Under the Volcano (2 page)

   
How continually, how startlingly, the
landscape changed! Now the fields were full of stones: there was a row of dead
trees. An abandoned plough, silhouetted against the sky, raised its arms to
heaven in mute supplication; another planet, he reflected again, a strange
planet where, if you looked a little farther, beyond the Tres Marías, you would
find every sort of landscape at once, the Cotswolds, Windermere, New Hampshire,
the meadows of the Eure-et-Loire, even the grey dunes of Cheshire, even the Sahara,
a planet upon which, in the twinkling of an eye, you could change climates,
and, if you cared to think so, in the crossing of a highway, three
civilizations; but beautiful, there was no denying its beauty, fatal or
cleansing as it happened to be, the beauty of the Earthly Paradise itself.
   
Yet in the Earthly Paradise, what had
he done? He had made few friends. He had acquired a Mexican mistress with whom
he quarrelled, and numerous beautiful Mayan idols he would be unable to take
out of the country, and he had--
   
M. Laruelle wondered if it was going
to rain: it sometimes, though rarely, did at this time of year, as last year
for instance, it rained when it should not. And those were storm clouds in the
south. He imagined he could smell the rain, and it ran in his head he would
enjoy nothing better than to get wet, soaked through to the skin, to walk on
and on through this wild country in his clinging white flannels getting wetter
and wetter and wetter. He watched the clouds: dark swift horses surging up the
sky. A black storm breaking out of its season! That was what love was like, he
thought; love which came too late. Only no sane calm succeeded it, as when the
evening fragrance or slow sunlight and warmth returned to the surprised land!
M-Laruelle hastened his steps still farther. And let such love strike you dumb,
blind, mad, dead--your fate would not be altered by your simile. Tonnerre de
dieu ... It slaked no thirst to say what love was like which came too late.
   
The town was almost directly to his
right now and above him, for M. Laruelle had been walking gradually downhill
since leaving the Casino de la Selva. From the field he was crossing he could
see, over the trees on the slope of the hill, and beyond the dark castled shape
of Cortez Palace, the slowly revolving Ferris wheel, already lit up, in the
square of Quauhnahuac; he thought he could distinguish the sound of human
laughter rising from its bright gondolas and, again, that faint intoxication of
voices singing, diminishing, dying in the wind, inaudible finally. A despondent
American tune, the St Louis Blues, or some such, was borne across the fields to
him, at times a soft wind-blown surge of music from which skimmed a spray of
gabbling, that seemed not so much to break against as to be thumping the walls
and towers of the outskirts; then with a moan it would be sucked back into the
distance. He found himself in the lane that led away through the brewery to the
Tomalín road. He came to the Alcapancingo road. A car was passing and as he waited,
face averted, for the dust to subside, he recalled that time motoring with
Yvonne and the Consul along the Mexican lake-bed, itself once the crater-of a
huge volcano, and saw again the horizon softened by dust, the buses whizzing
past through the whirling dust, the shuddering boys standing on the backs of
the lorries holding on for grim death, their faces bandaged against the dust
(and there was a magnificence about this, he always felt, some symbolism for
the future, for which such truly great preparation had been made by a heroic
people, since all over Mexico one could see those thundering lorries with those
young builders in them, standing erect, their trousers flapping hard, legs
planted wide, firm) and in the sunlight, on the round hill, the lone section of
dust advancing, the dust-darkened hills by the lake like islands in driving
rain. The Consul, whose old house M. Laruelle now made out on the slope beyond
the barranca, had seemed happy enough too then, wandering around Cholula with
its three hundred and six churches and its two barber shops, the
"Toilet" and the "Harem," and climbing the ruined pyramid
later, which he had proudly insisted was the original Tower of Babel. How
admirably he had concealed what must have been the babel of his thoughts!
   
Two ragged Indians were approaching
M. Laruelle through the dust; they were arguing, but with the profound
concentration of university professors wandering in summer twilight through the
Sorbonne. Their voices, the gestures of their refined grimy hands, were
unbelievably courtly, delicate. Their carriage suggested the majesty of Aztec
princes, their faces obscure sculpturings on Yucatecan ruins:
   
"--perfectamente
borracho--"
   
"--completamente
fantástico--"
   
"Sí, hombre, la vida
impersonal--"
   
"Claro, hombre--"
   
"¡Positivamente!"
   
"Buenas noches"
   
"Buenas noches"
   
They passed into the dusk. The Ferris
wheel sank from sight: the sounds of the fair, the music, instead of coming
closer, had temporarily ceased. M. Laruelle looked into the west; a knight of
old, with tennis racket for shield and pocket torch for scrip, he dreamed a
moment of battles the soul survived to wander there. He had intended turning
down another lane to the right, that led past the model farm where the Casino
de la Selva grazed its horses, directly into his street, the Calle Nicaragua.
But on a sudden impulse he turned left along the road running by the prison. He
felt an obscure desire on his last night to bid farewell to the ruin of
Maximilian's Palace.
  
 
To the south an immense archangel, black as
thunder, beat up from the Pacific. And yet, after all, the storm contained its
own secret calm... His passion for Yvonne (whether or not she'd ever been much
good as an actress was beside the point, he'd told her the truth when he said
she would have been more than good in any film he made) had brought back to his
heart, in a way he could not have explained, the first time that alone, walking
over the meadows from Saint Pres, the sleepy French village of backwaters and
locks and grey disused watermills where he was lodging, he had seen, rising
slowly and wonderfully and with boundless beauty above the stubble fields
blowing with wildflowers, slowly rising into the sunlight, as centuries before
the pilgrims straying over those same fields had watched them rise, the twin
spires of Chartres Cathedral. His love had brought a peace, for all too short a
while, that was strangely like the enchantment, the spell, of Chartres itself,
long ago, whose every side-street he had come to love and cafe where he could
gaze at the Cathedral eternally sailing against the clouds, the spell not even
the fact he was scandalously in debt there could break. M. Laruelle walked on
swiftly towards the Palace. Nor had any remorse for the Consul's plight broken
that other spell fifteen years later here in Quauhnahuac; for that matter, M.
Laruelle reflected, what had reunited the Consul and himself for a time, even
after Yvonne left, was not, on either side, remorse. It was perhaps, partly,
more the desire for that illusory comfort, about as satisfying as biting on an
aching tooth, to be derived from the mutual unspoken pretence that Yvonne was
still here.
   
--Ah, but all these things might have
seemed a good enough reason for putting the whole earth between themselves and
Quauhnahuac! Yet neither had done so. And now M. Laruelle could feel their
burden pressing upon him from outside, as if somehow it had been transferred to
these purple mountains all around him, so mysterious, with their secret mines
of silver, so withdrawn, yet so close, so still, and from these mountains
emanated a strange melancholy force that tried to hold him here bodily, which
was its weight, the weight of many things, but mostly that of sorrow.
   
He passed a field where a faded blue
Ford, a total wreck, had been pushed beneath a hedge on a slope: two bricks had
been set under its front wheels against involuntary departure. What are you
waiting for, he wanted to ask it, feeling a sort of kinship, an empathy, for
those tatters of ancient hood flapping... Darling, why did I leave? Why did you
let me?
 
It was not to M. Laruelle that
these words on that long-belated postcard of Yvonne's had been addressed, that
postcard which the Consul must have maliciously put under his pillow some time
on that last morning--but how could one ever be sure when?--as though the
Consul had calculated it all,
 
knowing
 
M. Laruelle would
discover it at the precise moment that Hugh, distraughtly, would call from
Parián.--Parián! To his right towered the prison walls. Up on the watchtower,
just visible above them, two policemen peered east and west with binoculars. M.
Laruelle crossed a bridge over the river, then took a short cut through a wide
clearing in the woods evidently being laid out as a botanical garden. Birds
came swarming out of the southeast: small, black, ugly birds, yet too long,
something like monstrous insects, something like crows, with awkward long
tails, and an undulating, bouncing, laboured flight. Shatterers of the twilight
hour, they were flapping their way feverishly home, as they did every evening,
to roost within the fresno trees in the zócalo, which until nightfall would
ring with their incessant drilling mechanic screech. Straggling, the obscene
concourse hushed and peddled by. By the time he reached the Palace the sun had
set.
   
In spite of his amour propre he
immediately regretted having come. The broken pink pillars, in the half-light,
might have been waiting to fall down on him: the pool, covered with green scum,
its steps torn away and hanging by one rotting clamp, to close over his head.
The shattered evil-smelling chapel, over-grown with weeds, the crumbling walls,
splashed with urine, on which scorpions lurked--wrecked entablature, sad
archivolt, slippery stones covered with excreta--this place, where love had
once brooded, seemed part of a nightmare. And Laruelle was tired of nightmares.
France, even in Austrian guise, should not transfer itself to Mexico, he
thought. Maximilian had been unlucky in his palaces too, poor devil. Why did
they have to call that other fatal palace in Trieste also the Miramar, where
Carlotta went insane, and everyone who ever lived there from the Empress
Elizabeth of Austria to the Archduke Ferdinand had met with a violent death?
And yet, how they must have loved this land, these two lonely empurpled exiles,
human beings finally, lovers out of their element--their Eden, without either
knowing quite why, beginning to turn under their noses into a prison and smell
like a brewery, their only majesty at last that of tragedy. Ghosts. Ghosts, as
at the Casino, certainly lived here. And a ghost who still said: "It is
our destiny to come here, Carlotta. Look at this rolling glorious country, its
hills, its valleys, its volcanoes beautiful beyond belief. And to think that it
is ours! Let us be good and constructive and make ourselves worthy of it!"
Or there were ghosts quarrelling: "No, you loved yourself, you loved your
misery more than I. You did this deliberately to us." "I?"
"You always had people to look after you, to love you, to use you, to lead
you. You listened to everyone save me, who really loved you." "No,
you're the only person I've ever loved." "Ever? You loved only
yourself." "No, it was you, always you, you must believe me, please;
you must remember how we were always planning to go to Mexico. Do you
remember?... Yes, you are right. I had my chance with you. Never a chance like
that again!" And suddenly they were weeping together, passionately, as
they stood.
   
But it was the Consul's voice, not
Maximilian's, M. Laruelle could almost have heard in the Palace; and he
remembered as he walked on, thankful he had finally struck the Calle Nicaragua
even at its farthest end, the day he'd stumbled upon the Consul and Yvonne
embracing there; it was not very long after their arrival in Mexico and how
different the Palace had seemed to him then! M. Laruelle slackened his pace.
The wind had dropped. He opened his English tweed coat (bought however from
High Life, pronounced Eetchleef, Mexico City) and loosened his blue
polka-dotted scarf. The evening was unusually oppressive. And how silent. Not a
sound, not a cry reached his ears now. Nothing but the clumsy suction of his
footsteps... Not a soul in sight. M. Laruelle felt slightly chafed too, his trousers
bound him. He was getting too fat, had already got too fat in Mexico, which
suggested another odd reason some people might have for taking up arms, that
would never find its way into the newspapers. Absurdly, he swung his tennis
racket in the air, through the motions of a serve, a return: but it was too
heavy, he had forgotten about the press. He passed the model farm on his right,
the buildings, the fields, the hills shadowy now in the swiftly gathering
gloom. The Ferris wheel came into view again, just the top, silently burning
high on the hill, almost directly in front of him, then the trees rose up over
it. The road, which was terrible and full of pot-holes, went steeply downhill
here; he was approaching the little bridge over the barranca, the deep ravine.
Half-way across the bridge he stopped; he lit a new cigarette from the one he'd
been smoking, and leaned over the parapet, looking down. It was too dark to see
the bottom, but: here was finality indeed, and cleavage! Quauhnahuac was like
the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you
round the corner. Dormitory for vultures and city Moloch! When Christ was being
crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all
through this country, though the coincidence could hardly have impressed anyone
then! It was on this bridge the Consul had once suggested to him he make a film
about Atlantis. Yes, leaning over just like this, drunk but collected,
coherent, a little mad, a little impatient--it was one of those occasions when
the Consul had drunk himself sober--he had spoken to him about the spirit of
the abyss, the god of storm, "huracán," that "testified so
suggestively to intercourse between opposite sides of the Atlantic."
Whatever he had meant.