For Whom the Bell Tolls (20 page)

“Yes,” Pilar said. “We will go now. But let me tell you about Pablo. That night he said to me, ‘Pilar, tonight we will do nothing.'

“ ‘Good,' I told him. ‘That pleases me.'

“ ‘I think it would be bad taste after the killing of so many people.'

“‘
Qué va,'
I told him. ‘What a saint you are. You think I lived years with bullfighters not to know how they are after the Corrida?'

“ ‘Is it true, Pilar?' he asked me.

“ ‘When did I lie to you?' I told him. “

‘It is true, Pilar, I am a finished man this night. You do not reproach me?'

“ ‘No,
hombre,
' I said to him. ‘But don't kill people every day, Pablo.'

“And he slept that night like a baby and I woke him in the morning at daylight but I could not sleep that night and I got up and sat in a chair and looked out of the window and I could see the square in the moonlight where the lines had been and across the square the trees shining in the moonlight, and the darkness of their shadows, and the benches bright too in the moonlight, and the scattered bottles shining, and beyond the edge of the cliff where they had all been thrown. And there was no sound but the splashing of the water in the fountain and I sat there and I thought we have begun badly.

“The window was open and up the square from the Fonda I could hear a woman crying. I went out on the balcony standing there in my bare feet on the iron and the moon shone on the faces of all the buildings of the square and the crying was coming from the balcony of the house of Don Guillermo. It was his wife and she was on the balcony kneeling and crying.

“Then I went back inside the room and I sat there and I did not wish to think for that was the worst day of my life until one other day.”

“What was the other?” Maria asked.

“Three days later when the fascists took the town.”

“Do not tell me about it,” said Maria. “I do not want to hear it. This is enough. This was too much.”

“I told you that you should not have listened,” Pilar said. “See. I did not want you to hear it. Now you will have bad dreams.”

“No,” said Maria. “But I do not want to hear more.”

“I wish you would tell me of it sometime,” Robert Jordan said.

“I will,” Pilar said. “But it is bad for Maria.”

“I don't want to hear it,” Maria said pitifully. “Please, Pilar. And do not tell it if I am there, for I might listen in spite of myself.”

Her lips were working and Robert Jordan thought she would cry.

“Please, Pilar, do not tell it.”

“Do not worry, little cropped head,” Pilar said. “Do not worry. But I will tell the
Inglés
sometime.”

“But I want to be there when he is there,” Maria said. “Oh, Pilar, do not tell it at all.”

“I will tell it when thou art working.”

“No. No. Please. Let us not tell it at all,” Maria said.

“It is only fair to tell it since I have told what we did,” Pilar said. “But you shall never hear it.”

“Are there no pleasant things to speak of?” Maria said. “Do we have to talk always of horrors?”

“This afternoon,” Pilar said, “thou and
Inglés
. The two of you can speak of what you wish.”

“Then that the afternoon should come,” Maria said. “That it should come flying.”

“It will come,” Pilar told her. “It will come flying and go the same way and tomorrow will fly, too.”

“This afternoon,” Maria said. “This afternoon. That this afternoon should come.”

As they came up, still deep in the shadow of the pines, after dropping down from the high meadow into the wooden valley and climbing up it on a trail that paralleled the stream and then left it to gain, steeply, the top of a rim-rock formation, a man with a carbine stepped out from behind a tree.

“Halt,” he said. Then, “
Hola,
Pilar. Who is this with thee?”

“An
Inglés,
” Pilar said. “But with a Christian name—Roberto. And what an obscenity of steepness it is to arrive here.”

“
Salud, Camarada,
” the guard said to Robert Jordan and put out his hand. “Are you well?”

“Yes,” said Robert Jordan. “And thee?”

“Equally,” the guard said. He was very young, with a light build, thin, rather hawk-nosed face, high cheekbones and gray eyes. He wore no hat, his hair was black and shaggy and his handclasp was strong and friendly. His eyes were friendly too.

“Hello, Maria,” he said to the girl. “You did not tire yourself?”

“
Qué va,
Joaquín,” the girl said. “We have sat and talked more than we have walked.”

“Are you the dynamiter?” Joaquín asked. “We have heard you were here.”

“We passed the night at Pablo's,” Robert Jordan said. “Yes, I am the dynamiter.”

“We are glad to see you,” Joaquín said. “Is it for a train?”

“Were you at the last train?” Robert Jordan asked and smiled.

“Was I not,” Joaquín said. “That's where we got this,” he grinned at Maria. “You are pretty now,” he said to Maria. “Have they told thee how pretty?”

“Shut up, Joaquín, and thank you very much,” Maria said. “You'd be pretty with a haircut.”

“I carried thee,” Joaquín told the girl. “I carried thee over my shoulder.”

“As did many others,” Pilar said in the deep voice. “Who didn't carry her? Where is the old man?”

“At the camp.”

“Where was he last night?”

“In Segovia.”

“Did he bring news?”

“Yes,” Joaquín said, “there is news.”

“Good or bad?”

“I believe bad.”

“Did you see the planes?”

“Ay,” said Joaquín and shook his head. “Don't talk to me of that. Comrade Dynamiter, what planes were those?”

“Heinkel one eleven bombers. Heinkel and Fiat pursuit,” Robert Jordan told him.

“What were the big ones with the low wings?”

“Heinkel one elevens.”

“By any names they are as bad,” Joaquín said. “But I am delaying you. I will take you to the commander.”

“The commander?” Pilar asked.

Joaquín nodded seriously. “I like it better than ‘chief,'” he said. “It is more military.”

“You are militarizing heavily,” Pilar said and laughed at him.

“No,” Joaquín said. “But I like military terms because it makes orders clearer and for better discipline.”

“Here is one according to thy taste,
Inglés,
” Pilar said. “A very serious boy.”

“Should I carry thee?” Joaquín asked the girl and put his arm on her shoulder and smiled in her face.

“Once was enough,” Maria told him. “Thank you just the same.”

“Can you remember it?” Joaquín asked her.

“I can remember being carried,” Maria said. “By you, no. I remember the gypsy because he dropped me so many times. But I thank thee, Joaquín, and I'll carry thee sometime.”

“I can remember it well enough,” Joaquín said. “I can remember holding thy two legs and thy belly was on my shoulder and thy head over my back and thy arms hanging down against my back.”

“Thou hast much memory,” Maria said and smiled at him. “I remember nothing of that. Neither thy arms nor thy shoulders nor thy back.”

“Do you want to know something?” Joaquín asked her.

“What is it?”

“I was glad thou wert hanging over my back when the shots were coming from behind us.”

“What a swine,” Maria said. “And was it for this the gypsy too carried me so much?”

“For that and to hold onto thy legs.”

“My heroes,” Maria said. “My saviors.”

“Listen,
guapa,
” Pilar told her. “This boy carried thee much, and in that moment thy legs said nothing to any one. In that moment only the bullets talked clearly. And if he would have dropped thee he could soon have been out of range of the bullets.”

“I have thanked him,” Maria said. “And I will carry him sometime. Allow us to joke. I do not have to cry, do I, because he carried me?”

“I'd have dropped thee,” Joaquín went on teasing her. “But I was afraid Pilar would shoot me.”

“I shoot no one,” Pilar said.

“
No hace falta,
” Joaquín told her. “You don't need to. You scare them to death with your mouth.”

“What a way to speak,” Pilar told him. “And you used to be such a polite little boy. What did you do before the movement, little boy?”

“Very little,” Joaquín said. “I was sixteen.”

“But what, exactly?”

“A few pairs of shoes from time to time.”

“Make them?”

“No. Shine them.”

“
Qué va,
” said Pilar. “There is more to it than that.” She looked at his brown face, his lithe build, his shock of hair, and the quick heel-and-toe way that he walked. “Why did you fail at it?”

“Fail at what?”

“What? You know what. You're growing the pigtail now.”

“I guess it was fear,” the boy said.

“You've a nice figure,” Pilar told him. “But the face isn't much. So it was fear, was it? You were all right at the train.”

“I have no fear of them now,” the boy said. “None. And we have seen much worse things and more dangerous than the bulls. It is clear no bull is as dangerous as a machine gun. But if I were in the ring with one now I do not know if I could dominate my legs.”

“He wanted to be a bullfighter,” Pilar explained to Robert Jordan. “But he was afraid.”

“Do you like the bulls, Comrade Dynamiter?” Joaquín grinned, showing white teeth.

“Very much,” Robert Jordan said. “Very, very much.”

“Have you seen them in Valladolid?” asked Joaquín.

“Yes. In September at the feria.”

“That's my town,” Joaquín said. “What a fine town but how the
buena gente,
the good people of that town, have suffered in this war.” Then, his face grave, “There they shot my father. My mother. My brother-in-law and now my sister.”

“What barbarians,” Robert Jordan said.

How many times had he heard this? How many times had he watched people say it with difficulty? How many times had he seen their eyes fill and their throats harden with the difficulty of saying my father, or my brother, or my mother, or my sister? He could not remember how many times he had heard them mention their dead in this way. Nearly always they spoke as this boy did now; suddenly and apropos of the mention of the town and always you said, “What barbarians.”

You only heard the statement of the loss. You did not see the father fall as Pilar made him see the fascists die in that story she had
told by the stream. You knew the father died in some courtyard, or against some wall, or in some field or orchard, or at night, in the lights of a truck, beside some road. You had seen the lights of the car from the hills and heard the shooting and afterwards you had come down to the road and found the bodies. You did not see the mother shot, nor the sister, nor the brother. You heard about it; you heard the shots; and you saw the bodies.

Pilar had made him see it in that town.

If that woman could only write. He would try to write it and if he had luck and could remember it perhaps he could get it down as she told it. God, how she could tell a story. She's better than Quevedo, he thought. He never wrote the death of any Don Faustino as well as she told it. I wish I could write well enough to write that story, he thought. What we did. Not what the others did to us. He knew enough about that. He knew plenty about that behind the lines. But you had to have known the people before. You had to know what they had been in the village.

Because of our mobility and because we did not have to stay afterwards to take the punishment we never knew how anything really ended, he thought. You stayed with a peasant and his family. You came at night and ate with them. In the day you were hidden and the next night you were gone. You did your job and cleared out. The next time you came that way you heard that they had been shot. It was as simple as that.

But you were always gone when it happened. The
partizans
did their damage and pulled out. The peasants stayed and took the punishment. I've always known about the other, he thought. What we did to them at the start. I've always known it and hated it and I have heard it mentioned shamelessly and shamefully, bragged of, boasted of, defended, explained and denied. But that damned woman made me see it as though I had been there.

Well, he thought, it is part of one's education. It will be quite an education when it's finished. You learn in this war if you listen. You most certainly did. He was lucky that he had lived parts of ten years in Spain before the war. They trusted you on the language, principally. They trusted you on understanding the language completely and speaking it idiomatically and having a knowledge of the different
places. A Spaniard was only really loyal to his village in the end. First Spain of course, then his own tribe, then his province, then his village, his family and finally his trade. If you knew Spanish he was prejudiced in your favor, if you knew his province it was that much better, but if you knew his village and his trade you were in as far as any foreigner ever could be. He never felt like a foreigner in Spanish and they did not really treat him like a foreigner most of the time; only when they turned on you.

Of course they turned on you. They turned on you often but they always turned on every one. They turned on themselves, too. If you had three together, two would unite against one, and then the two would start to betray each other. Not always, but often enough for you to take enough cases and start to draw it as a conclusion.