Under the Volcano (38 page)

   
Still, there had not yet been a
"next" mescal. The Consul stood, his hand as if part of the glass,
listening, remembering... Suddenly he heard, above the roar, the clear sweet
voices of the young Mexicans outside: the voice of Yvonne too, dear,
intolerable--and different, after the first mescal--shortly to be lost.
   
Why lost?... The voices were as if
confused now with the blinding torrent of sunlight which poured across the open
doorway, turning the scarlet flowers along the path into flaming swords. Even
almost bad poetry is better than life, the muddle of voices might have been
saying, as, now, he drank half his drink.
   
The Consul was aware of another
roaring, though it came from inside his head: clipperty-one: the American
Express, swaying, bears the corpse through the green meadows. What is man but a
little soul holding up a corpse? The soul! Ah, and did she not too have her
savage and traitorous Tlaxcalans, her Cortes and her noches tristes, and,
sitting within her innermost citadel in chains, drinking chocolate, her pale
Moctezuma?
   
The roaring rose, died away, rose
again; guitar chords mingled with the shouting of many voices, calling,
chanting, like native women in Kashmir, pleading, above the noise of the
maelstrom: "Borrrrraaacho," they wailed. And the dark room with its
flashing doorway rocked under his feet.
   
"--what do you think, Yvonne, if
sometime we climb that baby, Popo I mean--"
   
"Good heavens why! Haven't you
had enough exercise for one--"
   
"--might be a good idea to
harden your muscles first, try a few small peaks."
   
They were joking. But the Consul was
not joking. His second mescal had become serious. He left it still unfinished
on the counter, Señor Cervantes was beckoning from a far corner.
   
A shabby little man with a black
shade over one eye, wearing a black coat, but a beautiful sombrero with long
gay tassels down the back, he seemed, however savage at heart, in almost as
highly nervous a state as himself. What magnetism drew these quaking ruined
creatures into his orbit? Cervantes led the way behind the bar, ascended two
steps, and pulled a curtain aside. Poor lonely fellow, he wanted to show him
round his house again. The Consul made the steps with difficulty. One small
room occupied by a huge brass bedstead. Rusty rifles in a rack on the wall. In
one corner, before a tiny porcelain Virgin, burned a little lamp. Really a
sacramental candle, it diffused a ruby shimmer through its glass into the room,
and cast a broad yellow flickering cone on the ceiling: the wick was burning
low. "Mistair," Cervantes tremulously pointed to it. "Señor. My
grandfather tell me never to let her go out." Mescal tears came to the
Consul's eyes, and he remembered sometime during last night's debauch going
with Dr. Vigil to a church in Quauhnahuac he didn't know, with sombre
tapestries, and strange votive pictures, a compassionate Virgin floating in the
gloom, to whom he prayed, with muddily beating heart, he might have Yvonne
again. Dark figures, tragic and isolated, stood about the church, or were
kneeling--only the bereaved and lonely went there. "She is the Virgin for
those who have nobody with," the doctor told him, inclining his head
towards the image. "And for mariners on the sea." Then he knelt in
the dirt and placing his pistol--for Dr. Vigil always went armed to Red Cross
Balls--on the floor beside him, said sadly, "Nobody come here, only those
who have nobody them with." Now the Consul made this Virgin the other who
had answered his prayer and as they stood in silence before her, prayed again.
"Nothing is altered and in spite of God's mercy I am still alone. Though
my suffering seems senseless I am still in agony. There is no explanation of my
life." Indeed there was not, nor was this what he'd meant to convey.
"Please let Yvonne have her dream--dream?--of a new life with me--please
let me believe that all that is not an abominable self-deception," he
tried... "Please let me make her happy, deliver me from this dreadful
tyranny of self. I have sunk low. Let me sink lower still, that I may know the
truth. Teach me to love again, to love life." That wouldn't do either...
"Where is love? Let me truly suffer. Give me back my purity, the knowledge
of the Mysteries, that I have betrayed and lost.--Let me be truly lonely, that
I may honestly pray. Let us be happy again somewhere, if it's only together, if
it's only out of this terrible world. Destroy the world!" he cried in his
heart. The Virgin's eyes were turned down in benediction, but perhaps she
hadn't heard.--The Consul had scarcely noticed that Cervantes had picked up one
of the rifles. "I love hunting." After replacing it he opened the
bottom drawer of a wardrobe which was squeezed in another corner. The drawer
was chock full of books, including the History of Tlaxcala, in ten volumes. He
shut it immediately. "I am an insignificant man, and I do not read these
books to prove my insignificance," he said proudly. "Sí hombre,"
he went on, as they descended to the bar again, "as I told you, I obey my
grandfather. He tell me to marry my wife. So I call my wife my mother." He
produced a photograph of a child lying in a coffin and laid it on the counter.
"I drank all day."
   
"--snow goggles and an
alpenstock. You'd look awfully nice with--"
 
   
"--and my face all covered with
grease. And a woollen cap pulled right down over my eyes--"
   
Hugh's voice came again, then
Yvonne's, they were dressing, and conversing loudly over the tops of their
bathing boxes, not six feet away, beyond the wall:
   
"--hungry now, aren't you?"
   
"--a couple of raisins and half
a prune!"
  
"--not forgetting
the limes--"
   
The Consul finished his mescal: all a
pathetic joke, of course, still, this plan to climb Popo, if just the kind of
thing Hugh would have found out about before arriving, while neglecting so much
else: yet could it be that the notion of climbing the volcano had somehow
struck them as having the significance of a lifetime together? Yes, there it
rose up before them, with all its hidden dangers, pitfalls, ambiguities,
deceptions, portentous as what they could imagine for the poor brief
self-deceived space of a cigarette was their own destiny--or was Yvonne simply,
alas, happy?
   
"--where is it we start from,
Amecameca--" "To prevent mountain sickness."
   
"--though quite a pilgrimage at
that, I gather! Geoff and I thought of doing it, years ago. You go on horseback
first, to Tlamancas--"
   
"--at midnight, at the Hotel
Fausto!"
   
"What would you all prefer?
Cauliflowers or pootootsies," the Consul, innocent, drinkless in a booth,
greeted them, frowning; the supper at Emmaus, he felt, trying to disguise his
distant mescal voice as he studied the bill of fare provided him by Cervantes.
"Or extramapee syrup. Onans in garlic soup on egg...
   
"Pep with milk? Or what about a
nice Filete de Huachinango rebozado tartar con German friends?"
   
Cervantes had handed Yvonne and Hugh
each a menu but they were sharing hers: "Dr. Moise von Schmidthaus's
special soup," Yvonne pronounced the words with gusto.
   
"I think a pepped petroot would
be about my mark," said the Consul, "after those onans."
   
"Just one," the Consul went
on, anxious, since Hugh was laughing so loudly, for Cervantes's feelings,
"but please note the German friends. They even get into the filet."
   
"What about the tartar?"
Hugh inquired.
   
"Tlaxcala!" Cervantes,
smiling, debated between them with trembling pencil. "Sí, I am
Tlaxcaltecan... You like eggs, Señora. Stepped on eggs. Muy sabrosos. Divorced
eggs? For fish, sliced of filet with peas. Vol-au-vent a la reine. Somersaults
for the queen. Or you like poxy eggs, poxy in toast. Or veal liver tavernman?
Pimesan chike chup? Or spectral chicken of the house? Youn' pigeon. Red
snappers with a fried tartar, you like?"
   
"Ha, the ubiquitous
tartar," Hugh exclaimed.
   
"I think the spectral chicken of
the house would be even more terrific, don't you?" Yvonne was laughing,
the foregoing bawdry mostly over her head however, the Consul felt, and still
she hadn't noticed anything.
   
"Probably served in its own
ectoplasm."
   
"Sí, you like sea-sleeves in his
ink? Or tunny fish? Or an exquisite mole? Maybe you like fashion melon to
start? Fig mermelade? Brambleberry con crappe Gran Due? Omele he sourpusse, you
like? You like to drink first a gin fish? Nice gin fish? Silver fish?
Sparkenwein?"
   
"Madre?" the Consul asked,
"What's this madre here?--You like to eat your mother, Yvonne?"
   
"Badre, señor. Fish también,
Yautepec fish. Muy sabroso. You like?"
   
"What about it, Hugh--do you
want to wait for the fish that dies?"
   
"I'd like a beer."
   
"Cerveza, si, Moctezuma? Dos
Equis? Carta Blanca?"
   
At last they all decided on clam
chowder, scrambled eggs, the spectral chicken of the house, beans, and beer.
The Consul at first had ordered only shrimps and a hamburger sandwich but
yielded to Yvonne's: "Darling, won't you eat more than that, I could eat a
young horse," and their hands met across the table.
   
And then, for the second time that
day, their eyes, in a long look, a long look of longing. Behind her eyes,
beyond her, the Consul, an instant, saw Granada, and the train waltzing from
Algeciras over the plains of Andalusia, chufferty pupperty, chufferty pupperty,
the low dusty road from the station past the old bull-ring and the Hollywood
bar and into the town, past the British Consulate and convent of Los Angeles up
past the Washington Irving Hotel (You can't escape me, I can see you, England
must return again to New England for her values!), the old number seven train
running there: evening, and the stately horse cabs clamber up through the
gardens slowly, plod through the arches, mounting past where the eternal beggar
is playing on a guitar with three strings, through the gardens, gardens,
gardens everywhere, up, up, to the marvellous traceries of the Alhambra (which
bored him) past the well where they had met, to the América Pensión; and up,
up, now they were climbing themselves, up to the Generalife Gardens, and now
from the Generalife Gardens to the Moorish tomb on the extreme summit of the
hill; here they plighted their troth...
   
The Consul dropped his eyes at last.
How many bottles since then? In how many glasses, how many bottles had he
hidden himself, since then alone? Suddenly he saw them, the bottles of
aguardiente, of anís, of jerez, of Highland Queen, the glasses, a babel of
glasses--towering, like the smoke from the train that day--built to the sky,
then falling, the glasses toppling and crashing, falling downhill from the
Generalife Gardens, the bottles breaking, bottles of Oporto, tinto, bianco,
bottles of Pernod, Oxygénée, absinthe, bottles smashing, bottles cast aside,
falling with a thud on the ground in parks, under benches, beds, cinema seats,
hidden in drawers at Consulates, bottles of Calvados dropped and broken, or
bursting into smithereens, tossed into garbage heaps, flung into the sea, the
Mediterranean, the Caspian, the Caribbean, bottles floating in the ocean, dead
Scotchmen on the Atlantic highlands--and now he saw them, smelt them, all, from
the very beginning-bottles, bottles, bottles, and glasses, glasses, glasses, of
bitter, of Dubonnet, of Falstaff, Rye, Johnny Walker, Vieux Whisky, blanc
Canadien, the aperitifs, the digestifs, the demis, the dobles, the noch ein
Herr Obers, the et glas Araks, the tusen taks, the bottles, the bottles, the
beautiful bottles of tequila, and the gourds, gourds, gourds, the millions of
gourds of beautiful mescal... The Consul sat very still. His conscience sounded
muffled with the roar of water. It whacked and whined round the wooden
frame-house with the spasmodic breeze, massed, with the thunderclouds over the
trees, seen through the windows, its factions. How indeed could he hope to find
himself to begin again when, somewhere, perhaps, in one of those lost or broken
bottles, in one of those glasses, lay, for ever, the solitary clue to his
identity? How could he go back and look now, scrabble among the broken glass,
under the eternal bars, under the oceans?
   
Stop! Look! Listen! How drunk, or how
drunkly sober un-drunk, can you calculate you are now, at any rate? There had
been those drinks at Señora Gregorio's, no more than two certainly. And before?
Ah, before! But later, in the bus, he'd only had that sip of Hugh's habanero,
then, at the bullthrowing, almost finished it. It was this that made him tight
again, but tight in a way he didn't like, in a worse way than in the square even,
the tightness of impending unconsciousness, of seasickness, and it was from
this sort of tightness--was it?--he'd tried to sober up by taking those
mescalitos on the sly. But the mescal, the Consul realized, had succeeded in a
manner somewhat outside his calculations. The strange truth was, he had another
hangover. There was something in fact almost beautiful about the frightful
extremity of that condition the Consul now found himself in. It was a hangover
like a great dark ocean swell finally rolled up against a foundering steamer,
by countless gales to windward that have long since blown themselves out. And
from all this it was not so much necessary to sober up again, as once more to
wake, yes, as to wake, so much as to--
   
"Do you remember this morning,
Yvonne, when we were crossing the river, there was a pulquería on the other
side, called La Sepultura or something, and there was an Indian sitting with
his back against the wall, with his hat over his face, and his horse tethered
to a tree, and there was a number seven branded on the horse's hipbone--"