Nearly always they spoke as this boy did now; suddenly and apropos of the mention of the town and always you said,
"What barbarians."
You only heard the statement of the loss.
You did not see the father fall as Pilar made him see the fascists die in that story she had told by the stream.
You knew the father died in some courtyard, or against some wall, or in some field or orchard, or at night, in the lights of a truck, beside some road.
You had seen the lights of the car from the hills and heard the shooting and afterwards you had come down to the road and found the bodies.
You did not see the mother shot, nor the sister, nor the brother.
You heard about it; you heard the shots; and you saw the bodies.
Pilar had made him see it in that town.
If that woman could only write.
He would try to write it and if he had luck and could remember it perhaps he could get it down as she told it.
God, how she could tell a story.
She's better than Quevedo, he thought.
He never wrote the death of any Don Faustino as well as she told it.
I wish I could write well enough to write that story, he thought.
What we did.
Not what the others did to us.
He knew enough about that.
He knew plenty about that behind the lines.
But you had to have known the people before.
You had to know what they had been in the village.
Because of our mobility and because we did not have to stay afterwards to take the punishment we never knew how anything really ended, he thought.
You stayed with a peasant and his family.
You came at night and ate with them.
In the day you were hidden and the next night you were gone.
You did your job and cleared out.
The next time you came that way you heard that they had been shot.
It was as simple as that.
But you were always gone when it happened.
The _partizans_ did their damage and pulled out.
The peasants stayed and took the punishment.
I've always known about the other, he thought.
What we did to them at the start I've always known it and hated it and I have heard it mentioned shamelessly and shamefully, bragged of, boasted of, defended, explained and denied.
But that damned woman made me see it as though I had been there.
Well, he thought, it is part of one's education.
It will be quite an education when it's finished.
You learn in this war if you listen.
You most certainly did.
He was lucky that he had lived parts of ten years ifl Spain before the war.
They trusted you on the language, principally.
They trusted you on understanding the language completely and speaking it idiomatically and having a knowledge of the different places.
A Spaniard was only really loyal to his village in the end.
First Spain of course, then his own tribe, then his province, then his village, his family and finally his trade.
If you knew Spanish he was prejudiced in your favor, if you knew his province it was that much better, but if you knew his village and his trade you were in as far as any foreigner ever could be.
He never felt like a foreigner in Spanish and they did not really treat him like a foreigner most of the time; only when they turned on you.
Of course they turned on you.
They turned on you often but they always turned on every one.
They turned on themselves, too. If you had three together, two would unite against one, and then the two would start to betray each other. Not always, but often enough for you to take enough cases and start to draw it as a conclusion.
This was no way to think; but who censored his thinking?
Nobody but himself.