Under the Volcano (26 page)

   
"One always heard they had a
therapeutic quality. They always had zoos in Mexico apparently--Moctezuma,
courteous fellow, even showed stout Cortes around a zoo. The poor chap thought
he was in the infernal regions." The Consul had discovered a scorpion on
the wall.
   
"¿Alacrán?" Yvonne
produced.
   
"It looks like a violin."
   
"A curious bird is the scorpion.
He cares not for priest nor for poor peon... It's really a beautiful creature.
Leave him be. He'll only sting himself to death anyway." The Consul swung
his stick...
   
They climbed the Calle Nicaragua, always
between the parallel swift streams, past the school with the grey tombstones
and the swing like a gallows, past high mysterious walls, and hedges
intertwined with crimson flowers, among which marmalade-coloured birds were
trapezing, crying raucously. Hugh felt glad of his drinks now, remembering from
his boyhood how the last day of the holidays was always worse if you went
anywhere, how then time, that one had hoped to bemuse, would at any moment
begin to glide after you like a shark following a swimmer.--¡Box! said an
advertisement. Arena Tomalín. El Balón vs El Redondillo. The Balloon vs the
Bouncing Ball--was that? Domingo... But that was for Sunday; while they were
only going to a bullthrowing, a purpose in life whose object was not even worth
advertising. 666: also said further advertisements for an insecticide, obscure
yellow tin plates at the bottom of walls, to the quiet delight of the Consul.
Hugh chuckled to himself. So far the Consul was doing superbly. His few
"necessary drinks," reasonable or outrageous, had worked wonders. He
was walking magnificently erect, shoulders thrown back, chest out: the best
thing about it was his deceitful air of infallibility, of the unquestionable,
especially when contrasted with what one must look like oneself in cowboy
clothes. In his finely cut tweeds (the coat Hugh had borrowed was not much
crumpled, and now Hugh had borrowed another one) and blue and white striped old
Chagfordian tie, with the barbering Hugh had given him, his thick fair hair
neatly slicked back, his freshly trimmed brownish greying beard, his stick, his
dark glasses, who would say that he was not, unmistakably, a figure of complete
respectability? And if this respectable figure, the Consul might have been
saying, appeared to be undergoing from time to time a slight mutation, what of
it? who noticed? It might be--for an Englishman in a foreign country always
expects to meet another Englishman--merely of nautical origin. If not, his
limp, obviously the result of an elephant hunt or an old brush with Pathans,
excused it. The typhoon spun invisibly in the midst of a tumult of broken
pavements: who was aware of its existence, let alone what landmarks in the
brain it had destroyed? Hugh was laughing.
   
"Plingen, plangen, aufgefangen
Swingen, swangen at my side,
Poode, swoode, off to Boode,
Nemesis, a pleasant ride,"
said the Consul mysteriously, and added with heroism, glancing about him:
"It's really an extraordinarily nice day to take a trip."
   
No se permite fijar anuncios...
   
Yvonne was in fact walking alone now:
they climbed in a sort of single file, Yvonne ahead, the Consul and Hugh
unevenly behind, and whatever their collective distraught soul might be
thinking Hugh was oblivious of it, for he had become involved with a fit of
laughing, which the Consul was trying not to find infectious. They walked in
this manner because a boy was driving some cows past them down the hill, half
running; and, as in a dream of a dying Hindu, steering them by their tails. Now
there were some goats. Yvonne turned and smiled at him. Rut these goats were
meek and sweet-looking, jangling little bells. Father is waiting for you
though. Father has not forgotten. Behind the goats a woman with a black
clenched face staggered past them under the weight of a basket loaded with
carbon. A peon loped after her down the hill balancing a large barrel of
ice-cream on his head and calling apparently for customers, with what hope of
success one could not imagine, since he seemed so burdened as to be unable
either to look from side to side or to halt.
   
"It's true that at
Cambridge," the Consul was saying, tapping Hugh on the shoulder, "you
may have learned about Guelphs and so on... But did you know that no angel with
six wings is ever transformed?"
   
"I seem to have learned that no
bird ever flew with one--"
   
"Or that Thomas Burnet, author
of the Telluris Theoria Sacra, entered Christs in--Cáscaras Caracoles! Virgen
Santísima! Ave María! Fuego, fuego! Ay, qué me matan!
   
With a shattering and fearful tumult
a plane slammed down upon them, skimmed the frightened trees, zooming, narrowly
missed a mirador, and was gone the next moment, headed in the direction of the
volcanoes, from which rolled again the monotonous sound of artillery.
   
"Acabó se," sighed the
Consul.
  
 
Hugh suddenly noticed that a tall man (who
must have stepped out of the side-road Yvonne had seemed anxious they should
take) with sloping shoulders and handsome, rather swarthy features, though he
was obviously a European, doubtless in some state of exile, was confronting
them, and it was as though die whole of this man, by some curious fiction,
reached up to the crown of his perpendicularly raised Panama hat, for the gap
below seemed to Hugh still occupied by something, a sort of halo or spiritual
property of his body, or the essence of some guilty secret perhaps that he kept
under the hat but which was now momentarily exposed, fluttering and
embarrassed. He was confronting them, though smiling, it appeared, at Yvonne
alone, his blue, bold protuberant eyes expressing an incredulous dismay, his
black eyebrows frozen in a comedian's arch: he hesitated: then this man, who
wore his coat open and trousers very high over a stomach they had probably been
designed to conceal but merely succeeded in giving the character of an
independent tumescence of the lower part of his body, came forward with eyes
flashing and mouth under its small black moustache curved in a smile at once
false and engaging, yet somehow protective--and somehow, also, increasingly
grave--came forward as it were impelled by clockwork, hand out, automatically
ingratiating:
   
" Why Yvonne, what a delightful
surprise. Why goodness me, I thought; oh, hullo, old bean--"
   
"Hugh, this is Jacques
Laruelle," the Consul was saying. "You've probably heard me speak
about him at one time or another. Jacques, my young brother Hugh: ditto...
,"/ vient d'arriver... or vice versa. How goes it, Jacques? You look as
though you needed a drink rather badly."
   
"—"
   
"—"
   
A minute later M. Laruelle, whose name
struck only a very distant chord for Hugh, had taken Yvonne's arm and was
walking in the middle of the road with her up the hill. Probably there was no
significance in this. But the Consul's introduction had been brusque to say the
least. Hugh himself felt half hurt and, whatever the cause, a slight appalling
sense of tension as the Consul and he slowly fell behind again. Meantime M.
Laruelle was saying:
   
"Why do we not all drop into my
"madhouse"; that would be good fun, don't you think Geoffrey--ah--ah--Hughes?"
   
"No," softly remarked the
Consul, behind, to Hugh, who on the other hand now felt almost disposed to
laugh once more.
   
For the Consul was also saying
something cloacal very quietly to himself over and over again. They were
following Yvonne and her friend through the dust which now, chased by a lonely
gust of wind, was moving along with them up the road, sizzling in petulant
ground-swirls to blow away like rain. When the wind died away the water rushing
headlong down the gutters here was like a sudden force in the opposite
direction. M. Laruelle was saying attentively, ahead of them, to Yvonne:
"Yes... Yes... But your bus won't leave till two-thirty. You have over an
hour."
   
--"But that does sound like an
unusual bloody miracle," Hugh said." You mean after all these
years--"
   
"Yeah. It was a great
coincidence our meeting here," the Consul told Hugh in a changed even
tone. "But I really think you two ought to get together, you have
something in common. Seriously you might enjoy his house, it's always mildly
amusing." "Good," said Hugh.
   
"Why, here comes the
cartero," Yvonne called out ahead, half turning round and disengaging her
arm from M. Laruelle's. She was pointing to the corner on the left at the top
of the hill where the Calle Nicaragua met the Calle Tierra del Fuego."
He's simply amazing," she was saying volubly. "The funny thing is
that all the postmen in Quauhnahuac look exactly alike. Apparently they're all
from the same family and have been postmen for positively generations. I think
this one's grandfather was a cartero at the time of Maximilian. Isn't it
delightful to think of the post-office collecting all these grotesque little
creatures like so many carrier pigeons to dispatch at their will?"
   
Why are you so voluble? Hugh
wondered: "How delightful, for the post-office," he said politely.
They were all watching the cartero's approach. Hugh happened not to have
observed any of these unique postmen before. He could not have been five feet
in height, and from a distance appeared like an unclassifiable but somehow
pleasing animal advancing on all fours. He was wearing a colourless dungaree
suit and a battered official cap and Hugh now saw he had a tiny goatee beard.
Upon his small wizened face as he lunged down the street towards them in his
inhuman yet endearing fashion there was the friendliest expression imaginable.
Seeing them he stopped, unshouldered the bag and began to unbuckle it.
   
"There is a letter, a letter, a
letter,1 he was saying when they came up with him, bowing to Yvonne as if he'd
last greeted her yesterday, "a message por el señor, for your horse,"
he informed the Consul, withdrawing two packages and smiling roguishly as he
undid them. "What?--nothing for Señor Caligula."
   
"Ah." The cartero flicked through
another bundle, glancing at them sideways and keeping his elbows close to his
sides in order not to drop the bag. "No." He put down the bag now
altogether, and began to search feverishly; soon letters were spread all over
the road. "It must be. Here. No. This is. Then this one. Ei ei ei ei ei
ei."
   
"Don't bother, my dear
fellow," the Consul said." Please."
But the cartero tried again: "Badrona, Dios dado--" Hugh too was
waiting expectantly, not so much any word from the Globe, which would come if at
all by cable, but half in hope, a hope which the postman's own appearance
rendered delightfully plausible, of another minuscule Oaxaquenian envelope,
covered with bright stamps of archers shooting at the sun, from Juan Cerillo.
He listened: somewhere, behind a wall, someone was playing a guitar--badly, he
was let down; and a dog barked sharply.
   
"--Feeshbank, Figueroa,
Gómez--no, Quincey, Sandovah, no."
   
At last the good little man gathered
up his letters and bowing apologetically, disappointedly, lunged off down the
street again. They were all looking after him, and just as Hugh was wondering
whether the postman's behaviour might not have been part of some enormous
inexplicable private joke, if really he'd been laughing at them the whole time,
though in the kindliest way, he halted, fumbled once more at one of the
packages, turned, and trotting back with little yelps of triumph, handed the
Consul what looked like a postal card.
   
Yvonne, a little ahead again by now,
nodded at him over her shoulder, smiling, as to say: "Good, you've got a
letter after all," and with her buoyant dancing steps walked on slowly
beside M. Laruelle, up the dusty hill. The Consul turned the card over twice,
then handed it to Hugh.
   
"Strange--" he said.
   
--It was from Yvonne herself and
apparently written at least a year ago. Hugh suddenly realized it must have
been posted soon after she'd left the Consul and most probably in ignorance he
proposed to remain in Quauhnahuac. Yet curiously it was the card that had wandered
far afield: originally addressed to Wells Fargo in Mexico City, it had been
forwarded by some error abroad, gone badly astray in fact, for it was
date-stamped from Paris, Gibraltar, and even Algeciras, in Fascist Spain.
   
"No, read it," the Consul
smiled.
   
Yvonne's scrawl ran: Darling, why did
I leave? Why did you let me? Expect to arrive in the U.S. tomorrow, California
two days later. Hope to find a word from you there waiting. Love Y.
   
Hugh turned the card over. There was
a picture of the leonine Signal Peak on El Paso with Carlsbad Cavern Highway
leading over a white fenced bridge between desert and desert. The road turned a
little corner in the distance and vanished.

   
On the side of the drunken madly revolving world hurtling at 1.20 p.m. towards
Hercules's Butterfly the house seemed a bad idea, the Consul thought--
   
There were two towers, Jacques's
zacualis, one at each end and joined by a catwalk over the roof, which was the
glassed-in gable of the studio below. These towers were as if camouflaged
(almost like the Samaritan, in fact): blue, grey, purple, vermilion, had once
been slashed on in zebra stripes. But time and weather had combined to render
the effect from a short distance of a uniform dull mauve. Their tops, reached
from the catwalk by twin wooden ladders, and from inside by two spiral
staircases, made two flimsy crenellated miradors, each scarcely larger than a
bartizan, tiny roofless variants of the observation posts which everywhere
commanded the valley in Quauhnahuac.
 
  
On the battlements of the mirador to their left, as the Consul and Hugh
confronted the house, with the Calle Nicaragua stretching downhill to their
right, now appeared to them two bilious-looking angels. The angels, carved out
of pink stone, knelt facing one another in profile against the sky across the
intervening crenels, while behind, upon corresponding merlons at the far side,
sat solemnly two nameless objects like marzipan cannonballs, evidently
constructed from the same material.
   
The other mirador was unadorned save
by its crenellations and it often struck the Consul that this contrast was
somehow obscurely appropriate to Jacques, as indeed was that between the angels
and the cannonballs. It was perhaps also significant he should use his bedroom
for working whereas the studio itself on the main floor had been turned into a
dining-room often no better than a camping-ground for his cook and her
relatives.
   
Coming closer it could be seen that
on the left and somewhat larger tower, below that bedroom's two windows--which,
as if degenerate machicolations, were built askew, like the separated halves of
a chevron--a panel of rough stone, covered with large letters painted in gold
leaf, had been slightly set into the wall to give a semblance of bas-relief.
These gold letters though very thick were merged together most confusingly. The
Consul had noticed visitors to the town staring up at them for half an hour at
a time. Sometimes M. Laruelle would come out to explain they really spelt
something, that they formed that phrase of Frey Luis de Leon's the Consul did
not at this moment allow himself to recall. Nor did he ask himself why he
should have come to be almost more familiar with this extraordinary house than
his own as, preceding M. Laruelle now, who was prodding him cheerfully from
behind, he followed Hugh and Yvonne into it, into the studio, empty for once,
and up the spiral staircase of its left-hand tower. "Haven't we overshot
the drinks?" he asked, his mood of detachment expiring now he remembered
that only a few weeks before he'd sworn never to enter this place again.
"Don't you ever think of anything else?" it seemed Jacques had said.
   
The Consul made no reply but stepped
out into the familiar disorderly room with the askew windows, the degenerate
machicolations, now seen from inside, and followed the others obliquely through
it to a balcony at the back, into a view of sun-filled valleys and volcanoes,
and cloud shadows wheeling across the plain.
   
M. Laruelle, however, was already
nervously going downstairs. "Not for me!" protested the others.
Fools! The Consul took two or three steps after him, a movement apparently
without meaning, but it almost constituted a threat: his gaze shifted vaguely
up the spiral staircase which continued from the room to the mirador above,
then he rejoined Hugh and Yvonne on the balcony.
   
"Get up on the roof, you people,
or stay on the porch, just make yourselves at home," came from downstairs.
"There's a pair of binoculars on the table there--er--Hugh's... I won't be
a minute."
   
"Any objection if I go on the
roof?" Hugh asked them.
   
"Don't forget the
binoculars!"
   
Yvonne and the Consul were alone on
the flying balcony.
   
From where they stood the house
seemed situated half-way up a cliff rising steeply from the valley stretched
out below them. Leaning round they saw the town itself, built as on top of this
cliff, overhanging them. The clubs of flying machines waved silently over the
roofs, their motions like gesticulations of pain. But the cries and music of
the fair reached them at this moment clearly. Far away the Consul made out a
green corner, the golf course, with little figures working their way round the
side of the cliff, crawling... Golfing scorpions. The Consul remembered the
card in his pocket, and apparently he had made a movement towards Yvonne,
desiring to tell her about it, to say something tender to her concerning it, to
turn her towards him, to kiss her. Then he realized that without another drink
shame for this morning would prevent his looking in her eyes. "What do you
think, Yvonne," he said, "with your astronomical mind--" Could
it be he, talking to her like this, on an occasion like this! Surely not, it
was a dream. He was pointing up at the town.
   
"--With your astronomical
mind," he repeated, but no, he had not said it: "doesn't all that
revolving and plunging up there somehow suggest to you the voyaging of unseen
planets, of unknown moons hurtling backwards?" He had said nothing.
   
"Please Geoffrey--" Yvonne
laid her hand on his arm. "Please, please believe me, I didn't want to be
drawn into this. Let's make some excuse and get away as quickly as possible...
I don't mind how many drinks you have after," she added.
   
"I wasn't aware I'd said
anything about drinks now. Or after. It's you that have put the thought into my
head. Or Jacques, whom I can hear breaking--or should we say, crushing?--the
ice down below."
   
"Haven't you got any tenderness
or love left for me at all?" Yvonne asked suddenly, almost piteously,
turning round on him, and he thought: Yes, I do love you, I have all the love
in the world left for you, only that love seems so far away from me and so
strange too, for it is as though I could almost hear it, a droning or a
weeping, but far, far away, and a sad lost sound, it might be either
approaching or receding, I can't tell which.
   
"Don't you think of anything
except of how many drinks you're going to have?"
   
"Yes," said the Consul (but
wasn't it Jacques who'd just asked him this?), "yes, I do--oh my God, Yvonne!"
   
"Please, Geoffrey--"
   
Yet he could not face her. The clubs
of the flying machines seen out of the corner of his eye, now seemed as if
belabouring him all over. "Listen," he said, "are you asking me
to extricate us from all this, or are you starting to exhort me again about
drinking?"
   
"Oh, I'm not exhorting you,
really I'm not. I'll never exhort you again. I'll do anything you ask."
   
"Then--" he had begun in
anger.
   
But a look of tenderness came over
Yvonne's face and the Consul thought once more of the postcard in his pocket.
It ought to have been a good omen. It could be the talisman of their immediate
salvation now. Perhaps it would have been a good omen if only it had arrived
yesterday or at the house this morning. Unfortunately one could not now
conceive of it as having arrived at any other moment. And how could he know
whether it was a good omen or not without another drink?
   
"But I'm back," she was
apparently saying. "Can't you see it? We're here together again, it's us.
Can't you see that?" Her lips were trembling, she was almost crying.
   
Then she was close to him, in his
arms, but he was gazing over her head.
   
"Yes, I can see," he said,
only he couldn't see, only hear, the droning, the weeping, and feel, feel the
unreality."I do love you. Only--" "I can never forgive you
deeply enough": was that what was in his mind to add?
   
--And yet, he was thinking all over
again, and all over again as for the first time, how he had suffered, suffered,
suffered without her; indeed such desolation, such a desperate sense of
abandonment, bereavement, as during this last year without Yvonne, he had never
known in his life, unless it was when his mother died. But this present emotion
he had never experienced with his mother: this urgent desire to hurt, to
provoke, at a time when forgiveness alone could save the day, this, rather, had
commenced with his stepmother, so that she would have to cry: "I can't
eat, Geoffrey, the food sticks in my throat!" It was hard to forgive, hard,
hard to forgive. Harder still, not to say how hard it was, I hate you. Even
now, of all times. Even though here was God's moment, the chance to agree, to
produce the card, to change everything; or there was but a moment left... Too
late. The Consul had controlled his tongue. But he felt his mind divide and
rise, like the two halves of a counterpoised drawbridge, ticking, to permit
passage of these noisome thoughts. "Only my heart--" he said.
   
"Your heart, darling?" she
asked anxiously.
   
"Nothing--"
   
"Oh my poor sweetheart, you must
be so weary!"
   
"Momentito," he said,
disengaging himself.
   
He strolled back into Jacques's room,
leaving Yvonne on the porch. Laruelle's voice floated up from downstairs. Was
it here he had been betrayed? This very room, perhaps, had been filled with her
cries of love. Books (among which he did not see his Elizabethan plays) were
strewn all over the floor and on the side of the studio couch nearest the wall,
were stacked, as by some half-repenting poltergeist, almost to the ceiling.
What if Jacques, approaching his design with Tarquin's ravishing strides, had
disturbed this potential avalanche! Grisly Orozco charcoal drawings, of an
unexampled horrendousness, snarled down from the walls. In one, executed by a
hand of indisputable genius, harpies grappled on a smashed bedstead among
broken bottles of tequila, gnashing their teeth. No wonder; the Consul, peering
closer, sought in vain for a sound bottle. He sought in vain around Jacques's
room too. There were two ruddy Riveras. Expressionless Amazons with feet like
legs of mutton testified to the oneness of the toilers with the earth. Over the
chevron-shaped windows, which looked down the Calle Tierra del Fuego, hung a
terrifying picture he hadn't seen before, and took at first to be a tapestry.
Called Los Borrachones--why not Los Borrachos?--it resembled something between
a primitive and a prohibitionist poster, remotely under the influence of
Michelangelo. In fact, he now saw, it really amounted to a prohibitionist
poster, though of a century or so back, half a century, God knows what period.
Down, headlong into hades, selfish and florid-faced, into a tumult of
fire-spangled fiends, Medusae, and belching monstrosities, with swallow-dives
or awkwardly, with dread backward leaps, shrieking among falling bottles and
emblems of broken hopes, plunged the drunkards; up, up, flying palely,
selflessly into the light towards heaven, soaring sublimely in pairs, male
sheltering female, shielded themselves by angels with abnegating wings, shot
the sober. Not all were in pairs however, the Consul noted. A few lone females
on the upgrade were sheltered by angels only. It seemed to him these females
were casting half-jealous glances downward after their plummeting husbands,
some of whose faces betrayed the most unmistakable relief. The Consul laughed,
a trifle shakily. It was ridiculous, but still--had anyone ever given a good
reason why good and evil should not be thus simply delimited? Elsewhere in
Jacques's room cuneiform stone idols squatted like bulbous infants: on one side
of the room there was even a line of them chained together. One part of the
Consul continued to laugh, in spite of himself, and all this evidence of lost
wild talents, at the thought of Yvonne confronted in the aftermath of her
passion by a whole row of fettered babies.
   
"How are you getting on up
there, Hugh?" he called up the staircase.
   
"I think I've got Parián in
pretty good focus."
   
Yvonne was reading on the balcony,
and the Consul gazed back at Los Borrachones. Suddenly he felt something never
felt before with such shocking certainty. It was that he was in hell himself.
At the same time he became possessed of a curious calm. The inner ferment
within him, the squalls and eddies of nervousness, were held again in check. He
could hear Jacques moving downstairs and soon he would have another drink. That
would help, but it was not the thought which calmed him. Parián--the Farolito!
he said to himself. The Lighthouse, the lighthouse that invites the storm, and
lights it! After all, some time during the day, when they were at the
bullthrowing perhaps, he might break away from the others and go there, if only
for five minutes, if only for one drink. That prospect filled him with an
almost healing love and at this moment, for it was part of the calm, the
greatest longing he had ever known. The Farolito!
   
It was a strange place, a place
really of the late night and early dawn, which as a rule, like that one other
terrible cantina in Oaxaca, did not open till four o'clock in the morning. But
today being the holiday for the dead it would not close. At first it had
appeared to him tiny. Only after he had grown to know it well had he discovered
how far back it ran, that it was really composed of numerous little rooms, each
smaller and darker than the last, opening one into another, the last and
darkest of all being no larger than a cell. These rooms struck him as spots
where diabolical plots must be hatched, atrocious murders planned; here, as
when Saturn was in Capricorn, life reached bottom. But here also great wheeling
thoughts hovered in the brain; while the potter and the field-labourer alike,
early risen, paused a moment in the paling doorway, dreaming... He saw it all
now, the enormous drop on one side of the cantina into the barranca that
suggested Kubla Khan: the proprietor, Ramón Diosdado, known as the Elephant,
who was reputed to have murdered his wife to cure her neurasthenia, the
beggars, hacked by war and covered with sores, one of whom one night after four
drinks from the Consul had taken him for the Christ, and falling down on his
knees before him, had pinned swiftly under his coat-lapel two medallions,
joined to a tiny worked bleeding heart like a pin-cushion, portraying the
Virgin of Guadalupe. "I ah give you the Saint!" He saw all this,
feeling the atmosphere of the cantina enclosing him already with its certainty
of sorrow and evil, and with its certainty of something else too, that escaped
him. But he knew: it was peace. He saw the dawn again, watched with lonely
anguish from that open door, in the violet-shaded light, a slow bomb bursting
over the Sierra Madre--Sonnenauf-gang!--the oxen harnessed to their carts with
wooden disc wheels patiently waiting outside for their drivers, in the sharp
cool pure air of heaven. The Consul's longing was so great his soul was locked
with the essence of the place as he stood and he was gripped by thoughts like
those of the mariner who, sighting the faint beacon of Start Point after a long
voyage, knows that soon he will embrace his wife.