It was a clear, bright day and warm now in the sun. Robert Jordan looked at the big, brown-faced woman with her kind, widely set eyes and her square, heavy face, lined and pleasantly ugly, the eyes merry, but the face sad until the lips moved. He looked at her and then at the man, heavy and stolid, moving off through the trees toward the corral. The woman, too, was looking after him.
“Did you make love?” the woman said.
“What did she say?”
“She would not tell me.”
“I neither.”
“Then you made love,” the woman said. “Be as careful with her as you can.”
“What if she has a baby?”
“That will do no harm,” the woman said. “That will do less harm.”
“This is no place for that.”
“She will not stay here. She will go with you.”
“And where will I go? I can’t take a woman where I go.”
“Who knows? You may take two where you go.”
“That is no way to talk.”
“Listen,” the woman said. “I am no coward, but I see things very clearly in the early morning and I think there are many that we know that are alive now who will never see another Sunday.”
“In what day are we?”
“Sunday.”
“Qué va,” said Robert Jordan. “Another Sunday is very far. If we see Wednesday we are all right. But I do not like to hear thee talk like this.”
“Every one needs to talk to some one,” the woman said. “Before we had religion and other nonsense. Now for every one there should be some one to whom one can speak frankly, for all the valor that one could have one becomes very alone.”
“We are not alone. We are all together.”
“The sight of those machines does things to one,” the woman said. “We are nothing against such machines.”
“Yet we can beat them.”
“Look,” the woman said. “I confess a sadness to you, but do not think I lack resolution. Nothing has happened to my resolution.”
“The sadness will dissipate as the sun rises. It is like a mist.”
“Clearly,” the woman said. “If you want it that way. Perhaps it came from talking that foolishness about Valencia. And that failure of a man who has gone to look at his horses. I wounded him much with the story. Kill him, yes. Curse him, yes. But wound him, no.”
“How came you to be with him?”
“How is one with any one? In the first days of the movement and before too, he was something. Something serious. But now he is finished. The plug has been drawn and the wine has all run out of the skin.”
“I do not like him.”
“Nor does he like you, and with reason. Last night I slept with him.” She smiled now and shook her head. “ Vamos a ver,” she said. “I said to him, ‘Pablo, why did you not kill the foreigner?’
“‘He’s a good boy, Pilar,’ he said. ‘He’s a good boy.’
“So I said, ‘You understand now that I command?’
“‘Yes, Pilar. Yes,’ he said. Later in the night I hear him awake and he is crying. He is crying in a short and ugly manner as a man cries when it is as though there is an animal inside that is shaking him.
“‘What passes with thee, Pablo?’ I said to him and I took hold of him and held him.
“‘Nothing, Pilar. Nothing.’
“‘Yes. Something passes with thee.’
“‘The people,’ he said. ‘The way they left me. The gente.’
“‘Yes, but they are with me,’ I said, ‘and I am thy woman.’
“‘Pilar,’ he said, ‘remember the train.’ Then he said, ‘May God aid thee, Pilar.’
“‘What are you talking of God for?’ I said to him. ‘What way is that to speak?’
“‘Yes,’ he said. ‘God and the Virgen.’
“‘Qué va, God and the Virgen,’ I said to him. ‘Is that any way to talk?’
“‘I am afraid to die, Pilar,’ he said. ‘Tengo miedo de morir. Dost thou understand?’
“‘Then get out of bed,’ I said to him. ‘There is not room in one bed for me and thee and thy fear all together.’