For Whom The Bell Tolls

The blanket fastened across the opening of the cave was lifted and Pablo put his head in. He grinned at them all, pushed under the blanket and then turned and fastened it again. He turned around and stood there, then pulled the blanket cape over his head and shook the snow from it.

"You were speaking of me?" he addressed them all. "I am interrupting?"

No one answered him and he hung the cape on a peg in the wall and walked over to the table.

"Que tal?" he asked and picked up his cup which had stood empty on the table and dipped it into the wine bowl. "There is no wine," he said to Maria. "Go draw some from the skin."

Maria picked up the bowl and went over to the dusty, heavily distended, black-tarred wineskin that hung neck down from the wall and unscrewed the plug from one of the legs enough so that the wine squirted from the edge of the plug into the bowl. Pablo watched her kneeling, holding the bowl up and watched the light red wine flooding into the bowl so fast that it made a whirling motion as it filled it.

"Be careful," he said to her. "The wine's below the chest now."

No one said anything.

"I drank from the belly-button to the chest today," Pablo said. "It's a day's work. What's the matter with you all? Have you lost your tongues?"

No one said anything at all.

"Screw it up, Maria," Pablo said. "Don't let it spill."

"There'll be plenty of wine," Agustin said. "You'll be able to be drunk."

"One has encountered his tongue," Pablo said and nodded to Agustin. "Felicitations. I thought you'd been struck dumb."

"By what?" Agustin asked.

"By my entry."

"Thinkest thou that thy entry carries importance?"

He's working himself up to it, maybe, Robert Jordan thought. Maybe Agustin is going to do it. He certainly hates him enough. I don't hate him, he thought. No, I don't hate him. He is disgusting but I do not hate him. Though that blinding business puts him in a special class. Still this is their war. But he is certainly nothing to have around for the next two days. I am going to keep away out of it, he thought. I made a fool of myself with him once tonight and I am perfectly willing to liquidate him. But I am not going to fool with him beforehand. And there are not going to be any shooting matches or monkey business in here with that dynamite around either. Pablo thought of that, of course. And did you think of it, he said to himself? No, you did not and neither did Agustin. You deserve whatever happens to you, he thought.

"Agustin," he said.

"What?" Agustin looked up sullenly and turned his head away from Pablo.

"I wish to speak to thee," Robert Jordan said.

"Later."

"Now," Robert Jordan said. "Por favor."

Robert Jordan had walked to the opening of the cave and Pablo followed him with his eyes. Agustin, tall and sunken cheeked, stood up and came over to him. He moved reluctantly and contemptuously.

"Thou hast forgotten what is in the sacks?" Robert Jordan said to him, speaking so low that it could not be heard.

"Milk!" Agustin said. "One becomes accustomed and one forgets."

"I, too, forgot."

"Milk!" Agustin said. "Leche! What fools we are." He swung back loose-jointedly to the table and sat down. "Have a drink, Pablo, old boy," he said. "How were the horses?"

"Very good," Pablo said. "And it is snowing less."

"Do you think it will stop?"

"Yes," Pablo said. "It is thinning now and there are small, hard pellets. The wind will blow but the snow is going. The wind has changed."

"Do you think it will clear tomorrow?" Robert Jordan asked him.

"Yes," Pablo said. "I believe it will be cold and clear. This wind is shifting."

Look at him, Robert Jordan thought. Now he is friendly. He has shifted like the wind. He has the face and the body of a pig and I know he is many times a murderer and yet he has the sensitivity of a good aneroid. Yes, he thought, and the pig is a very intelligent animal, too. Pablo has hatred for us, or perhaps it is only for our projects, and pushes his hatred with insults to the point where you are ready to do away with him and when he sees that this point has been reached he drops it and starts all new and clean again.

"We will have good weather for it, Ingles," Pablo said to Robert Jordan.

"We

," Pilar said. "We?"

"Yes, we," Pablo grinned at her and drank some of the wine. "Why not? I thought it over while I was outside. Why should we not agree?"

"In what?" the woman asked. "In what now?"

"In all," Pablo said to her. "In this of the bridge. I am with thee now."

"You are with us now?" Agustin said to him. "After what you have said?"

"Yes," Pablo told him. "With the change of the weather I am with thee."

Agustin shook his head. "The weather," he said and shook his head again. "And after me hitting thee in the face?"

"Yes," Pablo grinned at him and ran his fingers over his lips. "After that too."