Under the Volcano (51 page)

‘And the woolly dog and the foals that came with us and the river with those swift birds overhead –'

‘How far to the Farolito now?'

‘About a mile and a half. We can cut nearly a mile if we take the forest path.'

‘In the dark?'

‘We can't wait very long if you're going to make the last bus back to Quauhnahuac. It's after six now. I can't drink this beer, can you?'

‘No. It tastes like gun-metal — hell — Christ,' Hugh said, ‘let's –'

‘Have a different drink,' Yvonne proposed, half ironically.

‘Couldn't we
phone
?'

‘Mescal,' Yvonne said brightly.

The air was so full of electricity it trembled.

‘
Comment
?'

‘
Mescal, por favor
,' Yvonne repeated, shaking her head solemnly, sardonically. ‘I've always wanted to find out what Geoffrey sees in it.'

‘
¿Cómo no
? let's have two mescals.'

But Hugh had still not returned when the two drinks were brought by a different waiter questioning the gloom, who, balancing the tray on one palm, switched on another light.

The drinks Yvonne had had at dinner and during the day,
relatively few though they'd been, lay like swine on her soul: some moments passed before she reached out her hand and drank.

Sickly, sullen, and ether-tasting, the mescal produced at first no warmth in her stomach, only, like the beer, a coldness, a chill. But it worked. From the porch outside a guitar, slightly out of tune, struck up
La Paloma
, a Mexican voice was singing, and the mescal was still working. It had in the end the quality of a good hard drink. Where was Hugh? Had he found the Consul here, after all? No: she knew he was not here. She gazed round the EI Popo, a soulless draughty death that ticked and groaned, as Geoff himself once said — a bad ghost of an American road-house; but it no longer appeared so awful. She selected a lemon from the table and squeezed a few drops into her glass and all this took her an inordinately long time to do.

All at once she became conscious she was laughing unnaturally to herself, something within her was smouldering, was on fire: and once more, too, in her brain a picture shaped of a woman ceaselessly beating her fists on the ground…

But no, it was not herself that was on fire. It was the house of her spirit. It was her dream. It was the farm, it was Orion, the Pleiades, it was their house by the sea. But where was the fire? It was the Consul who had been the first to notice it. What were these crazy thoughts, thoughts without form or logic? She stretched out her hand for the other mescal, Hugh's mescal, and the fire went out, was overwhelmed by a sudden wave through her whole being of desperate love and tenderness for the Consul.

—
very dark and clear with an onshore wind, and the sound of surf you couldn't see, deep in the spring night the summer stars were overhead, presage of summer, and the stars bright; clear and dark, and the moon had not risen; a beautiful strong clean onshore wind, and then the waning moon rising over the water, and later, inside the house, the roar of unseen surf beating in the night–
-

‘How do you like the mescal?'

Yvonne jumped up. She had been almost crouching over Hugh's drink; Hugh, swaying, stood over her, carrying under his arm a long battered key-shaped canvas case.

‘What in the world have you got there?' Yvonne's voice was blurred and remote.

Hugh put the case on the parapet. Then he laid on the table an electric torch. It was a boy scout contraption like a ship's ventilator with a metal ring to slip your belt through. ‘I met the fellow on the porch Geoff was so bloody rude to in the Salón Ofelia and I bought this from him. But he wanted to sell his guitar and get a new one so I bought that too. Only
ocho pesos cincuenta
–'

‘What do you want a guitar for? Are you going to play the Internationale or something on it, on board your ship?' Yvonne said.

‘How's the mescal?' Hugh said again.

‘Like ten yards of barbed-wire fence. It nearly took the top of my head off. Here, this is yours, Hugh, what's left of it.'

Hugh sat down: ‘I had a tequila outside with the guitar
hombre
'…

‘Well,' he added, ‘I'm definitely not going to try and get to Mexico City tonight, and that once decided there're various things we might do about Geoff.'

‘I'd rather like to get tight,' Yvonne said.

‘
Como tu quieras
. It might be a good idea.'

‘Why did you say it would be a good idea to get tight?' Yvonne was asking over the new mescals; then, ‘What did you get a guitar for?' she repeated.

‘To sing with. To give people the lie with maybe.'

‘What are you so strange for, Hugh? To give what people what lie?'

Hugh tilted back his chair until it touched the parapet behind him, then sat like that, smoking, nursing his mescal in his lap.

‘The kind of lie Sir Walter Raleigh meditates, when he addresses his soul. “The truth shall be thy warrant. Go, since I needs must die. And give the world the lie. Say to the court it glows, and shines like rotten wood. Say to the church it shows, what's good and doth no good. If Church and Court reply, then give them both the lie.” That sort of thing, only slightly different.'

‘You're dramatizing yourself, Hugh.
Salud y pesetas
.'

‘
Salud y pesetas
.'

‘
Salud y pesetas
.'

He stood, smoking, drink in hand, leaning against the dark monastic archway and looking down at her:

‘But on the contrary,' he was saying, ‘we do want to do good, to help, to be brothers in distress. We will even condescend to be crucified, on certain terms. And
are
, for that matter, regularly, every twenty years or so. But to an Englishman it's such terribly bad form to be a bona-fide martyr. We may respect with one part of our minds the integrity, say, of men like Gandhi, or Nehru. We may even recognize that their selflessness, by example, might save us. But in our hearts we cry “Throw the bloody little man in the river”. Or “Set Barabbas free!” “O'Dwyer for ever!”Jesus! — It's even pretty bad form for Spain to be a martyr too; in a very different way of course… And if Russia should prove –'

Hugh was saying all this while Yvonne was scanning a document he'd just skimmed on to the table for her. It was an old soiled and creased menu of the house simply, that seemed to have been picked up from the floor, or spent a long period in someone's pocket, and this she read, with alcoholic deliberation, several times:

This much was typed in blue and underneath it — she made out with the same deliberation — was a design like a small wheel round the inside of which was written ‘Lotería Nacional Para La Beneficencia Pùblica', making another circular frame, within which appeared a sort of trade or hallmark representing a happy mother caressing her child.

The whole left side of the menu was taken up by a full-length lithographic portrait of a smiling young woman surmounted by the announcement that
Hotel Restaurant El Popo se observa la más estricta moralidad, siendo esta disposición de su proprietario una garantía para el pasajero, que llegue en compañía
: Yvonne studied this woman: she was buxom and dowdy, with a quasi-American coiffure, and she was wearing a long, confetti-coloured print dress: with one hand she was beckoning roguishly, while with the other she held up a block of ten lottery tickets, on each of which a cowgirl was riding a bucking horse and (as if these ten minute figures were Yvonne's own reduplicated and half-forgotten selves waving good-bye to herself) waving her hand.

‘Well,' she said.

‘No, I meant on the other side,' Hugh said.

Yvonne turned the menu over and then sat staring blankly.

The back of the menu was almost covered by the Consuls handwriting at its most chaotic. At the top on the left was written:

This was signed G. Firmin. It was a small bill left here by the Consul some months ago, a chit he'd made out for himself —No, I just paid it, said Hugh, who was now sitting beside her.

But below this ‘reckoning' was written, enigmatically, dearth… filth… earth, below that was a long scrawl of which one could make nothing. In the center of the paper were seen these words: rope… cope… grope, then, of a cold cell, while on the right, the parent and partial explanation of these prodigals,
appeared what looked a poem in process of composition, an attempt at some kind of sonnet perhaps, but of a wavering and collapsed design, and so crossed out and scrawled over and stained, defaced, and surrounded with scratchy drawings — of a club, a wheel, even a long black box like a coffin — as to be almost indecipherable; at last it had this semblance:

Some years ago he started to escape
… has been… escaping ever since
Not knowing his pursuers gave up hope
Of seeing him (dance) at the end of a rope
Hounded by eyes and thronged terrors now the lens
Of glaring world that shunned even his defence
Reading him strictly in the preterite tense
Spent no… thinking him not worth
(Even)… the price of a cold cell.
There would have been a scandal at his death
Perhaps. No more man this. Some tell
Strange hellish tales of this poor foundered soul
Who once fled north…

Who once fled north, she thought. Hugh was saying:

'
Vámonos
.'

Yvonne said yes.

Outside the wind was blowing with an odd shrillness. A loose shutter somewhere banged and banged, and the electric sign over the garage prodded the night:
Euzkadi —

The clock above it – man's public inquiry of the hour! — said twelve to seven: ‘Who once fled north.' The diners had left the porch of the El Popo…

Lightning as they started down the steps was followed by volleys of thunder almost at once, dispersed and prolonged. Piling black clouds swallowed the stars to the north and east; Pegasus pounded up the sky unseen; but overhead it was still clear: Vega, Deneb, Altair; through the trees, towards the west, Hercules. ‘Who once fled north,' she repeated. — Straight ahead of them beside the road was a ruined Grecian temple, dim, with two tall slender pillars, approached by two broad steps: or there had been a moment this temple, with its exquisite beauty of pillars, and, perfect in balance and proportion, its broad expanse
of steps, that became now two beams of windy light from the garage, falling across the road, and the pillars, two telegraph poles.

They turned into the path. Hugh, with his torch, projected a phantom target, expanding, becoming enormous, and that swerved and transparently tangled with the cactus. The path narrowed and they walked, Hugh behind, in single file, the luminous target sliding before them in sweeping concentric ellipticities, across which her own wrong shadow leaped, or the shadow of a giantess. — The candelabras appeared salt grey where the flashlight caught them, too stiff and fleshy to be bending with the wind, in a slow multitudinous heaving, an inhuman cackling of scales and spines.

‘Who once fled north…'

Yvonne now felt cold sober: the cactus fell away, and the path, still narrow, through tall trees and undergrowth, seemed easy enough.

‘Who once fled north.' But they were not going north, they were going to the Farolito. Nor had the Consul fled north then, he'd probably gone of course, just as tonight, to the Farolito. ‘There might have been a scandal at his death.' The treetops made a sound like water rushing over their heads. ‘At his death.'

Yvonne was sober. It was the undergrowth, which made sudden swift movements into their path, obstructing it, that was not sober; the mobile trees were not sober; and finally it was Hugh, who she now realized had only brought her this far to prove the better practicality of the road, the danger of these woods under the discharges of electricity now nearly on top of them, who was not sober: and Yvonne found she had stopped abruptly, her hands clenched so tightly her fingers hurt, saying: