning of May she went with Matthews and Hemingway to Marseille, from which they planned to fly into the Loyalists’ southern zone; then, by leisurely stages, she drove north to Paris. And on May 1, Prime Minister Negrín, one of her “good men,” released a thirteen-point peace manifesto, outlining the sort of government—a much-watered-down version of the Popular Front, with accommodation for private capital and an amnesty for the rebels—he envisioned for a postwar Spain, if the back-channel negotiations he’d been making to Franco through the Vatican and other parties resulted in an armistice. All he had to do was keep fighting until Franco said yes. He didn’t seem to understand that the only thing Franco was interested in was unconditional surrender.

May 1938: Madrid

Hemingway and Matthews arrived at the Hotel Florida on May 9. They’d flown down the coast the day before, the only two passengers in a twenty-two-seat plane, gazing out the windows at the brown hills—“like a dinosaur come to drink,” Hemingway said—that were all that stood between the Nationalist lines and Castellón and Valencia; and their visit to the front at Castellón had reassured them that the Nationalists’ steamroller advance seemed to have stalled, at least momentarily. Madrid cheered them up even more. Dropping in on their old haunts in the trenches in University City and talking to the soldiers, they’d concluded that Fortress Madrid was, as Hemingway described it, “unchanged and more solid than ever.” If Hemingway had had a crisis of confidence in Barcelona, two days of high-level military briefings were enough to cure it: they had plenty of guns and ammunition, the commanders told him, all they needed was more artillery, more planes, more automatic weapons, and they could
win
this thing. He wanted to believe them; “certainly there will be bitter fighting,” he cabled to NANA, “but there is a year of war clearly ahead where European diplomats are trying to say it will be over in a month.”

The Hotel Florida, Hemingway and Matthews found, was outwardly the same as they remembered it, if slightly more shell-battered, with Don Cristóbal still tending his stamp collection at the reception desk; but the pilots and correspondents and
whores de combat
had for the most part moved on, and the raucous sense of life that had pervaded the place in the first year and a half of the war seemed to have ebbed away. In the lobby Hemingway ran into
The Daily Worker
’s Joe North, who had also come to check the situation in Madrid. As editor at
The New Masses
, North had been responsible for commissioning Hemingway’s “Who Killed the Vets” piece in 1935; and he’d watched the formerly apolitical Hemingway’s evolution into an engagé writer and antifascist spokesman with interest and some skepticism. Did he now try to probe the depth and nature of Hemingway’s commitment to antifascism? Whatever it was, Hemingway—beginning to chafe at the propagandist’s harness, and probably several drinks beyond rationality—turned swiftly pugnacious. “I like the Communists when they’re soldiers,” he said to North, doubtless thinking of Líster, Modesto, even the irascible Walter; “but when they’re priests I hate them.” North must have looked puzzled, because Hemingway went on to explain: “Yes, priests, the commissars who hand down the papal bulls.”