Under the Volcano (23 page)

‘Dr Livingstone, I presume.'

‘Hicket,' said the Consul, taken aback by the premature rediscovery, at such close quarters, of the tall slightly stooping figure, in khaki shirt and grey flannel trousers, sandalled, immaculate, grey-haired, complete, fit, a credit to Soda Springs, and carrying a watering-can, who was regarding him distastefully through horn-rimmed spectacles from the other side of the fence. ‘Ah, good morning, Quincey.'

‘What's good about it?' the retired walnut grower asked suspiciously, continuing his work of watering his flower beds, which were out of range of the ceaselessly swinging hoses.

The Consul gestured towards his briars, and perhaps unconsciously also in the direction of the tequila bottle. ‘I saw you from over there… I was just out inspecting my jungle, don't you know.'

‘You are doing
what
?' Mr Quincey glanced at him over the top of the watering-can as if to say: I have seen all this going on; I know all about it because I am God, and even when God was much older than you are he was nevertheless up at this time and fighting it, if necessary, while you don't even know whether you're up or not yet, and even if you have been out all night you are certainly not fighting it, as I would be, just as I would be ready to fight anything or anybody else too, for that matter, at the drop of a hat !

‘And I'm afraid it really is a jungle too,' pursued the Consul, ‘in fact I expect Rousseau to come riding out of it at any moment on a tiger.'

‘What's that?' Mr Quincey said, frowning in a manner that might have meant: And God never drinks before breakfast either.

‘On a tiger,' the Consul repeated.

The other gazed at him a moment with the cold sardonic eye of the material world. ‘I expect so,' he said sourly. ‘Plenty tigers. Plenty elephants too… Might I ask you if the next time you inspect your jungle you'd mind being sick on your own side of the fence?'

‘Hicket,' answered the Consul simply. ‘Hicket,' he snarled, laughing, and, trying to take himself by surprise, he thwacked himself hard in the kidneys, a remedy which, strangely, seemed to work. ‘Sorry I gave that impression, it was merely this damned hiccups ! –'

‘So I observe,' Mr Quincey said, and perhaps he too had cast a subtle glance towards the ambush of the tequila bottle.

‘And the funny dung is,' interrupted the Consul, ‘I scarcely touched anything more than Tehuacan water all night… By the way; how did you manage to survive the ball?'

Mr Quincey stared at him evenly, then began to refill his watering can from a hydrant nearby.

‘Just Tehuacan,' the Consul continued. ‘And a little
gaseosa
.
That ought to take you back to dear old Soda Springs, eh? —tee hee I — yes, I've cut liquor right out these days.'

The other resumed his watering, sternly moving on down the fence, and the Consul, not sorry to leave the fruit tree, to which he had noticed clinging the sinister carapace of a seven-year locust, followed him step by step.

‘Yes, I'm on the wagon now,' he commented, ‘in case you didn't know.'

‘The funeral wagon, I'd say, Firmin,' Mr Quincey muttered testily.

‘By the way, I saw one of those little garter snakes just a moment ago,' the Consul broke out.

Mr Quincey coughed or snorted but said nothing.

‘And it made me think… Do you know, Quincey, I've often wondered whether there isn't more in the old legend of the Garden of Eden, and so on, than meets the eye. What if Adam wasn't really banished from the place at all? That is, in the sense we used to understand it –' The walnut grower had looked up and was fixing him with a steady gaze that seemed, however, directed at a point rather below the Consul's midriff —‘What if his punishment really consisted', the Consul continued with warmth, ‘in his having to
go on living there
, alone, of course — suffering, unseen, cut off from God… Or perhaps', he added, in more cheerful vein, ‘perhaps Adam was the first property owner and God, the first agrarian, a kind of Cárdenas, in fact — tee hee ! — kicked him out. Eh? Yes,' the Consul chuckled, aware, moreover, that all this was possibly not so amusing under the existing historical circumstances, ‘for it's obvious to everyone these days — don't you think so, Quincey? — that the original sin was to be an owner of property…'

The walnut grower was nodding at him, almost imperceptibly, but not it seemed in any agreement; his
realpolitik
eye was still concentrated upon that same spot below his midriff and looking down the Consul discovered his open fly.
Licentia vatum
indeed! ‘Pardon me,
jadoubej
he said, and making the adjustment continued, laughing, returning to his first theme mysteriously unabashed by his recusancy. ‘Yes, indeed. Yes… And of course the real
reason
for that punishment — his being
forced to go on living in the garden, I mean, might well have been that the poor fellow, who knows, secretly loathed the place! Simply hated it, and had done so all along.
And that the Old Man found this out —
'

‘Was it my imagination, or did I see your wife up there a while ago?' patiently said Mr Quincey.

‘ – and no wonder ! To hell with the place ! Just think of all the scorpions and leafcutter ants — to mention only a few of the abominations he must have had to put up with! What?' the Consul exclaimed as the other repeated his question. ‘In the garden? Yes — that is, no. How do you know? No, she's asleep as far as I –'

‘Been away quite a time, hasn't she?' the other asked mildly, leaning forward so that he could see, more clearly, the Consul's bungalow. ‘Your brother still here?'

‘Brother? Oh. you mean Hugh… No, he's in Mexico City.'

‘I think you'll find he's got back.'

The Consul now glanced up at the house himself. ‘Hicket,' he said briefly, apprehensively.

‘I think he went out with your wife,' the walnut grower added.

‘ – Hullo-hullo-look-who-comes-hullo-my-little-snake-in-the-grass-my-little-anguish-in-herba –' the Consul at this moment greeted Mr Quincey's cat, momentarily forgetting its owner again as the grey, meditative animal, with a tail so long it trailed on the ground, came stalking through the zinnias: he stooped, patting his thighs — ‘hello-pussy-my-little-Priapusspuss, my-little-Oedipusspusspuss,' and the cat, recognizing a friend and uttering a cry of pleasure, wound through the fence and rubbed against the Consul's legs, purring. ‘My little Xicotancatl.' The Consul stood up. He gave two short whistles while below him the cat's ears twirled. ‘She thinks I'm a tree with a bird in it,' he added.

‘I wouldn't wonder,' retorted Mr Quincey, who was refilling his watering can at the hydrant.

‘Animals not fit for food and kept only for pleasure, curiosity, or whim — eh? — as William Blackstone said — you've heard of him of course! –' The Consul was somehow on his haunches
half talking to the cat, half to the walnut grower, who had paused to light a cigarette. ‘Or was that another William Black-stone?' He addressed himself now directly to Mr Quincey, who was paying no attention. ‘He's a character I've always liked. I think it was William Blackstone. Or so Abraham… Anyway, one day he arrived in what is now, I believe — no matter — somewhere in Massachusetts. And lived there quietly among the Indians. After a while the Puritans settled on the other side of the river. They invited him over; they said it was healthier on that side, you see. Ah, these people, these fellows with ideas,' he told the cat, ‘old William didn't like them — no he didn't —so he went back to live among the Indians, so he did. But the Puritans found him out, Quincey, trust them. Then he disappeared altogether — God knows where…
Now
, little cat', the Consul tapped his chest indicatively, and the cat, its face swelling, body arched, important, stepped back, ‘the Indians are in here.'

‘They sure are,' sighed Mr Quincey, somewhat in the manner of a quietly exacerbated sergeant-major, ‘along with all those snakes and pink elephants and them tigers you were talking about.'

The Consul laughed, his laughter having a humourless sound, as though the part of his mind that knew all this essentially a burlesque of a great and generous man once his friend knew also how hollow the satisfaction afforded him by the performance. ‘Not real Indians… And I didn't mean in the garden; but in
here
.' He tapped his chest again. ‘Yes, just the final frontier of consciousness, that's all. Genius, as I'm so fond of saying,' he added, standing up, adjusting his tie and (he did not think further of the tie) squaring his shoulders as if to go with a decisiveness that, also borrowed on this occasion from the same source as the genius and his interest in cats, left him abruptly as it had been assumed,' — genius will look after itself.'

Somewhere in the distance a clock was striking; the Consul still stood there motionless. ‘Oh, Yvonne, can I have forgotten you already, on this of all days?' Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one strokes. By his watch it was a quarter to eleven. But the clock hadn't finished: it struck twice more, two wry, tragic notes:
bing-bong
: whirring. The emptiness in the air after filled with whispers:
alas
,
alas
. Wings, it really meant.

‘Where's your friend these days — I never can remember his name — that French fellow?' Mr Quincey had asked a moment ago.

‘Laruelle?' The Consul's voice came from far away. He was aware of vertigo; closing his eyes wearily he took hold of the fence to steady himself. Mr Quincey's words knocked on his consciousness — or someone actually was knocking on a door —fell away, then knocked again, louder. Old De Quincey; the knocking on the gate in Macbeth. Knock, knock, knock: who's there? Cat. Cat who? Catastrophe. Catastrophe who? Catastro-physicist. What, is it you, my little popocat? Just wait an eternity till Jacques and I have finished murdering sleep? Katabasis to cat abysses. Cat hartes atratus… Of course, he should have know it, these were the final moments of the retiring of the human heart, and of the final entrance of the fiendish, the night insulated — just as the real De Quincey (that mere drug fiend, he thought opening his eyes — he found he was looking straight over towards the tequila bottle) imagined the murder of Duncan and the others insulated, self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion… But where had Quincey gone? And my God, who was this advancing behind the morning paper to his rescue across the lawn, where the breath of the hoses had suddenly failed as if by magic, if not Dr Guzman?

If not Guzmán, if not, it could not be, but it was, it certainly was no less a figure than that of his companion the night before, Dr Vigil; and what on earth would he be doing here? As the figure approached closer the Consul felt an increasing uneasiness. Quincey was his patient doubtless. But in that case why wasn't the doctor in the house? Why all this secretive prowling about the garden? It could only mean one thing: Vigil's visit had somehow been timed to coincide with his own probable visit to the tequila (though he had fooled them neatly there), with the object, naturally, of spying upon him, of obtaining some information about him, some clue to the nature of which might all too conceivably be found within the pages of that accusing newspaper: ‘Old Samaritan case to be reopened, Commander Firmin
believed in Mexico.' ‘Firmin found guilty, acquitted, cries in box.' ‘Firmin innocent, but bears guilt of world on shoulders.' ‘Body of Firmin found drunk in bunker', such monstrous headlines as these indeed took instant shape in the Consul's mind, for it was not merely
El Universal
the doctor was reading, it was his fate; but the creatures of his more immediate conscience were not to be denied, they seemed silently to accompany that morning paper too, withdrawing to one side (as the doctor came to a standstill, looking about him) with averted heads, listening, murmuring now: ‘You cannot lie to us. We know what you did last night.' What
had
he done though? He saw again clearly enough — as Dr Vigil, recognized him with a smile, closed his paper and hastened towards him — the doctor's consulting-room in the Avenida de la Revolución, visited for some drunken reason in the early hours of the morning, macabre with its pictures of ancient Spanish surgeons, their goat faces rising queerly from ruffs resembling ectoplasm, roaring with laughter as they performed inquisitorial operations; but since all this was retained as a mere vivid setting completely detached from his own activity, and since it was about all he did remember, he could scarcely take comfort from not seeming to appear within it in any vicious role. Not so much comfort, at least, as had just been afforded him by Vigil's smile, nor half so much as was now afforded him when the doctor, upon reaching the spot lately vacated by the walnut grower, halted, and, suddenly, bowed to him profoundly from the waist; bowed once, twice, thrice, mutely yet tremendously assuring the Consul that after all no crime had been committed during the night so great he was still not worthy of respect.

Then, simultaneously, the two men groaned.

‘
Quét —
‘began the Consul.

‘
Por favor
,' broke in the other hoarsely, placing a well-manicured though shaky finger to his lips, and with a slightly worried look up the garden.

The Consul nodded. ‘Of course. You're looking so fit, I see
you
can't have been at the ball last night,' he added loudly and loyally, following the other's gaze, though Mr Quincey, who after all could not have been so fit, was still nowhere to be seen.
He had probably been turning off the hoses at the main hydrant — and how absurd to have suspected a ‘plan' when it was so patently an informal call and the doctor had just happened to notice Quincey working in the garden from the drive. He lowered his voice. ‘All the same, might I take this opportunity of asking you what you prescribe for a slight case of katzenjammer?'