He nodded his great square head against the crumpled pillowcase, and then lay quietly. Finally he said, “Today I was thinking how wonderful it would be if we could wake up in Paris.” His voice seemed to fall to the back of his throat. The sheet was wound around part of his chest and twisted like a tourniquet. “We should have years in an apartment in Saint-Germain with almost no space but wonderful light. But we’ll never have Paris. Not the way we should.”
“We won’t have Nice or St. Moritz either,” I said, catching on. This was a game of loss. We were giving the future away in bright fistfuls. “All those champagne cocktails with slivers of pink fruit. Or Monaco. We definitely won’t ever have Monaco.”
“Or Cuba. You should see Havana, the colors of the buildings, and the Morro and the Gulf Stream. I’d show you how to make a proper daiquiri with plenty of lime with no sugar and we’d stay up all night under the palms in a warm wind.”
I was quiet for a moment, only watching the high ceiling painted with cracks that day by day would stretch wider. Time would have its way with everything, because that’s what had always happened and always would, out into infinity. But we were doing something else. We were wrenching ourselves free. Throwing love into the fire before the flames could rise and take it.
“We won’t ever have a house together with two good armchairs side by side and loads of books,” he said.
“We won’t have mornings of lazing in bed in our pajamas. We won’t have anything regular happy people do. Not years to know everything about each other. Not children.”
He nodded soberly and then said, “Sometimes it feels as if we’ve already lived out a lifetime together. Because we never will. I don’t expect you to understand.”
But I did understand. It was how I felt about what was happening all around me. Spain was falling and we were falling with it. But the loss came with moments of incredible happiness, and the feeling of being seen and understood, of being found. There might be no future, no future at all, but time had sharpened into an unforgettable point. And that was a version of forever. That might be the only version of forever worth reaching for.
No matter what else happened going forward, Ernest and Madrid and this awful, marvelous war were tangled up together inside me, like the story of my own life.
I wouldn’t keep them; I couldn’t. But they were mine.
26
Teruel was colder than anywhere else he’d been in Spain, with snow blowing sideways, and a wind that shrieked like a wounded animal. From behind stacked boulders, frigid as steel to the touch, Ernest crouched with Matthews and Delmer and watched the Loyalist forces bear down. The first target was Muela,“the Tooth,” a jagged and strange-looking hill outside the village, which was rigged with mines and tank traps and flanked heavily by the Nationalist troops, but hopefully not for long.
This was a surprise offensive from the Loyalist side that had been a long time coming. It wouldn’t end quickly either, not in this storm. It was so cold that sometimes, as the assault went on punishingly, they had to duck into a railway car inside an abandoned tunnel for a nip of brandy and to feel their hands again. It was almost bearable there, away from the wind. There was a burlap sack of frozen oranges. To eat them, you had to hold the fruit over an open fire, feeling it going soft in your palm. Afterward, when they headed back to the ridge and their position, he could smell the citrus oil on his hands, and taste the singed sugar of the orange on his tongue, and it was almost better than the brandy, but not quite.
On the fourth day of the offensive, the Loyalists finally liberated Teruel, and he and Matthews and Delmer had gotten to ride into the village in the convoy of tanks and trucks. Ernest had never seen surrender before and wasn’t sure it looked much like victory at first. The people in the town came out of their houses slowly, looking confused and terrified, but when it dawned on them that they weren’t going to be shot, they began to thump the soldiers on the back. An old woman brought out a ceramic pitcher full of tangy Rioja she’d made herself and poured it into any available cup, smiling a beautifully toothless smile.
* * *
—
After the surrender, Ernest went to Barcelona to have Christmas dinner with Marty. She was sailing home the next day, and he had no idea what to say to her. They’d said so much already, and nothing helped soften the fact that they were both headed away from each other, possibly forever. So he held her. He braided his hands under her hair, breathing her in. He said goodbye very softly against her neck. He said it five times, or six times, and still it took everything to let her go.
In Paris a week later, on his own way home, he found Fife waiting for him at the Hôtel Élysées. It was blizzarding outside nearly as badly as it had been in Teruel, and Fife was on edge because she’d been there for days, sending cable after cable to Madrid, where she thought he was, and growing more and more distraught. As soon as he really looked into her eyes, he knew why she’d come. Lots of people passing through Madrid on their way to New York had big mouths and narrow consciences. She’d no doubt heard rumors swirling. It didn’t really matter who’d done the talking, because Fife knew, and now before him there was a battle needing to be played out, and his hand was being forced. In a way, the battle had already started without him, because she’d had the whole of her passage over to think of how she’d confront him and was so jangly now she reminded him of frayed wire.
Would he confess it? she wanted to know. If not, she was going to throw herself from the balcony.
Ernest was standing by the bed when Fife made her threat. He watched her open the French doors and then climb up onto the wrought-iron railing in her stockings. The snow fell thick and fast, and clung to her dark hair. Her eyes were wounded and wild and he felt pinned and wrecked simultaneously. He didn’t think she would really jump, but who knew what anyone was capable of when you got down to it. Hadn’t his own life proven that, if nothing else?
There was a long moment as Fife tottered there, not crying, not saying terrible things anymore, but simply waiting for his move. Either they faced off for a very few seconds, or it was years and years, but either way he found he could only plunge ahead with his lie. She’d gotten it all wrong, he swore. Someone had been telling awful tales, but the girl in question was only a friend, a trench buddy.
“A trench buddy?” Fife sneered. “You don’t think I know who we’re talking about? She’s too young for you. And anyway, I don’t even think she’s very talented.”
He remembered the night at Whitehead Street when they had all been in the garden together, talking over drinks. Whoever those people were, they had nothing to do with this moment. He stood fast and held his grip on the lie. And slowly, though her eyes had never softened, she’d climbed down from the rail and crossed to the bathroom and washed her face and changed for bed, and come out calmly, like a child, and crawled under the duvet and gone to sleep.
The next day was strained, and the one after that. He felt rotten and went to see a doctor, who told him he was in bad shape and his liver was, too, and that he needed to stop drinking altogether or at least half of what he took in now. He put him on something called Chophytol, which tasted bitter as hell but was supposed to clean him up, and something else called Drainochol, which was worse still. Somehow Fife had decided to believe him, at least on the surface. Whatever she was thinking, they lingered in Paris for twelve days in a deadly quiet truce, and then sailed for home on the Gripsholm through lurching weather. It was more than ironic that this was the very same ship they had booked for their Africa trip four years earlier. Nothing could have been more different now, particularly inside his head.
In their cabin, Fife took to bed with seasickness while up on deck he let the wind rail at him and the salt spray come like a slap with the wind, and wondered how he’d get out of this mess, or even through the night, since what he really needed but couldn’t have was a goddamned drink or six.
That theory of God never giving you more than you could handle was about the wrongest thing he’d ever heard. If he were really smart, he’d just throw himself overboard and be done with it, because he wasn’t only carrying more than he could properly manage, but also had gotten turned around and was headed backward through his own life. How else could you look at it when this had already happened years ago, except with Hadley?
Fife had to be feeling all that, too. She had to be, since she was the other woman then, and had set out to win him no matter what it took or whom she crossed. Whatever moral accounting she was doing now, he had to leave her to it. He had his own accounting to do, and very few answers. If this same awful story could happen to him twice, there might be something twisted up in him, possibly from the beginning. His mother and father had ruined him good, or he’d ruined himself. Either he couldn’t be happy with just one woman or he hadn’t found the right one yet.
Who could say, really? Who, when you got right down to it, knew a goddamned thing about love?
27
My speaking tour was supposed to be about the lessons of war. That’s what I believed I had said yes to. But when I flung myself back to the States with force and launched state to state by train, zigzagging the country wildly and doing twenty-two lectures in one month, I realized that no one wanted to hear me praise the volunteers of the International Brigades for their dignity and nobility. They didn’t want to hear me call Franco a butcher and a lunatic, or question America’s position of neutrality. They didn’t, in a word, want the truth.
Lecturing was the loneliest sort of business, I soon discovered. City after city, I talked out at rows and rows of people who never talked back. I had one hour and one hour only to distill everything I’d learned and say it fast, and passionately enough that it would wake them up to what was happening in the world. I couldn’t stop feeling desperate and hysterical, but my audiences only nodded at everything, tucking my warnings into their handbags. When they shook my hand afterward, they told me I was inspiring, but I’d meant to terrify them. The situation in Spain was dire, and if things didn’t turn somehow, and very soon, war would likely be coming for us all. And yet here they were chewing watercress sandwiches and then carefully reapplying their lipstick.
I wanted to scream, but who would hear me? With each engagement, the stakes seemed that much higher, and my energy that much more frenetic and despairing. I lost fourteen pounds because food had become sand. I couldn’t sleep a wink and took to calling my mother late at night, threatening to quit the tour.
“Gellhorns don’t back out of contracts, Martha,” she insisted. “You’ll find a way through.”
But I couldn’t. In the end I forfeited my fees, most of which I’d meant to send to Spain, and made plans to go to Barcelona alone, borrowing money to do so. Each day’s news from Spain was more sickening. Franco’s army was bearing down on the Mediterranean, bent on severing Barcelona from Valencia and Madrid. Heinkels pounded the cities ceaselessly with bombs until the streets ran with blood. The Loyalist army was retreating on almost every front, with long convoys of refugees in its wake. Orphans filled the hospitals, long past tears, past wailing, their black eyes empty and haunted.
The next great war was racing toward us at terrifying speed, and Spain was on its knees. I felt so desperate and heartbroken, wrung out and diminished, that I found myself writing to Ernest. I sent a cable not to the Key West house but to Sloppy Joe’s, his favorite Conch bar, sure it would find him, and it did.
“One last time,” I told him when he reached me by phone in St. Louis. “It’s all going to hell and we have to be there.” I heard my voice shaking and thought I would surely frighten him. I was frightening myself. I had sheaves of arguments at the ready, and wasn’t at all above pleading.
But he only said, “When you land in Barcelona, send word back and I’ll find you.”
Instantly I felt steadier. My heart stopped thundering. I could breathe again. “All right,” I told him. “I will.”
“And Marty?”
“Yes?”
“When this is all over, come with me to Cuba. All the countries we really care about are going to come crashing down. Nothing will be the same soon.”
I’d worn myself so thin and ragged the tears came easily. “We said we’d never have Cuba.”
“We were just trying to be brave, weren’t we? I don’t know that I can live without you is the thing.”
He’d knocked me sideways. Of course I felt the same, I had for a long time, but what did any of it mean, the wishing? The wanting? He wasn’t offering a promise because he couldn’t. “It’s hard to think ahead, now,” I told him. “It’s hard to believe that anything could be good again. When the war really does come for everyone, it’s going to be the most awful and horrific thing imaginable. You’ve read what they’re saying about Hitler these days. He’s worse than Franco, even.”
“That’s why we’d be wrong to do anything but bank on each other. You’re the strongest woman I know. Who else would I want in the foxhole?”
I was too raw to answer him. We rang off soon after, and I lit a cigarette nervously, running my mind over the edges of what he’d said. Cuba. Together. What could be more impossible than that combination of words? Happiness and peace, maybe. The future and us in it, tucked safely inside.
Part 4
FOXHOLES
FEBRUARY 1939–JANUARY 1940
28
The moment I stepped off the ferry in Havana, blinding outrageous sunlight flooded in from everywhere, splashing bright heat over my sandals and the tops of my shoulders, piercing through my white blouse as though it were nothing. Maybe it was nothing, here. Maybe the sun and the sea could melt through anything—my exhaustion and fear and heartbreak—leaving me clean and patched in the hurt places, able to go on.
I was counting on it. The past year had been hell. We’d gone back one last time, to Barcelona as it fell. Eighteen raids in forty-eight hours leveled the city, and still the bombers came, strafing anything in their path. The refugees were numberless, and they were starving. Most carried some small bundle with them, which amounted to all they owned now. And it was shocking to think that after such a prolonged and valiant struggle, they would end up so reduced and so hopeless. Countryless.
For six weeks, Ernest and Tom Delmer and I reported on the losses and the changing battle lines, traveling in caravans along roads full of retreating troops and families; farmers with oxen that looked beaten to the core. One night we heard and then saw thirty Italian bomber planes carving up the sky, louder than anything should be. We ran from the car and threw ourselves into the ditch. Crouching there, Ernest gripped my hand hard. We locked eyes for a moment, wondering if this might be the end, but they only screamed over us on the way to Tortosa. Looking up, I thought they were like brutal silver Valkyries bent on absolute destruction. This whole war had probably been futile from its beginning, but its ideals had been only beautiful. Whatever came next was going to be so awful I couldn’t let myself imagine it.
When the Fascists finally reached the sea, we watched the wounded spill in an endless wave over the French border, and while I wanted to weep for every last one of them, Ernest got to work. He reached out to the American ambassador in France, asking for an evacuation plan for Americans. The British navy was drawn in to dispatch rescue ships to Spanish ports because we knew that as the Republican government crumbled Franco’s troops would begin capturing, imprisoning, and even executing Americans caught behind enemy lines.
I had never seen Ernest act more tirelessly or selflessly. He helped raise money for those who’d been crippled and wounded, and when Collier’s cabled that they were sending me on assignment, Ernest stayed behind, pitching in to help anyone in a tight spot. He hopped aboard a boat heading up the Ebro River, where groups of soldiers from the International Brigades had been stranded, sending word every few days from places that were
like diminishing levels of Dante’s inferno. I worried for him, but it helped that we were in constant contact now, not pretending we could bear anything else.
I spent almost a year crisscrossing through Europe on my own, writing steadily for Collier’s, taking the pulse of nations on the brink of war. It was June of ’38 when I left Paris for Prague. A little over two months before, Hitler had marched into Austria and claimed it for Germany. Now the same fate seemed more than likely for the Sudeten-German part of Czechoslovakia.
I went to all the frontiers, feeling worse and worse for Czechoslovakia’s future. The small country was home to more than three million Sudeten Germans and surrounded on three sides by the German Reich. Hitler was putting pressure on the Czech president, Edvard Beneš, to concede. Meanwhile, Beneš was appealing to France and to England for aid in his struggle, while everywhere the mood seemed as dire as that of an operating theater with no ether being offered, not for any money.
The piece I wrote I titled “Come Ahead Hitler!” meant to sound a loud warning to my American readers that war in Europe was on its way—not an if, but a when. Then I went to England, and on to France, hoping they would come to Czechoslovakia’s aid while there was still time. But everywhere I went, there seemed to be a maddening level of denial and complacency. That actual war could come to them directly was inconceivable, I heard over and over, a song that was being sung even more loudly by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain.
While I was still in England, the Munich Pact was signed and Czechoslovakia was finished. I hurried back to Prague to find the border thick with Nazis. In another week, eleven thousand square miles of territory had been devoured, becoming the Sudetenland. Chamberlain and French prime minister Daladier had essentially hand delivered an entire country to the wolves. I could barely breathe to think of it.