"The melon of Castile is better," Fernando said.
"Que va," said the woman of Pablo. "The melon of Castile is for self abuse. The melon of Valencia for eating. When I think of those melons long as one's arm, green like the sea and crisp and juicy to cut and sweeter than the early morning in summer. Aye, when I think of those smallest eels, tiny, delicate and in mounds on the plate. Also the beer in pitchers all through the afternoon, the beer sweating in its coldness in pitchers the size of water jugs."
"And what did thee when not eating nor drinking?"
"We made love in the room with the strip wood blinds hanging over the balcony and a breeze through the opening of the top of the door which turned on hinges. We made love there, the room dark in the day time from the hanging blinds, and from the streets there was the scent of the flower market and the smell of burned powder from the firecrackers of the traca that ran though the streets exploding each noon during the Feria. It was a line of fireworks that ran through all the city, the firecrackers linked together and the explosions running along on poles and wires of the tramways, exploding with great noise and a jumping from pole to pole with a sharpness and a cracking of explosion you could not believe.
"We made love and then sent for another pitcher of beer with the drops of its coldness on the glass and when the girl brought it, I took it from the door and I placed the coldness of the pitcher against the back of Finito as he lay, now, asleep, not having wakened when the beer was brought, and he said, 'No, Pilar. No, woman, let me sleep. And I said, 'No, wake up and drink this to see how cold, and he drank without opening his eyes and went to sleep again and I lay with my back against a pillow at the foot of the bed and watched him sleep, brown and dark-haired and young and quiet in his sleep, and drank the whole pitcher, listening now to the music of a band that was passing. You," she said to Pablo. "Do you know aught of such things?"
"We have done things together," Pablo said.
"Yes," the woman said. "Why not? And thou wert more man than Finito in your time. But never did we go to Valencia. Never did we lie in bed together and hear a band pass in Valencia."
"It was impossible," Pablo told her. "We have had no opportunity to go to Valencia. Thou knowest that if thou wilt be reasonable. But, with Finito, neither did thee blow up any train."
"No," said the woman. "That is what is left to us. The train. Yes. Always the train. No one can speak against that. That remains of all the laziness, sloth and failure. That remains of the cowardice of this moment. There were many other things before too. I do not want to be unjust. But no one can speak against Valencia either. You hear me?"
"I did not like it," Fernando said quietly. "I did not like Valencia."
"Yet they speak of the mule as stubborn," the woman said. "Clean up, Maria, that we may go."
As she said this they heard the first sound of the planes returning.
9
They stood in the mouth of the cave and watched them. The bombers were high now in fast, ugly arrow-heads beating the sky apart with the noise of their motors. They are shaped like sharks, Robert Jordan thought, the wide-finned, sharp-nosed sharks of the Gulf Stream. But these, wide-finned in silver, roaring, the light mist of their propellers in the sun, these do not move like sharks. They move like no thing there has ever been. They move like mechanized doom.
You ought to write, he told himself. Maybe you will again some time. He felt Maria holding to his arm. She was looking up and he said to her, "What do they look like to you, guapa?"
"I don't know," she said. "Death, I think."
"They look like planes to me," the woman of Pablo said. "'Where are the little ones?"
"They may be crossing at another part," Robert Jordan said. "Those bombers are too fast to have to wait for them and have come back alone. We never follow them across the lines to fight. There aren't enough planes to risk it."
Just then three Heinkel fighters in V formation came low over the clearing coming toward them, just over the tree tops, like clattering, wing-tilting, pinch-nosed ugly toys, to enlarge suddenly, fearfully to their actual size; pouring past in a whining roar. They were so low that from the cave mouth all of them could see the pilots, helmeted, goggled, a scarf blowing back from behind the patrol leader's head.
"Those can see the horses," Pablo said.
"Those can see thy cigarette butts," the woman said. "Let fall the blanket."
No more planes came over. The others must have crossed farther up the range and when the droning was gone they went out of the cave into the open.
The sky was empty now and high and blue and clear.
"It seems as though they were a dream that you wake from," Maria said to Robert Jordan. There was not even the last almost unheard hum that comes like a finger faintly touching and leaving and touching again after the sound is gone almost past hearing.
"They are no dream and you go in and clean up," Pilar said to her. "What about it?" she turned to Robert Jordan. "Should we ride or walk?"
Pablo looked at her and grunted.
"As you will," Robert Jordan said.
"Then let us walk," she said. "I would like it for the liver."
"Riding is good for the liver."
"Yes, but hard on the buttocks. We will walk and thou-" She turned to Pablo. "Go down and count thy beasts and see they have not flown away with any."
"Do you want a horse to ride?" Pablo asked Robert Jordan.
"No. Many thanks. What about the girl?"
"Better for her to walk," Pilar said. "She'll get stiff in too many places and serve for nothing."
Robert Jordan felt his face reddening.
"Did you sleep well?" Pilar asked. Then said, "It is true that there is no sickness. There could have been. I know not why there wasn't. There probably still is God after all, although we have abolished Him. Go on," she said to Pablo. "This does not concern thee. This is of people younger than thee. Made of other material. Get on." Then to Robert Jordan, "Agustin is looking after thy things. We go when he comes."
It was a clear, bright day and warm now in the sun. Robert Jordan looked at the big, brown-faced woman with her kind, widely set eyes and her square, heavy face, lined and pleasantly ugly, the eyes merry, but the face sad until the lips moved. He looked at her and then at the man, heavy and stolid, moving off through the trees toward the corral. The woman, too, was looking after him.
"Did you make love?" the woman said.
"What did she say?"
"She would not tell me."
"I neither."
"Then you made love," the woman said. "Be as careful with her as you can."
"What if she has a baby?"
"That will do no harm," the woman said. "That will do less harm."
"This is no place for that."
"She will not stay here. She will go with you."
"And where will I go? I can't take a woman where I go."
"Who knows? You may take two where you go."
"That is no way to talk."
"Listen," the woman said. "I am no coward, but I see things very clearly in the early morning and I think there are many that we know that are alive now who will never see another Sunday."