Under the Volcano (53 page)

Popocatepetl towered through the window, its immense flanks partly hidden by rolling thunderheads; its peak blocking the sky, it appeared almost right overhead, the
barranca
, the Farolito, directly beneath it. Under the volcano! It was not for nothing the ancients had placed Tartarus under Mt Aetna, nor within it, the monster Typhoeus, with his hundred heads and —relatively — fearful eyes and voices.

Turning, the Consul took his drink over to the open door. A mercurochrome agony down the west. He stared out at Parián. There, beyond a grass plot, was the inevitable square with its little public garden. To the left, at the edge of the
barranca
, a soldier slept under a tree. Half facing him, to the right, on an incline, stood what seemed at first sight a ruined monastery or waterworks. This was the grey turreted barracks of the Military Police he had mentioned to Hugh as the reputed Unión Militar headquarters. The building, which also included the prison, glowered at him with one eye, over an archway set in the forehead of its low façade: a clock pointing to six. On either side of the archway the barred windows in the Comisario de Policía and the Policía de Seguridad looked down on a group of soldiers talking, their bugles slung over their shoulders with bright green lariats. Other soldiers, puttees flapping, stumbled at sentry duty. Under the archway, in the entrance to the courtyard, a corporal was working at a table, on which stood an unlighted oil lamp. He was inscribing something in copperplate handwriting, the Consul knew, for his rather unsteady course hither — not so
unsteady however as in the square at Quauhnahuac earlier, but still disgraceful – had brought him almost on top of him. Through the archway, grouped round the courtyard beyond, the Consul could make out dungeons with wooden bars like pigpens. In one of them a man was gesticulating. Elsewhere, to the left, were scattered huts of dark thatch, merging into the jungle which on all sides surrounded the town, glowing now in the unnatural livid light of approaching storm.

A Few Fleas having returned, the Consul went to the bar for his change. The boy, not hearing apparently, slopped some mescal into his glass from the beautiful gourd. Handing it back he upset the toothpicks. The Consul said nothing further about the change for the moment. However he made a mental note to order for his next drink something costing more than the fifty centavos he had already laid down. In this way he saw himself gradually recovering his money. He argued absurdly with himself that it was necessary to remain for this alone. He knew there was another reason yet couldn't place his finger on it. Every time the thought of Yvonne recurred to him he was aware of this. It seemed indeed then as though he must stay here for her sake, not because she would
follow
him here — no, she had gone, he'd let her go finally now, Hugh might come, though never she, not this time, obviously she would return home and his mind could not travel beyond that point — but for something else. He saw his change lying on the counter, the price of the mescal not deducted from it. He pocketed it all and came to the door again. Now the situation was reversed; the boy would have to keep an eye on
him
. It lugubriously diverted him to imagine, for A Few Fleas' benefit, though half aware the preoccupied boy was not watching him at all, he had assumed the blue expression peculiar to a certain type of drunkard, tepid with two drinks grudgingly on credit, gazing out of an empty saloon, an expression that pretends he hopes help, any kind of help, may be on its way, friends, any kind of friends coming to rescue him. For him life is always just around the corner, in the form of another drink at a new bar. Yet he really wants none of these things. Abandoned by his friends, as they by him, he knows that nothing but the crushing look of a creditor lives round that corner. Neither has he fortified
himself sufficiently to borrow more money, nor obtain more credit; nor does he like the liquor next door anyway. Why am I here, says the silence, what have I done, echoes the emptiness, why have I ruined myself in this wilful manner, chuckles the money in the till, why have I been brought so low, wheedles the thoroughfare, to which the only answer was — The square gave him no answer. The little town, that had seemed empty, was filling up as evening wore on. Occasionally a moustachioed officer swaggered past, with a heavy gait, slapping his swagger stick on his leggings. People were returning from the cemeteries, though perhaps the procession would not pass for some time. A ragged platoon of soldiers were marching across the square. Bugles blared. The police too — those who were not on strike, or had been pretending to be on duty at the graves, or the deputies, it was not easy to get the distinction between the police and the military clear in one's mind either — had arrived in force.
Con
German friends, doubtless. The corporal was still writing at his table; it oddly reassured him. Two or three drinkers pushed their way past him into the Farolito, tasselled
sombreros
on the backs of their heads, holsters slapping their thighs. Two beggars had arrived and were taking up their posts outside the bar, under the tempestuous sky. One, legless, was dragging himself through the dust like a poor seal. But the other beggar, who boasted one leg, stood up stiffly, proudly, against the
cantina
wall as if waiting to be shot. Then this beggar with one leg leaned forward: he dropped a coin into the legless man's outstretched hand. There were tears in the first beggar's eyes. The Consul now observed that on his extreme right some unusual animals resembling geese, but large as camels, and skinless men, without heads, upon stilts, whose animated entrails jerked along the ground, were issuing out of the forest path the way he had come. He shut his eyes from this and when he opened them someone who looked like a policeman was leading a horse up the path, that was all. He laughed, despite the policeman, then stopped. For he saw that the face of the reclining beggar was slowly changing to Señora Gregorio's, and now in turn to his mother's face, upon which appeared an expression of infinite pity and supplication.

Closing his eyes again, standing there, glass in hand, he thought for a minute with a freezing detached almost amused calm of the dreadful night inevitably awaiting him whether he drank much more or not, his room shaking with daemonic orchestras, the snatches of fearful tumultuous sleep, interrupted by voices which were really dogs barking, or by his own name being continually repeated by imaginary parties arriving, the vicious shouting, the strumming, the slamming, the pounding, the battling with insolent archfiends, the avalanche breaking down the door, the proddings from under the bed, and always, outside, the cries, the wailing, the terrible music, the dark's spinets: he returned to the bar.

Diosdado, the Elephant, had just entered from the back. The Consul watched him discard his black coat, hang it in the closet, then feel in the breast pocket of his spotless white shirt for a pipe protruding from it. He took this out and began to fill it from a package of Country Club el Bueno Tono tobacco. The Consul remembered now about his pipe: here it was, no doubt about that.

‘
Sí, sí, mistair
,' he replied, listening with bent head to the Consul's query. ‘
Claro
. No — my ah peeper no
Inglese
. Monterey peeper. You were — ah –
borracho
one day then.
¿No señor
?'

‘
¿Como no
?' said the Consul.

‘Twice a day.' ‘You was dronk three times a day,' Diosdado said, and his look, the insult, the implied extent of his downfall, penetrated the Consul. ‘Then you'll be going back to America now,' he added, rummaging behind the bar.

‘I — no—
por qué
?'

Diosdado suddenly slapped a fat package of envelopes fastened with elastic on the bar counter.‘
¿— es suyo
?' he asked directly.

Where are the letters Geoffrey Firmin the letters the letters she wrote till her heart broke
? Here were the letters, here and nowhere else: these were the letters and this the Consul knew immediately without examining the envelopes. When he spoke he could not recognize his own voice:

‘
Sí, señor, muchas gracias
,' he said.

‘
De nada, señor
.' The Godgiven turned away.

La rame inutile fatigua vainement une mer immobile
… The Consul could not move for a full minute. He could not even
make a move toward a drink. Then he began to trace sideways in spilled liquor a little map on the bar. Diosdado came back and watched with interest.‘
España
,' the Consul said, then his Spanish failing him, ‘You are Spanish,
señor
?'

‘
Sí, sí, señor, sí
,' said Diosdado, watching, but in a new tone. ‘
Español. España
.'

‘These letters you gave me — see? — are from my wife, my
esposa. ¿Claro
? This is where we met. In Spain. You recognize it, your old home, you know Andalusia? That, up there, that's the Guadalquivir. Beyond there, the Sierra Morena. Down there's Almería. Those,' he traced with his finger, ‘lying between, are the Sierra Nevada mountains. And there's Granada. That is the place. The very place we met.' The Consul smiled.

‘Granada,' said Diosdado, sharply, in a different, harder pronunciation to the Consul's. He gave him a searching, an important, suspicious look, then left him again. Now he was speaking to a group at the other end of the bar. Faces were turned in the Consul's direction.

The Consul carried another drink with Yvonne's letters into an inner room, one of the boxes in the Chinese puzzle. He hadn't remembered before they were framed in dull glass, like cashiers' offices in a bank. In this room he was not really surprised to find the old Tarascan woman of the Bella Vista this morning. Her tequila, surrounded by dominoes, was set before her on the round table. Her chicken pecked among them. The Consul wondered if they were her own; or was it just necessary for her to have dominoes wherever she happened to be? Her stick with the claw handle hung, as though alive, on the edge of the table. The Consul moved to her, drank half his mescal, took off his glasses, then slipped the elastic from the package.

— ‘Do you remember tomorrow?' he read. No, he thought; the words sank like stones in his mind. — It was a fact that he was losing touch with his situation… He was dissociated from himself, and at the same time he saw this plainly, the shock of receiving the letters having in a sense waked him, if only, so to say, from one somnambulism into another; he was drunk, he was sober, he had a hangover; all at once; it was after six in the evening, yet whether it was being in the Farolito, or the presence of
the old woman in this glass-framed room where an electric light was burning, he seemed back in the early morning again: it was almost as if he were yet another kind of drunkard, in different circumstances, in another country, to whom something quite different was happening: he was like a man who gets up half stupefied with liquor at dawn, chattering, ‘Jesus this is the kind of fellow I am, Ugh! Ugh!' to see his wife off by an early bus, though it is too late, and there is the note on the breakfast table. ‘Forgive me for being hysterical yesterday, such an outburst was certainly not excused on any grounds of your having hurt me, don't forget to bring in the milk,' beneath which he finds written, almost as an afterthought: ‘Darling, we can't go on like this, it's too awful, I'm leaving –' and who, instead of perceiving the whole significance of this, remembers incongruously he told the barman at too great length last night how somebody's house burned down — and why has he told him where he lives, now the police will be able to find out — and why is the barman's name Sherlock? an unforgettable name! — and having a glass of port and water and three aspirin, which make him sick, reflects that he has five hours before the pubs open when he must return to that same bar and apologize… But where did I put my cigarette? and why is my glass of port under the bathtub? and was that an explosion I heard, somewhere in the house?

And encountering his accusing eyes in another mirror within the little room, the Consul had the queer passing feeling he'd risen in bed to do this, that he had sprung up and must gibber ‘Coriolanus is dead!' or ‘muddle muddle muddle' or ‘I think it. was, Oh! Oh!' or something really senseless like ‘buckets, buckets, millions of buckets in the soup!' and that he would now (though he was sitting quite calmly in the Farolito) relapse once more upon the pillows to watch, shaking in impotent terror at himself, the beards and eyes form in the curtains, or fill the space between the wardrobe and the ceiling, and hear, from the street, the soft padding of the eternal ghostly policeman outside —

‘Do you remember tomorrow? It is our wedding anniversary… I have not had one word from you since I left. God, it is this silence that frightens me.'

The Consul drank some more mescal.

‘It is this silence that frightens me — this silence –'

The Consul read this sentence over and over again, the same sentence, the same letter, all of the letters vain as those arriving on shipboard in port for one lost at sea, because he found some difficulty in focusing, the words kept blurring and dissembling, his own name starting out at him: but the mescal had brought him in touch with his situation again to the extent that he did not now need to comprehend any meaning in the words beyond their abject confirmation of his own lostness, his own fruitless selfish ruin, now perhaps finally self-imposed, his brain, before this cruelly disregarded evidence of what heartbreak he had caused
her
, at an agonized standstill.

‘It is this silence that frightens me. I have pictured all sorts of tragic things befalling you, it is as though you were away at war and I were waiting, waiting for news of you, for the letter, the telegram… but no war could have this power to so chill and terrify my heart. I send you all my love and my whole heart and all my thoughts and prayers.' — The Consul was aware, drinking, that the woman with the dominoes was trying to attract his attention, opening her mouth and pointing into it: now she was subtly moving round the table nearer him. — ‘Surely you must have thought a great deal of
us
, of what we built together, of how mindlessly we destroyed the structure and the beauty but yet could not destroy the memory of that beauty. It has been this which has haunted me day and night. Turning I see us in a hundred places with a hundred smiles. I come into a street, and you are there. I creep at night to bed and you are waiting for me. What is there in life besides the person whom one adores and the life one can build with that person? For the first time I understand the meaning of suicide… God, how pointless and empty the world is I Days filled with cheap and tarnished moments succeed each other, restless and haunted nights follow in bitter routine: the sun shines without brightness, and the moon rises without light. My heart has the taste of ashes, and my throat is tight and weary with weeping. What is a lost soul? It is one that has turned from its true path and is groping in the darkness of remembered ways –'