La Pasionaria

La Pasionaria, also identified in the novel as Dolores, appears through remembered political words and reports of her public presence rather than through a sustained personal storyline. Her influence is measured by how others invoke her: a Republican fighter reaches for her defiant maxim under pressure, while a correspondent presents her as the source of news that fascist forces near Segovia were fighting among themselves.

Political Voice and Reputation

Joaquín cites La Pasionaria’s maxim that it is better to die standing than to live on one’s knees. He offers it to men whose position makes the words sound less like a triumphal slogan than a test of resolve: one answers that they are lying on their bellies, not kneeling. The exchange preserves both the force and the limits of political rhetoric. The maxim asserts dignity in defeat, but the reply makes the fighters’ immediate vulnerability impossible to ignore.

The same exchange turns La Pasionaria’s authority into a subject of argument. A man challenges Joaquín with the claim that she has a son his age in Russia, and Joaquín calls the story a lie. The allegation is presented as hearsay, attributed to a dynamiter who had belonged to Joaquín’s party; the passage does not establish it as fact. Instead, it shows how a political figure’s personal life becomes material for testing a supporter’s confidence and the credibility of the movement’s words.

News from Segovia

In a later report, a puffy-eyed correspondent tells Karkov that fascists have been fighting among themselves near Segovia, that mutinies were put down with automatic rifles and machine guns, and that their planes bombed their own troops. He says Dolores brought the news herself. The scene presents her as a direct source of information, not merely as a name invoked from a distance, although the reader receives the account through the correspondent’s testimony rather than an independent report.

The correspondent remembers her arrival in terms of conviction and feeling: he says the news seemed to shine from her face and voice, and praises the combination of pity, compassion, and truth he heard in her. His response is so fervent that he describes the moment as one of the greatest of the war and calls her a saint of the people. Karkov answers without sharing the correspondent’s tone, then urges him to write the article before forgetting its striking opening. Their contrast separates the political and emotional power of her public presence from the polished language through which a reporter may turn that experience into print.

Public Figure and Narrative Function

The novel gives La Pasionaria two distinct forms of influence. In Joaquín’s exchange, her words supply an ideal that can be invoked, challenged, and measured against the fighters’ actual position. In the report to Karkov, she becomes a public messenger whose authority rests on the force with which she communicates news. Neither appearance supplies a full biography or a direct account of her political work; instead, the differing responses reveal how slogans and reports acquire meaning among people living through the war.

Her name also links private conviction with collective struggle. Joaquín treats the maxim as a talisman, but the answer from the man on his belly punctures any easy equation between heroic language and military success. The correspondent, by contrast, treats her delivery as evidence that the reported dissension is true, while Karkov’s dry response keeps admiration at a distance. La Pasionaria thus matters not through a developed plot arc, but as a figure whose words and reported presence expose the tension between political hope, lived vulnerability, and the making of wartime news.