What a people they are, she thought. What a people are the Spaniards, “and if he was so short he should not have tried to be a matador.” And I hear it and say nothing. I have no rage for that and having made an explanation I am silent. How simple it is when one knows nothing. Qué sencillo! Knowing nothing one says, “He was not much of a matador.” Knowing nothing another says, “He was tubercular.” And another says, after one, knowing, has explained, “If he was so short he should not have tried to be a matador.”
Now, bending over the fire, she saw on the bed again the naked brown body with the gnarled scars in both thighs, the deep, seared whorl below the ribs on the right side of the chest and the long white welt along the side that ended in the armpit. She saw the eyes closed and the solemn brown face and the curly black hair pushed back now from the forehead and she was sitting by him on the bed rubbing the legs, chafing the taut muscles of the calves, kneading them, loosening them, and then tapping them lightly with her folded hands, loosening the cramped muscles.
“How is it?” she said to him. “How are the legs, little one?”
“Very well, Pilar,” he would say without opening his eyes.
“Do you want me to rub the chest?”
“Nay, Pilar. Please do not touch it.”
“And the upper legs?”
“No. They hurt too badly.”
“But if I rub them and put liniment on, it will warm them and they will be better.”
“Nay, Pilar. Thank thee. I would rather they were not touched.”
“I will wash thee with alcohol.”
“Yes. Do it very lightly.”
“You were enormous in the last bull,” she would say to him and he would say, “Yes, I killed him very well.”
Then, having washed him and covered him with a sheet, she would lie by him in the bed and he would put a brown hand out and touch her and say, “Thou art much woman, Pilar.” It was the nearest to a joke he ever made and then, usually, after the fight, he would go to sleep and she would lie there, holding his hand in her two hands and listening to him breathe.
He was often frightened in his sleep and she would feel his hand grip tightly and see the sweat bead on his forehead and if he woke, she said, “It’s nothing,” and he slept again. She was with him thus five years and never was unfaithful to him, that is almost never, and then after the funeral, she took up with Pablo who led picador horses in the ring and was like all the bulls that Finito had spent his life killing. But neither bull force nor bull courage lasted, she knew now, and what did last? I last, she thought. Yes, I have lasted. But for what?
“Maria,” she said. “Pay some attention to what you are doing. That is a fire to cook with. Not to burn down a city.”
Just then the gypsy came in the door. He was covered with snow and he stood there holding his carbine and stamping the snow from his feet.
Robert Jordan stood up and went over to the door, “Well?” he said to the gypsy.
“Six-hour watches, two men at a time on the big bridge,” the gypsy said. “There are eight men and a corporal at the roadmender’s hut. Here is thy chronometer.”
“What about the sawmill post?”
“The old man is there. He can watch that and the road both.”
“And the road?” Robert Jordan asked.
“The same movement as always,” the gypsy said. “Nothing out of the usual. Several motor cars.”
The gypsy looked cold, his dark face was drawn with the cold and his hands were red. Standing in the mouth of the cave he took off his jacket and shook it.
“I stayed until they changed the watch,” he said. “It was changed at noon and at six. That is a long watch. I am glad I am not in their army.”
“Let us go for the old man,” Robert Jordan said, putting on his leather coat.