Under the Volcano (33 page)

‘How are you getting on up there, Hugh?' he called up the staircase.

‘I think I've got Parian in pretty good focus.'

Yvonne was reading on the balcony, and the Consul gazed back at
Los Bonachones
. Suddenly he felt something never felt before with such shocking certainty. It was that he was in hell himself. At the same time he became possessed of a curious calm. The inner ferment within him, the squalls and eddies of nervousness, were held again in check. He could hear Jacques moving downstairs and soon he would have another drink. That would help, but it was not the thought which calmed him. Parian — the Farolito! he said to himself. The Lighthouse, the lighthouse that invites the storm, and lights it! After all, some time during the day, when they were at the bullthrowing perhaps, he might break away from the others and go there, if only for five minutes, if only for one drink. That prospect filled him with an almost healing love and at this moment, for it was part of the calm, the greatest longing he had ever known. The Farolito!
It was a strange place, a place really of the late night and early dawn, which as a rule, like that one other terrible
cantina
in Oaxaca, did not open till four o'clock in the morning. But today being the holiday for the dead it would not close. At first it had appeared to him tiny. Only after he had grown to know it well had he discovered how far back it ran, that it was really composed of numerous little rooms, each smaller and darker than the last, opening one into another, the last and darkest of all being no larger than a cell. These rooms struck him as spots where diabolical plots must be hatched, atrocious murders planned; here, as when Saturn was in Capricorn, life reached bottom. But here also great wheeling thoughts hovered in the brain; while the potter and the field-labourer alike, early risen, paused a moment in the paling doorway, dreaming… He saw it all now, the enormous drop on one side of the
cantina
into the
barranca
that suggested Kubla Khan: the proprietor, Ramón Diosdado, known as the Elephant, who was reputed to have murdered his wife to cure her neurasthenia, the beggars, hacked by war and covered with sores, one of whom one night after four drinks from the Consul had taken him for the Christ, and falling down on his knees before him, had pinned swiftly under his coat-lapel two medallions, joined to a tiny worked bleeding heart like a pin-cushion, portraying the Virgin of Guadalupe. ‘I ah give you the Saint!' He saw all this, feeling the atmosphere of the
cantina
enclosing him already with its certainty of sorrow and evil, and with its certainty of something else too, that escaped him. But he knew: it was peace. He saw the dawn again, watched with lonely anguish from that open door, in the violet-shaded light, a slow bomb bursting over the Sierra Madre —
Sonnenaufgangl –
the oxen harnessed to their carts with wooden disc wheels patiently waiting outside for their drivers, in the sharp cool pure air of heaven. The Consul's longing was so great his soul was locked with the essence of the place as he stood and he was gripped by thoughts like those of the mariner who, sighting the faint beacon of Start Point after a long voyage, knows that soon he will embrace his wife.

Then they returned to Yvonne abruptly. Had he really forgotten her, he wondered. He looked round the room again. Ah,
in how many rooms, upon how many studio couches, among how many books, had they found their own love, their marriage, their life together, a life which, in spite of its many disasters, its total calamity indeed — and in spite too of any slight element of falsehood in its inception on her side, her marriage partly into the past, into her Anglo-Scottish ancestry, into the visioned empty ghost-whistling castles in Sutherland, into an emanation of gaunt lowland uncles chumbling shortbread at six o'clock in the morning — had not been without triumph. Yet for how brief a time. Far too soon it had begun to seem too much of a triumph, it had been too good, too horribly unimaginable to lose, impossible finally to bear: it was as if it had become itself its own foreboding that it could not last, a foreboding that was like a presence too, turning his steps towards the taverns again. And how could one begin all over again, as though the Café Chagrin, the Farolito, had never been? Or without them? Could one be faithful, to Yvonne and the Farolito both? — Christ, oh pharos of the world, how, and with what blind faith, could one find one's way back, fight one's way back, now, through the tumultuous horrors of five thousand shattering awakenings, each more frightful than the last, from a place where even love could not penetrate, and save in the thickest flames there was no courage? On the wall the drunks eternally plunged. But one of the little Mayan idols seemed to be weeping…

‘
Ei ei ei ei
,' M. Laruelle was saying, not unlike the little postman, coming, stamping up the stairs; cocktails, despicable repast. Unperceived the Consul did an odd thing; he took the postcard he'd just received from Yvonne and slipped it under Jacques's pillow. She emerged from the balcony. ‘Hullo, Yvonne, where is Hugh? — sorry I've been so long. Let's get on the roof, shall we?' Jacques continued.

Actually all the Consul's reflections had not occupied seven minutes. Still, Laruelle seemed to have been away longer. He saw, following them, following the drinks up the spiral staircase, that in addition to the cocktail shaker and glasses there were canapés and stuffed olives on the tray. Perhaps despite all his seductive aplomb, Jacques had really gone downstairs frightened by the whole business and completely beside himself. While
these elaborate preparations were merely the excuse for his flight. Perhaps also it was quite true, the poor fellow had really loved Yvonne — ‘Oh, God,' the Consul said, reaching the mirador, to which Hugh had almost simultaneously ascended, climbing, as they approached, the last rungs of the wooden ladder from the catwalk, ‘God, that the dream of dark magician in his visioned cave, even while his hand shakes in its last decay — that's the bit I like — were the true end of this so lousy world… You shouldn't have gone to all this trouble, Jacques.'

He took the binoculars from Hugh, and now, his drink upon a vacant merlon between the marzipan objects, he gazed steadily over the country. But oddly he had not touched this drink. And the calm mysteriously persisted. It was as if they were standing on a lofty golf-tee somewhere. What a beautiful hole this would make, from here to a green out into those trees on the other side of the
barranca
, that natural hazard which some hundred and fifty yards away could be carried by a good full spoon shot, soaring… Plock. The Golgotha Hole. High up, an eagle drove downwind in one. It had shown lack of imagination to build the local course back up there, remote from the
barranca
. Golf = gouffre = gulf. Prometheus would retrieve lost balls. And on that other side what strange fairways could be contrived, crossed by lone railway lines, humming with telegraph poles, glistening with crazy lies on embankments, over the hills and far away, like youth, like life itself, the course plotted all over these plains, extending far beyond Tomalín, through the jungle, to the Farolito, the nineteenth hole… The Case is Altered.

‘No, Hugh,' he said, adjusting the lenses but without turning round, ‘Jacques means the film he made out of
Alastor
before he went to Hollywood, which he shot in a bathtub, what he could of it, and apparently struck the rest together with sequences of ruins cut out of old travelogues, and a jungle hoiked out of
In dunkelste Africa
, and a swan out of the end of some old Corinne Griffith — Sarah Bernhardt, she was in it too, I understand, while all the time the poet was standing on the shore, and the orchestra was supposed to be doing its best with the
Sacre du Printemps
. I think I forgot the fog.'

Their laughter somewhat cleared the air.

‘But beforehand you do have certain
wisions
, as a German director friend of mine used to say, of what your film should be like,' Jacques was telling them, behind him, over by the angels. ‘But afterwards, that is another story… As for the fog, that is after all the cheapest commodity in any studio.'

‘Didn't you make any films in Hollywood?' Hugh asked, who a moment ago had almost drifted into a political argument with M. Laruelle.

‘Yes… But I refuse to see them.'

But what on earth was he, the Consul, the Consul wondered, continuing to look out for there on those plains, in that tumulose landscape, through Jacques's binoculars? Was it for some figment of himself, who had once enjoyed such a simple healthy stupid good thing as golf, as blind holes, for example, driving up into a high wilderness of sand-dunes, yes, once with Jacques himself? To climb, and then to see, from an eminence, the ocean with the smoke on the horizon, then, far below, resting near the pin on the green, his new Silver King, twinkling. Ozone! — The Consul could no longer play golf: his few efforts of recent years had proved disastrous… I should have become a sort of Donne of the fairways at least. Poet of the unreplaced turf. — Who holds the flag while I hole out in three? Who hunts my Zodiac Zone along the shore? And who, upon that last and final green, though I hole out in four, accepts my ten and three score… Though I have more. The Consul dropped the glasses at last and turned round. And still he had not touched his drink.

‘
Alastor, Alastor
,' Hugh strolled over to him saying. ‘Who is, was, why, and/or wrote
Alastor
, anyway?'

‘Percy Bysshe Shelley.' The Consul leaned against the mirador beside Hugh. ‘Another fellow with ideas… The story I like about Shelley is the one where he just let himself sink to the bottom of the sea — taking several books with him of course —and just stayed there, rather than admit he couldn't swim.'

‘Geoffrey don't you think Hugh ought to see something of the
fiesta
,' suddenly Yvonne was saying from the other side, ‘since it's his last day? Especially if there's native dancing?'

So it was Yvonne who was ‘extricating them from all this', just when the Consul was proposing to stay. ‘I wouldn't know,'
he said. ‘Won't we get native dancing and things in Tomalín? Would you like to, Hugh?'

‘Sure. Of course. Anything you say.' Hugh got down awkwardly from the parapet. ‘There's still about an hour before the bus leaves, isn't there?'

‘I'm sure Jacques will forgive us if we rush off,' Yvonne was saying almost desperately.

‘Let me see you downstairs safely then.' Jacques controlled his voice. ‘It's too early for the
fête
to be very much but you ought to see Rivera's murals, Hughes, if you haven't already.'

‘Aren't you coming, Geoffrey?' Yvonne turned on the staircase. ‘Please come,' her eyes said.

‘Well,
fiestas
aren't my strong suit. You run along and I'll meet you at the terminal in time for the bus. I have to talk to Jacques here anyway.'

But they had all gone downstairs and the Consul was alone on the mirador. And yet not alone. For Yvonne had left a drink on the merlon by the angels, poor Jacques's was in one of the crenels, Hugh's was on the side parapet. And the cocktail shaker was not empty. Moreover the Consul had not touched his own drink. And still, now, he did not drink. The Consul felt with his right hand his left bicep under his coat. Strength — of a kind —but how to give oneself courage? That fine droll courage of Shelley's; no, that was pride. And pride bade one go on, either go on and kill oneself, or ‘straighten out', as so often before, by oneself with the aid of thirty bottles of beer and staring at the ceiling. But this time it was different. What if courage here implied admission of total defeat, admission that one couldn't swim, admission indeed (though just for a second the thought was not too bad) into a sanatorium? No, to whatever end, it wasn't merely a matter of being ‘got away'. No angels nor Yvonne nor Hugh could help him here. As for the demons, they were inside him as well as outside; quiet at the moment —taking their
siesta
perhaps — he was none the less surrounded by them and occupied; they were in possession. The Consul looked at the sun. But he had lost the sun: it was not his sun. Like the truth, it was well-nigh impossible to face; he did not want to go anywhere near it, least of all, sit in its light, facing it. ‘Yet I
shall face it.' How? When he not only lied to himself, but himself believed the lie and lied back again to those lying factions, among whom was not even their own honour. There was not even a consistent basis to his self-deceptions. How should there be then to his attempts at honesty? ‘Horror,' he said. ‘Yet I will not give in.' But who was I, how find that I, where had ‘I' gone? ‘Whatever I do, it shall be deliberately.' And deliberately, it was true, the Consul still refrained from touching his drink. ‘The will of man is unconquerable.' Eat? I should eat. So the Consul ate half a canapé. And when M. Laruelle returned the Consul was still gazing drinklessly — where was he gazing? He didn't know himself. ‘Do you remember when we went to Cholula,' he said, ‘how much dust there was?'

The two men faced each other in silence. ‘I don't want to speak to you at all really,' the Consul added after a moment. ‘For that matter I wouldn't mind if this was the last time I ever saw you… Did you hear me?'

‘Have you gone mad?' M. Laruelle exclaimed at last. ‘Am I to understand that your wife has come back to you, something I have seen you praying and howling for under the table — really under the table… And that you treat her indifferently as this, and still continue only to care where the next drink's coming from?'

To this unanswerable and staggering injustice the Consul had no word; he reached for his cocktail, he held it, smelt it: but somewhere, where it would do little good, a hawser did not give way: he did not drink; he almost smiled pleasantly at M. Laruelle. You might as well start now as later, refusing the drinks. You might as well start now; as later. Later.