We passed a six-story building that was open to the street, its façade ripped cleanly away. There was something almost vulgar in it, how you could look all the way through to the china cabinets and beds and wing chairs and bathtubs, the furniture of any life rattled apart and suspended. Some of the apartments seemed untouched except for the small matter of having no front wall—like some abandoned life-size dollhouse you could reach into and rearrange to suit yourself. Someone’s home should be a haven, a fixed and unshakable thing—I thought—but this was more proof you couldn’t count on anything but people, and only the right sort. The ones who could be like walls for you once you found them. This was my first war and I didn’t know anything yet, but I knew that.
We were on the Paseo Rosales, once the most elegant address, Madrid’s version of Park Avenue, now a ruin. Above us was the battered apartment building the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens was using to gather footage for his documentary about the war, which by now had a title, The Spanish Earth.
When we climbed the darkened staircase and came out again, we could see over all of the Casa de Campo and the front lines. That’s why Ivens was so excited to have found this spot for shooting. You could see absolutely everything, clear across the broad sweep of the valley to the hills and the stark-looking pine trees, to where the infantry moved across the broken land. Here and there, you could even look right down into pieces of trench, where the men bent over their tommy guns like dust-colored toy soldiers.
Just shy of the balcony, Ivens and his cameraman had created a sort of viewing blind, propping the telephoto lens on a bier of old furniture and crates. The camera was wrapped in rags and ruined curtains, to camouflage it. Any glint of sun off the lens could draw a sniper and give our location away, Ernest explained as we moved toward the back of the apartment.
It was warmer there, out of the wind, though large chunks of the front wall and most of the windows had been blown out. I took off my coat and sat so I could lean against the wall between Ernest and Matthews. Herb handed me a jug of water and we looked out through exploded windows and watched the war, the feeling of safety and distance playing an odd game with my mind. A grenade blew a patch of ground into a cascade of earth and debris. Some of the men fell, bent over by the explosion, and they didn’t get up. I kept watching, willing them to move, but they didn’t.
As ill as the whole thing made me feel, I understood why it was going to be important to the film. You could see the entire shape of the battle from this distance without being swallowed by it. The shifting clouds of smoke and flashes of light. The sudden spoutings of dust as shrapnel rained along the ridge. The way the infantry moved forward by the inch and then pushed back, losing men, and taking men, until it seemed the same action. Maybe it was.
I reached for the notebook in my satchel, suddenly terrified that if I didn’t write everything down that very second, I would lose it all. I felt my hand shake a little with the intensity and noticed Ernest had taken up his notebook as well and was scratching away at it, caught in the same wish to hold time still and make it behave. The world needed to see this, and that’s why we had to see it first. Why we’d come.
* * *
—
“You need another,” Matthews said at Chicote’s that night. The bar was so crowded we had to sit on top of each other or nearly.
“Tell me,” I asked him, “why do you write about war instead of something else?”
“Someone has to. And I guess I believe we can change something. If we do it well enough.”
“If it’s not already too late. I keep thinking that. That this is our one moment to fight for good in the world. It’s now, now, and here. But what if the world stays asleep and won’t see it no matter how loudly we shout?”
He shrugged. “Then God help us all, I guess.”
I handed him my empty glass and he forged off through the wall of bodies. Half a second later, Ernest tumbled into his place and we were crushed together, elbow to elbow, knee to knee, laughter and serious talk to every side of us. I could barely breathe and he was part of it. He would want to talk now, when I only wanted to forget. Actually, I wanted to kiss him again, just once, very hard, and for a long time, because the taste of him had stayed with me, whether or not I could stand to admit it. One more kiss, and then I could begin forgetting.
“You’re avoiding me,” he said.
“We were together all afternoon.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I guess I do.” There was nowhere to look away. “I’m sorry. I haven’t known what to say.”
“How about what you actually feel? That can be a fine place to start.”
“Who feels just one way?”
“I do,” he said. “At least about some things. About you.”
“This isn’t exactly the place, is it?”
But it was, ironically. The interesting thing about chaos is that it provides perfect privacy. Everyone we knew was there, which gave us a kind of seclusion we wouldn’t have had anywhere else. We probably could have stripped naked and done a fan dance without drawing notice.
“You’re afraid to let something happen between us. But it’s already too late as far as I’m concerned. Maybe it was from the beginning. From the moment you walked into my damned bar.”
“Maybe. But we don’t have to give in to that. I’d hate it if anything changed between us. You’re too important to me.”
“That’s something, I guess.”
“That’s everything in my book. I can be an awfully good friend to you if you let me.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think I was being ditched.” His tone changed to acid. “It’s been a while, but I think I remember the feeling.”
“Stop it. That’s the last thing I want. Aren’t you listening?”
“I’m listening.” His look was level, skewering. “I’ve got plenty of friends.”
Before I could even think to answer him, Matthews was sliding through the fray to squeeze beside us. He held three big glasses of gin, all precariously full, and looked back and forth between us. “Have I interrupted something?”
“Don’t be silly,” I said, while my heart raced and rattled. “But Christ, let’s have that drink.”
16
It’s late when Ernest crosses the darkly flowing Manzanares and skirts the southern corner of the Parque del Oeste, walking fast. It isn’t at all safe here, particularly at night, when most of the shelling happens. Sometimes bombs fall, too, the great hulking Junkers or Heinkels passing over and sounding like death, turning his knees to butter.
Alongside the river, the park stretches out black as anything except for the cooking fires and barrels burning for warmth. Thousands of refugees are camped with their sheep and donkeys and children, each group huddled and separate around crackling red cinders. They’ve been there for months, since the siege began, and now can only wait by their small fires for the tide to turn. But will it?
Already the war has gone on months longer than anyone thought it would and shows no signs of stopping. Behind him smoke is still rising in columns from the front line at Garabitas Hill. The attack had lasted for only ten or fifteen minutes, but that had been long enough. In the trench, stray bullets had zipped over his head like May beetles, and when he had closed his eyes, trying to focus on the different voices of gunfire as a way of staying calm, he had thought of Marty instead, and knew then he was in a real jam, and that no one could help him out of it.
He hadn’t planned to fall in love with her, but what did that matter now? The day she’d turned up in Key West, he’d only been reading his mail—that was the funny thing—and enjoying his daiquiri like any other afternoon. Then the door to the street had opened and sunlight had streamed in, and that was her.
Later, he would repeat a joke to friends about how she had legs that began at her shoulders, but the thing he’d actu
ally noticed was her hair, which was the color of a wheat field, and her skin, which glowed as if some incandescent summer day had been stored in a jar for a century and then loosed all at once.
She was a beautiful girl, as beautiful as they came, but in his hometown bar, in the middle of his life, he felt protected and quite safe. He had a routine he’d built up very carefully and knew what it was, and what it meant. He had friends he could count on and others he couldn’t, and he was learning to know the difference. And anyway, what really mattered was his work. There were books he had written and stories he liked a great deal, even if others didn’t always see their value. After the Africa book, the critics had come at him hard, wanting to draw blood. But they couldn’t get at the thing he’d built inside him or the stories and books that were waiting for him to be ready, the ones he hadn’t touched yet.
He had every advantage; that was the feeling he had, and so he would drink a second daiquiri and read his mail and maybe the paper, and then go home to his wife and sons. Even shining as she was, and not at all the typical thing, this beautiful girl was not a threat to him. When he talked to her he let himself notice everything, the length of her calves, and the way the black fabric of the dress fell against her skin, and how her eyes were somehow every color at once so that you had to look at them over and over to see how they changed.
Her mother was a beautiful woman, too. He liked her immediately. He liked them all, even the brother, and felt easy and natural talking with them. It was only after he’d gone that he realized he was still thinking of the girl. She followed him home, flaring softly in his memory, like notes of a symphony heard only once. She was still there when he closed the door behind him at Whitehead Street and stepped out of his shoes to feel the cool tile. Then Fife had appeared saying that they’d held dinner for him if he still wanted it. She was not a woman who missed much. She had cocked her head to the side like a raven and asked him where he’d been and why he was late, and he had known immediately that he needed to lie, and that this would not be the last lie he would tell his wife about this particular blond.
* * *
—
Now, at the edge of the park, he stops and turns to look behind him, the hill coarsely rounded and in shadow. Tomorrow he knows he’ll hear the number of casualties on both sides, strict accounting being one of the things you do in a war to keep you from thinking about the actual people who have fallen. But it never works well, not for him, anyway. A drink is almost always the more effective cure. He’ll go to Chicote’s, then, and hopefully he’ll see her there, too, and begin to feel better before he feels worse again.
All he can see for the moment is what’s in front of him, only that, and she is part of it. It might be the war changing him, being at the knife-bright edge of things for the first time in many years. Whatever the reason, she’s gotten through whatever defenses he’s built up and now he doesn’t want to stop thinking of her and trying to be closer to her, no matter what it ruins.
There was what you meant to do and what you had to do. There was who you thought you were, and who you became on a night like this, in Madrid, in the dark chaos of the street, following your feet where they needed to go.
17
After three weeks I felt I’d been in Madrid for years, and also that I never wanted to leave. I’d never experienced such intensity, ever. It was like living with my heart constantly in my throat. When the German batteries on Garabitas Hill began shelling the city steadily, life grew even sharper and more precious for everyone. In the daytime, the volleys came in short bursts—sixty or a hundred shells in ten minutes while we waited it out in doorways or in cafés or in the bathtubs of our hotels. Later, at the Hotel Gran Vía or at Chicote’s or in Delmer’s room, we would talk about the number of shells that had come, and how many people had been killed, and if there were any other battles that day, elsewhere, and what had happened then, and what might happen tomorrow. It felt comforting to go over everything again and again. It was a way of knitting ourselves together and feeling safer. It was a single language, and we all spoke it.
Very quickly I had learned to recognize the different sounds of gunfire, how to walk through fountains of exploded glass, and how to breathe when the air grew thick with lyddite smoke and dust. My Spanish improved and soon I could talk to the women who waited for hours in food lines, and the children who went to school in any building that would have them, walking past sprinkled trails of human blood to get there, and stopping sometimes to dig for souvenir shells to barter with one another, the way children in St. Louis did with marbles and baseball cards.
One evening I’d just come from the military hospital when I stopped at the square at Santo Domingo to listen to a flamenco player. Couples were strolling hand in hand, walking slowly through the soft air and talking as if the heavy shelling that morning had been only a dream.
At one corner of the square pigeons were trying to sleep while a group of children threw pebbles at them. The guitar player sat a little apart and hugged his instrument closely to his body while his other hand plucked bright notes. The song was beautiful. I sat to hear the rest, wondering about where courage comes from. Since the previous November, when Franco had locked his sights on destroying the capital, nearly every day had brought fire and death. But most Madrileños had still refused to leave. They would take the armed guards and the barricades and the blackouts as long as they could stay in their homes. They would take the shell holes and the buildings stove in by trench mortars, too, and the avenues cut off to block the movement of tanks. When their homes were gone, they would stay anyway, and walk after dinner if they damn well pleased, saying to themselves and to each other that it was better to die on their feet than on their knees. And wasn’t it?
The guitarist had just reached the end of his song when there came a chuffing sound. I shrank without thinking, my shoulders clamping tight. And then the shell. It spun and screamed its way into the square, exploding the cobbles on impact. And while everything in me tensed to run, my heart galloping ahead with panic, I crouched instead, counting seconds to myself until the whistling came once more, spiraling in louder and louder until it flashed on impact and the whole square rattled.
The children scattered, thrown like coins. The flamenco player collapsed onto his guitar and I finally bolted, hardly breathing, pushing my way into an already crowded doorway along the square. The lyddite smoke floated past, like lace made of poison. We counted and waited, but nothing happened.
“Que Dios nos ayude,” the woman in front of me whispered. May God help us. An empty market basket balanced in the crook of her arm. Her black-haired son gripped the edge of her dark shawl, carefully watching her face.
After five or ten seconds more of silence, she darted out into the square without glancing back. The boy scrambled after her, thin dark socks slipping into his rope-soled shoes, her shawl becoming the edge of a kite tail pulling him along. I could guess what she was thinking, that she needed to get the boy home to safety.
They had just reached the center of the square when the air shredded. The shell whined past and burst into countless fragments, like pieces of the sun. Faster than anyone could see, faster than thought, one pierced the boy’s throat. He crumpled, his hand still in hers, while shells kept falling all around, one every few seconds. The woman bent over him. She screamed again and again for him to get up.
I had never seen death like this, right before my eyes, let alone the death of a child. Something in me cracked. My pulse was racing so violently I thought my heart might explode. But I went on living, while two men ran out to tenderly carry the boy’s body to the edge of the square, and his mother stumbled after, walking in the trail of blood as she always would now, going forward, wailing and wailing and not stopping.
18
“You okay, Gellhorn?” Ernest asked that night. We were at Chicote’s, but the greater part of me was still at the square.
I
took the whiskey and water he put into my hands. “I don’t know. Is it always this way?”
“There aren’t any rules for how to get through it, but it sometimes helps to remember that it’s not you death has come for. Not you, and not anyone you love.”
That couldn’t be right, I thought. Every death was equally horrible, and this had been an innocent boy. But I knew he had meant not to be callous, but to comfort me. There was something in his voice that did work to make me feel calmer, and more settled. And then there was simply being near him and the other people I’d come to count on. I had never been so grateful for friends.
We ordered more drinks and made room for stragglers. Tom Delmer had a five o’clock shadow. He and Matthews had just come back from the Tajuña Valley where they had interviewed some of the men from the Fifteenth Brigade who had survived the attack on Pingarrón Hill. Suicide Hill, it was called now, because four hundred Americans had gone over the top of the trench in one battle, and only one hundred and eight were still standing. If you could even call it that.
They had terrible stories. The mood was dark all the way around, but we stayed, knowing it was far worse to be in a bad place in your mind when you were alone. Sometime past midnight, we walked the few blocks back to the Florida. The city was black and cold, and we huddled together as a group, leaning against one another and lightly bumping shoulders, only separating when we came to the barrel-shaped lobby. Stringing our way up the curving staircase, we called good night to each other blurrily and repeatedly. In a few moments I was alone, the inky carpet in the long hallway swallowing my steps, a pleasant rubbery sensation there in my limbs and the muscles of my face, and in my mind, too. But I only thought I was alone.
I turned to place my key in the lock, and saw that Ernest stood a short distance down the hall in a pool of shadows, waiting for me to turn around.