For Whom The Bell Tolls

"I believe he cannot see it," Robert Jordan said. Pablo was staring at him curiously and Pilar was watching him with no expression on her face. "In the case of this Russian comrade he was very nervous from being too much time at the front. He had fought at Irun which, you know, was bad. Very bad. He had fought later in the north. And since the first groups who did this work behind the lines were formed he had worked here, in Estremadura and in AndalucIa. I think he was very tired and nervous and he imagined ugly things."

"He would undoubtedly have seen many evil things," Fernando said.

"Like all the world," Andres said. "But listen to me, Ingles. Do you think there is such a thing as a man knowing in advance what will befall him?"

"No," Robert Jordan said. "That is ignorance and superstition."

"Go on," Pilar said. "Let us hear the viewpoint of the professor." She spoke as though she were talking to a precocious child.

"I believe that fear produces evil visions," Robert Jordan said. "Seeing bad signs--"

"Such as the airplanes today," Primitivo said.

"Such as thy arrival," Pablo said softly and Robert Jordan looked across the table at him, saw it was not a provocation but only an expressed thought, then went on. "Seeing bad signs, one, with fear, imagines an end for himself and one thinks that imagining comes by divination," Robert Jordan concluded. "I believe there is nothing more to it than that. I do not believe in ogres, nor soothsayers, nor in the supernatural things."

"But this one with the rare name saw his fate clearly," the gypsy said. "And that was how it happened."

"He did not see it," Robert Jordan said. "He had a fear of such a possibility and it became an obsession. No one can tell me that he saw anything."

"Not I?" Pilar asked him and picked some dust up from the fire and blew it off the palm of her hand. "I cannot tell thee either?"

"No. With all wizardry, gypsy and all, thou canst not tell me either."

"Because thou art a miracle of deafness," Pilar said, her big face harsh and broad in the candlelight. "It is not that thou art stupid. Thou art simply deaf. One who is deaf cannot hear music. Neither can he hear the radio. So he might say, never having heard them, that such things do not exist. Que va, Ingles. I saw the death of that one with the rare name in his face as though it were burned there with a branding iron."

"You did not," Robert Jordan insisted. "You saw fear and apprehension. The fear was made by what he had been through. The apprehension was for the possibility of evil he imagined."

"Que va," Pilar said. "I saw death there as plainly as though it were sitting on his shoulder. And what is more he smelt of death."

"He smelt of death," Robert Jordan jeered. "Of fear maybe. There is a smell to fear."

"De la muerte," Pilar said. "Listen. When Blanquet, who was the greatest peon de brega who ever lived, worked under the orders of Granero he told me that on the day of Manolo Granero's death, when they stopped in the chapel on the way to the ring, the odor of death was so strong on Manolo that it almost made Blanquet sick. And he had been with Manolo when he had bathed and dressed at the hotel before setting out for the ring. The odor was not present in the motorcar when they had sat packed tight together riding to the bull ring. Nor was it distinguishable to any one else but Juan Luis de la Rosa in the chapel. Neither Marcial nor Chicuelo smelled it neither then nor when the four of them lined up for the paseo. But Juan Luis was dead white, Blanquet told me, and he, Blanquet, spoke to him saying, 'Thou also?'

"'So that I cannot breathe,' Juan Luis said to him. 'And from thy matador.'

"'Pues nada,' Blanquet said. 'There is nothing to do. Let us hope we are mistaken.'

"'And the others?' Juan Luis asked Blanquet.

"'Nada

,' Blanquet said. 'Nothing. But this one stinks worse than Jose at Talavera.'

"And it was on that afternoon that the bull Pocapena of the ranch of Veragua destroyed Manolo Granero against the planks of the barrier in front of tendido two in the Plaza de Toros of Madrid. I was there with Finito and I saw it. The horn entirely destroyed the cranium, the head of Manolo being wedged under the estribo at the base of the barrera where the bull had tossed him."

"But did you smell anything?" Fernando asked.