Under the Volcano (4 page)

   
M. Laruelle passed up the hill: he
stood, tired, in the town below the square. He had not, however, climbed the
Calle Nicaragua. In order to avoid his own house he had taken a cut to the left
just beyond the school, a steep broken circuitous path that wound round behind
the zócalo. People stared at him curiously as he sauntered down the Avenida de
la Revolucón, still encumbered with his tennis racket. This street, pursued far
enough, would lead back to the American highway again and the Casino de la Selva;
M. Laruelle smiled: at this rate he could go on travelling in an eccentric
orbit round his house for ever. Behind him now, the fair, which he'd given
scarcely a glance, whirled on. The town, colourful even at night, was
brilliantly lit, but only in patches, like a harbour. Windy shadows swept the
pavements. And occasional trees in the shadow seemed as if drenched in coal
dust, their branches bowed beneath a weight of soot. The little bus clanged by
him again, going the other way now, braking hard on the steep hill, and without
a tail light. The last bus to Tomalín. He passed Dr. Vigil's windows on the far
side: Dr. Arturo Diaz Vigil, Médico Cirujano y Partero, Facultad de México, de
la Escuela Médico Militar, Enfermedades de Niños, Indisposiciones nerviosas ~
and how politely all this differed from the notices one encountered in the
mingitorios!--Consultas de 12 a 2 y 4 a 7. A slight overstatement, he thought.
Newsboys ran past selling copies of Quauhnahuac Nuevo, the pro-Almazan,
pro-Axis sheet put out, they said, by the tiresome Unión Militar. Un avión de
combate Francis derribado por un caza Alemán. Los trabajadores de Australia
abogan por la paz. ¿Quiere Vd.?--a placard asked him in a shop window--vestirse
con elegancia y a la última moda de Europa y los Estados Unidos? M. Laruelle
walked on down the hill. Outside the barracks two soldiers, wearing French army
helmets and grey faded purple uniforms laced and interlaced with green lariats,
paced on sentry duty. He crossed the street. Approaching the cinema he became
conscious all was not as it should be, that there was a strange unnatural
excitement in the air, a kind of fever. It had grown on the instant much
cooler. And the cinema was dark, as though no picture were playing tonight. On
the other hand a large group of people, not a queue, but evidently some of the
patrons from the cine itself, who had come prematurely flooding out, were
standing on the pavement and under the arcature listening to a loudspeaker
mounted on a van blaring the Washington Post March. Suddenly there was a crash
of thunder and the street lights twitched off. So the lights of the cine had
gone already. Rain, M. Laruelle thought. But his desire to get wet had deserted
him. He put his tennis racket under his coat and ran. A troughing wind all at
once engulfed the street, scattering old newspapers and blowing the naphtha
flares on the tortilla stands flat: there was a savage scribble of lightning
over the hotel opposite the cinema, followed by another peal of thunder. The
wind was moaning, everywhere people were running, mostly laughing, for shelter.
M. Laruelle could hear the thunderclaps crashing on the mountains behind him.
He just reached the theatre in time. The rain was falling in torrents.
   
He stood, out of breath, under the
shelter of the theatre entrance which was, however, more like the entrance to
some gloomy bazaar or market. Peasants were crowding in with baskets. At the
box office, momentarily vacated, the door left half open, a frantic hen sought
admission. Everywhere people were flashing torches or striking matches. The van
with the loudspeaker slithered away into the rain and thunder. Las Manos de
Orlac, said a poster: 6 y 8.30. Las Manos de Orlac, con Peter Lorre.
   
The street lights came on again,
though the theatre still remained dark. M. Laruelle fumbled for a cigarette.
The hands of Orlac... How, in a flash, that had brought back the old days of
the cinema, he thought, indeed his own delayed student days, the days of the
Student of Prague, and Wiene and Werner Krauss and Karl Grüne, the Ufa days
when a defeated Germany was winning the respect of the cultured world by the
pictures she was making. Only then it had been Conrad Veidt in Orlac.
Strangely, that particular film had been scarcely better than the present
version, a feeble Hollywood product he'd seen some years before in Mexico City
or perhaps--M. Laruelle looked around him--perhaps at this very theatre. It was
not impossible. But so far as he remembered not even Peter Lorre had been able
to salvage it and he didn't want to see it again... Yet what a complicated
endless tale it seemed to tell, of tyranny and sanctuary, that poster looming
above him now, showing the murderer Orlac! An artist with a murderer's hands;
that was the ticket, the hieroglyphic of the times. For really it was Germany
itself that, in the gruesome degradation of a bad cartoon, stood over him.--Or
was it, by some uncomfortable stretch of the imagination, M. Laruelle himself?
   
The manager of the cine was standing
before him, cupping, with that same lightning-swift, fumbling-thwarting
courtesy exhibited by Dr. Vigil, by all Latin Americans, a match for his
cigarette: his hair, innocent of raindrops, which seemed almost lacquered, and
a heavy perfume emanating from him, betrayed his daily visit to the peluquería;
he was impeccably dressed in striped trousers and a black coat, inflexibly muy
correcto, like most Mexicans of his type, despite earthquake and thunderstorm.
He threw the match away now with a gesture that was not wasted, for it amounted
to a salute. "Come and have a drink," he said.
   
"The rainy season dies
hard," M. Laruelle smiled as they elbowed their way through into a little
cantina which abutted on the cinema without sharing its frontal shelter. The
cantina, known as the Cervecería XX, and which was also Vigil's "place
where you know," was lit by candles stuck in bottles on the bar and on the
few tables along the walls. The tables were all full.
   
"Chingar," the manager
said, under his breath, preoccupied, alert, and gazing about him: they took
their places standing at the end of the short bar where there was room for two.
"I am very sorry the function must be suspended. But the wires have
decomposed. Chingado. Every blessed week something goes wrong with the lights.
Last week it was much worse, really terrible. You know we had a troupe from
Panama City here trying out a show for Mexico."
   
"Do you mind my--"
   
"No, hombre," laughed the
other--M. Laruelle had asked Sr Bustamente, who'd now succeeded in attracting
the barman's attention, hadn't he seen the Orlac picture here before and if so
had he revived it as a hit. "¿--uno--?"
   
M. Laruelle hesitated:
"Tequila" then corrected himself: "No, anís--anís, por favor,
señor."
   
"Y una--ah--gaseosa," Sr
Bustamente told the barman. "No, señor," he was fingering
appraisingly, still preoccupied, the stuff of M. Laruelle's scarcely wet tweed
jacket. "Compañero, we have not revived it. It has only returned. The
other day I show my latest news here too: believe it, the first newsreels from
the Spanish war, that have come back again."
   
"I see you get some modern
pictures still though," M. Laruelle (he had just declined a seat in the
autoridades box for the second showing, if any) glanced somewhat ironically at
a garish three-sheet of a German film star, though the features seemed
carefully Spanish, hanging behind the bar: La simpatiquísima y encantadora
María Landrock, notable artista alemana que pronto habremos de ver en
sensacional Film.
   
"--un momentito, señor. Con
permiso..."
   
Sr Bustamente went out, not through
the door by which they had entered, but through a side entrance behind the bar
immediately on their right, from which a curtain had been drawn back, into the
cinema itself. M. Laruelle had a good view of the interior. From it, exactly
indeed as though the show were in progress, came a beautiful uproar of bawling
children and hawkers selling fried potatoes and frijoles. It was difficult to
believe so many had left their seats. Dark shapes of pariah dogs prowled in and
out of the stalls. The lights were not entirely dead: they glimmered, a dim
reddish orange, flickering. On the screen, over which clambered an endless
procession of torchlit shadows, hung, magically projected upside down,, a faint
apology for the "suspended function"; in the autoridades box three
cigarettes were lit on one match. At the rear where reflected light caught the
lettering SALIDA of the exit he just made out the anxious figure of Sr
Bustamente taking to his office. Outside it thundered and rained. M. Laruelle
sipped his water-clouded anís which was first greenly chilling then rather
nauseating. Actually it was not at all like absinthe. But his tiredness had
left him and he began to feel hungry. It was already seven o'clock. Though
Vigil and he would probably dine later at the Gambrinus or Charley's Place. He
selected, from a saucer, a quarter lemon and sucked it reflectively, reading a
calendar which, next to the enigmatic María Landrock, behind the bar portrayed
the meeting of Cortez and Montezuma in Tenochtitlán: El último Emperador
Azteca, it said below, Moctezuma y Hernán Cortes representativo de la raza
hispana, quedan frente a frente: dos razas y dos civilizaciones que habían
llegado a un alto grado de perfección se mezclan para integrar el núcleo de
nuestra nacionalidad actual. But Sr Bustamente was coming back, carrying, in
one uplifted hand above a press of people by the curtain, a book...
   
M. Laruelle, conscious of shock, was
turning the book over and over in his hands. Then he laid it on the bar counter
and took a sip of anís. "Bueno, muchas gracias, señor," he said.
   
"De nada," Sr Bustamente
answered in a lowered tone; he waved aside with a sweeping somehow inclusive
gesture, a sombre pillar advancing bearing a tray of chocolate skulls.
"Don't know how long, maybe two, maybe three years aquí."
   
M. Laruelle glanced in the flyleaf
again, then shut the book on the counter. Above them the rain slammed on the
cinema roof. It was eighteen months since the Consul had lent him the thumbed
maroon volume of Elizabethan plays. At that time Geoffrey and Yvonne had been
separated for perhaps five months. Six more must elapse before she would
return. In the Consul's garden they drifted gloomily up and down among the
roses and the plumbago and the waxplants "like dilapidated
préservatifs" the Consul had remarked with a diabolical look at him, a
look at the same time almost official, that seemed now to have said: "I
know, Jacques, you may never return the book, but suppose I lend it you precisely
for that reason, that some day you may be sorry you did not. Oh, I shall
forgive you then, but will you be able to forgive yourself? Not merely for not
having returned it, but because the book will by then have become an emblem of
what even now it is impossible to return." M. Laruelle had taken the book.
He wanted it because for some time he had been carrying at the back of his mind
the notion of making in France a modern film version of the Faustus story with
some such character as Trotsky for its protagonist: as a matter of fact he had
not opened the volume till this minute.
   
Though the Consul had several times
asked him for it later he had missed it that same day when he must have left it
behind in the cinema. M. Laruelle listened to the water booming down the
gutters beneath the one jalousie door of the Cervecería XX which opened into a
side-street in the far left-hand corner. A sudden thunderclap shook the whole
building and the sound echoed away like coal sliding down a chute.
   
"You know, señor," he said
suddenly, "that this isn't my book."
   
"I know," Sr Bustamente
replied, but softly, almost in a whisper: "I think your amigo, it was
his." He gave a little confused cough, an appoggiatura. "Your amigo,
the bicho--" Sensitive apparently to M. Laruelle's smile he interrupted
himself quietly. "I did not mean bitch; I mean bicho, the one with the
blue eyes." Then, as if there were any longer doubt of whom he spoke, he
pinched his chin and drew downward from it an imaginary beard. "Your
amigo--ah--Señor Firmin. El Consul. The Americano."
   
"No. He wasn't American."
M. Laruelle tried to raise his voice a little. It was hard, for everyone in the
cantina had stopped talking and M. Laruelle noticed that a curious hush had
also fallen in the theatre. The light had now completely failed and he stared
over Sr Bustamente's shoulder past the curtain into a graveyard darkness,
stabbed by flashes of torchlight like heat lightning, but the vendors had
lowered their voices, the children had stopped laughing and crying while the
diminished audience sat slackly and bored yet patient before the dark screen,
suddenly illuminated, swept, by silent grotesque shadows of giants and spears
and birds, then dark again, the men along the right-hand balcony, who hadn't bothered
to move or come downstairs, a solid frieze carved into the wall, serious,
moustachioed men, warriors waiting for the show to begin, for a glimpse of the
murderer's bloodstained hands.
   
"No?" Sr Bustamente said
softly. He took a sip of his gaseosa, looking too into the dark theatre and
then, preoccupied again, around the cantina. "But was it true, then, he
was a Consul? For I remember him many time sitting here drinking: and often,
the poor guy, he have no socks."
   
M. Laruelle laughed shortly. "Yes,
he was the British Consul here." They spoke subduedly in Spanish, and Sr
Bustamente despairing for another ten minutes of the lights, was persuaded to a
glass of beer while M. Laruelle himself took a soft drink.
   
But he had not succeeded in explaining
the Consul to the gracious Mexican. The lights had dimly come on again both in
the theatre and the cantina, though the show had not recommenced, and M.
Laruelle sat alone at a vacated corner table of the Cervecería XX with another
anís before him. His stomach would suffer for it: it was only during the last
year he had been drinking so heavily. He sat rigidly, the book of Elizabethan
plays closed on the table, staring at his tennis racket propped against the
back of the seat opposite he was keeping for Dr. Vigil. He felt rather like
someone lying in a bath after all the water has run out, witless, almost dead.
Had he only gone home he might have finished his packing by now. But he had not
been able to even make the decision to say good-bye to Sr Bustamente. It was
still raining, out of season, over Mexico, the dark waters rising outside to
engulf his own zacuali in the Calle Nicaragua, his useless tower against the
coming of the second flood. Night of the Culmination of the Pleiades! What,
after all, was a Consul that one was mindful of him? Sr Bustamente, who was
older than he looked, had remembered the days of Porfirio Diaz, the days when,
in America, every small town along the Mexican border harboured a
"Consul." Indeed Mexican Consuls were to be found even in villages
hundreds of miles from that border. Consuls were expected to look after the
interests of trade between countries--were they not? But towns in Arizona that
did not do ten dollars" worth of trade a year with Mexico had Consuls
maintained by Diaz. Of course, they were not Consuls but spies. Sr Bustamente
knew because before the revolution his own father, a liberal and a member of
the Ponciano Arriaga, had been held for three months in prison at Douglas,
Arizona (in spite of which Sr Bustamente himself was going to vote for
Almazan), on the orders of a Diaz-maintained Consul. Was it not then reasonable
to suppose, he had hinted, without offence, and perhaps not altogether
seriously, Señor Firmin was such a Consul, not, it was true, a Mexican Consul,
nor of quite the same breed as those others, but an English Consul who could
scarcely claim to have the interests of British trade at heart in a place where
there were no British interests and no Englishmen, the less so when it was
considered that England had severed diplomatic relations with Mexico?