Under the Volcano (11 page)

   
"I say I say what's the matter
there?" The English "King's Parade" voice, scarcely above him,
called out from behind the steering wheel, the Consul saw now, of an extremely
long low car drawn up beside him, murmurous: an M. G. Magna, or some such.
   
"Nothing." The Consul
sprang to his feet instantly sober as a judge. "Absolutely all
right."
   
"Can't be all right, you were
lying right down in the road there, what?" The English face, now turned up
toward him, was rubicund, merry, kindly, but worried, above the English striped
tie, mnemonic of a fountain in a great court.
   
The Consul brushed the dust from his
clothes; he sought for wounds in vain; there was not a scratch. He saw the
fountain distinctly. Might a soul bathe there and be clean or slake its
drought?
   
"All right, apparently," he
said, "thanks very much."
   
"But damn it all I say you were
lying right down in the road there, might have run over you, there must be
something wrong, what? No?" The Englishman switched his engine off,
"I say, haven't I seen you before or something."
   
"Trinity." The Consul found
his own voice becoming involuntarily a little more "English."
"Unless--"
   
"Cams."
   
"But you're wearing a Trinity
tie--" the Consul remarked with a polite note of triumph.
   
"Trinity?... Yes. It's my
cousin's, as a matter of fact." The Englishman peered down his chin at the
tie, his red merry face become a shade redder. "We're going to
Guatemala... Wonderful country this. Pity about all this oil business, isn't
it? Bad show.--Are you sure there's no bones broken or anything, old man?"
   
"No. There are no bones
broken," the Consul said. But he was trembling.
   
The Englishman leaned forward
fumbling as for the engine switch again. "Sure you're all right? We're
staying at the Bella Vista Hotel, not leaving until this afternoon. I could
take you along there for a little shuteye... Deuced nice pub I must say but
deuced awful row going on all night. I suppose you were at the ball--is that it?
Going the wrong way though, aren't you? I always keep a bottle of something in
the car for an emergency... No. Not Scotch. Irish. Burke's Irish. Have a nip?
   
But perhaps you'd--"
   
" Ah..." The Consul was
taking a long draught. "Thanks a million."
 
  
"Go ahead... Go ahead..."
   
"Thanks." The Consul handed
back the bottle. "A million."
   
"Well, cheerio." The
Englishman restarted his engine. "Cheerio man. Don't go lying down in
roads. Bless my soul you'll get run over or run in or something, damn it all.
Dreadful road too. Splendid weather, isn't it?" The Englishman drove away
up the hill, waving his hand.
   
"If you're ever in any kind of a
jam yourself," the Consul cried after him recklessly, "I'm--wait,
here's my card--"
   
"Bungho!"
   
--It was not Dr. Vigil's card the
Consul still held in his hand: but it was certainly not his own.
 
Compliments of the Venezuelan
Government.
 
What was this?
 
The Venezuelan Government will
appreciate...
 
Wherever could this have
sprung from?
 
The Venezuelan Government
will appreciate an acknowledgement to the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores.
Caracas, Venezuela.
 
Well, now,
Caracas--well, why not?
   
Erect as Jim Taskerson, he thought,
married now too, poor devil--restored, the Consul glided down the Calle Nicaragua.
   
Within the house there was the sound
of bathwater running out: he made a lightning toilet. Intercepting Concepta
(though not before he had added a tactful strychnine to her burden) with the
breakfast tray, the Consul, innocently as a man who has committed a murder
while dummy at bridge, entered Yvonne's room. It was bright and tidy. A gaily
coloured Oaxaquenan serape covered the low bed where Yvonne lay half asleep
with her head resting on one hand.
   
"How!"
   
"How!"
   
A magazine she'd been reading dropped
to the floor. The Consul, inclined slightly forward over the orange juice and
ranchero eggs, advanced boldly through a diversity of powerless emotions.
   
"Are you comfortable
there?"
   
"Fine, thanks." Yvonne
accepted the tray smiling. The magazine was the amateur astronomy one she
subscribed to and from the cover the huge domes of an observatory, haloed in
gold and standing out in black silhouette like roman helmets, regarded the
Consul waggishly. ""The Mayas'," he read aloud, "'were far
advanced in observational astronomy. But they did not suspect a Copernican
system.'" He threw the magazine back on the bed and sat easily in his
chair, crossing his legs, the tips of his fingers meeting in a strange calm,
his strychnine on the floor beside him. "Why should they?... What I like
though are the 'vague' years of the old Mayans. And their 'pseudo years,'
mustn't overlook them! And their delicious names for the months. Pop. Uo. Zip.
Zotz. Tzec. Xul. Yaxkin."
   
"Mac," Yvonne was laughing.
"Isn't there one called Mac?"
   
"There's Yax and Zac. And Uayeb:
I like that one most of all, the month that only lasts five days."
   
"In receipt of yours dated Zip
the first I--"
   
"But where does it all get you
in the end?" The Consul sipped his strychnine that had yet to prove its
adequacy as a chaser to the Burke's Irish (now perhaps in the garage at the
Bella Vista). "The knowledge, I mean. One of the first penances I ever
imposed on myself was to learn the philosophical section of War and Peace by
heart. That was of course before I could dodge about in the rigging of the
Cabbala like a St Jago's monkey. But then the other day I realized that the
only thing I remembered about the whole book was that Napoleon's leg
twitched--"
   
"Aren't you going to eat
anything yourself? You must be starved."
   
"I partook."
   
Yvonne who was herself breakfasting
heartily asked:
   
"How's the market?"
   
"Tom's a bit fed up because
they've confiscated some property of his in Tlaxcala, or Puebla, he thought he'd
got away with. They haven't my number yet, I'm not sure where I really do stand
in that regard, now I've resigned the service--"
   
"So you--"
   
"By the by I must apologize for
still being in these duds--dusty too--bad show, I might have put on a blazer at
least for your benefit!" The Consul smiled inwardly at his accent, now
become for undivulgeable reasons almost uncontrolledly "English."
   
"So you really have
resigned!"
   
"Oh absolutely! I'm thinking of
becoming a Mexican subject, of going to live among the Indians, like William
Blackstone. But for one's habit of making money, don't you know, all very
mysterious to you, I suppose, outside looking in--" The Consul stared
round mildly at the pictures on the wall, mostly water-colours by his mother depicting
scenes in Kashmir: a small grey stone enclosure encompassing several birch
trees and a taller poplar was Lalla Rookh's tomb, a picture of wild torrential
scenery, vaguely Scottish, the gorge, the ravine at Gugganvir; the Shalimar
looked more like the Cam than ever: a distant view of Nanga Parbat from Sind
valley could have been painted on the porch here, Nanga Parbat might well have
passed for old Popo..."--outside looking in," he repeated, "the
result of so much worry, speculation, foresight, alimony, seigniorage--"
   
"But--" Yvonne had laid
aside her breakfast tray and taken a cigarette from her own case beside the bed
and lit it before the Consul could help her.
   
"One might have already done
so!"
   
Yvonne lay back in bed smoking... In
the end the Consul scarcely heard what she was saying--calmly, sensibly,
courageously--for his awareness of an extraordinary thing that was happening in
his mind. He saw in a flash, as if these were ships on the horizon, under a
black lateral abstract sky, the occasion for desperate celebration (it didn't
matter he might be the only one to celebrate it) receding, while at the same
time, coming closer, what could only be, what was--Good God!--his salvation...
   
" Now? " he found he had
said gently. "But we can't very well go away now can we, what with Hugh
and you and me and one thing and another, don't you think? It's a little
unfeasible, isn't it?" (For his salvation might not have seemed so large
with menace had not the Burke's Irish whiskey chosen suddenly to tighten, if
almost imperceptibly, a screw. It was the soaring of this moment, conceived of
as continuous, that felt itself threatened.) "Isn't it?" he repeated.
   
"I'm sure Hugh'd
understand--"
   
"But that's not quite the
point!"
   
"Geoffrey, this house has become
somehow evil--"
   
"--I mean it's rather a dirty
trick--"
   
Oh Jesus... The Consul slowly assumed
an expression intended to be slightly bantering and at the same time assured,
indicative of a final consular sanity. For this was it. Goethe's church bell
was looking him straight between the eyes; fortunately, he was prepared for it.
"I remember a fellow I helped out in New York once," he was saying
with apparent irrelevance, "in some way, an out of work actor he was. 'Why
Mr Firmin,' he said, 'it isn't naturel here.' That's exactly how he pronounced
it: naturel. "Man wasn't intended for it,' he complained. 'All the streets
are the same as this Tenth or Eleventh Street in Philadelphia too...'" The
Consul could feel his English accent leaving him and that of a Bleecker Street
mummer taking its place. "'But in Newcastle, Delaware, now that's another
thing again! Old cobbled roads... And Charleston: old Southern stuff... But oh
my God this city--the noise! the chaos! If I could only get out! If only I knew
where you could get to!'" The Consul concluded with passion, with anguish,
his voice quivering--though as it happened he had never met any such person,
and the whole story had been told him by Tom, he shook violently with the
emotion of the poor actor.
   
"What's the use of
escaping," he drew the moral with complete seriousness, "from
ourselves?"
   
Yvonne had sunk back in bed
patiently. But now she stretched forward and stabbed out her cigarette in the
tray of a tall grey tin-work ashstand shaped like an abstract representation of
a swan. The swan's neck had become slightly unravelled but it bowed gracefully,
tremulously at her touch as she answered:
   
"All right, Geoffrey: suppose we
forget it until you're feeling better: we can cope with it in a day or two,
when you're sober."
   
"But good lord!"
   
The Consul sat perfectly still
staring at the floor while the enormity of the insult passed into his soul. As
if, as if, he were not sober now! Yet there was some elusive subtlety in the
impeachment that still escaped him. For he was not sober. No, he was not, not
at this very moment he wasn't! But what had that to do with a minute before, or
half an hour ago? And what right had Yvonne to assume it, assume either that he
was not sober now, or that, far worse, in a day or two he would be sober? And
even if he were not sober now, by what fabulous stages, comparable indeed only
to the paths and spheres of the Holy Cabbala itself, had he reached this stage
again, touched briefly once before this morning, this stage at which alone he
could, as she put it, "cope," this precarious precious stage, so
arduous to maintain, of being drunk in which alone he was sober! What right had
she, when he had sat suffering the tortures of the damned and the madhouse on
her behalf for fully twenty-five minutes on end without having a decent drink,
even to hint that he was anything but, to her eyes, sober? Ah, a woman could
not know the perils, the complications, yes, the importance of a drunkard's
life! From what conceivable standpoint of rectitude did she imagine she could
judge what was anterior to her arrival? And she knew nothing whatever of what
all too recently he had gone through, his fall in the Calle Nicaragua, his
aplomb, coolness, even bravery there--the Burke's Irish whiskey! What a world!
And the trouble was she had now spoiled the moment. Because the Consul now felt
that he might have been capable, remembering Yvonne's "perhaps I'll have
one after breakfast," and all that implied, of saying, in a minute (but
for her remark and yes, in spite of any salvation), "Yes, by all means you
are right: let us go!" But who could agree with someone who was so certain
you were going to be sober the day after tomorrow? It wasn't as though either,
upon the most superficial plane, it were not well known that no one could tell
when he was drunk. Just like the Taskersons: God bless them. He was not the
person to be seen reeling about in the street. True he might lie down in the
street, if need be, like a gentleman, but he would not reel. Ah, what a world
it was, that trampled down the truth and drunkards alike! A world full of
bloodthirsty people, no less! Bloodthirsty, did I hear you say bloodthirsty,
Commander Firmin?
   
"But my lord, Yvonne, surely you
know by this time I can't get drunk however much I drink," he said almost
tragically, taking an abrupt swallow of strychnine. "Why, do you think
I
 
like
 
swilling down this awful
 
nux
vomica