Under the Volcano (45 page)

   
"Mescal," said the Consul.
   
The main barroom of the Farolito was
deserted. From a mirror behind the bar, that also reflected the door open to
the square, his face silently glared at him, with stern, familiar foreboding.
   
Yet the place was not silent. It was
filled by that ticking: the ticking of his watch, his heart, his conscience, a
clock somewhere. There was a remote sound too, from far below, of rushing
water, of subterranean collapse; and moreover he could still hear them, the
bitter wounding accusations he had flung at his own misery, the voices as in
argument, his own louder than the rest, mingling now with those other voices
that seemed to be wailing from a distance distressfully: "Borracho,
Borrachón, Borraaaacho!"
   
But one of these voices was like
Yvonne's, pleading. He still felt her look, their look in the Salón Ofelia,
behind him. Deliberately he shut out all thought of Yvonne. He drank two swift
mescals: the voices ceased.
   
Sucking a lemon he took stock of his
surroundings. The mescal, while it assuaged, slowed his mind; each object
demanded some moments to impinge upon him. In one corner of the room sat a
white rabbit eating an ear of Indian corn. It nibbled at the purple and black
stops with an air of detachment, as though playing a musical instrument. Behind
the bar hung, by a clamped swivel, a beautiful Oaxaquenan gourd of mescal de
olla, from which his drink had been measured. Ranged on either side stood
bottles of Tenampa, Berreteaga, Tequila Añejo, Anís doble de Mallorca, a violet
decanter of Henry Mallet's "delicioso licor," a flask of peppermint
cordial, a tall voluted bottle of Anís del Mono, on the label of which a devil
brandished a pitchfork. On the wide counter before him were saucers of
toothpicks, chillies, lemons, a tumblerful of straws, crossed long spoons in a
glass tankard. At one end large bulbous jars of many-coloured aguardiente were
set, raw alcohol with different flavours, in which citrus fruit rinds floated.
An advertisement tacked by the mirror for last night's ball in Quauhnahuac
caught his eye: Hotel Bella Vista Gran Baile a Beneficio de la Cruz Roja. Los
Mejores Artistas del radio en acción. No falte Vd. A scorpion clung to the
advertisement. The Consul noted all these things carefully. Drawing long sighs of
icy relief, he even counted the toothpicks. He was safe here; this was the
place he loved--sanctuary, the paradise of his despair.
   
The "barman"--the son of
the Elephant--known as A Few Fleas, a small dark sickly-looking child, was
glancing nearsightedly through horn-rimmed spectacles at a cartoon serial El
Hijo del Diablo in a boy's magazine. Tito. As he read, muttering to himself, he
ate chocolates. Returning another replenished glass of mescal to the Consul he
slopped some on the bar. He went on reading without wiping it up, however,
muttering, cramming himself with chocolate skulls bought for the Day of the
Dead, chocolate skeletons, chocolate, yes, funeral wagons. The Consul pointed
out the scorpion on the wall and the boy brushed it off with a vexed gesture:
it was dead. A Few Fleas turned back to his story, muttering aloud thickly,
"De pronto, Dalia vuelve en Sigrita llamando la atención de un guardia que
pasea, ¡Suélteme! ¡Suélteme!"
   
Save me, thought the Consul vaguely,
as the boy suddenly went out for a change, suélteme, help: but maybe the
scorpion, not wanting to be saved, had stung itself to death. He strolled
across the room. After fruitlessly trying to make friends with the white
rabbit, he approached the open window on his right. It was almost a sheer drop
to the bottom of the ravine. What a dark, melancholy place! In Parián did Kubla
Khan... And the crag was still there too--just as in Shelley or Calderón or
both--the crag that couldn't make up its mind to crumble absolutely, it clung so,
cleft, to life. The sheer height was terrifying, he thought, leaning outwards,
looking sideways at the split rock and attempting to recall the passage in The
Cenci that described the huge stack clinging to the mass of earth, as if
resting on life, not afraid to fall, but darkening, just the same, where it
would go if it went. It was a tremendous, an awful way down to the bottom. But
it struck him he was not afraid to fall either. He traced mentally the
barranca's circuitous abysmal path back through the country, through shattered
mines, to his own garden, then saw himself standing again this morning with
Yvonne outside the printer's shop, gazing at the picture of that other rock, La
Despedida, the glacial rock crumbling among the wedding invitations in the shop
window, the spinning flywheel behind. How long ago, how strange, how sad,
remote as the memory of first love, even of his mother's death, it seemed; like
some poor sorrow, this time without effort, Yvonne left his mind again.
   
Popocatepetl towered through the
window, its immense flanks partly hidden by rolling thunderheads; its peak
blocking the sky, it appeared almost right overhead, the barranca, the
Farolito, directly beneath it. Under the volcano! It was not for nothing the
ancients had placed Tartarus under Mt Aetna, nor within it, the monster
Typhoeus, with his hundred heads and--relatively--fearful eyes and voices.
   
Turning, the Consul took his drink
over to the open door. A mercurochrome agony down the west. He stared out at
Parián. There, beyond a grass plot, was the inevitable square with its little
public garden. To the left, at the edge of the barranca, a soldier slept under
a tree. Half facing him, to the right, on an incline, stood what seemed at
first sight a ruined monastery or waterworks. This was the grey turreted
barracks of the Military Police he had mentioned to Hugh as the reputed Unión
Militar headquarters. The building, which also included the prison, glowered at
him with one eye, over an archway set in the forehead of its low facade: a
clock pointing to six. On either side of the archway the barred windows in the
Comisario de Policía and the Policía de Seguridad looked down on a group of
soldiers talking, their bugles slung over their shoulders with bright green
lariats. Other soldiers, puttees flapping, stumbled at sentry duty. Under the
archway, in the entrance to the courtyard, a corporal was working at a table,
on which stood an unlighted oil lamp. He was inscribing something in
copperplate handwriting, the Consul knew, for his rather unsteady course
hither--not so unsteady however as in the square at Quauhnahuac earlier, but
still disgraceful--had brought him almost on top of him. Through the archway,
grouped round the courtyard beyond, the Consul could make out dungeons with
wooden bars like pigpens. In one of them a man was gesticulating. Elsewhere, to
the left, were scattered huts of dark thatch, merging into the jungle which on
all sides surrounded the town, glowing now in the unnatural livid light of
approaching storm.
   
A Few Fleas having returned, the
Consul went to the bar for his change. The boy, not hearing apparently, slopped
some mescal into his glass from the beautiful gourd. Handing it back he upset
the toothpicks. The Consul said nothing further about the change for the
moment. However he made a mental note to order for his next drink something
costing more than the fifty centavos he had already laid down. In this way he
saw himself gradually recovering his money. He argued absurdly with himself
that it was necessary to remain for this alone. He knew there was another
reason yet couldn't place his finger on it. Every time the thought of Yvonne
recurred to him he was aware of this. It seemed indeed then as though he must
stay here for her sake, not because she would follow him here--no, she had
gone, he'd let her go finally now, Hugh might come, though never she, not this
time, obviously she would return home and his mind could not travel beyond that
point--but for something else. He saw his change lying on the counter, the
price of the mescal not deducted from it. He pocketed it all and came to the
door again. Now the situation was reversed; the boy would have to keep an eye
on him. It lugubriously diverted him to imagine, for A Few Fleas' benefit,
though half aware the preoccupied boy was not watching him at all, he had
assumed the blue expression peculiar to a certain type of drunkard, tepid with
two drinks grudgingly on credit, gazing out of an empty saloon, an expression
that pretends he hopes help, any kind of help, may be on its way, friends, any
kind of friends coming to rescue him. For him life is always just around the
corner, in the form of another drink at a new bar. Yet he really wants none of
these things. Abandoned by his friends, as they by him, he knows that nothing
but the crushing look of a creditor lives round that corner. Neither has he
fortified himself sufficiently to borrow more money, nor obtain more credit;
nor does he like the liquor next door anyway. Why am I here, says the silence,
what have I done, echoes the emptiness, why have I ruined myself in this wilful
manner, chuckles the money in the till, why have I been brought so low,
wheedles the thoroughfare, to which the only answer was--The square gave him no
answer. The little town, that had seemed empty, was filling up as evening wore
on. Occasionally a moustachioed officer swaggered past, with a heavy gait,
slapping his swagger stick on his leggings. People were returning from the
cemeteries, though perhaps the procession would not pass for some time. A
ragged platoon of soldiers were marching across the square. Bugles blared. The
police too--those who were not on strike, or had been pretending to be on duty
at the graves, or the deputies, it was not easy to get the distinction between the
police and the military clear in one's mind either--had arrived in force. Con
German friends, doubtless. The corporal was still writing at his table; it
oddly reassured him. Two or three drinkers pushed their way past him into the
Farolito, tasselled sombreros on the backs of their heads, holsters slapping
their thighs. Two beggars had arrived and were taking up their posts outside
the bar, under the tempestuous sky. One, legless, was dragging himself through
the dust like a poor seal. But the other beggar, who boasted one leg, stood up
stiffly, proudly, against the cantina wall as if waiting to be shot. Then this
beggar with one leg leaned forward: he dropped a coin into the legless man's
outstretched hand. There were tears in the first beggar's eyes. The Consul now
observed that on his extreme right some unusual animals resembling geese, but
large as camels, and skinless men, without heads, upon stilts, whose animated
entrails jerked along the ground, were issuing out of the forest path the way
he had come. He shut his eyes from this and when he opened them someone who
looked like a policeman was leading a horse up the path, that was all. He
laughed, despite the policeman, then stopped. For he saw that the face of the
reclining beggar was slowly changing to Señora Gregorio's, and now in turn to
his mother's face, upon which appeared an expression of infinite pity and
supplication.
   
Closing his eyes again, standing
there, glass in hand, he thought for a minute with a freezing detached almost
amused calm of the dreadful night inevitably awaiting him whether he drank much
more or not, his room shaking with daemonic orchestras, the snatches of fearful
tumultuous sleep, interrupted by voices which were really dogs barking, or by
his own name being continually repeated by imaginary parties arriving, the
vicious shouting, the strumming, the slamming, the pounding, the battling with
insolent archfiends, the avalanche breaking down the door, the proddings from
under the bed, and always, outside, the cries, the wailing, the terrible music,
the dark: spinets: he returned to the bar.
   
Diosdado, the Elephant, had just
entered from the back. The Consul watched him discard his black coat, hang it
in the closet, then feel in the breast pocket of his spotless white shirt for a
pipe protruding from it. He took this out and began to fill it from a package
of Country Club el Bueno Tono tobacco. The Consul remembered now about his
pipe: here it was, no doubt about that.
   
"Sí, sí, mistair," he
replied, listening with bent head to the Consul's query. "Claro. No--my ah
peeper no Inglés. Monterey peeper. You were--ah--borracho one day then. ¿No
señor?
   
"¿Como no?" said the
Consul.
   
"Twice a day."
   
"You was dronk three times a
day," Diosdado said, and his look, the insult, the implied extent of his
downfall, penetrated the Consul. "Then you'll be going back to America
now," he added, rummaging behind the bar.
   
"I--no--por qué?"
   
Diosdado suddenly slapped a fat
package of envelopes fastened with elastic on the bar counter. "¿--es
suyo?" he asked directly.
   
Where are the letters Geoffrey Firmin
the letters the letters she wrote till her heart broke? Here were the letters,
here and nowhere else: these were the letters and this the Consul knew
immediately without examining the envelopes. When he spoke he could not
recognize his own voice:
   
"Sí, señor, muchas
gracias," he said.
   
"De nada, señor." The
Godgiven turned away.
   
La rame inutile fatigua vainement une
mer immobile... The Consul could not move for a full minute. He could not even
make a move toward a drink. Then he began to trace sideways in spilled liquor a
little map on the bar. Diosdado came back and watched with interest.
"España," the Consul said, then his Spanish failing him, "You
are Spanish, señor?"
   
"Sí, sí, señor, si," said
Diosdado, watching, but in a new tone. "Español. España."
   
"These letters you gave
me--see?--are from my wife, my esposa. ¿Claro? This is where we met. In Spain.
You recognize it, your old home, you know Andalusia? That, up there, that's the
Guadalquivir. Beyond there, the Sierra Morena. Down there's Almeria.
Those," he traced with his finger, "lying between, are the Sierra
Nevada mountains. And there's Granada. That is the place. The very place we
met." The Consul smiled.