Under the Volcano (20 page)

   
Then Yvonne and Hugh, below, were
swimming in the--"Absolutamente," the doctor had said, beside the
Consul at the parapet, and attentively lighting a cigarette. "I
have," the Consul was telling him, lifting his face towards the volcanoes
and feeling his desolation go out to those heights where even now at
mid-morning the howling snow would whip the face, and the ground beneath the
feet was dead lava, a soulless petrified residue of extinct plasm in which even
the wildest and loneliest trees would never take root; "I have another
enemy round the back you can't see. A sunflower. I know it watches me and I
know it hates me." "Exactamente!" Dr. Vigil said, "very
posseebly it might be hating you a little less if you would stop from drinking
tequila." "Yes, but I'm only drinking beer this morning," the
Consul said with conviction, "as you can see for yourself." "Sí,
hombre," Dr. Vigil nodded, who after a few whiskies (from a new bottle)
had given up trying to conceal himself from Mr Quincey's house and was standing
boldly by the parapet with the Consul. "There are," the Consul added,
"a thousand aspects of this infernal beauty I was talking about, each with
its peculiar tortures, each jealous as a woman of all stimulations save its
own." "Naturalmente," Dr. Vigil said. "But I think if you
are very serious about your progresión a ratos you may take a longer journey
even than this proposed one." The Consul placed his glass on the parapet
while the doctor continued. "Me too unless we contain with ourselves never
to drink no more. I think, mi amigo sickness is not only in body but in that
part used to be call: soul." "Soul?"
 
"Precisamente," the doctor said,
swiftly clasping and unclasping his fingers. "But a mesh? Mesh. The nerves
are a mesh, like, how do you say it, an eclectic systemë." "Ah, very
good," the Consul said, "you mean an electric system." "But
after much tequila the eclectic systemë is perhaps un poco descompuesto,
comprenez, as sometimes in the cine: claro?" "A sort of eclampsia, as
it were," the Consul nodded desperately, removing his glasses, and at this
point, the Consul remembered, he had been without a drink nearly ten minutes;
the effect of the tequila too had almost gone. He had peered out at the garden,
and it was as though bits of his eyelids had broken off and were flittering and
jittering before him, turning into nervous shapes and shadows, jumping to the
guilty chattering in his mind, not quite voices yet, but they were coming back,
they were coming back; a picture of his soul as a town appeared once more
before him, but this time a town ravaged and stricken in the black path of his
excess and shutting his burning eyes he had thought of the beautiful
functioning of the system in those who were truly alive, switches connected,
nerves rigid only in real danger, and in nightmareless sleep now calm, not
resting, yet poised: a peaceful village. Christ, how it heightened the torture
(and meantime there had been every reason to suppose the others imagined he was
enjoying himself enormously) to be aware of all this, while at the same time
conscious of the whole horrible disintegrating mechanism, the light now on, now
off, now on too glaringly, now too dimly, with the glow of a fitful dying
battery--then at last to know the whole town plunged into darkness, where
communication is lost, motion mere obstruction, bombs threaten, ideas
stampede--
  
 
The Consul had now finished his glass of flat
beer. He sat gazing at the bathroom wall in an attitude like a grotesque parody
of an old attitude in meditation. "I am very much interested in
insanes." That was a strange way to start a conversation with a fellow
who'd just stood you a drink. Yet that was precisely how the doctor, in the
Bella Vista bar, had started their conversation the previous night. Could it be
Vigil considered his practised eye had detected approaching insanity (and this
was funny too, recalling his thoughts on the subject earlier, to conceive of it
as merely approaching) as some who have watched wind and weather all their
lives can prophesy, under a fair sky, the approaching storm, the darkness that
will come galloping out of nowhere across the fields of the mind? Not that
there could be said to be a very fair sky either in that connexion. Yet how
interested would the doctor have been in one who felt himself being shattered
by the very forces of the universe? What cataplasms have laid on his soul? What
did even the hierophants of science know of the fearful potencies of, for them,
unvintageable evil? The Consul wouldn't have needed a practised eye to detect
on this wall, or any other, a Mene-Tekel-Peres for the world, compared to which
mere insanity was a drop in the bucket. Yet who would ever have believed that
some obscure man, sitting at the centre of the world in a bathroom, say,
thinking solitary miserable thoughts, was authoring their doom, that, even
while he was thinking, it was as if behind the scenes certain strings were
being pulled, and whole continents burst into flame, and calamity moved
nearer--just as now, at this moment perhaps, with a sudden jolt and grind,
calamity had moved nearer, and, without the Consul's knowing it, outside the
sky had darkened. Or perhaps it was not a man at all, but a child, a little
child, innocent as that other Geoffrey had been, who sat as up in an organ loft
somewhere playing, pulling out all the stops at random, and kingdoms divided
and fell, and abominations dropped from the sky--a child innocent as that
infant sleeping in the coffin which had slanted past them down the Calle Tierra
del Fuego...
   
The Consul lifted his glass to his
lips, tasted its emptiness again, then set it on the floor, still wet from the
feet of the swimmers. The uncontrollable mystery on the bathroom floor. He
remembered that the next time he had returned to the porch with a bottle of
Carta Blanca, though for some reason this now seemed a terribly long time ago,
in the past--it was as if something he could not put his finger on had
mysteriously supervened to separate drastically that returning figure from
himself sitting in the bathroom (the figure on the porch, for all its
damnation, seemed younger, to have more freedom of movement, choice, to have,
if only because it held a full glass of beer once more, a better chance of a
future)--Yvonne, youthful and pretty-looking in her white satin bathing-suit,
had been wandering on tiptoe round the doctor, who was saying:
   
"Señora Firmin, I am really
disappoint though you cannot come me with."
   
The Consul and she had exchanged a
look of understanding, it almost amounted to, then Yvonne was swimming again,
below, and the doctor was saying to the Consul:
   
"Guanajuato is sited in a
beautiful circus of steepy hills."
   
"Guanajuato," the doctor
was saying, "you will not believe me, how she can lie there, like the old
golden jewel on the breast of our grandmother."
   
"Guanajuato," Dr. Vigil
said, "the streets. How can you resist the names of the streets? Street of
Kisses. Street of Singing Frogs. The Street of the Little Head. Is not that
revolting?"
   
"Repellent," the Consul
said. "Isn't Guanajuato the place they bury everybody standing
up?"--ah, and this was where he had remembered about the bullthrowing and,
feeling a return of energy, had called down to Hugh, who was sitting
thoughtfully by the edge of the pool in the Consul's swimming-trunks.
"Tomalín's quite near Parián, where your pal was going," he said. "We
might even go on there." And then to the doctor, "Perhaps you might
come too... I left my favourite pipe in Parián. Which I might get back, with
luck. In the Farolito." And the doctor had said: "Wheee, es un
infierno," while Yvonne, lifting up a corner of her bathing-cap to hear
better, said meekly, "Not a bullfight?" And the Consul: "No, a
bullthrowing. If you're not too tired?"
   
But the doctor could not of course
come to Tomalín with them, though this was never discussed, since just then the
conversation was violently interrupted by a sudden terrific detonation, that
shook the house and sent birds skimming panic-stricken all over the garden.
Target practice in the Sierra Madre. The Consul had been half aware of it in
his sleep earlier. Puffs of smoke were drifting high over the rocks below Popo
at the end of the valley. Three black vultures came tearing through the trees
low over the roof with soft hoarse cries like the cries of love. Driven at
unaccustomed speed by their fear they seemed almost to capsize, keeping close
together but balancing at different angles to avoid collision. Then they sought
another tree to wait in and the echoes of gunfire swept back over the house,
soaring higher and higher and growing fainter while somewhere a clock was
striking nineteen. Twelve o'clock, and the Consul said to the doctor: "Ah,
that the dream of the dark magician in his visioned cave, even while his
hand--that's the bit I like--shakes in its last decay, were the true end of
this so lovely world. Jesus. Do you know, compañero, I sometimes have the
feeling that it's actually sinking, like Atlantis, beneath my feet. Down, down
to the frightful 'poulps.' Meropis of Theopompus... And the ignívoma
mountains." And the doctor who was nodding gloomily said: "Sí, that
is tequila. Hombre, un poco de cerveza, un poco de vino, but never no more
tequila. Never no more mescal." And then the doctor was whispering:
"But hombre, now that your esposa has come back." (It seemed that Dr.
Vigil had said this several times, only with a different look on his face:
"But hombre, now that your esposa has come back.") And then he was
going: "I did not need to be inquisitive to be knowing you might have
wished my advice. No hombre, as I say last night, I am not so interested in
moneys.--Con permiso, the plaster he no good." A little shower of plaster
had, indeed, rained down on the doctor's head. Then: "Hasta la vista"
"Adiós" "Muchas gracias" "Thank you so much"
"Sorry we couldn't come" "Have a good time," from the
swimming-pool. "Hasta la vista" again, then silence.
   
And now the Consul was in the
bathroom getting ready to go to Tomalín. "Oh..." he said,
"Oh..." But, you see, nothing so dire has happened after all. First
to wash. Sweating and trembling again, he took off his coat and shirt. He had
turned on the water in the basin. Yet for some obscure reason he was standing
under the shower, waiting in an agony for the shock of cold water that never
came. And he was still wearing his trousers.
   
The Consul sat helplessly in the
bathroom, watching the insects which lay at different angles from one another
on the wall, like ships out in the roadstead. A caterpillar started to wriggle
toward him, peering this way and that, with interrogatory antennae. A large
cricket, with polished fuselage, clung to the curtain, swaying it slightly and
cleaning its face like a cat, its eyes on stalks appearing to revolve in its
head. He turned, expecting the caterpillar to be much nearer, but it too had
turned, just slightly shifting its moorings. Now a scorpion was moving slowly
across towards him. Suddenly the Consul rose, trembling in every limb. But it
wasn't the scorpion he cared about. It was that, all at once, the thin shadows
of isolated nails, the stains of murdered mosquitoes, the very scars and cracks
of the wall, had begun to swarm, so that, wherever he looked, another insect
was born, wriggling instantly toward his heart. It was as if, and, this was
what was most appalling, the whole insect world had somehow moved nearer and
now was closing, rushing in upon him. For a moment the bottle of tequila at the
bottom of the garden gleamed on his soul, then the Consul stumbled into his
bedroom.
   
Here there was no longer that
terrible visible swarming, yet--lying now on the bed--it still seemed to
persist in his mind, much as the vision of the dead man earlier had persisted,
a kind of seething, from which, as from the persistent rolling of drums heard
by some great dying monarch, occasionally a half-recognizable voice dissociated
itself:
   
--Stop it, for God's sake, you fool.
Watch your step. We can't help you any more.
   
--I would like the privilege of
helping you, of your friendship. I would work you with. I do not care a damn
for moneys anyway.
   
--What, is this you, Geoffrey? Don't
you remember me? Your old friend, Abe. What have you done, my boy?
   
--Ha ha, you're for it now.
Straightened out--in a coffin! Yeah.
   
--My son, my son!
   
--My lover. Oh come to me again as
once in May.

   
--Nel mezzo del bloody cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai in... Hugh flung
himself down on the porch daybed.
   
A strong warm gusty wind howled over
the garden. Refreshed by his swim and a lunch of turkey sandwiches, the cigar
Geoff had given him earlier partially shielded by the parapet, he lay watching
the clouds speeding across the Mexican skies. How fast they went, how far too
fast! In the middle of our life, in the middle of the bloody road of our
life...
   
Twenty-nine clouds. At twenty-nine a
man was in his thirtieth year. And he was twenty-nine. And now at last, though
the feeling had perhaps been growing on him all morning, he knew what it felt
like, the intolerable impact of this knowledge that might have come at
twenty-two, but had not, that ought at least to have come at twenty-five, but
still somehow had not, this knowledge, hitherto associated only with people
tottering on the brink of the grave and A. E. Housman, that one could not be
young for ever--that indeed, in the twinkling of an eye, one was not young any
longer. For in less than four years, passing so swiftly today's cigarette
seemed smoked yesterday, one would be thirty-three, in seven more, forty; in
forty-seven, eighty. Sixty-seven years seemed a comfortingly long time but then
he would be a hundred. I am not a prodigy any longer. I have no excuse any
longer to behave in this irresponsible fashion. I am not such a dashing fellow
after all. I am not young. On the other hand: I
 
am
 
a prodigy. I
 
am
 
young. I
 
am
 
a dashing fellow. Am I not? You are a liar,
said the trees tossing in the garden. You are a traitor, rattled the plantain
leaves. And a coward too, put in some fitful sounds of music that might have
meant that in the zócalo the fair was beginning. And they are losing the Battle
of the Ebro. Because of you, said the wind. A traitor even to your journalist
friends you like to run down and who are really courageous men, admit it--
Ahhh!
 
Hugh, as if to rid himself of
these thoughts, turned the radio dial back and forth, trying to get San Antonio
("I am none of these things really." "I have done nothing to
warrant all this guilt." "I am no worse than anybody else...");
but it was no good. All his resolutions of this morning were to no avail. It
seemed useless to struggle any further with these thoughts, better to let them
have their way. At least they would take his mind from Yvonne for a time, if
they only led back to her in the end. Even Juan Cerillo failed him now, as did,
at this moment, San Antonio: two Mexican voices on different wavelengths were
breaking in. For everything you have done up to now has been dishonest, the
first might have been saying. What about the way you treated poor old Bolowski,
the music publisher, remember his shabby little shop in Old Compton Street, off
the Tottenham Court Road? Even what you persuade yourself is the best thing
about you, your passion for helping the Jews, has some basis in a dishonourable
action of your own. Small wonder, since he so charitably forgave you, that you
forgave him
 
his
 
skulduggery, to the point of being prepared
to lead the whole Jewish race out of Babylon itself... No: I am much afraid
there is little enough in your past, which will come to your aid against the
future. Not even the seagull? said Hugh...
The seagull--pure scavenger of the empyrean, hunter of edible stars--I rescued
that day as a boy when it was caught in a fence on the cliffside and was
beating itself to death, blinded by snow, and though it attacked me, I drew it
out unharmed, with one hand by its feet, and for one magnificent moment held it
up in the sunlight, before it soared away on angelic wings over the freezing
estuary?
   
The artillery started blasting away
in the foothills again. A train hooted somewhere, like an approaching steamer;
perhaps the very train Hugh'd be taking tonight. From the bottom of the
swimming-pool below a reflected small sun blazed and nodded among the inverted
papayas. Reflections of vultures a mile deep wheeled upside down and were gone.
A bird, quite close really, seemed to be moving in a series of jerks across the
glittering summit of Popocatepetl--the wind, in fact, had dropped, which was as
well for his cigar. The radio had gone dead too, and Hugh gave it up, settling
himself back on the daybed.
   
Not even the seagull was the answer
of course. The seagull had been spoilt already by his dramatizing it. Nor yet
the poor little hot-dog man. That bitter December night he had met him trudging
down Oxford Street with his new wagon--the first hot-dog wagon in London, and
he had been pushing it around for a whole month without selling a single hot
dog. Now with a family to support and Christmas approaching he was on his
uppers. Shades of Charles Dickens! It was perhaps the
 
newness
 
of the wretched wagon he'd been cozened into buying that seemed so
awful. But how could he expect, Hugh asked him, as above them the monstrous
deceptions twitched on and off, and around them the black soulless buildings
stood wrapped in a cold dream of their own destruction (they had halted by a
church from whose sooty wall a figure of Christ on the cross had been removed
leaving only the scar and the legend: Is it nothing to you all ye who pass by?)
how could he expect to sell anything so revolutionary as a hot dog in Oxford
Street? He might as well try ice-cream at the South Pole. No, the idea was to
camp outside a pub down a back alley, and that not any pub, but the Fitzroy
Tavern in Charlotte Street, chock full of starving artists drinking themselves
to death simply because their souls pined away, each night between eight and
ten, for lack of just such a thing as a hot dog. That was the place to go!
   
And--not even the hot-dog man was the
answer; even though by Christmas time, obviously, he had been doing a roaring
trade outside the Fitzroy. Hugh suddenly sat up, scattering cigar-ash
everywhere.--And yet is it nothing I am beginning to atone, to atone for my
past, so largely negative, selfish, absurd, and dishonest? That I propose to
sit on top of a shipload of dynamite bound for the hard-pressed Loyalist
armies? Nothing that after all I am willing to give my life for humanity, if
not in minute particulars? Nothing to ye that pass by?... Though what on earth
he expected it to be, if none of his friends knew he was going to do it, was
not very clear. So far as the Consul was concerned, he probably suspected him
of something even more reckless. And it had to be admitted, one was not
altogether averse to this, if it had not prevented the Consul from still
hinting uncomfortably close to the truth, that the whole stupid beauty of such
a decision made by anyone at a time like this, must lie in that it was so
futile, that it
 
was
 
too late, that the Loyalists had already
lost, and that should that person emerge safe and sound, no one would be able
to say to
 
him
 
that he had been carried away by the popular
wave of enthusiasm for Spain, when even the Russians had given up, and the
Internationals withdrawn. But death and truth could rhyme at a pinch. There was
the old dodge too of telling anyone who shook the dust of the City of
Destruction from his feet, he was running away from himself and his
responsibilities. But the useful thought struck Hugh: I have no
responsibilities. And how can I be escaping from myself when I am without a
place on earth? No home. A piece of driftwood on the Indian Ocean. Is India my
home? Disguise myself as an untouchable, which should not be so difficult, and
go to prison on the Andaman Islands for seventy-seven years, until England
gives India her freedom? But I will tell you this: you would only by doing so
be embarrassing Mahatma Gandhi, secretly the only public figure in the world
for whom you have any respect. No, I respect Stalin too, Cardenas, and
Jawaharlal Nehru--all three of whom probably could only be embarrassed by my
respect.--Hugh had another shot at San Antonio.
   
The radio came alive with a
vengeance; at the Texan station news of a flood was being delivered with such
rapidity one gained the impression the commentator himself was in danger of
drowning. Another narrator in a higher voice gabbled bankruptcy, disaster,
while yet another told of misery blanketing a threatened capital, people
stumbling through debris littering dark streets, hurrying thousands seeking
shelter in bomb-torn darkness. How well he knew the jargon. Darkness, disaster!
How the world fed on it. In the war to come correspondents would assume unheard
of importance, plunging through flame to feed the public its little gobbets of
dehydrated excrement. A bawling scream abruptly warned of stocks lower, or
irregularly higher, the prices of grain, cotton, metal, munitions. While static
rattled on eternally below--poltergeists of the ether, claquers of the idiotic!
Hugh inclined his ear to the pulse of this world beating in that latticed
throat, whose voice was now pretending to be horrified at the very thing by
which it proposed to be engulfed the first moment it could be perfectly certain
the engulfing process would last long enough. Impatiently switching the dial
around, Hugh thought he heard Joe Venuti's violin suddenly, the joyous little
lark of discursive melody soaring in some remote summer of its own above all
this abyssal fury, yet furious too, with the wild controlled abandon of that
music which still sometimes seemed to him the happiest thing about America.
Probably they were rebroadcasting some ancient record, one of those with the
poetical names like Little Buttercup or Apple Blossom, and it was curious how
much it hurt, as though this music, never outgrown, belonged irretrievably to
that which had today at last been lost. Hugh switched the radio off, and lay,
cigar between his fingers, staring at the porch ceiling.
   
Joe Venuti had not been the same, one
heard, since Ed Lang died. The latter suggested guitars, and if Hugh ever
wrote, as he often threatened to do, his autobiography, though it would have
been rather unnecessary, his life being one of those that perhaps lent
themselves better to such brief summation in magazines as "So and so is
twenty-nine, has been riveter, song-writer, watcher of manholes, stoker,
sailor, riding instructor, variety artist, bandsman, bacon-scrubber, saint,
clown, soldier (for five minutes), and usher in a spiritualist church, from
which it should not always be assumed that far from having acquired through his
experiences a wider view of existence, he has a somewhat narrower notion of it
than any bank clerk who has never set foot outside
Newcastle-under-Lyme,"--but if he ever wrote it, Hugh reflected, he would
have to admit that a guitar made a pretty important symbol in his life.
   
He had not played one, and Hugh could
play almost any kind of guitar, for four or five years, and his numerous
instruments declined with his books in basements or attics in London or Paris,
in Wardour Street night-clubs or behind the bar of the Marquis of Granby or the
old Astoria in Greek Street, long since become a convent and his bill still
unpaid there, in pawnshops in Tithebarn Street or the Tottenham Court Road,
where he imagined them as waiting for a time with all their sounds and echoes
for his heavy step, and then, little by little, as they gathered dust, and each
successive string broke, giving up hope, each string a hawser to the fading
memory of their friend, snapping off, the highest pitched string always first,
snapping with sharp gun-like reports, or curious agonized whines, or
provocative nocturnal meows, like a nightmare in the soul of George Frederic
Watts, till there was nothing but the blank untumultuous face of the songless
lyre itself, soundless cave for spiders and steamflies, and delicate fretted
neck, just as each breaking string had severed Hugh himself pang by pang from
his youth, while the past remained, a tortured shape, dark and palpable and
accusing. Or the guitars would have been stolen many times by now, or resold,
repawned--inherited by some other master perhaps, as if each were some great
thought or doctrine. These sentiments, he was almost diverted to think, were
possibly more suited to some exiled dying Segovia than to a mere
ex-hot-guitarist. But Hugh, if he could not play quite like Django Reinhardt or
Eddie Lang on the one hand or, God help him, Frank Crumit on the other, could
not help remembering either that he had once enjoyed the reputation of a
tremendous talent. It was in an odd sense spurious, this reputation, like so
much else about him, his greatest hits having been made with a tenor guitar
tuned as a ukulele and played virtually as a percussion instrument. Yet that in
this bizarre manner he had become the magician of commotions mistakable for
anything from the Scotch Express to elephants trampling in moonlight, an old Allophone
rhythm classic (entitled, tersely, Juggernaut) testified to this day. At all
events, he thought, his guitar had probably been the least fake thing about
him. And fake or not one had certainly been behind most of the major decisions
of his life. For it was due to a guitar he'd become a journalist, it was due to
a guitar he had become a songwriter, it was largely owing to a guitar even--and
Hugh felt himself suffused by a slow burning flush of shame--that he had first
gone to sea.
   
Hugh had started writing songs at
school and before he was seventeen, at about the same time he lost his
innocence, also after several attempts, two numbers of his were accepted by the
Jewish firm of Lazarus Bolowski and Sons in New Compton Street, London. His
method was each whole holiday to make the rounds of the music publishers with
his guitar--and in this respect his early life vaguely recalled that of another
frustrated artist, Adolf Hider--his manuscripts transcribed for piano alone in
the guitar case, or another old Gladstone bag of Geoff's. This success in the
tin-pan alleys of England overwhelmed him; almost before his aunt knew what was
afoot he was leaving school on the strength of it with her permission. At this
school, where he sub-edited the magazine, he got on erratically; he told
himself that he hated it for the snobbish ideals prevailing there. There was a
certain amount of anti-Semitism; and Hugh, whose heart was easily touched, had,
though popular for his guitar, chosen Jews as his particular friends and
favoured them in his columns. He was already entered at Cambridge for a year or
so hence. He had not, however, the slightest intention of going there. The
prospect of it, for some reason, he dreaded only less than being stuck meantime
at some crammer's. And to prevent this he must act swiftly. As he naively saw
it, through his songs there was an excellent chance of rendering himself
completely independent, which also meant independent in advance of the income
that four years later he was to begin receiving from the Public Trustees,
independent of everybody, and without the dubious benefit of a degree.