Under the Volcano (45 page)

A corpse will be transported by express…

Oozing alcohol from every pore, the Consul stood at the open door of the Salón Ofelia. How sensible to have had a mescal. How sensible ! For it was the right, the sole drink to have under the circumstances. Moreover he had not only proved to himself he was not afraid of it, he was now fully awake, fully sober again, and well able to cope with anything that might come his way. But for this slight continual twitching and hopping within his field of vision, as of innumerable sand fleas, he might have told himself he hadn't had a drink for months. The only thing wrong with him, he was too hot.

A natural waterfall crashing down into a sort of reservoir built on two levels — he found the sight less cooling than grotesquely suggestive of some organized ultimate sweat; the lower level made a pool where Hugh and Yvonne were still not yet swimming. The water on the turbulent upper level raced over an artificial falls beyond which, becoming a swift stream, it wound through thick jungle to spill down a much larger natural
cascada
out of sight. After that it dispersed, he recalled, lost its identity, dribbled, at various places, into the
barranca
. A path followed the stream through the jungle and at one place another path branched off to the right which went to Parián and the Farolito. Though the first path led you to rich
cantina
country too. God
knows why. Once, perhaps, in
hacienda
days, Tomalín had held some irrigational importance. Then, after the burning of the sugar plantations, schemes, cleavable and lustrous, evolved for a spa, were abandoned sulphurously. Later, vague dreams of hydro-electric power hovered in the air, though nothing had been done about them. Parián was an even greater mystery. Originally settled by a scattering of those fierce forebears of Cervantes who had succeeded in making Mexico great even in her betrayal, the traitorous Tlaxcalans, the nominal capital of the state had been quite eclipsed by Quauhnahuac since the revolution, and while still an obscure administrative centre, no one had ever adequately explained its continued existence to him. One met people going there; few, now he thought about it, ever coming back. Of course they'd come back, he had himself: there was an explanation. But why didn't a bus run there, or only grudgingly, and by a strange route? The Consul started.

Near him lurked some hooded photographers. They were waiting by their tattered machines for the bathers to leave their boxes. Now two girls were squealing as they came down to the water in their ancient, hired costumes. Their escorts swaggered along a grey parapet dividing the pool from the rapids above, obviously deciding not to dive in, pointing for excuse up at a ladderless springboard, derelict, like some forgotten victim of tidal catastrophe, in a weeping pepper tree. After a time they rushed howling down a concrete incline into the pool. The girls bridled, but waded in after, tittering. Nervous gusts agitated the surface of the baths. Magenta clouds piled higher against the horizon, though overhead the sky remained clear.

Hugh and Yvonne appeared, grotesquely costumed. They stood laughing on the brink of the pool — shivering, though the horizontal rays of the sun lay on them all with solid heat.

The photographers took photographs.

‘Why,' Yvonne called out, ‘this is like the Horseshoe Falls in Wales.'

‘Or Niagara', observed the Consul, ‘
circa
1900. What about a trip on the
Maid of the Mist
, seventy-five cents with oilskins.'

Hugh turned round gingerly, hands on knees.

‘Yeah. To where the rainbow ends.'

‘The Cave of the Winds. The Cascada Sagrada.'

There were, in fact, rainbows. Though without them the mescal (which Yvonne couldn't of course have noticed) would have already invested the place with a magic. The magic was of Niagara Falls itself, not its elemental majesty, the honeymoon town; in a sweet, tawdry, even hoydenish sense of love that haunted this nostalgic spray-blown spot. But now the mescal struck a discord, then a succession of plaintive discords to which the drifting mists all seemed to be dancing, through the elusive subtleties of ribboned light, among the detached shreds of rainbows floating. It was a phantom dance of souls, baffled by these deceptive blends, yet still seeking permanence in the midst of what was only perpetually evanescent, or eternally lost. Or it was a dance of the seeker and his goal, here pursuing still the gay colours he did not know he had assumed, there striving to identify the finer scene of which he might never realize he was already a part…

Dark coils of shadows lay in the deserted bar-room. They sprang at him.‘
Otro mescalito. Un poquito
.' The voice seemed to come from above the counter where two wild yellow eyes pierced the gloom. The scarlet comb, the wattles, then the bronze green metallic feathers of some fowl standing on the bar, materialized, and Cervantes, rising playfully from behind it, greeted him with Tlaxcaltecan pleasure: ‘
Muy fuerte. Muy
terreebly,' he cackled.

Was this the face that launched five hundred ships, and betrayed Christ into being in the Western Hemisphere? But the bird appeared tame enough. Half past tree by the cock, that other fellow had said. And here was the cock. It was a fighting cock. Cervantes was training it for a fight in Tlaxcala, but the Consul couldn't be interested. Cervantes's cockerels always lost —he'd attended drunkenly one session in Cuautla; the vicious little man-made battles, cruel and destructive, yet somehow bedraggledly inconclusive, each brief as some hideously mismanaged act of intercourse, disgusted and bored him. Cervantes took the cock away. ‘
Un bruto
,' he added.

The subdued roar of the falls filled the room like a ship's engine… Eternity… The Consul, cooler, leaned on the bar,
staring into his second glass of the colourless ether-smelling liquid. To drink or not to drink. — But without mescal, he imagined, he had forgotten eternity, forgotten their world's voyage, that the earth was a ship, lashed by the Horn's tail, doomed never to make her Valparaiso. Or that it was like a golf ball, launched at Hercules's Butterfly, wildly hooked by a giant out of an asylum window in hell. Or that it was a bus, making its erratic journey to Tomalín and nothing. Or that it was like —whatever it would be shortly, after the next mescal.

Still, there had not yet been a ‘next' mescal. The Consul stood, his hand as if part of the glass, listening, remembering… Suddenly he heard, above the roar, the clear sweet voices of the young Mexicans outside: the voice of Yvonne too, dear, intolerable — and different, after the first mescal — shortly to be lost.

Why lost?… The voices were as if confused now with the blinding torrent of sunlight which poured across the open doorway, turning the scarlet flowers along the path into flaming swords. Even almost bad poetry is better than life, the muddle of voices might have been saying, as, now, he drank half his drink.

The Consul was aware of another roaring, though it came from inside his head:
clipperty-one
: the American Express, swaying, bears the corpse through the green meadows. What is man but a little soul holding up a corpse? The soul! Ah, and did she not too have her savage and traitorous Tlaxcalans, her Cortés and her
noches tristes
, and, sitting within her innermost citadel in chains, drinking chocolate, her pale Moctezuma?

The roaring rose, died away, rose again; guitar chords mingled with the shouting of many voices, calling, chanting, like native women in Kashmir, pleading, above the noise of the maelstrom: ‘
Borrrrraaacho
,' they wailed. And the dark room with its flashing doorway rocked under his feet.

‘ – what do you think, Yvonne, if sometime we climb that baby, Popo I mean –'

‘Good heavens why ! Haven't you had enough exercise for one –'

‘ – might be a good idea to harden your muscles first, try a few small peaks.'

They were joking. But the Consul was not joking. His second mescal had become serious. He left it still unfinished on the counter, Señor Cervantes was beckoning from a far corner.

A shabby little man with a black shade over one eye, wearing a black coat, but a beautiful
sombrero
with long gay tassels down the back, he seemed, however savage at heart, in almost as highly nervous a state as himself. What magnetism drew these quaking ruined creatures into his orbit? Cervantes led the way behind the bar, ascended two steps, and pulled a curtain aside. Poor lonely fellow, he wanted to show him round his house again. The Consul made the steps with difficulty. One small room occupied by a huge brass bedstead. Rusty rifles in a rack on the wall. In one corner, before a tiny porcelain Virgin, burned a little lamp. Really a sacramental candle, it diffused a ruby shimmer through its glass into the room, and cast a broad yellow flickering cone on the ceiling: the wick was burning low. ‘Mistair,' Cervantes tremulously pointed to it. ‘
Señor
. My grand-father tell me never to let her go out.' Mescal tears came to the Consul's eyes, and he remembered sometime during last night's debauch going with Dr Vigil to a church in Quauhnahuac he didn't know, with sombre tapestries, and strange votive pictures, a compassionate Virgin floating in the gloom, to whom he prayed, with muddily beating heart, he might have Yvonne again. Dark figures, tragic and isolated, stood about the church, or were kneeling — only the bereaved and lonely went there. ‘She is the Virgin for those who have nobody with,' the doctor told him, inclining his head towards the image. ‘And for mariners on the sea.' Then he knelt in the dirt and placing his pistol — for Dr Vigil always went armed to Red Cross Balls — on the floor beside him, said sadly, ‘Nobody come here, only those who have nobody them with.' Now the Consul made this Virgin the other who had answered his prayer and as they stood in silence before her, prayed again. ‘Nothing is altered and in spite of God's mercy I am still alone. Though my suffering seems senseless I am still in agony. There is no explanation of my life.' Indeed there was not, nor was this what he'd meant to convey. ‘Please let Yvonne have her dream — dream? — of a new life with me — please let me believe that all that is not an abominable self-deception,'
he tried… ‘Please let me make her happy, deliver me from this dreadful tyranny of self. I have sunk low. Let me sink lower still, that I may know the truth. Teach me to love again, to love life.' That wouldn't do either… ‘Where is love? Let me truly suffer. Give me back my purity, the knowledge of the Mysteries, that I have betrayed and lost. — Let me be truly lonely, that I may honestly pray. Let us be happy again somewhere, if it's only together, if it's only out of this terrible world. Destroy the world!' he cried in his heart. The Virgin's eyes were turned down in benediction, but perhaps she hadn't heard. — The Consul had scarcely noticed that Cervantes had picked up one of the rifles. ‘I love hunting.' After replacing it he opened the bottom drawer of a wardrobe which was squeezed in another corner. The drawer was chock full of books, including the
History of Tlaxcala
, in ten volumes. He shut it immediately. ‘I am an insignificant man, and I do not read these books to prove my insignificance,' he said proudly. ‘
Sí hombre
,' he went on, as they descended to the bar again, ‘as I told you, I obey my grandfather. He tell me to marry my wife. So I call my wife my mother.' He produced a photograph of a child lying in a coffin and laid it on the counter. ‘I drank all day.'

‘ – snow goggles and an alpenstock. You'd look awfully nice with –'

‘ – and my face all covered with grease. And a woollen cap pulled right down over my eyes –'

Hugh's voice came again, then Yvonne's, they were dressing, and conversing loudly over the tops of their bathing boxes, not six feet away, beyond the wall:

‘ – hungry now, aren't you?'

‘ – a couple of raisins and half a prune!'

‘ – not forgetting the limes –'

The Consul finished his mescal: all a pathetic joke, of course, still, this plan to climb Popo, if just the kind of thing Hugh would have found out about before arriving, while neglecting so much else: yet could it be that the notion of climbing the volcano had somehow struck them as having the significance of a lifetime together? Yes, there it rose up before them, with all its hidden dangers, pitfalls, ambiguities, deceptions, portentous as
what they could imagine for the poor brief self-deceived space of a cigarette was their own destiny — or was Yvonne simply, alas, happy?

‘ – where is it we start from, Amecameca –'

‘To prevent mountain sickness.'

‘ – though quite a pilgrimage at that, I gather! Geoff and I thought of doing it, years ago. You go on horseback first, to Tlamancas –'

‘ – at midnight, at the Hotel Fausto!'

‘What would you all prefer? Cauliflowers or pootootsies,' the Consul, innocent, drinkless in a booth, greeted them, frowning; the supper at Emmaus, he felt, trying to disguise his distant mescal voice as he studied the bill of fare provided him by Cervantes. ‘Or extramapee syrup. Onans in garlic soup on egg…

‘Pep with milk? Or what about a nice Filete de Huachinango
rebozado tartar con
German friends?'

Cervantes had handed Yvonne and Hugh each a menu but they were sharing hers: ‘Dr Moise von Schmidthaus's special soup,' Yvonne pronounced the words with gusto.

‘I think a pepped petroot would be about my mark,' said the Consul, ‘after those onans.'

‘Just one,' the Consul went on, anxious, since Hugh was laughing so loudly, for Cervantes's feelings, ‘but please note the German friends. They even get into the filet.'

‘What about the tartar?' Hugh inquired.

‘Tlaxcala!' Cervantes, smiling, debated between them with trembling pencil. ‘
sí
, I am Tlaxcaltecan… You like eggs,
señora
. Stepped on eggs.
Muy sabrosos
. Divorced eggs? For fish, sliced of filet with peas. Vol-au-vent à la reine. Somersaults for the queen. Or you like poxy eggs, poxy in toast. Or veal liver tavernman? Pimesan chike chup? Or spectral chicken of the house? Youn' pigeon. Red snappers with a fried tartar, you like?'