Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (9 page)

During those heady first days in Barcelona, if he picked up a copy of
La Vanguardia
or
La Humanitat
, or the new
Treball
or
La Veu de Catalunya
—newspapers filled with pictures taken by the Spanish photographers of the events following the generals’ insurrection—he couldn’t have missed seeing Agustí Centelles’s images of the conflict he and Gerda had missed. Shot with a fast, portable Leica like his own, they showed a woman in black keening over the body of a man lying on the pavement; a group of Assault Guards,
asaltos
, firing from behind the contorted bodies of their dead horses; a trio of the same
asaltos
, guns drawn, surrounding a man in a tweed cap, as if all of them were partners in a grim dance—powerful, emblematic photographs that were simultaneously composed and immediate. And he’d have recognized in Centelles a kindred impulse for rushing into the thick of what was happening and photographing it; only in this case the subject wasn’t speeches or demonstrations, it was life and death. By now, the opportunity to get such pictures was over in Barcelona; the drama was elsewhere. In the weeks since the rising, the rebels, or the Nationalists as they called themselves, had gained control of the northwestern third of Spain, and a tiny wedge of the southernmost part; the government forces, the Loyalists, were pushing back along a line that extended from Huesca in the north through Aragon before looping back to the Guadarrama, northwest of Madrid. That was where the closest fighting was. And so Capa and Gerda packed up their gear, exchanged their French press credentials for Spanish ones, and moved on.

The road to the front—one of the fronts—led west along the valley of the Ebro toward the cathedral city of Saragossa, then north to Huesca through the dry, dusty hills. Traveling in a press car provided by the Generalitat, along with an armed driver and an armed bodyguard, they made their way slowly, stopped at almost every village by residents brandishing ancient shotguns and demanding to see their papers. Near Barcelona these guards were anarchists from the CNT-FAI; but closer to the front they were members of the anti-Stalinist Marxist party called the POUM (Partido Obrera de Unificación Marxista), which was allied with Gerda’s old group from Leipzig, the German SAP. No matter their party affiliation, though, they seemed unsure of where the fighting was. “It may be the front begins there,” a gaunt, bearded man in a bandana told the photographers. “We aren’t sure.”
Nobody’s sure of anything
, Capa thought.

At Santa Eulalia, northeast of Huesca, one of several villages of that name, they found a company of militia—including at least one woman—trading occasional volleys with a rebel force so far away across the valley that they were barely possible to see, let alone shoot at; in the hills above Lecineña, where the POUM were headquartered, soldiers—shirtless in the hot sun—struggled to place their field guns to protect against an attack that didn’t come. Everywhere, it seemed, both sides were at a standoff. To compensate for the lack of real action, Capa and Gerda did what virtually all other news photographers did: they persuaded the soldiers to simulate it, running down grassy hillsides brandishing their rifles, taking aim at imaginary enemies. But although Gerda did take one extraordinary photo of a hillside gun emplacement in which the lines of the terraced fields, shot from above, have the vertiginous quality of Breughel’s
Fall of Icarus
, most of these pictures lacked tension and excitement. So the photographers turned to symbolic, poster-like images that would humanize the war for audiences in the rest of Europe: a genial militiaman flanked by a line of smiling boys; another squirting wine into his mouth from a wineskin; four soldiers, each in a different uniform, but all squinting heroically into the sunlight; another soldier in a helmet with “POUM” stenciled on it, his rifle at his side, delicately petting a dove.

Hoping to get closer to the story they’d come to Spain to find, they drove south and west over the flat Aragonese plateau toward Madrid. It was harvesttime, but the landowners who had formerly owned the grain fields were gone—fled or killed—and peasants in wide-brimmed straw hats were harvesting the wheat for themselves with the help of a detachment of militia. For the first time, they told Capa, there would be enough bread for all the villagers, and for their defenders as well. Both Capa and Gerda were entranced by the sight of the men with their rakes and winnowing sieves, who had the immemorial look of farmers from a Millet painting—and then there were the little girls riding the mules that turned the well wheel, and the soldier feeding a baby lamb from a nursing bottle while a cigarette dangled from his other hand. Peasants and soldiers proudly lined up for Capa’s camera in front of a threshing machine that bore the legend “Appropriated by the Authorities” and held their left fists aloft in salute. In Barcelona and Aragon, at least, it looked as if the enemy was invisible, and a revolution had triumphed. But maybe it would be different in Madrid.

*   *   *

Madrid was baking in the summer heat, the trees in the Paseo del Prado barely stirring in the nonexistent breeze, the smell of dust and yesterday’s frying mixing with the aroma of the coffee roaster’s cart in the Plaza Anton Martin. Work in the patent office in the Calle de Alcalá had ground to a standstill, and Barea was spending most of his days—except for the afternoon tête-à-têtes Maria still insisted on—drilling men who had signed up for the Clerical Workers’ Battalion, which they called La Pluma, “The Pen.” Turning clerical workers into an organized fighting force was exasperating labor—“I haven’t come here to play at soldiers,” whined one of the pasty-faced clerks, who just wanted to be taught how to fire his rifle so he could “get on with it”—but Barea knew that the government needed all the help it could get. The rebels were pressing south toward Madrid from the Guadarrama, and north from Andalusia through Extremadura; although Hitler was assuring other European governments that no war materials would
ever
be sent to Spain, the Führer had already provided ships and planes to help ferry Franco’s Army of Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar to Andalusia, as well as bombers to attack government targets. Meanwhile, Britain and France—France, with its own Popular Front government!—had agreed to a nonintervention agreement, eventually signed by all the European powers (nominally including Germany and Italy), under which each country promised neither to send military or other aid to the Spanish republic nor to sell it armaments of any kind. No one wanted to upset Hitler and provoke another terrible war, everyone agreed, particularly since this was surely just an internal, civil conflict—a conflict in which, senior British diplomats murmured,
We really have to stand by our class
.

While the diplomats looked the other way, the war was transforming the capital. Streets were blocked with barricades made from dug-up paving stones; shop windows were crisscrossed with lattices of tape to prevent breakage in case of a bombardment. The whole city was tensed, waiting. Then one morning a bomb fell into the Calle Jesus y Maria, a block from Barea’s house, where new and expectant mothers had lined up to receive their daily ration of milk: running to the scene, Barea found the street covered with debris and blood and body parts, and the air full of the sound of screaming. That night, still shaken but determined to do something to stop this from happening again, he ignored Aurelia’s cloying pleas that he stay at home and instead joined a blackout squad that was going from block to block until daybreak, painting the bulbs on the streetlamps with a mixture of plaster and blue aniline dye that plunged the streets into a ghostly crepuscule. In the shadows the taillights of the troop trucks glowed red:
like the eyes of nightmare monsters
, Barea thought, summoning Goya.

Monsters prowled in the daylight, too: the vigilantes brought into being by a toxic combination of zealotry and fear. You saw their work at the old slaughterhouses in Mataderos, where the bodies of those who’d been executed the day before were laid out on display before being buried, and hordes of gawkers came to peer and jeer at them. Or you saw it in the interrogation cells and holding pens of the CNT
checa
at the Circulo de Bellas Artes, the former cultural center where suspected fascists were detained; in the peoples’ courts held in commandeered churches, where those who’d been denounced were pronounced guilty or—rarely—not guilty, and either freed (again rarely) or imprisoned, or condemned to death. Barea tried fighting with the monsters: searching for a friend’s son in the wilderness of detention; protesting the arrest of a colleague, a frail old Catholic of considerable wealth but incorruptible principles; cursing an acquaintance who boasted about how many fascists he’d shot. But then, in Extremadura, the Army of Africa overran the walled city of Badajoz, Barea’s birthplace, and machine-gunned 1,800 of its defenders—men and women—in the bullring there. The bloodstains, it was said, were palm-deep on the walls. After that it wasn’t so easy to intercede for anyone suspected of fascist sympathies without risking your own neck.

Barea had always been (as he put it)
an emotional socialist
, not a doctrinaire one; and in the last weeks he’d felt as uncomfortable with the cautious old-line Republicans who’d been ready to make a deal with the rebels as he did with the anarchic Jacobins who were behind the popular tribunals and executions that so sickened him. He was damned if he’d go in for the kind of reflexive saluting and sloganeering that passed for patriotism among many of his fellow Madrileños, but he was frustrated at not being actively and positively involved in the war effort.

Remembering a patent application that had crossed his desk in the days before the insurrection—the design for a simple hand grenade that would be easy and cheap to make—he had an idea. The Republic needed cheap, available weapons; he was an engineer. Why didn’t he start producing those grenades? He located the inventor, an old mechanic named Fausto; and the two of them went to a friend of Barea’s, the Communist leader Antonio Mije García, who had enlisted him for the blackout squad. Barea wasn’t a Communist, just a union man; and he knew that—with a membership of approximately 130,000 and only seventeen members in the Popular Front Cortes—the Communists were an insignificant force in Spanish political life. But recently they’d seemed like the only people with a sense of organization, the only ones who understood what it would take to actually defeat the fascist insurrection. Barea was particularly impressed with their new enterprise, the Fifth Regiment—a strike force modeled on the regiments of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, in which each company had its own political commissar, an officer whose job was to explain to the untrained, often uneducated, even illiterate troops what they were fighting for. So he was encouraged when Mije told him to get the cooperation of the Fifth Regiment’s leader, a charismatic professional revolutionary who went by the name of Carlos Contreras, or “Comandante Carlos.”

Barea found his quarry—a burly, thick-necked man, by turns impatient and charming—in a requisitioned nobleman’s palace in the Salamanca barrio where he was overseeing the training of recruits. Contreras wasn’t his real name: he’d been born Vittorio Vidali, in Istria, near Trieste, thirty-six years earlier. Since then, under a variety of aliases, he’d been a founder of the Italian Communist Party; an agent of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD; a steelworker in Chicago; and a hit man involved in the assassination, in Mexico, of a dissident Communist who was the lover of the photographer Tina Modotti; afterward, Modotti had become
his
mistress, and they’d come to Spain together in 1934. Now, in addition to leading the Fifth Regiment, he was acting as a general strategic advisor to the government, and unofficially he was one of the most powerful men in Madrid. But this morning he was shaking his head over the intransigence of the Asturian miners who were making their own grenades—from pipe segments filled with dynamite—in a workroom in the palace. The place was littered with open boxes of explosives and to Barea’s horror the miners insisted on smoking there, tossing their spent cigarette ends onto the floor. When he pointed out the danger, Contreras just nodded glumly. “Nobody will ever persuade them that they’re crazy, because they’ve been handling dynamite all their lives,” he said. Barea’s proposal cheered him, though; and he was glad to authorize it. Shortly afterward, Barea left the palace with the necessary papers in his pocket—and half an hour later the palace workroom blew up.

Things didn’t go much better for Barea and Fausto. The factory where they proposed to start grenade production was in the old medieval capital of Toledo, perched on a rock over the Tajo River forty-five miles away. The city had been in government hands since the outbreak of the war but a garrison of rebel soldiers had managed to hold out in the Alcázar, the fortified palace on the city’s heights; they had taken about a hundred hostages into the building with them and the fortress was now under siege. The atmosphere in the city was understandably tense; and the workers at the munitions factory were suspicious. Although they were all set up to produce screws and pins and other external parts of the grenade Fausto had designed, they explained that they couldn’t manufacture the explosive charge itself because their explosives expert was unavailable. Actually, he was dead—executed. By them. He’d refused to give them the makings of rifle cartridges; so they’d appropriated his stock of dynamite and simply packed the loose gunpowder into the barrels of the rifles they were making. They were astonished when the rifles exploded when they were fired. “It was sabotage,” they said; “so we had to shoot him.” Fausto and Barea just looked at each other and left.

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Fausto said, as they got into their official car to drive back to Madrid. “We’re going to lose the war if this is a symbol.” The road was crowded with military vehicles, and militiamen and women, as well as a handful of photographers, were clustered in the main square, watching as soldiers and Assault Guards vainly peppered the massive stone walls of the Alcázar with rifle fire. Barea and Fausto threaded their way through the bystanders until they came to the bridge over the Tajo, where they had to pull over to let a garbage truck go by. It was one of the vehicles used to take the bodies of the executed to the cemetery, and Barea held his breath as the driver hit a pothole that banged the truck’s rear doors open. The hold, thankfully, was empty.