“It is not bad,” the old man said. “I will not go with a military band.”
“Nor with a bell around his neck,” Agustín said. “Nor carrying a banner.”
“How will you go?”
“Above and down through the forest.”
“But if they pick you up.”
“I have papers.”
“So have we all but thou must eat the wrong ones quickly.”
Anselmo shook his head and tapped the breast pocket of his smock.
“How many times have I contemplated that,” he said. “And never did I like to swallow paper.”
“I have thought we should carry a little mustard on them all,” Robert Jordan said. “In my left breast pocket I carry our papers. In my right the fascist papers. Thus one does not make a mistake in an emergency.”
It must have been bad enough when the leader of the first patrol of cavalry had pointed toward the entry because they were all talking very much. Too much, Robert Jordan thought.
“But look, Roberto,” Agustín said. “They say the government moves further to the right each day. That in the Republic they no longer say Comrade but Señor and Señora. Canst shift thy pockets?”
“When it moves far enough to the right I will carry them in my hip pocket,” Robert Jordan said, “and sew it in the center.”
“That they should stay in thy shirt,” Agustín said. “Are we to win this war and lose the revolution?”
“Nay,” Robert Jordan said. “But if we do not win this war there will be no revolution nor any Republic nor any thou nor any me nor anything but the most grand carajo.”
“So say I,” Anselmo said. “That we should win the war.”
“And afterwards shoot the anarchists and the Communists and all this canalla except the good Republicans,” Agustín said.
“That we should win this war and shoot nobody,” Anselmo said. “That we should govern justly and that all should participate in the benefits according as they have striven for them. And that those who have fought against us should be educated to see their error.”
“We will have to shoot many,” Agustín said. “Many, many, many.”
He thumped his closed right fist against the palm of his left hand.
“That we should shoot none. Not even the leaders. That they should be reformed by work.”
“I know the work I’d put them at,” Agustín said, and he picked up some snow and put it in his mouth.
“What, bad one?” Robert Jordan asked.
“Two trades of the utmost brilliance.”
“They are?”
Agustín put some more snow in his mouth and looked across the clearing where the cavalry had ridden. Then he spat the melted snow out. “Vaya. What a breakfast,” he said. “Where is the filthy gypsy?”
“What trades?” Robert Jordan asked him. “Speak, bad mouth.”
“Jumping from planes without parachutes,” Agustín said, and his eyes shone. “That for those that we care for. And being nailed to the tops of fence posts to be pushed over backwards for the others.”
“That way of speaking is ignoble,” Anselmo said. “Thus we will never have a Republic.”
“I would like to swim ten leagues in a strong soup made from the cojones of all of them,” Agustín said. “And when I saw those four there and thought that we might kill them I was like a mare in the corral waiting for the stallion.”
“You know why we did not kill them, though?” Robert Jordan said quietly.
“Yes,” Agustín said. “Yes. But the necessity was on me as it is on a mare in heat. You cannot know what it is if you have not felt it.”
“You sweated enough,” Robert Jordan said. “I thought it was fear.”
“Fear, yes,” Agustín said. “Fear and the other. And in this life there is no stronger thing than the other.”
Yes, Robert Jordan thought. We do it coldly but they do not, nor ever have. It is their extra sacrament. Their old one that they had before the new religion came from the far end of the Mediterranean, the one they have never abandoned but only suppressed and hidden to bring it out again in wars and inquisitions. They are the people of the Auto de Fe; the act of faith. Killing is something one must do, but ours are different from theirs. And you, he thought, you have never been corrupted by it? You never had it in the Sierra? Nor at Usera? Nor through all the time in Estremadura? Nor at any time? Qué va, he told himself. At every train.