From For Whom The Bell Tolls--The Smell of Death To Come “For part of it is the smell that comes when, on a ship, there is a storm and the portholes are closed up. Put your nose against the brass handle of a screwed-tight porthole on a rolling ship that is swaying under you so that you are faint and hollow in the stomach and you have a part of that smell….” “After that of the ship you must go down the hill in Madrid to the Puente de Toldedo early in the morning to the matadero and stand there on the wet paving when there is a fog from the Manzanares and wait for the old women who go before daylight to drink the blood of the beasts that are slaughtered. When such an old woman comes out of the matadero, holding her shawl around her, with her face gray and her eyes hollow, and the whiskers of age on her chin, and on her cheeks, set in the waxen white of her face as the sprouts grow from the seed of a bean, not bristles, but pale sprouts in the death of her face; put your arms tight around her Ingles, and hold her to you and kiss her on the mouth and you will know the second part that odor is made of….” “Kiss one,” Pilar said. “Kiss one, Ingles, for thy knowledge’s sake and then, with this in thy nostrils, walk back up into the city and when thous seest a refuse pail with dead flowers [chrysanthemums] in it plunge thy nose deep into it and inhale so that scent mixes with those thou hast already in thy nasal passages….” “Then,” Pilar went on, “it is important that the day be in the autumn with rain, or at least some fog, or early winter even and now thou shouldst continue to walk through the city and down the Called de Salud smelling what thou wilt smell where they are sweeping out the casas de putas and emptying the slop jars into the drains and, with this odor of love’s labor lost mixed sweetly with soapy water and cigarette butts only faintly reaching thy nostrils, thou shouldst go on to the Jardin Botanico where at night those girls who can no longer work in the houses do their work against the iron gates of the park and the iron picketed fences and upon the sidewalks. It is there in the shadow of the trees against the iron railing that they will perform all that a man wishes; from the simplest requests at a remuneration of ten centimos up to a peseta for that great act that we are born to and there, on a dead flower bed that has not yet been plucked out and replanted, and so serves to soften the earth that is so much softer than the sidewalk, thou wilt find an abandoned gunny sack with the odor of the wet earth, the dead flowers, and the doings of that night. In this sack will be contained the essence of it all, both the dead earth and the dead stalks of the flowers and their rotted blooms and the smell that is both the death and birth of man. Thou wild wrap this sack around thy head and try to breathe through it.” “No.” “Yes,” Pilar said. “Thou wilt wrap this sack around thy head and try to breath and then, if thou hast not lost any of the previous odors, when thou inhalest deeply, thou wilt smell the odor of death-to-come as we know it.

— Ernest Hemingway

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