Pilar And Ugliness

I remember reading For Whom The Bell Tolls when I was thirteen mainly because it was the first book ever to make me cry. I did not know then it would also be the last book to do so. A few days ago, I found a DVD of the Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman movie adaptation of the novel and decided to watch it. I wanted to return to my childhood perhaps replicate that unique experience.

The movie felt nowhere close to the book or maybe I am glamorizing the past. With my elevated expectations, it was just another war movie and not even the best I have seen of the genre. Whereas at thirteen, the characters that etched the deepest mark on me were those of Maria and Robert Jordan, this time I paid attention to Pilar. I vaguely remembered reading these lines when I heard her character say them in the movie :

"Look at the ugliness. Yet one has a feeling within one that blinds a man while he loves you. You, with that feeling, blind him, and blind yourself. Then, one day, for no reason, he sees you as ugly as you really are and he is not blind anymore and then you see yourself as ugly as he sees you and you lose your man and your feeling... After a while, when you are as ugly as I am, as ugly as women can be, then, as I say after a while the feeling, the idiotic feeling that you are beautiful , grows slowly in one again. It grows like a cabbage. And then, when the feeling is grown, another man sees you and thinks you are beautiful and it is all to do over."

I was too green then to understand the complexity of Pilar's character or to fathom the depth of what she had said about ugliness. This could as well be ugliness inside that is hidden behind a the facade of a beautiful face and body. Love can hide that ugliness for a while until something snaps and the fairy-tale is over. The beautiful princess is suddenly transformed into a hideous witch.