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.“Listen, Old Timer,” Hemingway told him heartily, “you’re going to be fine.You’ll be a lot of good, you know.You can talk on the radio.”“Maybe,” said Raven.As Hemingway rose to go, he asked, “You’ll be back?”“Absolutely,” Hemingway assured him, and perhaps even meant it.For with his soft voice and his ravaged face, the Pittsburgh social worker had suddenly brought the war close in a way that even the shells slamming into the Hotel Florida had not done.“It still isn’t you that gets hit,” Hemingway would write later that day, in a kind of twentieth-century iteration of John Donne’s famous meditation beginning “No man is an island”—“but it is your countryman now.”April 1937: MadridIn the weeks after Guadalajara, Barea thought, the atmosphere in Madrid had begun to change.There were still artillery barrages, and bombings, and the correspondents still queued anxiously for the two long-distance phone lines if something important seemed to be brewing; but suddenly there were more correspondents, some of them barely more than day-trippers popping in with a prewritten story they wanted to file in the Telefónica just to get the now-coveted Madrid dateline, others coming as if on a pilgrimage to a shrine.Spain was still news, and now it seemed safe to cover it; nobody was talking about “the fall of Madrid” anymore.Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the debonair French writer-aviator, came to write a series of articles on the war for Paris-Soir.Virginia Cowles, a darkly glamorous, well-connected twenty-seven-year-old who (she herself admitted) “had no qualifications for a war correspondent except curiosity” arrived—with “three wool dresses and a fur jacket”—to cover both sides of the conflict for the Hearst newspapers in the United States.The decidedly unglamorous Iowa novelist Josephine Herbst, armed with little more than her Communist sympathies and some vague letters of interest from magazines, wanted to cover what was happening to the man—or the woman—on the street.The swashbuckling Hollywood actor Errol Flynn, star of Captain Blood and The Charge of the Light Brigade, appeared on some kind of vague fact-finding trip.And of course now there was Hemingway, who blew in to the Telefónica press room one day with a beautifully groomed blonde on his arm.“That’s Marty—be nice to her,” Hemingway said.“She writes for Collier’s—you know, a million circulation.” Or maybe, thought Barea, dazed by Martha Gellhorn’s aura, it was half a million, or two million—the numbers were unimaginable.The new correspondents, along with the aid workers and off-duty International Brigaders, made a kind of expatriate colony that drifted from watering hole to watering hole along the Gran Via and the Calle de Alcalá—from the Miami Bar, with its collection of American jazz records and its frescoed murals of Bright Young Things disporting themselves on the beach, to the Café Molineros, or the Aquarium, or Chicote’s, Hemingway’s favorite, where an American girl who worked in the press office performed a striptease she called “The Widow of General Mola,” and an inebriated miliciano got himself shot dead for spraying guests with a Flit gun filled with lavender water.“We were a jokey bunch,” Martha would recall later.Barea and Ilsa, however, didn’t join in any of these hijinks.Perhaps the jokes didn’t seem very funny to either of them.Instead, Barea took Ilsa back to his old neighborhood, to the narrow lanes of Lavapiés and Serafín’s bar on Calle Ave Maria, past the streets and squares he’d known as a boy and a young man, the landmarks of his life.Aurelia had agreed to a divorce and he had filed the papers necessary to begin the process; a future with Ilsa now seemed not only possible but attainable, and he wanted to share with her not only his present but his past.He pointed out where his mother had laundered shirts in the Manzanares, or where he had waited for the stagecoach to take him to Brunete to stay with his father’s family, and Ilsa’s curiosity and enjoyment nourished him.Under her eager gaze he became a storyteller, weaving a tale of another Madrid, as different from the one they traversed—or from the one in Hemingway’s dispatches—as Goya’s pictures were from Capa’s.And for the first time, but not the last, Barea knew what it was to have an audience hang on his every word.* * *Although she’d originally thought this trip was going to be a great adventure, Martha was having a hard time in Madrid.To begin with there was the noise: the rifles and machine guns that yammered all night in metallic bursts—tacrong, crong, cararong, as Hemingway, who liked sound effects, put it; the shells; the loudspeakers on the Casa de Campo through which each side bombarded the other with music (“Kitten on the Keys” was a bipartisan favorite) and propaganda.She was cold at night, despite hot-water bottles and an electric heater that blew the fuses at the Florida; hungry all the time or disgusted by what food was available (“horrible” was a frequent note in her diary); and disdainful of most of the people she met.George Seldes and his wife were “unpleasant,” Koltsov’s mistress, the German journalist Maria Osten, “ominous,” Ehrenburg and Georges Soria self-important, Errol Flynn both “dumb” and a “shit,” Virginia Cowles (for coming to Madrid with only high-heeled shoes) frivolous, and Josie Herbst—an old friend of Hemingway’s, to make matters worse—was “ugly and vulgar and has a voice like scratching one’s fingernail on a blackboard.”Finally, despite their shared quarters and pet names—he called her “Mookie” as well as “Rabbit” and “Daughter,” she called him “Scrooby” (for “screwball”) or “Bug” or “Rabby”—Martha was confused and ambivalent about her relationship with Hemingway.She’d run off to Spain to be with him, but he was hardly ever around [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]