Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (58 page)

Telephone service between Catalonia and France had broken down, so Matthews, Forrest, and Gallagher left Figueras and went across the border to Perpignan to file their stories. But Capa and Sheean stayed, and a few hours later Boleslavskaya made a dramatic entrance after a long and suspenseful drive from Barcelona in which she’d been stuck in a traffic jam on a village street during an air raid. “And a lot of idiots up and down the road started honking their horns, as if that would do any good,” she said—the first funny thing any of them had heard in days.

That night, because there was nowhere else to sleep, those remaining all bivouacked in the press room, Bola and three or four others on a kind of
lit royal
made out of an abandoned box spring, some papers, and coats and shawls from Bola’s luggage, and Capa, swearing and joking, on a pile of propaganda leaflets—
finally, a good use for propaganda!
He wanted to go back to Barcelona, which given his identification with the Loyalist cause was a nearly suicidal thing to do; and for the next two days he tried in vain to find someone to drive him there. But on the evening of the twenty-seventh a communiqué was telephoned to the makeshift Propaganda Office: “Barcelona has fallen into the hands of the enemy.” By then the only accredited foreign correspondents present to hear it were Sheean, Boleslavskaya, and Capa.

The next day, France opened the border to Spain’s refugees, and along with the first trickle of what would become a flood of 400,000, Capa drove through the frontier at Le Perthus for the last time.

February–March 1939: Paris

You could see them in all the newsreels and on the smudged pages of newspapers and magazines: the beaten soldiers, broken men, women, and children, struggling over the icy roads, strafed and bombed from the air, pursued from the rear by an army that would show no mercy.
An endless line of fugitives desperate for safety
, Barea thought. He had heard nothing of Aurelia and the children for months; perhaps, because they had no connection to him, they were somehow better off. Meanwhile, the word from Austria was not good: the secret police had been making inquiries about Ilsa, and her history and associations were making her family’s already precarious situation worse. “These days are full of the most fateful happenings,” Valentin Pollak wrote, in Vienna, “fateful for the world and for myself.”

Fortunately, as dangerous as Ilsa’s old socialist contacts were to her family, they were useful to her: for in England a number of old friends from her days as a socialist speaker and journalist offered to help her and Barea emigrate. Some, like the translators and editors Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher, promised to help find work for them; others, like Henry Brinton, offered places to stay; still others extended loans to tide them over until some kind of money started coming in. For Ilsa, who had spent time in England as a girl and whose English was fluent, this seemed a promised safe haven; for Barea, it was a leap into the unknown, into a culture and a language he was completely unfamiliar with.

But they would have to go, and go at once: if and when Franco won the war, it was foolish to think that France, or Britain, wouldn’t recognize the Nationalists as Spain’s government, and then Republican passports wouldn’t be worth the paper they were printed on. Barea and Ilsa would be stateless persons.

Astonishingly, because he rarely gambled, Barea bought what turned out to be a winning ticket for the national lottery at the corner
tabac
, and with its modest proceeds they were able to buy their passage across the Channel. They packed their bags with their few belongings and left their sublet apartment without a backward look. At the Gare St. Lazare, the plainclothes officer asked them for their passports, then barely glanced at them before banging his rubber stamp on their pages.
Is that all?
Barea thought, imagining the river of refugees backed up at Le Perthus as if by a dam: no rubber stamps for them. As he and Ilsa settled in their compartment the train gathered speed; outside, the bare fields of Normandy slid by. How long until armies fought over them, as they had fought at Brunete, at the Ebro? In Dieppe the small steamer rose and fell on the Channel chop; Ilsa went below, but Barea stood smoking on the deck, the February wind in his hair. One of the French sailors, hearing his accent, asked where he was from, and he told them. Told them about Spain’s fight, his feelings of loss and betrayal at France’s capitulation at Munich, his fears for the future.
What’s wrong with your country?
he wanted to know.
Are you blind to what’s happening? Or don’t you care about your freedom?

“Oh, no,” the sailors assured him. “The others are the ones who won’t fight.” For a moment they all watched the French coast recede behind them. “Look, comrade,” one of the Frenchmen said. “Don’t go away from France in bitterness. We’ll fight together yet.”

*   *   *

“In Paris there’s nothing good,” wrote Capa to his mother, Julia, in New York. “Everybody is shitting in their pants and scared to death of Hitler.” He’d been too tired and despondent to work for a month after returning from Spain, he went on: “I walked around like an idiot.” But then he’d received a letter from his father, Deszö, in Budapest, saying he was ill—something wrong with his stomach, or maybe his liver. Capa pulled himself together enough to do some assignments for
Ce Soir
that would bring in a little money—now he could send a little something to Deszö to pay the doctor; and when the actress Luise Rainer, whom he’d met working on
The 400 Million
, asked him to escort her to a white-tie gala in Paris, he rented the requisite evening wear and went along. “Imagine how elegant I became,” he joked to Julia. “Just like a Bear in Tails!”

Then in early March he began hearing reports of appalling conditions in the internment camps that the French government had set up for those members of the Loyalist army that had finally been permitted to cross the border. More than 75,000 men were incarcerated in enclosures on the beach near Perpignan, with inadequate food, water, or sanitary arrangements; but no one was covering the situation, because the entire internment area had been declared off-limits for the French press. (He didn’t know that his friend Agustí Centelles, whom he’d last seen at the Despedida parade in Barcelona, was incarcerated in one of the camps, at Bram, surreptitiously taking photographs that wouldn’t be seen until years afterward.) So Capa, using his
Life
credentials and identifying himself as “André Friedmann” rather than the too-well-known Robert Capa, went to the police
préfecture
in Aude on March 19 and received a permit to visit the camps at Argelès-sur-Mer, Le Barcarès, Bram, and Montolieu. Even for someone used to the privations of war, they were a revelation.

Behind fences of barbed wire through which they might be allowed a few minutes to speak to rare visitors, policed by gendarmes and mounted Senegalese troops who must have reminded the prisoners of Franco’s Moors, thousands of men who had fought to the end for their country were now housed—if they had housing at all, and were not huddled in canvas tents or out in the open—in hastily constructed, unheated, and poorly insulated shacks. Filthy and emaciated, they dug holes in the sand for new huts, or lined up to receive their miserable rations. Their threadbare clothes were inadequate to the wintry wind from the nearby sea; many of them, too sick or malnourished even to stand up, lay on pallets of straw. Capa had always been prodigal with film, exposing frame after frame in the hope of finding, amid a torrent of possibilities, the perfect shot; but here he seemed overcome by what he saw and simply kept his finger on the shutter, shooting strings of images of desolation.
The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda
.

There were a few moments of gallantry and humor: he found two Basque soldiers who’d decorated their hut with wooden model airplanes and painted over the sign that bore the barracks number, 95, with the legend “Gran Hotel Euzkeldun” (“Grand Basque Hotel”)—adding an image of a man squirting wine into his mouth from a
bota
; and at Bram members of a Barcelona orchestra, who’d managed to bring their instruments with them across the border, played for him. But although the cellist—a friend, it was said, of Pablo Casals—tried to smile for the camera, his eyes were full of ineffable sadness. And the smile itself revealed his missing teeth, testament to malnutrition and neglect. At least he was alive, Capa must have thought as he made his last stop, a cemetery a mile outside the camps. There a newly dug grave awaited its occupant, and a long line of white crosses marked those of the forty-four men who had already given their lives for Spain, but on French soil.

Although his photographs of the camps were featured in
Picture Post
and
Se
, a Swedish magazine, Capa felt that his trip to document them, as well as his last sojourn in Spain, and maybe even his whole Spanish experience, were “a great disaster.” For the past three years he had made himself an international reputation chronicling—with compassion and immediacy—a war that had begun in hope and ended in defeat, disillusion, and personal loss. Now, he told his mother, “I am living in such a dumb manner, not knowing from one day to another what it will be … We are [all] walking around like dogs after the rain and trying to save our friends.” It was, now, all anyone could do.

February–March 1939: Key West/Havana

When Hemingway and Pauline had first come to Key West, back in the late twenties, it had been a charmingly funky backwater, a place to fish and write and get away from the rest of the world. But the intervening years, and the Overseas Highway, had brought a new, pleasure-seeking crowd to the island; and while Hemingway was away in Spain, Pauline had made numerous friends among them. Now they were all over the place, in Hemingway’s swimming pool and on his lawn and in his favorite saloon, wanting to talk or go out fishing or drinking, and he couldn’t stand it. He was missing Martha, he was missing Spain, and all he wanted to do, he told his Russian translator Ivan Kashkin, in Moscow, was write. “As long as there is a war you always think perhaps you will be killed so you have nothing to worry about. But now I am not killed so I have to work.”

He was already thinking about a new collection of short fiction, to be published in the fall, which would include the most recent Spanish stories from
Esquire
and
Cosmopolitan
as well as three more long ones, one about Teruel, one about an attack in the Guadarrama, and one about a Gulf Stream fisherman who loses a huge marlin to a swarm of sharks because it’s too big to haul into his boat.

But the news from Spain, in the aftermath of Barcelona’s fall—like having a death in the family, he and Martha agreed, in their clandestine telephone calls—seemed to require a grander response from him: a summation or an epitaph. For even though Negrín had returned to a base near Alicante in the shrinking Loyalist zone and was urging his commanders to keep up the fight, it was clear the effort was doomed. Hemingway couldn’t have known that in Moscow, Kliment Voroshilov was telling Stalin that Negrín’s requests for more aid were, “at the very least, inopportune”; but he
could
read in the newspapers of how the war-weary Republican generals were seeking to make a separate peace with Franco, and how, even before the Republic could formally capitulate, the governments of France and Britain were prepared to recognize the Nationalist rebels as the government of Spain. “The only thing about a war,” Hemingway said, “is to win it—and that is what we did not do.” It was over, in his mind; and now, he went on, “I understand the whole thing better.”

In Paris, in the fall, he had drafted two chapters of something he thought might be a novel about the war, then put them aside as too ambitious or too painful to go on with for the moment. But he was ready now, if he could get time and a place to write. Once Key West would have been the place, and Pauline would have been the muse to write for, but no longer. Dropping a thank-you note to Sara Murphy for a toy sailboat she’d sent Gregory for Christmas, Pauline remarked at how the little vessel sailed back and forth in their swimming pool, running aground as if it were trying to escape to a bigger body of water, then “setting out smoothly into the pool again … just like man and life.” Neither she nor Hemingway was acknowledging it, but he, too, was about to sail away.

In Naples, Florida, one hundred miles north of Key West, Martha Gellhorn had been having a midwinter holiday with her mother when Hemingway asked her to join him in Havana. On February 18, she arrived to find him already established in two different hotel rooms, at the Sevilla-Biltmore for sleeping and at the Ambos Mundos for writing—“Tell everybody you live in one hotel and live in another,” he joked to his bear-hunting buddy Tom Shevlin, whom he’d long ago forgiven for his comments about
To Have and Have Not
. He’d stocked the Ambos Mundos room with a twelve-pound ham and a supply of cured sausages, as if he were back in Madrid at the Hotel Florida with Sidney Franklin at the hot plate and Chopin on the Victrola.

But Martha didn’t want to camp out in a hotel room, like Dorothy Bridges in
The Fifth Column.
For one thing, she hated squalor, hated it more than ever after Madrid and Barcelona; and for another thing, she had books of her own she wanted to write, beginning with a story about a reporter in Prague into which she wanted to pour all the passion and vitriol that had built up in her over the past year in Europe. She went house hunting in the country and found a tumbledown estate,
La Finca Vigía
(Watchtower Farm), on a hill in the village of San Francisco de Paula: a one-story stone house with a swimming pool, a tennis court, a huge sitting room, a library, a guesthouse, and a magnificent if overgrown garden from which, at night, you could see the lights of Havana in the distance. Hemingway thought the rent, $100 a month, was too much; but Martha took the house anyway, and planned to invest some of what she’d earned from
Collier’s
in restoring and furnishing it. She was so pleased with the result that she felt embarrassed, she wrote Mrs. Roosevelt; at last she would have a place to do her own work in—a beautiful place, a place beyond her imagining—and she had paid for it all with her writing. “I have a feeling,” she told the First Lady, “I ought to put up a plaque to
Collier’s
magazine.”