“Yes,” Robert Jordan said. “I have seen him many times. He was small, gray-faced and no one handled a cape better. He was quick on his feet as a rabbit.”
“Exactly,” Pilar said. “He had a gray face from heart trouble and gypsies said that he carried death with him but that he could flick it away with a cape as you might dust a table. Yet he, who was no gypsy, smelled death on Joselito when he fought at Talavera. Although I do not see how he could smell it above the smell of manzanilla. Blanquet spoke of this afterwards with much diffidence but those to whom he spoke said that it was a fantasy and that what he had smelled was the life that José led at that time coming out in sweat from his armpits. But then, later, came this of Manolo Granero in which Juan Luis de la Rosa also participated. Clearly Juan Luis was a man of very little honor, but of much sensitiveness in his work and he was also a great layer of women. But Blanquet was serious and very quiet and completely incapable of telling an untruth. And I tell you that I smelled death on your colleague who was here.”
“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 café. 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, Inglés,” the gypsy, Rafael, said. “It is a well-known thing among us.”
“I believe nothing of it,” Robert Jordan said.
“Listen, Inglés,” 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, Inglés. 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 hei 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, Inglés, and hold her to you and kiss her on the mouth and you will know the second part that odor is made of.”