Under the Volcano (49 page)

‘Which would never do. Why all you people who talk about going to Spain and fighting for freedom — Cervantes! — should learn by heart what Tolstoy said about that kind of thing in
War and Peace
, that conversation with the volunteers in the train –'

‘But anyhow that was in –'

‘Where the first volunteer, I mean, turned out to be a bragging degenerate obviously convinced after he'd been drinking that he was doing something heroic — what are you laughing at, Hugh?'

‘It's funny.'

‘And the second was a man who had tried everything and been a failure in all of them. And the third –' Yvonne abruptly returned and the Consul, who had been shouting, slightly lowered his voice, ‘an artillery man, was the only one who struck him at first favourably. Yet what did he turn out to be? A cadet who'd failed in his examinations. All of them, you see, misfits, all good for nothing, cowards, baboons, meek wolves, parasites, every man jack of them, people afraid to face their own responsibilities, fight their own fight, ready to go anywhere, as Tolstoy well perceived –'

‘Quitters?' Hugh said. ‘Didn't Katamasov or whoever he was believe that the action of those volunteers was nevertheless an expression of the whole soul of the Russian people? — Mind you, I appreciate that a diplomatic corps which merely remains in San Sebastian hoping Franco will win quickly instead of returning to Madrid to tell the British Government the truth of what's really going on in Spain can't possibly consist of quitters!'

‘Isn't your desire to fight for Spain, for fiddlededee, for Timbuktu, for China, for hypocrisy, for bugger all, for any hokery pokery that a few moose-headed idiot sons choose to call freedom — of course there is nothing of the sort, really –'

‘If –'

‘If you've really read
War and Peace
, as you claim you have, why haven't you the sense to profit by it, I repeat?'

‘At any rate,' said Hugh, ‘I profited by it to the extent of being able to distinguish it from
Anna Karenina
.'

‘Well,
Anna Karenina
then…' the Consul paused.
‘Cervantes !' — and Cervantes appeared, with his fighting cock, evidently fast asleep, under his arm. ‘
Muy fuerte
,' he said, ‘
muy terreebly
,' passing through the room, ‘
un bruto
.' — ‘But as I implied, you bloody people, mark my words, you don't mind your own business any better at home, let alone in foreign countries. Geoffrey darling, why don't you stop drinking, it isn't too late —that sort of thing. Why isn't it? Did I say so?' What was he saying? The Consul listened to himself almost in surprise at this sudden cruelty, this vulgarity. And in a moment it was going to get worse. ‘I thought it was all so splendidly and legally settled that it was. It's only you that insists it isn't.'

‘Oh Geoffrey –'

— Was the Consul saying this? Must he say it? — It seemed he must. ‘For all you know it's only the knowledge that it most certainly is too late that keeps me alive at all… You're all the same, all of you, Yvonne, Jacques, you, Hugh, trying to interfere with other people's lives, interfering, interfering — why should anyone have interfered with young Cervantes here, for example, given him an interest in cock fighting? — and that's precisely what's bringing about disaster in the world, to stretch a point, yes, quite a point, all because you haven't got the wisdom and the simplicity and the courage, yes, the courage, to take any of the, to take –'

‘See here, Geoffrey –'

‘What have you ever done for humanity, Hugh, with all your
oratio obliqua
about the capitalist system, except talk, and thrive on it, until your soul stinks?'

‘Shut up, Geoff, for the love of Mike!'

‘For that matter, both your souls stink! Cervantes!'

‘Geoffrey, please sit down,' Yvonne seemed, to have said wearily, ‘you're making such a scene.'

‘No, I'm not, Yvonne. I'm talking very calmly. As when I ask you, what have you ever done for anyone but yourself?' Must the Consul say this? He was saying, had said it: ‘Where are the children I might have wanted? You may suppose I might have wanted them. Drowned. To the accompaniment of the rattling of a thousand douche bags. Mind you,
you
don't pretend to love “humanity”, not a bit of it! You don't even need an
illusion, though you do have some illusions unfortunately, to help you deny the only natural and good function you have. Though on second thoughts it might be better if women had no functions at all!'

‘Don't be a bloody swine, Geoffrey.' Hugh rose.

‘Stay where you bloody are,' ordered the Consul. ‘Of course I see the romantic predicament you two are in. But even if Hugh makes the most of it again it won't be long, it won't be long, before he realizes he's only one of the hundred or so other ninney-hammers with gills like codfish and veins like racehorses — prime as goats all of them, hot as monkeys, salt as wolves in pride! No, one will be enough…'

A glass, fortunately empty, fell to the floor and was smashed.

‘As if he plucked up kisses by the roots and then laid his leg over her thigh and sighed. What an uncommon time you two must have had, paddling palms and playing bubbies and titties all day under cover of saving me… Jesus. Poor little defenceless me —I hadn't thought of that. But, you see, it's perfectly logical, what it comes down to: I've got my own piddling little fight for freedom on my hands. Mummy, let me go back to the beautiful brothel! Back to where those
triskeles
are strumming, the infinite
trismus
…

‘True, I've been tempted to talk peace. I've been beguiled by your offers of a sober and non-alcoholic Paradise. At least I suppose that's what you've been working around towards all day. But now I've made up my melodramatic little mind, what's left of it, just enough to make up. Cervantes! That far from wanting it, thank you very much, on the contrary, I choose — Tlax –' Where was he? ‘Tlax — Tlax –'

… It was as if, almost, he were standing upon that black open station platform, where he had gone —
had
he gone? — that day after drinking all night to meet Lee Maitland returning from Virginia at 7.40 in the morning, gone, light-headed, light-footed, and in that state of being where Baudelaire's angel indeed wakes, desiring to meet trains perhaps, but to meet no trains that stop, for in the angel's mind are no trains that stop, and from such trains no one descends, not even another angel, nor even a fair-haired one, like Lee Maitland. — Was the train late? Why was he
pacing the platform? Was it the second or third train from Suspension Bridge — Suspension! — ‘Tlax –' the Consul repeated. ‘I choose–'

He was in a room, and suddenly in this room, matter was disjunct: a doorknob was standing a little way out from the door. A curtain floated in by itself, unfastened, ‘unattached to anything. The idea struck him it had come in to strangle him. An orderly little clock behind the bar called him to his senses, its ticking very loud:
Tlax
:
tlax
:
tlax
:
tlax:
… Half past five. Was that all? ‘Hell,' he finished absurdly. ‘Because –' He produced a twenty-peso note and laid it on the table.

‘I like it,' he called to them, through the open window, from outside. Cervantes stood behind the bar, with scared eyes, holding the cockerel. ‘I love hell. I can't wait to get back there. In fact I'm running. I'm almost back there already.'

He was running too, in spite of his limp, calling back to them crazily, and the queer thing was, he wasn't quite serious, running toward the forest, which was growing darker and darker, tumultuous above — a rush of air swept out of it, and the weeping pepper tree roared.

He stopped after a while: all was calm. No one had come after him. Was that good? Yes, it was good, he thought, his heart pounding. And since it was so good he would take the path to Parián, to the Farolito.

Before him the volcanoes, precipitous, seemed to have drawn nearer. They towered up over the jungle, into the lowering sky —massive interests moving up in the background.

SUNSET.
Eddies of green and orange birds scattered aloft with ever wider circlings like rings on water. Two little pigs disappeared into the dust at a gallop. A woman passed swiftly, balancing on her head, with the grace of a Rebecca, a small light bottle…

Then, the Salón Ofelia at last behind them, there was no more dust. And their path became straight, leading on through the roar of water past the bathing place, where, reckless, a few late bathers lingered, toward the forest.

Straight ahead, in the north-east, lay the volcanoes, the towering dark clouds behind them steadily mounting the heavens.

— The storm, that had already dispatched its outriders, must have been travelling in a circle: the real onset was yet to come. Meantime the wind had dropped and it was lighter again, though the sun had gone down at their back slightly to their left, in the south-west, where a red blaze fanned out into the sky over their heads.

The Consul had not been in the Todos Contentos y Yo También. And now, through the warm twilight, Yvonne was walking before Hugh, purposely too fast for talking. None the less his voice (as earlier that day the Consul's own) pursued her.

‘You know perfectly well I won't just run away and abandon him,' she said.

‘Christ Jesus, this never would have happened if I hadn't been here!'

‘Something else would probably have happened.'

The jungle closed over them and the volcanoes were blotted out. Yet it was still not dark. From the stream racing along beside them a radiance was cast. Big yellow flowers, resembling chrysanthemums, shining like stars through the gloom, grew on either side of the water. Wild bougainvillea, brick-red in the half-light, occasionally a bush with white handbells, tongue
downwards, started out at them, every little while a notice nailed to a tree, a whittled, weather-beaten arrow pointing, with the words hardly visible:
a la Cascada
—

Farther on worn-out ploughshares and the rusted and twisted chassis of abandoned American cars bridged the stream which they kept always to their left.

The sound of the falls behind was now lost in that of the cascade ahead. The air was full of spray and moisture. But for the tumult one might almost have heard things growing as the torrent rushed through the wet heavy foliage that sprang up everywhere around them from the alluvial soil.

All at once, above them, they saw the sky again. The clouds, no longer red, had become a peculiar luminous blue-white, drifts and depths of them, as though illumined by moon rather than sunlight, between which roared still the deep fathomless cobalt of afternoon.

Birds were sailing up there, ascending higher and higher. Infernal bird of Prometheus!

They were vultures, that on earth so jealously contend with one another, defiling themselves with blood and filth, but who were yet capable of rising, like this, above the storms, to heights shared only by the condor, above the summit of the Andes —

Down the south-west stood the moon itself, preparing to follow the sun below the horizon. On their left, through the trees beyond the stream appeared low hills, like those at the foot of the Calle Nicaragua; they were purple and sad. At their foot, so near Yvonne made out a faint rustling, cattle moved on the sloping fields among gold cornstalks and striped mysterious tents.

Before them, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl continued to dominate the north-east, the Sleeping Woman now perhaps the more beautiful of the two, with jagged angles of blood-red snow on its summit, fading as they watched, whipped with darker rock shadows, the summit itself seeming suspended in mid-air, floating among the curdling ever mounting black clouds.

Chimborazo, Popocatepetl — so ran the poem the Consul liked — had stolen his heart away! But in the tragic Indian legend Popocatepetl himself was strangely the dreamer: the fires of his
warrior's love, never extinct in the poet's heart, burned eternally for Ixtaccihuatl, whom he had no sooner found than lost, and whom he guarded in her endless sleep…

They had reached the limit of the clearing, where the path divided in two. Yvonne hesitated. Pointing to the left, as it were straight on, another aged arrow on a tree repeated:
a la Cascada
. But a similar arrow on another tree pointed away from the stream down a path to their right:
a Pariàn
.

Yvonne knew where she was now, but the two alternatives, the two paths, stretched out before her on either side like the arms — the oddly dislocated thought struck her — of a man being crucified.

If they chose the path to their right they would reach Parián much sooner. On the other hand, the main path would bring them to the same place finally, and, what was more to the point, past, she felt sure, at least two other
cantinas
.

They chose the main path: the striped tents, the cornstalks dropped out of sight, and the jungle returned, its damp earthy leguminous smell rising about them with the night.

This path, she was thinking, after emerging on a sort of main highway near a restaurant-
cantina
named the Rum-Popo or the El Popo, took, upon resumption (if it could be called the same path), a short cut at right angles through the forest to Parián, across to the Farolito itself, as it might be the shadowy crossbar from which the man's arms were hanging.

The noise of the approaching falls was now like the awakening voices downwind of five thousand bobolinks in an Ohio savannah. Toward it the torrent raced furiously, fed from above, where, down the left bank, transformed abruptly into a great wall of vegetation, water was spouting into the stream through thickets festooned with convolvuli on a higher level than the topmost trees of the jungle. And it was as though one's spirit too were being swept on by the swift current with the uprooted trees and smashed bushes in a débâcle towards that final drop.