Authors: Malcolm Lowry
âThere is a letter, a letter, a letter,' he was saying when they came up with him, bowing to Yvonne as if he'd last greeted her yesterday, âa message
por el señor
, for your horse,' he informed the Consul, withdrawing two packages and smiling roguishly as he undid them.
âWhat? â nothing for Señor CalÃgula.'
âAh.' The
cartero
flicked through another bundle, glancing at them sideways and keeping his elbows close to his sides in order not to drop the bag. âNo.' He put down the bag now altogether, and began to search feverishly; soon letters were spread all over the road. âIt must be. Here. No. This is. Then this one.
Ei ei ei ei ei ei
.'
âDon't bother, my dear fellow,' the Consul said. âPlease.'
But the
cartero
tried again: âBadrona, Diosdado â'
Hugh too was waiting expectantly, not so much any word from the
Globe
, which would come if at all by cable, but half in hope, a hope which the postman's own appearance rendered delightfully plausible, of another minuscule Oaxaqueñian envelope, covered with bright stamps of archers shooting at the sun, from Juan Cerillo. He listened: somewhere, behind a wall, someone was playing a guitar â badly, he was let down; and a dog barked sharply.
â â Feeshbank, Figueroa, Gómez â no, Quincey, Sandovah, no.'
At last the good little man gathered up his letters and bowing apologetically, disappointedly, lunged off down the street again. They were all looking after him, and just as Hugh was wondering whether the postman's behaviour might not have been part of some enormous inexplicable private joke, if really he'd been laughing at them the whole time, though in the kindliest way, he halted, fumbled once more at one of the packages, turned, and trotting back with little yelps of triumph, handed the Consul what looked like a postal card.
Yvonne, a little ahead again by now, nodded at him over her shoulder, smiling, as to say: âGood, you've got a letter after all,'
and with her buoyant dancing steps walked on slowly beside M. Laruelle, up the dusty hill.
The Consul turned the card over twice, then handed it to Hugh.
âStrange â' he said.
â It was from Yvonne herself and apparently written at least a year ago. Hugh suddenly realized it must have been posted soon after she'd left the Consul and most probably in ignorance he proposed to remain in Quauhnahuac. Yet curiously it was the card that had wandered far afield: originally addressed to Wells Fargo in Mexico City, it had been forwarded by some error a-broad, gone badly astray in fact, for it was date-stamped from Paris, Gibraltar, and even Algeciras, in Fascist Spain.
âNo, read it,' the Consul smiled.
Yvonne's scrawl ran:
Darling, why did I leave? Why did you let me? Expect to arrive in the U.S. tomorrow, California two days later. Hope to find a word from you there waiting. Love
Y.
Hugh turned the card over. There was a picture of the leonine Signal Peak on El Paso with Carlsbad Cavern Highway leading over a white fenced bridge between desert and desert. The road turned a little corner in the distance and vanished.
O
N
the side of the drunken madly revolving world hurtling at 1.20 p.m. towards Hercules's Butterfly the house seemed a bad idea, the Consul thought â
There were two towers, Jacques's
zacualis
, one at each end and joined by a catwalk over the roof, which was the glassed-in gable of the studio below. These towers were as if camouflaged (almost like the
Samaritan
, in fact): blue, grey, purple, vermilion, had once been slashed on in zebra stripes. But time and weather had combined to render the effect from a short distance of a uniform dull mauve. Their tops, reached from the catwalk by twin wooden ladders, and from inside by two spiral staircases, made two flimsy crenellated miradors, each scarcely larger than a
bartizan
, tiny roofless variants of the observation posts which everywhere commanded the valley in Quauhnahuac.
On the battlements of the mirador to their left, as the Consul and Hugh confronted the house, with the Calle Nicaragua stretching downhill to their right, now appeared to them two bilious-looking angels. The angels, carved out of pink stone, knelt facing one another in profile against the sky across the intervening crenels, while behind, upon corresponding merlons at the far side, sat solemnly two nameless objects like marzipan cannonballs, evidently constructed from the same material.
The other mirador was unadorned save by its crenellations and it often struck the Consul that this contrast was somehow obscurely appropriate to Jacques, as indeed was that between the angels and the cannonballs. It was perhaps also significant he should use his bedroom for working whereas the studio itself on the main floor had been turned into a dining-room often no better than a camping-ground for his cook and her relatives.
Coming closer it could be seen that on the left and somewhat larger tower, below that bedroom's two windows â which, as if degenerate machicolations, were built askew, like the separated
halves of a chevron â a panel of rough stone, covered with large letters painted in gold leaf, had been slightly set into the wall to give a semblance of bas-relief. These gold letters though very thick were merged together most confusingly. The Consul had noticed visitors to the town staring up at them for half an hour at a time. Sometimes M. Laruelle would come out to explain they really spelt something, that they formed that phrase of Frey Luis de León's the Consul did not at this moment allow himself to recall. Nor did he ask himself why he should have come to be almost more familiar with this extraordinary house than his own as, preceeding M. Laruelle now, who was prodding him cheerfully from behind, he followed Hugh and Yvonne into it, into the studio, empty for once, and up the spiral staircase of its left-hand tower. âHaven't we overshot the drinks?' he asked, his mood of detachment expiring now he remembered that only a few weeks before he'd sworn never to enter this place again.
âDon't you ever think of anything else?' it seemed Jacques had said.
The Consul made no reply but stepped out into the familiar disorderly room with the askew windows, the degenerate machicolations, now seen from inside, and followed the others obliquely through it to a balcony at the back, into a view of sun-filled valleys and volcanoes, and cloud shadows wheeling across the plain.
M. Laruelle, however, was already nervously going downstairs. âNot for me!' protested the others. Fools! The Consul took two or three steps after him, a movement apparently without meaning, but it almost constituted a threat: his gaze shifted vaguely up the spiral staircase which continued from the room to the mirador above, then he rejoined Hugh and Yvonne on the balcony.
âGet up on the roof, you people, or stay on the porch, just make yourselves at home,' came from downstairs. âThere's a pair of binoculars on the table there â er â Hughes⦠I won't be a minute.'
âAny objection if I go on the roof?' Hugh asked them.
âDon't forget the binoculars!'
Yvonne and the Consul were alone on the flying balcony.
From where they stood the house seemed situated half-way up a cliff rising steeply from the valley stretched out below them. Leaning round they saw the town itself, built as on top of this cliff, overhanging them. The clubs of flying machines waved silently over the roofs, their motions like gesticulations of pain. But the cries and music of the fair reached them at this moment clearly. Far away the Consul made out a green corner, the golf course, with little figures working their way round the side of the cliff, crawling⦠Golfing scorpions. The Consul remembered the card in his pocket, and apparently he had made a movement towards Yvonne, desiring to tell her about it, to say something tender to her concerning it, to turn her towards him, to kiss her. Then he realized that without another drink shame for this morning would prevent his looking in her eyes. âWhat do you think, Yvonne,' he said, âwith your astronomical mind â' Could it be he, talking to her like this, on an occasion like this! Surely not, it was a dream. He was pointing up at me town.' â With your astronomical mind,' he repeated, but no, he had not said it: âdoesn't all that revolving and plunging up there somehow suggest to you the voyaging of unseen planets, of unknown moons hurtling backwards?' He had said nothing.
âPlease Geoffrey â' Yvonne laid her hand on his arm. âPlease, please believe me, I didn't want to be drawn into this. Let's make some excuse and get away as quickly as possible⦠I don't mind how many drinks you have
after
,' she added.
âI wasn't aware I'd said anything about drinks now or after. It's you that have put the thought into my head. Or Jacques, whom I can hear breaking â or should we say, crushing? â the ice down below.'
âHaven't you got any tenderness or love left for me at all?' Yvonne asked suddenly, almost piteously, turning round on him, and he thought: Yes, I do love you, I have all the love in the world left for you, only that love seems so far away from me and so strange too, for it is as though I could almost hear it, a droning or a weeping, but far, far away, and a sad lost sound, it might be either approaching or receding, I can't tell which. âDon't you think of anything except of how many drinks you're going to have?'
âYes,' said the Consul (but wasn't it Jacques who'd just asked him this?), âyes, I do â oh my God, Yvonne!'
âPlease, Geoffrey â'
Yet he could not face her. The clubs of the flying machines seen out of the corner of his eye, now seemed as if belabouring him all over. âListen,' he said, âare you asking me to extricate us from all this, or are you starting to exhort me again about drinking?'
âOh, I'm not exhorting you, really I'm not. I'll never exhort you again. I'll do anything you ask.'
âThen â' he had begun in anger.
But a look of tenderness came over Yvonne's face and the Consul thought once more of the postcard in his pocket. It ought to have been a good omen. It could be the talisman of their immediate salvation now. Perhaps it would have been a good omen if only it had arrived yesterday or at the house this morning. Unfortunately one could not now conceive of it as having arrived at any other moment. And how could he know whether it was a good omen or not without another drink?
âBut I'm back,' she was apparently saying. âCan't you see it? We're here together again, it's
us
. Can't you see that?' Her lips were trembling, she was almost crying.
Then she was close to him, in his arms, but he was gazing over her head.
âYes, I can see,' he said, only he couldn't see, only hear, the droning, the weeping, and feel, feel the unreality. âI do love you. Only â' âI can never forgive you deeply enough': was that what was in his mind to add?
â And yet, he was thinking all over again, and all over again as for the first time, how he had suffered, suffered, suffered without her; indeed such desolation, such a desperate sense of abandonment, bereavement, as during this last year without Yvonne, he had never known in his life, unless it was when his mother died. But this present emotion he had never experienced with his mother suffered, suffered, suffered with-this urgent desire to hurt, to provoke, at a time when forgiveness alone could save the day, this, rather, had commenced with his stepmother, so that she would have to cry: âI
can't eat, Geoffrey, the food sticks in my throat!' It was hard to forgive, hard, hard to forgive. Harder still, not to say how hard it was,
I hate you
. Even now, of all times. Even though here was God's moment, the chance to agree, to produce the card, to change everything; or there was but a moment left⦠Too late. The Consul had controlled his tongue. But he felt his mind divide and rise, like the two halves of a counterpoised drawbridge, ticking, to permit passage of these noisome thoughts. âOnly my heart â' he said.
âYour heart, darling?' she asked anxiously.
âNothing â'
âOh my poor sweetheart, you must be so weary!'
â
Momentito
,' he said, disengaging himself.
He strolled back into Jacques's room, leaving Yvonne on the porch. Laruelle's voice floated up from downstairs. Was it here he had been betrayed? This very room, perhaps, had been filled with her cries of love. Books (among which he did not see his Elizabethan plays) were strewn all over the floor and on the side of the studio couch nearest the wall, were stacked, as by some half-repenting poltergeist, almost to the ceiling. What if Jacques, approaching his design with Tarquin's ravishing strides, had disturbed this potential avalanche! Grisly Orozco charcoal drawings, of an unexampled horrendousness, snarled down from the walls. In one, executed by a hand of indisputable genius, harpies grappled on a smashed bedstead among broken bottles of tequila, gnashing their teeth. No wonder; the Consul, peering closer, sought in vain for a sound bottle. He sought in vain around Jacques's room too. There were two ruddy Riveras. Expressionless Amazons with feet like legs of mutton testified to the oneness of the toilers with the earth. Over the chevron-shaped windows, which looked down the Calle Tierra del Fuego, hung a terrifying picture he hadn't seen before, and took at first to be a tapestry. Called
Los Borrachones
â why not
Los Borrachos
? â it resembled something between a primitive and a prohibitionist poster, remotely under the influence of Michelangelo. In fact, he now saw, it really amounted to a prohibitionist poster, though of a century or so back, half a century, God knows what period. Down, headlong into hades, selfish and florid-faced, into a
tumult of fire-spangled fiends, Medusae, and belching monstrosities, with swallow-dives or awkwardly, with dread backward leaps, shrieking among falling bottles and emblems of broken hopes, plunged the drunkards; up, up, flying palely, selflessly into the light towards heaven, soaring sublimely in pairs, male sheltering female, shielded themselves by angels with abnegating wings, shot the sober. Not all were in pairs however, the Consul noted. A few lone females on the upgrade were sheltered by angels only. It seemed to him these females were casting half-jealous glances downward after their plummeting husbands, some of whose faces betrayed the most unmistakable relief. The Consul laughed, a trifle shakily. It was ridiculous, but still â had anyone ever given a good reason why good and evil should not be thus simply delimited? Elsewhere in Jacques's room cuneiform stone idols squatted like bulbous infants: on one side of the room there was even a line of them chained together. One part of the Consul continued to laugh, in spite of himself, and all this evidence of lost wild talents, at the thought of Yvonne confronted in the aftermath of her passion by a whole row of fettered babies.