Who would imagine they would have whiskey up here, he thought. But La Granja was the most likely place in Spain to find it when you thought it over. Imagine Sordo getting a bottle for the visiting dynamiter and then remembering to bring it down and leave it. It wasn’t just manners that they had. Manners would have been producing the bottle and having a formal drink. That was what the French would have done and then they would have saved what was left for another occasion. No, the true thoughtfulness of thinking the visitor would like it and then bringing it down for him to enjoy when you yourself were engaged in something where there was every reason to think of no one else but yourself and of nothing but the matter in hand–that was Spanish. One kind of Spanish, he thought. Remembering to bring the whiskey was one of the reasons you loved these people. Don’t go romanticizing them, he thought. There are as many sorts of Spanish as there are Americans. But still, bringing the whiskey was very handsome.
“How do you like it?” he asked Anselmo.
The old man was sitting by the fire with a smile on his face, his big hands holding the cup. He shook his head.
“No?” Robert Jordan asked him.
“The child put water in it,” Anselmo said.
“Exactly as Roberto takes it,” Maria said. “Art thou something special?”
“No,” Anselmo told her. “Nothing special at all. But I like to feel it burn as it goes down.”
“Give me that,” Robert Jordan told the girl, “and pour him some of that which burns.”
He tipped the contents of the cup into his own and handed it back empty to the girl, who poured carefully into it from the bottle.
“Ah,” Anselmo took the cup, put his head back and let it run down his throat. He looked at Maria standing holding the bottle and winked at her, tears coming from both eyes. “That,” he said. “That.” Then he licked his lips. “That is what kills the worm that haunts us.”
“Roberto,” Maria said and came over to him, still holding the bottle. “Are you ready to eat?”
“Is it ready?”
“It is ready when you wish it.”
“Have the others eaten?”
“All except you, Anselmo and Fernando.”
“Let us eat then,” he told her. “And thou?”
“Afterwards with Pilar.”
“Eat now with us.”
“No. It would not be well.”
“Come on and eat. In my country a man does not eat before his woman.”
“That is thy country. Here it is better to eat after.”
“Eat with him,” Pablo said, looking up from the table. “Eat with him. Drink with him. Sleep with him. Die with him. Follow the customs of his country.”
“Are you drunk?” Robert Jordan said, standing in front of Pablo. The dirty, stubble-faced man looked at him happily.
“Yes,” Pablo said. “Where is thy country, Inglés, where the women eat with the men?”
“In Estados Unidos in the state of Montana.”
“Is it there that the men wear skirts as do the women?”
“No. That is in Scotland.”
“But listen,” Pablo said. “When you wear skirts like that, Inglés–”
“I don’t wear them,” Robert Jordan said.
“When you are wearing those skirts,” Pablo went on, “what do you wear under them?”
“I don’t know what the Scotch wear,” Robert Jordan said. “I’ve wondered myself.”
“Not the Escoceses,” Pablo said. “Who cares about the Escoceses? Who cares about anything with a name as rare as that? Not me. I don’t care. You, I say, Inglés. You. What do you wear under your skirts in your country?”
“Twice I have told you that we do not wear skirts,” Robert Jordan said. “Neither drunk nor in joke.”
“But under your skirts,” Pablo insisted. “Since it is well known that you wear skirts. Even the soldiers. I have seen photographs and also I have seen them in the Circus of Price. What do you wear under your skirts, Inglés?”
“Los cojones,” Robert Jordan said.
Anselmo laughed and so did the others who were listening; all except Fernando. The sound of the word, of the gross word spoken before the women, was offensive to him.