Maria said, “Do not speak. It is better if we do not speak.”
“I must tell thee for it is a great thing.”
“Nay.”
“Rabbit – ”
But she held him tight and turned her head away and he asked softly, “Is it pain, rabbit?”
“Nay,” she said. “It is that I am thankful too to have been another time in la gloria.”
Then afterwards they lay quiet, side by side, all length of ankle, thigh, hip and shoulder touching, Robert Jordan now with the watch where he could see it again and Maria said, “We have had much good fortune.”
“Yes,” he said, “we are people of much luck.”
“There is not time to sleep?”
“No,” he said, “it starts soon now.”
“Then if we must rise let us go to get something to eat.”
“All right.”
“Thou. Thou art not worried about anything?”
“No.”
“Truly?”
“No. Not now.”
“But thou hast worried before?”
“For a while.”
“Is it aught I can help?”
“Nay,” he said. “You have helped enough.”
“That? That was for me.”
“That was for us both,” he said. “No one is there alone. Come, rabbit, let us dress.”
But his mind, that was his best companion, was thinking La Gloria. She said La Gloria. It has nothing to do with glory nor La Gloire that the French write and speak about. It is the thing that is in the Cante Hondo and in the Saetas. It is in Greco and in San Juan de la Cruz, of course, and in the others. I am no mystic, but to deny it is as ignorant as though you denied the telephone or that the earth revolves around the sun or that there are other planets than this.
How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think, than in all the other time. I’d like to be an old man and to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew about so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.