Love and Ruin

  I went to the edge of my bed and took the glass he offered as he sat down beside me. But I only held it in my hand. The growling of the bombers was finally beginning to dim a little, but other sounds were starting up from University City, the carong of rifle fire in bouncing volleys, and then a series of short metallic bursts. The hand that wasn’t holding my glass began to flutter in my lap. I tucked it under one leg.

  “It’s okay to be afraid,” he said. The curtains were open. Moonlight pushed in through the windows and made small pools along the wooden planks of the floor. But Ernest’s face was mostly in shadow as he said, very quietly, “Do you want me to stay?”

  “Oh.” He’d caught me off guard. Somehow I hadn’t let myself think this could happen, though he was very much a man, and I was a woman. I had kept him high above all that in my mind, where he was my hero and also my teacher, my friend. I tried to think of what else to say, but it was all too thin. “I’ll be fine. Thanks for worrying about me.”

  “Maybe I’m worried about me is the thing.”

  Even in the darkness, I had a hard time meeting his eyes. The sounds from the front went on, as alarming as ever, but there was also a strange stillness as he reached to draw his hand through my hair, pushing it to one side and exposing the base of my neck above the rumpled collar of my pajamas. In a moment, before I could begin to catch up, he was kissing me there, lightly as a moth might touch down, and with incredible tenderness.

  “Ernest.” I pulled back. My heart was making a terrible racket. I had no idea what to say or do.

  He leaned to kiss me again, and the pressure of his mouth on mine drowned out every other thought. I put my hands against his chest, fully meaning to push him away, but then gripped the cotton fabric instead, urging him closer. His tongue moved between my teeth and he breathed, warm and slow, an exhalation that seemed to go on and on.

  “Ernest,” I said again. “What are we doing?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care.”

  Before I could respond, the building convulsed, and I was bounced to the floor hard. The hotel must have taken a direct mortar hit. Everything quaked, the ceiling raining plaster. Ernest helped me up, and then we both raced to the door and threw it open. Door after door spilled bodies into the hall. We all looked at one another, wondering where we should run or hide. At least three Spanish prostitutes appeared and stood blinking as if disoriented. When Sidney Franklin came out, he was with a woman I’d never seen before. Her sweater was on backward, her hair rumpled with sleep. I knew I looked as guilty as she did in that moment. I felt Sid looking at me with a question in his eyes, but it was easy to avoid it in the chaos.

  Suddenly, Saint-Ex appeared in his beautiful dressing gown, like some sort of mirage. The attack seemed to be over, and he offered coffee. Ernest and I followed a small group of friends and stragglers to his room. But as we all sat, talking, waiting for the coffee to boil and wondering aloud if the hotel would be a real target now, or if tonight’s barrage was an accident, I felt exposed in more than one way. I didn’t think I could bear it.

  Standing awkwardly, I was careful not to glance at Ernest. “I’m going back to bed. Good night, everyone.”

  “Be safe,” Ginny said.

  “Take this,” Saint-Ex said, and handed me a heavy pink grapefruit from a wooden crate, his private store.

  I thanked him and moved out into the hall, carrying the grapefruit in front of me, as if it were some sort of offering or sacrifice to foreign gods. Plaster dust was strewn everywhere, like a speckling of fine snow. There were thick cracks along the wall on both sides, and a tipped-over table. And a broken lamp. Inside, I was in disarray, too. I wasn’t sure what might have happened with Ernest if the hit hadn’t come, but I had felt myself tumbling faster than I thought possible away from my own good sense and resolve. He was my friend, and that meant the world to me. He did, just as he was. And anyway, hadn’t I learned my lesson with married men?

  With a lingering unease, I went into my dark room and closed the door behind me, sliding shut the bolt.

  14

  The next morning I woke to a pale, still dawn, everything quiet as quiet could be. It was cold in my room, the radiator having turned to stone sometime in the night. I could smell good coffee wafting up the staircase from the third floor, and also the sharp fatty salt smell of ham and eggs frying on Sidney Franklin’s magic hot plate. But as dizzyingly wonderful as the odors were, I didn’t want to turn up at their place, not today.

  I reached for the slacks I’d draped over the back of a chair and a linen shirt from the bureau and my wool jacket. Then I went downstairs thinking of the café across the street, even though that meant a day-old roll and bitter coffee crystals and perhaps an orange.

  The week before, in the middle of a morning quiet as this one, three men had been at the window of the café when it exploded inward. Now there was thick brown paper and cardboard taped over the shell hole. Inside, the rubble had been cleared and the blood scrubbed; when I stepped near that place, I stopped for a moment, remembering for them. They’d had wives and children, probably, rituals and small pleasures, and a future that had been wrenched away. That’s what you could never wash clean or get back.

  I decided to take my breakfast with me, not stopping until I came to the Plaza Mayor, where I sat at the base of one of the grand lampposts, and watched the pigeons settle and scatter and settle again in some rhythm only they understood. The shoeblacks were setting up their stations around the square, avoiding the places where there were new shell holes in the cobblestones. I studied them awhile and drank my coffee, feeling a headache squeeze at my temples and the base of my skull. I couldn’t shake Ernest from my thoughts. The memory of his hands in my hair, the smell of his skin rising between us, prickled and unsettled me. Almost nothing had happened, and already it was too much. What would I say when we next spoke? What would he want from me? Did I want things from him, things I was ashamed to admit to myself?

  There were no answers, not that I wanted to face. Pushing all these thoughts away with force, I stood and crossed the square. I’d arranged to meet Ginny Cowles at the Palace Hotel, which had been converted into a military hospital. The façade still looked like old Madrid, creamy and grand as a tiered wedding cake. Once inside the doors, though, I was immediately hit with the high sharp biting smell of ether, and beneath that, a murkier and more complex one of human illness and blood and suffering.

  Ginny was waiting for me near the concierge desk in a slim black wool coat and good gold jewelry and the high heels she favored. In truth she looked dressed more for the Upper East Side than for any part of this besieged city, but I liked her, and I was grateful that she’d offered to introduce me to the doctors and show me around so I might come back again on my own.

  “That was some party last night,” she said as I walked up.

  “Did you sleep at all?”

  “Not really, but I never sleep much. There’s always too much to think about.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “Even without the shelling.”

  Beyond the foyer with its neat wicker furniture and nesting tables was the hotel’s old reading room, which had been transformed into an operating theater. There were sheets pinned up to form partitions and more sheets draped everywhere to give the general impression of sterility. Ordinary dining tables were now surgical tables. Cut-glass chandeliers stood in for operating lamps, crystal bulbs replaced with harsh brilliant ones. Along the wall, all the books had vanished from the shelves, changed out for bandages and penicillin and contraband peroxide.

  Ginny introduced me to one of the surgeons, explaining that I was an American writer, and that I wanted to know as much as possible about the conditions here. The surgeon was Catalonian, middle aged and reserved, with a sad mouth and very black delicately curved eyebrows.

  “It is difficult to do my work here,” he said, “but so much
more difficult in the field. My colleagues at the front in Teruel, or Jarama, Brihuega, they have everything to deal with and also the weather. And no such luxuries as we have here.” He pointed above him at the bastardized chandelier which was suddenly—I could see it, too—a small miracle.

  “What was your training?” I asked him through Ginny. “From before?”

  “Before…? Before I was a foot doctor. Now I am all things and none of them quite enough.”

  He led us to a recovery ward on the sixth floor, where blood-mottled stretchers lay stacked like cordwood in the halls. The rooms were full of the wounded, four or six cots squeezed into small but clean spaces. Sunlight spilled in through the tall sash windows, tumbling onto the floor and resting in the corners, but bringing very little warmth.

  One of the men was a wiry bearded Russian pilot. His plane had been shot out of the sky and he’d burned with it before being rescued. Rescued wasn’t quite the word, though, I thought, taking in his hands and arms and scalp, the flesh transformed to leathery knots and ridges that gave him so much pain he couldn’t sleep without paralyzing doses of morphine. Looking at him made me want to weep—but you couldn’t weep for all of them. Or could you?

  Another man, a Canadian infantryman—Fisher was his name—had one leg up to the hip in plaster and was using his time to write letters home for everyone else in the ward. He was practicing penmanship with his left hand, since his right had been taken above the elbow. He had a round face and a thatch of coarse reddish hair that made him look tufted and also rather magnificent.

  “You two should be movie stars,” he said to us, looking up from his letters. “I’m not kidding.”

  “Where were you wounded?” I asked.

  “Right up the street…University City. Isn’t that the damnedest thing?”

  “Were you trained here, too?”

  “Trained? That’s not what anyone would call it. We were holed up for a week in a small farming village after I arrived, mostly freezing to death and eating burro meat. Ever try it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, make sure you don’t. It’s pure rubber and tastes like your granny’s shoe.”

  He smiled, twisting his lips at one corner, and then told us how one day a convoy from the International Brigades had rolled into the training base, scooped hundreds of men up, and taken them out onto the plains west of Madrid and taught them to fire Remington bolt-action rifles against the steep side of a quarry. “I fired three times, or maybe five times. I’d never held a gun before. Then they said enough, we couldn’t waste the ammunition, and back in the trucks we went.”

  “And they sent you into battle that way?” I looked back and forth between his face and Ginny’s and the Catalonian doctor’s, but no one was incredulous or even surprised except me. “Aren’t you angry?”

  “What good would that do? Besides, I volunteered. I knew I could get my head blown off over here. That was a very real possibility.”

  “Why did you come?”

  “Same as everyone else, I suppose. ’Cause I was too furious and too excited to do anything else. I’d just gotten my diploma from McGill, but I couldn’t think what good it was going to do me if the world went to hell. You know? It’s Spain’s turn now, that’s what I was thinking, but anyone’s turn next if we don’t stop Franco.”

  “I believe that, too. But it’s hard to die for ideas, isn’t it?”

  “It’s hard to die any way.” Color had risen to his face. The pen in his left hand twitched. “At least our ideas are the right ones.”

  * * *

  —

  Ginny and I toured several of the other rooms. In one, a boy with a massive caved-in sort of head wound was sketching another boy’s portrait with careful, tender strokes. In another, a French soldier whose stomach had been blasted open, his entire abdomen wrapped in layers upon layers of gauze, showed us a branch of mimosa a pretty Hungarian nurse had brought him. He held one of the blooms, pink and feathered and silky. Stroking it with one thumb, he told us how there was a tree in Marseille that dropped flowers like this, sticky as honey as they decomposed on the road near his childhood home.

  “Will you be going home soon?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” He blinked several times, as if this might help him see the future. “If I recover, I’ve promised to stay and fight. But I’m not sure I believe in wars anymore. They only make ghosts and they don’t change anything.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say, and then praised the beauty of his mimosa, which was all I could praise just then. “I hope you do make it home to your tree again, and to your family.”

  A short while later, Ginny and I stood outside in the cold bright April sunshine. My thoughts were still whirling, but Ginny seemed detached and coolheaded, somehow, as if she’d seen all I had, but then set it down immediately, the way you would any thorny burden. I hadn’t learned how to manage that, if I ever would. I wanted to ask how long it had taken her to grow such a thick skin, and if sad, impossible things still slipped through sometimes, and what she did then. But we weren’t friends like that, at least not yet.

  We said goodbye, and then she walked off at a clipped pace to some other appointment or to meet a secret source or contact, or to type up that day’s story. Something important, that much was obvious.

  I wanted to be of consequence in this war, too, but didn’t yet see a clear path. I had come to write, but there were journalists literally everywhere, and everyone more experienced than I was. In one sense, it felt important merely to be here, to witness everything without turning away, and to write it all down. But then what? Would I really be bold enough to send an article to Collier’s if I managed to finish one? How could I break out of this pack of writers covering the same battles and tragedies when I wasn’t sure I had anything to add that hadn’t been said many times before?

  In my room later, I sat thinking as the light faded, a volume of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience in my lap, cold tea on the table nearby. At some point, my eyes fell closed. It must have been past midnight when I woke again. My room was bathed in total darkness, and there were tentative footsteps in the hall just outside my door. Then I heard a knock. A whispered voice came. “Gellhorn. You up?”

  I went rigid.

  “Gellhorn, it’s me. Open up. We should talk.”

  I was afraid to make even the slightest sound, and closed my eyes, listening.

  “Marty,” the voice hissed again.

  After a few more agonizing moments, I heard Ernest’s steps retreating. Only then did I dare to breathe. Rolling to the wall, I placed my hand on it flat, feeling the surging and siphoning of water moving through the pipes as through the arteries of a body.

  Sometimes I thought I could almost reach into the different rooms this way, where the others slept curled on their sides or stared at the pages of a magazine, or drank alone in the dark. The hotel was a kind of honeycomb, in my mind, and we were all connected. That was one of the most surprising things about coming to Spain. That I was finding my sort of people, perhaps for the first time. That I belonged.

  And then there was all the rest of it, too, how noble this revolution was, and how crucial, quite possibly one of the most important moments my generation would know. And I was here for it, incredibly enough. I couldn’t let myself ruin this experience, not when I was so close to figuring everything out. What mattered to me, and what I wanted out of life, and who I really was, deep down.

  Spain was a chance to find my voice as well as my compass. Tumbling into anyone’s arms would be a grave mistake now, but being with Ernest would be riskier still. I couldn’t lose this lovely bridge of friendship and understanding between us, not when it was so new. Not for sex alone. I also couldn’t begin to imagine anything like an actual relationship with such a man. He was like a film star here. When he said anything, ev
eryone leaned nearer. His scribbled-off dispatches, almost unintelligible if you didn’t know what you were looking at, earned him five hundred dollars each. I had fifty dollars to my name and no idea if I had the talent to earn more.

  I turned over onto my back again and looked up into the swirling dark of the ceiling. Ernest would have reached his room by now, and was sitting on the edge of his bed, perhaps, removing his shoes. Perhaps reaching for his flask, baffled, or merely tired, ready to be done with women and the trouble they caused.

  I didn’t want to cause trouble; I only knew what I knew. That Ernest could eclipse me, large as any sun, without even trying. That he was too famous, too far along in his own career, too sure of what he wanted. He was also too married, too dug into the life he’d built in Key West. Too driven, too dazzling.

  Too Hemingway.

  15

  “We’re going to have to run for it,” Ernest said. We had come to an exposed part of the street, twenty-five yards or so between the cover of ruined buildings in a neighborhood gutted by bombing. “Snipers like this spot. Two or three people die here every day.”

  I only nodded, a live fluttering at my throat, while he straightened his hunter’s cap. His body pitched forward, bent at the waist so sharply I thought he might fall, but he didn’t. When he reached the other side, he motioned for me to follow, just as he’d done, and though I wondered if I could even make my legs move, as wobbly as they were, I plunged forward.

  As I came to the safety of the wall and crouched behind it, my pulse in my ears, I was euphoric. I could see he felt it, too—a sensation that was less like whistling past the graveyard than dancing furiously atop your own tombstone. Energy rippled between us. This was as close as we’d been since the night in my room, and that was here between us, hooked into the electricity and risk as we set off again.