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.