Under the Volcano (16 page)

   
"God, that's cold," Hugh
said, "good though." The beer had a piercing taste, half metallic,
half earthy, like distilled loam. It was so cold that it hurt.
   
"Buenos días, muchacha!"
Yvonne, tankard in hand, was smiling down at the child with the armadillo. The
gamekeeper vanished through an ostiole back into the machinery; closing away
its clamour from them, as might an engineer on shipboard. The child was
crouching on her haunches holding the armadillo and apprehensively eyeing the
dog, who however lay at a safe distance watching the foals inspect the rear of
the plant. Each time the armadillo ran off, as if on tiny wheels, the little
girl would catch it by its long whip of a tail and turn it over. How
astonishingly soft and helpless it appeared then! Now she righted the creature
and set it going once more, some engine of destruction perhaps that after
millions of years had come to this."¿Cuánto?" Yvonne asked. .
   
Catching the animal again the child
piped:
   
"Cincuenta centavos?"
   
"You don't really want it, do
you?" Hugh--like General Winfield Scott, he thought privately, after
emerging from the ravines of the Cerro Gordo--was sitting with one leg athwart
the pommel. Yvonne nodded in jest: "I'd adore it. It's perfectly
sweet." "You couldn't make a pet of it. Neither can the kid: that's
why she wants to sell it." Hugh sipped his beer. "I know about
armadillos."
"Oh so do I!" Yvonne shook her head mockingly, opening her eyes very
wide. "But everything!"
   
"Then you know that if you let
the thing loose in your garden it'll merely tunnel down into the ground and
never come back."
   
Yvonne was still half-mockingly
shaking her head, her eyes wide. "Isn't he a darling?"
   
Hugh swung his leg back and sat now
with his tankard propped on the pommel looking down at the creature with its
big mischievous nose, iguana's tail, and helpless speckled belly, a Martian
infant's toy. "No, muchas gracias," he said firmly to the little girl
who, indifferent, did not retreat. "It'll not only never come back,
Yvonne, but if you try to stop it it will do its damnedest to pull you down the
hole too." He turned to her, eyebrows raised, and for a time they watched
each other in silence. "As your friend W. H. Hudson, I think it was, found
out to his cost," Hugh added. A leaf fell off a tree somewhere behind them
with a crash, like a sudden footstep. Hugh drank a long cold draught.
"Yvonne," he said, "do you mind if I ask you straight out if you
are divorced from Geoff or not?"
   
Yvonne choked on her beer; she wasn't
holding the reins at all, which were looped round her pommel, and her horse
gave a small lurch forward, then halted before Hugh had time to reach for the
bridle.
   
"Do you mean to go back to him
or what? Or have you already gone back?" Hugh's mare had also taken a
sympathetic step forward. "Forgive my being so blunt, but I feel in a
horribly false position.--I'd like to know precisely what the situation
is."
   
"So would I." Yvonne did
not look at him.
   
"Then you don't know whether you
have divorced him or not?"
   
"Oh, I've--divorced him,"
she answered unhappily.
   
"But you don't know whether
you've gone back to him or not?"
   
"Yes. No... Yes. I've gone back
to him all right all right." Hugh was silent while another leaf fell,
crashed and hung tilted, balanced in the undergrowth. "Then wouldn't it be
rather simpler for you if I went away immediately," he asked her gently,
"instead of staying on a little while as I'd hoped?--I'd been thinking of
going to Oaxaca for a day or two anyhow--"
   
Yvonne had raised her head at the
word Oaxaca. "Yes," she said. "Yes, it might. Though, oh Hugh, I
don't like to say it, only--"
   
"Only what?"
   
"Only please don't go away till
we've talked it over. I'm so frightened."
   
Hugh was paying for the beers, which
were only twenty centavos; thirty less than the armadillo, he thought. "Or
do you want another?" He had to raise his voice above the renewed clamour
of the plant: dungeons: dungeons: dungeons: it said.
   
"I can't finish this one. You
finish it for me."
   
Their cavalcade moved off again
slowly, out of the courtyard, through the massive gate into the road beyond. As
by common consent they turned right, away from the railway station. A camión
was approaching behind them from the town and Hugh reined in beside Yvonne
while the dog herded the foals along the ditch. The bus--Tomalín:
Zócalo--disappeared, clanging round a corner. "That's one way to get to
Parián." Yvonne averted her face from the dust.
   
"Wasn't that the Tomalín
bus?"
   
"Just the same it's the easiest
way to get to Parián. I think there is a bus goes straight there, but from the
other end of the town, and by another road, from Tepalzanco."
   
"There seems to be something
sinister about Parián."
   
"It's a very dull place
actually. Of course it's the old capital of the state. Years ago there used to
be a huge monastery there, I believe--rather like Oaxaca in that respect. Some
of the shops and even the cantinas are part of what were once the monks'
quarters. But it's quite a ruin."
   
"I wonder what Weber sees in
it," Hugh said. They left the cypresses and the plant behind. Having come,
unwarned, to a gateless level-crossing they turned right once more, this time
heading homeward.
   
They were riding abreast down the
railway lines Hugh had seen from the grove, flanking the grove in almost the
opposite direction to the way they had approached. On either side a low
embankment sloped to a narrow ditch, beyond which stretched scrub-land. Above
them telegraph wires twanged and whined: guitarra guitarra guitarra: which was,
perhaps, a better thing to say than
 
dungeons . The railway--a double track but of narrow gauge--now
divagated away from the grove, for no apparent reason, then wandered back again
parallel to it. A little farther on, as if to balance matters, it made a
similar deviation towards the grove. But in the distance it curved away in a
wide leftward sweep of such proportions one felt it must logically come to
involve itself again with the Tomalín road. This was too much for the telegraph
poles that strode straight ahead arrogantly and were lost from sight.
   
Yvonne was smiling. "I see you
look worried. There's really a story for your
 
Globe
 
in this line."
   
"I can't make out what sort of
damn thing it is at all."
   
"It was built by you English.
Only the company was paid by the kilometre."
   
Hugh laughed loudly. "How
marvellous. You don't mean it was laid out in this cockeyed fashion just for
the sake of the extra mileage, do you?" "That's what they say. Though
I don't suppose it's true." "Well, well. I'm disappointed. I'd been
thinking it must be some delightful Mexican whimsey. It certainly gives one to
think however."
   
"Of the capitalist system?"
There was again a hint of mockery about Yvonne's smile.
   
"It reminds one of some story
in
 
Punch ... Did you know there was a
place called Punch in Kashmir by the by?" (Yvonne murmured, shaking her
head.) "--Sorry, I've forgotten what I was going to say."
   
"What do you think about
Geoffrey?" Yvonne asked the question at last. She was leaning forward,
resting on the pommel, watching him sideways. "Hugh, tell me the truth. Do
you think there's any--well--hope for him?" Their mares were picking their
way delicately along this unusual lane, the foals keeping farther ahead than before,
glancing round from time to time for approbation at their daring. The dog ran
ahead of the foals though he never failed to dodge back periodically to see all
was well. He was sniffing busily for snakes among the metals.
   
"About his drinking, do you
mean?"
 
  
"Do you think there's anything I can do?"
   
Hugh looked down at some blue
wildflowers like forget-me-nots that had somehow found a place to grow between
the sleepers on the track. These innocents had their problem too: what is this
frightful dark sun that roars and strikes at our eyelids every few minutes?
Minutes? Hours more likely. Perhaps even days: the lone semaphores seemed
permanently up, it might be sadly expeditious to ask about trains oneself.
"I dare say you've heard about his 'strychnine,' as he calls it,"
Hugh said. "The journalist's cure. Well, I actually got the stuff by
prescription from some guy in Quauhnahuac who knew you both at one time."
   
"Dr. Guzmán?"
   
"Yes, Guzmán. I think that was
the name. I tried to persuade him to see Geoff. But he refused to waste time on
him. He said simply that so far as he knew there was nothing wrong with Papa
and never had been save that he wouldn't make up his mind to stop drinking.
That seems plain enough and I dare say it's true." The track sank level
with the scrub-land, then below it, so that the embankments were now above
them,
   
"It
  
isn't
 
drinking, somehow," Yvonne said suddenly. "But why does he do
it?"
   
"Perhaps now you've come back
like this he'll stop."
   
"You don't sound very hopeful."
   
"Yvonne, listen to me. So
obviously there are a thousand things to say and there isn't going to be time
to say most of them. It's difficult to know where to begin. I'm almost
completely in the dark. I wasn't even sure you were divorced till five minutes
ago. I don't know--" Hugh clicked his tongue at his horse but held her
back. "As for Geoff," he went on, "I simply have no idea what
he's been doing or how much he's been drinking. Half the time you can't tell
when he's tight anyway."
   
"You couldn't say that if you
were his
 
wife ."
   
"Wait a minute.--My attitude
towards Geoff was simply the one I'd take towards some brother scribe with a
godawful hangover. But while I've been in Mexico City I've been saying to
myself: ¿Cui bono? What's the good? Just sobering him up for a day or two's not
going to help. Good God, if our civilization were to sober up for a couple of
days it'd die of remorse on the third--"
   
"That's
 
very
 
helpful," Yvonne said. "Thank you." "Besides after a
while one begins to feel, if a man can hold his liquor as well as that why
shouldn't he drink?" Hugh leaned over and patted her horse. "No,
seriously, why don't both of you get out, though? Out of Mexico. There's no
reason for you to stay any longer, is there? Geoff loathed the consular service
anyway." For a moment Hugh watched one of the foals standing silhouetted
against the sky on top of the embankment. "You've got money."
   
"You'll forgive me when I tell
you this, Hugh. It wasn't because I didn't want to see you. But I tried to get
Geoffrey to leave this morning before you came back."
   
"It was no go, eh?"
   
"Maybe it wouldn't have worked
anyhow. We tried it before, this getting away and starting all over. But
Geoffrey said something this morning about going on with his book--for the life
of me I don't know whether he's still writing one or not, he's never done any
work on it since I've known him, and he's never let me see scarcely any of it,
still, he keeps all those reference books with him--and I thought--"
  
 
"Yes," Hugh said, "how much
does he really know about all this alchemy and cabbala business? How much does
it mean to him?"
   
"That's just what I was going to
ask you. I've never been able to find out--"
   
"Good lord, I don't
know..." Hugh added with almost avuncular relish: "Maybe he's a black
magician!"
   
Yvonne smiled absently, flicking her
reins against the pommel. The track emerged into the open and once more the
embankments sloped down on either side. High overhead sailed white sculpturings
of clouds, like billowing concepts in the brain of Michelangelo. One of the
foals had strayed from the track into the scrub. Hugh repeated the ritual of
whistling, the foal hauled itself back up the bank and they were a company
again, trotting smartly along the meandering selfish little railroad.
"Hugh," Yvonne said, "I had an idea coming down on the boat... I
don't know whether--I've always dreamed of having a farm somewhere. A real
farm, you know, with cows and pigs and chickens--and a red barn and silos and
fields of corn and wheat."
   
"What, no guinea-fowl? I might
have a dream like that in a week or two," Hugh said. "Where does the
farm come in?"
"Why--Geoffrey and I might
 
buy
 
one."
 
"Buy one?"
   
"Is that so fantastic?"
   
"I suppose not, but where?"
Hugh's pint-and-a-half of strong beer was beginning to take pleasurable effect,
and all at once he gave a guffaw that was more like a sneeze. "I'm
sorry," he said, "it was just the notion of Geoff among the alfalfa,
in overalls and a straw hat, soberly hoeing, that got me a moment."
   
"It wouldn't have to be as
soberly as all that. I'm not an ogre." Yvonne was laughing too, but her
dark eyes, that had been shining, were opaque and withdrawn,
   
"But what if Geoff hates farms?
Perhaps the mere sight of a cow makes him seasick."