As they had left him, Pilar had said to him, “Well, Santiago?”
“Well, nothing, woman,” the deaf man said. “It is all right. But I am thinking.”
“Me, too,” Pilar had said and now as they walked down the trail, the walking easy and pleasant down the steep trail through the pines that they had toiled up, Pilar said nothing. Neither Robert Jordan nor Maria spoke and the three of them travelled along fast until the trail rose steeply out of the wooded valley to come up through the timber, leave it, and come out into the high meadow.
It was hot in the late May afternoon and halfway up this last steep grade the woman stopped. Robert Jordan, stopping and looking back, saw the sweat beading on her forehead. He thought her brown face looked pallid and the skin sallow and that there were dark areas under her eyes.
“Let us rest a minute,” he said. “We go too fast.”
“No,” she said. “Let us go on.”
“Rest, Pilar,” Maria said. “You look badly.”
“Shut up,” the woman said. “Nobody asked for thy advice.”
She started on up the trail but at the top she was breathing heavily and her face was wet with perspiration and there was no doubt about her pallor now.
“Sit down, Pilar,” Maria said. “Please, please sit down.”
“All right,” said Pilar and the three of them sat down under a pine tree and looked across the mountain meadow to where the tops of the peaks seemed to jut out from the roll of the high country with snow shining bright on them now in the early afternoon sun.
“What rotten stuff is the snow and how beautiful it looks,” Pilar said. “What an illusion is the snow.” She turned to Maria. “I am sorry I was rude to thee, guapa. I don’t know what has held me today. I have an evil temper.”
“I never mind what you say when you are angry,” Maria told her. “And you are angry often.”
“Nay, it is worse than anger,” Pilar said, looking across at the peaks.
“Thou art not well,” Maria said.
“Neither is it that,” the woman said. “Come here, guapa, and put thy head in my lap.”
Maria moved close to her, put her arms out and folded them as One does who goes to sleep without a pillow and lay with her head on her arms. She turned her face up at Pilar and smiled at her but the big woman looked on across the meadow at the mountains. She stroked the girl’s head without looking down at her and ran a blunt finger across the girl’s forehead and then around the line of her ear and down the line where the hair grew on her neck.
“You can have her in a little while, Inglés,” she said. Robert Jordan was sitting behind her.
“Do not talk like that,” Maria said.
“Yes, he can have thee,” Pilar said and looked at neither of them. “I have never wanted thee. But I am jealous.”
“Pilar,” Maria said. “Do not talk thus.”
“He can have thee,” Pilar said and ran her finger around the lobe of the girl’s ear. “But I am very jealous.”
“But Pilar,” Maria said. “It was thee explained to me there was nothing like that between us.”
“There is always something like that,” the woman said. “There is always something like something that there should not be. But with me there is not. Truly there is not. I want thy happiness and nothing more.”
Maria said nothing but lay there, trying to make her head rest lightly.
“Listen, guapa,” said Pilar and ran her finger now absently but tracingly over the contours of her cheeks. “Listen, guapa, I love thee and he can have thee, I am no tortillera but a woman made for men. That is true. But now it gives me pleasure to say thus, in the daytime, that I care for thee.”
“I love thee, too.”
“Qué va. Do not talk nonsense. Thou dost not know even of what I speak.”
“I know.”
“Qué va, that you know. You are for the Inglés. That is seen and as it should be. That I would have. Anything else I would not have. I do not make perversions. I only tell you something true. Few people will ever talk to thee truly and no women. I am jealous and say it and it is there. And I say it.”