Under the Volcano (14 page)

   
"This ought to be about the
place, if Alcapancingo's over there," Hugh said, "where Bernal Diaz
and his Tlaxcalans got across to beat up Quauhnahuac. Superb name for a
dance-band: Bernal Diaz and his Tlaxcalans... Or didn't you get around to
Prescott at the University of Hawaii?"
   
"Mm hm," Yvonne said,
meaning yes or no to the meaningless question, and peering down the ravine with
a shudder.
   
"I understand it made even old
Diaz's head swim."
   
"I shouldn't wonder."
   
"You can't see them, but it's
chock full of defunct newspapermen, still spying through keyholes and
persuading themselves they're acting in the best interests of democracy. But
I'd forgotten you didn't read the papers. Eh?" Hugh laughed.
"Journalism equals intellectual male prostitution of speech and writing,
Yvonne. That's one point on which I'm in complete agreement with Spengler.
Hullo." Hugh looked up suddenly at a sound, unpleasantly familiar, as of a
thousand carpets being simultaneously beaten in the distance: the uproar,
seeming to emanate from the direction of the volcanoes, which had almost
imperceptibly come into view on the horizon, was followed presently by the
prolonged twang-piiing of its echo.
   
"Target practice," Yvonne
said. "They're at it again."
   
Parachutes of smoke were drifting
over the mountains; they watched a minute in silence. Hugh sighed and started
to roll a cigarette.
   
"I had an English friend
fighting in Spain, and if he's dead I expect he's still there." Hugh
licked the fold of paper, sealed it and lit it, the cigarette drawing hot and
fast. "As a matter of fact he was reported dead twice but he turned up
again the last two times. He was there in thirty-six. While they were waiting
for Franco to attack he lay with his machine-gun in the library at University
City reading De Quincey, whom he hadn't read before. I may be exaggerating
about the machine-gun though: I don't think they had one between them. He was a
Communist and approximately the best man I've ever met. He had a taste for Vin
Rosé d'Anjou. He also had a dog named Harpo, back in London. You probably
wouldn't have expected a Communist to have a dog named Harpo--or would
you?"
   
"Or would you?"
   
Hugh put one foot up on the parapet
and regarded his cigarette that seemed bent, like humanity, on consuming itself
as quickly as possible.
   
"I had another friend who went
to China, but didn't know what to make of that, or they didn't of him, so he
went to Spain too as a volunteer. He was killed by a stray shell before seeing
any action at all. Both these fellows had perfectly good lives at home. They
hadn't robbed the bank." He was lamely silent.
   
"Of course we left Spain about a
year before it started, but Geoffrey used to say there was far too much
sentiment about this whole business of going to die for the Loyalists. In fact,
he said he thought it would be much better if the Fascists just won and got it
over with--"
   
"He has a new line now. He says
when the Fascists win there'll only be a sort of
 
'freezing' of culture in Spain--by the way,
is that the moon up there?--well, freezing anyway. Which will presumably thaw
at some future date when it will be discovered, if you please, simply to have
been in a state of suspended animation. I dare say it's true as far as that
goes. Incidentally, did you know I was in Spain?"
   
"No," Yvonne said,
startled.
   
"Oh yes. I fell out of an
ambulance there with only two dozen beer bottles and five journalists on top of
me, all heading for Paris. That wasn't so very long after I last saw you. The
thing was, just as the Madrid show was really getting under way, as it turned
out, it seemed all up, so the Globe told me to beat it... And like a heel I
went, though they sent me back again afterwards for a time. I didn't go to
China until after Brihuega."
   
Yvonne gave him an odd look, then
said:
   
"Hugh, you're not thinking of
going back to Spain now are you, by any chance?"
   
Hugh shook his head, laughing: he
meticulously dropped his ravaged cigarette down the ravine. "¿Cui bono? To
stand in for the noble army of pimps and experts, who've already gone home to
practise the little sneers with which they propose to discredit the whole
thing--the first moment it becomes fashionable not to be a Communist fence. No,
muchas gracias. And I'm completely through with newspaper work, it isn't a
pose." Hugh put his thumbs under his belt. "So--since they got the
Internationals out five weeks ago, on the twenty-eighth of September to be
precise--two days before Chamberlain went to Godesberg and neatly crimped the
Ebro offensive--and with half the last bunch of volunteers still rotting in
goal in Perpignan, how do you suppose one could get in anyway, at this late
date?"
   
"Then what did Geoffrey mean by
saying that you 'wanted action' and all that?... And what's this mysterious
other purpose you came down here for?"
   
"It's really rather
tedious," Hugh answered. "As a matter of fact I'm going back to sea
for a while. If all goes well I'll be sailing from Vera Cruz in about a week.
As quartermaster, you knew I had an A.B.'s ticket didn't you? Well, I might
have got a ship in Galveston but it's not so easy as it used to be. Anyway
it'll be more amusing to sail from Vera Cruz. Havana, perhaps Nassau and then,
you know, down to the West Indies and São Paulo. I've always wanted to take a
look at Trinidad--might be some real fun coming out of Trinidad one day. Geoff
helped me with a couple of introductions but no more than that, I didn't want
to make him responsible. No, I'm merely fed to the teeth with myself, that's
all. Try persuading the world not to cut its throat for half a decade or more,
like me, under one name or another, and it'll begin to dawn on you that even
your behaviour's part of its plan. I ask you, what do we know?"
   
And Hugh thought: the
 
S.S. Noemijolea , 6,000 tons, leaving Vera
Cruz on the night of 13-14 (?) November 1938, with antimony and coffee, bound
for Freetown, British West Africa, will proceed thither, oddly enough, from
Tzucox on the Yucatan coast, and also in a north-easterly direction: in spite
of which she will still emerge through the passages named Windward and Crooked
into the Atlantic Ocean: where after many days out of sight of land she will
make eventually the mountainous landfall of Madeira: whence, avoiding Port
Lyautey and carefully keeping her destination in Sierra Leone some 1,800 miles
to the south-east, she will pass, with luck, through the straits of Gibraltar.
Whence again, negotiating, it is profoundly to be hoped, Franco's blockade, she
will proceed with the utmost caution into the Mediterranean Sea, leaving first
Cape de Gata, then Cape de Palos, then Cape de la Nao, well aft: thence, the
Pityusae Isles sighted, she will roll through the Gulf of Valencia and so
northwards past Carlos de la Rápita, and the mouth of the Ebro until the rocky
Garraf coast looms abaft the beam where finally, still rolling, at Vallcara,
twenty miles south of Barcelona, she will discharge her cargo of T.N.T. for the
hard-pressed Loyalist armies and probably be blown to smithereens--
   
Yvonne was staring down the barranca,
her hair hanging over her face: "I know Geoff sounds pretty foul
sometimes," she was saying, "but there's one point where I do agree
with him, these romantic notions about the International Brigade--"
   
But Hugh was standing at the wheel:
Potato Firmin or Columbus in reverse: below him the foredeck of the
 
Noemijolea
 
lay over in the blue trough and spray slowly exploded through the lee
scuppers into the eyes of the seaman chipping a winch: on the forecastle head
the look-out echoed one bell, struck by Hugh a moment before, and the seaman
gathered up his tools: Hugh's heart was lifting with the ship, he was aware
that the officer on duty had changed from white to blue for winter but at the
same time of exhilaration, the limitless purification of the sea--
   
Yvonne flung back her hair
impatiently and stood up. "If they'd stayed out of it the war would have
been over long ago!"
   
"Well, there ain't no brigade no
mo," Hugh said absently, for it was not a ship he was steering now, but
the world, out of the Western Ocean of its misery. "If the paths of glory
lead but to the grave--I once made such an excursion into poetry--then Spain's
the grave where England's glory led."
   
"Fiddlesticks!"
   
Hugh suddenly laughed, not loud,
probably at nothing at all: he straightened himself with a swift movement and
jumped on the parapet.
   
"Hugh!"
   
"My God! Horses," Hugh
said, glancing and stretching himself to his full mental height of six feet two
(he was five feet eleven).
   
"Where?"
   
He was pointing. "Over
there."
   
"Of course," Yvonne said
slowly, "I'd forgotten--they belong to the Casino de la Selva: they put
them out there to pasture or something. If we go up the hill a ways we'll come
to the place--"
   
... On a gentle slope to their left
now, colts with glossy coats were rolling in the grass. They turned off the
Calle Nicaragua along a narrow shady lane leading down one side of the paddock.
The stables were part of what appeared to be a model dairy farm. It stretched
away behind the stables on level ground where tall English-looking trees lined
either side of a grassy wheel-rutted avenue. In the distance a few rather large
cows, which, however, like Texas longhorns, bore a disturbing resemblance to
stags (you've got your cattle again, I see, Yvonne said) were lying under the
trees. A row of shining milkpails stood outside the stables in the sun. A sweet
smell of milk and vanilla and wild flowers hung about the quiet place. And the
sun was over all.
   
"Isn't it an adorable
farm?" Yvonne said. "I believe it's some government experiment. I'd
love to have a farm like that."
   
"--perhaps you'd like to hire a
couple of those greater kudus over there instead?"
   
Their horses proved two pesos an hour
apiece. "Muy correcto," the stable boy's dark eyes flashed
good-humouredly at Hugh's boots as he turned swiftly to adjust Yvonne's deep
leather stirrups. Hugh didn't know why, but this lad reminded him of how, in
Mexico City, if you stand at a certain place on the Paseo de la Reforma in the
early morning, suddenly everyone in sight will seem to be running, laughing, to
work, in the sunlight, past the statue of Pasteur... "Muy
incorrecto," Yvonne surveyed her slacks: she swung, swung twice into the
saddle. "We've never ridden together before, have we?" She leaned
forward to pat her mare's neck as they swayed forward.
   
They ambled up the lane, accompanied
by two foals, which had followed their mothers out of the paddock, and an
affectionate scrubbed woolly white dog belonging to the farm. After a while the
lane branched off into a main road. They seemed to be in Alcapancingo itself, a
sort of straggling suburb. The watchtower, nearer, taller, bloomed above a
wood, through which they just made out the high prison walls. On the other
side, to their left, Geoffrey's house came in sight, almost a bird's-eye view,
the bungalow crouching, very tiny, before the trees, the long garden below
descending steeply, parallel with which on different levels obliquely climbing
the hill, all the other gardens of the contiguous residences, each with its
cobalt oblong of swimming-pool, also descended steeply towards the barranca,
the land sweeping away at the top of the Calle Nicaragua back up to the pre-eminence
of Cortez Palace. Could that white dot down there be Geoffrey himself? Possibly
to avoid coming to a place where, by the entrance to the public garden, they
must be almost directly opposite the house, they trotted into another lane that
inclined to their right. Hugh was pleased to see that Yvonne rode
cowboy-fashion, jammed to the saddle, and not, as Juan Cerillo put it, "as
in gardens." The prison was now behind them and he imagined themselves
jogging into enormous focus for the inquisitive binoculars up there on the
watchtower; "Guapa," one policeman would say. "Ah, muy
hermosa," another might call, delighted with Yvonne and smacking his lips.
The world was always within the binoculars of the police. Meantime the foals,
which perhaps were not fully aware that a road was a means of getting somewhere
and not, like a field, something to roll on or eat, kept straying into the
undergrowth on either hand. Then the mares whinnied after them anxiously and
they scrambled back again. Presently the mares grew tired of whinnying, so in a
way he had learned Hugh whistled instead. He had pledged himself to guard the
foals but actually the dog was guarding all of them. Evidently trained to
detect snakes, he would run ahead then double back to make sure all were safe
before loping on once more. Hugh watched him a moment. It was certainly hard to
reconcile this dog with the pariahs one saw in town, those dreadful creatures
that seemed to shadow his brother everywhere.
   
"You do sound astonishingly like
a horse," Yvonne said suddenly. "Wherever did you learn that?"
   
"Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wheeee-u," Hugh whistled again.
"In Texas." Why had he said Texas? He had learned the trick in Spain,
from Juan Cerillo. Hugh took off his jacket and laid it across the horse's withers
in front of the saddle. Turning round as the foals came obediently plunging out
of the bushes he added: