Under the Volcano (30 page)

   
And yet not over. On terra firma the
world continued to spin madly round; houses, whirligigs, hotels, cathedrals,
cantinas, volcanoes: it was difficult to stand up at all. He was conscious of
people laughing at him but, what was more surprising, of his possessions being
restored to him, one by one. The child who had his notecase withdrew it from
him playfully before returning it. No: she still had something in her other
hand, a crumpled paper. The Consul thanked her for it firmly. Some telegram of
Hugh's. His stick, his glasses, his pipe, unbroken; yet not his favourite pipe;
and no passport. Well, definitely he could not have brought it. Putting his
other things back in his pockets he turned a corner, very unsteadily, and
slumped down on a bench. He replaced his dark glasses, set his pipe in his
mouth, crossed his legs, and, as the world gradually slowed down, assumed the bored
expression of an English tourist sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens.
   
Children, he thought, how charming
they were at heart. The very same kids who had besieged him for money, had now
brought him back even the smallest of his small change and then, touched by his
embarrassment, had scurried away without waiting for a reward. Now he wished he
had given them something. The little girl had gone also. Perhaps this was her
exercise book open on the bench. He wished he had not been so brusque with her,
that she would come back, so that he could give her the book. Yvonne and he
should have had children, would have had children, could have had children,
should have... In the exercise book he made out with difficulty: Scrunch is an
old man. He lives in London. He lives alone in a large house. Scrooge is a rich
man but he never gives to the poor. His is a miser. No one loves Scrooge and
Scrooge loves no one. He has no friends. He is alone in the world. The man (el
hombre): the house (la casa): the poor (los pobres): he lives (él vive): he
gives (él da): he has no friends (él no tiene amigos): he loves (él amo): old
(viejo): large (grande): no one (nadie): rich (rico): Who is Scrooge? Where
does he live? Is Scrooge rich or poor? Has he friends? How does he live? Alone.
World. On.
   
At last the earth had stopped
spinning with the motion of the Infernal Machine. The last house was still, the
last tree rooted again. It was seven minutes past two by his watch. And he was
cold stone sober. How horrible was the feeling. The Consul closed the exercise
book: bloody old Scrooge; how queer to meet him here!
   
--Gay-looking soldiers, grimy as
sweeps, strolled up and down the avenues with a jaunty unmilitary gait. Their
officers, smartly uniformed, sat on benches, leaning forward over their swagger
canes as if petrified by remote strategical thoughts. An Indian carrier with a
towering load of chairs loped along the Avenida Guerrero. A madman passed,
wearing, in the manner of a lifebelt, an old bicycle tyre. With a nervous movement
he continually shifted the injured tread round his neck. He muttered to the
Consul, but waiting neither for reply nor reward, took off the tyre and flung
it far ahead of him towards a booth, then followed unsteadily, stuffing
something in his mouth from a tin bait jar. Picking up the tyre he flung it far
ahead again, repeating this process, to the irreducible logic of which he
appeared eternally committed, until out of sight.
   
The Consul felt a clutch at his heart
and half rose. He had caught sight of Hugh and Yvonne again at a booth; she was
buying tortilla from an old woman. While the woman plastered the tortilla for
her with cheese and tomato sauce, a touchingly dilapidated little policeman,
doubtless one on strike, with cap askew, in soiled baggy trousers, leggings,
and a coat several sizes too large for him, tore off a piece of lettuce and,
with a consummately courteous smile, handed it to her. They were having a
splendid time, it was obvious. They ate their tortillas, grinning at each other
as the sauce dripped from their fingers; now Hugh had brought out his
handkerchief; he was wiping a smear from Yvonne's cheek, while they roared with
laughter, in which the policeman joined. What had happened to their plot now,
their plot to get him away? Never mind. The clutch at his heart had become a
cold iron grip of persecution which had been stayed only by a certain relief;
for how, had Jacques communicated his little anxieties to them, would they now
be here, laughing? Still, one never knew; and a policeman was a policeman, even
if on strike, and friendly, and the Consul was more afraid of the police than
death. He placed a small stone upon the child's exercise book, leaving it on
the bench, and dodged behind a stall to avoid them. He got a glimpse through
the boards of the man still half-way up the slippery pole, neither near enough
to the top nor the bottom to be certain of reaching either in comfort, avoided
a huge turtle dying in two parallel streams of blood on the pavement outside a
sea-food restaurant, and entered El Bosque with a steady gait, as once before,
similarly obsessed, at a run: there was no sign of the bus yet; he had twenty
minutes, probably more.
   
The Terminal Cantina El Bosque,
however, seemed so dark that even with his glasses off he had to stop dead...Mi
ritrovai in una bosca oscura--or selva? No matter. The Cantina was well named,
"The Boskage." This darkness, though, was associated in his mind with
velvet curtains, and there they were, behind the shadowy bar, velvet or
velveteen curtains, too dirty and full of dust to be black, partially screening
the entrance to the back room, which one could never be sure was private. For
some reason the fiesta had not overflowed in here; the place--a Mexican
relative of the English "Jug and Bottle," chiefly dedicated to those
who drank "off" the premises, in which there was only one spindly
iron table and two stools at the bar, and which, facing east, became
progressively darker as the sun, to those who noticed such things, climbed
higher into the sky--was deserted, as usual at this hour. The Consul groped his
way forward. "Señora Gregorio," he called softly, yet with an
agonized impatient quaver in his voice. It had been difficult to find his voice
at all; he now needed another drink badly. The word echoed through the back of
the house; Gregorio; there was no answer. He sat down, while gradually the
shapes about him became more clearly defined, shapes of barrels behind the bar,
of bottles. Ah, the poor turtle!--The thought struck at a painful tangent.--There
were big green barrels of jerez, habanero, catalán, parras, zarzamora, málaga,
durazno, membrillo, raw alcohol at a peso a litre, tequila, mescal, rompope. As
he read these names and, as if it were a dreary dawn outside, the cantina grew
lighter to his eyes, he heard voices in his ears again, a single voice above
the muted roar of the fair: "Geoffrey Firmin, this is what it is like to
die, just this and no more, an awakening from a dream in a dark place, in
which, as you see, are present the means of escape from yet another nightmare.
But the choice is up to you. You are not invited to use those means of escape;
it is left up to your judgement; to obtain them it is necessary only to--"
"Señora Gregorio," he repeated, and the echo came back:."Orio."
   
In one corner of the bar someone had
apparently once begun a small mural, aping the Great Mural in the Palace, two
or three figures only, peeling and inchoate Tlahuicans.--There was the sound of
slow, dragging footsteps from behind; the widow appeared, a little old woman
wearing an unusually long and shabby rustling black dress. Her hair that he
recalled as grey seemed to have been recently hennaed, or dyed red, and though
it hung untidily in front, it was twisted up at the back into a Psyche knot. Her
face, which was beaded with perspiration, evinced the most extraordinary waxen
pallor; she looked careworn, wasted with suffering, yet at the sight of the
Consul her tired eyes gleamed, kindling her whole expression to one of wry
amusement in which there appeared also both a determination and a certain weary
expectancy. "Mescal posseebly," she said, in a queer, chanting
half-bantering tone, "Mescal imposseebly." But she made no move to
draw the Consul a drink, perhaps because of his debt, an objection he
immediately disposed of by laying a tostón on the counter. She smiled almost
slyly as she edged towards the mescal barrel. "No, tequila, por
favor," he said.
   
"Un obsequio"--she handed
him the tequila. "Where do you laugh now?"
   
"I still laugh in the Calle
Nicaragua, cincuenta dos," the Consul replied, smiling. "You mean
'live,' Señora Gregorio, not 'laugh,'con permiso."
   
"Remember," Señora Gregorio
corrected him gently, slowly, "remember my English. Well, so it is,"
she sighed, drawing a small glass of málaga for herself from the barrel chalked
with that name. "Here's to your love. What's my names?" She pushed
towards him a saucer filled with salt that was speckled with orange-coloured
pepper.
   
"Lo mismo! The Consul drank the
tequila down. "Geoffrey Firmin."
   
Señora Gregorio brought him a second
tequila; for a time they regarded one another without speaking. "So it
is," she repeated at last, sighing once more; and there was pity in her
voice for the Consul. "So it is. You must take it as it come. It can't be
helped."
   
"No, it can't be helped."
   
"If you har your wife you would
lose all things in that love," Señora Gregorio said, and the Consul,
understanding that somehow this conversation was being taken up where it had
been left off weeks before, probably at the point where Yvonne had abandoned
him for the seventh time that evening, found himself not caring to change the
basis of shared misery on which their relationship rested--for Gregorio had
really abandoned her before he died--by informing her his wife had come back,
was indeed, perhaps, not fifty feet away. "Both minds is occupied in one
thing, so you can't lose it," she continued sadly.
   
"Sí--," said the Consul.
   
"So it is. If your mind is
occupied with all things, then you never lose your mind. Your minds, your
life--your everything in it. Once when I was a girl I never used to think I
live like I laugh now. I always used to dream about kernice dreams. Nice
clothes, nice hairts--"Everything is good for me just now' it was one time,
theatres, but everything--now, I don't think of but nothing but trouble,
trouble, trouble, trouble; and trouble comes... So it is."
   
"Sí--, Señora Gregorio."
   
"Of course I was a kernice girl
from home," she was saying. "This--" she glanced contemptuously
round the dark little bar, "was never in my mind. Life changes, you know,
you can never drink of it." "Not 'drink of it,' Señora Gregorio, you
mean 'think of it.'" "Never drink of it. Oh, well," she said,
pouring out a litre of raw alcohol for a poor noseless peon who had entered
silently and was standing in a corner, "a kernice life among kernice
people and now what?"
   
Señora Gregorio shuffled off into the
back room, leaving the Consul alone. He sat with his second large tequila
untouched for some minutes. He imagined himself drinking it yet had not the
will to stretch out his hand to take it, as if it were something once long and
tediously desired but which, an overflowing cup suddenly within reach, had lost
all meaning. The cantina's emptiness, and a strange ticking like that of some
beetle, within that emptiness, began to get on his nerves; he looked at his
watch: only seventeen minutes past two. This was where the tick was coming
from. Again he imagined himself taking the drink: again his will failed him.
Once the swing door opened, someone glanced round quickly to satisfy himself,
went out: was that Hugh, Jacques? Whoever it was had seemed to possess the
features of both, alternately. Somebody else entered and, though the next
instant the Consul felt this was not the case, went right through into the back
room, peering round furtively. A starving pariah dog with the appearance of
having lately been skinned had squeezed itself in after the last man; it looked
up at the Consul with beady, gentle eyes. Then, thrusting down its poor wrecked
dinghy of a chest, from which raw withered breasts drooped, it began to bow and
scrape before him. Ah, the ingress of the animal kingdom! Earlier it had been
the insects; now these were closing in upon him again, these animals, these
people without ideas: "Dispense usted, por Dios," he whispered to the
dog, then wanting to say something kind, added, stooping, a phrase read or
heard in youth or childhood: "For God sees how timid and beautiful you
really are, and the thoughts of hope that go with you like little white
birds--" The Consul stood up and suddenly declaimed to the dog: "Yet
this day, pichicho, shalt thou be with me in--" But the dog hopped away in
terror on three legs and slunk under the door.
   
The Consul finished his tequila in
one gulp; he went to the counter. "Señora Gregorio," he called; he
waited, casting his eyes about the cantina, which seemed to have grown very
much lighter. And the echo came back: "Orio."--Why, the mad pictures
of the wolves! He had forgotten they were here. The materialized pictures, six
or seven of considerable length, completed, in the defection of the muralist,
the decoration of El Bosque. They were precisely the same in every detail. All
showed the same sleigh being pursued by the same pack of wolves. The wolves
hunted the occupants of the sleigh the entire length of the bar and at
intervals right round the room, though neither sleigh nor wolves budged an inch
in the process. To what red tartar, oh mysterious beast? Incongruously, the
Consul was reminded of Rostov's wolf hunt in War and Peace--ah, that
incomparable party afterwards at the old uncle's, the sense of youth, the
gaiety, the love! At the same time he remembered having been told that wolves
never hunted in packs at all. Yes, indeed, how many patterns of life were based
on kindred misconceptions, how many wolves do we feel on our heels, while our
real enemies go in sheepskin by? "Señora Gregorio," he said again,
and saw that the widow was returning, dragging her feet, though it was perhaps
too late, there would not be time for another tequila.