“Do you ever go to Segovia?”
“Qué va. With this face? This is a face that is known. How would you like to be ugly, beautiful one?” she said to Maria.
“Thou art not ugly.”
“Vamos, I’m not ugly. I was born ugly. All my life I have been ugly. You, Inglés, who know nothing about women. Do you know how an ugly woman feels? Do you know what it is to be ugly all your life and inside to feel that you are beautiful? It is very rare,” she put the other foot in the stream, then removed it. “God, it’s cold. Look at the water wagtail,” she said and pointed to the gray ball of a bird that was bobbing up and down on a stone up the stream. “Those are no good for anything. Neither to sing nor to eat. Only to jerk their tails up and down. Give me a cigarette, Inglés,” she said and taking it, lit it from a flint and steel lighter in the pocket of her skirt. She puffed on the cigarette and looked at Maria and Robert Jordan.
“Life is very curious,” she said, and blew smoke from her nostrils. “I would have made a good man, but I am all woman and all ugly. Yet many men have loved me and I have loved many men. It is curious. Listen, Inglés, this is interesting. Look at me, as ugly as I am. Look closely, Inglés.”
“Thou art not ugly.”
“Qué no? Don’t lie to me. Or,” she laughed the deep laugh. “Has it begun to work with thee? No. That is a joke. No. Look at the ugliness. Yet one has a feeling within one that blinds a man while he loves you. You, with that feeling, blind him, and blind yourself. Then one day, for no reason, he sees you ugly as you really are and he is not blind any more and then you see yourself as ugly as he sees you and you lose your man and your feeling. Do you understand, guapa?” She patted the girl on the shoulder.
“No,” said Maria. “Because thou art not ugly.”
“Try to use thy head and not thy heart, and listen,” Pilar said. “I am telling you things of much interest. Does it not interest you, Inglés?”
“Yes. But we should go.”
“Qué va, go. I am very well here. Then,” she went on, addressing herself to Robert Jordan now as though she were speaking to a classroom; almost as though she were lecturing. “After a while, when you are as ugly as I am, as ugly as women can be, then, as I say, after a while the feeling, the idiotic feeling that you are beautiful, grows slowly in one again. It grows like a cabbage. And then, when the feeling is grown, another man sees you and thinks you are beautiful and it is all to do over. Now I think I am past it, but it still might come. You are lucky, guapa, that you are not ugly.”
“But I am ugly,” Maria insisted.
“Ask him,” said Pilar. “And don’t put thy feet in the stream because it will freeze them.”
“If Roberto says we should go, I think we should go,” Maria said.
“Listen to you,” Pilar said. “I have as much at stake in this as thy Roberto and I say that we are well off resting here by the stream and that there is much time. Furthermore, I like to talk. It is the only civilized thing we have. How otherwise can we divert ourselves? Does what I say not hold interest for you, Inglés?”
“You speak very well. But there are other things that interest me more than talk of beauty or lack of beauty.”
“Then let us talk of what interests thee.”
“Where were you at the start of the movement?”
“In my town.”
“Avila?”
“Qué va, Avila.”
“Pablo said he was from Avila.”
“He lies. He wanted to take a big city for his town. It was this town,” and she named a town.
“And what happened?”
“Much,” the woman said. “Much. And all of it ugly. Even that which was glorious.”