Under the Volcano (8 page)

   
"
You-are-a-man-who-like-much-Vine! " now issued powerfully from the
abarrotes into the peaceful street, followed by a roar of incredibly
good-humoured but ruffianly male laughter. "You are—diablo!" There
was a pause in which she heard the Consul saying something. "Eggs!"
the good-humoured voice exploded again. "You--two diablos! You tree
diablos." The voice crackled with glee. "Eggs!" Then: "Who
is the beautiful layee?--Ah, you are--ah five diablos, you ah—Eggs!"
ludicrously followed the Consul, who appeared at this moment, calmly smiling,
on the pavement above Yvonne.
   
"In Tortu," he was saying
as, steadier again, he fell into step beside her, "the ideal University,
where no application whatsoever, so I have heard on good authority, nothing,
not even athletics, is allowed to interfere with the business of--look out!...
drinking."
   
It came sailing out of nowhere, the
child's funeral, the tiny lace-covered coffin followed by the band: two
saxophones, bass guitar, a fiddle, playing of all things "La
Cucaracha" the women behind, very solemn, while several paces back a few
hangers-on were joking, straggling along in the dust almost at a run.
   
They stood to one side while the
little cortege slanted by swiftly in the direction of the town, then walked on
in silence not looking at one another. The banking of the street now became
less acute and the sidewalks and the shops dropped away. To the left there was only
a low blank wall with vacant lots behind it, whereas to the right the houses
had turned into low open shanties filled with black carbon. Yvonne's heart,
that had been struggling with an insufferable pang, suddenly missed a beat.
Though one might not think it they were approaching the residential district,
their own terrain.
   
"Do look where you're going,
Geoffrey!" But it was Yvonne who had stumbled rounding the right-angled
corner into the Calle Nicaragua. The Consul regarded her without expression as
she stared up into the sun at the bizarre house opposite them near the head of
their street, with two towers and a connecting catwalk over the ridgepole, at
which someone else, a peon with his back turned, was also gazing curiously.
   
"Yes, it's still there, it
hasn't budged an inch," he said, and now they had passed the house to
their left with its inscription on the wall she didn't want to see and were
walking down the Calle Nicaragua.
   
"Yet the street looks different
somehow." Yvonne relapsed into silence again. Actually she was making a
tremendous effort to control herself. What she could not have explained was
that recently in her picture of Quauhnahuac this house hadn't been here at all!
On the occasions imagination had led her with Geoffrey down the Calle Nicaragua
lately, never once, poor phantoms, had they been confronted with Jacques's
zacuali. It had vanished some time before, leaving not a trace, it was as if
the house had never existed, just as in the mind of a murderer, it may happen,
some prominent landmark in the vicinity of his crime becomes obliterated, so
that on returning to the neighbourhood, once so familiar, he scarcely knows
where to turn. But the Calle Nicaragua didn't really look different. Here it
was, still cluttered up with large grey loose stones, full of the same lunar
potholes, and in that well-known state of frozen eruption that resembled repair
but which in fact only testified facetiously to the continued deadlock between
the Municipality and the property owners here over its maintenance. Calle
Nicaragua!--the name, despite everything, sang plangently within her: only that
ridiculous shock at Jacques's house could account for her feeling, with one
part of her mind, calm as she did about it.
   
The road, broad, sidewalkless, ran
with increasing steepness downhill, mostly between high walls overhung by
trees, though at the moment there were more little carbon shanties to their
right, down to a leftward curve some three hundred yards away where roughly the
same distance again above their own house it was lost from sight. Trees blocked
the view beyond of low rolling hills. Nearly all the large residences were on
their left, built far back from the road towards the barranca in order to face
the volcanoes across the valley. She saw the mountains again in the distance
through a gap between two estates, a small field bounded by a barbed-wire fence
and overflowing with tall spiny grasses tossed wildly together as by a big wind
that had abruptly ceased. There they were, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl,
remote ambassadors of Mauna Loa, Mokuaweoweo: dark clouds now obscured their
base. The grass, she thought, wasn't as green as it should be at the end of the
rains: there must have been a dry spell, though the gutters on either side of
the road were brimful of rushing mountain water and--
   
"And he's still there too. He
hasn't budged an inch either," The Consul without turning was nodding back
in the direction of M. Laruelle's house.
   
"Who--who hasn't--" Yvonne
faltered. She glanced behind her: there was only the peon who had stopped
looking at the house and was going into an alleyway.
   
"Jacques."
   
"Jacques!"
   
"That's right. In fact we've had
terrific times together. We've been slap through everything from Bishop
Berkeley to the four o'clock mirabilis jalapa"
   
"You do
 
what ?"
   
"The Diplomatic Service."
The Consul had paused and was lighting his pipe. "Sometimes I really think
there's something to be said for it."
   
He stopped to float a match down the
brimming gutter and somehow they were moving, even hurrying on: she heard
bemusedly the swift angry click and crunch of her heels on the road and the
Consul's seemingly effortless voice at her shoulder.
   
"For instance had you ever been
British attaché to the White Russian Embassy in Zagreb in 1922, and I've always
thought a woman like you would have done very well as attaché to the White
Russian Embassy in Zagreb in 1922, though God knows how it managed to survive
that long, you might have acquired a certain, I don't say technique exactly,
but a mien, a mask, a way, at any rate, of throwing a look into your face at a
moment's notice of sublime dishonest detachment."
   
"Although I can very well see
how it strikes you--how the picture of our implied indifference, Jacques's and
mine that is, I mean, strikes you, as being even more indecent than that, say,
Jacques shouldn't have left when you did or that we shouldn't have dropped the
friendship."
   
"But had you, Yvonne, ever been
on the bridge of a British Q-ship, and I've always thought a woman like you
would have been very good on the bridge of a British Q-ship--peering at the
Tottenham Court Road through a telescope, only figuratively speaking of course,
day in and day out, counting the waves, you might have learnt--"
   
"Please look where you're
going!"
   
"Though had you of course ever
been Consul to Cuckolds-haven, that town cursed by the lost love of Maximilian
and Carlotta, then, why then--"
   
--¡BOX! ARENA TOMALÍN. EL BALON VS EL
REDONDILLO.
   
"But I don't think I finished
about the little corpse. What is really so astonishing about him is that he has
to be checked, actually checked, to the U. S. Border of Exit. While the charges
for him are equivalent to two adult passengers--"
   
"However since you don't seem to
want to listen to me, here's something else perhaps I ought to tell you."
   
"Something else, I repeat, very
important, that perhaps I ought to tell you." "Yes. What is it?"
"About Hugh." Yvonne said at last: "You've heard from Hugh. How
is he?" "He's staying with me."
   
--¡BOX! ARENA TOMALÍN. FRENTE AL
JARDIN XICOTANCATL
Domingo 8 de Noviembre de 1938.
4 Emocionantes Peleas.
El balón vs el redondillo.
   
Las Maños de Orlac.
Con Peter Lorre,
   
"What!" Yvonne stopped
dead.
   
"It seems he's been in America
this time on a cattle ranch," the Consul was saying rather gravely as
somehow, anyhow, they moved on, but this time more slowly. "Why, heaven
knows. It couldn't be he was learning to ride, but still, he turned up about a
week ago in a distinctly unpukka outfit, looking like Hoot S. Hart in the
Riders to the Purple Sage. Apparently he'd teleported himself, or been
deported, from America by cattle-truck. I don't pretend to know how the Press
get by in these matters. Or maybe it was a bet... Anyhow he got as far as
Chihuahua with the cattle, and some gun-running gun-toting pal by the name
of--Weber?--I forget, anyway, I didn't meet him, flew him the rest of the
way." The Consul knocked out his pipe on his heel, smiling. "It seems
everyone comes flying to see me these days."
   
"But--but Hugh--I don't
understand--"
   
"He'd lost his clothes en route
but it wasn't carelessness, if you can believe it, only that they wanted to
make him pay higher duty at the border than they were worth, so quite naturally
he left them behind. He hadn't lost his passport however, which was unusual
perhaps because he's still somehow with--though I haven't the foggiest in what
capacity--the London Globe... Of course you knew he's become quite famous
lately. For the second time, in case you weren't aware of the first."
   
"Did he know about our
divorce?" Yvonne managed to ask.
   
The Consul shook his head. They
walked on slowly, the Consul looking at the ground.
   
"Did you tell him?"
   
The Consul was silent, walking more and
more slowly. "What did I say?" he said at length.
   
"Nothing, Geoff."
   
"Well, he knows now that we're
separated, of course." The Consul decapitated a dusty coquelicot poppy
growing by the side of the gutter with his stick. "But he expected us both
to be here. I gather he had some idea we might let--but I avoided telling him
the divorce had gone through. That is, I think I did. I meant to avoid it. So
far as I know, honestly, I hadn't got around to telling him when he left."
   
"Then he's not staying with you
any longer."
   
The Consul burst out in a laugh that
became a cough. "Oh yes he is! He most certainly is... In fact, I nearly
passed out altogether under the stress of his salvage operations. Which is to
say he's been trying to 'straighten me out'. Can't you see it? Can't you
recognize his fine Italian hand? And he almost literally succeeded right off
with some malevolent strychnine compound he produced. But," just for one
moment the Consul seemed to have difficulty placing one foot before another,
"to be more concrete, actually he did have a better reason for staying
than to play Theodore Watts Dunton. To my Swinburne." The Consul
decapitated another poppy. "Mute Swinburne. He'd got wind of some story
while vacationing on the ranch and came after it here like a red rag after a
bull. Didn't I tell you that?... Which--didn't I say so before?--is why he's
gone off to Mexico City."
   
After a while Yvonne said weakly,
scarcely hearing herself speak: "Well, we may have a little time together,
mayn't we?" "¿Quien sabe?"
   
"But you mean he's in the City
now," she covered hastily.
   
"Oh, he's throwing up the
job--he might be home now. At any rate he'll be back today, I think. He says he
wants 'action'. Poor old chap, he's wearing a very popular front indeed these
days." Whether the Consul was being sincere or not he added,
sympathetically enough, it sounded, "And God alone knows what will be the
end of that romantic little urge in him."
   
"And how will he feel,"
Yvonne asked bravely all at once, "when he sees you again?"
   
"Yes, well, not much difference,
not enough time to show, but I'd just been about to say," the Consul went
on with a slight hoarseness, "that the terrific times, Laruelle's and
mine, I mean, ceased on the advent of Hugh." He was poking at the dust
with his stick, making little patterns for a minute as he went along, like a
blind man. "They were mostly mine because Jacques has a weak stomach and
is usually sick after three drinks and after four he would--start to play the Good
Samaritan, and after five Theodore Watts Dunton too... So that I appreciated,
so to speak, a change of technique. At least to the extent that I find I shall
be grateful now, on Hugh's behalf, if you'd say nothing to him--"
   
"Oh--"
   
The Consul cleared his throat.
"Not that I have been drinking much of course in his absence, and not that
I'm not absolutely cold stone sober now, as you can readily see."
   
"Oh yes indeed," Yvonne
smiled, full of thoughts that had already swept her a thousand miles in frantic
retreat from all this. Yet she was walking on slowly beside him. And
deliberately as a climber on a high unguarded place looks up at the pine trees
above on the precipice and comforts himself by saying: "Never mind about
the drop below me, how very much worse if I were on top of one of those pines
up there!" she forced herself out of the moment: she stopped thinking: or
she thought about the street again, remembering her last poignant glimpse of
it--and how even more desperate things had seemed then!--at the beginning of
that fateful journey to Mexico City, glancing back from the now lost Plymouth
as they turned the corner, crashing, crunching down on its springs into the
potholes, stopping dead, then crawling, leaping forward again, keeping in, it
didn't matter on which side, to the walls. They were higher than she recalled
and covered with bougainvillea; massive smouldering banks of bloom. Over them
she could see the crests of trees, their boughs heavy and motionless, and
occasionally a watch-tower, the eternal mirador of Parián state, set among
them, the houses invisible here below the walls and from on top too, she'd once
taken the trouble to find out, as if shrunken down inside their patios, the
miradores cut off, floating above like lonely rooftrees of the soul. Nor could
you distinguish the houses much better through the wrought-iron lacework of the
high gates, vaguely reminiscent of New Orleans, locked in these walls on which
were furtively pencilled lovers' trysts, and which so often concealed less Mexico
than a Spaniard's dream of home. The gutter on the right ran underground a
while and another of those low shanties built on the street frowned at her with
its dark open sinister bunkers--where María used to fetch their carbon. Then
the water tumbled out into the sunlight and on the other side, through a gap in
the walls, Popocatepetl emerged alone. Without her knowing it they had passed
the corner and the entrance to their house was in sight.