“So many people were singing that we had to almost shout to hear one another.
“‘Why?’
“‘He died very badly,’ Pablo said. ‘He had very little dignity.’
“‘How did you want him to have dignity when he was being chased by the mob?’ I said. ‘I thought he had much dignity all the time before. All the dignity that one could have.’
“‘Yes,’ Pablo said. ‘But in the last minute he was frightened.’
“‘Who wouldn’t be?’ I said. ‘Did you see what they were chasing him with?’
“‘Why would I not see?’ Pablo said. ‘But I find he died badly.’
“‘In such circumstances any one dies badly,’ I told him. ‘What do you want for your money? Everything that happened in the Ayuntamiento was scabrous.’
“‘Yes,’ said Pablo. ‘There was little organization. But a priest. He has an example to set.’
“‘I thought you hated priests.’
“‘Yes,’ said Pablo and cut some more bread. ‘But a Spanish priest. A Spanish priest should die very well.’
“‘I think he died well enough,’ I said. ‘Being deprived of all formality.’
“‘No,’ Pablo said. ‘To me he was a great disillusionment. All day I had waited for the death of the priest. I had thought he would be the last to enter the lines. I awaited it with great anticipation. I expected something of a culmination. I had never seen a priest die.’
“‘There is time,’ I said to him sarcastically. ‘Only today did the movement start.’
“‘No,’ he said. ‘I am disillusioned.’
“‘Now,’ I said. ‘I suppose you will lose your faith.’
“‘You do not understand, Pilai’ he said. ‘He was a Spanish priest.’
“‘What people the Spaniards are,’ I said to him. And what a people they are for pride, eh, Inglés? What a people.”
“We must get on,” Robert Jordan said. He looked at the sun. “It’s nearly noon.”
“Yes,” Pilar said. “We will go now. But let me tell you about Pablo. That night he said to me, ‘Pilar, tonight we will do nothing.’
“‘Good,’ I told him. ‘That pleases me.’
“‘I think it would be bad taste after the killing of so many people.’
“‘Qué va,’ I told him. ‘What a saint you are. You think I lived years with bullfighters not to know how they are after the Corrida?’
“‘Is it true, Pilar?’ he asked me.
“‘When did I lie to you?’ I told him.
“‘It is true, Pilar, I am a finished man this night. You do not reproach me?’
“‘No, hombre,’ I said to him. ‘But don’t kill people every day, Pablo.’
“And he slept that night like a baby and I woke him in the morning at daylight but I could not sleep that night and I got up and sat in a chair and looked out of the window and I could see the square in the moonlight where the lines had been and across the square the trees shining in the moonlight, and the darkness of their shadows, and the benches bright too in the moonlight, and the scattered bottles shining, and beyond the edge of the cliff where they had all been thrown. And there was no sound but the splashing of the water in the fountain and I sat there and I thought we have begun badly.
“The window was open and up the square from the Fonda I could hear a woman crying. I went out on the balcony standing there in my bare feet on the iron and the moon shone on the faces of all the buildings of the square and the crying was coming from the balcony of the house of Don Guillermo. It was his wife and she was on the balcony kneeling and crying.
“Then I went back inside the room and I sat there and I did not wish to think for that was the worst day of my life until one other day.”
“What was the other?” Maria asked.
“Three days later when the fascists took the town.”
“Do not tell me about it,” said Maria. “I do not want to hear it. This is enough. This was too much.”
“I told you that you should not have listened,” Pilar said. “See. I did not want you to hear it. Now you will have bad dreams.”