For Whom the Bell Tolls

by Ernest Hemingway

  "I do not believe it," Robert Jordan said. "Also you said that Blanquet smelled this just before the paseo. Just before the bullfight started. Now this was a successful action here of you and Kashkin and the train. He was not killed in that. How could you smell it then?"

  "That has nothing to do with it," Pilar explained. "In the last season of Ignacio Sanchez Mejias he smelled so strongly of death that many refused to sit with him in the cafe. All gypsies knew of this."

  "After the death such things are invented," Robert Jordan argued. "Every one knew that Sanchez Mejias was on the road to a cornada because he had been too long out of training, because his style was heavy and dangerous, and because his strength and the agility in his legs were gone and his reflexes no longer as they had been."

  "Certainly," Pilar told him. "All of that is true. But all the gypsies knew also that he smelled of death and when he would come into the Villa Rosa you would see such people as Ricardo and Felipe Gonzalez leaving by the small door behind the bar."

  "They probably owed him money," Robert Jordan said.

  "It is possible," Pilar said. "Very possible. But they also smelled the thing and all knew of it."

  "What she says is true, Ingles," the gypsy, Rafael, said. "It is a well-known thing among us."

  "I believe nothing of it," Robert Jordan said.

  "Listen, Ingles," Anselmo began. "I am against all such wizardry. But this Pilar has the fame of being very advanced in such things."

  "But what does it smell like?" Fernando asked. "What odor has it? If there be an odor it must be a definite odor."

  "You want to know, Fernandito?" Pilar smiled at him. "You think that you could smell it?"

  "If it actually exists why should I not smell it as well as another?"

  "Why not?" Pilar was making fun of him, her big hands folded across her knees. "Hast thou ever been aboard a ship, Fernando?"

  "Nay. And I would not wish to."

  "Then thou might not recognize it. For part of it is the smell that comes when, on a ship, there is a storm and the portholes are closed up. Put your nose against the brass handle of a screwed-tight porthole on a rolling ship that is swaying under you so that you are faint and hollow in the stomach and you have a part of that smell."

  "It would be impossible for me to recognize because I will go on no ship," Fernando said.

  "I have been on ships several times," Pilar said. "Both to go to Mexico and to Venezuela."

  "What's the rest of it?" Robert Jordan asked. Pilar looked at him mockingly, remembering now, proudly, her voyages.

  "All right, Ingles. Learn. That's the thing. Learn. All right. After that of the ship you must go down the hill in Madrid to the Puente de Toledo early in the morning to the matadero and stand there on the wet paving when there is a fog from the Manzanares and wait for the old women who go before daylight to drink the blood of the beasts that are slaughtered. When such an old woman comes out of the matadero, holding her shawl around her, with her face gray and her eyes hollow, and the whiskers of age on her chin, and on her cheeks, set in the waxen white of her face as the sprouts grow from the seed of the bean, not bristles, but pale sprouts in the death of her face; put your arms tight around her, Ingles, and hold her to you and kiss her on the mouth and you will know the second part that odor is made of."

  "That one has taken my appetite," the gypsy said. "That of the sprouts was too much."

  "Do you want to hear some more?" Pilar asked Robert Jordan.

  "Surely," he said. "If it is necessary for one to learn let us learn."

  "That of the sprouts in the face of the old women sickens me," the gypsy said. "Why should that occur in old women, Pilar? With us it is not so."

  "Nay," Pilar mocked at him. "With us the old woman, who was so slender in her youth, except of course for the perpetual bulge that is the mark of her husband's favor, that every gypsy pushes always before her----"

  "Do not speak thus," Rafael said. "It is ignoble."

  "So thou art hurt," Pilar said. "Hast thou ever seen a Gitana who was not about to have, or just to have had, a child?"

  "Thou."

  "Leave it," Pilar said. "There is no one who cannot be hurt. What I was saying is that age brings its own form of ugliness to all. There is no need to detail it. But if the Ingles must learn that odor that he covets to recognize he must go to the matadero early in the morning."

  "I will go," Robert Jordan said. "But I will get the odor as they pass without kissing one. I fear the sprouts, too, as Rafael does."

  "Kiss one," Pilar said. "Kiss one, Ingles, for thy knowledge's sake and then, with this in thy nostrils, walk back up into the city and when thou seest a refuse pail with dead flowers in it plunge thy nose deep into it and inhale so that scent mixes with those thou hast already in thy nasal passages."

  "Now have I done it," Robert Jordan said. "What flowers were they?"

  "Chrysanthemums."

  "Continue," Robert Jordan said. "I smell them."

  "Then," Pilar went on, "it is important that the day be in autumn with rain, or at least some fog, or early winter even and now thou shouldst continue to walk through the city and down the Calle de Salud smelling what thou wilt smell where they are sweeping out the casas de putas and emptying the slop jars into the drains and, with this odor of love's labor lost mixed sweetly with soapy water and cigarette butts only faintly reaching thy nostrils, thou shouldst go on to the Jardin Botanico where at night those girls who can no longer work in the houses do their work against the iron gates of the park and the iron picketed fences and upon the sidewalks. It is there in the shadow of the trees against the iron railings that they will perform all that a man wishes; from the simplest requests at a remuneration of ten centimos up to a peseta for that great act that we are born to and there, on a dead flower bed that has not yet been plucked out and replanted, and so serves to soften the earth that is so much softer than the sidewalk, thou wilt find an abandoned gunny sack with the odor of the wet earth, the dead flowers, and the doings of that night. In this sack will be contained the essence of it all, both the dead earth and the dead stalks of the flowers and their rotted blooms and the smell that is both the death and birth of man. Thou wilt wrap this sack around thy head and try to breathe through it."

  "No."

  "Yes," Pilar said. "Thou wilt wrap this sack around thy head and try to breathe and then, if thou hast not lost any of the previous odors, when thou inhalest deeply, thou wilt smell the odor of death-to-come as we know it."

  "All right," Robert Jordan said. "And you say Kashkin smelt like that when he was here?"

  "Yes."

  "Well," said Robert Jordan gravely. "If that is true it is a good thing that I shot him."

  "Ole," the gypsy said. The others laughed.

  "Very good," Primitivo approved. "That should hold her for a while."

  "But Pilar," Fernando said. "Surely you could not expect one of Don Roberto's education to do such vile things."

  "No," Pilar agreed.

  "All of that is of the utmost repugnance."

  "Yes," Pilar agreed.

  "You would not expect him actually to perform those degrading acts?"

  "No," Pilar said. "Go to bed, will you?"

  "But, Pilar--" Fernando went on.

  "Shut up, will you?" Pilar said to him suddenly and viciously. "Do not make a fool of thyself and I will try not to make a fool of myself talking with people who cannot understand what one speaks of."

  "I confess I do not understand," Fernando began.

  "Don't confess and don't try to understand," Pilar said. "Is it still snowing outside?"

  Robert Jordan went to the mouth of the cave, lifted the blanket and looked out. It was clear and cold in the night outside and no snow was falling. He looked through the tree trunks where the whiteness lay and up through the trees to where the sky was now clear. The air came into his lungs sharp and cold as he breathed.

  El Sordo will leave plenty of tracks if he has stolen horses tonight
, he thought.

  He dropped the blanket and came back into the smoky cave. "It is clear," he said. "The storm is over."

  20

  Now in the night he lay and waited for the girl to come to him. There was no wind now and the pines were still in the night. The trunks of the pines projected from the snow that covered all the ground, and he lay in the robe feeling the suppleness of the bed under him that he had made, his legs stretched long against the warmth of the robe, the air sharp and cold on his head and in his nostrils as he breathed. Under his head, as he lay on his side, was the bulge of the trousers and the coat that he had wrapped around his shoes to make a pillow and against his side was the cold metal of the big automatic pistol he had taken from the holster when he undressed and fastened by its lanyard to his right wrist. He pushed the pistol away and settled deeper into the robe as he watched, across the snow, the dark break in the rocks that was the entrance to the cave. The sky was clear and there was enough light reflected from the snow to see the trunks of the trees and the bulk of the rocks where the cave was.

  Earlier in the evening he had taken the ax and gone outside of the cave and walked through the new snow to the edge of the clearing and cut down a small spruce tree. In the dark he had dragged it, butt first, to the lee of the rock wall. There close to the rock, he had held the tree upright, holding the trunk firm with one hand, and, holding the ax-haft close to the head had lopped off all the boughs until he had a pile of them. Then, leaving the pile of boughs, he had laid the bare pole of the trunk down in the snow and gone into the cave to get a slab of wood he had seen against the wall. With this slab he scraped the ground clear of the snow along the rock wall and then picked up his boughs and shaking them clean of snow laid them in rows, like overlapping plumes, until he had a bed. He put the pole across the foot of the bough bed to hold the branches in place and pegged it firm with two pointed pieces of wood he split from the edge of the slab.

  Then he carried the slab and the ax back into the cave, ducking under the blanket as he came in, and leaned them both against the wall.

  "What do you do outside?" Pilar had asked. "I made a bed."

  "Don't cut pieces from my new shelf for thy bed."

  "I am sorry."

  "It has no importance," she said. "There are more slabs at the sawmill. What sort of bed hast thou made?"

  "As in my country."

  "Then sleep well on it," she had said and Robert Jordan had opened one of the packs and pulled the robe out and replaced those things wrapped in it back in the pack and carried the robe out, ducking under the blanket again, and spread it over the boughs so that the closed end of the robe was against the pole that was pegged cross-wise at the foot of the bed. The open head of the robe was protected by the rock wall of the cliff. Then he went back into the cave for his packs but Pilar said, "They can sleep with me as last night."

  "Will you not have sentries?" he asked. "The night is clear and the storm is over."

  "Fernando goes," Pilar said.

  Maria was in the back of the cave and Robert Jordan could not see her.

  "Good night to every one," he had said. "I am going to sleep."

  Of the others, who were laying out blankets and bedrolls on the floor in front of the cooking fire, pushing back the slab tables and the rawhide-covered stools to make sleeping space, Primitivo and Andres looked up and said, "Buenas noches."

  Anselmo was already asleep in a corner, rolled in his blanket and his cape, not even his nose showing. Pablo was asleep in his chair.

  "Do you want a sheep hide for thy bed?" Pilar asked Robert Jordan softly.

  "Nay," he said. "Thank thee. I do not need it."

  "Sleep well," she said. "I will respond for thy material."

  Fernando had gone out with him and stood a moment where Robert Jordan had spread the sleeping robe.

  "You have a curious idea to sleep in the open, Don Roberto," he said standing there in the dark, muffled in his blanket cape, his carbine slung over his shoulder.

  "I am accustomed to it. Good night."

  "Since you are accustomed to it."

  "When are you relieved?"

  "At four."

  "There is much cold between now and then."

  "I am accustomed to it," Fernando said.

  "Since, then, you are accustomed to it--" Robert Jordan said politely.

  "Yes," Fernando agreed. "Now I must get up there. Good night, Don Roberto."

  "Good night, Fernando."

  Then he had made a pillow of the things he took off and gotten into the robe and then lain and waited, feeling the spring of the boughs under the flannelly, feathered lightness of the robe warmth, watching the mouth of the cave across the snow; feeling his heart beat as he waited.

  The night was clear and his head felt as clear and cold as the air. He smelled the odor of the pine boughs under him, the piney smell of the crushed needles and the sharper odor of the resinous sap from the cut limbs. Pilar, he thought. Pilar and the smell of death. This is the smell I love. This and fresh-cut clover, the crushed sage as you ride after cattle, wood-smoke and the burning leaves of autumn. That must be the odor of nostalgia, the smell of the smoke from the piles of raked leaves burning in the streets in the fall in Missoula. Which would you rather smell? Sweet grass the Indians used in their baskets? Smoked leather? The odor of the ground in the spring after rain? The smell of the sea as you walk through the gorse on a headland in Galicia? Or the wind from the land as you come in toward Cuba in the dark? That was the odor of the cactus flowers, mimosa and the sea-grape shrubs. Or would you rather smell frying bacon in the morning when you are hungry? Or coffee in the morning? Or a Jonathan apple as you bit into it? Or a cider mill in the grinding, or bread fresh from the oven? You must be hungry, he thought, and he lay on his side and watched the entrance of the cave in the light that the stars reflected from the snow.

  Some one came out from under the blanket and he could see whoever it was standing by the break in the rock that made the entrance. Then he heard a slithering sound in the snow and then whoever it was ducked down and went back in.

  I suppose she won't come until they are all asleep, he thought. It is a waste of time. The night is half gone. Oh, Maria. Come now quickly, Maria, for there is little time. He heard the soft sound of snow falling from a branch onto the snow on the ground. A little wind was rising. He felt it on his face. Suddenly he felt a panic that she might not come. The wind rising now reminded him how soon it would be morning. More snow fell from the branches as he heard the wind now moving the pine tops.

  Come now, Maria. Please come here now quickly, he thought. Oh, come here now. Do not wait. There is no importance any more to your waiting until they are asleep.

  Then he saw her coming out from under the blanket that covered the cave mouth. She stood there a moment and he knew it was she but he could not see what she was doing. He whistled a low whistle and she was still at the cave mouth doing something in the darkness of the rock shadow. Then she came running, carrying something in her hands and he saw her running long-legged through the snow. Then she was kneeling by the robe, her head pushed hard against him, slapping snow from her feet. She kissed him and handed him her bundle.

  "Put it with thy pillow," she said. "I took these off there to save time."

  "You came barefoot through the snow?"

  "Yes," she said, "and wearing only my wedding shirt."

  He held her close and tight in his arms and she rubbed her head against his chin.

  "Avoid the feet," she said. "They are very cold, Roberto."

  "Put them here and warm them."

  "Nay," she said. "They will warm quickly. But say quickly now that you love me."

  "I love thee."

  "Good. Good. Good."

  "I love thee, little rabbit."

  "Do you love my wedding shirt?"

  "It is the same one as always."

  "Yes. As last night. It is my wedding shirt."

  "Put thy feet here."

&
nbsp; "Nay, that would be abusive. They will warm of themselves. They are warm to me. It is only that the snow has made them cold toward thee. Say it again."

  "I love thee, my little rabbit."

  "I love thee, too, and I am thy wife."

  "Were they asleep?"

  "No," she said. "But I could support it no longer. And what importance has it?"

  "None," he said, and felt her against him, slim and long and warmly lovely. "No other thing has importance."

  "Put thy hand on my head," she said, "and then let me see if I can kiss thee.

  "Was it well?" she asked.

  "Yes," he said. "Take off thy wedding shirt."

  "You think I should?"

  "Yes, if thou wilt not be cold."

  "Que va, cold. I am on fire."

  "I, too. But afterwards thou wilt not be cold?"

  "No. Afterwards we will be as one animal of the forest and be so close that neither one can tell that one of us is one and not the other. Can you not feel my heart be your heart?"

  "Yes. There is no difference."

  "Now, feel. I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other. And I love thee, oh, I love thee so. Are you not truly one? Canst thou not feel it?"

  "Yes," he said. "It is true."

  "And feel now. Thou hast no heart but mine."

  "Nor any other legs, nor feet, nor of the body."

  "But we are different," she said. "I would have us exactly the same."

  "You do not mean that."

  "Yes I do. I do. That is a thing I had to tell thee."

  "You do not mean that."

  "Perhaps I do not," she said speaking softly with her lips against his shoulder. "But I wished to say it. Since we are different I am glad that thou art Roberto and I Maria. But if thou should ever wish to change I would be glad to change. I would be thee because I love thee so."

  "I do not wish to change. It is better to be one and each one to be the one he is."

  "But we will be one now and there will never be a separate one." Then she said, "I will be thee when thou are not there. Oh, I love thee so and I must care well for thee."