Under the Volcano (44 page)

   
Sándwiches
                 
….. $0.30
   
Frijoles refritos
              
….. $0.30
   
Chocolate a la española
    
….. $0.30
Chocolate a la francesa
    
….. $0.30
Café solo o con leche
      
….. $0.30
   
This much was typed in blue and
underneath it--she made out with the same deliberation--was a design like a
small wheel round the inside of which was written "Lotería Nacional Para
La Beneficencia Pública," making another circular frame, within which
appeared a sort of trade or hallmark representing a happy mother caressing her
child.
   
The whole left side of the menu was
taken up by a full-length lithographic portrait of a smiling young woman
surmounted by the announcement that Hotel Restaurant El Popo se observa la más
estricta moralidad, siendo esta disposición de su propietario una garantía para
el pasajero, que llegue en compañía: Yvonne studied this woman: she was buxom
and dowdy, with a quasi-American coiffure, and she was wearing a long,
confetti-coloured print dress: with one hand she was beckoning roguishly, while
with the other she held up a block of ten lottery tickets, on each of which a
cowgirl was riding a bucking horse and (as if these ten minute figures were
Yvonne's own reduplicated and half-forgotten selves waving good-bye to herself)
waving her hand.
   
"Well," she said.
   
"No, I meant on the other
side," Hugh said.
   
Yvonne turned the menu over and then
sat staring blankly.
   
The back of the menu was almost
covered by the Consul's handwriting at its most chaotic. At the top on the left
was written:
   
Recknung
   
1 ron y anís
           
1.20
   
1 ron Salón Brasse
 
0.60
   
1 tequila doble
        
0.30
            
           
2.10
   
This was signed G. Firmin. It was a
small bill left here by the Consul some months ago, a chit he'd made out for
himself--"No, I just paid it," said Hugh, who was now sitting beside
her. But below this "reckoning" was written, enigmatically,
"dearth... filth... earth," below that was a long scrawl of which one
could make nothing. In the centre of the paper were seen these words:
"rope... cope... grope," then, "of a cold cell," while on
the right, the parent and partial explanation of these prodigals, appeared what
looked a poem in process of composition, an attempt at some kind of sonnet
perhaps, but of a wavering and collapsed design, and so crossed out and
scrawled over and stained, defaced, and surrounded with scratchy drawings--of a
club, a wheel, even a long black box like a coffin--as to be almost
indecipherable; at last it had this semblance:
   
Some years ago he started to escape
   
... has been... escaping ever since
   
Not knowing his pursuers gave up hope
   
Of seeing him (dance) at the end of a
rope
   
Hounded by eyes and thronged terrors
now the lens
   
Of glaring world that shunned even
his defence
   
Reading him strictly in the preterite
tense
   
Spent no... thinking him not worth
   
(Even)... the price of a cold cell.
   
There would have been a scandal at
his death
   
Perhaps. No more than this. Some tell
   
Strange hellish tales of this poor
foundered soul
   
Who once fled north...
   
Who once fled north, she thought.
Hugh was saying:
   
"Vámonos."
   
Yvonne said yes.
   
Outside the wind was blowing with an
odd shrillness. A loose shutter somewhere banged and banged, and the electric
sign over the garage prodded the night: Euzkadi--
   
The clock above it--man's public
inquiry of the hour!--said twelve to seven: "Who once fled north."
The diners had left the porch of the El Popo...
   
Lightning as they started down the
steps was followed by volleys of thunder almost at once, dispersed and
prolonged. Piling black clouds swallowed the stars to the north and east;
Pegasus pounded up the sky unseen; but overhead it was still clear: Vega,
Deneb, Altair; through the trees, towards the west, Hercules. "Who once
fled north," she repeated.--Straight ahead of them beside the road was a
ruined Grecian temple, dim, with two tall slender pillars, approached by two
broad steps: or there had been a moment this temple, with its exquisite beauty
of pillars, and, perfect in balance and proportion, its broad expanse of steps,
that became now two beams of windy light from the garage, falling across the
road, and the pillars, two telegraph poles. They turned into the path. Hugh,
with his torch, projected a phantom target, expanding, becoming enormous, and
that swerved and transparently tangled with the cactus. The path narrowed and
they walked, Hugh behind, in single file, the luminous target sliding before
them in sweeping concentric ellipticities, across which her own wrong shadow
leaped, or the shadow of a giantess.--The candelabras appeared salt grey where
the flashlight caught them, too stiff and fleshy to be bending with the wind,
in a slow multitudinous heaving, an inhuman cackling of scales and spines.
   
"Who once fled north... "
   
Yvonne now felt cold sober: the
cactus fell away, and the path, still narrow, through tall trees and
undergrowth, seemed easy enough.
   
"Who once fled north." But
they were not going north, they were going to the Farolito. Nor had the Consul
fled north then, he'd probably gone of course, just as tonight, to the
Farolito. "There might have been a scandal at his death." The
treetops made a sound like water rushing over their heads. "At his
death."
   
Yvonne was sober. It was the
undergrowth, which made sudden swift movements into their path, obstructing it,
that was not sober; the mobile trees were not sober; and finally it was Hugh,
who she now realized had only brought her this far to prove the better
practicality of the road, the danger of these woods under the discharges of
electricity now nearly on top of them, who was not sober: and Yvonne found she
had stopped abruptly, her hands clenched so tightly her fingers hurt, saying:
   
"We ought to hurry, it must be
almost seven," then, that she was hurrying, almost running down the path,
talking loudly and excitedly: "Did I tell you that the last night before I
left a year ago Geoffrey and I made an appointment for dinner in Mexico City
and he forgot the place, he told me, and went from restaurant to restaurant
looking for me, just as we're looking for him now."
   
"En los talleres y arsenales
a guerra! todos, tocan ya;"
Hugh sang resignedly, in a deep voice.
   
"--and it was the same way when
I first met him in Granada. We made an appointment for dinner in a place near
the Alhambra and I thought he'd meant us to meet in the Alhambra, and I couldn't
find him and now it's me, looking for him again--on my first night back."
   
"--todas, tocan ya;
   
morir ¿quién quiere por la gloria
   
o por vendedores de cañones?"
   
Thunder volleyed through the forest,
and Yvonne almost stopped dead again, half imagining she had seen, for an
instant, beckoning her on at the end of the path, the fixedly smiling woman
with the lottery tickets.
   
"How much farther?" Hugh
asked.
   
"We're nearly there, I think.
There's a couple of turns in the path ahead and a fallen log we have to climb
over."
   
"Adelante, la juventud,
al asalto, vamos ya,
y contra los imperialismos,
para un nuevo mundo hacer.
I guess you were right then," Hugh said.
   
There was a lull in the storm that
for Yvonne, looking up at the dark treetops' long slow swaying in the wind
against the tempestuous sky, was a moment like that of the tide's turning, and
yet that was filled with some quality of this morning's ride with Hugh, some
night essence of their shared morning thoughts, with a wild sea-yearning of
youth and love and sorrow.
   
A sharp pistol-like report, from
somewhere ahead, as of a back-firing car, broke this swaying stillness,
followed by another and another. "More target practice," Hugh
laughed; yet these were different mundane sounds to hold as a relief against
the sickening thunder that followed, for they meant Parián was near, soon its
dim lights would gleam through the trees: by a lightning flash bright as day
they had seen a sad useless arrow pointing back the way they'd come, to the
burned Anochtitlán: and now, in the profounder gloom, Hugh's own light fell
across a tree trunk on the left side where a wooden sign with a pointing hand
confirmed their direction.
   
A PARIÁN
 
?
   
Hugh was singing behind her... It
began to rain softly and a sweet cleanly smell rose from the woods. And now,
here was the place where the path doubled back on itself, only to be blocked by
a huge moss-covered bole that divided it from that very same path she had
decided against, which the Consul must have taken beyond Tomalín. The mildewed
ladder with its wide-spaced rungs mounted against the near side of the bole was
still there, and Yvonne had clambered up it almost before she realized she had
lost Hugh's light. Yvonne balanced herself someway on top of this dark slippery
log and saw his light again, a little to one side, moving among the trees. She
said with a certain note of triumph:
   
"Mind you don't get off the path
there, Hugh, it's sort of tricky. And mind the fallen log. There's a ladder up
this side, but you have to jump down on the other."
   
"Jump then," said Hugh.
"I must have got off your path." Yvonne, hearing the plangent
complaint of his guitar as Hugh banged the case, called: "Here I am, over
here."
   
"Hijos del pueblo que oprimen
cadenas
   
esa injusticia no debe existir
   
si tu existencia es un mundo de penas
   
antes que esclavo, prefiere morir
prefiere morir."
Hugh was singing ironically.
   
All at once the rain fell more
heavily. A wind like an express train swept through the forest; just ahead
lightning struck through the trees with a savage tearing and roar of thunder
that shook the earth--
   
There is, sometimes in thunder,
another person who thinks for you, takes in one's mental porch furniture, shuts
and bolts the mind's window against what seems less appalling as a threat than
as some distortion of celestial privacy, a shattering insanity in heaven, a
form of disgrace forbidden mortals to observe too closely: but there is always
a door left open in the mind--as men have been known in great thunderstorms to
leave their real doors open for Jesus to walk in--for the entrance and the
reception of the unprecedented, the fearful acceptance of the thunderbolt that
never falls on oneself, for the lightning that always hits the next street, for
the disaster that so rarely strikes at the disastrous likely hour, and it was
through this mental door that Yvonne, still balancing herself on the log, now
perceived that something was menacingly wrong. In the slackening thunder something
was approaching with a noise that was not the rain. It was an animal of some
sort, terrified by the storm, and whatever it might be--a deer, a horse,
unmistakably it had hooves--it was approaching at a dead run, stampeding,
plunging through the undergrowth: and now as the lightning crashed again and
the thunder subsided she heard a protracted neigh becoming a scream almost
human in its panic. Yvonne was aware that her knees were trembling. Calling out
to Hugh she tried to turn, in order to climb back down the ladder, but felt her
footing on the log give way: slipping, she tried to regain her balance, slipped
again and pitched forward. One foot doubled under her with a sharp pain as she
fell. The next moment attempting to rise she saw, by a brilliant flash of
lightning, the riderless horse. It was plunging sideways, not at her, and she
saw its every detail, the jangling saddle sliding from its back, even the
number seven branded on its rump. Again trying to rise she heard herself scream
as the animal turned towards her and upon her. The sky was a sheet of white
flame against which the trees and the poised rearing horse were an instant
pinioned.--
   
They were the cars at the fair that
were whirling around her; no, they were the planets, while the sun stood,
burning and spinning and glittering in the centre; here they came again,
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto; but they
were not planets, for it was not the merry-go-round at all, but the Ferris
Wheel, they were constellations, in the hub of which, like a great cold eye,
burned Polaris, and round and round it here they went: Cassiopeia, Cepheus, the
Lynx, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, and the Dragon; yet they were not constellations,
but, somehow, myriads of beautiful butterflies, she was sailing into Acapulco
harbour through a hurricane of beautiful butterflies, zigzagging overhead and
endlessly vanishing astern over the sea, the sea, rough and pure, the long dawn
rollers advancing, rising, and crashing down to glide in colourless ellipses
over the sand, sinking, sinking, someone was calling her name far away and she
remembered, they were in a dark wood, she heard the wind and the rain rushing
through the forest and saw the tremors of lightning shuddering through the
heavens and the horse--great God, the horse--and would this scene repeat itself
endlessly and for ever?--the horse, rearing, poised over her, petrified in
mid-air, a statue, somebody was sitting on the statue, it was Yvonne Griffaton,
no, it was the statue of Huerta, the drunkard, the murderer, it was the Consul,
or it was a mechanical horse on the merry-go-round, the carrousel, but the
carrousel had stopped and she was in a ravine down which a million horses were
thundering towards her, and she must escape, through the friendly forest to
their house, their little home by the sea. But the house was on fire, she saw
it now from the forest, from the steps above, she heard the crackling, it was
on fire, everything was burning, the dream was burning, the house was burning, yet
here they stood an instant, Geoffrey and she, inside it, inside the house,
wringing their hands, and everything seemed all right, in its right place, the
house was still there, everything dear and natural and familiar, save that the
roof was on fire and there was this noise as of dry leaves blowing along the
roof, this mechanical crackling, and now the fire was spreading even while they
watched, the cupboard, the saucepans, the old kettle, the new kettle, the
guardian figure on the deep cool well, the trowels, the rake, the sloping
shingled woodshed on whose roof the white dogwood blossoms fell but would fall
no more, for the tree was burning, the fire was spreading faster and faster,
the walls with their millwheel reflections of sunlight on water were burning,
the flowers in the garden were blackened and burning, they writhed, they
twisted, they fell, the garden was burning, the porch where they sat on spring
mornings was burning, the red door, the casement windows, the curtains she'd
made were burning, Geoffrey's old chair was burning, his desk, and now his
book, his book was burning, the pages were burning, burning, burning, whirling
up from the fire they were scattered, burning, along the beach, and now it was
growing darker and the tide coming in, the tide washed under the ruined house,
the pleasure boats that had ferried song upstream sailed home silently over the
dark waters of Eridanus. Their house was dying, only an agony went there now.
And leaving the burning dream Yvonne felt herself suddenly gathered upwards and
borne towards the stars, through eddies of stars scattering aloft with ever
wider circlings like rings on water, among which now appeared, like a flock of
diamond birds flying softly and steadily towards Orion, the Pleiades...