Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (37 page)

“
THE PICTURE WAS BEYOND PRAISE AND SO WAS YOUR ATTITUDE
,” wired Scott Fitzgerald after the screening he saw, at which Hemingway had spoken about
la causa
and the loss of Lukács and Heilbrun. Fitzgerald sensed in his old and now distant friend an attachment to the film project, and to the war in Spain itself, that had “something almost religious about it.” As so often, he saw Hemingway more clearly than Hemingway saw himself.

July 1937: Valencia/Madrid

On July 4, the second International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture—the first had been held in Paris two years previously—convened in Valencia’s Ayuntamiento, the grand town hall on the Plaza de Emilio Castelar. Prime Minister Juan Negrín and Álvarez del Vayo, until recently the foreign minister, gave the welcome speeches, and among the delegates were André Malraux, Stephen Spender, Ilya Ehrenburg, José Bergamín, Anna Seghers, Malcolm Cowley, Pablo Neruda, Tristan Tzara, Alexis Tolstoi, and more—two hundred writers from twenty-six countries. (Ernest Hemingway cabled his regrets from New York, where he was completing work on
The Spanish Earth
; he planned to return to Spain in August and in the meantime sent “comradely greetings.”) Some of the attendees, unable to meet the visa requirements of the non-intervention pact, had entered the country with forged passports or by smugglers’ routes over the Pyrenees; but they had all come together to show their solidarity with the Spanish Republic, to speak out against fascism, and to discuss what the role of a writer should be in these dangerous and difficult times.

Some of them had another purpose, too, although this wasn’t openly advertised: to blacklist André Gide for his “treacherous” book,
Retour de l’U.R.S.S.
, which had dared to point out that all wasn’t perfect in the Workers’ Paradise that was the Soviet Union, and to denounce “Trotskyism,” or any deviation from Stalin’s party line, at a time when some on the left were beginning to ask questions about the purges and show trials that had been taking place in Moscow, not to mention the liquidation of the POUM in Catalonia.

The keynote speech on this touchy question was given by Mikhail Koltsov, who’d returned from Russia, and his meetings with Stalin, in June, and now denounced Gide’s book as “a filthy slander.” He went further:

There are some people who are wondering why we, the Soviet Union, support the vigorous and pitiless measures of our government against traitors, spies, and enemies of the people … why we do not interfere and simply keep quiet about it, not drawing attention to it in the pages of our publications. No, colleagues and comrades, for us this is a matter of honor. The honor of the Soviet writer consists precisely in being at the forefront of the battle against treachery … We support our government because … its hand does not shake when punishing the enemy.

Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, just arrived in Valencia from Valsequillo, circled the hall of the Ayuntamiento with their cameras in hand, Gerda svelte and cool in an embroidered cream blouse and skirt, Capa darker than ever from the Andalusian sun, his hair long again. During a break in the proceedings they struck up a conversation with Elena Garro, the novelist wife of the Mexican writer Octavio Paz, who was entranced equally by Gerda’s musical voice and Capa’s black hair and violet eyes. There were more famous people at the conference, but Capa and Taro were the ones she would remember later—“wrapped in the tragic, romantic aura of adventurers who were young, beautiful, and very much in love.”

Capa left that afternoon for Paris to sell their pictures of the opening ceremony, as well as those from Segovia and Córdoba, and to take the “March of Time” film to Richard de Rochemont; Gerda was staying behind to cover the conference for
Ce Soir
. As he left Capa told Ted Allan, who had come to Valencia on one of his frequent errands, “I leave Gerda in your charge, Teddie. Take good care of her.” He must have noticed that a number of the conference delegates, from the Prussian journalist Bodo Uhse to the French writers Claude Aveline and André Chamson, were already giving her the eye. And Gerda was never one to discourage a little masculine attention.

The conference moved
en masse
to Madrid on July 5—stopping en route, to the discomfiture of some of the conferees, to be fêted and fed in an impoverished village that could ill afford such generosity; in Madrid they were welcomed with a banquet featuring flamenco singers and a recitation by Rafael Alberti of a ballad he’d composed about Franco. The evening broke up when the Nationalists on Garabitas started firing shells over the city and most of the delegates scurried for cover to their hotel. André Chamson, in fact, was so alarmed that he wanted to leave Madrid directly, saying that if he were killed by a bombardment France would have no choice but to declare war on Franco at once. “I am the only one here who
feels
all this!” he proclaimed histrionically.

He was persuaded to stay, however, and the next morning the conference went on as scheduled. The proceedings had a more military tone than the session in Valencia, with a guard of honor stationed at the front of the hall, and a military band playing the “Internationale” and the jaunty Republican anthem, “The Hymn of Riego”—“Soldiers, our country calls us to fight: swear we will give her victory or death!” Unbeknownst to most of the attendees, however, a real military drama was about to take place not twenty miles away.

For days there had been rumors of a new offensive against the Nationalist forces along the Manzanares; trucks were moving troops north and west, and men and matériel were coming in daily from the coast. But though every journalist in the Gran Via basement suspected something was up, nothing could be written about, by order of Rubio Hidalgo and Constancia de la Mora, and suddenly no passes could be issued to sensitive areas to the west of the city. Then, on the morning of July 6, in an attempt to cut off the Nationalist salient protruding into Madrid’s boundaries, government troops attacked the hamlet of Villanueva la Cañada and started moving on the nearby village of Brunete, accompanied by Loyalist bombers. The offensive met fierce resistance, however, and General Miaja gave orders to place artillery behind the infantrymen to
make
them go forward. That afternoon, as the congress delegates were just applauding yet another speech, three government soldiers—in an extraordinary piece of political theater—burst into the conference hall, still wearing their battle helmets. “The town of Brunete,” they announced, “is now in our power.” Then, like Roman centurions displaying an enemy’s trophies, they held aloft two captured Nationalist battle flags on the points of their bayonets, and the crowd went wild.

To Gerda, who’d been snapping photographs in the front row, the appearance of the flags was like a signal. She
had
to get to the front,
had
to get pictures of the action while it was happening, before anyone else had them. Racing out of the auditorium with her colleague,
Ce Soir
’s Marc Ribécourt, and the film critic Léon Moussinac scrambling after her, she tried in vain to get passes and transportation from the censorship: but Barea and Ilsa had their orders from Valencia:
absolutely no journalists at the front.

This didn’t stop Gerda. She commandeered a car, told the chauffeur where to go, talked her way through roadblocks; she was, by now, a familiar figure to the
brigadistas
, who called her
la pequeña rubia
, the little blonde. Ribécourt and Moussinac could only follow where she led. Dodging tanks and trucks, they managed to get to Brunete itself, and Gerda, knowing it was important to document that the village had been won and she had been there to witness it, photographed three government soldiers in front of a doorway bearing an enameled plaque with the village’s name on it. Another of her photographs showed a soldier painting over Falangist graffiti, replacing the beribboned bundle of arrows that was a Nationalist symbol with the hammer and sickle and the words
Viva Rusia
. What a message to send the world, one year into the war!

In the late afternoon they began to make their way back to Madrid along a road now lined with the dead and wounded. Toward sunset they came upon a column of French, Belgian, and Italian volunteers who invited them to share their rations, and—when it came time for them to drive on—serenaded them with the “Internationale.” Gerda joined in, raising her voice in song and her clenched fist to the sky,
la causa
’s own Marianne. Moussinac, watching, found his eyes wet with tears.

Over the next two days—except for a junket to Guadalajara, where she photographed the culture defenders gawking at the battle site and touring ruined villages with the ever-present Hans Kahle—Gerda virtually ignored the congress. The real story, for her, was in the parched brown hills west of Madrid, where the Loyalist armies were trying to hold the ground they had gained and press forward; and to get to the front she hijacked congress cars and brought along any of her admirers who dared go with her, braving the heat and dust and danger—even briefly breaching enemy lines when one bewildered chauffeur didn’t know where he was going and drove them into Nationalist territory. Gone were the high heels and the tailored skirt she’d worn in Valencia; she was in her combat uniform of khaki overalls and
alpargatas
, her cameras around her neck, dust in her hair. And she came back with pictures no one else had, pictures whose dynamism—learned perhaps in her film work over the past few months—set them apart from the elegant but sometimes stagy photographs she’d made up to now. On July 8, Jay Allen, Capa’s Bilbao acquaintance who was now in Madrid, came into the basement canteen at the Gran Via and saw her sitting in the corner with Ribécourt, Georges Soria, and other French correspondents.
Look
, someone said with awe,
that’s Gerda Taro.
Allen, a renowned journalist himself, was too shy to approach her. “She had become legend to me already” is how he put it.

July 9 was the last day of the Madrid portion of the congress, and the delegates were moving on to Barcelona; but Gerda didn’t want to go with them. A year ago she might have been inspired by the speeches and by scenes like the presentation of the captured battle flags, but she’d gone beyond such pageantry now. She had seen too much death and destruction, felt too personally the stakes Spain was fighting for. She wired her editors at
Ce Soir
and asked to be taken off the conference coverage and assigned to Brunete instead. She was a war correspondent, and she needed to cover the
battle
—not (as Stephen Spender had described it) “a circus of intellectuals.”

But the offensive stalled; the Loyalists needed to regroup, bring up supplies and reinforcements; and Gerda seized the opportunity to make a flying visit to Paris and celebrate July 14, Bastille Day, with Capa.

*   *   *

Barea and Ilsa weren’t sorry to see the congress delegates go;
a lot of posturing intellectuals, using Madrid as a backdrop for arguments about the politics of André Gide
, Barea grumbled. They had enough to do dealing with the correspondents who wanted to send out real news, not just official bulletins about the fighting at Brunete, and were resorting to oddly worded “personal” telegrams about sick aunts and travel plans that were obviously coded reports of what they’d been able to find out. It was like the bad old days of November: Why couldn’t the press cover the truth? Finally, Barea went directly to the war secretary, Indalecio Prieto, who had come to Madrid to be close to operations, and begged him to lift the prohibitions on journalists’ copy. Grudgingly, Prieto agreed. But by then the Nationalists had brought up reinforcements and were fighting fiercely back, and caught in the middle of the field of fire, Brunete—where Barea had spent his childhood summers in his aunt and uncle’s big whitewashed house—was being pounded to ruins.

Every day the Messerschmitts and Chatos flew over Madrid on their way to drop bombs on the battlefield; the smoke and the dust clouds from the fighting could be seen in the city, and in his bunker in the Palacio de Santa Cruz, where the Foreign Ministry was, Barea could hear the din of battle, like summer thunder. Finally he could hold off no longer, and climbed the stairway to the westernmost of the Palacio’s towers. In the distance, over the dun-colored
meseta
, hovered a dark, almost biblical cloud from which a column of smoke rose into the hot bright sky. In the magic lantern of his memory flashed images of Brunete, its pond and its dry plowed fields, and of himself as a boy, walking between his uncles down the hard, dusty street. His stomach turned and he tasted bile at the back of his throat. Brunete’s unforgiving soil was where his roots were—“the roots of my blood and my rebellion,” he would say—and the war was turning it into a wasteland.

That night, when the car had taken him to the broadcasting station on the Calle de Alcalá, he sat before the microphone to read what he had written about Brunete, and he wept.

July 1937: Paris

Coming out of the Gare d’Austerlitz into the cool gray evening drizzle, Gerda found that the copies of
Ce Soir
in the news kiosks around the Place Valhubert were full of her pictures of Brunete.
Ce Soir
had been featuring her all week, in fact: her very first Brunete photos on the eighth, as well as images from the Writers’ Congress on the ninth and the eleventh. At the studio on the rue Froidevaux there was more good news: Capa’s photograph of the falling militiaman had been reprinted as the sole accompaniment to an editorial in
Life
magazine marking the first anniversary of Franco’s uprising: “DEATH IN SPAIN: THE CIVIL WAR HAS TAKEN 500,000 LIVES IN ONE YEAR”; her stills of the Granjuela reenactment would be in
Ce Soir
(presented as a real-life attack on an unnamed village), and
Regards
—which had already given her photos of the Valencia bombing victims a prominent spread—would be including her photos and Capa’s in its own anniversary issue, due to appear on Bastille Day. What a contrast to their situation a year ago! Then they had been poor and unknown, refugees ekeing out an existence on the margins; now they had become the person they had invented, the famous international photographer—no,
two
famous international photographers, each with a name to conjure with. Even Gerda’s anxieties about her family appeared on their way to a solution: they had applied for clearance to emigrate from Yugoslavia, where they were living with her mother’s parents, to Palestine.