«Safety,» the wife of Pablo said. «There is no such thing as safety. There are so many seeking safety here now that they make a great danger. In seeking safety now you lose all.»
She stood now by the table with the big spoon in her hand.
«There is safety,» Pablo said. «Within the danger there is the safety of knowing what chances to take. It is like the bullfighter who knowing what he is doing, takes no chances and is safe.»
«Until he is gored,» the woman said bitterly. «How many times have I heard matadors talk like that before they took a goring. How often have I heard Finito say that it is all knowledge and that the bull never gored the man; rather the man gored himself on the horn of the bull. Always do they talk that way in their arrogance before a goring. Afterwards we visit them in the clinic.» Now she was mimicking a visit to a bedside, «Hello, old timer. Hello,» she boomed. Then, «‘Buenas, Compadre’. How goes it, Pilar?» imitating the weak voice of the wounded bullfighter. «How did this happen, Finito, Chico, how did this dirty accident occur to thee?» booming it out in her own voice.
Then talking weak and small, «It is nothing, woman. Pilar, it is nothing. It shouldn’t have happened. I killed him very well, you understand. Nobody could have killed him better. Then having killed him exactly as I should and him absolutely dead, swaying on his legs, and ready to fall of his own weight, I walked away from him with a certain amount of arrogance and much style and from the back he throws me this horn between the cheeks of my buttocks and it comes out of my liver.» She commenced to laugh, dropping the imitation of the almost effeminate bullfighter’s voice and booming again now. «You and your safety! Did I live nine years with three of the worst paid matadors in the world not to learn about fear and about safety? Speak to me of anything but safety. And thee. What illusions I put in thee and how they have turned out! From one year of war thou has become lazy, a drunkard and a coward.»
«In that way thou hast no right to speak,» Pablo said. «And less even before the people and a stranger.»
«In that way will I speak,» the wife of Pablo went on. «Have you not heard? Do you still believe that you command here?»
«Yes,» Pablo said. «Here I command.»
«Not in joke,» the woman said. «Here I command! Haven’t you heard ‘la gente?’ Here no one commands but me. You can stay if you wish and eat of the food and drink of the wine, but not too bloody much, and share in the work if thee wishes. But here I command.»
«I should shoot thee and the foreigner both,» Pablo said suilenly.
«Try it,» the woman said. «And see what happens.»
«A cup of water for me,» Robert Jordan said, not taking his eyes from the man with his sullen heavy head and the woman standing proudly and confidently holding the big spoon as authoritatively as though it were a baton.
«Maria,» called the woman of Pablo and when the girl came in the door she said, «Water for this comrade.»
Robert Jordan reached for his flask and, bringing the flask out, as he brought it he loosened the pistol in the holster and swung it on top of his thigh. He poured a second absinthe into his cup and took the cup of water the girl brought him and commenced to drip it into the cup, a little at a time. The girl stood at his elbow, watching him.
«Outside,» the woman of Pablo said to her, gesturing with the spoon.
«It is cold outside,» the girl said, her cheek close to Robert Jordan’s, watching what was happening in the cup where the liquor was clouding.
«Maybe,» the woman of Pablo said. «But in here it is too hot.» Then she said, kindly, «It is not for long.»
The girl shook her head and went out.
I don’t think he is going to take this much more, Robert Jordan thought to himself. He held the cup in one hand and his other hand rested, frankly now, on the pistol. He had slipped the safety catch and he felt the worn comfort of the checked grip chafed almost smooth and touched the round, cool companionship of the trigger guard. Pablo no longer looked at him but only at the woman. She went on, «Listen to me, drunkard. You understand who commands here?»
«I command.»
«No. Listen. Take the wax from thy hairy ears. Listen well. I command.»
Pablo looked at her and you could tell nothing of what he was thinking by his face. He looked at her quite deliberately and then he looked across the table at Robert Jordan. He looked at him a long time contemplatively and then he looked back at the woman, again.
«All right. You command,» he said. «And if you want he can command too. And the two of you can go to hell.» He was looking the woman straight in the face and he was neither dominated by her nor seemed to be much affected by her. «It is possible that I am lazy and that I drink too much. You may consider me a coward but there you are mistaken. But I am not stupid.» He paused. «That you should command and that you should like it. Now if you are a woman as well as a commander, that we should have something to eat.»
«Maria,» the woman of Pablo called.
The girl put her head inside the blanket across the cave mouth. «Enter now and serve the supper.»
The girl came in and walked across to the low table by the hearth and picked up the enameled-ware bowls and brought them to the table.
«There is wine enough for all,» the woman of Pablo said to Robert Jordan. «Pay no attention to what that drunkard says. When this is finished we will get more. Finish that rare thing thou art drinking and take a cup of wine.»
Robert Jordan swallowed down the last of the absinthe, feeling it, gulped that way, making a warm, small, fume-rising, wet, chemicalchange-producing heat in him and passed the cup for wine. The girl dipped it full for him and smiled.
«Well, did you see the bridge?» the gypsy asked. The others, who had not opened their mouths after the change of allegiance, were all leaning forward to listen now.
«Yes,» Robert Jordan said. «It is something easy to do. Would you like me to show you?»
«Yes, man. With much interest.»
Robert Jordan took out the notebook from his shirt pocket and showed them the sketches.
«Look how it seems,» the flat-faced man, who was named Primitivo, said. «It is the bridge itself.»
Robert Jordan with the point of the pencil explained how the bridge should be blown and the reason for the placing of the charges.
«What simplicity,» the scarred-faced brother, who was called Andrés, said. «And how do you explode them?»
Robert Jordan explained that too and, as he showed them, he felt the girl’s arm resting on his shoulder as she looked. The woman of Pablo was watching too. Only Pablo took no interest, sitting by himself with a cup of wine that he replenished by dipping into the big bowl Maria had filled from the wineskin that hung to the left of the entrance to the cave.
«Hast thou done much of this?» the girl asked Robert Jordan softly.
«Yes.»
«And can we see the doing of it?»
«Yes. Why not?»
«You will see it,» Pablo said from his end of the table. «I believe that you will see it.»
«Shut up,» the woman of Pablo said to him and suddenly remembering what she had seen in the hand in the afternoon she was wildly, unreasonably angry. «Shut up, coward. Shut up, bad luck bird. Shut up, murderer.»
«Good,» Pablo said. «I shut up. It is thou who commands now and you should continue to look at the pretty pictures. But remember that I am not stupid.»
The woman of Pablo could feel her rage changing to sorrow and to a feeling of the thwarting of all hope and promise. She knew this feeling from when she was a girl and she knew the things that caused it all through her life. It came now suddenly and she put it away from her and would not let it touch her, neither her nor the Republic, and she said, «Now we will eat. Serve the bowls from the pot, Maria.»
5
Robert Jordan pushed aside the saddle blanket that hung over the mouth of the cave and, stepping out, took a deep breath of the cold night air. The mist had cleared away and the stars were out. There was no wind, and, outside now of the warm air of the cave, heavy with smoke of both tobacco and charcoal, with the odor of cooked rice and meat, saffron, pimentos, and oil, the tarry, wine-spilled smell of the big skin hung beside the door, hung by the neck and the four legs extended, wine drawn from a plug fitted in one leg, wine that spilled a little onto the earth of the floor, settling the dust smell; out now from the odors of different herbs whose names he did not know
