Under the Volcano (11 page)

‘But look here, hang it all, it is not altogether darkness,' the Consul seemed to be saying in reply to her, gently, as he produced a half-filled pipe and with the utmost difficulty lit it, and as her eyes followed his as they roved around the bar, not meeting those of the barman, who had gravely, busily effaced himself into the background, ‘you misunderstand me if you think it is altogether darkness I see, and if you insist on thinking so, how can I tell you why I do it? But if you look at that sunlight there, ah, then perhaps you'll get the answer, see, look at the way it falls through the window: what beauty can compare to that of a
cantina
in the early morning? Your volcanoes outside? Your stars — Ras Algethi? Antares raging south south-east? Forgive me, no. Not so much the beauty of this one necessarily, which, a regression on my part, is not perhaps properly a
cantina
, but think of all the other terrible ones where people go mad that will soon be taking down their shutters, for not even the gates of heaven, opening wide to receive me, could fill me with such celestial complicated and hopeless joy as the iron screen that rolls up with a crash, as the unpadlocked jostling jalousies which admit those whose souls tremble with the drinks they carry unsteadily to their lips. All mystery, all hope, all disappointment, yes, all disaster, is here, beyond those swinging doors. And, by the way, do you see that old woman from Tarasco sitting in the corner, you didn't before, but do you now?' his eyes asked her, gazing round him with the bemused unfocused brightness of a lover's, his love asked her, ‘how, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old woman from Tarasco who plays dominoes at seven o'clock in the morning?'

It was true, it was almost uncanny, there
was
someone else in the room she hadn't noticed until the Consul, without a word, had glanced behind them: now Yvonne's eyes came to rest on the old woman, who was sitting in the shadow at the bar's one table. On the edge of the table her stick, made of steel with some animal's claw for a handle, hung like something alive. She had a little chicken on a cord which she kept under her dress over her heart. The chicken peeped out with pert, jerky, sidelong glances. She set the little chicken on a table near her where
it pecked among the dominoes, uttering tiny cries. Then she replaced it, drawing her dress tenderly over it. But Yvonne looked away. The old woman with her chicken and the dominoes chilled her heart. It was like an evil omen.

—‘Talking of corpses' — the Consul poured himself another whisky and was signing a chit book with a somewhat steadier hand while Yvonne sauntered towards the door — ‘personally I'd like to be buried next to William Blackstone –' He pushed the book back for Fernando, to whom mercifully he had not attempted to introduce her. ‘The man who went to live among the Indians. You know who he was, of course?' The Consul stood half turned towards her, doubtfully regarding this new drink he had not picked up.

‘ – Christ, if you want it, Alabama, go ahead and take it… I don't want it. But if you wish it, you go and take it.'

‘
Absolutamente necesario —
'

The Consul left half of it.

Outside, in the sunlight, in the backwash of tabid music from the still-continuing ball, Yvonne waited again, casting nervous glances over her shoulder at the main entrance of the hotel from which belated revellers like half-dazed wasps out of a hidden nest issued every few moments while, on the instant, correct, abrupt, army and navy, consular, the Consul, with scarce a tremor now, found a pair of dark glasses and put them on.

‘Well,' he said, ‘the taxis seem to have all disappeared. Shall we walk?'

‘Why what's happened to the car?' So confused by apprehension of meeting any acquaintance was she, Yvonne had almost taken the arm of another man wearing dark glasses, a ragged young Mexican leaning against the hotel wall to whom the Consul, slapping his stick over his wrist and with something enigmatic in his voice observed: ‘
Buenas tardes, señor
.' Yvonne started forward quickly. ‘Yes, let's walk.'

The Consul took her arm with courtliness (the ragged Mexican with the dark glasses had been joined, she noticed, by another man with a shade over one eye and bare feet who had been leaning against the wall farther down, to whom the Consul also remarked ‘
Buenas tardes
', but there were no more
guests coming out of the hotel, only the two men who'd politely called ‘
Buenas
' after them standing there nudging each other as if to say: ‘He said
“Buenas tardes”
, what a card he is!') and they set off obliquely through the square. The
fiesta
wouldn't start till much later and the streets that remembered so many other Days of the Dead were fairly deserted. The bright banners, the paper streamers, flashed: the great wheel brooded under the trees, brilliant, motionless. Even so the town around and below them was already full of sharp remote noises like explosions of rich colour.
¡Box¡
said an advertisement.
ARENA TOMALÍN.
Frente al Jardin Xicotancatl. Domingo 8 de Noviembre de 1938. 4 Emocionantes Peleas
.

Yvonne tried to keep herself from asking:

‘Did you smack the car up again?'

‘As a matter of fact I've lost it.'

‘
Lost it
!'

‘It's a pity because — but look here, dash it all, aren't you terribly tired, Yvonne?'

‘Not in the least! I should think you're the one to be –'

—
¡Box¡ Preliminar a 4 Rounds.
EL TURCO
(Gonzalo Calderónde Par. de 52 kilos) us
EL OSO
(de Par.de 5J kilos)
.

‘I had a million hours of sleep on the boat I And I'd
far
rather walk, only –'

‘Nothing. Just a touch of rheumatiz. — O is it the sprue? I'm glad to get some circulation going in the old legs.'

—
¡Box¡ Evento Especial a
5
rounds, en los que el vencedor pasará al ‘grupo de Semi-Finales
,
TOMA AGÜERO
(
El Invencible Indio de Quauhnahuac de
57
kilos, que acaba de llegar de la Capital de ‘la República
),
ARENA TOMALÍN.
Frente al JardínXicotancatl
.

‘It's a pity about the car because we might have gone to the boxing,' said the Consul, who was walking almost exaggeratedly erect.

‘I hate boxing.'

‘ – But that's not till next Sunday anyhow… I heard they had some kind of a bullthrowing on today over at ‘Tomalín. —Do you remember –'

‘No!'

The Consul, with no more recognition than she, held up one finger in dubious greeting to an individual resembling a carpenter, running past them wagging his head and carrying a sawed length of grained board under his arm and who threw, almost chanted, a laughing word at him that sounded like:
¡Mes-calito¡
'

The sunlight blazed down on them, blazed on the eternal ambulance whose headlights were momentarily transformed into a blinding magnifying glass, glazed on the volcanoes — she could not look at them now. Born in Hawaii, she'd had volcanoes in her life before, however. Seated on a park bench under a tree in the square, his feet barely touching the ground, the little public scribe was already crashing away on a giant typewriter.

‘I am taking the only way out, semicolon,' the Consul offered cheerfully and, soberly in passing. ‘Good-bye, full stop. Change of paragraph, change of chapter, change of worlds –'

The whole scene about her — the names on the shops surrounding the square:
La China Poblana, hand-embroidered dresses
, the advertisements:
Baños de la Libertad, Los mejores de la Capital y los únicos en donde nunca falta el agua, Estufas especiales para Damas y Caballeros:
and
Sr Panadero: Si quiere hacer buen pan exija las harinas ‘Princesa Donaji —
striking Yvonne as so strangely familiar all over again and yet so sharply strange after the year's absence, the severance of thought and body, mode of being, became almost intolerable for a moment. ‘You might have made use of him to answer some of
my
letters,' she said.

‘Look, do you remember what Maria used to call it?' The Consul, with his stick, was indicating through the trees the little American grocery store, catercorner to Cortez Palace. ‘Peegly Weegly.'

‘I won't,' Yvonne thought, hurrying on and biting her lips. ‘I won't cry.'

The Consul had taken her arm. ‘I'm sorry, I never thought.'

They emerged on the street again: when they had crossed it she was grateful for the excuse suggested by the printer's shop window for readjustment. They stood, as once, looking in. The
shop, adjacent to the Palace, but divided from it by the breadth of a steep narrow street desperate as a winze, was opening early. From the mirror within the window an ocean creature so drenched and coppered by sun and winnowed by sea-wind and spray looked back at her she seemed, even while making the fugitive motions of Yvonne's vanity, somewhere beyond human grief charioting the surf. But the sun turned grief to poison and a glowing body only mocked the sick heart, Yvonne knew, if the sun-darkened creature of waves and sea margins and windows did not! In the window itself, on either side of this abstracted gaze of her mirrored face, the same brave wedding invitations she remembered were ranged, the same touched-up prints of extravagantly floriferous brides, but this time there was something she hadn't seen before, which the Consul now pointed out with a murmur of ‘Strange', peering closer: a photographic enlargement, purporting to show the disintegration of a glacial deposit in the Sierra Madre, of a great rock split by forest fires. This curious, and curiously sad picture — to which the nature of the other exhibits lent an added ironic poignance — set behind and above the already spinning flywheel of the presses, was called:
La Despedida
.

They moved on past the front of Cortez Palace, then down its blind side began to descend the cliff that traversed it width-ways. Their path made the short cut to the Calle Tierra del Fuego which curved below to meet them but the cliff was little better than a rubbish heap with smouldering debris and they had to pick their way carefully. Yvonne breathed more freely though, now they were leaving the centre of the town behind. La Despedida, she thought. The Parting ! After the damp and detritus had done their work both severed halves of that blasted rock would crumble to earth. It was inevitable, so it said on the picture… Was it really? Wasn't there some way of saving the poor rock whose immutability so short a time ago no one would have dreamed of doubting! Ah, who would have thought of it then as other than a single integrated rock? But granted it had been split, was there no way before total disintegration should set in of at least saving the severed halves? There was no way. The violence of the fire which split the rock apart had
also incited the destruction of each separate rock, cancelling the power that might have held them unities. Oh, but why — by some fanciful geologic thaumaturgy, couldn't the pieces be welded together again! She longed to heal the cleft rock. She was one of the rocks and she yearned to save the other, that both might be saved. By a superlapidary effort she moved herself nearer it, poured out her pleas, her passionate tears, told all her forgiveness: the other rock stood unmoved. ‘That's all very well,' it said, ‘but it happens to be your fault, and as for myself, I propose to disintegrate as I please!'

‘ – in Tortu,' the Consul was saying, though Yvonne was not following, and now they had come out in the Calle Tierra del Fuego itself, a rough narrow dusty street that, deserted, looked quite unfamiliar. The Consul was beginning to shake again.

‘Geoffrey, I'm so thirsty, why don't we stop and have a drink?'

‘Geoffrey, let's be reckless this once and get tight together before breakfast!'

Yvonne said neither of these things.

— The Street of the Land of Fire! To their left, raised high above road level, were uneven sidewalks with rough steps hewn in them. The whole little thoroughfare, slightly humpbacked in the centre where the open sewers had been filled in, was banked sharply down to the right as though it had once sideslipped in an earthquake. On this side one-storied houses with tiled roofs and oblong barred windows stood flush with the street but seemingly below it. On the other, above them, they were passing small shops, sleepy, though mostly opening or, like the ‘
Molino para Nixtamal, Morelense
', open: harness shops, a milk shop under its sign
Lecheria
(brothel, someone insisted it meant, and she hadn't seen the joke), dark interiors with strings of tiny sausages, chorizos, hanging over the counters where you could also buy goat cheese or sweet quince wine or cacao, into one of which the Consul was ⁅now, with a'‘
momentito
'‘, disappearing. ‘Just go on and I'll catch you up. I won't be a jiffy.'

Yvonne walked on past the place a short distance, then
retraced her steps. She had not entered any of these shops since their first week in Mexico and the danger of being recognized in the
abarrotes
was slight. Nevertheless, repenting her tardy impulse to follow the Consul in, she waited outside, restless as a little yacht turning at anchor. The opportunity to join him ebbed. A mood of martyrdom stole upon her. She wanted the Consul to see her, when he emerged, waiting there, abandoned and affronted. But glancing back the way they had come she forgot Geoffrey an instant. — It was unbelievable. She was in Quauhnahuac again! There was Cortez Palace and there, high on the cliff, a man standing gazing over the valley who from his air of martial intentness might have been Cortez himself. The man moved, spoiling the illusion. Now he looked less like Cortez than the poor young man in the dark glasses who'd been leaning against the wall of the Bella Vista.