Under the Volcano (22 page)

B
EHIND
them walked the only living thing that shared their pilgrimage, the dog. And by degrees they reached the briny sea. Then, with souls well disciplined they reached the northern region, and beheld, with heaven aspiring hearts, the mighty mountain Himavat… Whereupon the lake was lapping, the lilacs were blowing, the chenars were budding, the mountains were glistening, the waterfalls were playing, the spring was green, the snow was white, the sky was blue, the fruit blossoms were clouds: and he was still thirsty. Then the snow was not glistening, the fruit blossoms were not clouds, they were mosquitoes, the Himalayas were hidden by dust, and he was thirstier than ever. Then the lake was blowing, the snow was blowing, the waterfalls were blowing, the fruit blossoms were blowing, the seasons were blowing — blowing away — he was blowing away himself, whirled by a storm of blossoms into the mountains, where now the rain was falling. But this rain, that fell only on the mountains, did not assuage his thirst. Nor was he after all in the mountains. He was standing, among cattle, in a stream. He was resting, with some ponies, knee-deep beside him in the cool marshes. He was lying face downward drinking from a lake that reflected the white-capped ranges, the clouds piled five miles high behind the mighty mountain Himavat: the purple chenars and a village nestling among the mulberries. Yet his thirst still remained unquenched. Perhaps because he was drinking, not water, but lightness, and promise of lightness
—
how could he be drinking promise of lightness? Perhaps because he was drinking, not water, but certainty of brightness — how could he be drinking certainty of brightness? Certainty of brightness, promise of lightness, of light, light, light, and again, of light, light, light, light, lightl

… The Consul, an inconceivable anguish of horripilating hangover thunderclapping about his skull, and accompanied by
a protective screen of demons gnattering in his ears, became aware that in the horrid event of his being observed by his neighbours it could hardly be supposed he was just sauntering down his garden with some innocent horticultural object in view. Nor even that he was sauntering. The Consul, who had waked a moment or two ago on the porch and remembered everything immediately, was almost running. He was also lurching. In vain he tried to check himself, plunging his hands, with an extraordinary attempt at nonchalance, in which he hoped might appear more than a hint of consular majesty, deeper into the sweat-soaked pockets of his dress trousers. And now, rheumatisms discarded, he really was running… Might he not, then, be reasonably suspected of a more dramatic purpose, of having assumed, for instance, the impatient buskin of a William Blackstone leaving the Puritans to dwell among the Indians, or the desperate mien of his friend Wilson when he so magnificently abandoned the University Expedition to disappear, likewise in a pair of dress trousers, into the jungles of darkest Oceania, never to return? Not very reasonably. For one thing, if he continued much farther in this present direction towards the bottom of his garden any such visioned escape into the unknown must shortly be arrested by what was, for him, an unscalable wire fence. ‘Do not be so foolish as to imagine you have no object, however. We warned you, we told you so, but now that in spite of all our pleas you have got yourself into this deplorable –' He recognized the tone of one of his familiars, faint among the other voices as he crashed on through the metamorphoses of dying and reborn hallucinations, like a man who does not know he has been shot from behind.‘ — condition,' the voice went on severely, ‘you have to do something about it. Therefore we are leading you towards the accomplishment of this something.' ‘I'm not going to drink,' the Consul said, halting suddenly. ‘Or am I? Not mescal anyway.' ‘Of course not, the bottle's just there, behind that bush. Pick it up.' ‘I can't,' he objected — ‘That's right, just take one drink, just the necessary, the therapeutic drink: perhaps two drinks.' ‘God,' the Consul said. ‘Ah. Good. God. Christ.' ‘Then you can say it doesn't count.' ‘It doesn't. It isn't mescal.' ‘Of course not, it's tequila,
You might have another.' ‘Thanks, I will.' The Consul palsiedly readjusted the bottle to his lips.'Bliss. Jesus. Sanctuary… Horror,' he added.' — Stop. Put that bottle down, Geoffrey Firmin, what are you doing to yourself?' another voice said in his ear so loudly he turned round. On the path before him a little snake he had thought a twig was rustling off into the bushes and he watched it a moment through his dark glasses, fascinated. It was a real snake all right. Not that he was much bothered by anything so simple as snakes, he reflected with a degree of pride, gazing straight into the eyes of a dog. It was a pariah dog and disturbingly familiar. ‘
Perro
,' he repeated, as it still stood there — but had not this incident occurred, was it not now, as it were, occurring an hour or two ago, he thought in a flash. Strange. He dropped the bottle which was of white corrugated glass — Tequila Añejo de Jalisco, it said on the label —out of sight into the undergrowth, looking about him. All seemed normal again. Anyway, both snake and dog had gone. And the voices had ceased…

The Consul now felt himself in a position to entertain, for a minute, the illusion that all really was ‘normal'. Yvonne would probably be asleep: no point in disturbing her yet. And it was fortunate he'd remembered about the almost full tequila bottle: now he had a chance to straighten up a little, which he never could have done on the porch, before greeting her again. There was altogether too much difficulty involved, under the circumstances, in drinking on the porch; it was a good thing a man knew where to have a quiet drink when he wanted it, without being disturbed, etc. etc.… All these thoughts were passing through his mind — which, so to say, nodding gravely, accepted them with the most complete seriousness — while he gazed back up his garden. Oddly enough, it did not strike him as being nearly so ‘ruined' as it had earlier appeared. Such chaos as might exist even lent an added charm. He liked the exuberance of the unclipped growth at hand. Whereas farther away, the superb plantains flowering so finally and obscenely, the splendid trumpet vines, brave and stubborn pear trees, the papayas planted around the swimming-pool and beyond, the low white bungalow itself covered by bougainvillea, its long porch like the
bridge of a ship, positively made a little vision of order, a vision, however, which inadvertently blended at this moment, as he turned by accident, into a strangely subaqueous view of the plains and the volcanoes with a huge indigo sun multitudinously blazing south-south-east. Or was it north-north-west? He noted it all without sorrow, even with a certain ecstasy, lighting a cigarette, an Alas (though he repeated the word ‘Alas' aloud mechanically), then, the alcohol sweat pouring off his brows like water, he began to walk down the path towards the fence separating his garden from the little new public one beyond that truncated his property.

In this garden, which he hadn't looked at since the day Hugh arrived, when he'd hidden the bottle, and which seemed carefully and lovingly kept, there existed at the moment certain evidence of work left uncompleted: tools, unusual tools, a murderous machete, an oddly shaped fork, somehow nakedly impaling the mind, with its twisted tines glittering in the sunlight, were leaning against the fence, as also was something else, a sign uprooted or new, whose oblong pallid face stared through the wire at him. ¿
Le gusta este jardin
? it asked…

¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDÍN?
¿QUE ES SUYO?
¡EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!

The Consul stared back at the black words on the sign without moving. You like this garden? Why is it yours? We evict those who destroy! Simple words, simple and terrible words, words which one took to the very bottom of one's being, words which, perhaps a final judgement on one, were nevertheless unproductive of any emotion whatsoever, unless a kind of colourless cold, a white agony, an agony chill as that iced mescal drunk in the Hotel Canada on the morning of Yvonne's departure.

However he was drinking tequila again now — and with no very clear idea how he'd returned so quickly and found the bottle. Ah, the subtle bouquet of pitch and teredos! Careless of being observed this time, he drank long and deeply, then stood — and he had been observed too, by his neighbour Mr Quincey,
who was watering flowers in the shade of their common fence to the left beyond the briars — stood facing his bungalow once more. He felt hemmed in. Gone was the little dishonest vision of order. Over his house, above the spectres of neglect that now refused to disguise themselves, the tragic wings of untenable responsibilities hovered. Behind him, in the other garden, his fate repeated softly: ‘Why is it yours?… Do you like this garden?… We evict those who destroy!' Perhaps the sign didn't mean quite that — for alcohol sometimes affected the Consul's Spanish adversely (or perhaps the sign itself, inscribed by some Aztec, was wrong) — but it was near enough. Coming to an abrupt decision he dropped the tequila into the undergrowth again and turned back towards the public garden, walking with an attempted ‘easy' stride.

Not that he had any intention of ‘verifying' the words on the sign, which certainly seemed to have more question marks than it should have; no, what he wanted, he now saw very clearly, was to talk to someone: that was necessary: but it was more, merely, than that; what he wanted involved something like the grasping, at this moment, of a brilliant opportunity, or more accurately, of an opportunity to be brilliant, an opportunity evinced by that apparition of Mr Quincey through the briars which, now upon his right, he must circumvent in order to reach him. Yet this opportunity to be brilliant was, in turn, more like something else, an opportunity to be admired; even, and he could at least thank the tequila for such honesty, however brief its duration, to be loved. Loved precisely for what was another question: since he'd put it to himself he might answer: loved for my reckless and irresponsible appearance, or rather for the fact that, beneath that appearance, so obviously burns the fire of genius, which, not so obviously, is not my genius but in an extraordinary manner that of my old and good friend, Abraham Taskerson, the great poet, who once spoke so glowingly of my potentialities as a young man.

And what he wanted then, ah then (he had turned right without looking at the sign and was following the path along the wire fence), what he wanted then, he thought, casting one
yearning glance at the plains — and at this moment he could have sworn that a figure, the details of whose dress he did not have time to make out before it departed, but apparently in some kind of mourning, had been standing, head bowed in deepest anguish, near the centre of the public garden — what you want then, Geoffrey Firmin, if only as an antidote against such routine hallucinations, is, why it is, nothing less than to drink; to drink, indeed, all day, just as the clouds once more bid you, and yet not quite; again it is more subtle than this; you do not wish merely to drink, but to drink in a particular place and in a particular town.

Parián !… It was a name suggestive of old marble and the gale-swept Cyclades. The Farolito in Pariÿn, how it called to him with its gloomy voices of the night and early dawn. But the Consul (he had inclined right again leaving the wire fence behind) realized he wasn't yet drunk enough to be very sanguine about his chances of going there; the day offered too many immediate — pitfalls ! It was the exact word… He had almost fallen into the
barranca
, an unguarded section of whose hither bank — the ravine curved sharply down here towards the Alcapancingo road to curve again below and follow its direction, bisecting the public garden — added at this juncture a tiny fifth side to his estate. He paused, peeping, tequila-unafraid, over the bank. Ah the frightful cleft, the eternal horror of opposites ! Thou mighty gulf, insatiate cormorant, deride me not, though I seem petulant to fall into thy chops. One was, come to that, always stumbling upon the damned thing, this immense intricate donga cutting right through the town, right, indeed, through the country, in places a two-hundred-foot sheer drop into what pretended to be a churlish river during the rainy season, but which, even now, though one couldn't see the bottom, was probably beginning to resume its normal role of general Tartarus and gigantic jakes. It was, perhaps, not so frightening here: one might even climb down, if one wished, by easy stages of course, and taking the occasional swig of tequila on the way, to visit the cloacal Prometheus who doubtless inhabited it. The Consul walked on more slowly. He had come face to face with his house again and simultaneously to the path skirting Mr
Quincey's garden. On his left beyond their common fence, now at hand, the green lawns of the American, at the moment being sprinkled by innumerable small whizzing hoses, swept down parallel with his own briars. Nor could any English turf have appeared smoother or lovelier. Suddenly overwhelmed by sentiment, as at the same time by a violent attack of hiccups, the Consul stepped behind a gnarled fruit tree rooted on his side but spreading its remnant of shade over the other, and leaned against it, holding his breath. In this curious way he imagined himself hidden from Mr Quincey, working farther up, but he soon forgot all about Quincey in spasmodic admiration of his garden… Would it happen at the end, and would this save one, that old Popeye would begin to seem less desirable than a slag-heap in Chester-le-Street, and that mighty Johnsonian prospect, the road to England, would stretch out again in the Western Ocean of his soul? And how peculiar that would be! How strange the landing at Liverpool, the Liver Building seen once more through the misty rain, that murk smelling already of nosebags and Caegwyrle Ale — the familiar deep-draughted cargo steamers, harmoniously masted, still sternly sailing outward bound with the tide, worlds of iron hiding their crews from the weeping black-shawled women on the piers: Liverpool, whence sailed so often during the war under sealed orders those mysterious submarine catchers Q-boats, fake freighters turning into turreted men-of-war at a moment's notice, obsolete peril of submarines, the snouted voyagers of the sea's unconscious…