This officer looked up at Gomez and said, “What doest thou here? Have you never heard of the telephone?”
“I must see the Lieutenant-Colonel,” Gomez said.
“He is asleep,” the officer said. “I could see the lights of that bicycle of thine for a mile coming down the road. Dost wish to bring on a shelling?”
“Call the Lieutenant-Colonel,” Gomez said. “This is a matter of the utmost gravity.”
“He is asleep, I tell thee,” the officer said. “What sort of a bandit is that with thee?” he nodded toward Andrés.
“He is a guerrillero from the other side of the lines with a dispatch of the utmost importance for the General Golz who commands the attack that is to be made at dawn beyond Navacerrada,” Gomez said excitedly and earnestly. “Rouse the Teniente-Coronel for the love of God.”
The officer looked at him with his droopy eyes shaded by the green celluloid.
“All of you are crazy,” he said. “I know of no General Golz nor of no attack. Take this sportsman and get back to your battalion.”
“Rouse the Teniente-Coronel, I say,” Gomez said and Andrés saw his mouth tightening.
“Go obscenity yourself,” the officer said to him lazily and turned away.
Gomez took his heavy 9 mm. Star pistol out of its holster and shoved it against the officer’s shoulder.
“Rouse him, you fascist bastard,” he said. “Rouse him or I’ll kill you.”
“Calm yourself,” the officer said. “All you barbers are emotional.”
Andrés saw Gomez’s face draw with hate in the light of the reading lamp. But all he said was, “Rouse him.”
“Orderly,” the officer called in a contemptuous voice.
A soldier came to the door and saluted and went out.
“His fiancée is with him,” the officer said and went back to reading the paper. “It is certain he will be delighted to see you.”
“It is those like thee who obstruct all effort to win this war,” Gomez said to the staff officer.
The officer paid no attention to him. Then, as he read on, he remarked, as though to himself, “What a curious periodical this is!”
“Why don’t you read El Debate then? That is your paper,” Gomez said to him naming the leading Catholic-Conservative organ published in Madrid before the movement.
“Don’t forget I am thy superior officer and that a report by me on thee carries weight,” the officer said without looking up. “I never read El Debate. Do not make false accusations.”
“No. You read A. B. C.,” Gomez said. “The army is still rotten with such as thee. With professionals such as thee. But it will not always be. We are caught between the ignorant and the cynical. But we will educate the one and eliminate the other.”
“‘Purge’ is the word you want,” the officer said, still not looking up. “Here it reports the purging of more of thy famous Russians. They are purging more than the epsom salts in this epoch.”
“By any name,” Gomez said passionately. “By any name so that such as thee are liquidated.”
“Liquidated,” the officer said insolently as though speaking to himself. “Another new word that has little of Castilian in it.”
“Shot, then,” Gomez said. “That is Castilian. Canst understand it?”
“Yes, man, but do not talk so loudly. There are others beside the Teniente-Coronel asleep in this Brigade Staff and thy emotion bores me. It was for that reason that I always shaved myself. I never liked the conversation.”
Gomez looked at Andrés and shook his head. His eyes were shining with the moistness that rage and hatred can bring. But he shook his head and said nothing as he stored it all away for some time in the future. He had stored much in the year and a half in which he had risen to the command of a battalion in the Sierra and now, as the Lieutenant-Colonel came into the room in his pajamas he drew himself stiff and saluted.
The Lieutenant-Colonel Miranda, who was a short, gray-faced man, who had been in the army all his life, who had lost the love of his wife in Madrid while he was losing his digestion in Morocco, and become a Republican when he found he could not divorce his wife (there was never any question of recovering his digestion), had entered the civil war as a Lieutenant-Colonel. He had only one ambition, to finish the war with the same rank. He had defended the Sierra well and he wanted to be left alone there to defend it whenever it was attacked. He felt much healthier in the war, probably due to the forced curtailment of the number of meat courses, he had an enormous stock of sodium-bicarbonate, he had his whiskey in the evening, his twenty-three-year-old mistress was having a baby, as were nearly all the other girls who had started out as milicianas in the July of the year before, and now he came into the room, nodded in answer to Gomez’s salute and put out his hand.