Stop making dubious literature about the Berbers and the old Iberians and admit that you have liked to kill as all who are soldiers by choice have enjoyed it at some time whether they lie about it or not. Anselmo does not like to because he is a hunter, not a soldier. Don’t idealize him, either. Hunters kill animals and soldiers kill men. Don’t lie to yourself, he thought. Nor make up literature about it. You have been tainted with it for a long time now. And do not think against Anselmo either. He is a Christian. Something very rare in Catholic countries.
But with Agustín I had thought it was fear, he thought. That natural fear before action. So it was the other, too. Of course, he may be bragging now. There was plenty of fear. I felt the fear under my hand. Well, it was time to stop talking.
“See if the gypsy brought food,” he said to Anselmo. “Do not let him come up. He is a fool. Bring it yourself. And however much he brought, send back for more. I am hungry.”
24
Now the morning was late May, the sky was high and clear and the wind blew warm on Robert Jordan’s shoulders. The snow was going fast and they were eating breakfast. There were two big sandwiches of meat and the goaty cheese apiece, and Robert Jordan had cut thick slices of onion with his clasp knife and put them on each side of the meat and cheese between the chunks of bread.
“You will have a breath that will carry through the forest to the fascists,” Agustín said, his own mouth full.
“Give me the wineskin and I will rinse the mouth,” Robert Jordan said, his mouth full of meat, cheese, onion and chewed bread.
He had never been hungrier and he filled his mouth with wine, faintly tarry-tasting from the leather bag, and swallowed. Then he took another big mouthful of wine, lifting the bag up to let the jet of wine spurt into the back of his mouth, the wineskin touching the needles of the blind of pine branches that covered the automatic rifle as he lifted his hand, his head leaning against the pine branches as he bent it back to let the wine run down.
“Dost thou want this other sandwich?” Agustín asked him, handing it toward him across the gun.
“No. Thank you. Eat it.”
“I cannot. I am not accustomed to eat in the morning.”
“You do not want it, truly?”
“Nay. Take it.”
Robert Jordan took it and laid it on his lap while he got the onion out of his side jacket pocket where the grenades were and opened his knife to slice it. He cut off a thin sliver of the surface that had dirtied in his pocket, then cut a thick slice. An outer segment fell and he picked it up and bent the circle together and put it into the sandwich.
“Eatest thou always onions for breakfast?” Agustín asked.
“When there are any.”
“Do all in thy country do this?”
“Nay,” Robert Jordan said. “It is looked on badly there.”
“I am glad,” Agustín said. “I had always considered America a civilized country.”
“What hast thou against the onion?”
“The odor. Nothing more. Otherwise it is like the rose.”
Robert Jordan grinned at him with his mouth full.
“Like the rose,” he said. “Mighty like the rose. A rose is a rose is an onion.”
“Thy onions are affecting thy brain,” Agustín said. “Take care.”
“An onion is an onion is an onion,” Robert Jordan said cheerily and, he thought, a stone is a stein is a rock is a boulder is a pebble.
“Rinse thy mouth with wine,” Agustín said. “Thou art very rare, Inglés. There is great difference between thee and the last dynamiter who worked with us.”
“There is one great difference.”
“Tell it to me.”
“I am alive and he is dead,” Robert Jordan said. Then: what’s the matter with you? he thought. Is that the way to talk? Does food make you that slap happy? What are you, drunk on onions? Is that all it means to you, now? It never meant much, he told himself truly. You tried to make it mean something, but it never did. There is no need to lie in the time that is left.