"But I was afraid Pilar would shoot me."
"I shoot no one," Pilar said.
"_No hace falta_," Joaquin told her. "You don't need to.
You scare them to death with your mouth."
"What a way to speak," Pilar told him.
"And you used to be such a polite little boy.
What did you do before the movement, little boy?"
"Very little," Joaquin said.
"I was sixteen."
"But what, exactly?"
"A few pairs of shoes from time to time."
"Make them?"
"No. Shine them."
"_Que va_," said Pilar.
"There is more to it than that."
She looked at his brown face, his lithe build, his shock of hair, and the quick heel-and-toe way that he walked.
"Why did you fail at it?"
"Fail at what?"
"What?
You know what.
You're growing the pigtail now."
"I guess it was fear," the boy said.
"You've a nice figure," Pilar told him.
"But the face isn't much.
So it was fear, was it?
You were all right at the train."
"I have no fear of them now," the boy said.
"None.
And we have seen much worse things and more dangerous than the bulls.
It is clear no bull is as dangerous as a machine gun.
But if I were in the ring with one now I do not know if I could dominate my legs."
"He wanted to be a bullfighter," Pilar explained to Robert Jordan.
"But he was afraid."
"Do you like the bulls, Comrade Dynamiter?" Joaquin grinned, showing white teeth.
"Very much," Robert Jordan said.
"Very, very much."
"Have you seen them in Valladolid?" asked Joaquin.
"Yes.
In September at the feria."
"That's my town," Joaquin said.
"What a fine town but how the _buena gente_, the good people of that town, have suffered in this war."
Then, his face grave,
"There they shot my father.
My mother.
My brother-in-law and now my sister."
"What barbarians," Robert Jordan said.
How many times had he heard this?
How many times had he watched people say it with difficulty?
How many times had he seen their eyes fill and their throats harden with the difficulty of saying my father, or my brother, or my mother, or my sister?
He could not remember how many times he had heard them mention their dead in this way.