Under the Volcano (5 page)

   
Actually Sr Bustamente seemed half
convinced that M. Laruelle had been taken in, that Señor Firmin had really been
a sort of spy, or, as he put it, spider. But nowhere in the world were there
people more human or readily moved to sympathy than the Mexicans, vote as they
might for Almazan. Sr Bustamente was prepared to be sorry for the Consul even
as a spider, sorry in his heart for the poor lonely dispossessed trembling soul
that had sat drinking here night after night, abandoned by his wife (though she
came back, M. Laruelle almost cried aloud, that was the extraordinary thing,
she came back!) and possibly, remembering the socks, even by his country, and
wandering hatless and desconsolado and beside himself around the town pursued
by other spiders who, without his ever being quite certain of it, a man in dark
glasses he took to be a loafer here, a man lounging on the other side of the
road he thought was a peon there, a bald boy with ear-rings swinging madly on a
creaking hammock there, guarded every street and alley entrance, which even a
Mexican would no longer believe (because it was not true, M. Laruelle said) but
which was still quite possible, as Sr Bustamente's father would have assured
him, let him start something and find out, just as his father would have
assured him that he, M. Laruelle, could not cross the border in a cattle truck,
say, without "their" knowing it in Mexico City before he arrived and
having already decided what "they" were going to do about it.
Certainly Sr Bustamente did not know the Consul well, though it was his habit
to keep his eyes open, but the whole town knew him by sight, and the impression
he gave, or gave that last year anyway, apart from being always muy borracho of
course, was of a man living in continual terror of his life. Once he had run
into the cantina El Bosque, kept by the old woman Gregorio, now a widow,
shouting something like "¡Santuario!" that people were after him, and
the widow, more terrified than he, had hidden him in the back room for half the
afternoon. It was not the widow who'd told him that but Señor Gregorio himself
before he died, whose brother was his, Sr Bustamente's, gardener, because
Señora Gregorio was half English or American herself and had had some difficult
explanations to make both to Señor Gregorio and his brother Bernardino. And
yet, if the Consul were a "spider," he was one no longer and could be
forgiven. After all, he was simpático himself. Had he not seen him once in this
very bar give all his money to a beggar taken by the police?
   
--But the Consul also was not a
coward, M. Laruelle had interrupted, perhaps irrelevantly, at least not the
kind to be craven about his life. On the contrary he was an extremely brave
man, no less than a hero in fact, who had won, for conspicuous gallantry in the
service of his country during the last war, a coveted medal. Nor with all his
faults was he at bottom a vicious man.. Without knowing quite why M. Laruelle
felt he might have actually proved a great force for good. But Sr Bustamente
had never said he was a coward. Almost reverently Sr Bustamente pointed out
that being a coward and afraid for one's life were two different things in
Mexico. And certainly the Consul was not vicious but an hombre noble. Yet might
not just such a character and distinguished record as M. Laruelle claimed was
his have precisely qualified him for the excessively dangerous activities of a
spider? It seemed useless to try and explain to Sr Bustamente that the poor
Consul's job was merely a retreat, that while he had intended originally to
enter the Indian Civil Service, he had in fact entered the Diplomatic Service
only for one reason and another to be kicked downstairs into ever remoter
consulships, and finally into the sinecure in Quauhnahuac as a position where
he was least likely to prove a nuisance to the Empire, in which, with one part
of his mind at least, M. Laruelle suspected he so passionately believed.
   
But why had all this happened? he
asked himself now. ¿Quién sabe? He risked another anís, and at the first sip a
scene, probably rather inaccurate (M. Laruelle had been in the artillery during
the last war, survived by him in spite of Guillaume Apollinaire's being for a
time his commanding officer), was conjured to his mind. A dead calm on the
line, but the S.S. Samaritan, if she should have been on the line, was actually
far north of it. Indeed for a steamer bound from Shanghai to Newcastle, New
South Wales, with a cargo of antimony and quicksilver and wolfram she had for
some time been steering a rather odd course. Why, for instance, had she emerged
into the Pacific Ocean out of the Bungo Strait in Japan south of Shikoku and
not far from the East China Sea? For days now, not unlike a stray sheep on the
immeasurable green meadows of waters, she had been keeping an offing from
various interesting islands far out of her path. Lot's Wife and Arzobispo.
Rosario and Sulphur Island. Volcano Island and St Augustine. It was somewhere
between Guy Rock and the Euphrosyne Reef that she first sighted the periscope
and sent her engines full speed astern. But when the submarine surfaced she
hove to. An unarmed merchantman, the Samaritan put up no fight. Before the
boarding party from the submarine reached her, however, she suddenly changed
her temper. As if by magic the sheep turned to a dragon belching fire. The
U-boat did not even have time to dive. Her entire crew was captured. The
Samaritan, who had lost her captain in the engagement, sailed on, leaving the
submarine burning helplessly, a smoking cigar a-glow on the vast surface of the
Pacific.
   
And in some capacity obscure to M.
Laruelle--for Geoffrey had not been in the merchant service but, arrived via
the yacht club and something in salvage, a naval lieutenant, or God knows
perhaps by that time a lieutenant-commander--the Consul had been largely
responsible for this escapade. And for it, or gallantry connected with it, he
had received the British Distinguished Service Order or Cross.
   
But there was a slight hitch apparently.
For whereas the submarine's crew became prisoners of war when the Samaritan
(which was only one of the ship's names, albeit that the Consul liked best)
reached port, mysteriously none of her officers was among them. Something had
happened to those German officers, and what had happened was not pretty. They
had, it was said, been kidnapped by the Samaritan's stokers and burned alive in
the furnaces.
   
M. Laruelle thought of this. The
Consul loved England and as a young man may have subscribed--though it was
doubtful, this being rather more in those days the prerogative of
non-combatants--to the popular hatred of the enemy. But he was a man of honour
and probably no one supposed for a moment he had ordered the Samaritan's
stokers to put the Germans in the furnace. None dreamed that such an order
given would have been obeyed. But the fact remained the Germans had been put
there and it was no use saying that was the best place for them. Someone must
take the blame.
   
So the Consul had not received his decoration
without first being court-martialled. He was acquitted. It was not at all clear
to M. Laruelle why he and no one else should have been tried. Yet it was easy
to think of the Consul as a kind of more lachrymose pseudo "Lord Jim"
living in a self-imposed exile, brooding, despite his award, over his lost
honour, his secret, and imagining that a stigma would cling to him because of
it throughout his whole life. Yet this was far from the case. No stigma clung
to him evidently. And he had shown no reluctance in discussing the incident
with M. Laruelle, who years before had read a guarded article concerning it in
the Paris-Soir. He had even been enormously funny about it. "People simply
did not go round," he said, "putting Germans in furnaces! It was only
once or twice during those later months when drunk that to M. Laruelle's
astonishment he suddenly began proclaiming not only his guilt in the matter but
that he'd always suffered horribly on account of it. He went much further. No
blame attached to the stokers. No question arose of any order given them.
Flexing his muscles he sardonically announced the single-handed accomplishment
himself of the deed. But by this time the poor Consul had already lost almost
all capacity for telling the truth and his life had become a quixotic oral
fiction. Unlike "Jim" he had grown rather careless of his honour and
the German officers were merely an excuse to buy another bottle of mescal. M.
Laruelle told the Consul as much, and they quarrelled grotesquely, becoming
estranged again--when bitterer things had not estranged them--and remained so
till the last--indeed at the very last it had been wickedly, sorrowfully worse
than ever--as years before at Leasowe.
   
Then will I headlong fly into the
earth:
Earth, gape! it will not harbour me!
   
M. Laruelle had opened the book of
Elizabethan plays at random and for a moment he sat oblivious of his
surroundings, gazing at the words that seemed to have the power of carrying his
own mind downward into a gulf, as in fulfilment on his own spirit of the threat
Marlowe's Faustus had cast at his despair. Only Faustus had not said quite
that. He looked more closely at the passage. Faustus had said: "Then will
I headlong run into the earth," and "O, no, it will not--" That
was not so bad. Under the circumstances to run was not so bad as to fly.
Intaglioed in the maroon leather cover of the book was a golden faceless
figurine also running, carrying a torch like the elongated neck and head and
open beak of the sacred ibis. M. Laruelle sighed, ashamed of himself. What had
produced the illusion, the elusive flickering candlelight, coupled with the
dim, though now less dim, electric light, or some correspondence, maybe, as
Geoff liked to put it, between the subnormal world and the abnormally suspicious?
How the Consul had delighted in the absurd game too: sortes
Shakespeareanae...
 
And what wonders I
have done all Germany can witness. Enter Wagner, solus... Ick sal you wat
suggen, Hans. Dis skip, dat comen from Candy, is als vol, by God's sacrament,
van sugar, almonds, cambrick, end alle dingen, towsand, towsand ding.
 
M. Laruelle closed the book on Dekker's
comedy, then, in the face of the barman who was watching him, stained dishcloth
over his arm, with quiet amazement, shut his eyes, and opening the book again
twirled one finger in the air, and brought it down firmly upon a passage he now
held up to the light:
   
Cut is the branch that might have
grown full straight,
And burned is Apollo's laurel bough,
That sometimes grew within this learned man,
Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall—
Shaken, M. Laruelle replaced the book on the table, closing it with the fingers
and thumb of one hand, while with the other hand he reached to the floor for a
folded sheet of paper that had fluttered out of it. He picked the paper up
between two fingers and unfolded it, turning it over. Hotel Bella Vista, he
read. There were really two sheets of uncommonly thin hotel note-paper that had
been pressed flat in the book, long but narrow and crammed on both sides with meaningless
writing in pencil. At first glance it did not appear a letter. But there was no
mistaking, even in the uncertain light, the hand, half crabbed, half generous,
and wholly drunken, of the Consul himself, the Greek e's, flying buttresses of
d's, the t's like lonely wayside crosses save where they crucified the entire
word, the words themselves slanting steeply downhill, though the individual
characters seemed as if resisting the descent, braced, climbing the other way.
M. Laruelle felt a qualm. For he saw now that it was indeed a letter of sorts,
though one that the writer undoubtedly had little intention, possibly no
capability for the further tactile effort, of posting:
   
... Night: and once again, the
nightly grapple with death, the room shaking with daemonic orchestras, the
snatches of fearful sleep, the voices outside the window, my name being
continually repeated with scorn by imaginary parties arriving, the dark's
spinnets. As if there were not enough real noises in these nights the colour of
grey hair. Not like the rending tumult of American cities, the noise of the
unbandaging of great giants in agony. But the howling pariah dogs, the cocks
that herald dawn all night, the drumming, the moaning that will be found later
white plumage huddled on telegraph wires in back gardens or fowl roosting in
apple trees, the eternal sorrow that never sleeps of great Mexico. For myself I
like to take my sorrow into the shadow of old monasteries, my guilt into
cloisters and under tapestries, and into the misericordes of unimaginable
cantinas where sad-faced potters and legless beggars drink at dawn, whose cold
jonquil beauty one rediscovers in death. So that when you left, Yvonne, I went
to Oaxaca. There is no sadder word. Shall I tell you, Yvonne, of the terrible
journey there through the desert over the narrow gauge railway on the rack of a
third-class carriage bench, the child whose life its mother and I saved by
rubbing its belly with tequila out of my bottle, or of how, when I went to my
room in the hotel where we once were happy, the noise of slaughtering below in
the kitchen drove me out into the glare of the street, and later, that night,
there was a vulture sitting in the washbasin? Horrors portioned to a giant
nerve! No, my secrets are of the grave and must be kept. And this is how I
sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some
extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the
world: but the name of this land is hell.
   
It is not Mexico of course but in the
heart. And today I was in Quauhnahuac as usual when I received from my lawyers
news of our divorce. This was as I invited it. I received other news too:
England is breaking off diplomatic relations with Mexico and all her
Consuls--those, that is, who are English--are being called home. These are
kindly and good men, for the most part, whose name I suppose I demean. I shall
not go home with them. I shall perhaps go home but not to England, not to that
home. So, at midnight, I drove in the Plymouth to Tomalín to see my
Tlaxcaltecan friend Cervantes the cockfighter at the Salon Ofelia. And thence I
came to the Farolito in Parián where I sit now in a little room off the bar at
four-thirty in the morning drinking ochas and then mescal and writing this on
some Bella Vista notepaper I filched the other night, perhaps because the
writing paper at the Consulate, which is a tomb, hurts me to look at. I think I
know a good deal about physical suffering. But this is worst of all, to feel
your soul dying. I wonder if it is because tonight my soul has really died that
I feel at the moment something like peace.