For Whom the Bell Tolls: Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis

As they come up the mountain, a man with a carbine steps out from behind a tree and greets Pilar, asking who Robert Jordan is. The guard, Joaquin, is a young man, with “friendly” eyes, who tells Maria that she is looking pretty; he reminds her that he “carried [her] over [his] shoulder.” Joaquin says that he will take them to the “commander,” and he offers to carry Maria again. She says that she remembers what he did for her and thanks him for it, noting that she will carry him sometime. Joaquin jokes that he would have dropped Maria, but he was afraid that Pilar would shoot him.

Before the war, Joaquin shined shoes, and though he wanted to be a bullfighter, he was too afraid of the bulls to fight. Now, he has no fear of them, since he has “seen much worse things and more dangerous than the bulls,” and “it is clear no bull is as dangerous as a machine gun.” Joaquin is from Valladolid, and his father, mother, brother-in-law, and sister were killed by fascists there. Robert Jordan reflects that he has heard people speak about murders in their family many times, and he always answers in the same way: “What barbarians.”

Pilar’s story made Robert Jordan vividly visualize the fascists’ deaths, and he wishes that she could write, since she is an excellent storyteller. He also wishes that he could write well enough to write the story of what the Republicans did—not what the fascists did to them, but what they had been before the war. He reflects that as a foreign soldier, he never knew how anything ended in the villages where he stayed; he would stay with a peasant and their family and leave before they were killed, and when he returned, he would find out that they had been shot.

Robert Jordan believes that it is part of his education to hear about the casualties of the war, and that it is lucky that he lived in Spain for ten years on and off before the war, since the Spaniards trust his understanding of the language and his knowledge of the different regions and provinces. If you knew a Spaniard’s region, “you were in as far as any foreigner could ever be.” Sometimes, Jordan reflects, they “turned on you,” but “they always turned on every one,” including themselves.

Jordan realizes that he shouldn’t “think himself into any defeatism,” since it is imperative for him to stay focused on winning the war; if he doesn’t win the war, everything will be lost. Still, he wants to notice everything that goes on during the war, since he wants to have material to draw from for his writing. He hopes that Pilar will tell him the rest of her story. He thinks of her as “a mountain,” and Joaquin and Maria as “young trees.”

Jordan recalls a Belgian boy in the Eleventh Brigade who had enlisted with five other boys from his small hometown. When he met the boy, the other five boys had been killed, and the boy was distraught, unable to stop crying. Jordan thinks that Maria seems “sound enough now,” and he feels “fine” today, “unworried and happy.” He looks at Maria and thinks that meeting her has been like a dream. He can remember spending time with Garbo and Harlow, and he recalls that he loved Garbo more than Harlow, though he feels differently about Maria. He is afraid that Maria might be a dream, like the dreams he has of his “old girls” coming back to sleep in his robe at night. He puts his hand on Maria’s arm, and when she greets him, he looks at her “tawny brown face” and sees that “it was true all right.”

As they near El Sordo’s camp, Pilar asks Joaquin about the shooting of his family. Joaquin’s parents were socialists, and the husband of one of his sisters was a member of a syndicate (union) of tramway drivers. Joaquin asks Pilar and Maria to forgive him for “molesting” them by speaking “of things of the family.” Pilar says that he should speak, and that they should aid each other by listening. Maria kisses Joaquin, “as a brother,” and says that they are all family, including Robert Jordan.

Pilar insists that she will kiss him, too—though not as a sister, like Maria—since “it’s [been] years since I’ve kissed a bullfighter, even an unsuccessful one like [Joaquin].” Joaquin reacts awkwardly, and Pilar says that “at times many things tire” her, since she is forty-eight years old: she admits that she is perturbed by the “panic” she saw in “the face of [the] failed bullfighter” when she said she might kiss him.

El Sordo emerges from his camp, a short, heavy man with a “hooked nose like an Indian’s.” He asks when the bridge will be blown up, and Robert Jordan tells him that it will take place the day after tomorrow, in the morning. He tells Maria and Joaquin to come back later, and he, Pilar, and Robert Jordan drink whiskey. Jordan asks him where he got the whiskey, but El Sordo doesn’t hear him; he is deaf in one ear. El Sordo says that there has been troop movement between Villacastin and Segovia, and Villacastin and San Rafael; he tells them that he has eight men and four horses, which, with Pilar’s group, makes seventeen people and nine horses all together. Though Pilar is worried about the plan, El Sordo seems confident.

Pilar asks where El Sordo thinks they should go after blowing up the bridge; she says she wants to go to the Republic, and he says that it is possible. Robert Jordan suggests that they could operate from the Gredos, against the main line of the railway. El Sordo says that this would be difficult, and Robert Jordan feels that he has made a mistake: he has told the Spaniards that he can “do something better than they can” instead of flattering them.

Pilar says that the last dynamiter sent to the group, Kashkin, was “very nervous,” and Robert Jordan admits that he shot him when he was injured during combat, since he was “too badly wounded to travel.” Pilar asks if Jordan’s nerves are all right, and Jordan says that they are; he insists that the plan to go to the Gredos would be best and Pilar begins to curse at him. She tells him to take his “little cropped-headed whore and go back to the Republic but do not shut the door on others who are not foreigners and who loved the Republic when thou wert wiping thy mother’s milk off thy chin.”

El Sordo says that “it is the morning that is difficult,” since blowing up the bridge would be easy before daylight or at daylight, but fleeing from the mountains will be difficult. He asks Robert Jordan if they could blow up the bridge at night, but Jordan says that he would be shot for it. El Sordo says that they exist in the mountains “by a miracle of laziness and stupidity of the fascists,” and that the Republicans’ plan to leave the mountains is clearly complicated. Putting aside their argument, the three begin to eat.