Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (10 page)

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Milling about with the crowd in front of the Alcázar, Gerda and Capa could be forgiven for feeling frustrated. They’d arrived in Madrid at the end of August to find a city girding for war, not celebrating a revolution: a far cry from the “show-off city” Capa had discovered on his first trip only a year ago. They’d taken pictures of cobblestone street barricades, of slogan-plastered cars crammed with waving
milicianos
, of the protective brick cocoon being constructed around the Fountain of Cibeles, the beloved landmark at the junction of the Paseo del Prado and the Calle de Alcalá; and Gerda had gone to the barracks of the recently formed Fifth Regiment, where she photographed a military barber cutting the hair of some of the new recruits. But this was all just background to what they were looking for: real fighting. There was plenty of it in the Guadarrama and at Talavera de la Reina, seventy-six miles southwest of Madrid, where government troops were vainly struggling to hold off the Nationalist army advancing on the capital: the rebels were causing heavy losses for the Loyalists, whose militiamen refused to dig trenches because they thought that was cowardly. But the combat zone had been declared off-limits and the photographers’ passes were no good to them. So they’d doubled back eastward to Toledo, hoping to shoot the breaking of the Alcázar siege, which would be an important symbolic victory for the government. Unfortunately, they learned, it would probably be days, if not weeks, before that happened, because the attackers were waiting for a team of Asturian
dinamiteros
to lay tunnels beneath the ramparts and blow holes in the walls.

It looked like there was nothing for it but to head to the Córdoba front, several days’ journey to the south. The Nationalist rebels had taken control of Córdoba itself at the beginning of the war, but the Loyalist Third Brigade, under the command of General José Miaja, had dug in to the east and north of the city and were planning an assault that would retake it; if Capa and Gerda could arrive in time, perhaps they could at last get the pictures they had come to Spain for. Certainly they hoped so: their money was running out and they couldn’t stay much longer—Gerda, at least, wanted to be back in Paris by the second week in September. Throwing their cameras into their official car, they set off.

September 1936: Paris

Really, it was a strange sort of coincidence—if it
was
a coincidence. Ilse had been hoping to go work for the Spanish government’s war effort, and by doing so to put some distance between herself and Poldi, whose secretiveness and strange moods were making her more and more uncomfortable. But she’d had only vague ideas for how to make this happen: until Poldi told her that for the past several months, using the alias “Maresch,” he had been working as an undercover agent for the Spanish Republic, traveling around Germany and central Europe to find out what kinds of material resources (principally guns, ammunition, and airplanes) the Nazis were sending to the Spanish rebels; and he’d been forwarding this information, or some of it, to his Spanish handler, a Socialist minister named Julio Álvarez del Vayo.

Now Álvarez had been promoted to minister of foreign affairs in a new “Victory Government” headed by another Socialist, Francisco Largo Caballero, and he was handing off control of Poldi to the new ambassador to France, Luís Araquistáin, who would also be in charge of the government’s Arms Purchase Commission in Paris—or would be if the French ever suspended the arms blockade that was denying the government the sort of help the Nationalists were getting from both Italy and Germany. And so, just like that, Poldi and Ilse left Brno for Paris; and Ilse discovered that the Spanish visas and safe-conducts that had seemed almost unattainable to her in Czechoslovakia were not so hard to get after all.

And thank heaven for that, because the situation in Spain seemed increasingly critical. On September 3, after days of bombing and street fighting, the Nationalists had taken the city of Irun, on the Bay of Biscay near the French border, thus cutting off the Loyalist Basque provinces from contact with France; and while the French blockade continued in effect the rebels had just taken delivery of a dozen new warplanes from Germany. The French press was covering it all with gusto, but although the French workers were striking and demonstrating, in huge numbers, in support of the Republic and against the blockade, the people who mattered, the people in France and Britain and the rest of the world who could decide to help Spain’s government defeat the rebels, were hanging back. They needed to be persuaded to commit themselves, which Ilse was sure would happen if they just knew the truth of what was going on; and
this
was something she could help with. She could write for European papers in their own languages—in fact, she had already gotten assignments from some of the Norwegian and Czech papers she’d written for in the past. And since Álvarez del Vayo’s portfolio as foreign minister also included the Propaganda Ministry, he would surely help her with access to stories that needed covering.

There remained, however, the problem of physically getting Ilse to Spain. She didn’t have the money for train fare, still less for an airplane ticket—and she apparently didn’t know her husband was being handsomely paid by the Spanish government for his intelligence work. But then fate intervened in the person of the Stendhalian novelist/adventurer André Malraux, whose résumé included stints as an editor of artistic dirty books (limited editions of Sade’s
Le Bordel de Venise
and
Les amis du crime
), smuggler of Khmer bas-reliefs from Indochina, and anticolonial propagandist. A nervous man with a furrowed brow, dark slicked-down hair, and a cigarette seemingly permanently affixed to the corner of his mouth, Malraux had recently conceived the notion of forming a kind of airborne Foreign Legion, the Escuadrilla España, to aid the Spanish Republic. He’d managed to hire a handful of pilots, most of them out-of-work rumrunners and bushwhackers, and scrounge together some outdated aircraft, mainly Dewoitine D372 fighters and poky Potez 54 bombers, in which he himself occasionally flew as copilot and tail gunner, wearing a uniform designed for him by the couturier Jeanne Lanvin. Although the Escuadrilla was based in Madrid, Malraux continually shuttled between there and Paris, where he came to raise money for more planes. And on one of these trips he found out about Ilse. Perhaps, it was suggested, she would like to fly down to Spain with him?

She would.

September 1936: Madrid

It was one of the many ironies of the war that the headquarters of the Communist Party in Madrid were now located in the Palacio de Liria, the grand residence of the Duke of Alba on the Calle de la Princesa, a place which under normal circumstances Arturo Barea would never have been privileged to visit. But today he had an urgent message from his friend Antonio Mije, whose office was—naturally enough—in Party headquarters; so he presented himself at the Palacio, where he found the formal gardens and their baroque fountains guarded by young militiamen and women, while inside the boiserie-encrusted rooms soldiers were polishing the parquet floors, dusting the stuffed crocodiles and suits of antique armor, and taking inventory of the palace’s collection of Goyas, Titians, and other old masters before packing them away for safekeeping.

Mije had a proposition for him. The inclusion of Communists in the government had given him some patronage power, and he might be able to suggest Barea for a post at the Foreign Ministry—that is, if he had any fluency in English. Although Barea’s other language was French, he could read English well enough, and translate it; so within minutes he was being hustled off to the Foreign Ministry, where a harried young assistant ushered him into the crepuscular office of Luis Rubio Hidalgo, the newly appointed chief of the ministry’s Press and Propaganda Department. Pale, bald as an egg, with a thin mustache on his upper lip and lashless eyes peering from behind round tinted lenses, Rubio sat impassively in the cone of light cast by his solitary desk lamp, his white hands folded in front of him, while Barea described his qualifications. Then he asked Barea if he would like to join the Propaganda Department as a nighttime censor for the foreign press—an important job, since most journalists wrote and wired their stories from Madrid at night in order to catch the morning editions of their newspapers in Europe and America.

The moment the words were out of Rubio’s mouth, Barea knew they were what he’d been waiting weeks to hear. Although he was personally repelled by his prospective chief, the work the man was describing was essential and interesting; unlike his frustrated efforts at the Toledo grenade factory, it might allow him to actually make a difference in the struggle for the Republic’s survival. It involved working with words and writers, something he had always longed to do. And the hours, far from being a disincentive for him, represented an opportunity for him to escape the twin demands of Maria and Aurelia. He accepted the job with alacrity; and broke the news to each of the women, separately, the next day. Aurelia, predictably, was vocally dismayed when he told her:
why did he have to get mixed up in these things?
Maria, on the other hand, was overjoyed: If duty kept Barea out of Aurelia’s bed, wouldn’t this be
her
chance at last? Barea didn’t have the courage to tell her how wrong she was.

That evening, just before midnight, he was driven through the dark, silent streets in a ministry car, pausing at checkpoints while the sentries shone their flashlights at his papers, until he reached the Telefónica, the white New York–style skyscraper that towered fourteen stories over the Gran Via. Built in the late 1920s as the headquarters for the Spanish subsidiary of the International Telephone and Telegraph Company, the Telefónica housed telegraph transmitters and connectors to underwater cables, as well as the main switching terminus of the Spanish telephone system, and was thus the nerve center for communications coming into or out of Spain. ITT technicians still worked in the building, but with the onset of war the Press and Propaganda Department had established an outpost there as well, with a newsroom for correspondents on the fourth floor (along with camp beds for those who had long waits for transmitting their stories) and censorship offices on the fifth.

After handing his credentials to the guard at the security desk in the entrance hall, Barea went up in one of the building’s five clanking elevators to the fifth floor, where he found the censors’ office at the end of a maze of passages. It was a narrow room, lit only by the purplish glow of a single desk lamp around which a sheet of carbon paper had been taped to form an improvised blackout shade. The wax on the paper, heated by the bare bulb, made the room smell like a church.

Barea introduced himself to the other censor on duty, a man named Perea, and they started dividing up their workload. In the first days of the war there had been no foreign-language censors—journalists had to translate their dispatches into Spanish before they could be approved; and the censors themselves were ITT employees with little idea of, and no direction about, what details constituted permissible news and what were breaches of security. Their standards varied wildly and randomly: sometimes a correspondent would send a story to his newspaper with no interference and a colleague, transmitting the same information a few minutes later, would find his report struck through with red pencil; no one was happy. But with the arrival of Rubio Hidalgo, a former journalist himself, things were going to be different: the censors would now be able to read the stories in the language they were written in, and there would be consistent standards for what to approve.

That, at any rate, was the way it was
supposed
to work. In practice, problems persisted. The big agencies—United Press International, Associated Press, Reuters, Havas—had teams of reporters filing almost around the clock; the major foreign newspapers all had their special correspondents; material poured out of them all. And the word from on high, to Barea and Perea, was that nothing,
nothing
should be passed that hinted at anything other than success for the Republican forces. Given what was going on from day to day, this seemed a near-impossibility: the rebels took San Sebastián, the country’s summer capital on the Bay of Biscay, extending their hold over the north; in the south they rolled, seemingly inexorably, toward Málaga; at Madrid’s threshold, they continued to press south from the Guadarrama and east from Talavera de la Reina. And the journalists, who often made daily trips to the front, knew what was happening and wanted to report it.

But when Barea went to the Foreign Ministry for his daily meetings with Rubio, his chief would complain about correspondents sneaking negative stories out in the diplomatic pouches of their embassies, or extremists who threatened him for letting through too much bad news. Not that he was frightened, of course. Opening his desk drawer, he showed Barea the pistol he kept inside it. “Before they get me, I’ll get one of them!” he said. He didn’t seem to be joking. “Take care, and don’t let anything pass!”

September 1936: Córdoba Front

In the first days of September, Robert Capa and Gerda Taro worked their way south from Toledo across the tawny plain of La Mancha, passing white stucco windmills Don Quixote might have battled against, toward the mountains of the Sierra Morena. Sometimes they stopped to stretch their legs and refill their canteens, and Capa snapped pictures of Gerda, in her worker’s coveralls, bending over a mountain stream and grinning flirtatiously back at him, or curled up like a sleepy child with her head resting on a stone boundary marker engraved with the letters
P.C.
—which meant
partido communal
, but which could just as easily stand for “Partido Comunista.” On the Sierra’s northern slopes, in the village of Almadén, they paused to photograph a mercury mine that had once been the property of the Rothschild banking family but had been—like so much else since the beginning of the war—taken over by a workers’ committee. Because mercury was an important element for munitions production the mine was good material for reportage; and the brutalist machinery and heroic laborers, the lead amphorae packed with mercury standing like so many soldiers in regimented lines, provided striking, resonant images for their cameras. But it still wasn’t enough, wasn’t
combat
. So they headed over the mountains, to Andalusia.