"As a man who is cold and wet.
And a man who has just come to his house.
Here it is."
She brought the bottle to where Robert Jordan sat.
"It is the bottle of this noon.
With this bottle one could make a beautiful lamp.
When we have electricity again, what a lamp we can make of this bottle."
She looked at the pinch-bottle admiringly.
"How do you take this, Roberto?"
"I thought I was _Ingles_," Robert Jordan said to her.
"I call thee Roberto before the others," she said in a low voice and blushed.
"How do you want it, Roberto?"
"Roberto," Pablo said thickly and nodded his head at Robert Jordan.
"How do you want it, Don Roberto?"
"Do you want some?" Robert Jordan asked him.
Pablo shook his head.
"I am making myself drunk with wine," he said with dignity.
"Go with Bacchus," Robert Jordan said in Spanish.
"Who is Bacchus?" Pablo asked. "A comrade of thine," Robert Jordan said. "Never have I heard of him," Pablo said heavily.
"Never in these mountains."
"Give a cup to Anselmo," Robert Jordan said to Maria.
"It is he who is cold."
He was putting on the dry pair of socks and the whiskey and water in the cup tasted clean and thinly warming.
But it does not curl around inside of you the way the absinthe does, he thought.
There is nothing like absinthe.
Who would imagine they would have whiskey up here, he thought.
But La Granja was the most likely place in Spain to find it when you thought it over.
Imagine Sordo getting a bottle for the visiting dynamiter and then remembering to bring it down and leave it.
It wasn't just manners that they had.
Manners would have been producing the bottle and having a formal drink.
That was what the French would have done and then they would have saved what was left for another occasion.
No, the true thoughtfulness of thinking the visitor would like it and then bringing it down for him to enjoy when you yourself were engaged in something where there was every reason to think of no one else but yourself and of nothing but the matter in hand--that was Spanish.
One kind of Spanish, he thought.
Remembering to bring the whiskey was one of the reasons you loved these people.
Don't go romanticizing them, he thought.
There are as many sorts of Spanish as there are Americans.
But still, bringing the whiskey was very handsome.
"How do you like it?" he asked Anselmo.
The old man was sitting by the fire with a smile on his face, his big hands holding the cup.
He shook his head.
"No?" Robert Jordan asked him.
"The child put water in it," Anselmo said.
"Exactly as Roberto takes it," Maria said.
"Art thou something special?"
"No," Anselmo told her.
"Nothing special at all.
But I like to feel it burn as it goes down."
"Give me that," Robert Jordan told the girl, "and pour him some of that which burns."
He tipped the contents of the cup into his own and handed it back empty to the girl, who poured carefully into it from the bottle.
"Ah," Anselmo took the cup, put his head back and let it run down his throat.