For Whom the Bell Tolls: Chapter 10 Summary & Analysis

As they are walking to El Sordo’s, Pilar asks Robert Jordan and Maria if they can rest, and she sits down by a stream. El Sordo’s camp is not far away, across the open country and down into the next valley. Though Robert Jordan is in a hurry, Pilar wants to enjoy the nature around her; she is tired of the pine trees they see every day at the camp. Maria, though, loves the pine trees. Pilar says that Maria likes anything, and that she would be a gift to any man, if she could “cook a little better.” She reiterates that pine trees are “boredom.”

Robert Jordan asks if Pilar ever went to Segovia, and Pilar says that she couldn’t, “with this face.” She feels that she was born ugly, and she asks Robert Jordan if he knows “what it is to be ugly all your life and inside to feel that you are beautiful.” She says that she would have made a good man, but she is “all woman and all ugly,” though many men have loved her and she has loved many men. Jordan says that she isn’t ugly; laughing, she tells him not to lie to her. She says that she has a feeling within her that will “blind a man” before he realizes that she is ugly; she then starts to see herself as ugly again.

Maria disagrees with Pilar and tells her that she isn’t ugly. Pilar says that “when you are as ugly as [she is], as ugly as women can be,” men reject her: after being rejected, though, a feeling of “inside beauty” begins to grow within her, “like a cabbage,” and another man falls in love with her again. She says that Maria is lucky that she isn’t ugly, and Maria insists that she is. She also tells Pilar that if “Roberto (Robert Jordan) says we should go, I think we should go”—continuing on toward Sordo’s camp. Pilar says that she likes to talk, since “it is the only civilized thing” they have. Jordan says that Pilar speaks very well, and he asks her where she was at the start of the movement.

Pilar says that she was in her hometown, though not Avila, where Pablo claims they are from, and she recounts the story of her town at the start of the movement: the fascist civil guards surrendered at the barracks after Pablo blew a wall of the barracks down. Pablo then retrieved a pistol from the barracks, from the hand of an officer who killed himself, but he had never fired a pistol before, and he asked one of the surviving guards to show him how it works. Pablo then told the guard to prepare to die, and the guard and his colleague knelt, saying that they “know how to die.” Pablo shot both of them and gave to the pistol to Pilar, who felt “weak in the stomach.”

Robert Jordan interjects to ask what happened to the other fascists, and Pilar replies that Pilar had them beaten to death with flails and thrown from the top of a cliff into a river. The main plaza in the town, she says, overlooks the river, with a three hundred foot drop, and Pablo had the entrances to the streets from the plaza blocked off, except for the side facing the river, and the fascists seized in their homes. Pilar says that Pablo is “very intelligent but very brutal,” and he planned the attack on the town well. She then continues her story.

In the story, Pablo orders the town’s priest to confess the fascists and give them “the necessary sacraments.” The townspeople are armed with flails obtained from the store of one of the fascists. One of the townspeople gathered in the plaza asks Pilar if they will be killing the wives of the fascists, and Pilar says that they will not. The townspeople discuss the act of killing, and Pilar says the fascists will never take the town. Pilar is wearing a three-cornered hat, the type that the civil guards wear, as a joke, but one of the men in the plaza tells her to take it off, and he throws the hat off of the cliff. The mayor, Don Benito Garcia, is the first fascist to emerge and be beaten to death by the crowd; he is tossed off of the cliff as well.

In the church, Pablo is pressuring the priest to send the men out to the plaza, but the priest will not respond during prayer. Don Ricardo Montalvo, a landowner, walks out, saying that “to die is nothing,” and swears at the townspeople before he is clubbed to death. The townspeople become more agitated and call out for the priest. Don Faustino Rivera, the son of a land owner and a poor bullfighter, enters the plaza; he throws himself on the grass, screaming for mercy, and is thrown off of the cliff without being beaten.

The mob is becoming vicious, and many of the townspeople are drinking: “cruelty had entered into the lines and also drunkenness,” Pilar remarks. Robert Jordan recalls an incident in Ohio, where he attended a wedding as a seven-year-old, in which a “Negro was hanged to a lamp post.” He believes that drunkenness is the same in the United States as it is in Spain. Pilar resumes her story, recounting the death of Don Guillermo, a fascist because of “the religiousness of his wife.” His wife calls out to him from their home as he is brought into the plaza, and a drunkard beats him to death with a bottle.

Pilar believes that killing is “a thing of ugliness but also a necessity to do” during the war. At the same time, she recalls that she was sickened by the violence of the mob and decided to walk away from the square. The drunkards become more aggressive, and Pilar picks up a chair and stands on it to see over the heads of the crowd. An overweight fascist, Don Anastasio Rivas, is beaten, but he is too heavy to be thrown over the cliff.

Pilar can see into the church where Pablo, the priest, and the remaining fascists are gathered as the mob attempts to break in; Pablo has locked the door of the church. After some time, one of Pablo’s men unlocks the door, and the mob rushes in. Pilar watches as the priest and the other fascists are brutally murdered, clubbed and stabbed to death, and her chair breaks; on the ground, all she can see are the legs of people going into the doorway of the church.

Pilar says she is glad that she did not have to see more of the killings. She notices a drunkard pouring something over the dead body of Don Anastasio, which catches fire, but the drunkard is knocked out before he can do serious damage. The fascists’ bodies are put into a cart and hauled off of a cliff. After the church massacre, Pilar says, there was no more killing, but the Republicans could not organize a meeting afterward because there were too many drunkards in the crowd.

That night, Pilar feels “hollow” and “full of shame,” and she tells Pablo that she didn’t like the killings. Pablo says he liked it, except for the priest, even though he hates priests more than he hates fascists; he says that the priest died with “very little dignity.” Pablo admits that he is disillusioned, and that he is a “finished man.” In the morning, Pilar goes into the square and hears a woman, the wife of Don Guillermo, crying from the balcony of her house. Pilar says that it was the worst day of her life until “one other day”—three days later, when the fascists took the town back. Maria begs Pilar not to tell this story, asking if there are “no pleasant things to speak of.” Pilar says that she and Robert Jordan should be alone in the afternoon, when they “can speak of what [they] wish.”