"I doubt it," Robert Jordan told him. "Cowardly, yes."
It was so quiet in the cave, suddenly, that he could hear the hissing noise the wood made burning on the hearth where Pilar cooked. He heard the sheepskin crackle as he rested his weight on his feet. He thought he could almost hear the snow falling outside. He could not, but he could hear the silence where it fell.
I'd like to kill him and have it over with, Robert Jordan was thinking. I don't know what he is going to do, but it is nothing good. Day after tomorrow is the bridge and this man is bad and he constitutes a danger to the success of the whole enterprise. Come on. Let us get it over with.
Pablo grinned at him and put one finger up and wiped it across his throat. He shook his head that turned only a little each way on his thick, short neck.
"Nay, Ingles," he said. "Do not provoke me." He looked at Pilar and said to her, "It is not thus that you get rid of me."
"Sinverguenza," Robert Jordan said to him, committed now in his own mind to the action. "Cobarde."
"It is very possible," Pablo said. "But I am not to be provoked. Take something to drink, Ingles, and signal to the woman it was not successful."
"Shut thy mouth," Robert Jordan said. "I provoke thee for myself."
"It is not worth the trouble," Pablo told him. "I do not provoke."
"Thou art a bicho raro," Robert Jordan said, not wanting to let it go; not wanting to have it fail for the second time; knowing as he spoke that this had all been gone through before; having that feeling that he was playing a part from memory of something that he had read or had dreamed, feeling it all moving in a circle.
"Very rare, yes," Pablo said. "Very rare and very drunk. To your health, Ingles." He dipped a cup in the wine bowl and held it up. "Salud y cojones."
He's rare, all right, Robert Jordan thought, and smart, and very complicated. He could no longer hear the fire for the sound of his own breathing.
"Here's to you," Robert Jordan said, and dipped a cup into the wine. Betrayal wouldn't amount to anything without all these pledges, he thought. Pledge up. "Salud," he said. "Salud and Salud again," you salud, he thought. Salud, you salud.
"Don Roberto," Pablo said heavily.
"Don Pablo," Robert Jordan said.
"You're no professor," Pablo said, "because you haven't got a beard. And also to do away with me you have to assassinate me and, for this, you have not cojones."
He was looking at Robert Jordan with his mouth closed so that his lips made a tight line, like the mouth of a fish, Robert Jordan thought. With that head it is like one of those porcupine fish that swallow air and swell up after they are caught.
"Salud, Pablo," Robert Jordan said and raised the cup up and drank from it. "I am learning much from thee."
"I am teaching the professor," Pablo nodded his head. "Come on, Don Roberto, we will be friends."
"We are friends already," Robert Jordan said.
"But now we will be good friends."
"We are good friends already."
"I'm going to get out of here," Agustin said. "Truly, it is said that we must eat a ton of it in this life but I have twenty-five pounds of it stuck in each of my ears this minute."
"What is the matter, negro?" Pablo said to him. "Do you not like to see friendship between Don Roberto and me?"
"Watch your mouth about calling me negro." Agustin went over to him and stood in front of Pablo holding his hands low.
"So you are called," Pablo said.
"Not by thee."
"Well, then, blanco-"
"Nor that, either."
"What are you then, Red?"
"Yes. Red. Rojo. With the Red star of the army and in favor of the Republic. And my name is Agustin."
"What a patriotic man," Pablo said. "Look, Ingles, what an exemplary patriot."
Agustin hit him hard across the mouth with his left hand, bringing it forward in a slapping, backhand sweep. Pablo sat there. The corners of his mouth were wine-stained and his expression did not change, but Robert Jordan watched his eyes narrow, as a cat's pupils close to vertical slits in a strong light.
"Nor this," Pablo said. "Do not count on this, woman." He turned his head toward Pilar. "I am not provoked."
Agustin hit him again. This time he hit him on the mouth with his closed fist. Robert Jordan was holding his pistol in his hand under the table. He had shoved the safety catch off and he pushed Maria away with his left hand. She moved a little way and he pushed her hard in the ribs with his left hand again to make her get really away. She was gone now and he saw her from the corner of his eye, slipping along the side of the cave toward the fire and now Robert Jordan watched Pablo's face.
The round-headed man sat staring at Agustin from his flat little eyes. The pupils were even smaller now. He licked his lips then, put up an arm and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, looked down and saw the blood on his hand. He ran his tongue over his lips, then spat.
"Nor that," he said. "I am not a fool. I do not provoke."
"Cabron," Agustin said.
"You should know," Pablo said. "You know the woman."
Agustin hit him again hard in the mouth and Pablo laughed at him, showing the yellow, bad, broken teeth in the reddened line of his mouth.
"Leave it alone," Pablo said and reached with a cup to scoop some wine from the bowl. "Nobody here has cojones to kill me and this of the hands is silly."
"Cobarde," Agustin said.
"Nor words either," Pablo said and made a swishing noise rinsing the wine in his mouth. He spat on the floor. "I am far past words."
Agustin stood there looking down at him and cursed him, speaking slowly, clearly, bitterly and contemptuously and cursing as steadily as though he were dumping manure on a field, lifting it with a dung fork out of a wagon.
"Nor of those," Pablo said. "Leave it, Agustin. And do not hit me more. Thou wilt injure thy hands."
Agustin turned from him and went to the door.
"Do not go out," Pablo said. "It is snowing outside. Make thyself comfortable in here."
"And thou! Thou!" Agustin turned from the door and spoke to him, putting all his contempt in the single, "Tu."
"Yes, me," said Pablo. "I will be alive when you are dead."
He dipped up another cup of wine and raised it to Robert Jordan. "To the professor," he said. Then turned to Pilar. "To the Senora Commander." Then toasted them all, "To all the illusioned ones."
Agustin walked over to him and, striking quickly with the side of his hand, knocked the cup out of his hand.
"That is a waste," Pablo said. "That is silly."
Agustin said something vile to him.
"No," Pablo said, dipping up another cup. "I am drunk, seest thou? When I am not drunk I do not talk. You have never heard me talk much. But an intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend his time with fools."
"Go and obscenity in the milk of thy cowardice," Pilar said to him. "I know too much about thee and thy cowardice."
"How the woman talks," Pablo said. "I will be going out to see the horses."
"Go and befoul them," Agustin said. "Is not that one of thy customs?"
"No," Pablo said and shook his head. He was taking down his big blanket cape from the wall and he looked at Agustin. "Thou," he said, "and thy violence."
"What do you go to do with the horses?" Agustin said.
"Look to them," Pablo said.
"Befoul them," Agustin said. "Horse lover."
"I care for them very much," Pablo said. "Even from behind they are handsomer and have more sense than these people. Divert yourselves," he said and grinned. "Speak to them of the bridge, Ingles. Explain their duties in the attack. Tell them how to conduct the retreat. Where will you take them, Ingles, after the bridge? Where will you take your patriots? I have thought of it all day while I have been drinking."
"What have you thought?" Agustin asked.
"What have I thought?" Pablo said and moved his tongue around exploringly inside his lips. "Que te importa, what have I thought."
"Say it," Agustin said to him.
"Much," Pablo said. He pulled the blanket coat over his head, the roundness of his head protruding now from the dirty yellow folds of the blanket. "I have thought much."
"What?" Agustin said. "What?"
"I have thought you are a group of illusioned people," Pablo said. "Led by a woman with her brains between her thighs and a foreigner who comes to destroy you."
"Get out," Pilar shouted at him. "Get out and fist yourself into the snow. Take your bad milk out of here, you horse exhausted maricon."
"Thus one talks," Agustin said admiringly, but absent-mindedly. He was worried.
"I go," said Pablo. "But I will be back shortly." He lifted the blanket over the door of the cave and stepped out. Then from the door he called, "It's still falling, Ingles."
The only noise in the cave now was the hissing from the hearth where snow was falling through the hole in the roof onto the coals of the fire.
"Pilar," Fernando said. "Is there more of the stew?"
"Oh, shut up," the woman said. But Maria took Fernando's bowl over to the big pot set back from the edge of the fire and ladled into it. She brought it over to the table and set it down and then patted Fernando on the shoulder as he bent to eat. She stood for a moment beside him, her hand on his shoulder. But Fernando did not look up. He was devoting himself to the stew.
Agustin stood beside the fire. The others were seated. Pilar sat at the table opposite Robert Jordan.
"Now, Ingles," she said, "you have seen how he is."
"What will he do?" Robert Jordan asked.
"Anything," the woman looked down at the table. "Anything. He is capable of doing anything."
"Where is the automatic rifle?" Robert Jordan asked.
"There in the corner wrapped in the blanket," Primitivo said. "Do you want it?"
"Later," Robert Jordan said. "I wished to know where it is."
"It is there," Primitivo said. "I brought it in and I have wrapped it in my blanket to keep the action dry. The pans are in that sack."
"He would not do that," Pilar said. "He would not do anything with the maquina."
"I thought you said he would do anything."
"He might," she said. "But he has no practice with the maquina. He could toss in a bomb. That is more his style."
"It is an idiocy and a weakness not to have killed him," the gypsy said. He had taken no part in any of the talk all evening. "Last night Roberto should have killed him."
"Kill him," Pilar said. Her big face was dark and tired looking. "I am for it now."
"I was against it," Agustin said. He stood in front of the fire, his long arms hanging by his sides, his cheeks, stubble-shadowed below the cheekbones, hollow in the firelight. "Now I am for it," he said. "He is poisonous now and he would like to see us all destroyed."
"Let all speak," Pilar said and her voice was tired. "Thou, Andres?"
"Matarlo," the brother with the dark hair growing far down in the point on his forehead said and nodded his head.
"Eladio?"
"Equally," the other brother said. "To me he seems to constitute a great danger. And he serves for nothing."
"Primitivo?"
"Equally."
"Fernando?"
"Could we not hold him as a prisoner?" Fernando asked.
"Who would look after a prisoner?" Primitivo said. "It would take two men to look after a prisoner and what would we do with him in the end?"
"We could sell him to the fascists," the gypsy said.
"None of that," Agustin said. "None of that filthiness."
"It was only an idea," Rafael, the gypsy, said. "It seems to me that the facciosos would be happy to have him."
"Leave it alone," Agustin said. "That is filthy."
"No filthier than Pablo," the gypsy justified himself.
"One filthiness does not justify another," Agustin said. "Well, that is all. Except for the old man and the Ingles."
"They are not in it," Pilar said. "He has not been their leader."
"One moment," Fernando said. "I have not finished."
"Go ahead," Pilar said. "Talk until he comes back. Talk until he rolls a hand grenade under that blanket and blows this all up. Dynamite and all."
"I think that you exaggerate, Pilar," Fernando said. "I do not think that he has any such conception."
"I do not think so either," Agustin said. "Because that would blow the wine up too and he will be back in a little while to the wine."
"Why not turn him over to El Sordo and let El Sordo sell him to the fascists?" Rafael suggested. "You could blind him and he would be easy to handle."
"Shut up," Pilar said. "I feel something very justified against thee too when thou talkest."
"The fascists would pay nothing for him anyway," Primitivo said. "Such things have been tried by others and they pay nothing. They will shoot thee too."
"I believe that blinded he could be sold for something," Rafael said.
"Shut up," Pilar said. "Speak of blinding again and you can go with the other."
"But, he, Pablo, blinded the guardia civil who was wounded," the gypsy insisted. "You have forgotten that?"
"Close thy mouth," Pilar said to him. She was embarrassed before Robert Jordan by this talk of blinding.
"I have not been allowed to finish," Fernando interrupted.
"Finish," Pilar told him. "Go on. Finish."
"Since it is impractical to hold Pablo as a prisoner," Fernando commenced, "and since it is repugnant to offer him-"
"Finish," Pilar said. "For the love of God, finish."
"— in any class of negotiation," Fernando proceeded calmly, "I am agreed that it is perhaps best that he should be eliminated in order that the operations projected should be insured of the maximum possibility of success."
Pilar looked at the little man, shook her head, bit her lips and said nothing.
"That is my opinion," Fernando said. "I believe we are justified in believing that he constitutes a danger to the Republic-"
"Mother of God," Pilar said. "Even here one man can make a bureaucracy with his mouth."
"Both from his own words and his recent actions," Fernando continued. "And while he is deserving of gratitude for his actions in the early part of the movement and up until the most recent time-"
Pilar had walked over to the fire. Now she came up to the table.
"Fernando," Pilar said quietly and handed a bowl to him. "Take this stew please in all formality and fill thy mouth with it and talk no more. We are in possession of thy opinion."
"But, how then-" Primitivo asked and paused without completing the sentence.
"Estoy listo," Robert Jordan said. "I am ready to do it. Since you are all decided that it should be done it is a service that I can do."
What's the matter? he thought. From listening to him I am beginning to talk like Fernando. That language must be infectious. French, the language of diplomacy. Spanish, the language of bureaucracy.
"No," Maria said. "No."
"This is none of thy business," Pilar said to the girl. "Keep thy mouth shut."
"I will do it tonight," Robert Jordan said.
He saw Pilar looking at him, her fingers on her lips. She was looking toward the door.
The blanket fastened across the opening of the cave was lifted and Pablo put his head in. He grinned at them all, pushed under the blanket and then turned and fastened it again. He turned around and stood there, then pulled the blanket cape over his head and shook the snow from it.
"You were speaking of me?" he addressed them all. "I am interrupting?"
No one answered him and he hung the cape on a peg in the wall and walked over to the table.
"Que tal?" he asked and picked up his cup which had stood empty on the table and dipped it into the wine bowl. "There is no wine," he said to Maria. "Go draw some from the skin."
Maria picked up the bowl and went over to the dusty, heavily distended, black-tarred wineskin that hung neck down from the wall and unscrewed the plug from one of the legs enough so that the wine squirted from the edge of the plug into the bowl. Pablo watched her kneeling, holding the bowl up and watched the light red wine flooding into the bowl so fast that it made a whirling motion as it filled it.
"Be careful," he said to her. "The wine's below the chest now."
No one said anything.
"I drank from the belly-button to the chest today," Pablo said. "It's a day's work. What's the matter with you all? Have you lost your tongues?"
No one said anything at all.
"Screw it up, Maria," Pablo said. "Don't let it spill."
"There'll be plenty of wine," Agustin said. "You'll be able to be drunk."
"One has encountered his tongue," Pablo said and nodded to Agustin. "Felicitations. I thought you'd been struck dumb."
"By what?" Agustin asked.
"By my entry."
"Thinkest thou that thy entry carries importance?"
He's working himself up to it, maybe, Robert Jordan thought. Maybe Agustin is going to do it. He certainly hates him enough. I don't hate him, he thought. No, I don't hate him. He is disgusting but I do not hate him. Though that blinding business puts him in a special class. Still this is their war. But he is certainly nothing to have around for the next two days. I am going to keep away out of it, he thought. I made a fool of myself with him once tonight and I am perfectly willing to liquidate him. But I am not going to fool with him beforehand. And there are not going to be any shooting matches or monkey business in here with that dynamite around either. Pablo thought of that, of course. And did you think of it, he said to himself? No, you did not and neither did Agustin. You deserve whatever happens to you, he thought.
"Agustin," he said.
"What?" Agustin looked up sullenly and turned his head away from Pablo.
"I wish to speak to thee," Robert Jordan said.
"Later."
"Now," Robert Jordan said. "Por favor."
Robert Jordan had walked to the opening of the cave and Pablo followed him with his eyes. Agustin, tall and sunken cheeked, stood up and came over to him. He moved reluctantly and contemptuously.
"Thou hast forgotten what is in the sacks?" Robert Jordan said to him, speaking so low that it could not be heard.
"Milk!" Agustin said. "One becomes accustomed and one forgets."
"I, too, forgot."
"Milk!" Agustin said. "Leche! What fools we are." He swung back loose-jointedly to the table and sat down. "Have a drink, Pablo, old boy," he said. "How were the horses?"
"Very good," Pablo said. "And it is snowing less."
"Do you think it will stop?"
"Yes," Pablo said. "It is thinning now and there are small, hard pellets. The wind will blow but the snow is going. The wind has changed."
"Do you think it will clear tomorrow?" Robert Jordan asked him.
"Yes," Pablo said. "I believe it will be cold and clear. This wind is shifting."
Look at him, Robert Jordan thought. Now he is friendly. He has shifted like the wind. He has the face and the body of a pig and I know he is many times a murderer and yet he has the sensitivity of a good aneroid. Yes, he thought, and the pig is a very intelligent animal, too. Pablo has hatred for us, or perhaps it is only for our projects, and pushes his hatred with insults to the point where you are ready to do away with him and when he sees that this point has been reached he drops it and starts all new and clean again.
"We will have good weather for it, Ingles," Pablo said to Robert Jordan.
"We," Pilar said. "We?"
"Yes, we," Pablo grinned at her and drank some of the wine. "Why not? I thought it over while I was outside. Why should we not agree?"
"In what?" the woman asked. "In what now?"
"In all," Pablo said to her. "In this of the bridge. I am with thee now."
"You are with us now?" Agustin said to him. "After what you have said?"
"Yes," Pablo told him. "With the change of the weather I am with thee."
Agustin shook his head. "The weather," he said and shook his head again. "And after me hitting thee in the face?"
"Yes," Pablo grinned at him and ran his fingers over his lips. "After that too."
Robert Jordan was watching Pilar. She was looking at Pablo as at some strange animal. On her face there was still a shadow of the expression the mention of the blinding had put there. She shook her head as though to be rid of that, then tossed it back. "Listen," she said to Pablo.
"Yes, woman."
"What passes with thee?"
"Nothing," Pablo said. "I have changed my opinion. Nothing more."
"You were listening at the door," she told him.
"Yes," he said. "But I could hear nothing."
"You fear that we will kill thee."
"No," he told her and looked at her over the wine cup. "I do not fear that. You know that."
"Well, what passes with thee?" Agustin said. "One moment you are drunk and putting your mouth on all of us and disassociating yourself from the work in hand and speaking of our death in a dirty manner and insulting the women and opposing that which should be done-"
"I was drunk," Pablo told him.
"And now-"
"I am not drunk," Pablo said. "And I have changed my mind."
"Let the others trust thee. I do not," Agustin said.
"Trust me or not," Pablo said. "But there is no one who can take thee to Gredos as I can."
"Gredos?"
"It is the only place to go after this of the bridge."
Robert Jordan, looking at Pilar, raised his hand on the side away from Pablo and tapped his right ear questioningly.
The woman nodded. Then nodded again. She said something to Maria and the girl came over to Robert Jordan's side.
"She says, 'Of course he heard," Maria said in Robert Jordan's ear.
"Then Pablo," Fernando said judicially. "Thou art with us now and in favor of this of the bridge?"
"Yes, man," Pablo said. He looked Fernando squarely in the eye and nodded.
"In truth?" Primitivo asked.
"De veras," Pablo told him.
"And you think it can be successful?" Fernando asked. "You now have confidence?"
"Why not?" Pablo said. "Haven't you confidence?"
"Yes," Fernando said. "But I always have confidence."
"I'm going to get out of here," Agustin said.
"It is cold outside," Pablo told him in a friendly tone.
"Maybe," Agustin said. "But I can't stay any longer in this manicomio."
"Do not call this cave an insane asylum," Fernando said.
"A manicomio for criminal lunatics," Agustin said. "And I'm getting out before I'm crazy, too."
It is like a merry-go-round, Robert Jordan thought. Not a merry-goround that travels fast, and with a calliope for music, and the children ride on cows with gilded horns, and there are rings to catch with sticks, and there is the blue, gas-flare-lit early dark of the Avenue du Maine, with fried fish sold from the next stall, and a wheel of fortune turning with the leather flaps slapping against the posts of the numbered compartments, and the packages of lump sugar piled in pyramids for prizes. No, it is not that kind of a merrygo-round; although the people are waiting, like the men in caps and the women in knitted sweaters, their heads bare in the gaslight and their hair shining, who stand in front of the wheel of fortune as it spins. Yes, those are the people. But this is another wheel. This is like a wheel that goes up and around.
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