Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (45 page)

Well, she
did
have a husband named Leopold Kulcsar, Ilsa said, but she was separated from him, and the last time she’d heard, he was in Prague; if he was in Barcelona the only way she was going there was if Barea went with her. And who was
he
? the agents wanted to know. Barea went back in the house, produced his own papers; the two strangers looked them over, then decided they might as well take him as well. Maybe he should be arrested, too. They gave Barea and Ilsa only enough time to pack a small suitcase before shoving them into the black car parked outside.

“Don’t worry so much,” Ilsa said, as they bumped off down the dirt track toward the highway. It was just some stupid misunderstanding, she went on; Poldi would soon set it right. She seemed ready to treat the whole thing like an outing. But Barea, sitting silently beside her, knew better. He put his hand in his coat pocket to feel for the gun his friend Agustín had given him as a parting present when they left Madrid. For he’d looked at the papers the agents had handed him, even if Ilsa hadn’t. They were stamped SIM, Servicio de Información Militar.

December 1937: The North Atlantic

During the night of December 19 two ships, going in opposite directions, passed each other in the dark waters of the North Atlantic. One was the
Normandie
, the French Line’s luxury flagship, which had sailed from Le Havre the day before, its first-class cabins filled with celebrity passengers, including the film star Charles Boyer and the composer Richard Rodgers. Also on board were Joris Ivens and Martha Gellhorn. Martha had traveled to Paris in early December with Rubio Hidalgo, who had filled her full of political gossip; and on her arrival she’d got a royalty check from
The Trouble I’ve Seen
, which she promptly endorsed over to Hemingway to cover her share of expenses for the past few months—happy, as she wrote to him in a note, that “this book, which is the best thing I ever wrote, paid for Spain, which is the best thing I ever did.” She’d booked passage on the
Aquitania
, which was to sail on December 15, so she could be home in St. Louis in plenty of time for Christmas; but she’d had to make new, more expensive, and less satisfactory arrangements when Ivens, her intended traveling companion, didn’t turn up in Paris on time.

Ivens had been in Europe trying to raise money for a new film about the Sino-Japanese War that had all the earmarks of a Willi Münzenberg propaganda project. Originally, while Mao Tse-tung’s Communists were still fighting with Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang, it had been planned as a celebration of Communist achievements in rural China, but as Japan encroached ever farther into the country and the Communists and Kuomintang closed ranks, the Party had decreed that the film’s theme would be Chinese unity against Japanese aggression. And although Ivens had intended to go back to Spain and was initially unhappy about what he called a “sudden change in assignment,” he’d thrown himself into fund-raising and preproduction, forming a new American production company, History Today, that excluded John Dos Passos, whom he now considered an “enemy.” When contributions were slow to materialize he’d gone to Europe, where he also met with Münzenberg to talk about the film’s content; and he’d made a flying visit to Amsterdam, where he participated in a shadowy Party “cleansing action”—a purge of “people who were once good friends,” which he said was “hard work.” It was these murky doings that had made him late for his rendezvous with Martha.

Did they talk about them as they tramped around on the
Normandie
’s deck or sat in each other’s cabin, with Martha acting as “Joris’s secretary again,” as she’d done in
Spanish Earth
days? Did they brainstorm about fund-raising or writing a treatment for the Chinese film, or strategize how Ivens might preemptively strike at his “enemy” Dos Passos? Whatever they discussed, Martha was fully aware of, even complicit in, Ivens’s Party commitments. Writing to Hemingway from the boat, she urged him not to encourage their friend Gustav Regler, still convalescing from his wounds, to embark on anything so ambitious as a U.S. speaking tour. Ivens believed it would be a mistake, she reported, and if Hemingway wanted “the good old Party” to forbid it, he should wire Ivens. “Yes, Hem,” Ivens scribbled in the margin of Martha’s note, and added a precautionary comment: “You must
not
have any connection with his … political appearances in public.” Was he worried that association with the political commissar wouldn’t go down well with Hemingway’s American contacts? Ivens had sent his own letter to Hemingway: he regretted not being able to see his friend before he left Europe, because there were “many things that cannot be written” that they needed to talk over—among them the growing internal friction in the Loyalist government. “Prieto is trying to make a deal with the republicans,” he said, “and Negrín with us [i.e., the Communists] … With us he knows he has the help of a great country.” If Hem needed guidance, Maurice Thorez and Marcel Cachin, two Communist founders of the French Popular Front, would give him “the right inside picture.” And, he promised Hemingway, “one thing is good, that you … will be in an action on the front now.”

As the
Normandie
steamed westward, carrying Ivens and Martha to New York, the Hapag Lloyd Line’s ship
Europa
, twinkling with Christmas lights and garlanded with evergreens, plowed east through heavy seas with Pauline Hemingway aboard. “Very cute and nervy,” as Katy Dos Passos had found her during a visit to the Dosses in Provincetown a month earlier, Pauline had dyed her dark hair blond and let it grow long into a bob like Martha’s, and (she wrote to Sara Murphy from the boat) she was “not stuffing my face, and seeing
nobody
but my masseuse, Mrs. Tiffany, and the Duchess of Westminster.” After spending months ignoring gossip and suppressing suspicion, she’d finally recognized that her husband was in the grip of a powerful obsession, one whose measure she had to take. She would go to him, and they would spend Christmas together in Paris, the city where they had first become lovers. She would patch things up, just as she had after Hemingway’s affair with Jane Mason, and all would go on as before.

She arrived on December 21 to find snow mantling the buildings along the boulevards—but, at the Hotel Elysée Park, no Hemingway. Despite two cables from Barcelona in which he’d assured her he would be with her by the twenty-second, he failed to appear.

December 1937: Teruel

At 7:10 on the morning of December 15, with a blizzard whistling through the passes of the Montes Universales, the Loyalist Army of the Levante launched a surprise attack on Teruel, the bleak walled Aragonese town that Hemingway, Herbert Matthews, and Martha Gellhorn had squinted at through their binoculars in September. The offensive began before sunrise, without preliminary shelling or bombing, which would have softened resistance but would also have tipped off the rebels that something was afoot; as a result, by the end of the day the Loyalists had cut the road from Teruel to Saragossa and were preparing to strike at the town itself.

The Nationalists were caught completely unaware. They hadn’t been planning to swoop down on Valencia during the winter—Hemingway had been right about that—and they
had
been preparing an assault on Guadalajara, and then Madrid, the plans for which were fortuitously betrayed, with days to spare, by a Loyalist spy. By moving so suddenly and swiftly on Teruel, the government hoped to abort the Nationalists’ Guadalajara plans and knock them off their threatening perch before snow closed the mountain passes for the winter. And a victory here—especially after the bitter losses in the north during the summer and autumn—might turn popular opinion abroad and the tide of the war at home. At the very least it might make it possible to negotiate with Franco from a position of strength.

When the news of the offensive reached Hemingway in Barcelona, where he had been on the point of leaving for Christmas in Paris, he was as surprised as the Nationalists. He’d been so sure that the Teruel front would be dead after the first snowfall, so sure that the only action, if it came, would be on the Castilian plain. But no matter where it was happening, it
was
action, and if he moved fast he could at last be a part of it. He turned around and headed for Valencia, from which Teruel was only a few hours’ drive.
You will be in an action on the front now
—that’s what Joris Ivens had promised him, and that’s what he was going to do.

For three days, waiting for the government troops to break through the Nationalist defenses, he, Matthews, and Tom Delmer shuttled back and forth from Valencia to the command post that Colonel Hernández Saravia had established in a railroad train sheltered in a tunnel under the mountains near Teruel. It was bitterly cold—“cold as a steel engraving” was how Hemingway put it: so cold that putting binoculars to your face was an act of masochism; so cold that soldiers froze to death in the front lines, and casualties from frostbite numbered in the thousands. But by December 21, as the three men drove up the Sagunto road in a car with
Ce Soir
’s correspondent Mathieu Corman, a thaw had set in. It was a good day to go into battle.

At Saravia’s dugout the word was that the Loyalist troops would try to fight their way past the Mansueto, Teruel’s heavily fortified natural rock bulwark; and Corman, a good-looking young Belgian who claimed to have contacts in the field command, proposed heading forward with them, so the four correspondents continued on toward Teruel behind a mass of troops and armored cars. Nine kilometers from the town they had to get out and leave the car. They made an odd quartet: the dashing Corman, the tall, schoolmasterish Matthews, the lumbering Delmer, and the unkempt Hemingway, in his shabby tweed jacket and wire-rimmed spectacles. The sun was warm as they walked along, the snow of the past few days had melted, and although the Loyalist artillery was keeping up a constant barrage on the Mansueto they heard no answering gunfire. Then suddenly a khaki-clad wave of Loyalist soldiers surged over the hill on their left, aiming for the Mansueto and shooting as they came.

Hemingway and his companions scrambled up a rise to the right, just behind a line of shallow trenches from which more Loyalists were firing on the Mansueto. Answering machine-gun volleys raked the ridge and the correspondents, who didn’t have the advantage of trench cover, threw themselves flat, pressing their faces close to the earth as bullets struck around them with a whispery
pfft
. Gradually the rebels fell back. One of the Loyalist riflemen was cursing at his weapon, which kept jamming after every shot; and Hemingway, a man who knew his way around a rifle, was happy to show him how to bash the bolt open with a piece of rock.

As the day wore on, the Loyalists pressed forward, the journalists following behind the first wave of the attack, being shot at when the soldiers were shot at, resting when they rested. But it didn’t seem like they were going to make it into Teruel today after all: the December sun was touching the horizon and they were still two kilometers away from the prize. Then two trucks drew up, unloading a squad of
dinamiteros
, their faces and hands grimy, grenades dangling from their belts, who ran down the road toward the front line. Soon the air was full of the sound and smell of explosives, and bursts of flame punctuated the gathering twilight. The phalanx of troops started moving forward again, and an armored car passed the journalists, the driver leaning out, shouting, “You can get up to the Plaza de Toros,” then driving away with a grinding of gears. Hemingway, Delmer, and Matthews—Corman had slipped off on his own—looked at each other in the dusk. Why not? Attaching themselves to two Loyalist officers so they wouldn’t be mistaken for rebel sympathizers and shot by the invaders, they walked unopposed into the outskirts of Teruel.

*   *   *

Capa hadn’t been planning on coming back to a battlefield so soon. With his
Life
deal and the arrangements for
Death in the Making
completed, he’d returned to Paris, and the studio on the rue Froidevaux, in November; and he had started a casual, no-strings affair with a beautiful North African woman who was, according to some of his friends, both a sometime prostitute and bisexual. She teased him and made him laugh, and once she tried to strangle him at a café when he teased her back; but neither of them expected anything from the other. It was better that way.

Before leaving New York he’d agreed to make a short film for the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, a documentary about the committee’s services for children—schools, hospitals, and suchlike—in Spain; and the committee had paid him an advance of $100 and lent him a movie camera for the purpose. Hoping to get some additional photo income, Capa had asked
Ce Soir
to underwrite the trip as well; but it was taking them a long time to decide about it. In the meantime, Joris Ivens, in Paris to raise money for his upcoming China film, made him a proposition. Why didn’t Capa come to China with him and John Ferno? He could take still photos for their movie, and his connection with
Life
would help them get publicity for it. Capa said yes immediately. It was the trip he had meant to make with Gerda, and now he could make it
for
her. He’d learn more about filmmaking, which he was eager to do. And since Ferno, with whom he planned to travel, wasn’t sailing until late January, he would still have time to go to Spain—if
Ce Soir
’s sponsorship, and his papers, came through.

They did, in mid-December. He had a new press card from the Préfecture, for “M. Cappa” of
Ce Soir
, showing his new face: thinner, unsmiling, older; the hair slicked down and brushed to the side the way Gerda had liked it; the eyes, under their black brows, smudged with deep shadows. He had a ticket for Barcelona, too; but as soon as he arrived there and heard that the government had attacked Teruel, he knew where he had to be.