For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway [41]
“This is no place for that.”
“She will not stay here. She will go with you.”
“And where will I go? I can’t take a woman where I go.”
“Who knows? You may take two where you go.”
“That is no way to talk.”
“Listen,” the woman said. “I am no coward, but I see things very clearly in the early morning and I think there are many that we know that are alive now who will never see another Sunday.”
“In what day are we?”
“Sunday.”
“Qué va,” said Robert Jordan. “Another Sunday is very far. If we see Wednesday we are all right. But I do not like to hear thee talk like this.”
“Every one needs to talk to some one,” the woman said. “Before we had religion and other nonsense. Now for every one there should be some one to whom one can speak frankly, for all the valor that one could have one becomes very alone.”
“We are not alone. We are all together.”
“The sight of those machines does things to one,” the woman said. “We are nothing against such machines.”
“Yet we can beat them.”
“Look,” the woman said. “I confess a sadness to you, but do not think I lack resolution. Nothing has happened to my resolution.”
“The sadness will dissipate as the sun rises. It is like a mist.”
“Clearly,” the woman said. “If you want it that way. Perhaps it came from talking that foolishness about Valencia. And that failure of a man who has gone to look at his horses. I wounded him much with the story. Kill him, yes. Curse him, yes. But wound him, no.”
“How came you to be with him?”
“How is one with any one? In the first days of the movement and before too, he was something. Something serious. But now he is finished. The plug has been drawn and the wine has all run out of the skin.”
“I do not like him.”
“Nor does he like you, and with reason. Last night I slept with him.” She smiled now and shook her head. “ Vamos a ver,” she said. “I said to him, ‘Pablo, why did you not kill the foreigner?’
“‘He’s a good boy, Pilar,’ he said. ‘He’s a good boy.’
“So I said, ‘You understand now that I command?’
“‘Yes, Pilar. Yes,’ he said. Later in the night I hear him awake and he is crying. He is crying in a short and ugly manner as a man cries when it is as though there is an animal inside that is shaking him.
“‘What passes with thee, Pablo?’ I said to him and I took hold of him and held him.
“‘Nothing, Pilar. Nothing.’
“‘Yes. Something passes with thee.’
“‘The people,’ he said. ‘The way they left me. The gente.’
“‘Yes, but they are with me,’ I said, ‘and I am thy woman.’
“‘Pilar,’ he said, ‘remember the train.’ Then he said, ‘May God aid thee, Pilar.’
“‘What are you talking of God for?’ I said to him. ‘What way is that to speak?’
“‘Yes,’ he said. ‘God and the Virgen.’
“‘Qué va, God and the Virgen,’ I said to him. ‘Is that any way to talk?’
“‘I am afraid to die, Pilar,’ he said. ‘Tengo miedo de morir. Dost thou understand?’
“‘Then get out of bed,’ I said to him. ‘There is not room in one bed for me and thee and thy fear all together.’
“Then he was ashamed and was quiet and I went to sleep but, man, he’s a ruin.”
Robert Jordan said nothing.
“All my life I have had this sadness at intervals,” the woman said. “But it is not like the sadness of Pablo. It does not affect my resolution.”
“I believe that.”
“It may be it is like the times of a woman,” she said. “It may be it is nothing,” she paused, then went on. “I put great illusion in the Republic. I believe firmly in the Republic and I have faith. I believe in it with fervor as those who have religious faith believe in the mysteries.”
“I believe you.”
“And you have this same faith?”
“In the Republic?”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” he said, hoping it was true.
“I am happy,” the woman said. “And you have no fear?”
“Not to die,” he said truly.
“But other fears?”
“Only of not doing my duty as I should.”
“Not of capture, as the other had?”
“No,” he said truly. “Fearing that, one would be so preoccupied as to be useless.”
“You are a very cold boy.”
“No,” he said. “I do not think so.”
“No. In the head you are very cold.”
“It is that I am very preoccupied with