Maybe you dreamed it or made it up and it never did happen.
Maybe it is like the dreams you have when some one you have seen in the cinema comes to your bed at night and is so kind and lovely.
He'd slept with them all that way When he was asleep in bed.
He could remember Garbo still, and Harlow.
Yes, Harlow many times.
Maybe it was like those dreams.
But he could still remember the time Garbo came to his bed the flight before the attack at Pozoblanco and she was wearing a soft silky wool sweater when he put his arm around her and when she leaned forward her hair swept forward and over his face and she said why had he never told her that he loved her when she had loved him all this time?
She was not shy, nor cold, nor distant.
She was just lovely to hold and kind and lovely and like the old days with Jack Gilbert and it was as true as though it happened and he loved her much more than Harlow though Garbo was only there once while Harlow--maybe this was like those dreams.
Maybe it isn't too, he said to himself.
Maybe I could reach over and touch that Maria now, he said to himself.
Maybe you are afraid to he said to himself.
Maybe you would find out that it never happened and it was not true and it was something you made up like those dreams about the people of the cinema or how all your old girls come back and sleep in that robe at night on all the bare floors, in the straw of the haybarns, the stables, the _corrales_ and the _cortijos_, the woods, the garages, the trucks and all the hills of Spain.
They all came to that robe when he was asleep and they were all much nicer than they ever had been in life.
Maybe it was like that.
Maybe you would be afraid to touch her to see if it was true.
Maybe you would, and probably it is something that you made up or that you dreamed.
He took a step across the trail and put his hand on the girl's arm.
Under his fingers he felt the smoothness of her arm in the worn khaki.
She looked at him and smiled.
"Hello, Maria," he said.
"Hello, _Ingles_," she answered and he saw her tawny brown face and the yellow-gray eyes and the full lips smiling and the cropped sun-burned hair and she lifted her face at him and smiled in his eyes.
It was true all right.
Now they were in sight of El Sordo's camp in the last of the pines, where there was a rounded gulch-head shaped like an upturned basin.
All these limestone upper basins must be full of caves, he thought.
There are two caves there ahead.
The scrub pines growing in the rock hide them well.
This is as good or a better place than Pablo's.
"How was this shooting of thy family?" Pilar was saying to Joaquin.
"Nothing, woman," Joaquin said.
"They were of the left as many others in Valladolid.
When the fascists purified the town they shot first the father.
He had voted Socialist.
Then they shot the mother.
She had voted the same.
It was the first time she had ever voted.
After that they shot the husband of one of the sisters.
He was a member of the syndicate of tramway drivers.
Clearly he could not drive a tram without belonging to the syndicate.
But he was without politics.
I knew him well.
He was even a little hit shameless.
I do not think he was even a good comrade.
Then the husband of the other girl, the other sister, who was also in the trams, had gone to the hills as I had.
They thought she knew where he was.
But she did not.
So they shot her because she would not tell them where he was."
"What barbarians," said Pilar.
"Where is El Sordo?
I do not see him."