Love and Ruin

  “You have your rooms sorted yet?” Ernest asked as we went inside the Florida.

  I shook my head.

  “Sidney’s next to me. I have two rooms on the third floor toward the back. It’s safer there, but harder to breathe. All the dust drifts that way and hangs there. I don’t know why.”

  We stood at the desk and waited for the concierge to see about me, and Sidney made noises about needing to arrange all the parcels and supplies. In one corner, the tired-looking porter leaned against a tired-looking wicker sofa, as if they each needed the other desperately. A potted palm listed in another corner, its leaves painted with white powder that was clearly ceiling plaster and not simple dust. Madrid had been under fire for five months. Nowhere, I guessed, was there simple dust.

  By the time I had a key in my hand, I was nearly falling down from exhaustion.

  The lift had recently been damaged by shelling, Ernest informed us, so I told the men good night and hoisted myself up four flights of steps, to the floor above Ernest and Sidney, then down a long carpeted hallway to my simple room. I had a bed and a bureau and a radiator and a small bathroom, the kind where you have to fold yourself up into a handkerchief to properly wash. Near my bureau, a single lamp threw murky gray shadows. I took one look at myself in the mirror, pronounced myself a spook, and went to bed without washing my face.

  The blanket was woolen but too thin, and I had been cold for days. I drew it all the way up to my nose and lay listening to the muffled repeat of machine-gun fire. The front line was a mile away, Ernest had said? I tried to imagine what the trenches looked like from film reels I’d seen, but somehow could only picture the six beautiful Spaniards I’d met heading to Barcelona, lying huddled together on a broken earthen floor. And that wasn’t a good direction at all for my thinking.

  I curled my knees into my chest and wished I had something strong to drink. It was strange to be here, in a besieged city, where people were trying to kill one another and not get killed themselves. In the corner, the radiator clanked on, startling me, while in the distance, artillery fire came soft and stuttered. I felt too many things, and all at once, and wondered how I would ever sleep.

  12

  There were other, safer hotels in Madrid, I would soon learn, but most of the foreigners found their way to the Florida—American journalists and French photographers, German filmmakers and British aviators. There were prostitutes, too—curvy or thin, young or old, some with long braids down their back, some with blond streaks through jet black that made me think they’d watched too many American movies.

  “The whores de combat,” Ernest told me the next day as we made our way through the lobby and out onto the Gran Vía, crossing the Plaza del Callao in cold sunshine. It was midmorning and I had slept for twelve hours. Only now was the fog beginning to lift. Meanwhile Ernest strode comfortably beside me, swinging his arms, skirting piles of rubble and broken glass. I didn’t know how he was so at ease, unless this was the kind of world he felt most comfortable in. Unless disaster suited him perfectly.

  Here and there, work crews were sweeping up the chaos and trundling it off in wheelbarrows. Other crews were laying fresh concrete to fill the holes. I looked up at a ruined apartment building as we passed, the whole structure sagging, windows exploded out. “Where have all these people gone?”

  “Elsewhere in the city, or in the parks like gypsies. Some have fled, of course, but most refuse to leave.”

  “That’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “I think so. Though I don’t like to imagine what can happen to them here. I try very hard not to, actually.”

  A tram passed us, running right along the side of the boulevard, right past the barricades and ruined squares.

  “You can take it all the way to the front. Isn’t that the damnedest thing?”

  I told him I’d never seen anything like it, though that was true of anything and everything in Madrid.

  Soon we came to the Telefónica Building. It was thirteen stories high and white, or what passed for white in that blighted district, rising up bravely from the bones of decimated houses and cafés, all concrete and steel, more modern than anything nearby. We passed into a courtyard, where an armed guard took our credentials, then went down into the building, into the cellar where the censorship office was located. Inside, a wiry Spaniard greeted us.

  “Arturo Barea, this is Marty Gellhorn. Be nice to her, will you? She’s a friend of mine, and she’s writing for Collier’s.”

  “She is too beautiful to be a journalist. And too beautiful to be with you,” he barked as he laughed.

  I took his hand, which was warm. “I don’t know about all that.”

  “Welcome to Madrid.”

  Arturo’s partner, Ilsa Kulcsar, came into the room then, and Ernest took something from his jacket pocket, holding it out in his palm. It was an orange.

  “He never forgets me, this one,” Ilsa said. She was Austrian and young and very pretty, with a thick accent and a warm smile that made me feel instantly at ease.

  “This is where you’ll post any dispatches,” Ernest explained. “There are two lines, one to London and one to Paris. Censorship is strict here. These two will check every word you write, and they do the work of ten,” he went on. “Their energy is astounding.”

  Arturo shrugged good-naturedly. “Who else will do it? The war does not stop because anyone is tired.” He sat down on top of one of the two desks in the room and lit an American cigarette, telling us that the price had now gone up to fifteen pesetas a pack on the black market. The week before it had been ten.

  I reached into my satchel and gave him a pack of my own. The smile he gave me was everything.

  “That’s the fastest way to his heart, you know,” Ilsa said.

  “That and beautiful hair,” Arturo said. “Yours is gold like a cloud. Are you sure you’re a writer?”

  “Not at all sure, actually. If my hair is a cloud, I can assure you it’s a filthy one. There’s no shampoo in the hotel.”

  “At least there’s hot water,” Ilsa said. “Think of that.”

  We stayed for a while, talking about a message that had just come over the wire. A heavy concentration of Italian troops was currently north of Madrid and moving at a speed of twenty kilometers a day.

  “That isn’t what I would call good news,” Arturo said. “But at least I have fine cigarettes.”

  “I want to be just like Arturo when I grow up,” I told Ernest as we left.

  He laughed. “You want to be a bantamweight Spaniard? And deprive the world of those legs?”

  “Stop teasing me. He seems to have such a good, rich heart, even in the midst of all this.”

  “They all seem to have that, these people. It’s something about being connected to each day as it comes. You should see all this during fiesta sometime. Spain knows how to be alive like no other country.”

  “It’s even more of a shame, then, that all this is happening.”

  “I’m hoping the film can make some sort of difference.”

  “With the ambulances, you mean?”

  “More than that. If we do it right, then whoever watches back in the States will know how it really is here, and then they’ll have to help. A whole world can shift that way. From telling the truth.”

  “You sound like a writer,” I said gently.

  “Oh, brother,” he said. “Don’t get me started.”

  We had come back to the Gran Vía. On one side of the boulevard the great plane trees climbed, the branches still bare and almost sculptural, awaiting spring. Beneath the trees, a long stone wall stretched for many blocks, and was full of shell holes. Everyone seemed to be walking on that side of the street, though there was less obvious destruction on the other side. I stopped for a moment, thinking about this, about habits and what it meant to feel safe, even when you weren’t. “I wish yo
u hadn’t told him about Collier’s,” I said. “I haven’t proven myself yet.”

  “That’s only semantics.”

  “Do you really think so? I can’t tell you what it means to have you in my corner.”

  “You don’t have to tell me. We’re the same that way. Maybe in other ways, too, I’m thinking.”

  I glanced at him to see if he was teasing me somehow, but he only walked on, swinging those arms, true as an arrow.

  * * *

  —

  When we got back to the hotel, Sid had cooked up piles of breakfast—fried ham and slabs of dense bread browned in lard, and real coffee, not the instant crystals I had in my room. We fell to eating in happy silence, and then Ernest yawned and said he needed to try to do some writing or he’d fall asleep and waste the rest of the day.

  I decided to explore a little on my own, taking the Baedeker with me because Ernest insisted I should. He also suggested I stick to the main thoroughfares.

  “What should I do if there’s shelling?”

  “Duck into a doorway, preferably a stone one. You should be all right, though. Mostly they shell at night.”

  “How will I know?” I asked.

  “It’s a high whistling scream that turns your insides into jelly.”

  “You certainly know how to reassure a girl.”

  “I can’t imagine you’d have gotten this far if you were the needy type.”

  “Maybe not.” I stood a little taller, pocketing the Baedeker, and then emptied my cup, thanking Sidney for the breakfast.

  I stopped in my room and grabbed my windbreaker, and then went down through the lobby, which was nearly empty. At the open front door, a small well-dressed Spaniard stood with a newspaper tucked under his arm. He glanced at his watch and then looked out at the street again.

  “I thought I heard sniper fire a few moments ago,” he said to me.

  “Are you sure?”

  “No. It could have been something else.” He looked at his watch again while I waited beside him. Anything was out there, beyond the door, a sniper, a high whistling shell, a grenade, a death. But the door was also only the slimmest idea of protection, and the lobby, too. No one was ever safe anywhere, not really. I stood a moment longer, thinking all this and wanting to be brave, or at least moving somewhere, pretending to be. The man wasn’t going to budge anytime soon; that was clear. Finally I excused myself and wished him a good day. Then I stepped around him and out into the street.

  13

  There were plenty of first-rate correspondents in Madrid, and other writers who came through briefly, wanting to be part of what was going on. Some of them were famous already and some would be much later, and some never would be. They all had something to say, and I wanted to listen.

  In the evenings, we would gather at the Hotel Gran Vía for some ghastly food and then retreat to Chicote’s, the best of several cramped bars in that area of Madrid. Sometimes we went to Gaylord’s instead, or Tom Delmer’s room, which was one of the largest at the Florida. He wrote for the Daily Express and kept a cache of good whiskey and also chocolate in a little blue tin he must have brought from home. I wasn’t sure I liked him. He had thick rounded shoulders and a high laugh that could sound like a hyena’s. When he had too much to drink, his face went deep red, too. But I liked his chocolate and the Beethoven he often played on his phonograph.

  Ginny Cowles wrote for Hearst, which was sympathetic to the Nationalist side, but no one faulted her for that. She was only doing her job. Just before Mussolini had invaded Abyssinia, she’d interviewed him and written smartly and objectively, which was a feat in itself. She often came to sit near me when we were in Delmer’s room, the gold bangles on her wrist clinking musically as she passed her glass from hand to hand.

  I felt closest to her and to Ernest, and to Herb Matthews, who wrote for the Times. He was tall and slender everywhere, and wore gray flannels and nice shirts that he kept fresh looking somehow when Ernest’s always looked like he’d slept in his. Matthews was also intelligent and serious in a way that you felt every time he said anything. I liked him more all the time, and also felt lucky to know him, to be thrown together like this, even for a few weeks or months.

  One night, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry came and drank with us. He’d flown into Spain in his own plane, which I couldn’t even imagine as I watched him sitting sideways on Delmer’s bed. He wore a peacock-blue dressing gown belted over silk pajamas and leather slippers that looked exotic enough to have come from Morocco or Dar es Salaam.

  “What do you think of this country?” Saint-Ex asked Tom as he lit two cigarettes simultaneously, one for himself and one for Ginny.

  “I think it’s in the middle of the most enormous change of any country on earth.”

  Saint-Ex nodded three times quickly while waving his match. “They seem to be fighting for the truth.”

  “And paying dearly,” Matthews added.

  “Freedom has only ever been paid for with lives,” Tom said. “It’s always the same story. We just happen to have a front-row seat this time.”

  “I’m not sure it’s the same. Something feels very new to me,” Ginny said.

  “Think of the people who’ve come to fight and possibly die for Spain from all over the world,” Ernest added, leaning forward. “Forty thousand volunteers, I heard, and it’s not their freedom at stake, it’s all freedom.”

  “The courage is beautiful,” I said. “But do you think these boys really know what they’re doing?”

  “Sacrificing themselves?” Matthews asked.

  “We have to think they do,” Ernest said.

  Tom passed a carton of cigarettes around. I’d been smoking too much already, but took another anyway. The smoking and the talking and the whiskey were all part of the fabric of the evening, the way time slid forward. I had never been a great drinker, but I was learning to hold my own in this crowd, mostly out of self-preservation. So when the bottle came around again, I took more of that, too.

  “You seem quiet tonight,” Ernest said at one point, coming to sit next to me in the cretonne-covered chair Ginny had just vacated. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Just how happy I am to be here. That seems silly to say, I guess. But I’ve been wanting something to care about for a long time, something larger than myself. It makes me afraid to go home again.”

  “You’re not leaving soon, are you?”

  “I don’t want to leave at all. I told you I was being silly.”

  “I think I understand what you mean. Everything is clearer here. I’ve been in a kind of fog for the last few years. This new novel I’m on is fine, but it’s not costing me enough. It’s not doing anything new.”

  “Is that why you came? To be jolted toward a different kind of book?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe I’m just hoping to remember who I am and what brings me alive.”

  It still surprised me that we could talk so openly this way, about substantial things. Ernest listened to me with his brown eyes half closed, as if he had all the time in the world, and didn’t want to be anywhere else. It was a wonderful feeling, that what I said mattered. I thought that it would take very little for me to tell him anything, possibly everything.

  “Sometimes I wish I weren’t so young,” I told him.

  “It’s a fine thing to be young. When I was your age I was a father with one marriage behind me and all the awful feelings still inside me from hurting other people.”

  I thought he must have meant his first wife, the marriage that had ended before Pauline, but didn’t want to pry. “Sometimes hurting others can’t be helped,” I offered.

  “That’s what we tell ourselves, isn’t it?” The slimmest shadow passed over his expression. “See this scar here?” He pointed to a shiny, jagged shape above his right eye. “I walked into a skylight in Paris when things were about as dar
k for me as they ever were.”

  I only nodded, waiting for him to go on.

  “I think Freud might say I wanted to hurt myself.”

  “Did you?” It was a hard question to ask, but I wanted to know if he was willing to share such a thing.

  “I can’t say for sure, but it makes sense, I guess. That I felt too rotten not to show it somehow. In a physical way, I mean. To break through to the hurting place.”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer him. It was terrible, the kind of pain he was talking about. I looked at the scar again, silvery white as a fish just below the surface, and then made an effort to be lighter. To be kind. “I don’t know much about Freud. Do you talk to him often?”

  He squinted and smiled a little. “Only when it can’t be helped.”

  * * *

  —

  It was past midnight when the party finally broke up that night. In my room, I washed my face, changed into cotton pajamas, and collapsed into bed. I was asleep in moments and don’t expect I even moved until sometime in the middle of the night, when a squadron of Junker planes flew over the hotel.

  The motors sounded like the end of the world. The room shook with a juddering I felt in my chest. I sat up fast, my head swimming with panic, and bolted from my bed. Then I froze. Did they have bombs, I wondered, and if so how many? Should I hide in the bathroom, or under my bed? Whatever the rules were, I hadn’t learned them yet.

  A quick hard knock came at my door. I nearly jumped out of my skin, but it was Ernest. He had his trench coat over his pajamas, and his feet were bare. “Are you okay?”

  “I think so.” We stood there for a moment, listening. The sound of the motors seemed to hover, as if the planes weren’t moving at all, though I knew that was impossible. “What are they going to do?”

  “Maybe nothing,” he said. “Why don’t we have a drink?”

  “I’ve already had too much.”

  “It might help anyway.” He crossed to my bureau where I kept a bottle and poured a few fingers for each of us into water glasses.