"Do you ever go to Segovia?"
"Que va. With this face? This is a face that is known. How would you like to be ugly, beautiful one?" she said to Maria.
"Thou art not ugly."
"Vamos, I'm not ugly. I was born ugly. All my life I have been ugly. You, Ingles, who know nothing about women. Do you know how an ugly woman feels? Do you know what it is to be ugly all your life and inside to feel that you are beautiful? It is very rare," she put the other foot in the stream, then removed it. "God, it's cold. Look at the water wagtail," she said and pointed to the gray ball of a bird that was bobbing up and down on a stone up the stream. "Those are no good for anything. Neither to sing nor to eat. Only to jerk their tails up and down. Give me a cigarette, Ingles," she said and taking it, lit it from a flint and steel lighter in the pocket of her skirt. She puffed on the cigarette and looked at Maria and Robert Jordan.
"Life is very curious," she said, and blew smoke from her nostrils. "I would have made a good man, but I am all woman and all ugly. Yet many men have loved me and I have loved many men. It is curious. Listen, Ingles, this is interesting. Look at me, as ugly as I am. Look closely, Ingles."
"Thou art not ugly."
"Que no? Don't lie to me. Or," she laughed the deep laugh. "Has it begun to work with thee? No. That is a joke. No. Look at the ugliness. Yet one has a feeling within one that blinds a man while he loves you. You, with that feeling, blind him, and blind yourself. Then one day, for no reason, he sees you ugly as you really are and he is not blind any more and then you see yourself as ugly as he sees you and you lose your man and your feeling. Do you understand, guapa?" She patted the girl on the shoulder.
"No," said Maria. "Because thou art not ugly."
"Try to use thy head and not thy heart, and listen," Pilar said. "I am telling you things of much interest. Does it not interest you, Ingles?"
"Yes. But we should go."
"Que va, go. I am very well here. Then," she went on, addressing herself to Robert Jordan now as though she were speaking to a classroom; almost as though she were lecturing. "After a while, when you are as ugly as I am, as ugly as women can be, then, as I say, after a while the feeling, the idiotic feeling that you are beautiful, grows slowly in one again. It grows like a cabbage. And then, when the feeling is grown, another man sees you and thinks you are beautiful and it is all to do over. Now I think I am past it, but it still might come. You are lucky, guapa, that you are not ugly."
"But I am ugly," Maria insisted.
"Ask him," said Pilar. "And don't put thy feet in the stream because it will freeze them."
"If Roberto says we should go, I think we should go," Maria said.
"Listen to you," Pilar said. "I have as much at stake in this as thy Roberto and I say that we are well off resting here by the stream and that there is much time. Furthermore, I like to talk. It is the only civilized thing we have. How otherwise can we divert ourselves? Does what I say not hold interest for you, Ingles?"
"You speak very well. But there are other things that interest me more than talk of beauty or lack of beauty."
"Then let us talk of what interests thee."
"Where were you at the start of the movement?"
"In my town."
"Avila?"
"Que va, Avila."
"Pablo said he was from Avila."
"He lies. He wanted to take a big city for his town. It was this town," and she named a town.
"And what happened?"
"Much," the woman said. "Much. And all of it ugly. Even that which was glorious."
"Tell me about it," Robert Jordan said.
"It is brutal," the woman said. "I do not like to tell it before the girl."
"Tell it," said Robert Jordan. "And if it is not for her, that she should not listen."
"I can hear it," Maria said. She put her hand on Robert Jordan's. "There is nothing that I cannot hear."
"It isn't whether you can hear it," Pilar said. "It is whether I should tell it to thee and make thee bad dreams."
"I will not get bad dreams from a story," Maria told her. "You think after all that has happened with us I should get bad dreams from a story?"
"Maybe it will give the Ingles bad dreams."
"Try it and see."
"No, Ingles, I am not joking. Didst thou see the start of the movement in any small town?"
"No," Robert Jordan said.
"Then thou hast seen nothing. Thou hast seen the ruin that now is Pablo, but you should have seen Pablo on that day."
"Tell it."
"Nay. I do not want to."
"Tell it."
"All right, then. I will tell it truly as it was. But thee, guapa, if it reaches a point that it molests thee, tell me."
"I will not listen to it if it molests me," Maria told her. "It cannot be worse than many things."
"I believe it can," the woman said. "Give me another cigarette, Ingles, and vamonos."
The girl leaned back against the heather on the bank of the stream and Robert Jordan stretched himself out, his shoulders against the ground and his head against a clump of the heather. He reached out and found Maria's hand and held it in his, rubbing their two hands against the heather until she opened her hand and laid it flat on top of his as they listened.
"It was early in the morning when the civiles surrendered at the barracks," Pilar began.
"You had assaulted the barracks?" Robert Jordan asked.
"Pablo had surrounded it in the dark, cut the telephone wires, placed dynamite under one wall and called on the guardia civil to surrender. They would not. And at daylight he blew the wall open. There was fighting. Two civiles were killed. Four were wounded and four surrendered.
"We all lay on roofs and on the ground and at the edge of walls and of buildings in the early morning light and the dust cloud of the explosion had not yet settled, for it rose high in the air and there was no wind to carry it, and all of us were firing into the broken side of the building, loading and firing into the smoke, and from within there was still the flashing of rifles and then there was a shout from in the smoke not to fire more, and out came the four civiles with their hands up. A big part of the roof had fallen in and the wall was gone and they came out to surrender.
"'Are there more inside? Pablo shouted.
"'There are wounded.
"'Guard these, Pablo said to four who had come up from where we were firing. 'Stand there. Against the wall, he told the civiles. The four civiles stood against the wall, dirty, dusty, smoke-grimed, with the four who were guarding them pointing their guns at them and Pablo and the others went in to finish the wounded.
"After they had done this and there was no longer any noise of the wounded, neither groaning, nor crying out, nor the noise of shooting in the barracks, Pablo and the others came out and Pablo had his shotgun over his back and was carrying in his hand a Mauser pistol.
"'Look, Pilar, he said. 'This was in the hand of the officer who killed himself. Never have I fired a pistol. You, he said to one of the guards, 'show me how it works. No. Don't show me. Tell me.
"The four civiles had stood against the wall, sweating and saying nothing while the shooting had gone on inside the barracks. They were all tall men with the faces of guardias civiles, which is the same model of face as mine is. Except that their faces were covered with the small stubble of this their last morning of not yet being shaved and they stood there against the wall and said nothing.