Chapter 17, Barcelona, December 1938

            On a freezing December night in a filthy room at the Majestic in Barcelona, Martha had a little desk pulled up to the edge of the bed to hold her typewriter. She stopped writing every minute to breathe onto her frigid fingers, or wrap her sweater tighter around her shoulders. They had no fuel and little food, and she was writing a story for Collier’s about the awful condition of civilians in the city, what now began to look like mass starvation on the way to the final defeat of the Republic. The year before, editors had waved her off the same story, but since then she’d reported from Prague, London, and Paris, and she thought, with no little satisfaction, that they’d take it now. It was the third winter of the war.

            Hemingway had gone home to Pauline and the boys, and Martha was camped out with Herbert Matthews from the Times, photographer Robert Capa and a few others, Gallagher from the Daily Express. They were the last-ditchers, watching the slow-motion defeat of the Republic through Munich and Stalin’s withdrawal of the International Brigades. The fascists would win. It had been almost two years since she’d come over the mountains the first time in her good flannel trousers with a bag of canned food. This was her fourth time to Spain in Civil War.

            She was trying to get down her day’s notes from a visit to a hospital, but German Heinkels, flown by Italians, passed over three or four times an hour, dropping bombs.  The last several explosions sounded far off, but then she heard the plane a little too clearly and one hit close. The hotel juddered, the noise spikey and harsh, making her blood pound and her ears ring. Her nerves were shot, but she considered the risks of going out to see. Then there was a knock on the door. Capa, pale but smiling, clutched a bottle of Scotch and his Leica. His teeth were chattering.

            “Doesn’t it keep you warm?” she said, moving aside so he could come in. He had bought a very fashionable camel’s hair coat the last time he was in Paris, with mile-wide lapels and mother-of-pearl buttons. “It’s a bit much for a war zone, don’t you think?”

            “If I must die in an air raid, I want to die in this coat,” he said.  “I always wanted such a coat.”

            He’d been penniless for years after leaving Budapest at 17, so when he was flush, he got everyone drinks, meals, tickets; played poker and mostly lost; bought ridiculous coats. Martha tried to smarten him up, clothes-wise. He was 25 and she had just turned 30, but he was tragic, having lost the love of his life to a tank accident in the retreat from Brunete the year before. He never spoke of it. They had both been in Madrid for several weeks in the spring of ’37, but never met. As soon as they did, they sparked off one another like siblings:  alike, devoted, belligerent.

            “What are you doing?” he asked.

            “Civilians,” she said. 

            “For God’s sake, why?” he asked, handing her a glass of Scotch. 

            Because she’d seen a beautiful four year old boy with a head wound, and a jolly little girl with one leg, and a whole ward of children with tuberculosis and rickets who would share a clear soup for dinner. But the two of them had been over this ground before, mostly yelling. Switching to French to save herself his English, she said, shrugging, “nous briller une lumière dans l'obscurité,” we shine a light in the darkness.

            “Fuck’s sake,” he said, emptying his glass and collapsing on the bed.

            “And what exactly do you suppose you’re doing when you point your camera?”

            “Trying to get paid. I need a hat to go with my coat.”

            “Liar.”

            “Mule.” He rolled up onto one elbow, and turned up the charm just a bit. “When are you going to let go of this delusion that you can do anything to stop the world’s suffering?”

            Martha said, “If I drown you in two inches of Scotch, I will stop suffering this stupid argument. And then I can have the bottle while I finish my notes.”

            “If you drown me in Scotch—“ he stopped when they heard a Heinkel, then two, coming back for another pass. They looked at one another as they listened to the engines and then an explosion, but it was farther away than the last had been, and they exhaled. Martha scratched the flea bites on her neck, thinking dignity really had expired. He lit two cigarettes.

            “Seriously, who told you that you can change anything?” he said, looking at her as if he could see into her past. She contemplated all she had seen in Spain and Czechoslovakia, the collapse of the democracies, the blind bull-headedness of the English and the cowardice of the French, and, though thoroughly discouraged, saw no alternative to pushing against it.

            She said, “Who told you that you’re allowed to sit in cafés and chase girls while terrible things happen? Haven’t you got a tongue that works badly in six languages? Didn’t your Madrid pictures galvanize a lot of people?”

            “It’s a job.”

            “Christ, spare me the tough-guy bullshit! They’ve all gone home, Capa. The Spanish chapter of the Ballsy & Cynical Correspondents Club has been disbanded until further notice.”

            “What, tough?” he laughed. “I’m scared like a baby. And you’re as macho as any of them. Hemingway says it, you’re the bravest girl he knows.”

            A foul mix of pride and exasperation filled her nose, and she fell back on the bed. “If I am, it’s because I believe in the Republic. And what’s the point of courage if you don’t use it on behalf of the wounded and the orphans, and all those brave boys?”

            “You know,” he said, throwing a disinterested glance at her breasts, “it’s no good looking like a showgirl if inside you’re like a little nun.”

            She narrowed her brown eyes and sat up to toss her blonde head, which in Spain was considered a very great accomplishment. “On balance, it’s very good looking like a showgirl, though I must admit that tending the hair is a wretched bother. And inside I’m not a nun, I’m a New Dealer, and an enraged citizen, and no fool, mostly. My parents were great social reformers, you see, and I got a strong urge to save the world in mother’s milk.”

            “Ah, the mother. You see, you must learn to leave all that childhood shit behind you. Change your name; it helps.”

            She looked at him. “What is your real name?”

            First he froze, but then he shrugged, made light of it, introduced himself with at last the right accent. “Endre Ernő Friedmann,” he said, putting out his hand. Martha thought it must have been Gerda Taro to call him Capa, and took his hand in her two.

            They proceeded to drink and gossip and argue, until one of the Heinkels dropped its load all too close, and they dove to the floor between the bed and the wall, each trying to shield the other with their body. When the dust settled, they dragged the mattress into the corner and made a little dugout, wrapping themselves together in the damned coat. They held hands and shivered and wondered how long before Barcelona fell. 

            “Are you going to marry Nesto?” he asked.

            “It will get in the way of my saving the world,” she said.

            “Ha!” he said, and kept watching her.

            “He wants me to. Fortunately, he’s married to someone else.”

            “Why does he always want to marry, anyway? Better to come together when you want.”

            “That’s how I see it,” she said. “I would rather sin respectably, when the only thing between two people is their choice to be together.”

            “There, you can be a very modern girl.”

            “I’ve seen divorce. People trying to ruin one another with the fate of appliances.” 

            In her mind’s eye, she was seeing Ernest leaning against the wall of a different room in the Majestic in October, crying. “How can they do it?” he was saying. They had come from the farewell parade of the International Brigades through Barcelona, and everyone was torn to pieces. They were trying to shame Franco into sending away the Germans and Italians. What got to Ernest was Randolfo Pacciardi, the Italian commander who’d tried to seduce Martha in Madrid, marching in silence, his head high. He had fought the Italian fascists, and the communists within his battalion, and now had nowhere to go, and no money. He would be a refugee. “How can they do it to him?” Ernest didn’t even like Pacciardi, but hated a man of such power being thrown away. Just then, she loved him above all else, for stunning compassion.

            When they both neared sleep, Capa said, “You’re very brave, ma chére, but you are also like a little old lady wanting to tidy up everything. I don’t blame you, but you do know it’s ludicrous to suppose you can fix anything.”

            “That will have to be my folly, then,” she said. “Because I don’t think I’ll ever get clear of it. Righteous rage, you know. You should have met my grandmother. She could have frightened the fascists into surrender by beating her cane on the floor.”

            He whistled. “So it’s grandma’s anger. You want to smack all the little people back into their places.”

            Martha came fully awake, a bit shocked. People sometimes called her a snob, but it was usually over her Bryn Mawr manners or her good clothes, not her politics.  “No, I want to smack the fascists and the cowards who give in to them. For God’s sake, Capa, you can’t pretend that the defeat of the Republic isn’t a catastrophe!”

            “Ay, Dios,” he moaned. “You really can’t help it, can you? Every single conversation ends with the fate of the world. No wonder Pop wants to marry you. He needs the judgment of all history at every moment, and here you are!”

            She smacked his chest with the back of her hand, and he pinched her ass, laughing. “Of course he wants you by him.”

            “Thank you very much, I’m sure.”

            “Oh Marty, it’s priceless, don’t you see?”

            “Stop. Just stop.”

            He said “I’m sorry,” but kept laughing. Then he said, “He will be a united front with your mother, turning you into the voice of history. You will be trapped forever as handmaiden and chorus to the greatest living writer.” He said the last in a decent imitation of drunk Hemingway.

            “Fuck you, Capa. This from you, who’s given up. You’re so hurt you pretend there’s no love and no hope anywhere. What are you, twelve years old?”

            This slowed him down. “No, I suppose you’re right,” he said. “The only cure for all your talk and your busybody life is to have your heart really broken, and we don’t want that.” He patted her arm, and all the fight went out of her too. They lay quiet, arms and hands entwined, being much the same but on opposite sides of catastrophe. They slept in the morning, after the last bombardment.