"That they should stay in thy shirt," Agustin said. "Are we to win this war and lose the revolution?"
"Nay," Robert Jordan said. "But if we do not win this war there will be no revolution nor any Republic nor any thou nor any me nor anything but the most grand carajo."
"So say I," Anselmo said. "That we should win the war."
"And afterwards shoot the anarchists and the Communists and all this canalla except the good Republicans," Agustin said.
"That we should win this war and shoot nobody," Anselmo said. "That we should govern justly and that all should participate in the benefits according as they have striven for them. And that those who have fought against us should be educated to see their error."
"We will have to shoot many," Agustin said. "Many, many, many."
He thumped his closed right fist against the palm of his left hand.
"That we should shoot none. Not even the leaders. That they should be reformed by work."
"I know the work I'd put them at," Agustin said, and he picked up some snow and put it in his mouth.
"What, bad one?" Robert Jordan asked.
"Two trades of the utmost brilliance."
"They are?"
Agustin put some more snow in his mouth and looked across the clearing where the cavalry had ridden. Then he spat the melted snow out. "Vaya. What a breakfast," he said. "Where is the filthy gypsy?"
"What trades?" Robert Jordan asked him. "Speak, bad mouth."
"Jumping from planes without parachutes," Agustin said, and his eyes shone. "That for those that we care for. And being nailed to the tops of fence posts to be pushed over backwards for the others."
"That way of speaking is ignoble," Anselmo said. "Thus we will never have a Republic."
"I would like to swim ten leagues in a strong soup made from the cojones of all of them," Agustin said. "And when I saw those four there and thought that we might kill them I was like a mare in the corral waiting for the stallion."
"You know why we did not kill them, though?" Robert Jordan said quietly.
"Yes," Agustin said. "Yes. But the necessity was on me as it is on a mare in heat. You cannot know what it is if you have not felt it."
"You sweated enough," Robert Jordan said. "I thought it was fear."
"Fear, yes," Agustin said. "Fear and the other. And in this life there is no stronger thing than the other."
Yes, Robert Jordan thought. We do it coldly but they do not, nor ever have. It is their extra sacrament. Their old one that they had before the new religion came from the far end of the Mediterranean, the one they have never abandoned but only suppressed and hidden to bring it out again in wars and inquisitions. They are the people of the Auto de Fe; the act of faith. Killing is something one must do, but ours are different from theirs. And you, he thought, you have never been corrupted by it? You never had it in the Sierra? Nor at Usera? Nor through all the time in Estremadura? Nor at any time? Que va, he told himself. At every train.
Stop making dubious literature about the Berbers and the old Iberians and admit that you have liked to kill as all who are soldiers by choice have enjoyed it at some time whether they lie about it or not. Anselmo does not like to because he is a hunter, not a soldier. Don't idealize him, either. Hunters kill animals and soldiers kill men. Don't lie to yourself, he thought. Nor make up literature about it. You have been tainted with it for a long time now. And do not think against Anselmo either. He is a Christian. Something very rare in Catholic countries.
But with Agustin I had thought it was fear, he thought. That natural fear before action. So it was the other, too. Of course, he may be bragging now. There was plenty of fear. I felt the fear under my hand. Well, it was time to stop talking.
"See if the gypsy brought food," he said to Anselmo. "Do not let him come up. He is a fool. Bring it yourself. And however much he brought, send back for more. I am hungry."
24
Now the morning was late May, the sky was high and clear and the wind blew warm on Robert Jordan's shoulders. The snow was going fast and they were eating breakfast. There were two big sandwiches of meat and the goaty cheese apiece, and Robert Jordan had cut thick slices of onion with his clasp knife and put them on each side of the meat and cheese between the chunks of bread.
"You will have a breath that will carry through the forest to the fascists," Agustin said, his own mouth full.
"Give me the wineskin and I will rinse the mouth," Robert Jordan said, his mouth full of meat, cheese, onion and chewed bread.
He had never been hungrier and he filled his mouth with wine, faintly tarry-tasting from the leather bag, and swallowed. Then he took another big mouthful of wine, lifting the bag up to let the jet of wine spurt into the back of his mouth, the wineskin touching the needles of the blind of pine branches that covered the automatic rifle as he lifted his hand, his head leaning against the pine branches as he bent it back to let the wine run down.
"Dost thou want this other sandwich?" Agustin asked him, handing it toward him across the gun.
"No. Thank you. Eat it."
"I cannot. I am not accustomed to eat in the morning."
"You do not want it, truly?"
"Nay. Take it."
Robert Jordan took it and laid it on his lap while he got the onion out of his side jacket pocket where the grenades were and opened his knife to slice it. He cut off a thin sliver of the surface that had dirtied in his pocket, then cut a thick slice. An outer segment fell and he picked it up and bent the circle together and put it into the sandwich.
"Eatest thou always onions for breakfast?" Agustin asked.
"When there are any."
"Do all in thy country do this?"
"Nay," Robert Jordan said. "It is looked on badly there."
"I am glad," Agustin said. "I had always considered America a civilized country."
"What hast thou against the onion?"
"The odor. Nothing more. Otherwise it is like the rose."
Robert Jordan grinned at him with his mouth full.
"Like the rose," he said. "Mighty like the rose. A rose is a rose is an onion."
"Thy onions are affecting thy brain," Agustin said. "Take care."
"An onion is an onion is an onion," Robert Jordan said cheerily and, he thought, a stone is a stein is a rock is a boulder is a pebble.
"Rinse thy mouth with wine," Agustin said. "Thou art very rare, Ingles. There is great difference between thee and the last dynamiter who worked with us."
"There is one great difference."
"Tell it to me."
"I am alive and he is dead," Robert Jordan said. Then: what's the matter with you? he thought. Is that the way to talk? Does food make you that slap happy? What are you, drunk on onions? Is that all it means to you, now? It never meant much, he told himself truly. You tried to make it mean something, but it never did. There is no need to lie in the time that is left.
"No," he said, seriously now. "That one was a man who had suffered greatly."
"And thou? Hast thou not suffered?"
"No," said Robert Jordan. "I am of those who suffer little."
"Me also," Agustin told him. "There are those who suffer and those who do not. I suffer very little."
"Less bad," Robert Jordan tipped up the wineskin again. "And with this, less."
"I suffer for others."
"As all good men should."
"But for myself very little."
"Hast thou a wife?"
"No."
"Me neither."
"But now you have the Maria."
"Yes."
"There is a rare thing," Agustin said. "Since she came to us at the train the Pilar has kept her away from all as fiercely as though she were in a convent of Carmelites. You cannot imagine with what fierceness she guarded her. You come, and she gives her to thee as a present. How does that seem to thee?"