We Saw Spain Die (14 page)

Without the date of the second letter, it is impossible to know if it was written before or after his arrest. The suggestion that his next letter would not come from Madrid implies that the letter was written at the end of October or the beginning of November, just before the evacuation of the government to Valencia. In that case, the phrase ‘a resolution to my case’ would imply that Robles was awaiting permission to leave the Ministry of War and the service of the Russians. In the unlikely case that the letter post-dates his arrest, the phrase would refer to his arrest, implying that he did not consider himself to be in real danger and that he was merely the victim of a misunderstanding which he would be able to clear up. However, it is much more likely that it was before, given that it was addressed from the Hotel Palace and that he was still in a position to occupy himself with file-cards for a scholarly journal.

When the government moved to Valencia, Gorev remained throughout the siege of Madrid but Robles was among the staff evacuated. There, Robles soon became an assiduous member of the
tertulia
in the popular café known as the Ideal Room. One day in early December, he told the American Military Attaché, Colonel Stephen Fuqua, that ‘he had to leave Madrid because he was being persecuted by someone who was ignorantly denouncing him’. This makes little sense and sounds like Robles preparing the ground in advance of a possible denunciation. Another habitué of the Ideal Room was the novelist Francisco Ayala. ‘One day’
(cierto día)
– Ayala does not mention the date in his memoirs – Robles failed to appear after lunch as he normally did. That same evening, Robles’ wife, the tiny brunette Márgara Fernández de Villegas, accompanied by her two children, was to be seen frantically going from café to café asking if anyone had seen her husband. Apparently, José had been detained the night before in his own apartment by a group of men in plain clothes. It appears that he accompanied them without fuss. At the Soviet Embassy, Márgara was told that no one knew anything. However, she soon discovered that he
had been accused of treachery and taken to the Cárcel de Extranjeros on the banks of the river Turia. She was able to visit him there on two separate occasions and told their daughter to walk up and down the pavement outside so that he could see her. Robles himself told her not to worry, that there had been a misunderstanding and it would soon be cleared up.
¹⁶

The visits must have taken place after 6 January 1937, for on that day, Robles’ son Francisco ‘Coco’ wrote to Henry Lancaster, his father’s friend and head of the Department of Romance Languages at Johns Hopkins University:

Through misunderstanding and perhaps the personal feelings of people with whom he worked my father José Robles has suffered a rather disagreeable mishap. My father was working lately at the Ministry of War and more recently in the Junta de Defensa of Madrid. Because of the designs of certain people he was obliged to come to Valencia where he worked with the Soviet Embassy. By orders from Madrid he was arrested there. Nobody, from the Minister of State and the Russian Embassy down, has been able to find out a concrete reason for his ridiculous arrest. He has been arrested nearly a month already.

This would place the arrest a couple of days either side of 9 December. Because the family was running out of money, Coco went on to ask for financial help from the university and that any moneys be sent in such a way as to avoid the need for José Robles’ signature: ‘He is incommunicated. We haven’t been able to come in touch with him in any way.’
¹⁷

Wild rumours flew around Valencia about the disappearance of Robles. Some said that he had been arrested on espionage charges and shot within the Soviet Embassy. Of all the reasons given for his subsequent death, the most widely believed was that, in a café conversation, he had carelessly let slip a piece of sensitive military information which he could have known only by dint of his privileged access to coded telegrams. This is what Ayala believed and Louis Fischer also heard the same rumours. In fact, Fischer’s unique combination of access to both the Russian hierarchy in Spain and to the highest levels of the Spanish
Government gives considerable credence to his comments on the case – written after he had broken all ties with Communism. He wrote:

He was not shot by the government, and I do not know whether he was shot, but he vanished about that time without leaving a trace. People affirmed that he had been smuggled out of Spain against his will and taken by boat to Russia. Whispers said he had talked too much and revealed military secrets in Madrid cafés. If that could have been proved it might have warranted turning him over to the Spanish government for trial, but not ‘taking him for a ride’.
¹⁸

Louis Fischer was not in the habit of repeating rumours just for the sake of filling pages. He had strict journalistic ethics as well as high-level contacts. His contacts spoke to him uninhibitedly because they trusted him never to reveal more than they were comfortable with. Accordingly, this passage takes on considerable significance. His assertion that the Spanish Government was not involved carries some weight. He was a close friend of various ministers, including Julio Álvarez del Vayo, who at the time was both Foreign Minister and Chief Commissar for War. If Fischer’s elimination of the Republican Government as a suspect is accepted, the hint that Robles was killed by the Russians is doubly significant. Taken with the suspicion that, to get the position that he occupied, Robles had to have close connections with the Russian security services, it might well explain why, at this relatively early stage, they had no compunction in eliminating him. In other words, they regarded him as one of their own and not merely a Spanish employee. Enquiries about Robles directed by the present author to a hitherto helpful member of Gorev’s staff, who was a GRU interpreter during the Civil War and knew about the case, were met with a brusque refusal to comment.

What would make the Robles case notorious was the interest taken in it by John Dos Passos. He arrived in Spain on 8 April 1937, on a trip that he later described as ‘so typical of the blundering of well-intentioned American liberals trying to make themselves useful in the world’. Since the outbreak of the war, he had been working with ‘various
friends’ to find ways of persuading the Roosevelt administration to lift the embargo which prevented the Spanish Republic buying arms. It having been decided that a documentary about the Civil War would help get public opinion behind the campaign, he was now en route to Madrid where he intended to link up with Ernest Hemingway and the Dutch director Joris Ivens to make the film
The Spanish Earth.
Dos Passos intended Pepe Robles to be his first port of call: ‘I knew that with his knowledge and taste he would be the most useful man in Spain for the purposes of our documentary film.’ On reaching Valencia, he headed for the press office in the Calle Campaneros. On a nearby street corner, Dos Passos was introduced by the American journalist Griffin Barry to Kate Mangan, who remembered him as ‘yellow, small and bespectacled’.
¹⁹

When he got to the press office, and began asking for Robles, Dos Passos recalled much later:‘faces took on a strange embarrassment. Behind the embarrassment was fear. No one would tell me where he could be found. When at last I found his wife she told me. He had been arrested by some secret section or other and was being held for trial.’ Márgara asked him to try to find out what had happened to her husband by using his influence as an internationally celebrated novelist who was identified with the Republic’s cause. He began to make enquiries in an effort to discover what Robles had been accused of. If Robles had been arrested by Grigulevich’s Brigada Especial or by some other section of the secret police, whether Russian or Spanish, none of the functionaries that he visited would have known anything. Nevertheless, Dos Passos regarded their ignorance as only feigned and thus as deeply sinister: ‘again the run-around, the look of fear, fear for their own lives, in the faces of republican officials’. Grasping around for a story with which to fob him off, ‘the general impression that the higher-ups in Valencia tried to give was that if Robles were dead he had been kidnapped and shot by anarchist “uncontrollables”’.
²⁰

Not long after the arrest of Robles, at some point in January, his family had been evicted from their flat, which was unlikely to have been a coincidence. In an overcrowded Valencia, Robles had a decent apartment only because of his military rank and position in the Ministry of War. To pay the rent on the sleazy apartment to which they had to
move, ‘Coco’ Robles had taken the job in the press office. Márgara told Dos Passos that the last time that she saw her husband was ‘in the hands of a Communist group of secret police in Valencia’ in late January 1937.
²¹
Thereafter, Robles was transferred from the prison on the banks of the Turia to Madrid where, presumably, he was executed. On 9 April, the day after Dos Passos reached Valencia, Coco was told that his father was dead. His informant was his immediate boss in the press and propaganda office, Liston Oak, the man responsible for the daily English-language news release. The gloomy, self-obsessed Oak was a member of the American Communist Party, but was developing sympathy for the anti-Stalinist POUM.
²²
Those who worked in the press with ‘Coco’ were appalled by the news about his father. At the time, the most vocal in expressing her outrage was the outspoken American Milly Bennet. An English colleague, Kate Mangan, tried later in her memoirs to explain what had happened to Robles: ‘he had been engaged in rather hush-hush work. What happened remained a mystery; it was inexplicable but it leaked out despite efforts to hush it up on the part of our communist friends.’
²³

Ironically, ‘one of our communist friends’ who not only did not hush the case up but was instrumental in giving it notoriety was that bundle of introspective misery and political contradictions, Liston Oak. His involvement in the Robles case and in the subsequent estrangement between Dos Passos and Hemingway was considerable. It derived in the first instance from his contact with Coco Robles and subsequently with Dos Passos. When Dos Passos went to the press office on 9 April and Coco Robles told him what Oak had said about the death of his father, they both chose to believe that this was merely a rumour. In fact, Coco, his sister and mother would go on believing for quite some time thereafter that José Robles was alive. On 20 April, Coco wrote to Henry Lancaster, saying: ‘From my father there is no definite news. Some even say that he is free and at one of the Madrid fronts. I am not inclined to believe this. The whole affair continues to be surrounded with great mystery. We do not know what to think or expect next.’ Then, in late April or early May, Maurice Coindreau heard from Márgara that ‘for over a month she has not heard from her husband, that she thinks he is still in Madrid although she cannot understand why he doesn’t
communicate with her’. Coindreau was godfather to Robles’ daughter Margarita (Miggie) and was also Dos Passos’ French translator. As late as 17 July, Coco wrote to Professor Lancaster saying that there was still no news of his father.
²⁴

Meanwhile, on 9 April, Dos Passos was deeply affected by finding Márgara exhausted, her face drawn, living in a sordid and grimy apartment block, and by her desperate request that he try to find out what had happened to José. As a distinguished foreign visitor, Dos Passos was staying at the Hotel Colón, which had been renamed the Casa de Cultura and reserved for displaced and/or visiting intellectuals, artists and writers. Locally, it was known as the Casa de los Sabios (the house of the wise men), although Kate Mangan regarded it as ‘a kind of zoo for intellectuals’.
²⁵
When he was back in America, Dos Passos wrote about going back to his room and brooding on what Márgara had told him:

It’s quiet at night in the Casa de los Sabios. Lying in bed it’s hard not to think of what one had heard during the day of the lives caught in a tangle, the prisoners huddled in stuffy rooms waiting to be questioned, the woman with her children barely able to pay for the cheap airless apartment while she waits for her husband. It’s nothing they have told her, he was just taken away for questioning, certain little matters to be cleared up, wartime, no need for alarm. But the days have gone by, months, no news. The standing in line at the police station, the calling up of influential friends, the slow-growing terror tearing the woman to pieces.

He went on to imagine what had happened to his friend:

And the man stepping out to be court-martialed by his own side. The conversational tone of the proceedings. A joke or a smile that lets the blood flow easy again, but the gradual freezing recognition of the hundred ways a man may be guilty, the remark you dropped in a café that somebody wrote down, the letter you wrote last year, the sentence you scribbled on a
scratchpad, the fact that your cousin is in the ranks of the enemy, and the strange sound your own words make in your ears when they are quoted in the indictment. They shove a cigarette in your hand and you walk out into the courtyard to face six men you have never seen before. They take aim. They wait for the order. They fire.
²⁶

Those words were written months after. For now, Dos Passos was still uncertain of his friend’s fate but he feared the worst. Playing on his celebrity, he had been to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and asked to see the minister himself. His subsequent writings make it apparent that, although he had turned up without an appointment, he was mortified to be told that the minister could not see him until the following day. Julio Álvarez del Vayo, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and ultimate head of the press and propaganda machinery, was in fact an incredibly busy man. The government was in the throes of considerable internal upheaval. The Republic was fighting for its life, its forces exhausted after the battles of Jarama and Guadalajara, and facing a massive assault on the Basque Country. Del Vayo was the Commissar for War as well as Foreign Minister. In the latter capacity, he had to deal with the Republic’s most difficult problem, the non-intervention policy of the British and French Governments that deprived it of the possibility of buying arms with which to defend itself. Inevitably, he did not just drop everything to see Dos Passos. Nevertheless, despite his myriad occupations, Álvarez del Vayo managed to make time to see him on the following day. Regarding Robles, he ‘professed ignorance and chagrin’. This might have been expected and was almost certainly the truth. Nevertheless, he promised to try to find out what had happened.
²⁷
Although Dos Passos would never forgive Álvarez del Vayo for what he considered to be his snub and his duplicity, there is no reason whatsoever why the Minister of Foreign Affairs would know anything about the fate of a functionary working in the Ministry of War with the representative of the Russian GRU.