An epilogue written for Maria of For Whom The Bell Tolls. How the rest of her life might have looked like. Spoilers for the end of the book.
Another piece written for school. An attempt to copy Hemingway's writing style (though I'm really not manly enough to imitate him).
Maria's Epilogue
She is 21 when they loose the war (they had lost? She barely believes it, even today). She spends the week in mourning and in expectation. Pilar had put her back together, twice. Pilar had sent her to take care of the refugee children in England. And Pilar would escape to England and join her and her children and her beat-up, torn-down new family of refugees. They tell her she can return to Spain, but she can't - she's waiting for Pilar. Her new familia, her basque children, leave her one by one, returning to homes, to parents, to villages. Maria has no parents, no home, no village. She can only wait for Pablo's woman to rescue her. This escape lasts for a few days. She doesn't play pretend like she used to during the war. No more.
She soon joins a group of women who learn English and teach Spanish. They are good, and they teach her a lot. She leaves them when she meets Joshua. He is good and he knows her. She tells him that he is marrying a widow. That she had married the Inglez. He doesn't question her, because he is a good man. Or because he knows she is lying. She teaches Spanish at an school for young children and tells stories of star bullfighters with paralyzing fear of bulls and young couples walking down beautiful streets in Valencia.
She is 24 when she decides she will not return to Spain. Not like this. Not so that her children could be taught to love Franco and detest everything their grandfather stood for. Stood for and died for. (Viva la republica, he said).
She is 25 when she marries and finds that the Pilar was right, as always. She will never have children of her own. But there are many orphaned children that have been taken in by English families, and not all of them are quite welcome there. Some are still stuck in the battles and blood and loss that she leaves out of her stories in the schools. They need her carefully edited stories more than anyone. She loves two more than the rest and hopes the others will forgive her. She loves them like Pilar loved her, and tries to heal them like Pilar healed her. Joshua, somehow, does not mind. She is grateful. She supposes, although she isn't allowed to, that Mrs. Robert Jordan would never have adopted Gracia or Inez. World War Two ends, finally.
She is 29 when she goes to the protestant church down the street for the last time. Faith, she decides, is something that must be earned. When Joshua leaves she tells the children she is glad that she is getting another chance at love. Their Spanish improves as a result of their Inglez father leaving. She thinks it funny that she married an Inglez after all.
Inez does well at school and wants to go to college on her school teacher's salary. She thinks: me cago en la leche but she says: "of course, my love". She loves again, and again, and always remembers Pilar and her last minute lessons.
It's not that it really matters in the end, if they were really in love. The real one. She remembers the feeling, although she barely remembers him, even the little of him she had actually known has been washed mostly away by the years. She was told there was no point in supposing. Suppose the Inglez had pulled his foot up at the right moment. Suppose the stupid horse hadn't been so damn heavy. Her life would have been very different. (Madrid, my rabbit, and the Plaza del Callao).
But a lifetime can be a long time if spent supposing. So she doesn't. Not usually.