Under the Volcano (18 page)

The bird swaggered ahead of them now down the cratered drive, through the gateless gateway, where it was joined by a crimson and white turkey, a pirate attempting to escape under full sail, and into the dusty street. They were laughing at the birds, but the things they might have gone on to say under somewhat different circumstances, as : I wonder what's happened to our bikes, or, do you remember, in Paris, that café, with the tables up the trees, in Robinson, remained unspoken.

They turned to the left, away from the town. The road declined sharply below them. At the bottom rose purple hills. Why is this not bitter, he thought, why is it not indeed, it was already: Hugh was aware for the first time of the other gnawing, as the Calle Nicaragua, the walls of the large residences left behind, became an almost unnavigable chaos of loose stones and potholes. Yvonne's bicycle wouldn't have been much use here.

‘What on earth were
you
doing in Texas, Hugh?'

‘Stalking Okies. That is, I was after them in Oklahoma. I thought the
Globe
ought to be interested in Okies. Then I went down to this ranch in Texas. That's where I'd heard about these chaps from the dust bowl not being allowed to cross the border.'

‘What an old Nosey Parker you are !'

‘I landed in Frisco just in time for Munich.' Hugh stared over to the left where in the distance the latticed watchtower of the Alcapancingo prison had just appeared with little figures on top gazing east and west through binoculars.

“They're just playing. The police here love to be mysterious, like you. Where were you before that? We must have just missed each other in Frisco.'

A lizard vanished into the bougainvillea growing along the roadbank, wild bougainvillea now, an overflux, followed by a second lizard. Under the bank gaped a half-shored-in hole, another entrance to the mine perhaps. Precipitous fields fell away down to their right, tilting violently at every angle. Far beyond them, cupped by hills, he made out the old bull-ring and again he heard Weber's voice in the plane, shouting, yelling in his ear, as they passed the pinch-bottle of
habanero
between them:'
Quauhnahuacl That's where they crucified the women in the bull-rings during the revolution and set the bulls at them. And that's a nice thing to say! I The blood ran down the gutters and they barbecued the dogs in the market place. They shoot first and ask questions later! You're goddamn right –‘
But there was no revolution in Quauhnahuac now and in the stillness the purple slopes before them, the fields, even the watchtower and the bull-ring, seemed to be murmuring of peace, of paradise indeed. ‘China,' he said.

Yvonne turned, smiling, though her eyes were troubled and perplexed: ‘What about the war?' she said.

‘That was the point. I fell out of an ambulance with three dozen beer bottles and six journalists on top of me and that's when I decided it might be healthier to go to California.' Hugh glanced suspiciously at a billy goat which had been following them on their right along the grass margin between the road and a wire fence, and which now stood there motionless, regarding them with patriarchal contempt. ‘No, they're the lowest form of animal life, except possibly – look out! – my God, I knew it –' The goat had charged and Hugh felt the sudden intoxicating terrified incidence and warmth of Yvonne's body as the animal missed them, skidded, slithered round the abrupt
leftward bend the road took at this point over a low stone bridge, and disappeared beyond up a hill, furiously trailing its tether. ‘Goats,' he said, twisting Yvonne firmly out of his arms. ‘Even when there are no wars think of the damage they do,' he went on, through something nervous, mutually dependent still, about their mirth. ‘I mean journalists, not goats. There's no punishment on earth fit for them. Only the Malebolge… And here is the Malebolge.'

The Malebolge was the
barranca
, the ravine which wound through the country, narrow here – but its momentousness successfully prescinded their minds from the goat. The little stone bridge on which they stood crossed it. Trees, their tops below them, grew down into the gulch, their foliage partly obscuring the terrific drop. From the bottom came a faint chuckling of water.

‘This ought to be about the place, if Alcapancingo's over there,' Hugh said, ‘where Bernal Díaz and his Tlaxcalans got across to beat up Quauhnahuac. Superb name for a dance-band: Bernal Díaz and his Tlaxcalans… Or didn't you get around to Prescott at the University of Hawaii? ‘

‘Mm hm,' Yvonne said, meaning yes or no to the meaningless question, and peering down the ravine with a shudder.

‘I understand it made even old Díaz's head swim.'

‘I shouldn't wonder.'

‘You can't see them, but it's chock full of defunct newspapermen, still spying through keyholes and persuading themselves they're acting in the best interests of democracy. But I'd forgotten you didn't read the papers. Eh?' Hugh laughed. ‘Journalism equals intellectual male prostitution of speech and writing, Yvonne. That's one point on which I'm in complete agreement with Spengler. Hullo.' Hugh looked up suddenly at a sound, unpleasantly familiar, as of a thousand carpets being simultaneously beaten in the distance: the uproar, seeming to emanate from the direction of the volcanoes, which had almost imperceptibly come into view on the horizon, was followed presently by the prolonged
twang-piiing
of its echo.

‘Target practice,' Yvonne said. ‘They're at it again.'

Parachutes of smoke were drifting over the mountains; they
watched a minute in silence. Hugh sighed and started to roll a cigarette.

‘I had an English friend fighting in Spain, and if he's dead I expect he's still there.' Hugh licked the fold of paper, sealed it and lit it, the cigarette drawing hot and fast. ‘As a matter of fact he was reported dead twice but he turned up again the last two times. He was there in thirty-six. While they were waiting for Franco to attack he lay with his machine-gun in the library at University City reading De Quincey, whom he hadn't read before. I may be exaggerating about the machine-gun though: I don't think they had one between them. He was a Communist and approximately the best man I've ever met. He had a taste for Vin Rosé d'Anjou. He also had a dog named Harpo, back in London. You probably wouldn't have expected a Communist to have a dog named Harpo — or would you? ‘

‘Or would you?'

Hugh put one foot up on the parapet and regarded his cigarette that seemed bent, like humanity, on consuming itself as quickly as possible.

‘I had another friend who went to China, but didn't know what to make of that, or they didn't of him, so he went to Spain too as a volunteer. He was killed by a stray shell before seeing any action at all. Both these fellows had perfectly good lives at home. They hadn't robbed the bank.' He was lamely silent.

‘Of course we left Spain about a year before it started, but Geoffrey used to say there was far too much sentiment about this whole business of going to die for the Loyalists. In fact, he said he thought it would be much better if the Fascists just won and got it over with –'

‘He has a new line now. He says
when
the Fascists win there'll only be a sort of “freezing” of culture in Spain — by the way, is that the moon up there? — well, freezing anyway. Which will presumably thaw at some future date when it will be discovered, if you please, simply to have been in a state of suspended animation. I dare say it's true as far as that goes. Incidentally, did you know
I
was in Spain?'

‘No,' Yvonne said, startled.

‘Oh yes. I fell out of an ambulance there with only two dozen beer bottles and five journalists on top of me, all heading for Paris. That wasn't so very long after I last saw you. The thing was, just as the Madrid show was really getting under way, as it turned out, it seemed all up, so the
Globe
told me to beat it… And like a heel I went, though they sent me back again afterwards for a time. I didn't go to China until after Brihuega.'

Yvonne gave him an odd look, then said:

‘Hugh, you're not thinking of going back to Spain
now
are you, by any chance?'

Hugh shook his head, laughing: he meticulously dropped his ravaged cigarette down the ravine. ‘
¿Cut bono
? To stand in for the noble army of pimps and experts, who've already gone home to practise the little sneers with which they propose to discredit the whole thing — the first moment it becomes fashionable not to be a Communist fence.
No, muchas gracias
. And I'm completely through with newspaper work, it isn't a pose.' Hugh put his thumbs under his belt. ‘So — since they got the Internationals out five weeks ago, on the twenty-eighth of September to be precise — two days before Chamberlain went to Godesberg and neatly crimped the Ebro offensive — and with half the last bunch of volunteers still rotting in goal in Perpignan, how do you suppose one could get in anyway, at this late date?'

‘Then what did Geoffrey mean by saying that you “wanted action” and all that?… And what's this mysterious other purpose you came down here for?'

‘It's really rather tedious,' Hugh answered. ‘As a matter of fact I'm going back to sea for a while. If all goes well I'll be sailing from Vera Cruz in about a week. As quartermaster, you knew I had an
A.B.‘S
ticket didn't you? Well, I might have got a ship in Galveston but it's not so easy as it used to be. Anyway it'll be more amusing to sail from Vera Cruz. Havana, perhaps Nassau and then, you know, down to the West Indies and São Paulo. I've always wanted to take a look at Trinidad — might be some real fun coming out of Trinidad one day. Geoff helped me with a couple of introductions but no more than that, I didn't want to make him responsible. No, I'm merely fed
to the teeth with myself, that's all. Try persuading the world not to cut its throat for half a decade or more, like me, under one name or another, and it'll begin to dawn on you that even
your
behaviour's part of its plan. I ask you, what do we know?'

And Hugh thought: the s.s.
Noemijolea
, 6,000 tons, leaving Vera Cruz on the night of 13-14 (?) November 1938, with antimony and coffee, bound for Freetown, British West Africa, will proceed thither, oddly enough, from Tzucox on the Yucatan coast, and also in a north-easterly direction: in spite of which she will still emerge through the passages named Windward and Crooked into the Atlantic Ocean: where after many days out of sight of land she will make eventually the mountainous landfall of Madeira: whence, avoiding Port Lyautey and carefully keeping her destination in Sierra Leone some 1,800 miles to the south-east, she will pass, with luck, through the straits of Gibraltar. Whence again, negotiating, it is profoundly to be hoped, Franco's blockade, she will proceed with the utmost caution into the Mediterranean Sea, leaving first Cape de Gata, then Cape de Palos, then Cape de la Nao, well aft: thence, the Pityusae Isles sighted, she will roll through the Gulf of Valencia and so northwards past Carlos de la Rápita, and the mouth of the Ebro until the rocky Garraf coast looms abaft the beam where finally, still rolling, at Vallcara, twenty miles south of Barcelona, she will discharge her cargo of
T.N.T.
for the hard-pressed Loyalist armies and probably be blown to smithereens —

Yvonne was staring down the
barranca
, her hair hanging over her face: ‘I know Geoff sounds pretty foul sometimes,' she was saying, ‘but there's one point where I do agree with him, these romantic notions about the International Brigade –'

But Hugh was standing at the wheel: Potato Firmin or Columbus in reverse: below him the foredeck of the
Noemijolea
lay over in the blue trough and spray slowly exploded through the lee scuppers into the eyes of the seaman chipping a winch: on the forecastle head the look-out echoed one bell, struck by Hugh a moment before, and the seaman gathered up his tools: Hugh's heart was lifting with the ship, he was aware that the officer on duty had changed from white to blue for
winter but at the same time of exhilaration, the limitless purification of the sea —

Yvonne flung back her hair impatiently and stood up. ‘If they'd stayed out of it the war would have been over long ago!'

‘Well, there ain't no brigade no mo',' Hugh said absently, for it was not a ship he was steering now, but the world, out of the Western Ocean of its misery. ‘If the paths of glory lead but to the grave — I once made such an excursion into poetry — then Spain's the grave where England's glory led.'

‘Fiddlesticks!'

Hugh suddenly laughed, not loud, probably at nothing at all: he straightened himself with a swift movement and jumped on the parapet.

‘Hugh!'

‘My God! Horses,' Hugh said, glancing and stretching himself to his full mental height of six feet two (he was five feet eleven).

‘Where?'

He was pointing. ‘Over there.'

‘Of course,' Yvonne said slowly, ‘I'd forgotten — they belong to the Casino de la Selva: they put them out there to pasture or something. If we go up the hill a ways we'll come to the place –'

… On a gentle slope to their left now, colts with glossy coats were rolling in the grass. They turned off the Calle Nicaragua along a narrow shady lane leading down one side of the paddock. The stables were part of what appeared to be a model dairy farm. It stretched away behind the stables on level ground where tall English-looking trees lined either side of a grassy wheel-rutted avenue. In the distance a few rather large cows, which, however, like Texas longhorns, bore a disturbing resemblance to stags (you've got your cattle again, I see, Yvonne said) were lying under the trees. A row of shining milkpails stood outside the stables in the sun. A sweet smell of milk and vanilla and wild flowers hung about the quiet place. And the sun was over all.