Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (19 page)

PART II

“YOU NEVER HEAR THE ONE THAT HITS YOU”

January 1937: Madrid

A lot can change in a month. When Barea left the new capital of Valencia to come back to Madrid in mid-January, it wasn’t as a suspect, renegade temporary appointee of an emergency junta, but as the newly designated and official head of foreign press censorship, with Ilsa as his deputy. He and she—their liaison seemingly stamped with government approval—were to be given quarters in the Hotel Gran Via (no more camp beds in the press office), a raise in pay, and a living allowance; and they were whisked from Valencia in an official car with all safe-conducts and fuel vouchers laid on. Barea was mystified by this alteration in his circumstances; but apparently Rubio Hidalgo, fearful of potential competition from unknown Foreign Ministry appointees, had decided to back the devil he knew, and that was Barea.

Leaving the coast and driving north and west through the suddenly wintry hills, Barea found even the road transformed. The ragtag pickets and patrols that used to stand outside each village had disappeared, to be replaced by uniformed detachments of Assault Guards at the major crossroads; and as they neared Madrid their car passed convoys of trucks and tanks rolling toward the capital. In the Telefónica there were other differences: under Ilsa’s temporary tenure the journalists, and some of the foreign brigades, had begun to treat the censors’ office as a kind of clubhouse where they could exchange information, get letters mailed, and hear gossip, as well as receive hotel assignments, fuel vouchers, and passes for restricted areas of the front. Now, as Barea and Ilsa had dared to hope in the first hours of their meeting, the censorship seemed less an emergency news blackout than a machine for getting out information.

Everywhere, in fact, the impromptu crisis arrangements of the first months of siege had been superseded by more professional organization: instead of a city surprised by war, Madrid had become a city
at
war. The courtyard of the former Finance Ministry had been swept clean of the litter of old loan certificates and economic reports that had been dumped there when the government fled in November; now trucks and Russian tanks and official cars were parked on the paving stones, and in his office in the building’s underground bunker General Miaja, the Defense Junta chief, was less and less involved in the administration of the city because he had been made commander of a reorganized regular army corps charged with attacking the rebels on the city’s northwest front.

The paunchy, red-faced general still sped around Madrid in an armored motorcade, luxuriating in the adulation of the (mostly female) crowd—“
¡Soy la vedette de Madrid!
” (“I’m the star of Madrid!”), he told a visiting President Largo Caballero—but more and more the real power in the city seemed wielded by Vladimir Gorev, the Soviets’ special military attaché and Madrid station chief of the GRU, Russian military intelligence. Forty years old—he was the youngest general in the Red Army—tall, lean, with high cheekbones, thin lips, and pale blue eyes, Gorev took a dim view of the Spanish army’s commanders, and a dimmer one of Largo Caballero. The Loyalist prime minister, complained Gorev in the secret dispatches he sent, under his code name of SANCHO, to the GRU’s directorate, was “playing a complicated and dangerous political game, pandering to the anarchists” to “avoid strengthening the Communists.” If Moscow wanted to defeat the rebels, or just hold them indefinitely at bay, Gorev thought that he and his fellow advisors should break off
official
contact with the Red Army, which would free them to take greater control of the war effort since they wouldn’t be hindered by fear that their foreign military status might “dirty [their] laundry.”

During the time that Barea had been away in Valencia, Gorev had begun to show great interest in the work of the censorship office, and in the unflappable Austrian woman who was in temporary charge of it. He’d started sending for Ilsa in the early hours of the morning, after the correspondents’ dispatches had been vetted and sent; he’d fill his pipe and settle back to talk with her about theories of propaganda, and about certain press coverage of the war in particular. Now that Barea was back in Madrid and in command, he started accompanying her to these late-night sessions, whether he was invited or not, and listening while Ilsa and Gorev talked—mostly in French, for Barea’s benefit, although the general spoke fluent English, the fruit of three years’ residence as an undercover operative in New York. Sometimes the Russian had explicit advice for the two censors, which he expected them to follow even though, strictly speaking, they didn’t work for him; but mostly he seemed to focus less on the content of the dispatches they had passed than on the question of Ilsa’s political allegiance. On the one hand he was puzzled that she’d renounced her Party membership (“I could not live without my Party membership card,” he told her); on the other, he was diverted by her feistiness and lack of orthodoxy. Barea he dismissed as a romantic, not worth bothering about. And Barea, on his side, was unsettled by the general’s watchfulness and air of steely determination.
Not a man to cross
.

He’d have felt more at ease with the general’s former aide José Robles Pazos, a Spaniard who for the past few years had been teaching in America, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The Republican black sheep of a well-connected conservative family, Robles had returned to Spain to offer his services to the Republic when war had broken out, and because he had a reading knowledge of Russian—and both he and the general spoke fluent English—he had seemed a useful temporary interpreter for Gorev, who spoke no Spanish, until an official replacement could be trained and sent from Moscow. Robles was both literate and literary, and before the war he’d been an initiate in the
tertulias
, the writers’ café discussions, around whose fringes Barea had hovered as a starstruck boy; one of his best friends in Spain, in fact, was Barea’s idol, the white-bearded novelist and playwright Ramón del Valle-Inclán. So the two of them would have had much to talk about; but although Robles had been working for Gorev when Barea took over the censorship, he’d been reassigned to Valencia by the time Barea returned to Madrid.

Despite Barea’s vague discomfort about Gorev, not everything was bleak. The Nationalist attempt to cut the Corunna road between Madrid and El Escorial had been halted after much fighting and heavy losses; the resulting standoff outside the city limits felt almost like a victory. Madrid’s continued defiance of the fascist juggernaut seemed to promise an even greater triumph: the Defense Junta had recently plastered the city with a poster that showed Madrid’s symbol, the bear, devouring a swastika over the legend “
El Oso de Madrid Destrozara al Fascismo.
” (“The Madrid Bear Will Destroy Fascism.”) Some journalists who had left Madrid returned: Robert Capa was at the Hotel Florida and prowling the streets with his camera, and Claud Cockburn, a lanky Englishman with long, slightly receding dark hair—who was a cousin of the Catholic and conservative novelist Evelyn Waugh but wrote (as Frank Pitcairn) for London’s
Daily Worker
and for his own scrappy and incisive review,
The Week
—had returned from several months’ service as a private soldier with Commandante Carlos’s Fifth Regiment. The
New York Post
had sent the muckraker George Seldes, who had been thrown out of Italy for speaking out against Mussolini. A new correspondent had come from
The New York Times
: Herbert L. Matthews, a patient, careful reporter with a sure grasp of the stakes in the conflict, which he was already referring to as “the little world war.” And there was a new medium for coverage of the war, an organization Cockburn was working for in addition to his other jobs: a Paris-based press service called Agence Espagne.

Agence Espagne was the brainchild of a multilingual Sudeten German named Otto Katz. A smooth, dark, ingratiating man with multiple aliases, at least as many passports, and an eye for the ladies, Katz was a kind of Paganini of propaganda: someone for whom the truth was simply the departure point for magnificent invention. He claimed to have been Marlene Dietrich’s first husband (though probably he was only one of her numerous lovers in Berlin in the 1920s); he’d been a director of the Soviet film company Mezhrabpom and the principal author of
The Brown Book of Hitler Terror
, a creative exposé of the plots that helped bring Hitler to power; and even Cockburn admitted he fabricated news stories to serve his cause. That cause, currently, was the Loyalist resistance; and with the approval of his boss, the Comintern’s Willi Münzenberg, and the blessing of Álvarez del Vayo, he’d founded the Agence Espagne to disseminate—and report, or if necessary invent—stories that would tell the government’s side of what was going on in Spain. After all, the rebels were issuing exaggerated, often fictitious accounts of “Red” atrocities, illustrated with faked photographs of mutilated bodies, to inflame feelings against the government; why should they have a monopoly on such propaganda?

Katz had worked with Gustav Regler in the Saar and in writing
The Brown Book
, and in the early ’30s, in Paris, he had met with Ilsa’s Vienna associate Kim Philby; if he didn’t know Ilsa already, they certainly had friends in common. Now he’d turned up in Madrid, using the name of André Simone. He was, he said, looking for stories about war-battered Madrid from a Spanish perspective, and he had the idea of asking Ilsa’s Spanish lover, a man who had once had dreams of being a writer, if he could provide them.

The request was enough to stir the nearly dormant embers of Barea’s ambition. Long ago, when the teenaged Barea had dared to speak to his hero Valle-Inclán at the Café Granja in the Calle de Alcalá, the great man had told him not to waste his time trying to gate-crash the
tertulias
; instead, he’d said, the young man should study the best authors and stick to his work, whatever it was; “then you may begin to write, perhaps…” In his prickly boyish diffidence Barea had taken Valle-Inclán’s words for a brush-off; was it possible that they had really been sage advice, advice that was at last bearing fruit? Could his literary aspirations become reality?

Before Barea could feel pleasure in this unexpected turn of events, however, something else unexpected happened: a telephone call came for Ilsa from Paris. It was Leopold Kulcsar, announcing that he was transferring his operations to the Spanish Legation in Prague, where he’d be doing vague “propaganda work” for Spain in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, and demanding to know what Ilsa’s plans were. Was she returning to Paris? Would she be coming with him to Prague?

To her horror, Ilsa realized he must never have received the letter she’d written him, from Valencia, telling him that their marriage was definitively over and that she had fallen in love with someone else; now she had to explain all this to him through the static of a bad connection and in the hearing of her colleagues.
Like something in a novel
, thought the young censor on duty, who didn’t even pretend not to stare. At length she hung up the telephone, pale and shaking. When she could speak at last, she told Barea she would have to fly to Paris to sort things out.

Barea was stricken. Had she only been playacting when she said she loved him? Would Kulcsar win her back in Paris? Would she decide to stay no matter what, somewhere far from the cold and hunger and daily bombardments that were life in Madrid? Would she even make the journey safely? He had no right to beg her to stay, he thought, miserably. No right, even, to worry about her.

She left the next day in a small car, bound for the airfield at Alicante on the coast, where she would get the plane to France. Barea had never felt so alone.

January 1937: Valencia

By the first winter of the Civil War, Valencia—formerly a sleepy if elegant, historic, and cosmopolitan city, the third largest in Spain—had become a kind of caravanserai, its population tripled by refugees, transplanted government officials, hangers-on, and journalists, its palm-shaded streets full of people in uniform, its once-sacrosanct siesta hours superseded by wartime bustle. It was a place where you might meet anybody, at any time of day; where the war, and the business of the war, was on everybody’s lips; and at that moment it must have seemed like a good place for Gerda Taro to be.

She’d returned from Italy for a brief stopover in Paris; now she and Capa were both in Spain again. He’d gone to Madrid, although nothing seemed to be happening there just now, and she’d stayed on in Valencia. One day she sat in the corner of the Hotel Victoria’s lobby—“a nest of newspaper correspondents, governmental agents, spies, munitions salesmen and mystery women,” as an American writer put it—chatting over a glass of wine with the exiled German composer Hanns Eisler, a collaborator of Bertholt Brecht, who’d come to Valencia for a benefit concert in which his songs would be sung both for and by the soldiers of the International Brigades. On a couple of other occasions she met up with Alfred Kantorowicz, another German émigré, who’d been an associate of Gustav Regler and Willi Münzenberg in Paris and now edited the French and German editions of the battlefront newspaper
Volunteer for Liberty
from an office in Valencia. Both Kantorowicz and Eisler were well-traveled, German-speaking, like-minded antifascist intellectuals, and they could give Gerda a sense that she was participating in an enterprise greater than photojournalism, and had an identity beyond that of the unknown half of “Robert Capa.”

For her ingenious creation of this professional persona had succeeded almost too well. “Capa” had indeed become a famous photographer, but that byline was being associated mainly with the man who was her lover and partner; “Gerda Taro” was an also-ran. She told Ruth Cerf that she felt “insulted” by such treatment. And Capa’s most recent reportages, from Madrid, had cemented his reputation as a photographer of risk and action: “He shared the perils and the heroism of the antifascist volunteers,”
Regards
had boasted in their accompanying text. Gerda had photographs on the cover of two magazines this month,
Einheit
and
Unité
, but in each case they were images of children—touching human-interest photos, not visceral combat pictures. If she wanted to take such photographs, though, she’d have to get another camera. The Rollei was too boxy and cumbersome, its presentation too formal. What she really needed, in addition to her own byline, was a Leica. Like Capa’s.