Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War (12 page)

The other correspondents, meanwhile, were converging on Barea’s office in the Telefónica with stories reporting the rebel advance, and the failure of the Alcázar attack; and Barea was torn between his duty, his conscience, and his feelings. He knew what was happening and believed it was futile to deny it: on the road between Toledo and Madrid he’d seen the fleeing villagers and retreating
milicianos
, the ditches full of discarded weapons, equipment, blankets, clothing; he’d heard the sounds of rebel bombardment. But in their daily conferences Rubio continued to insist that no news be approved that didn’t parrot the official line:
the Alcázar will surely fall tomorrow, the rebel troops have been stopped in their tracks, a few
milicianos
have stampeded, but all is well.
And the correspondents, who also knew what was going on, were so certain the rebels were winning, and so eager to find sensational details to confirm it, that Barea perversely found himself hating them, hating their cynicism, the way they treated his country’s fight to the death as just another story. Alone in his blackout-shaded room—his colleague Perea, unable to stand the stress, had quit in panic—he slashed through their copy in a fury; and when one of the journalists, a snotty young Frenchman from
Le Petit Parisien
, tried to sneak an uncut dispatch through, Barea lost his temper.
I’ll have you arrested
, he shouted, waving his newly issued Star Modelo A pistol in the man’s face. The correspondent rewrote the story—just. The transmitted version led with the words: “A certain mystery persists on the subject of Toledo.”

Denials, however, could only go so far. On September 26, making a detour from its advance on the capital, Franco’s army cut the main Madrid–Toledo road; by the next evening the rebels had entered Toledo’s medieval gates. They took no prisoners—even pregnant women were loaded onto trucks at the maternity hospital to be driven to the cemetery and shot—and the cobbled main street that ran downhill to the city gates flowed with blood. For the Nationalist forces, this was a major symbolic victory: Toledo, the religious capital of Spain, had been the first important Muslim-occupied city to be captured by the forces of Their Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella during the Reconquest of Spain in the fifteenth century, and by taking it from the Republican government Franco was equating himself with the Catholic heroes of the medieval struggle against the infidel.

To underscore the point, the day after his troops entered the city, the general staged a reenactment of its “liberation” for the benefit of newsreel cameras, a gesture that undercut the grumblings of those who thought he should have pushed on to take Madrid and let the Loyalists abandon Toledo themselves. And on the last day of September, the rebels proclaimed Francisco Franco Bahamonde supreme commander of all the Nationalist armies, and—although the elected Republican government, inconveniently, still survived—
caudillo
, or head of government, of the Spanish state.

September 1936: L Bar T Ranch, Wyoming

In the three summers that he’d been hunting and fishing at the L Bar T, the Wyoming dude ranch owned by Lawrence and Olive Nordquist, Ernest Hemingway had never bagged a grizzly bear; but this year, he vowed, would be different. One of his new fishing buddies from Bimini, a wealthy young sportsman named Tom Shevlin, had come out to L Bar T with his wife, Lorraine, and to show them a good time, and maybe display his own prowess, Hemingway planned to take the couple grizzly-hunting. “I want to shoot one in the belly to see if I can make him come,” he wrote to Arnold Gingrich. So on September 10, to guarantee some sport for the new guests, the ranch’s owner, Lawrence Nordquist, killed a couple of mules and set out their carcasses to ripen on the slopes above the ranch, where they’d bring the bears to the hunters’ guns.

While the would-be grizzly-slayers waited for the baits to acquire the requisite attractive pong, Hemingway busied himself with his novel. He’d written more than thirty thousand words since arriving at the ranch, despite taking time off for a couple of fishing and hunting expeditions, and he was pleased with the results—so pleased, in fact, that he offered to let Tom Shevlin have a look at the manuscript. Although he didn’t say so, it was important to Hemingway that Shevlin like what he read.

Because just a few weeks ago the ranch mailbag had delivered a surprise: the August 10 issue of
Time
magazine, with a cover story devoted to Hemingway’s sometime friend, the writer John Dos Passos. Since their first meeting in a regimental mess hall in Italy during the Great War, the two men had argued over the future of fiction in Paris cafés, partied at the Gerald Murphys’ at Antibes, skiied in the Vorarlberg, gone to the bullfights in Pamplona, and fished in the Caribbean; and in their relationship, Dos (as everybody called him) had always been the beta male to Hemingway’s alpha. Shy, balding, nearsighted, with a rheumatic heart, Dos Passos was the illegitimate son of a distinguished Portuguese-American lawyer: he’d spent his childhood in European spas and hotels, not fishing camps in northern Michigan; he’d been educated at Choate and Harvard, not Oak Park High School and the newsroom of the
Kansas City Star
(Hemingway had declined to apply to college); and he’d married Hemingway’s boyhood girlfriend, Katy Smith, after Hemingway introduced them in Key West.

For years their friendship had been held in balance by Hemingway’s success and Dos’s admiration; but lately, as Dos Passos had labored on the third installment of an epic trio of novels about social and political upheavals in twentieth-century America, that balance had shifted imperceptibly. The first two volumes of the trilogy garnered admiring reviews, although they still didn’t sell well, and Hemingway’s
amour propre
was unsettled. He sneered when “poor Dos,” who needed the money, wrote a screenplay for Marlene Dietrich, and he complained that a man who had defended Sacco and Vanzetti and supported striking Kentucky coal miners shouldn’t be “living on a yacht in the Mediterranean while he attacks the capitalist system.” That the yacht belonged to their mutual friends the Murphys, and that Dos Passos was there recuperating from a serious bout of rheumatic fever, made no difference to Hemingway. And as he often did when he had some private score to settle with someone, he put Dos Passos into the novel he was writing—as a sexually impotent phony-radical novelist named Richard Gordon who lives off loans from his wealthy friends.

Now Dos was squinting out at him from the cover of
Time
, wearing a macho open-necked shirt and drawing deeply on a little cigar; and inside the magazine was an article, occasioned by the publication of
The Big Money
, the last novel in Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, calling the whole sequence “one of the most ambitious projects that any U.S. novelist has undertaken” and saying that to find its equal “one must look abroad, to Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
, to Balzac’s
Comédie Humaine
, to James Joyce’s
Ulysses
.” For someone with Hemingway’s overdeveloped sense of competition, this was a barb guaranteed to go straight to the heart. Damn it,
he
was the one who was supposed to write a new
War and Peace
; not poor, awkward, myopic Dos.

So the stakes were high when he gave his work-in-progress to Tom Shevlin to read; and unfortunately Shevlin wasn’t impressed by what he saw. He liked the parts about the rumrunner Harry Morgan all right, he said, but not the portrait of the pseudo-
engagé
writer Richard Gordon, the character based on Dos Passos. And although he was hesitant to say so directly, Shevlin hinted that the disparate strands of the novel made for “lousy” reading. When he heard this, Hemingway erupted in a fury: grabbing the manuscript from Shevlin’s hands, he chucked it out the window of the cabin into a patch of early snow, and for three days neither man spoke to the other.

But then the baits ripened, and Hemingway apologized for his outburst, and the Shevlins and the Hemingways rode their horses up to a camp near the timberline to find grizzlies. It was chilly, early fall on the mountain, and the days were drawing in. Late in the afternoon they arrived, Hemingway and Lorraine Shevlin were investigating one of the baited carcasses when three bears, attracted by the smell of meat, trotted out of the forest, their coats shining in the setting sun. As the largest bear approached the bait Hemingway stood up out of cover to shoot, and the bear, surprised, also reared up, its forepaws outstretched, claws extended. It was a magnificent and terrifying sight. Aiming his Springfield rifle at the bear’s chest, Hemingway fired; the grizzly fell to the ground, wounded, as the other two bears turned and ran for cover. Hemingway went after them and killed one, then returned and finished off the first bear with a shot to the neck. He was exhilarated—and seemed only a little disappointed when Shevlin killed another bear, bigger than either of Hemingway’s, two days later.

After the hunting party returned to the L Bar T, Hemingway wrote to both Maxwell Perkins and his old friend from Paris days, the poet Archibald MacLeish, to boast about the expedition; and by then he’d arranged the facts more comfortably. He’d been up on the mountain, he wrote, and just “ran into” the grizzlies while looking for elk. He’d shot two of them—he could have killed all three, he told Perkins, if he hadn’t been deterred by how beautiful they were. Shevlin had bagged a third one two days later, he added; but, he said dismissively, using the same wording in both letters, the younger man “got his on a bait.”

He’d been working very hard on his book, he reported; and he told Perkins that when he was finished with it he wanted to go to Spain if he wasn’t too late to get in on the action. Which is also what he said when—ignoring whatever bad feelings he’d had over the past months, and neglecting to mention the reception for
The Big Money
—he wrote a cheery letter to Dos Passos to say he was three-quarters finished with his new novel, and planned on going to Spain as soon as he was done, as long as there was still fighting. If not, they would have each missed the best novelistic material there ever was—material they, or at least he, was uniquely equipped to handle. But he doubted the war would be over that quickly, because the Spaniards, and the Moors, could really fight. If the battle was carried to Madrid, he hoped they’d spare the pictures in the Prado and elsewhere—though he didn’t care about the buildings themselves. “Anything looks better after being shelled,” he quipped.

October 1936: Madrid/Cartagena/Moscow

On October 13 Barea heard enemy guns for the first time.

The rebel commander General Emilio Mola had announced that he would be drinking coffee on the Gran Via on the twelfth, and he seemed only a little behind schedule. His troops were pressing ever closer to Madrid, while rebel planes continued to bomb it. The city swarmed with refugees: on the broad tree-lined avenues of Castellana and Recoletos, where the wealthy had lived in spacious stone
palacios
, they slept outdoors and did their cooking on open fires; the lucky ones were given quarters in deserted private houses where they camped with their dogs and goats in formerly grand salons hung with tattered tapestries.

The government had imposed a strict curfew and no one was permitted on the streets after eleven o’clock at night. Barea, who had to work into the small hours to censor reports going out to night desks at newspapers the world over, found himself confined to the Telefónica. He sent food, when he could get it, and money to Aurelia and the children, but going home was out of the question. Occasionally Maria called, pestering him for a rendezvous, and he found himself unable even to be civil to her on the telephone. His world had narrowed to one purple-shrouded cone of light in the censors’ office; soon, he felt, the darkness would engulf it altogether. Yet still the journalists came to him with their copy every night, trying to find ways to tell the truth of what they saw and heard on the streets; and still, despite the nagging feeling that it was wrong to do so, he had to cut that copy to order, until it was just a bloodless recital of old military news.

Under the circumstances, then, it was just as well that neither he nor the reporters knew about the coded cable that had arrived at the Soviet embassy on October 12. Marked “Absolutely Secret” and ostensibly sent by Nicolai Yezhov, people’s commissar for internal affairs and overseer of the NKVD in Moscow, to General Alexander Orlov, the recently appointed NKVD station chief in Madrid, the cable was in fact signed “Ivan Vasilievich”—the code name of General Secretary Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin himself. And it ordered Orlov to make immediate and covert arrangements to ship to Russia all of Spain’s most valuable treasure, her gold and silver reserves, which were the fourth largest in the world: a huge store of ingots, Louis d’or, dollars, sovereigns, and other coins that had been accumulating since the days of the
conquistadores
and had hitherto been the guarantee of the nation’s currency.

Until a few weeks ago this hoard had lain undisturbed in moated vaults under the Banco de España on the Paseo del Prado—vaults that were designed to flood in the event of a robbery. But a far greater danger than mere robbers had now appeared in the form of the rebel armies that were drawing ever closer to Madrid; and in mid-September the government had decided to move the reserves to a safer, more defensible place. The coins and ingots were crated and transported by truck to Cartagena, on the Mediterranean coast in Murcia, where they were hidden in the caves that the Spanish Navy used to store munitions; but this was only a temporary stopgap. For there were threats to the treasure’s security not only from the Nationalist insurgents but also from the anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti, who (it was feared) wanted to hijack it and take it to Barcelona.

The likeliest refuges would have appeared to be France or Britain; and indeed, some withdrawals from the reserves had been sent to France around the time of the insurrection in July. But both of these countries, for different reasons, seemed to have turned their backs on the Republic in the name of nonintervention. What if they decided that letting the Spanish government draw on its own gold reserves was as much off-limits as selling it arms? Meanwhile, as every day brought another insurgent victory, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were sending money, men, and matériel to the Nationalists—motivated not just by ideological kinship, but by Hitler’s belief that a Spanish war distracted the world’s attention from his own rearmament and gave him a laboratory to test its products, and by Mussolini’s desire for a stage on which he might be seen as an important actor.