Under the Volcano (42 page)

   
"See here, Geoffrey--"
   
"What have you ever done for
humanity, Hugh, with all your oratio obliqua about the capitalist system,
except talk, and thrive on it, until your soul stinks?"
   
"Shut up, Geoff, for the love of
Mike!"
   
"For that matter, both your
souls stink! Cervantes!"
   
"Geoffrey, please sit
down," Yvonne seemed to have said wearily, "you're making such a
scene."
   
"No, I'm not, Yvonne. I'm
talking very calmly. As when I ask you, what have you ever done for anyone but
yourself?" Must the Consul say this? He was saying, had said it:
"Where are the children I might have wanted? You may suppose I might have
wanted them. Drowned. To the accompaniment of the rattling of a thousand douche
bags. Mind you, you don't pretend to love 'humanity,' not a bit of it! You
don't even need an illusion, though you do have some illusions unfortunately,
to help you deny the only natural and good function you have. Though on second
thoughts it might be better if women had no functions at all!"
   
"Don't be a bloody swine,
Geoffrey." Hugh rose.
   
"Stay where you bloody
are," ordered the Consul. "Of course I see the romantic predicament
you two are in. But even if Hugh makes the most of it again it won't be long,
it won't be long, before he realizes he's only one of the hundred or so other
ninney-hammers with gills like codfish and veins like racehorses--prime as
goats all of them, hot as monkeys, salt as wolves in pride! No, one will be
enough."
   
A glass, fortunately empty, fell to
the floor and was smashed.
   
"As if he plucked up kisses by
the roots and then laid his leg over her thigh and sighed. What an uncommon
time you two must have had, paddling palms and playing bubbies and titties all
day under cover of saving me... Jesus. Poor little defenceless me--I hadn't
thought of that. But, you see, it's perfectly logical, what it comes down to:
I've got my own piddling little fight for freedom on my hands. Mummy, let me go
back to the beautiful brothel! Back to where those triskeles are strumming, the
infinite trismus..."
   
"True, I've been tempted to talk
peace. I've been beguiled by your offers of a sober and non-alcoholic Paradise.
At least I suppose that's what you've been working around towards all day. But
now I've made up my melodramatic little mind, what's left of it, just enough to
make up. Cervantes! That far from wanting it, thank you very much, on the
contrary, I choose--Tlax--" Where was he?" Tlax--Tlax--"
   
... It was as if, almost, he were
standing upon that black open station platform, where he had gone--had he
gone?--that day after drinking all night to meet Lee Maitland returning from
Virginia at 7.40 in the morning, gone, light-headed, light-footed, and in that
state of being where Baudelaire's angel indeed wakes, desiring to meet trains
perhaps, but to meet no trains that stop, for in the angel's mind are no trains
that stop, and from such trains no one descends, not even another angel, nor
even a fair-haired one, like Lee Maitland.--Was the train late? Why was he
pacing the platform? Was it the second or third train from Suspension
Bridge--Suspensión!--" Tlax--" the Consul repeated. "I
choose--"
   
He was in a room, and suddenly in
this room, matter was disjunct: a doorknob was standing a little way out from
the door. A curtain floated in by itself, unfastened, unattached to anything.
The idea struck him it had come in to strangle him. An orderly little clock
behind the bar called him to his senses, its ticking very loud; Tlax: tlax:
tlax: tlax... Half past five. Was that all? "Hell," he finished
absurdly. "Because--" He produced a twenty-peso note and laid it on
the table.
   
"I like it," he called to
them, through the open window, from outside. Cervantes stood behind the bar,
with scared eyes, holding the cockerel. "I love hell. I can't wait to get
back there. In fact I'm running. I'm almost back there already."
   
He was running too, in spite of his
limp, calling back to them crazily, and the queer thing was, he wasn't quite
serious, running toward the forest, which was growing darker and darker,
tumultuous above--a rush of air swept out of it, and the weeping pepper tree
roared.
   
He stopped after a while: all was
calm. No one had come after him. Was that good? Yes, it was good, he thought,
his heart pounding. And since it was so good he would take the path to Parián,
to the Farolito.
   
Before him the volcanoes,
precipitous, seemed to have drawn nearer. They towered up over the jungle, into
the lowering sky--massive interests moving up in the background.

   
Sunset. Eddies of green and orange birds scattered aloft with ever wider
circlings like rings on water. Two little pigs disappeared into the dust at a
gallop. A woman passed swiftly, balancing on her head, with the grace of a
Rebecca, a small light bottle...
   
Then, the Salón Ofelia at last behind
them, there was no more dust. And their path became straight, leading on
through the roar of Water past the bathing place, where, reckless, a few late
bathers lingered, toward the forest.
   
Straight ahead, in the north-east, lay
the volcanoes, the towering dark clouds behind them steadily mounting the
heavens.
   
--The storm, that had already
dispatched its outriders, must have been travelling in a circle: the real onset
was yet to come. Meantime the wind had dropped and it was lighter again, though
the sun had gone down at their back slightly to their left, in the south-west,
where a red blaze fanned out into the sky over their heads.
   
The Consul had not been in the Todos
Contentos y Yo También. And now, through the warm twilight, Yvonne was walking
before Hugh, purposely too fast for talking. None the less his voice (as
earlier that day the Consul's own) pursued her.
   
"You know perfectly well I won't
just run away and abandon him," she said.
   
"Christ Jesus, this never would
have happened if I hadn't been here!"
   
"Something else would probably
have happened."
   
The jungle closed over them and the
volcanoes were blotted out. Yet it was still not dark. From the stream racing
along beside them a radiance was cast. Big yellow flowers, resembling
chrysanthemums, shining like stars through the gloom, grew on either side of
the water. Wild bougainvillea, brick-red in the half-light, occasionally a bush
with white handbells, tongue downwards, started out at them, every little while
a notice nailed to a tree, a whittled, weather-beaten arrow pointing, with the
words hardly visible: a la Cascada--
   
Farther on worn-out ploughshares and
the rusted and twisted chassis of abandoned American cars bridged the stream
which they kept always to their left.
   
The sound of the falls behind was now
lost in that of the cascade ahead. The air was full of spray and moisture. But
for the tumult one might almost have heard things growing as the torrent rushed
through the wet heavy foliage that sprang up everywhere around them from the
alluvial soil.
   
All at once, above them, they saw the
sky again. The clouds, no longer red, had become a peculiar luminous
blue-white, drifts and depths of them, as though illumined by moon rather than
sunlight, between which roared still the deep fathomless cobalt of afternoon.
   
Birds were sailing up there,
ascending higher and higher. Infernal bird of Prometheus!
   
They were vultures, that on earth so
jealously contend with one another, defiling themselves with blood and filth,
but who were yet capable of rising, like this, above the storms, to heights
shared only by the condor, above the summit of the Andes--
   
Down the south-west stood the moon
itself, preparing to follow the sun below the horizon. On their left, through
the trees beyond the stream appeared low hills, like those at the foot of the
Calle Nicaragua; they were purple and sad. At their foot, so near Yvonne made
out a faint rustling, cattle moved on the sloping fields among gold cornstalks
and striped mysterious tents.
   
Before them, Popocatepetl and
Ixtaccihuatl continued to dominate the north-east, the Sleeping Woman now
perhaps the more beautiful of the two, with jagged angles of blood-red snow on
its summit, fading as they watched, whipped with darker rock shadows, the
summit itself seeming suspended in mid-air, floating among the curdling ever
mounting black clouds.
   
Chimborazo, Popocatepetl--so ran the
poem the Consul liked--had stolen his heart away! But in the tragic Indian legend
Popocatepetl himself was strangely the dreamer: the fires of his warrior's
love, never extinct in the poet's heart, burned eternally for Ixtaccihuatl,
whom he had no sooner found than lost, and whom he guarded in her endless
sleep...
   
They had reached the limit of the
clearing, where the path divided in two. Yvonne hesitated. Pointing to the
left, as it were straight on, another aged arrow on a tree repeated: a la
Cascada. But a similar arrow on another tree pointed away from the stream down
a path to their right: a Parián.
   
Yvonne knew where she was now, but
the two alternatives, the two paths, stretched out before her on either side
like the arms--the oddly dislocated thought struck her--of a man being
crucified.
   
If they chose the path to their right
they would reach Parián much sooner. On the other hand, the main path would
bring them to the same place finally, and, what was more to the point, past,
she felt sure, at least two other cantinas.
   
They chose the main path: the striped
tents, the cornstalks dropped out of sight, and the jungle returned, its damp
earthy leguminous smell rising about them with the night.
   
This path, she was thinking, after
emerging on a sort of main highway near a restaurant-cantina named the Rum-Popo
or the El Popo, took, upon resumption (if it could be called the same path), a
short cut at right angles through the forest to Parián, across to the Farolito
itself, as it might be the shadowy crossbar from which the man's arms were
hanging.
   
The noise of the approaching falls
was now like the awakening voices downwind of five thousand bobolinks in an
Ohio savannah. Toward it the torrent raced furiously, fed from above, where,
down the left bank, transformed abruptly into a great wall of vegetation, water
was spouting into the stream through thickets festooned with convolvuli on a
higher level than the topmost trees of the jungle. And it was as though one's
spirit too were being swept on by the swift current with the uprooted trees and
smashed bushes in a debacle towards that final drop.
   
They came to the little cantina El
Petate. It stood, at a short distance from the clamorous falls, its lighted
windows friendly against the twilight, and was at present occupied, she saw as
her heart leaped and sank, leaped again, and sank, only by the barman and two
Mexicans' shepherds or quince farmers, deep in conversation, and leaning
against the bar.--Their mouths opened and shut soundlessly, their brown hands
traced patterns in the air, courteously.
   
The El Petate, which from where she
stood resembled a sort of complicated postage stamp, surcharged on its outside
walls with its inevitable advertisements for Moctezuma, Criollo, Cafeaspirina,
Mentholatum--no se rasque las picaduras de los insectos!--was about all remaining,
the Consul and she'd once been told, of the formerly prosperous village of
Anochtitlán, which had burned, but which at one time extended to the westward,
on the other side of the stream.
   
In the smashing din she waited
outside. Since leaving the Salón Ofelia and up to this point, Yvonne had felt
herself possessed of the most complete detachment. But now, as Hugh joined the
scene within the cantina--he was asking the two Mexicans questions, describing
Geoffrey's beard to the barman, he was describing Geoffrey's beard to the
Mexicans, he was asking the barman questions, who, with two fingers had
assumed, jocosely, a beard--she became conscious she was laughing unnaturally
to herself; at the same time she felt, crazily, as if something within her were
smouldering, had taken fire, as if her whole being at any moment were going to
explode.
   
She started back. She had stumbled
over a wooden structure close to the Petate that seemed to spring at her. It
was a wooden cage, she saw by the light from the windows, in which crouched a
large bird.
   
It was a small eagle she had
startled, and which was now shivering in the damp and dark of its prison. The
cage was set between the cantina and a low thick tree, really two trees
embracing one another: an amate and a sabina. The breeze blew spray in her
face. The falls sounded. The intertwined roots of the two tree lovers flowed
over the ground toward the stream, ecstatically seeking it, though they didn't
really need it; the roots might as well have stayed where they were, for all
around them nature was out-doing itself in extravagant fructification. In the
taller trees beyond there was a cracking, a rebellious tearing, and a rattling,
as of cordage; boughs like booms swung darkly and stiffly about her, broad
leaves unfurled. There was a sense of black conspiracy, like ships in harbour
before a storm, among these trees, suddenly through which, far up in the
mountains, lightning flew, and the light in the cantina flickered off, then on
again, then off. No thunder followed. The storm was a distance away once more.
Yvonne waited in nervous apprehension: the lights came on and Hugh--how like a
man, oh God! but perhaps it was her own fault for refusing to come in--was
having a quick drink with the Mexicans. There the bird was still, a long-winged
dark furious shape, a little world of fierce despairs and dreams, and memories
of floating high above Popocatepetl, mile on mile, to drop through the
wilderness and alight, watching, in the timberline ghosts of ravaged mountain
trees. With hurried quivering hands Yvonne began to unfasten the cage. The bird
fluttered out of it and alighted at her feet, hesitated, took flight to the
roof of El Petate, then abruptly flew off through the dusk, not to the nearest
tree, as might have been supposed, but up--she was right, it knew it was
free--up soaring, with a sudden cleaving of pinions into the deep dark blue
pure sky above, in which at that moment appeared one star. No compunction
touched Yvonne. She felt only an inexplicable secret triumph and relief: no one
would ever know she had done this; and then, stealing over her, the sense of
utter heartbreak and loss.
   
Lamplight shone across the tree
roots; the Mexicans stood in the open door with Hugh, nodding at the weather
and pointing on down the path, while within the cantina the barman helped
himself to a drink from under the bar.
   
--"No!... "Hugh shouted
against the tumult. "He hasn't been there at all! We might try this other
place though!"
   
"On the road!"
   
Beyond the El Petate their path
veered to the right past a dog-kennel to which an anteater nuzzling the black
earth was chained. Hugh took Yvonne's arm.
   
"See the anteater? Do you
remember the armadillo?"
   
"I haven't forgotten,
anything!"
   
Yvonne said this, as they fell into
step, not knowing quite what she meant. Wild woodland creatures plunged past
them in the undergrowth, and everywhere she looked in vain for her eagle, half
hoping to see it once more. The jungle was thinning out gradually. Rotting
vegetation lay about them, and there was a smell of decay; the barranca
couldn't be far off. Then the air blew strangely warmer and sweeter, and the
path was steeper. The last time Yvonne had come this way she'd heard a
whip-poor-will. Whip-poor-will, whip-peri-will, the plaintive lonely voice of
spring at home had said, and calling one home--to where? To her father's home
in Ohio? And what should a whip-poor-will be doing so far from home itself in a
dark Mexican forest? But the whip-poor-will, like love and wisdom, had no home;
and perhaps, as the Consul had then added, it was better here than routing
around Cayenne, where it was supposed to winter.
   
They were climbing, approaching a
little hilltop clearing; Yvonne could see the sky. But she couldn't get her
bearings. The Mexican sky had become strange and tonight the stars found for
her a message even lonelier than that remembered one of the poor nestless
whip-poor-will. Why are we here, they seemed to say, in the wrong place, and
all the wrong shape, so far away, so far, so far away from home? From what
home? When had not she, Yvonne, come home? But the stars by their very being
consoled her. And walking on she felt her mood of detachment returning. Now
Yvonne and Hugh were high enough to see, through the trees, the stars low down
on the western horizon.
   
Scorpio, setting... Sagittarius,
Capricornus; ah, there, here they were, after all, in their right places, their
configurations all at once right, recognized, their pure geometry
scintillating, flawless. And tonight as five thousand years ago they would rise
and set: Capricorn, Aquarius, with, beneath, lonely Fomalhaut; Pisces; and the
Ram; Taurus, with Aldebaran and the Pleiades. "As Scorpio sets in the
south-west, the Pleiades are rising in the north-east." "As Capricorn
sets in the west, Orion rises in the east. And Cetus, the Whale, with
Mira." Tonight, as ages hence, people would say this, or shut their doors
on them, turn in bereaved agony from them, or towards them with love saying:
"That is our star up there, yours and mine"; steer by them above the
clouds or lost at sea, or standing in the spray on the forecastle head, watch
them, suddenly, careen, put their faith or lack of it in them; train, in a
thousand observatories, feeble telescopes upon them, across whose lenses swam
mysterious swarms of stars and clouds of dead dark stars, catastrophes of
exploding suns, or giant Antares raging to its end--a smouldering ember yet
five hundred times greater than the earth's sun. And the earth itself still
turning on its axis and revolving around that sun, the sun revolving around the
luminous wheel of this galaxy, the countless unmeasured jewelled wheels of
countless unmeasured galaxies turning, turning, majestically, into infinity,
into eternity, through all of which all life ran on--all this, long after she
herself was dead, men would still be reading in the night sky, and as the earth
turned through those distant seasons, and they watched the constellations still
rising, culminating, setting, to rise again--Aries, Taurus, Gemini, the Crab,
Leo, Virgo, the Scales and the Scorpion, Capricorn the Sea-goat and Aquarius
the Water Bearer, Pisces, and once more, triumphantly, Aries!--would they not,
too, still be asking the hopeless eternal question: to what end? What force drives
this sublime celestial machinery? Scorpio, setting... And rising, Yvonne
thought, unseen behind the volcanoes, those whose culmination was at midnight
tonight, as Aquarius set; and some would watch with a sense of fleeting, yet
feeling their diamonded brightness gleam an instant on the soul, touching all
within that in memory was sweet or noble or courageous or proud, as high
overhead appeared, flying softly like a flock of birds towards Orion, the
beneficent Pleiades...