He had gotten this helmet at the blowing up of the train. It had a bullet hole through it and every one had always joked at him for keeping it. But he had hammered the jagged edges of the bullet hole smooth and driven a wooden plug into it and then cut the plug off and smoothed it even with the metal inside the helmet.
When the shooting started he had clapped this helmet on his head so hard it banged his head as though he had been hit with a casserole and, in the last lung-aching, leg-dead, mouth-dry, bulletspatting, bullet-cracking, bullet-singing run up the final slope of the hill after his horse was killed, the helmet had seemed to weigh a great amount and to ring his bursting forehead with an iron band. But he had kept it. Now he dug with it in a steady, almost machinelike desperation. He had not yet been hit.
“It serves for something finally,” Sordo said to him in his deep, throaty voice.
“Resistir y fortificar es vencer,” Joaquín said, his mouth stiff with the dryness of fear which surpassed the normal thirst of battle. It was one of the slogans of the Communist party and it meant, “Hold out and fortify, and you will win.”
Sordo looked away and down the slope at where a cavalryman was sniping from behind a boulder. He was very fond of this boy and he was in no mood for slogans.
“What did you say?”
One of the men turned from the building that he was doing. This man was lying flat on his face, reaching carefully up with his hands to put a rock in place while keeping his chin flat against the ground.
Joaquín repeated the slogan in his dried-up boy’s voice without checking his digging for a moment.
“What was the last word?” the man with his chin on the ground asked.
“Vencer,” the boy said. “Win.”
“Mierda,” the man with his chin on the ground said.
“There is another that applies to here,” Joaquín said, bringing them out as though they were talismans, “Pasionaria says it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”
“Mierda again,” the man said and another man said, over his shoulder, “We’re on our bellies, not our knees.”
“Thou. Communist. Do you know your Pasionaria has a son thy age in Russia since the start of the movement?”
“It’s a lie,” Joaquín said.
“Qué va, it’s a lie,” the other said. “The dynamiter with the rare name told me. He was of thy party, too. Why should he lie?”
“It’s a lie,” Joaquín said. “She would not do such a thing as keep a son hidden in Russia out of the war.”
“I wish I were in Russia,” another of Sordo’s men said. “Will not thy Pasionaria send me now from here to Russia, Communist?”
“If thou believest so much in thy Pasionaria, get her to get us off this hill,” one of the men who had a bandaged thigh said.
“The fascists will do that,” the man with his chin in the dirt said.
“Do not speak thus,” Joaquín said to him.
“Wipe the pap of your mother’s breasts off thy lips and give me a hatful of that dirt,” the man with his chin on the ground said. “No one of us will see the sun go down this night.”
El Sordo was thinking: It is shaped like a chancre. Or the breast of a young girl with no nipple. Or the top cone of a volcano. You have never seen a volcano, he thought. Nor will you ever see one. And this hill is like a chancre. Let the volcanos alone. It’s late now for the volcanos.
He looked very carefully around the withers of the dead horse and there was a quick hammering of firing from behind a boulder well down the slope and he heard the bullets from the submachine gun thud into the horse. He crawled along behind the horse and looked out of the angle between the horse’s hindquarters and the rock. There were three bodies on the slope just below him where they had fallen when the fascists had rushed the crest under cover of the automatic rifle and submachine gunfire and he and the others had broken down the attack by throwing and rolling down hand grenades. There were other bodies that he could not see on the other sides of the hill crest. There was no dead ground by which attackers could approach the summit and Sordo knew that as long as his ammunition and grenades held out and he had as many as four men they could not get him out of there unless they brought up a trench mortar. He did not know whether they had sent to La Granja for a trench mortar. Perhaps they had not, because surely, soon, the planes would come. It had been four hours since the observation plane had flown over them.