Under the Volcano (35 page)

‘See, there's Yvonne and Hugues waving at you.' M. Laruelle waved back his tennis racket. Do you know I think they make rather a formidable couple,' he added, with a half pained, half malicious smile.

There they were too, he saw, the formidable couple, up by the frescoes: Hugh with his foot on the rail of the Palace balcony, looking over their heads at the volcanoes perhaps: Yvonne with her back to them now. She was leaning against the rail facing the murals, then she turned sideways towards Hugh to say something. They did not wave again.

M. Laruelle and the Consul decided against the cliff path. They floated along the base of the Palace then, opposite the Banco de Crédito y Ejidal, turned left up the steep narrow road climbing to the square. Toiling, they edged into the Palace wall to let a man on horseback pass, a fine-featured Indian of the poorer class, dressed in soiled white loose clothes. The man was singing gaily to himself. But he nodded to them courteously as if to thank them. He seemed about to speak, reining in his little horse — on either side of which chinked two saddle-bags, and upon whose rump was branded the number seven — to a slow walk beside them, as they ascended the hill.
Jingle jingle little surcingle
. But the man, riding slightly in front, did not speak and at the top he suddenly waved his hand and galloped away, singing.

The Consul felt a pang. Ah, to have a horse, and gallop away, singing, away to someone you loved perhaps, into the heart of all the simplicity and peace in the world; was not that like the opportunity afforded man by life itself? Of course not. Still, just for a moment, it had seemed that it was.

‘What is it Goethe says about the horse?' he said. ‘“Weary of liberty he suffered himself to be saddled and bridled, and was ridden to death for his pains.”'

In the
plaza
the tumult was terrific. Once again they could scarcely hear one another speak. A boy dashed up to them selling
papers.
Sangriento Combate en Mora de Ebro. Los Aviones de los Rebeldes Bombardean Barcelona. Es inevitable la muerte del Papa
. The Consul started; this time, an instant, he had thought the headlines referred to himself. But of course it was only the poor Pope whose death was inevitable. As if everyone else's death were not inevitable too! In the middle of the square a man was climbing a slippery flagpole in a complicated manner necessitating ropes and spikes. The huge carrousel, set near the bandstand, was thronged by peculiar long-nosed wooden horses mounted on whorled pipes, dipping majestically as they revolved with a slow piston-like circulation. Boys on roller skates, holding to the stays of the umbrella structure, were being whirled around yelling with joy, while the uncovered machine driving it hammered away like a steam pump: then they were whizzing. ‘Barcelona' and ‘Valencia' mingled with the crashes and cries against which the Consul's nerves were wooled. Jacques was pointing to the pictures on the panels running entirely around the inner wheel that was set horizontally and attached to the top of the central revolving pillar. A mermaid reclined in the sea combing her hair and singing to the sailors of a five-funnelled battleship. A daub which apparently represented Medea sacrificing her children turned out to be of performing monkeys. Five jovial-looking stags peered, in all their monarchical unlikelihood, out of a Scottish glen at them, then went tearing out of sight. While a fine Pancho Villa with handlebar moustaches galloped for dear life after them all. But stranger than these was a panel showing lovers, a man and a woman reclining by a river. Though childish and crude it had about it a somnambulistic quality and something too of truth, of the pathos of love. The lovers were depicted as awkwardly askance. Yet one felt that really they were wrapped in each other's arms by this river at dusk among gold stars. Yvonne, he thought, with sudden tenderness, where are you, my darling? Darling… For a moment he had thought her by his side. Then he remembered she was lost; then that no, this feeling belonged to yesterday, to the months of lonely torment behind him. She was not lost at all, she was here all the time, here now, or as good as here. The Consul wanted to raise his head, and shout for joy, like the horseman: she is here! Wake
up, she has come back again! Sweetheart, darling, I love you! A desire to find her immediately and take her home (where in the garden still lay the white bottle of Tequila Añejo de Jalisco, unfinished), to put a stop to this senseless trip, to be, above all, alone with her, seized him, and a desire, too, to lead immediately again a normal happy life with her, a life, for instance, in which such innocent happiness as all these good people around him were enjoying, was possible. But had they ever led a normal happy life? Had such a thing as a normal happy life ever been possible for them? It had… Yet what about that belated postcard, now under Laruelle's pillow? It proved the lonely torment unnecessary, proved, even, he must have wanted it. Would any-thing really have been
changed
had he received the card at the right time? He doubted it. After all, her other letters — Christ, again, where were they? — had not changed anything. If he had not read them properly, perhaps. But he had not read them properly. And soon he would forget about what had been done with the card. Nevertheless the desire remained — like an echo of Yvonne's own — to find her, to find her now, to reverse their doom, it was a desire amounting almost to a resolution… Raise your head, Geoffrey Firmin, breathe your prayer of thankfulness, act before it is too late. But the weight of a great hand seemed to be pressing his head down. The desire passed. At the same time, as though a cloud had come over the sun, the aspect of the fair had completely altered for him. The merry grinding of the roller skates, the cheerful if ironic music, the cries of the little children on their goose-necked steeds, the procession of queer pictures — all this had suddenly become transcendentally awful and tragic, distant, transmuted, as it were some final impression on the senses of what the earth was like, carried over into an obscure region of death, a gathering thunder of immedicable sorrow; the Consul needed a drink…

— ‘Tequila,' he said.‘
¿Una
?' the boy said sharply, and M. Laruelle called for gaseosa.

'
Sí, señores
.' The boy swept the table. ‘
Una tequila y una gaseosa
.' He brought immediately a bottle of El Nilo for M. Laruelle together with salt, chile, and a saucer of sliced lemons.

The café, which was in the centre of a little railed-in garden at
the edge of the square among trees, was called the Paris. And in fact it was reminiscent of Paris. A simple fountain dripped near. The boy brought them camarones, red shrimps in a saucer, and had to be told again to get the tequila.

At last it arrived.

‘Ah –' the Consul said, though it was the chalcedony ring that had been shaking.

‘Do you really like it?' M. Laruelle asked him, and the Consul, sucking a lemon, felt the fire of the tequila run down his spine like lightning striking a tree which thereupon, miraculously, blossoms.

‘What are you shaking for?' the Consul asked him.

M. Laruelle stared at him, he gave a nervous glance over his shoulder, he made as if absurdly to twang his tennis racket on his toe, but remembering the press, stood it up against his chair awkwardly.

‘What are
you
afraid of –' the Consul was mocking him.

‘I admit, I feel confused…' M. Laruelle cast a more protracted glance over his shoulder. ‘Here, give me some of your poison.' He leaned forward and took a sip of the Consul's tequila and remained bent over the thimble-shaped glass of terrors, a moment since brimming.

‘Like it?'

‘ – like Oxygénée, and petrol… If I ever start to drink that stuff, Geoffrey, you'll know I'm done for.'

‘It's mescal with me… Tequila, no, that is healthful… and delightful. Just like beer. Good for you. But if I ever start to drink mescal again, I'm afraid, yes, that would be the end,' the Consul said dreamily.

‘Name of a name of God,' shuddered M. Laruelle.

‘You're not afraid of Hugh, are you?' The Consul, mocking, pursued — while it struck him that all the desolation of the months following Yvonne's departure were now mirrored in the
other's
eyes. ‘Not jealous of him, by any chance, are you?'

‘Why should –'

‘But you are thinking, aren't you, that in all this time I have never once told you the truth about my life.' the Consul said, ‘isn't that right?'

‘No… For perhaps once or twice, Geoffrey, without knowing it, you have told the truth. No, I truly want to help. But, as usual, you don't give me a chance.'

‘I have never told you the truth. I know it, it is worse than terrible. But as Shelley says, the cold world shall not know. And the tequila hasn't cured your trembling.'

‘No, I am afraid,' M. Laruelle said.

‘But I thought you were never afraid…
Un otro tequila
,' the Consul told the boy, who came running, repeating sharply,' —
uno
?'

M. Laruelle glanced round after the boy as if it had been in his mind to say‘
dos
': ‘I'm afraid of you,' he said, ‘Old Bean.'

The Consul heard, after half the second tequila, every now and then, familiar well-meaning phrases. ‘It's hard to say this. As man to man, I don't care who she is. Even if the miracle has occurred. Unless you cut it out altogether.'

The Consul however was looking past M. Laruelle at the flying-boats which were at a little distance: the machine itself was feminine, graceful as a ballet dancer, its iron skirts of gondolas whirling higher and higher. Finally it whizzed round with a tense whipping and whining, then its skirts drooped chastely again when for a time there was stillness, only the breeze stirring them. And how beautiful, beautiful, beautiful —

‘For God's sake. Go home to bed… Or stay here. I'll find the others. And tell them you're not going…'

‘But I am going,' the Consul said, commencing to take one of the shrimps apart. ‘Not camarones,' he added. ‘Cabrones. That's what the Mexicans call them.' Placing his thumbs at the base of both ears he waggled his fingers.'
Cabrón
. You too, perhaps… Venus is a horned star.'

‘What about the damage you've done, to
her
life… After all your howling… If you've got her back! — If you've got this chance –'

‘You are interfering with my great battle,' the Consul said, gazing past M. Laruelle at an advertisement at the foot of the fountain:
Peter horre en has Manos de Orlac, a las 6.30 p.m
. ‘I have to have a drink or two now, myself — so long as it isn't mescal of course — else I shall become confused, like yourself.'

‘ – the truth is, I suppose, that sometimes, when you've calculated the amount exactly, you do see more clearly,' M. Laruelle was admitting a minute later.

‘Against death.' The Consul sank back easily in his chair. ‘My battle for the survival of the human consciousness.'

‘But certainly not the things so important to us despised sober people, on which the balance of any human situation depends. It's precisely your inability to see them, Geoffrey, that turns them into the instruments of the disaster you have created yourself. Your Ben Jonson, for instance, or perhaps it was Christopher Marlowe, your Faust man, saw the Carthaginians fighting on his big toe-nail. That's like the kind of clear seeing you indulge in. Everything seems perfectly clear, because indeed it is perfectly clear, in terms of the toe-nail.'

‘Have a devilled scorpion,' invited the Consul, pushing over the camarones with extended arm. ‘A bedevilled
cabrón
.'

‘I admit the efficacy of your tequila — but do you realize that while you're battling against death, or whatever you imagine you're doing, while what is mystical in you is being released, or whatever it is you imagine is being released, while you're enjoying all this, do you realize what extraordinary allowances are being made for you by the world which has to cope with you, yes, are even now being made by
me
?'

The Consul was gazing upward dreamily at the Ferris wheel near them, huge, but resembling an enormously magnified child's structure of girders and angle brackets, nuts and bolts, in Meccano; tonight it would be lit up, its steel twigs caught in the emerald pathos of the trees; the
wheel of the law, rolling
; and it bore thinking of too that the carnival was not going in earnest now. What a hullabaloo there would be later 1 His eye fell on another little carrousel, a dazzle-painted wobbling child's toy, and he saw himself as a child making up his mind to go on it, hesitating, missing the next opportunity, and the next, missing all the opportunities finally, until it was too late. What opportunities, precisely, did he mean? A voice on the radio somewhere began to sing a song:
Samaritana mía, alma pía, bebe en tu boca linda
, then went dead. It had sounded like Samaritana.

‘And you forget what you exclude from this, shall we say, feeling of omniscience. And at night, I imagine, or between drink and drink, which is a sort of night, what you have excluded, as if it resented that exclusion, returns –'

‘I'll say it returns,' the Consul said, listening at this point. ‘There are other minor deliriums too,
meteora
, which you can pick out of the air before your eyes, like gnats. And this is what people seem to think is the end… But d.t.'s are only the beginning, the music round the portal of the Qliphoth, the overture, conducted by the God of Flies… Why do people see rats? These are the sort of questions that ought to concern the world, Jacques. Consider the word remorse.
Remors. Mordeo, mor-dere. La Mordida! Agenbite
too… And why
rongeur
? Why all this biting, all those rodents, in the etymology?'

‘
Facilis est descensus Averno
… It's too easy.'