"Shut up, Joaquin, and thank you very much," Maria said. "You'd be pretty with a haircut."
"I carried thee," Joaquin 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," Joaquin said, "there is news."
"Good or bad?"
"I believe bad."
"Did you see the planes?"
"Ay," said Joaquin 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," Joaquin said. "But I am delaying you. I will take you to the commander."
"The commander?" Pilar asked.
Joaquin 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," Joaquin said. "But I like military terms because it makes orders clearer and for better discipline."
"Here is one according to thy taste, Ingles," Pilar said. "A very serious boy."
"Should I carry thee?" Joaquin 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?" Joaquin 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, Joaquin, and I'll carry thee sometime."
"I can remember it well enough," Joaquin 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?" Joaquin 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," Joaquin went on teasing her. "But I was afraid Pilar would shoot me."
"I shoot no one," Pilar said.
"No hace falta," Joaquin 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," Joaquin said. "I was sixteen."
"But what, exactly?"
"A few pairs of shoes from time to time."
"Make them?"
"No. Shine them."
"Que 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?" Joaquin grinned, showing white teeth.
"Very much," Robert Jordan said. "Very, very much."
"Have you seen them in Valladolid?" asked Joaquin.
"Yes. In September at the feria."
"That's my town," Joaquin 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 the
y 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.
This was no way to think; but who censored his thinking? Nobody but himself. He would not think himself into any defeatism. The first thing was to win the war. If we did not win the war everything was lost. But he noticed, and listened to, and remembered everything. He was serving in a war and he gave absolute loyalty and as complete a performance as he could give while he was serving. But nobody owned his mind, nor his faculties for seeing and hearing, and if he were going to form judgments he would form them afterwards. And there would be plenty of material to draw them from. There was plenty already. There was a little too much sometimes.
Look at the Pilar woman, he thought. No matter what comes, if there is time, I must make her tell me the rest of that story. Look at her walking along with those two kids. You could not get three better-looking products of Spain than those. She is like a mountain and the boy and the girl are like young trees. The old trees are all cut down and the young trees are growing clean like that. In spite of what has happened to the two of them they look as fresh and clean and new and untouched as though they had never heard of misfortune. But according to Pilar, Maria has just gotten sound again. She must have been in an awful shape.
He remembered a Belgian boy in the Eleventh Brigade who had enlisted with five other boys from his village. It was a village of about two hundred people and the boy had never been away from the village before. When he first saw the boy, out at Hans' Brigade Staff, the other five from the village had all been killed and the boy was in very bad shape and they were using him as an orderly to wait on table at the staff. He had a big, blond, ruddy Flemish face and huge awkward peasant hands and he moved, with the dishes, as powerfully and awkwardly as a draft horse. But he cried all the time. All during the meal he cried with no noise at all.
You looked up and there he was, crying. If you asked for the wine, he cried and if you passed your plate for stew, he cried; turning away his head. Then he would stop; but if you looked up at him, tears would start coming again. Between courses he cried in the kitchen. Every one was very gentle with him. But it did no good. He would have to find out what became of him and whether he ever cleared up and was fit for soldiering again.
Maria was sound enough now. She seemed so anyway. But he was no psychiatrist. Pilar was the psychiatrist. It probably had been good for them to have been together last night. Yes, unless it stopped. It certainly had been good for him. He felt fine today; sound and good and unworried and happy. The show looked bad enough but he was awfully lucky, too. He had been in others that announced themselves badly. Announced themselves; that was thinking in Spanish. Maria was lovely.
Look at her, he said to himself. Look at her.
He looked at her striding happily in the sun; her khaki shirt open at the neck. She walks like a colt moves, he thought. You do not run onto something like that. Such things don't happen. Maybe it never did happen, he thought. Maybe you dreamed it or made it up and it never did happen. Maybe it is like the dreams you have when some one you have seen in the cinema comes to your bed at night and is so kind and lovely. He'd slept with them all that way when he was asleep in bed. He could remember Garbo still, and Harlow. Yes, Harlow many times. Maybe it was like those dreams.
But he could still remember the time Garbo came to his bed the night before the attack at Pozoblanco and she was wearing a soft silky wool sweater when he put his arm around her and when she leaned forward her hair swept forward and over his face and she said why had he never told her that he loved her when she had loved him all this time? She was not shy, nor cold, nor distant. She was just lovely to hold and kind and lovely and like the old days with Jack Gilbert and it was as true as though it happened and he loved her much more than Harlow though Garbo was only there once while Harlow----maybe this was like those dreams.
Maybe it isn't too, he said to himself. Maybe I could reach over and touch that Maria now, he said to himself. Maybe you are afraid to he said to himself. Maybe you would find out that it never happened and it was not true and it was something you made up like those dreams about the people of the cinema or how all your old girls come back and sleep in that robe at night on all the bare floors, in the straw of the haybarns, the stables, the corrales and the cortijos, the woods, the garages, the trucks and all the hills of Spain. They all came to that robe when he was asleep and they were all much nicer than they ever had been in life. Maybe it was like that. Maybe you would be afraid to touch her to see if it was true. Maybe you would, and probably it is something that you made up or that you dreamed.
He took a step across the trail and put his hand on the girl's arm. Under his fingers he felt the smoothness of her arm in the worn khaki. She looked at him and smiled.
"Hello, Maria," he said.
"Hello, Ingles," she answered and he saw her tawny brown face and the yellow-gray eyes and the full lips smiling and the cropped sun-burned hair and she lifted her face at him and smiled in his eyes. It was true all right.
Now they were in sight of El Sordo's camp in the last of the pines, where there was a rounded gulch-head shaped like an upturned basin. All these limestone upper basins must be full of caves, he thought. There are two caves there ahead. The scrub pines growing in the rock hide them well. This is as good or a better place than Pablo's.
"How was this shooting of thy family?" Pilar was saying to Joaquin.
"Nothing, woman," Joaquin said. "They were of the left as many others in Valladolid. When the fascists purified the town they shot first the father. He had voted Socialist. Then they shot the mother. She had voted the same. It was the first time she had ever voted. After that they shot the husband of one of the sisters. He was a member of the syndicate of tramway drivers. Clearly he could not drive a tram without belonging to the syndicate. But he was without politics. I knew him well. He was even a little bit shameless. I do not think he was even a good comrade. Then the husband of the other girl, the other sister, who was also in the trams, had gone to the hills as I had. They thought she knew where he was. But she did not. So they shot her because she would not tell them where he was."
"What barbarians," said Pilar. "Where is El Sordo? I do not see him."
"He is here. He is probably inside," answered Joaquin and stopping now, and resting the rifle butt on the ground, said, "Pilar, listen to me. And thou, Maria. Forgive me if I have molested you speaking of things of the family. I know that all have the same troubles and it is more valuable not to speak of them."
"That you should speak," Pilar said. "For what are we born if not to aid one another? And to listen and say nothing is a cold enough aid."
"But it can molest the Maria. She has too many things of her own."
"Que va," Maria said. "Mine are such a big bucket that yours falling in will never fill it. I am sorry, Joaquin, and I hope thy sister is well."
"So far she's all right," Joaquin said. "They have her in prison and it seems they do not mistreat her much."
"Are there others in the family?" Robert Jordan asked.
"No," the boy said. "Me. Nothing more. Except the brother-in-law who went to the hills and I think he is dead."
"Maybe he is all right," Maria said. "Maybe he is with a band in other mountains."
"For me he is dead," Joaquin said. "He was never too good at getting about and he was conductor of a tram and that is not the best preparation for the hills. I doubt if he could last a year. He was somewhat weak in the chest too."
"But he may be all right," Maria put her arm on his shoulder.
"Certainly, girl. Why not?" said Joaquin.
As the boy stood there, Maria reached up, put her arms around his neck and kissed him. Joaquin turned his head away because he was crying.
"That is as a brother," Maria
said to him. "I kiss thee as a brother."
The boy shook his head, crying without making any noise.
"I am thy sister," Maria said. "And I love thee and thou hast a family. We are all thy family."
"Including the Ingles," boomed Pilar. "Isn't it true, Ingles?"
"Yes," Robert Jordan said to the boy, "we are all thy family, Joaquin."
"He's your brother," Pilar said. "Hey Ingles?"
Robert Jordan put his arm around the boy's shoulder. "We are all brothers," he said. The boy shook his head.
"I am ashamed to have spoken," he said. "To speak of such things makes it more difficult for all. I am ashamed of molesting you."
"I obscenity in the milk of my shame," Pilar said in her deep lovely voice. "And if the Maria kisses thee again I will commence kissing thee myself. It's years since I've kissed a bullfighter, even an unsuccessful one like thee, I would like to kiss an unsuccessful bullfighter turned Communist. Hold him, Ingles, till I get a good kiss at him."
"Deja," the boy said and turned away sharply. "Leave me alone. I am all right and I am ashamed."
He stood there, getting his face under control. Maria put her hand in Robert Jordan's. Pilar stood with her hands on her hips looking at the boy mockingly now.
"When I kiss thee," she said to him, "it will not be as any sister. This trick of kissing as a sister."
"It is not necessary to joke," the boy said. "I told you I am all right, I am sorry that I spoke."
"Well then let us go and see the old man," Pilar said. "I tire myself with such emotion."
The boy looked at her. From his eyes you could see he was suddenly very hurt.
"Not thy emotion," Pilar said to him. "Mine. What a tender thing thou art for a bullfighter."
"I was a failure," Joaquin said. "You don't have to keep insisting on it."
"But you are growing the pigtail another time."
"Yes, and why not? Fighting stock serves best for that purpose economically. It gives employment to many and the State will control it. And perhaps now I would not be afraid."
"Perhaps not," Pilar said. "Perhaps not."
"Why do you speak in such a brutal manner, Pilar?" Maria said to her. "I love thee very much but thou art acting very barbarous."
"It is possible that I am barbarous," Pilar said. "Listen, Ingles. Do you know what you are going to say to El Sordo?"
For Whom the Bell Tolls Page 15