Under the Volcano (18 page)

   
"Dr. Livingstone, I
presume."
   
"Hicket," said the Consul,
taken aback by the premature rediscovery, at such close quarters, of the tall
slightly stooping figure, in khaki shirt and grey flannel trousers, sandalled,
immaculate, grey-haired, complete, fit, a credit to Soda Springs, and carrying
a watering-can, who was regarding him distastefully through horn-rimmed
spectacles from the other side of the fence. "Ah, good morning,
Quincey."
   
"What's good about it?" the
retired walnut grower asked suspiciously, continuing his work of watering his
flower beds, which were out of range of the ceaselessly swinging hoses.
   
The Consul gestured towards his
briars, and perhaps unconsciously also in the direction of the tequila bottle.
"I saw you from over there... I was just out inspecting my jungle, don't
you know."
   
"You are doing what?" Mr
Quincey glanced at him over the top of the watering-can as if to say: I have
seen all this going on; I know all about it because I am God, and even when God
was much older than you are he was nevertheless up at this time and fighting
it, if necessary, while you don't even know whether you're up or not yet, and
even if you have been out all night you are certainly not fighting it, as I
would be, just as I would be ready to fight anything or anybody else too, for
that matter, at the drop of a hat!
   
"And I'm afraid it really is a
jungle too," pursued the Consul, "in fact I expect Rousseau to come
riding out of it at any moment on a tiger."
   
"What's that?" Mr Quincey
said, frowning in a manner that might have meant: And God never drinks before
breakfast either.
   
"On a tiger," the Consul
repeated.
   
The other gazed at him a moment with
the cold sardonic eye of the material world. "I expect so," he said
sourly. "Plenty tigers. Plenty elephants too... Might I ask you if the
next time you inspect your jungle you'd mind being sick on your own side of the
fence?"
   
"Hicket," answered the
Consul simply. "Hicket," he snarled, laughing, and, trying to take
himself by surprise, he thwacked himself hard in the kidneys, a remedy which,
strangely, seemed to work. "Sorry I gave that impression, it was merely
this damned hiccups!--"
   
"So I observe," Mr Quincey
said, and perhaps he too had cast a subtle glance towards the ambush of the
tequila bottle.
   
"And the funny thing is,"
interrupted the Consul, "I scarcely touched anything more than Tehuacan
water all night... By the way; how did you manage to survive the ball?"
   
Mr Quincey stared at him evenly, then
began to refill his watering can from a hydrant nearby.
   
"Just Tehuacan," the Consul
continued. "And a little gaseosa. That ought to take you back to dear old
Soda Springs, eh?--tee hee!--yes, I've cut liquor right out these days."
   
The other resumed his watering,
sternly moving on down the fence, and the Consul, not sorry to leave the fruit
tree, to which he had noticed clinging the sinister carapace of a seven-year
locust, followed him step by step.
   
"Yes, I'm on the wagon
now," he commented, "in case you didn't know." "The funeral
wagon, I'd say, Firmin," Mr Quincey muttered testily. "By the way, I
saw one of those little garter snakes just a moment ago," the Consul broke
out.
   
Mr Quincey coughed or snorted but
said nothing.
   
"And it made me think... Do you
know, Quincey, I've often wondered whether there isn't more in the old legend
of the Garden of Eden, and so on, than meets the eye. What if Adam wasn't
really banished from the place at all? That is, in the sense we used to
understand it--" The walnut grower had looked up and was fixing him with a
steady gaze that seemed, however, directed at a point rather below the Consul's
midriff--"What if his punishment really consisted," the Consul
continued with warmth, "in his having to
 
go on living there , alone, of course--suffering, unseen, cut off from
God... Or perhaps," he added,--in more cheerful vein, "perhaps Adam
was the first property owner and God, the first agrarian, a kind of Cardenas,
in fact--tee hee!--kicked him out. Eh? Yes," the Consul chuckled, aware,
moreover, that all this was possibly not so amusing under the existing
historical circumstances, "for it's obvious to everyone these days--don't
you think so, Quincey?--that the original sin was to be an owner of
property..."
   
The walnut grower was nodding at him,
almost imperceptibly, but not it seemed in any agreement; his
 
realpolitik
 
eye was still concentrated upon that same spot below his midriff and
looking down the Consul discovered his open fly.
 
Licentia vatum
 
indeed! "Pardon me, j'adoube," he
said, and making the adjustment continued, laughing, returning to his first
theme mysteriously unabashed by his recusancy. "Yes, indeed. Yes... And of
course the real
 
reason
 
for that punishment--his being forced to go
on living in the garden, I mean, might well have been that the poor fellow, who
knows, secretly loathed the place! Simply hated it, and had done so all along.
And that the Old Man found this out--"
   
"Was it my imagination, or did I
see your wife up there a while ago?" patiently said Mr Quincey.
   
"--and no wonder! To hell with
the place! Just think of all the scorpions and leafcutter ants--to mention only
a few of the abominations he must have had to put up with! What?" the
Consul exclaimed as the other repeated his question. "In the garden?
Yes--that is, no. How do you know? No, she's asleep as far as I--"
   
"Been away quite a time, hasn't
she?" the other asked mildly, leaning forward so that he could see, more
clearly, the Consul's bungalow. "Your brother still here?"
   
"Brother? Oh. you mean Hugh...
No, he's in Mexico City."
   
"I think you'll find he's got
back."
   
The Consul now glanced up at the
house himself. "Hicket," he said briefly, apprehensively.
   
"I think he went out with your
wife," the walnut grower added.
   
--Hullo--hullo--look--who-comes-hullo-my-little-snake-in-the-grass-my-little-anguish-in-herba--"
the Consul at this moment greeted Mr Quincey's cat, momentarily forgetting its
owner again as the grey, meditative animal, with a tail so long it trailed on
the ground, came stalking through the zinnias: he stooped, patting his
thighs--"hello-pussy-my-little-Priapusspuss,
my-little-Oedipusspusspuss," and the cat, recognizing a friend and
uttering a cry of pleasure, wound through the fence and rubbed against the
Consul's legs, purring. "My little Xicoténcatl." The Consul stood up.
He gave two short whistles while below him the cat's ears twirled. "She
thinks I'm a tree with a bird in it," he added.
   
"I wouldn't wonder,"
retorted Mr Quincey, who was refilling his watering can at the hydrant.
   
"Animals not fit for food and
kept only for pleasure, curiosity, or whim--eh?--as William Blackstone
said--you've heard of him of course!--" The Consul was somehow on his
haunches half talking to the cat, half to the walnut grower, who had paused to
light a cigarette. "Or was that another William Blackstone?" He
addressed himself now directly to Mr Quincey, who was paying no attention.
"He's a character I've always liked. I think it was William Blackstone. Or
so Abraham... Anyway, one day he arrived in what is now, I believe---no
matter--somewhere in Massachusetts. And lived there quietly among the Indians.
After a while the Puritans settled on the other side of the river. They invited
him over; they said it was healthier on that side, you see. Ah, these people,
these fellows with ideas," he told the cat, "old William didn't like
them--no he didn't--so he went back to live among the Indians, so he did. But
the Puritans found him out, Quincey, trust them. Then he disappeared
altogether--God knows where...
 
Now ,
little cat," the Consul tapped his chest indicatively, and the cat, its
face swelling, body arched, important, stepped back, "the Indians are in
here."
   
"They sure are," sighed Mr
Quincey, somewhat in the manner of a quietly exacerbated sergeant-major,
"along with all those snakes and pink elephants and them tigers you were
talking about."
   
The Consul laughed, his laughter
having a humourless sound, as though the part of his mind that knew all this
essentially a burlesque of a great and generous man once his friend knew also
how hollow the satisfaction afforded him by the performance. "Not real
Indians... And I didn't mean in the garden; but in
 
here " He tapped his chest again.
"Yes, just the final frontier of consciousness, that's all. Genius, as I'm
so fond of saying," he added, standing up, adjusting his tie and (he did
not think further of the tie) squaring his shoulders as if to go with a
decisiveness that, also borrowed on this occasion from the same source as the
genius and his interest in cats, left him abruptly as it had been assumed,
"--genius will look after itself."
   
Somewhere in the distance a clock was
striking; the Consul still stood there motionless. "Oh, Yvonne, can I have
forgotten you already, on this of all days?" Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one
strokes. By his watch it was a quarter to eleven. But the clock hadn't
finished: it struck twice more, two wry, tragic notes:
 
bing-bong : whirring. The emptiness in the
air after filled with whispers:
 
alas,
alas . Wings, it really meant.
   
"Where's your friend these
days--I never can remember his name--that French fellow?" Mr Quincey had
asked a moment ago.
   
" Laruelle?" The Consul's
voice came from far away. He was aware of vertigo; closing his eyes wearily he
took hold of the fence to steady himself. Mr Quincey's words knocked on his
consciousness--or someone actually was knocking on a door--fell away, then
knocked again, louder. Old De Quincey; the knocking on the gate in Macbeth.
Knock, knock, knock: who's there? Cat. Cat who? Catastrophe. Catastrophe who?
Catastro-physicist. What, is it you, my little popocat? Just wait an eternity
till Jacques and I have finished murdering sleep? Katabasis to cat abysses. Cat
hartes atratus... Of course, he should have know it, these were the final
moments of the retiring of the human heart, and of the final entrance of the
fiendish, the night insulated--just as the real De Quincey (that mere drug
fiend, he thought opening his eyes--he found he was looking straight over
towards the tequila bottle) imagined the murder of Duncan and the others
insulated, self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly
passion... But where had Quincey gone? And my God, who was this advancing
behind the morning paper to his rescue across the lawn, where the breath of the
hoses had suddenly failed as if by magic, if not Dr. Guzmán?
   
If not Guzmán, if not, it could not
be, but it was, it certainly was no less a figure than that of his companion
the night before, Dr. Vigil; and what on earth would he be doing here? As the
figure approached closer the Consul felt an increasing uneasiness. Quincey was
his patient doubtless. But in that case why wasn't the doctor in the house? Why
all this secretive prowling about the garden? It could only mean one thing:
Vigil's visit had somehow been timed to coincide with his own probable visit to
the tequila (though he had fooled them neatly there), with the object,
naturally, of spying upon him, of obtaining some information about him, some
clue to the nature of which might all too conceivably be found within the pages
of that accusing newspaper: "Old Samaritan case to be reopened, Commander
Firmin believed in Mexico." "Firmin found guilty, acquitted, cries in
box." "Firmin innocent, but bears guilt of world on shoulders."
"Body of Firmin found drunk in bunker," such monstrous headlines as
these indeed took instant shape in the Consul's mind, for it was not merely El
Universal the doctor was reading, it was his fate; but the creatures of his
more immediate conscience were not to be denied, they seemed silently to
accompany that morning paper too, withdrawing to one side (as the doctor came
to a standstill, looking about him) with averted heads, listening, murmuring
now: "You cannot lie to us. We know what you did last night."
What
 
had
 
he done though? He saw again clearly enough--as Dr. Vigil, recognized
him with a smile, closed his paper and hastened towards him--the doctor's
consulting-room in the Avenida de la Revolución, visited for some drunken
reason in the early hours of the morning, macabre with its pictures of ancient
Spanish surgeons, their goat faces rising queerly from ruffs resembling
ectoplasm, roaring with laughter as they performed inquisitorial operations;
but since all this was retained as a mere vivid setting completely detached
from his own activity, and since it was about all he did remember, he could
scarcely take comfort from not seeming to appear within it in any vicious role.
Not so much comfort, at least, as had just been afforded him by Vigil's smile,
nor half so much as was now afforded him when the doctor, upon reaching the
spot lately vacated by the walnut grower, halted, and, suddenly, bowed to him
profoundly from the waist; bowed once, twice, thrice, mutely yet tremendously
assuring the Consul that after all no crime had been committed during the night
so great he was still not worthy of respect.
   
Then, simultaneously, the two men
groaned.