Under the Volcano (14 page)

‘No, I'll stick to the old medicine, thanks.' The Consul had almost fallen backwards on to his broken green rocking-chair. He sat soberly facing Yvonne. This was the moment then, yearned for under beds, sleeping in the corners of bars, at the edge of dark woods, lanes, bazaars, prisons, the moment when — but the moment, stillborn, was gone: and behind him the
ursa horribilis
of the night had moved nearer. What had he done? Slept somewhere, that much was certain.
Tak: tok: help: help
: the swimming-pool ticked like a clock. He had slept: what else? His hand searching in his dress trousers pockets felt the hard edge of a clue. The card he brought to light said:

Arturo Díaz Vigil
Médico Cirujano y Partero
Enfermedades de Niños
Indisposiciones Nerviosas
Consultas de 12 a 2 y de 4 a 7
Av. Revolución Numero 8.

‘ – Have you really come back? Or have you just come to see me?' the Consul was asking Yvonne gently as he replaced the card.

‘Here I am, aren't I?' Yvonne said merrily,' even with a slight note of challenge.

‘Strange,' the Consul commented, half trying to rise for the drink Yvonne had ratified in spite of himself and the quick voice that protested: ‘You bloody fool Geoffrey Firmin, I'll kick your face in if you do, if you have a drink I'll cry, O idiot!' ‘Yet it's awfully courageous of you. What if — I'm in a frightfully jolly mess, you know.'

‘But you look
amazingly
well I thought. You've no
idea
how well you look.' (The Consul had absurdly flexed his biceps, feeling them: ‘Still strong as a horse, so to speak, strong as a horse!') ‘How do I look?' She seemed to have said. Yvonne averted her face a little, keeping it in profile.

‘Didn't I say?' The Consul watched her. ‘Beautiful… Brown.' Had he said that? ‘Brown as a berry. You've been swimming,' he added. ‘You look as though you've had plenty of sun… There's been plenty of sun here too of course,' he went on. ‘As usual… Too much of it. In spite of the rain… Do you know, I don't like it.'

‘Oh yes you do, really,' she had apparently replied. ‘We could get out in the sun, you know.'

‘Well –'

The Consul sat on the broken green rocker facing Yvonne. Perhaps it was just the soul, he thought, slowly emerging out of the strychnine into a form of detachment, to dispute with Lucretius, that grew older, while the body could renew itself many times unless it had acquired an unalterable habit of age. And perhaps the soul thrived on its sufferings, and upon the sufferings he had inflicted on his wife her soul had not only thrived but flourished. Ah, and not only upon the sufferings he had inflicted. What of those for which the adulterous ghost named Cliff he imagined always as just a morning coat and a pair of striped pyjamas open at the front, had been responsible? And the child, strangely named Geoffrey too, she had had by the ghost, two years before her first ticket to Reno, and which
would now be six, had it not died at the age of as many months as many years ago, of meningitis, in 1932, three years before they themselves had met, and been married in Granada, in Spain? There Yvonne was at all events, bronzed and youthful and ageless: she had been at fifteen, she'd told him (that is, about the time she must have been acting in those Western pictures M. Laruelle, who had not seen them, adroitly assured one had influenced Eisenstein or somebody), a girl of whom people said, ‘She is not pretty but she is going to be beautiful': at twenty they still said so, and at twenty-seven when she'd married him it was still true, according to the category through which one perceived such things of course: it was equally true of her now, at thirty, that she gave the impression of someone who is still going to be, perhaps just about to be, ‘beautiful': the same tilted nose, the small ears, the warm brown eyes, clouded now and hurt-looking, the same wide, full-lipped mouth, warm too and generous, the slightly weak chin. Yvonne's was the same fresh bright face that could collapse, as Hugh would say, like a heap of ashes, and be grey. Yet she was changed. Ah yes indeed! Much as the demoted skipper's lost command, seen through the bar-room window lying out in harbour, is changed. She was no longer his: someone had doubtless approved her smart slate-blue travelling suit: it had not been he.

Suddenly with a quietly impatient gesture Yvonne pulled her hat off, and shaking her brown sunbleached hair rose from the parapet. She settled herself on the daybed, crossing her unusually beautiful and aristocratic long legs. The daybed emitted a rending guitar crash of chords. The Consul found his dark glasses and put them on almost playfully. But it had struck him with remote anguish that Yvonne was still waiting for the courage to enter the house. He said consularly in a deep false voice:

‘Hugh ought to be here before very long if he comes back by the first bus.'

‘What time is the first bus?'

‘Half past ten, eleven.' What did it matter? Chimes sounded from the city. Unless of course it seemed utterly impossible, one
dreaded the hour of anyone's arrival unless they were bringing liquor. What if there had been no liquor in the house, only the strychnine? Could he have endured it? He would be even now stumbling through the dusty streets in the growing heat of the day after a bottle; or have dispatched Concepta. In some tiny bar at a dusty alley corner, his mission forgotten, he would drink all morning celebrating Yvonne's coming while she slept. Perhaps he would pretend to be an Icelander or a visitor from the Andes or Argentina. Far more than the hour of Hugh's arrival was to be dreaded the issue that was already bounding after him at the gait of Goethe's famous church bell in pursuit of the child truant from church. Yvonne twisted her wedding-ring round her finger, once. Did she still wear it for love or for one of two kinds of convenience, or both? Or, poor girl, was it merely for his, for
their
benefit? The swimming-pool ticked on.
Might a soul bathe there and be clean or slake its drought
?

‘It's still only eight-thirty.' The Consul took off his glasses again.

‘Your eyes, you poor darling — they've got such a glare,' Yvonne burst out with: and the church bell was nearer; now it had loped, clanging, over a stile and the child had stumbled.

‘A touch of the goujeers… Just a touch.'
Die Glocke Glocke tönt nicht mehr
… The Consul traced a pattern on one of the porch tiles with his dress shoes in which his sockless feet (sock-less not because as Sr Bustamente the manager of the local cinema would have it, he'd drunk himself into a position where he could afford no socks, but because his whole frame was so neuritic with alcohol he found it impossible to put them on) felt swollen and sore. They would not have, but for the strychnine, damn the stuff, and this complete cold ugly sobriety it had let him down into! Yvonne was sitting on the parapet again leaning against a pillar. She bit her lips, intent on the garden:

‘Geoffrey this place is a wreck!'

‘Mariana and the moated grange isn't in it.' The Consul was winding his wrist-watch. ‘… But look here, suppose for the sake of argument you abandoned a besieged town to the enemy and then somehow or other not very long afterwards you go back to it — there's something about my analogy I don't like,
but never mind, suppose you do it — then you can't very well expect to invite your soul into quite the same green graces, with quite the same dear old welcome here and there, can you, eh?'

‘But I didn't abandon –'

‘Even, I wouldn't say, if that town seems to be going about its business again, though in a somewhat stricken fashion, I admit, and its trams running more or less on schedule.' The Consul strapped his watch firmly on his wrist. ‘Eh?'

‘ – Look at the red bird on the tree-twigs, Geoffrey! I never saw a cardinal as big as that before.'

‘No.' The Consul, all unobserved, secured the whisky bottle, uncorked it, smelt its contents, and returned it to the tray gravely, pursing his lips : ‘ You wouldn't have. Because it isn't a cardinal.'

‘Of course that's a cardinal. Look at its red breast. It's like a bit of flame!' Yvonne, it was clear to him, dreaded the approaching scene as much as he, and now felt under some compulsion to go on talking about anything until the perfect inappropriate moment arrived, that moment too when, unseen by her, the awful bell would actually touch the doomed child with giant protruding tongue and hellish Wesleyan breath. ‘There, on the hibiscus!'

The Consul closed one eye. ‘He's a coppery-tailed trogon I believe. And he has no red breast. He's a solitary fellow who probably lives way off in the Canyon of the Wolves over there, away off from those other fellows with ideas, so that he can have peace to meditate about not being a cardinal.'

‘I'm sure it's a cardinal and lives right here in this garden!'

‘Have it your own way.
Trogon ambiguus ambiguus
is the exact name, I think, the ambiguous bird! Two ambiguities ought to make an affirmative and this is it, the coppery-tailed trogon, not the cardinal.” The Consul reached out towards the tray for his empty strychnine glass, but forgetting midway what he proposed to put in it, or whether it wasn't one of the bottles he wanted first, if only to smell, and not the glass, he dropped his hand and leaned still farther forward, turning the movement into one of concern for the volcanoes. He said:

‘Old Popeye ought to be coming out again pretty soon.'

‘He seems to be completely obliterated in spinach at the moment –' Yvonne's voice quivered.

The Consul struck a match against their old jest for the cigarette he had somehow failed to place between his lips: after a little, finding himself with a dead match, he put it in his pocket.

For a time they confronted each other like two mute unspeaking forts.

The water still trickling into the pool — God, how deadeningly slowly — filled the silence between them… There was something else: the Consul imagined he still heard the music of the ball, which must have long since ceased, so that this silence was pervaded as with a stale thudding of drums. Pariah: that meant drums too.
Parián
. It was doubtless the almost tactile absence of the music however, that made it so peculiar the trees should be apparently shaking to it, an illusion investing not only the garden but the plains beyond, the whole scene before his eyes, with horror, the horror of an intolerable unreality. This must be not unlike, he told himself, what some insane person suffers at those moments when, sitting benignly in the asylum grounds, madness suddenly ceases to be a refuge and becomes incarnate in the shattering sky and all his surroundings in the presence of which reason, already struck dumb, can only bow the head. Does the madman find solace at such moments, as his thoughts like cannonballs crash through his brain, in the exquisite beauty of the madhouse garden or of the neighbouring hills beyond the terrible chimney? Hardly, the Consul felt. As for this particular beauty he knew it dead as his marriage and as wilfully slaughtered. The sun shining brilliantly now on all the world before him, its rays picking out the timber-line of Popocateped as its summit like a gigantic surfacing whale shouldered out of the clouds again, all this could not lift his spirit. The sunlight could not share his burden of conscience, of sourceless sorrow. It did not know him. Down to his left beyond the plantains the gardener at the Argentinian ambassador's week-end residence was slashing his way through some tall grasses, clearing the ground for a badminton court, yet something about this innocent enough occupation contained a horrible threat against him. The broad leaves of the plantains themselves dropping gently seemed
menacingly savage as the stretched wings of pelicans, shaking before they fold. The movements of some more little red birds in the garden, like animated rosebuds, appeared unbearably jittery and thievish. It was as though the creatures were attached by sensitive wires to his nerves. When the telephone rang his heart almost stopped beating.

As a matter of fact the telephone was ringing clearly and the Consul left the porch for the dining-room where, afraid of the furious thing, he started to speak into the receiver, then, sweating, into the mouthpiece, talking rapidly — for it was a trunk-call — not knowing what he was saying, hearing Tom's muted voice quite plainly but turning his questions into his own answers, apprehensive lest at any moment boiling oil pour into his eardrums or his mouth:' All right. Good-bye… Oh, say, Tom, what was the origin of that silver rumour that appeared in the papers yesterday denied by Washington? I wonder where it came from… What started it? Yes. All right. Good-bye. Yes, I have, terrible. Oh they did! Too bad. But after all they own it. Or don't they? Good-bye. They probably will. Yes, that's all right, that's all right. Good-bye; good-bye!'… Christ. What does he want to ring me up at this hour of the morning for. What time is it in America? Erikson 43?

Christ… He hung up the receiver the wrong way and returned to the porch: no Yvonne; after a moment he heard her in the bathroom…

The Consul was guiltily climbing the Calle Nicaragua.

It was as if he were toiling up some endless staircase between houses. Or perhaps even old Popeye itself. Never had it seemed such a long way to the top of this hill. The road with its tossing broken stones stretched on for ever into the distance like a life of agony. He thought: 900 pesos = 100 bottles of whisky = 900 ditto tequila. Argal: one should drink neither tequila nor whisky but mescal. It was hot as a furnace too out on the street and the Consul sweated profusely. Away! Away! He was not going very far away, nor to the top of the hill. There was a lane branching to the left before you reached Jacques's house, leafy, no more than a cart-track at first, then a switchback, and somewhere along that lane to the right, not five minutes' walk, at a
dusty corner, waited a cool nameless
cantina
with horses probably tethered outside, and a huge white torn cat sleeping below the counter of whom a
whiskerando
would say: ‘He ah work all night mistair and sleep all day!' And this
cantina
would be open,