Under the Volcano (58 page)

Suddenly the Consul thought he saw an enormous rooster flapping before him, clawing and crowing. He raised his hands and it merded on his face. He struck the returning Jefe de Jardineros straight between the eyes. ‘Give me those letters back!' he heard himself shouting at the Chief of Rostrums, but the radio drowned his voice, and now a peal of thunder drowned the radio. ‘You poxboxes. You coxcoxes. You killed that Indian. You tried to kill him and make it look like an accident,' he roared. ‘You're all in it. Then more of you came up and took his horse. Give me my papers back.'

‘Papers.
Cabrón
. You har no papers.' Straightening himself the Consul saw in the Chief of Rostrum's expression a hint of M. Laruelle and he struck at it. Then he saw himself the Chief of Gardens again and struck that figure; then in the Chief of Municipality the policeman Hugh had refrained from striking this afternoon and he struck this figure too. The clock outside quickly chimed seven times. The cock flapped before his eyes, blinding him. The Chief of Rostrums took him by the coat. Someone else seized him from behind. In spite of his struggles he was being dragged towards the door. The fair man who had turned up again helped shove him towards it; and Diosdado, who had vaulted ponderously over the bar; and A Few Fleas, who kicked him viciously on the shins. The Consul snatched a machete lying on a table near the entrance and brandished it wildly. ‘Give me back those letters!' he cried. Where was that bloody cock? He would chop off its head. He stumbled backwards out into the road. People taking tables laden with gaseosas in from the storm stopped to watch. The beggars turned their heads dully. The sentinel outside the barracks stood motionless. The Consul didn't know what he was saying: ‘Only the poor, only through God, only the people you wipe your feet on, the poor in spirit, old men carrying their fathers and philosophers weeping in the dust. America perhaps, Don Quixote –' he was still brandishing the sword, it was that sabre really, he thought, in María's room — ‘if only you'd stop interfering, stop walking
in your sleep, stop sleeping with my wife, only the beggars and the accursed.' The machete fell with a rattle. The Consul felt himself stumbling backwards until he fell over a tussock of grass. ‘You stole that horse,' he repeated.

The Chief of Rostrums was looking down at him. Sanabria stood by silent, grimly rubbing his cheek.'
Norteamericano
, eh,' said the Chief. ‘Inglés. You Jew.' He narrowed his eyes. ‘What the hell you think you do around here? You
pelado
, eh? It's no good for your health. I shoot de twenty people.' It was half a threat, half confidential. ‘We have found out — on the telephone — is it right? — that you are a criminal. You want to be a policeman? I make you policeman in Mexico.'

The Consul rose slowly to his feet, swaying. He caught sight of the horse, tethered near him. Only now he saw it more vividly and as a whole, electrified: the corded mouth, the shaved wooden pommel behind which tape was hanging, the saddlebags, the mats under the belt, the sore and the glossy shine on the hipbone, the number seven branded on the rump, the stud behind the saddlebuckle. glittering like a topaz in the light from the
cantina
. He staggered towards it.

‘I blow you wide open from your knees up, you Jew
chingao
,' warned the Chief of Rostrums, grasping him by the collar, and the Chief of Gardens, standing by, nodded gravely. The Consul, shaking himself free, tore frantically at the horse's bridle. The Chief of Rostrums stepped aside, hand on his holster. He drew his pistol. With his free hand he waved away some tentative onlookers. ‘I blow you wide open from your knees up, you
cabrón
,' he said, ‘you
pelado
.'

‘No, I wouldn't do that,' said the Consul quietly, turning round. ‘That's a Colt 17, isn't it? It throws a lot of steel shavings.'

The Chief of Rostrums pushed the Consul back out of the light, took two steps forward, and fired. Lightning flashed like an inchworm going down the sky and the Consul, reeling, saw above him for a moment the shape of Popocateped, plumed with emerald snow and drenched with brilliance. The Chief fired twice more, the shots spaced, deliberate. Thunderclaps crashed on the mountains and then at hand. Released, the horse reared;
tossing its head, it wheeled round and plunged neighing into the forest.

At first the Consul felt a queer relief. Now he realized he had been shot. He fell on one knee, then, with a groan, flat on his face in the grass. ‘Christ,' he remarked, puzzled, ‘this is a dingy way to die.'

A bell spoke out:

Dolente
…
dolorel

It was raining softly. Shapes hovered by him, holding his hand, perhaps still trying to pick his pockets, or to help, or merely curious. He could feel life slivering out of him like liver, ebbing into the tenderness of the grass. He was alone. Where was everybody? Or had there been no one? Then a face shone out of the gloom, a mask of compassion. It was the old fiddler, stooping over him. ‘
Compañero
—
' he began. Then he had vanished.

Presently the word
pelado
began to fill his whole consciousness. That had been Hugh's word for the thief: now someone had flung the insult at him. And it was as if, for a moment, he had become the
pelado
, the thief — yes, the pilferer of meaningless muddled ideas out of which his rejection of life had grown, who had worn his two or three little bowler hats, his disguises, over these abstractions: now the realest of them all was close. But someone had called him
compañero
too, which was better, much better. It made him happy. These thoughts drifting through his mind were accompanied by music he could hear only when he listened carefully. Mozart was it? The Siciliana. Finale of the D minor quartet by Moses. No, it was something funereal, of Gluçk's perhaps, from Alcestis. Yet there was a Bach-like quality to it. Bach? A clavichord, heard from far away, in England in the seventeenth century. England. The chords of a guitar too, half lost, mingled with the distant clamour of a waterfall and what sounded like the cries of love.

He was in Kashmir, he knew, lying in the meadows near running water among violets and trefoil, the Himalayas beyond, which made it all the more remarkable he should suddenly be setting out with Hugh and Yvonne to climb Popocateped. Already they had drawn ahead. ‘Can you pick bougainvillea?' he
heard Hugh say, and, ‘Be careful,' Yvonne replied, ‘it's got spikes on it and you have to look at everything to be sure there're no spiders.' ‘We shoota de espiders in Méjico,' another voice muttered. And with this Hugh and Yvonne had gone. He suspected they had not only climbed Popocatepetl but were by now far beyond it. Painfully he trudged the slope of the foothills toward Amecameca alone. With ventilated snow goggles, with alpenstock, with mittens and a wool cap pulled over his ears, with pockets full of dried prunes and raisins and nuts, with a jar of rice protruding from one coat pocket, and the Hotel Fausto's information from the other, he was utterly weighed down. He could go no farther. Exhausted, helpless, he sank to the ground. No one would help him even if they could. Now he was the one dying by the wayside where no good Samaritan would halt. Though it was perplexing there should be this sound of-laughter in his ears, of voices: ah, he was being rescued at last. He was in an ambulance shrieking through the jungle itself, racing uphill past the timberline toward the peak — and this was certainly one way to get there! — while those were friendly voices around him, Jacques's and Vigil's, they would make allowances, would set Hugh and Yvonne's minds at rest about him. ‘
No se puede vivir sin amar
,' they would say, which would explain everything, and he repeated this aloud. How could he have thought so evil of the world when succour was at hand all the time? And now he had reached the summit. Ah, Yvonne, sweetheart, forgive me I Strong hands lifted him. Opening his eyes, he looked down, expecting to see, below him, the magnificent jungle, the heights, Pico de Orizabe, Malinche, Cofre de Perote, like those peaks of his life conquered one after another before this greatest ascent of all had been successfully, if unconventionally, completed. But there was nothing there: no peaks, no life, no climb. Nor was this summit a summit exactly: it had no substance, no firm base. It was crumbling too, whatever it was, collapsing, while he was falling, falling into the volcano, he must have climbed it after all, though now there was this noise'of foisting lava in his ears, horribly, it was in eruption, yet no, it wasn't the volcano, the world itself was bursting, bursting into black spouts of villages catapulted into space, with himself falling through it all, through
the inconceivable pandemonium of a million tanks, through the blazing of ten million burning bodies, falling, into a forest, falling —

Suddenly he screamed, and it was as though this scream were being tossed from one tree to another, as its echoes returned, then, as though the trees themselves were crowding nearer, huddled together, closing over him, pitying…

Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.

¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDIN?

¿QUE ES SUYO?

!EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!

¹
Selected Letters of Malcolm Lory
, eds. Harvey Breit and Margerie Bonner Lowry (Cape, 1967)

²
Octavio Paz,
El laberinto de la soledad
(Fondo de Cultura Económica, México D.F., second edition, 1959)

³
Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry
, ed. Earle Birney (City Lights, San Francisco, 1962)

⁴
Who's Who in Twentieth-Century Literature
(Weidenfeld, 1976)

⁵
Henry Reed,
The Novel Since 1939
(British Council, 1946, p. 27)