Hills Like White Elephants

Heat pressed like a hand against their shoulders: dust rose from the platform, the curtain at the bar fluttered with a dry, grainy hiss, and the sun burned the back of the man's neck. Between the shade and the glare, two people sat waiting, the quiet between them taut with an unspoken imperative.

The hills across the valley of Ebro were long and white. On this side of the tracks there was no shade; the station sat amid fields of grain and dry earth. The heat was unbearable. A curtain at the bar tried to block out the sun's harsh light, but it did little to cool the air. They were an American man and a girl, sitting at a small table outside the station bar, waiting for the train that would go to Madrid.

Jig looked toward the distant hills and said, “They look like white elephants.”

The man smiled faintly. “I’ve never seen one,” he replied.

“You wouldn’t have,” she said, with a little bite.

They ordered beers from the waitress who spoke no English. The initial trivialities evaporated quickly and the silence that followed felt weighty, almost deliberate. The conversation that did happen moved around something neither wanted to name fully.

Jig traced her finger around the rim of her glass. “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said suddenly, trying to meet her eyes. “It isn’t really an operation at all.”

She didn't answer at once, keeping her gaze on the hills. “Then what will we do afterward?” she asked.

“We’ll be fine afterward. Just like we were before,” he said, his voice meant to reassure, but it held a thin edge of worry.

Jig glanced at him, expression opaque. “And you think that makes it better?” she asked, coolly.

He shifted, adjusting his sunglasses as if to hide something in his face. “I think it’s the best thing for us to do. The best thing for you. I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do. But it’s really the simplest thing.”

She looked back at the hills. “And then what? We’ll be happy?”

“We’ll be happy,” he said, as though repeating a fact might make it true.

Jig was unconvinced. When the waitress brought two more beers, the heat seemed to press closer, and the conversation resumed with him offering reasons, examples, a string of small justifications. “I’ve known lots of people that have done it,” he said. “And afterward, they were all so happy.”

Jig’s eyes drifted lazily to the beer in front of her, but her thoughts were elsewhere. “Does it mean anything to you?” she asked, quietly, as if addressing the words to herself as much as to him.

“Of course it does. But I don’t want anybody but you,” the man answered, as if saying it faster would make it truer.

Jig sighed, a long breath that seemed to carry the weight of something larger than their table. “And if I do it, you’ll love me?” she asked, soft but pointed.

“I love you now,” he said, though his voice wavered.

“And afterward?”

“Afterward, I’ll love you just as much.”

The silence that followed was thick and absolute, broken only by the distant hum of insects and the occasional slap of heat against the fields. Jig’s eyes returned to the shimmering hills, which looked ghostly in the afternoon glare. They seemed both distant and insistent, holding their own unspoken meanings.

“You keep talking about afterward,” Jig said after a while. “But what about now? What do we do now?”

The man leaned forward, reaching for her hand. She pulled it away. “Now, we wait for the train. It’ll be here soon,” he said, though the words felt smaller than the thing he avoided naming.

Jig stood up abruptly, pushing her chair back. “I don’t feel like waiting,” she said and walked toward the bar, where the bartender wiped the counter with a practiced motion.

The man watched her go, his hand falling slowly from the air as if whatever he’d hoped to hold had slipped through his fingers. He looked back at the hills; their contours no longer conjured the odd image she had named. They were simply hills—bare, sun-bleached, indifferent.

Jig returned shortly, her face calm though her eyes held a storm. She sat down without meeting him. “Do you really think things will go back to the way they were?” she asked.

He hesitated, then nodded. “Yes. I know they will. We’ll be happy, and it’ll be like this never happened.”

“But it did happen,” Jig said, sharp and suddenly present. “And I don’t think you can just pretend like it didn’t.”

He opened his mouth and found no words that could bridge what she’d said. Instead he drank, as if swallowing the beer could drown what was rising between them.

Jig stood again, this time moving to the edge of the platform where the tracks stretched toward the horizon, a heat-scrambled line leading away from the station. The man watched her, heart beating faster, wanting to call her back but uncertain what to call her back to.

She stood looking down the tracks for a long moment. Then she returned to the table, sat down as if the motion had been routine. The quiet reasserted itself, but something inside each of them had shifted.

“You’ll do it, then?” the man asked after a long pause, voice tentative.

Jig did not answer immediately. She looked from him to the hills and back. “I don’t know,” she said softly. “I just don’t know.”

They sat in the oppressive stillness. The distant sound of the train arriving sliced into the hush: faint at first and then unmistakable. The man looked at her with the kind of hope that seeks permission. “It’s coming,” he said.

“I know,” she replied.

They gathered their things without speaking, preparing to board. The man glanced once toward the hills; Jig did not. She fixed her gaze straight ahead, on the path she had to follow, on decisions that would not wait until they reached Madrid.

The train hissed as it pulled in, doors sliding with a small, metallic sigh. The man reached for her hand as they stepped aboard, but she did not take it. They stood side by side, physically close only, otherwise separated by an expanse of something neither could cross.

They sat in a compartment, the world outside slipping past in blurred crops and small villages. Words that might have settled the matter frittered away into silence. The rhythm of the wheels on the rails filled the space between them.

They didn’t speak for a long time. The man wanted to reach across, to say something that would restore the feeling of being a pair. Each attempt stalled in his throat. Jig watched her reflection in the window, the landscape darkening outside. The inner weight she carried—the life inside her—felt like an ocean she could not navigate yet.

They rode on, the countryside moving in steady strips: fields of grain, empty hills, the occasional line of trees. The sun slid nearer to the horizon, turning the land golden and long.

At last the man turned to her. “Are you sure?” he asked, the question small and raw.

Jig barely looked away from the darkening scene. “No,” she said. “I’m not sure.”

He reached for her hand; she pulled away. The train carried them forward anyway, toward decisions neither of them felt equipped to make alone.

The air between them remained thick with unspoken things: past choices, possible futures, the knowledge that once some paths are taken, others are gone. The whistle blew, sharp and clear, and the train moved on. Jig watched the hills, their white shapes receding until they were nothing but a pale memory.

They did not speak for the remainder of the journey. The compartments filled with the evening’s gloom and the measured clack of the rails. The man finally bowed his head and closed his eyes; Jig rested her forehead against the window, the lights outside turning into scattered, indifferent stars.

The miles unrolled and the distance between them felt like a geography of its own. The train kept going, carrying them together into a future that had already started to separate them. Night settled in. Jig let herself drift, neither deciding nor refusing—holding the possibility in the only place left to her: inside.

{{{-04}}}