Under the Volcano (43 page)

   
The mountains that had been lost from
sight now stood ahead again as they walked on through the dwindling
forest.--Yet Yvonne still hung back.
   
Far away to the south-east the low
leaning horn of moon, their pale companion of the morning, was setting finally,
and she watched it--the dead child of the earth!--with a strange hungry
supplication.--The Sea of Fecundity, diamond-shaped, and the sea of Nectar,
pentagonal in form, and Frascatorius with its north wall broken down, the giant
west wall of Endymion, elliptical near the Western limb; the Leibnitz mountains
at the Southern Horn, and east of Proclus, the Marsh of a Dream.
   
Hercules and Atlas stood there, in
the midst of cataclysm, beyond our knowledge--
   
The moon had gone. A hot gust of wind
blew in their faces and lightning blazed white and jagged in the north-east:
thunder spoke, economically; a poised avalanche...
   
The path growing steeper inclined
still further to their right and began to twist through scattered sentinels of
trees, tall and lone, and enormous cactus, whose writhing innumerable spined
hands, as the path turned, blocked the view on every side. It grew so dark it
was surprising not to find blackest night in the world beyond.
   
Yet the sight that met their eyes as
they emerged on the road was terrifying. The massed black clouds were still
mounting the twilight sky. High above them, at a vast height, a dreadfully vast
height, bodiless black birds, more like skeletons of birds, were drifting.
Snowstorms drove along the summit of Ixtaccihuatl, obscuring it, while its mass
was shrouded by cumulus. But the whole precipitous bulk of Popocatepetl seemed
to be coming towards them, travelling with the clouds, leaning forward over the
valley on whose side, thrown into relief by the curious melancholy light, shone
one little rebellious hilltop with a tiny cemetery cut into it.
   
The cemetery was swarming with people
visible only as their candle flames.
   
But suddenly it was as if a
heliograph of lightning were stammering messages across the wild landscape; and
they made out, frozen, the minute black and white figures themselves. And now,
as they listened for the thunder, they heard them: soft cries and lamentations,
wind-borne, wandering down to them. The mourners were chanting over the graves
of their loved ones, playing guitars softly or praying. A sound like windbells,
a ghostly tintinnabulation, reached their ears.
   
A titanic roar of thunder overwhelmed
it, rolling down the valleys. The avalanche had started. Yet it had not
overwhelmed the candle flames. There they still gleamed, undaunted, a few
moving now in procession. Some of the mourners were filing off down the
hillside.
   
Yvonne felt with gratitude the hard
road beneath her feet. The lights of the Hotel y Restaurant El Popo sprang up.
Over a garage next door an electric sign was stabbing: Euzkadi--A radio
somewhere was playing wildly hot music at an incredible speed.
   
American cars stood outside the
restaurant ranged before the cul-de-sac at the edge of the jungle, giving the
place something of the withdrawn, waiting character that pertains to a border
at night, and a border of sorts there was, not far from here, where the ravine,
bridged away to the right on the outskirts of the old capital, marked the state
line.
   
On the porch, for an instant, the Consul
sat dining quietly by himself. But only Yvonne had seen him. They threaded
their way through the round tables and into a bare ill-defined bar where the
Consul sat frowning in a corner with three Mexicans. But none save Yvonne
noticed him. The barman had not seen the Consul. Nor had the assistant manager,
an unusually tall Japanese also the cook, who recognized Yvonne. Yet even as
they denied all knowledge of him (and though by this time Yvonne had quite made
up her mind he was in the Farolito) the Consul was disappearing round every
corner, and going out of every door. A few tables set along the tiled floor
outside the bar were deserted, yet here the Consul also sat dimly, rising at
their approach. And out behind by the patio it was the Consul who pushed his
chair back and came forward, bowing, to meet them.
   
In fact, as often turns out for some
reason in such places, there were not enough people in the El Popo to account
for the number of cars outside.
   
Hugh was casting round him, half for
the music, which seemed coming from a radio in one of the cars and which
sounded like absolutely nothing on earth in this desolate spot, an abysmal
mechanic force out of control that was running itself to death, was breaking
up, was hurtling into dreadful trouble, had abruptly ceased.
   
The patio of the pub was a long
rectangular garden overgrown with flowers and weeds. Verandas, half in
darkness, and arched on their parapets, giving them an effect of cloisters, ran
down either side. Bedrooms opened off the verandas. The light from the
restaurant behind picked out, here and there, a scarlet flower, a green shrub,
with unnatural vividness. Two angry-looking macaws with bright ruffled plumage
sat in iron rings between the arches.
   
Lightning, flickering, fired the
windows a moment; wind crepitated the leaves and subsided, leaving a hot void
in which the trees thrashed chaotically. Yvonne leaned against an arch and took
off her hat; one of the cockatoos screeched and she pressed the palms of her
hands against her ears, pressing them harder as the thunder started again,
holding them there with her eyes shut absently until it stopped, and the two
bleak beers Hugh ordered had arrived.
   
"Well," he was saying,
"this is somewhat different from the Cervecería Quauhnahuac... Indeed!...
Yes, I guess I'll always remember this morning. The sky was so blue, wasn't
it?"
   
"And the woolly dog and the
foals that came with us and the river with those swift birds overhead--"
   
"How far to the Farolito
now?"
   
"About a mile and a half. We can
cut nearly a mile if we take the forest path."
   
"In the dark?"
   
"We can't wait very long if
you're going to make the last bus back to Quauhnahuac. It's after six now. I
can't drink this beer, can you?"
   
"No. It tastes like gun-metal--hell--Christ,"
Hugh said, "let's--"
   
"Have a different drink,"
Yvonne proposed, half ironically.
   
"Couldn't we phone?"
   
"Mescal," Yvonne said
brightly.
   
The air was so full of electricity it
trembled.
   
"Comment?"
   
"Mescal, por favor," Yvonne
repeated, shaking her head solemnly, sardonically. "I've always wanted to
find out what Geoffrey sees in it."
   
"¿Como no? let's have two
mescals."
   
But Hugh had still not returned when
the two drinks were brought by a different waiter questioning the gloom, who,
balancing the tray on one palm, switched on another light.
   
The drinks Yvonne had had at dinner
and during the day, relatively few though they'd been, lay like swine on her
soul: some moments passed before she reached out her hand and drank.
   
Sickly, sullen, and ether-tasting,
the mescal produced at first no warmth in her stomach, only, like the beer, a
coldness, a chill. But it worked. From the porch outside a guitar, slightly out
of tune; struck up La Paloma, a Mexican voice was singing, and the mescal was
still working. It had in the end the quality of a good hard drink. Where was
Hugh? Had he found the Consul here, after all? No: she knew he was not here.
She gazed round the El Popo, a soulless draughty death that ticked and groaned,
as Geoff himself once said--a bad ghost of an American road-house; but it no
longer appeared so awful. She selected a lemon from the table and squeezed a
few drops into her glass and all this took her an inordinately long time to do.
   
All at once she became conscious she
was laughing unnaturally to herself, something within her was smouldering, was
on fire: and once more, too, in her brain a picture shaped of a woman
ceaselessly beating her fists on the ground...
   
But no, it was not herself that was
on fire. It was the house of her spirit. It was her dream. It was the farm, it
was Orion, the Pleiades, it was their house by the sea. But where was the fire?
It was the Consul who had been the first to notice it. What were these crazy
thoughts, thoughts without form or logic? She stretched out her hand for the
other mescal, Hugh's mescal, and the fire went out, was overwhelmed by a sudden
wave through her whole being of desperate love and tenderness for the Consul.
   
--very dark and clear with an onshore
wind, and the sound of surf you couldn't see, deep in the spring night the
summer stars were overhead, presage of summer, and the stars bright; clear and
dark, and the moon had not risen; a beautiful strong clean onshore wind, and
then the waning moon rising over the water, and later, inside the house, the
roar of unseen surf beating in the night--
   
"How do you like the
mescal?"
   
Yvonne jumped up. She had been almost
crouching over Hugh's drink; Hugh, swaying, stood over her, carrying under his
arm a long battered key-shaped canvas case.
   
"What in the world have you got
there?" Yvonne's voice was blurred and remote.
   
Hugh put the case on the parapet.
Then he laid on the table an electric torch. It was a boy scout contraption
like a ship's ventilator with a metal ring to slip your belt through. "I
met the fellow on the porch Geoff was so bloody rude to in the Salón Ofelia and
I bought this from him. But he wanted to sell his guitar and get a new one so I
bought that too. Only ocho pesos cincuenta--"
   
"What do you want a guitar for?
Are you going to play the Internationale or something on it, on board your
ship?" Yvonne said.
   
"How's the mescal?" Hugh
said again.
   
"Like ten yards of barbed-wire
fence. It nearly took the top of my head off. Here, this is yours, Hugh, what's
left of it."
   
Hugh sat down: "I had a tequila
outside with the guitar hombre...
   
"Well," he added, "I'm
definitely not going to try and get to Mexico City tonight, and that once
decided there're various things we might do about Geoff."
   
"I'd rather like to get
tight," Yvonne said.
   
"Como tu quieras. It might be a
good idea."
   
"Why did you say it would be a
good idea to get tight?" Yvonne was asking over the new mescals; then,
"What did you get a guitar for?" she repeated.
   
"To sing with. To give people
the lie with maybe."
   
"What are you so strange for,
Hugh? To give what people what lie?"
   
Hugh tilted back his chair until it
touched the parapet behind him, then sat like that, smoking, nursing his mescal
in his lap.
   
"The kind of lie Sir Walter
Raleigh meditates, when he addresses his soul. "The truth shall be thy
warrant. Go, since I needs must die. And give the world the lie. Say to the
court it glows, and shines like rotten wood. Say to the church it shows, what's
good and doth no good. If
 
Church and
Court reply, then give them both the lie."That sort of thing, only
slightly different."
   
"You're dramatizing yourself,
Hugh. Salud y pesetas."
   
"Salud y pesetas."
   
"Salud y pesetas."
   
He stood, smoking, drink in hand,
leaning against the dark monastic archway and looking down at her:
   
"But on the contrary," he
was saying, "we do want to do good, to help, to be brothers in distress.
We will even condescend to be crucified, on certain terms. And are, for that
matter, regularly, every twenty years or so. But to an Englishman it's such
terribly bad form to be a bona-fide martyr. We may respect with one part of our
minds the integrity, say, of men like Gandhi, or Nehru. We may even recognize
that their selflessness, by example, might save us. But in our hearts we cry
"Throw the bloody little man in the river." Or "Set Barabbas
free!" "O'Dwyer for ever!" Jesus!--It's even pretty bad form for
Spain to be a martyr too; in a very different way of course... And if Russia
should prove--"
   
Hugh was saying all this while Yvonne
was scanning a document he'd just skimmed on to the table for her. It was an
old soiled and creased menu of the house simply, that seemed to have been
picked up from the floor, or spent a long period in someone's pocket, and this
she read, with alcoholic deliberation, several times:
   
"EL POPO"
   
SERVICIO A LA CARTE
   
   
Sopa de ajo
                
….. $0.30
   
Enchiladas de salsa verde
  
….. $0.30
   
Chiles rellenos
            
….. $0.30
   
Rajas a la "Popo"
          
….. $0.30
 
Machitos en salsa verde
       
….. $0.30
Menudo estilo sonora
       
….. $0.30
Pierna de ternera al horno
 
….. $0.30
   
Cabrito al horno
               
….. $0.30
   
Asado de pollo
             
….. $0.30
   
Chuletas de cerdo
          
….. $0.30
   
Filete con papas o al gusto ….. $0.30