“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 Inglés 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, Inglés, 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 siop 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 Botánico 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 deathto-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.”
“Olé,” 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.”