Beautiful Exiles Read online

  Farther down the road, Madrid rose up at the horizon, framed by great clouds of smoke and dust from exploding shells.

  The streets of Madrid, when we reached them, were a maze of bomb craters and dug-up-paving-stone roadblocks, yellow trams scurrying about, camouflaged trucks and cars full of soldiers, and slogans plastered everywhere: “EVACUAD. Confiad vuestra familia a la REPUBLICA” and “¡¡MADRES !! Proteger vuestros hijos.”

  “Evacuate. Protect your families. Help us to victory,” Ted translated for me.

  Franco had vowed to destroy the city rather than cede it, and he’d spent much of the fall firebombing it section by section with the help of German planes.

  We carried on, inhaling the dust of the day’s shelling and the improbable smell from the coffee roasters’ carts as we passed rubble-filled courtyards, apartments from which outside walls had been stripped by bombs so that the bedrooms and dining rooms and kitchens were visible, and children gathering firewood from the ruins. When we passed a circle of brick in front of the city hall, Ted explained that it had been built to protect the fountain of Cibeles.

  “The great mother goddess, riding a chariot pulled by lions,” Sidney elaborated dismissively. “Anyone who knows anything about Madrid knows it’s the city’s most important symbol.”

  I decided by the time we arrived at the Hotel Florida—a terrific marble thing, ten stories of opulence across the Plaza de Callao from a sandbagged cinema offering Lionel Barrymore in David Copperfield and shops still showing, behind windows latticed with protective tape, furs and French perfume—that I didn’t like Sidney any better than he liked me.

  I did like Ted immensely. As we unloaded the car, he asked when he might see me.

  I answered, “And this such a glamorous place for romance?”

  Ted laughed, a sound that seemed to fend off the enormous dark of the city, the cold, the dread, and even Sidney Franklin’s disapproving glare.

  “In a few hours?” Ted asked. “I’ve got to go to the blood-transfusion unit, but I’ll have reason to hurry now.”

  The Hotel Florida, Madrid, Spain

  MARCH 1937

  A lone concierge minded his stamp collection at the Hotel Florida reception desk, behind a “Take One” box offering a single tired brochure for a hotel in Cuba. Six months of regular shelling from the batteries on Garabitas hill had relieved the hotel of some of its top stones, and the glass atrium above the circling floors was covered with soot, leaving the place feeling abandoned and downright despairing. Still, Hemingway stayed there, and Herb Matthews of the New York Times, Sefton Delmer of the Daily Press.

  “I can give you biggest, most beautiful room at front with view of castillo—seventh century, castillo is—for one dollar,” the concierge offered. “But Señor Hemingway, he say you must have best room, so I give you at back. It is more cost and view is alleyway, but more safe. The shells, they come from this direction,” he said, nodding toward the front.

  The considered wisdom was that unless the Fascists changed their gun positions more dramatically than they likely would, the buildings across the street would block the angle of any shot. Yes, we were awfully close to the front, close enough that the military used the newly built Telefónica skyscraper down the block as a lookout to watch the movement of Franco’s troops. But that was the good news for a journalist.

  We’d find everyone at the Gran Vía restaurant, the concierge said. “It is run by government so you will not expect much.” He suggested if we hurried we’d get there before the next shelling. He took my duffel and led the way to my room. “Third floor, no lift, because not enough electricity.”

  In my room, I unpacked my most prized possession—a new cake of soap—and put it to my nose to inhale the warm honey smell, the jammy, powdery intimacy. I washed the grit of the road from my face, then dried the soap and tucked it into my coat pocket, and I headed off with Sidney Franklin who was really Sidney Frumpkin to join the other journalists in Madrid, while Ted Allan who was really Alan Herman did whatever he was obliged to do.

  Sidney hurried me along the side of the street least likely to take a shell. In a few relatively quiet minutes, we reached a cacophony of clattering silverware and voices rising up from the storage basement that was the Gran Vía. I was glad of the safety of guards demanding our press credentials and, with the threat of shelling, would have paid extra for the restaurant’s added protection of being underground.

  Inside, at a long, dingy wooden table in a long, dingy room, journalists and soldiers, police and prostitutes—“whores de combat,” Hemingway called them when he was in his cups—crowded on plank benches. The place stank of greasy cooked meat (mule or donkey or horse) and the blue haze of cigarette smoke. I didn’t need to light a cigarette; I could just inhale.

  Hemingway was his usual outsized self, dirtier than ever in a torn shirt, filthy trousers, and a beret, his voice booming out some memory of the day’s shelling that left you imagining he might have barehanded one of those incoming shells and tossed it back. I stood watching him, wondering how a man who was such a pig in his personal habits could be so elegant with words. He wasn’t precisely sober, I didn’t think.

  When he noticed me, he adjusted his round wire rims as if not quite sure of what he saw, and he stood and grinned, his expression warm and welcoming. He was a big lug, but a lovable one.

  I went to him and pulled off his beret. “Manners, Hemingway!”

  “I knew you’d get here, Daughter!” he said, putting a hand on my head like I really was his daughter and he the proud father to claim such a resourceful girl.

  “Did you!” I replied, as gleeful now to be in Madrid as I ever had been to be anywhere.

  “I knew you’d get here, Daughter,” he repeated, “because I fixed it so you could.”

  I smiled the way a girl learns to smile to mask irritation, resisting the urge to fling his filthy beret back in his face. The ride from Valencia may or may not have had a Hemingway finger in it, but the whole lousy journey from St. Louis to Valencia was on my own damned sweat.

  “Did you fix it for me to get here, Ernestino?” I said. “That’s awfully funny, because I sure as hell wasn’t sure I’d get here myself.”

  To the others, who were all watching as I handed his hat back to him and planted a daughterly kiss on his filthy, scruffy cheek, I said, “Which part of this Nesto-arranged adventure do you suppose I enjoyed most? Bludgeoning Collier’s into giving me a letter back in New York? The dreary days I spent begging every functionary in Paris to let me come along to Spain? Of course that was all before I had the pleasure of hiking my sad rumpus over the border in the lousy cold—trying like hell not to get shot—for the luxury of five hundred hours on an unheated train. And to think I might have taken the night train to Toulouse and flown in from there like Ernesto did, and missed all the fun.”

  The men laughed, and if the whores didn’t, it was because they spoke no English, or weren’t very smart, or both. What kind of woman stays in a war zone just to sell herself?

  To the assembled table, Ernest said, “This is Marty Gellhorn, if you don’t know her. A hell of a lot of trouble she is, but everything here is trouble, and most of it doesn’t come with legs like hers.”

  Ernest asked an American airman sitting beside him to slide down one to make room for me, and I sat as Ernest directed, and he slid me his glass of whiskey and called for another for himself and some dinner for me.

  “Sidney,” he said to Sidney Franklin, “why don’t you tell Stooge here how you got into Spain?”

  “The part where I had to remove all my identification and look in the square in Toulouse for men dressed a certain way and giving a signal that I surreptitiously followed to a bus I wasn’t supposed to be on?” Sidney turned to me, and in his face I saw how he must have looked when facing a bull, all that pugnacious fury under the thinnest layer of charm. “We were guided by flashlight signals through a field, in danger of being shot by border guards the whole time.”

&n
bsp; “No, the river bit,” Ernest said.

  “Oh, the fun stuff,” Sidney said. Then to me, “Eighty feet wide, that river was, in the middle of winter, and chin deep and sometimes deeper, which maybe you could swim, but you couldn’t swim and hold your bundle of clothes over your head at the same time.”

  He pulled out his handkerchief and blew his nose again, still suffering from the dangerous border crossing he had made just to be Ernest’s errand boy.

  Ernest, as satisfied as if he’d made Sidney’s journey himself, said to everyone, “As long as there’s a war, you always think perhaps you’ll be killed—so you have nothing to worry about. We’re not dead, so we must write.”

  I took a sip of the sharp booze, wishing it were a nice fresh orangeade but glad to be talking about the writing, or listening about the writing, as the waiters served wine and whiskey and sold contraband cigarettes for fifteen pesetas a pack, lest the smoke of the room grow thin.

  “Living is much harder than dying, and damned if writing isn’t harder than living,” Ernest said as he drained half of his fresh whiskey. Yes, he was drunk. They were all drunk. They were all drinking nearly as much as he was, and addressing him as “Pop,” and talking about Guadalajara thirty miles northeast of Madrid, where the Nationalists held their position against Italian tanks. And all the while the whores stroked the correspondents’ shoulders and their cheeks. Ernest didn’t have a whore; I thought I might write Pauline to tell her so, then thought I shouldn’t. I hadn’t imagined whores dining with journalists until I’d opened the door, and I didn’t suppose Pauline would enjoy imagining it any more than I enjoyed the company.

  A waiter brought me a bit of stinking fish—truly stinking, not just “stinking” in the way I like to say so many things stink. The little pile of mess with it might have been chickpeas. I was hungry, but not that hungry. I was hungry to begin seeing what was here too, but there would be nothing until the morning except bad booze and bad food and whores and Hemingway the myth instead of Hemingway the man. I tolerated the whole scene as long as I could before making excuses and pulling a few coins from my knapsack.

  “No, Daughter,” Ernest said, touching my hand that held the money.

  I looked at him, wondering which Hemingway this gesture came from—but perhaps the man and the myth weren’t as separate as I’d thought them back in Key West. I hoisted my backpack and said, “Thank you, Ernestino,” and kissed him on the forehead, and headed back to the hotel, where I climbed the stairs to my room and took my soap from my pocket, and turned on the tap.

  The Hotel Florida, Madrid, Spain

  MARCH 1937

  I washed up again in cold water. (The hot water ran no more often than the elevator did, but the Florida was the only place in Madrid that had even occasional hot water.) I brushed my hair. I put my things away so the room looked decent, no panties hung to dry from the doorknob, although I was in sorry need of cleaner clothes. When Ted Allan knocked on the door, I called, “Who is it?” as if I might be expecting any number of visitors.

  When I opened the door, he took me in his arms and kissed me, his lips closed at first, and then soft and warm and devastating. Yes, he was definitely the kind who would stick to your guts, but this was Spain, and I was the one who would be doing the leaving, and I’ve always liked men best in foreign places, where I’m not Dr. Gellhorn’s horrid daughter, where people don’t judge or, if they do, I don’t care, the St. Louis rules don’t apply.

  Ted Allan and I talked, and we kissed, and we talked some more.

  “We could get some dinner. Would you like some dinner, Marty?” he asked.

  “A nice dinner with two dozen drunken journalists and their whores,” I said.

  I zipped open my food bag. We chose a tin of green beans and one of tuna, and we ate together with our fingers, feeding each other.

  He said, “God, I love a woman with an appetite.”

  With the tins empty, the last tastes licked from our fingers, we sat side by side with our backs to the pillows, our legs stretched out on the bed so the warmth of his thigh was long against mine as we shared a chocolate bar.

  “Most Spanish hotels need a key to lock the door,” he whispered.

  I kissed the chocolate off his lips and smiled. “No key.”

  He took my head in his hands, his fingers on my hair and on my ears. My brain thought no, my brain thought this was a fellow who could stick to your guts if you weren’t careful, but I was never much for careful. I would rather be dead than careful, that’s the thing.

  I kissed him again, and tucked a finger in the gap between the buttons on his shirt, to a muscled chest without much hair.

  Someone knocked at the door.

  Even as I moved to a more respectable position, calling that it was open, Ernest burst in like he owned the whole damned war-zone hotel, saying, “Stooge, you should—”

  His big brown eyes looked vulnerable, betrayed, as he took in the empty food tins, the chocolate bar wrapper, Ted and I together on the bed.

  “Ernestino,” I said, touching a hand to my lips as if the gesture might hide the crushed red rather than draw attention, thinking if Ted was a man who would stick to your guts if things went bad, Ernest would rip them out and leave them on the street to be trampled. I wasn’t his girl, though, I was just his daughter, his protégée, and he had a wife and two boys in Key West, another wife he’d left behind with another son, and random mistresses scattered about. I wasn’t his girl, and I didn’t want to be. I wanted to learn from him, to talk writing with him, to feel inspired and accomplished. I wanted him to say again how swell my words were, and help me make them as good as they could be. Not like his, exactly, but the best I could make them.

  “Ernest, this is Ted Allan,” I said, rising, and Ted stood too. “He’s—”

  “Sorry to find you just as you’re leaving, kid,” Ernest interrupted.

  “Oh!” Ted said. And then nothing. The poor fellow really was only a kid—a good-looking one with some confidence, and I might have fallen bad for him if he’d stood up to Ernest. But he was just a gypsy-eyed kid, and you couldn’t fault him for wilting in Hemingway’s wide shadow.

  I said, “I’ll catch up with you later, Ted.”

  “Okay. Yeah, sure,” Ted Allan said, and he lit out of there like a teenager caught necking in the back seat of a car. He left only the maw of the open doorway, and me thinking that was my trouble, that I couldn’t love without admiration, and wondering if I’d be happier if I could.

  In the middle of that first night, I woke to the sound of a subway train screaming at my window and the end of the world in my throat. With the boom boom boom of the first shells landing, I bolted—only to find my room locked from the outside. No amount of frantic rattling of the doorknob did any damned good.

  In the quiet thud-groan of another round releasing from the distant guns, the walls were alive with the scraping scattering of rats running for their lives. The maids called to each other somewhere down the hall, like little birds flying away. I pounded on the door and shouted for help, pounded and shouted, pounded and shouted as the boom boom boom continued, the terrifying whiz of shells ever closer. I felt ridiculous, panicked. I couldn’t bear to be seen this way, but I had to be seen, I had to get out.

  Again the scream of the shells. Higher-pitched and sharper. Faster. Nearer. The building trembled as if it might collapse in a smash of stone on stone. Again the pounding and the frantic sound of my own voice as a distant thud started the terror again.

  This time the whirring whistle was surely-crashing-into-my-window close. My brain filled with the granite thunder of shells hitting across the street and at the corner and in front of the hotel, never mind all that crud about the angle protecting us.

  The windowpane juddering. The tinkle of glass breaking somewhere, crystal on stone. My windows were closed, but still the shattered-stone dust rose around me. It stuck in my lousy lungs as I screamed, “Help me, oh, please help!”

  I nearly broke my
fists on the hard wood of the door.

  Finally an eerie silence settled for a longer moment, followed by the pop of animated voices.

  “Hello!” I called out. “Is anyone there? I’m locked in!”

  A voice I’d never heard in my life, a man’s voice from the other side of my door, said, “Hold tight. I’ll get the key.”

  I stood staring at the door, the little sign assuring me I could have my clothes pressed immediately, and warning there would be an additional 10 percent charge for meals delivered to my room. The edge of my hand was red, and the sign no better for my flailing.

  I fumbled for a cigarette and lit it, inhaling deeply despite the dust. A few moments later, I exhaled relief at the merciful metallic tink of someone keying my door.

  I coughed my thanks out into the hallway, to the banister and the lobby three floors below, where people were gathered in a dusty gaggle. I stumbled downstairs to hear the concierge, unharmed in his dusty concierge uniform, say, “It is regrettable, of course,” as if a collar had been sloppily pressed. “Most regrettable that they break the schedule today. But I do assure you, yes, that it was far worse last week.”

  “The schedule?” I said.

  “Before breakfast is the shelling, and before and after the midday and evening meals. Usually there is no more after that.”

  We stood together in the lobby, the war dust already settling on the wicker furniture. Was it over? Beyond the hotel entrance, people stood at the doorways of buildings on the square, poised but hesitant.

  “In any case, we each will die only once,” the concierge said.

  He turned his attention to the maids jabbering excitedly. He hurried up the stairs, and I followed, to see a jagged opening in the wall of a guest room in which the furniture was now kindling. A twisted iron bed frame sat preposterously upright, some new and dreadful art.

  A guest complained that his bathroom had been ruined by a shell fragment, his toiletries gone. It would have been laughable, how intent he was on the tragedy of his toothbrush and shaving things, if one didn’t understand how close to his person they’d been. I pushed back a rush of wanting to return to my own bathroom, to see my bar of soap safely where I had, in my panic, left it behind.