Under the Volcano (29 page)

   
--"Tequila," he said.
   
"¿Una?" the boy said
sharply, and M. Laruelle called for gaseosa.
   
"Sí, señores." The boy
swept the table. "Una tequila y una gaseosa." He brought immediately
a bottle of El Nilo for M. Laruelle together with salt, chile, and a saucer of
sliced lemons.
   
The café, which was in the centre of
a little railed-in garden at the edge of the square among trees, was called the
Paris. And in feet it was reminiscent of Paris. A simple fountain dripped near.
The boy brought them camarones, red shrimps in a saucer, and had to be told
again to get the tequila.
   
At last it arrived.
   
"Ah--" the Consul said,
though it was the chalcedony ring that had been shaking.
   
"Do you really like it?" M.
Laruelle asked him, and the Consul, sucking a lemon, felt the fire of the
tequila run down his spine like lightning striking a tree which thereupon,
miraculously, blossoms.
   
"What are you shaking for?"
the Consul asked him.
   
M. Laruelle stared at him, he gave a
nervous glance over his shoulder, he made as if absurdly to twang his tennis
racket on his toe, but remembering the press, stood it up against his chair
awkwardly.
   
"What are you afraid of--"
the Consul was mocking him.
   
"I admit, I feel
confused..." M. Laruelle cast a more protracted glance over his shoulder.
"Here, give me some of your poison." He leaned forward and took a sip
of the Consul's tequila and remained bent over the thimble-shaped glass of
terrors, a moment since brimming.
   
"Like it?"
   
"--like Oxygénée, and petrol...
If I ever start to drink that stuff, Geoffrey, you'll know I'm done for."
   
"It's mescal with me... Tequila,
no, that is healthful... and delightful. Just like beer. Good for you. But if I
ever start to drink mescal again, I'm afraid, yes, that would be the end,"
the Consul said dreamily.
   
"Name of a name of God,"
shuddered M. Laruelle.
   
"You're not afraid of Hugh, are
you?" The Consul, mocking, pursued--while it struck him that all the
desolation of the months following Yvonne's departure were now mirrored in the
other's eyes. "Not jealous of him, by any chance, are you?"
   
"Why should--"
   
"But you are thinking, aren't
you, that in all this time I have never once told you the truth about my
life," the Consul said, "isn't that right?"
   
"No... For perhaps once or
twice, Geoffrey, without knowing it, you have told the truth. No, I truly want
to help. But, as usual, you don't give me a chance."
   
"I have never told you the
truth. I know it, it is worse than terrible. But as Shelley says, the cold
world shall not know. And the tequila hasn't cured your trembling."
   
"No, I am afraid," M.
Laruelle said.
   
"But I thought you were never
afraid... Un otro tequila," the Consul told the boy, who came running,
repeating sharply, "--uno?"
   
M. Laruelle glanced round after the
boy as if it had been in his mind to say "dos": "I'm afraid of
you," he said, "Old Bean."
   
The Consul heard, after half the
second tequila, every now and then, familiar well-meaning phrases. "It's
hard to say this. As man to man, I don't care who she is. Even if the miracle
has occurred. Unless you cut it out altogether."
   
The Consul however was looking past
M. Laruelle at the flying-boats which were at a little distance: the machine
itself was feminine, graceful as a ballet dancer, its iron skirts of gondolas
whirling higher and higher. Finally it whizzed round with a tense whipping and
whining, then its skirts drooped chastely again when for a time there was
stillness, only the breeze stirring them. And how beautiful, beautiful,
beautiful--
   
"For God's sake. Go home to
bed... Or stay here. I'll find the others. And tell them you're not
going..."
   
"But I am going," the
Consul said, commencing to take one of the shrimps apart. "Not
camarones," he added. "Cabrones. That's what the Mexicans call
them." Placing his thumbs at the base of both ears he waggled his fingers.
"Cabrón. You too, perhaps... Venus is a horned star."
   
"What about the damage you've
done, to her life... After all your howling... If you've got her back!--If
you've got this chance--"
   
"You are interfering with my
great battle," the Consul said, gazing past M. Laruelle at an advertisement
at the foot of the fountain: Peter Lorre en Las Manos de Orlac, a las 6.30 p.m.
"I have to have a drink or two now, myself--so long as it isn't mescal of
course--else I shall become confused, like yourself."
   
"--the truth is, I suppose, that
sometimes, when you've calculated the amount exactly, you do see more
clearly," M. Laruelle was admitting a minute later.
   
"Against death." The Consul
sank back easily in his chair. "My battle for the survival of the human
consciousness."
   
"But certainly not the things so
important to us despised sober people, on which the balance of any human
situation depends. It's precisely your inability to see them, Geoffrey, that
turns them into the instruments of the disaster you have created yourself. Your
Ben Jonson, for instance, or perhaps it was Christopher Marlowe, your Faust
man, saw the Carthaginians fighting on his big toe-nail. That's like the kind
of clear seeing you indulge in. Everything seems perfectly clear, because
indeed it is perfectly clear, in terms of the toe-nail."
   
"Have a devilled scorpion,"
invited the Consul, pushing over the camarones with extended arm. "A
bedevilled cabrón."
   
"I admit the efficacy of your
tequila--but do you realize that while you're battling against death, or
whatever you imagine you're doing, while what is mystical in you is being
released, or whatever it is you imagine is being released, while you're
enjoying all this, do you realize what extraordinary allowances are being made
for you by the world which has to cope with you, yes, are even now being made
by me?"
   
The Consul was gazing upward dreamily
at the Ferris wheel near them, huge, but resembling an enormously magnified
child's structure of girders and angle brackets, nuts and bolts, in Meccano;
tonight it would be lit up, its steel twigs caught in the emerald pathos of the
trees; the wheel of the law rolling; and it bore thinking of too that the
carnival was not going in earnest now. What a hullabaloo there would be later!
His eye fell on another little carrousel, a dazzle-painted wobbling child's
toy, and he saw himself as a child making up his mind to go on it, hesitating,
missing the next opportunity, and the next, missing all the opportunities
finally, until it was too late. What opportunities, precisely, did he mean? A
voice on the radio somewhere began to sing a song: Samaritana mía, alma pía,
bebe en tu boca linda, then went dead. It had sounded like Samaritana.
   
"And you forget what you exclude
from this, shall we say, feeling of omniscience. And at night, I imagine, or
between drink and drink, which is a sort of night, what you have excluded, as
if it resented that exclusion, returns--"
   
"I'll say it returns," the
Consul said, listening at this point. "There are other minor deliriums
too, meteora, which you can pick out of the air before your eyes, like gnats.
And this is what people seem to think is the end... But d.t.'s are only the
beginning, the music round the portal of the Qliphoth, the overture, conducted
by the God of Flies... Why do people see rats? These are the sort of questions
that ought to concern the world, Jacques. Consider the word remorse. Remors.
Mordeo, mordere. La Mordida! Agenbite too... And why rongeur? Why all this
biting, all those rodents, in the etymology?"
   
"Facilis est descensus Averno...
It's too easy."
   
"You deny the greatness of my
battle? Even if I win. And I shall certainly win, if I want to," the
Consul added, aware of a man near them standing on a step-ladder nailing a
board to a tree.
   
"]e crois que le vautour est
doux a Prométhée et que les Ixion se plaisent en Enfers."
--¡Box!
   
"To say nothing of what you
lose, lose, lose, are losing, man. You fool, you stupid fool... You've even
been insulated from the responsibility of genuine suffering... Even the suffering
you do endure is largely unnecessary. Actually spurious. It lacks the very
basis you require of it for its tragic nature. You deceive yourself. For
instance that you're drowning your sorrows... Because of Yvonne and me. But
Yvonne knows. And so do I. And so do you. That Yvonne wouldn't have been aware.
If you hadn't been so drunk all the time. To know what she was doing. Or care.
And what's more. The same thing is bound to happen again you fool it will
happen again if you don't pull yourself together. I can see the writing on the
wall. Hullo."
   
M. Laruelle wasn't there at all; he
had been talking to himself. The Consul stood up and finished his tequila. But
the writing was there, all right, if not on the wall. The man had nailed his
board to the tree.
   
¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDÍN?
   
The Consul realized, leaving the
Paris, he was in a state of drunkenness, so to speak, rare with him. His steps
teetered to the left, he could not make them incline to the right. He knew in
which direction he was going, towards the Bus Terminal, or rather the little
dark cantina adjacent to it kept by the widow Gregorio, who herself was half
English and had lived in Manchester, and to whom he owed fifty centavos he'd
suddenly made up his mind to pay back. But simply he could not steer a straight
course there... Oh we all walk the wibberley wobberley--
   
Dies Faustus... The Consul looked at
his watch. Just for one moment, one horrible moment in the Paris, he had
thought it night, that it was one of those days the hours slid by like corks
bobbing astern, and the morning was carried away by the wings of the angel of
night, all in a trice, but tonight quite the reverse seemed to be happening: it
was still only five to two. It was already the longest day in his entire experience,
a lifetime; he had not only not missed the bus, he would have plenty of time
for more drinks. If only he were not drunk! The Consul strongly disapproved of
this drunkenness.
   
Children accompanied him, gleefully
aware of his plight. Money, money, money, they gibbered. O.K. mistair! Where
har you go? Their cries grew discouraged, fainter, utterly disappointed as they
clung to his trousers leg. He would have liked to give them something. Yet he
did not wish to draw more attention to himself. He had caught sight of Hugh and
Yvonne, trying their hands at a shooting gallery. Hugh was shooting, Yvonne
watched; phut, pssst, pfffing; and Hugh brought down a procession of wooden
ducks.
   
The Consul stumbled on without being
seen, passing a booth where you could have your photograph taken with your
sweetheart against a terrifying thunderous background, lurid and green, with a
charging bull, and Popocatepetl in eruption, past, his face averted, the shabby
little closed British Consulate, where the lion and the unicorn on the faded
blue shield regarded him mournfully. This was shameful. But we are still at
your service, in spite of all, they seemed to say. Dieu et mon droit. The
children had given him up. However he had lost his bearings. He was reaching
the edge of the fair. Mysterious tents were shut up here, or lying collapsed,
enfolded on themselves. They appeared almost human, the former kind awake,
expectant; the latter with the wrinkled crumpled aspect of men asleep, but
longing even in unconsciousness to stretch their limbs. Farther on at the final
frontiers of the fair, it was the day of the dead indeed. Here the tent booths
and galleries seemed not so much asleep as lifeless, beyond hope of revival.
Yet there were faint signs of life after all, he saw.
 
  
At a point outside the plaza's periphery, half on the pavement, there
was another, utterly desolated, "safe" roundabout. The little chairs
circulated beneath a frilled canvas pyramid that twirled slowly for half a
minute, then stopped, when it looked just like the hat of the bored Mexican who
tended it. Here it was, this little Popocatepetl, nestling far away from the
swooping flying-machines, far from the Great Wheel, existing--for whom did it
exist, the Consul wondered. Belonging neither to the children nor the adults it
stood, untenanted, as one might imagine the whirligig of adolescence as resting
deserted, if youth suspected it of offering an excitement so apparently
harmless, choosing rather what in the proper square swooned in agonizing
ellipses beneath some gigantic canopy.
   
The Consul walked on a little
farther, still unsteadily; he thought he had his bearings again, then stopped:
       
¡BRAVA ATRACCIÒN!
       
10 C. MÁQUINA INFERNAL
   
he read, half struck by some
coincidence in this. Wild attraction. The huge looping-the-loop machine, empty,
but going full blast over his head in this dead section of the fair, suggested
some huge evil spirit, screaming in its lonely hell, its limbs writhing,
smiting the air like flails of paddlewheels. Obscured by a tree, he hadn't seen
it before. The machine stopped also...
   
"--Mistair. Money money
money."
   
"Mistair! Where har you
go?"
   
The wretched children had spotted him
again; and his penalty for avoiding them was to be drawn inexorably, though
with as much dignity as possible, into boarding the monster. And now, his ten
centavos paid to a Chinese hunchback in a retiform visored tennis cap, he was
alone, irrevocably and ridiculously alone, in a little confession box. After a
while, with violent bewildering convulsions, the thing started to go. The
confession boxes, perched at the end of menacing steel cranks, zoomed upwards
and heavily fell. The Consul's own cage hurled up again with a powerful
thrusting, hung for a moment upside down at the top, while the other cage,
which significantly was empty, was at the bottom, then, before this situation
had been grasped, crashed down, paused a moment at the other extremity, only to
be lifted upwards again cruelly to the highest point where for an interminable,
intolerable period of suspension, it remained motionless.--The Consul, like
that poor fool who was bringing light to the world, was hung upside down over
it, with only a scrap of woven wire between himself and death. There, above
him, poised the world, with its people stretching out down to him, about to
fall off the road on to his head, or into the sky. 999. The people hadn't been
there before. Doubtless, following the children, they had assembled to watch
him. Obliquely he was aware that he was without physical fear of death, as he
would have been without fear at this moment of anything else that might sober
him up; perhaps this had been his main idea. But he did not like it. This was
not amusing. It was doubtless another example of Jacques's--Jacques?--unnecessary
suffering. And it was scarcely a dignified position for an ex-representative of
His Majesty's government to find himself in, though it was symbolic, of what he
could not conceive, but it was undoubtedly symbolic. Jesus. All at once, terribly,
the confession boxes had begun to go in reverse: Oh, the Consul said, oh; for
the sensation of falling was now as if terribly behind him, unlike anything,
beyond experience; certainly this recessive unwinding was not like
looping-the-loop in a plane, where the movement was quickly over, the only
strange feeling one of increased weight; as a sailor he disapproved of that
feeling too, but this--ah, my God! Everything was falling out of his pockets,
was being wrested from him, torn away, a fresh article at each whirling,
sickening, plunging, retreating, unspeakable circuit, his notecase, pipe, keys,
his dark glasses he had taken off, his small change he did not have time to
imagine being pounced on by the children after all, he was being emptied out,
returned empty, his stick, his passport--had that been his passport? He didn't
know if he'd brought it with him. Then he remembered he had brought it. Or
hadn't brought it. It could be difficult even for a Consul to be without a
passport in Mexico. Ex-consul. What did it matter? Let it go! There was a kind
of fierce delight in this final acceptance. Let everything go! Everything
particularly that provided means of ingress or egress, went bond for, gave
meaning or character, or purpose or identity to that frightful bloody nightmare
he was forced to carry around with him everywhere upon his back, that went by
the name of Geoffrey Firmin, late of His Majesty's Navy, later still of His
Majesty's Consular Service, later still of--Suddenly it struck him that the
Chinaman was asleep, that the children, the people had gone, that this would go
on for ever; no one could stop the machine... It was over.