Under the Volcano (37 page)

In one corner of the bar someone had apparently once begun a small mural, aping the Great Mural in the Palace, two or three figures only, peeling and inchoate Tlahuicans. — There was the sound of slow, dragging footsteps from behind; the widow appeared, a little old woman wearing an unusually long and shabby rustling black dress. Her hair that he recalled as grey seemed to have been recently hennaed, or dyed red, and though it hung untidily in front, it was twisted up at the back into a Psyche knot. Her face, which was beaded with perspiration, evinced the most extraordinary waxen pallor; she looked careworn, wasted with suffering, yet at the sight of the Consul her tired eyes gleamed, kindling her whole expression to one of wry amusement in which there appeared also both a determination
and a certain weary expectancy. ‘Mescal posseebly,' she said, in a queer, chanting half-bantering tone, ‘Mescal imposseebly.' But she made no move to draw the Consul a drink, perhaps because of his debt, an objection he immediately disposed of by laying a tostón on the counter. She smiled almost slyly as she edged towards the mescal barrel.

‘
No, tequila, por favor
,' he said.

‘
Un obsequio' —
she handed him the tequila. ‘Where do you laugh now?'

‘I still laugh in the Calle Nicaragua,
cincuenta dos
,' the Consul replied, smiling. ‘You mean “live”, Señora Gregorio, not “laugh”,
con permiso
.'

‘Remember,' Señora Gregorio corrected him gently, slowly, ‘remember my English. Well, so it is,' she sighed, drawing a small glass of málaga for herself from the barrel chalked with that name. ‘Here's to your love. What's my names?' She pushed towards him a saucer filled with salt that was speckled with orange-coloured pepper.

‘
La mismo
' The Consul drank the tequila down. ‘Geoffrey Firmin.'

Señora Gregorio brought him a second tequila; for a time they regarded one another without speaking. ‘So it is,' she repeated at last, sighing once more; and there was pity in her voice for the Consul. ‘So it is. You must take it as it come. It can't be helped.'

‘No, it can't be helped.'

‘If you har your wife you would lose all things in that love,' Señora Gregorio said, and the Consul, understanding that somehow this conversation was being taken up where it had been left off weeks before, probably at the point where Yvonne had abandoned him for the seventh time that evening, found himself not caring to change the basis of shared misery on which their relationship rested — for Gregorio had really abandoned her before he died — by informing her his wife had come back, was indeed, perhaps, not fifty feet away. ‘Both minds is occupied in one thing, so you can't lose it,' she continued sadly.

‘
Sí
,' said the Consul.

‘So it is. If your mind is occupied with all things, then you
never lose your mind. Your minds, your life — your everything in it. Once when I was a girl I never used to think I live like I laugh now. I always used to dream about kernice dreams. Nice domes, nice clothes, nice hairts — “Everything is good for me just now” it was one time, theatres, but everything — now, I don't think of but nothing but trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble; and trouble comes… So it is.'

‘
Sí
, Señora Gregorio.'

‘Of course I was a kernice girl from home,' she was saying. ‘This –' she glanced contemptuously round the dark little bar, ‘was never in my mind. Life changes, you know, you can never drink of it.'

‘Not “drink of it”, Señora Gregorio, you mean “think of it”.'

‘Never drink of it. Oh, well,' she said, pouring out a litre of raw alcohol for a poor noseless peon who had entered silently and was standing in a corner, ‘a kernice life among kernice people and now what?'

Señora Gregorio shuffled off into the back room, leaving the Consul alone. He sat with his second large tequila untouched for some minutes. He imagined himself drinking it yet had not the will to stretch out his hand to take it, as if it were something once long and tediously desired but which, an overflowing cup suddenly within reach, had lost all meaning. The
cantina's
emptiness, and a strange ticking like that of some beetle, within that emptiness, began to get on his nerves; he looked at his watch: only seventeen minutes past two. This was where the Tick was coming from. Again he imagined himself taking the drink: again his will failed him. Once the swing door opened, someone glanced round quickly to satisfy himself, went out: was that Hugh, Jacques? Whoever it was had seemed to possess the features of both, alternately. Somebody else entered and, though the next instant the Consul felt this was not the case, went right through into the back room, peering round furtively. A starving pariah dog with the appearance of having lately been skinned had squeezed itself in after the last man; it looked up at the Consul with beady, gentle eyes. Then, thrusting down its poor wrecked dinghy of a chest, from which raw withered breasts drooped, it began to bow and scrape before him. Ah, the ingress
of the animal kingdom I Earlier it had been the insects; now these were closing in upon him again, these animals, these people without ideas: ‘
Dispense usted, por Dios
,' he whispered to the dog, then wanting to say something kind, added, stooping, a phrase read or heard in youth or childhood: ‘For God sees how timid and beautiful you really are, and the thoughts of hope that go with you like little white birds –'

The Consul stood up and suddenly declaimed to the dog:

‘Yet this day,
pichicho
, shalt thou be with me in –' But the dog hopped away in terror on three legs and slunk under the door.

The Consul finished his tequila in one gulp; he went to the counter. ‘Señora Gregorio,' he called; he waited, casting his eyes about the
cantina
, which seemed to have grown very much lighter. And the echo came back: ‘Crio.' — Why, the mad pictures of the wolves ! He had forgotten they were here. The materialized pictures, six or seven of considerable length, completed, in the defection of the muralist, the decoration of El Bosque. They were precisely the same in every detail. All showed the same sleigh being pursued by the same pack of wolves. The wolves hunted the occupants of the sleigh the entire length of the bar and at intervals right round the room, though neither sleigh nor wolves budged an inch in the process. To what red tartar, oh mysterious beast? Incongruously, the Consul was reminded of Rostov's wolf hunt in
War and Peace
— ah, that incomparable party afterwards at the old uncle's, the sense of youth, the gaiety, the love! At the same time he remembered having been told that wolves never hunted in packs at all. Yes, indeed, how many patterns of life were based on kindred misconceptions, how many wolves do we feel on our heels, while our real enemies go in sheepskin by? ‘Señora Gregorio,' he said again, and saw that the widow was returning, dragging her feet, though it was perhaps too late, there would not be time for another tequila.

He held out his hand, then dropped it — Good God, what had come over him? For an instant he'd thought he was looking at his own mother. Now he found himself struggling with his tears, that he wanted to embrace Señora Gregorio, to cry like a
child, to hide his face on her bosom. ‘
Adiós
,' he said, and seeing a tequila on the counter just the same, he drank it rapidly.

Señora Gregorio took his hand and held it. ‘Life changes, you know,' she said, gazing at him intently. ‘You can never drink of it. I think I'see you with your
esposa
again soon. I see you laughing together in some kernice place where you laugh.' She smiled. ‘Far away. In some kernice place where all those troubles you har now will har –' The Consul started: what was Señora Gregorio saying? ‘
Adiós
she added in Spanish, ‘I have no house only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours.'

‘Thank you.'

‘Sank you.'

‘Not sank you, Señora Gregorio, thank you.'

‘Sank you.'

The coast looked clear: yet when the Consul pushed out cautiously through the jalousie doors he almost fell over Dr Vigil. Fresh and impeccable in his tennis clothes, he was hurrying by, accompanied by Mr Quincey and the local cinema manager, Señor Bustamente. The Consul drew back, fearful now of Vigil, of Quincey, of being seen coming out of the
cantina
, but they appeared not to notice him as they glided past the Tomalin
camión
, which had just arrived, their elbows working like jockeys, chattering unceasingly. He suspected their conversation to be entirely about him; what could be done with him, they were asking, how many drinks had he put away at the Gran Baile last night? Yes, there they were, even going towards the Bella Vista itself, to get a few more ‘opinions' about him. They flitted here and there, vanished…

Es inevitable la muerte del Papa
.

D
OWNHILL
…

‘Let in the clutch, step on the gas,' the driver threw a smile over his shoulder. ‘Sure, Mike,' he went on Irish-American for them.

The bus, a 1918 Chevrolet, jerked forward with a noise like startled poultry. It wasn't full, save for the Consul, who spread himself, in a good mood, drunk-sober-uninhibited; Yvonne sat neutral but smiling: they'd started anyhow. No wind; yet a gust lifted the awnings along the street. Soon they were rolling in a heavy sea of chaotic stone. They passed tall hexagonal stands pasted with advertisements for Yvonne's cinema:
Las Manos de Orlac
. Elsewhere posters for the same film showed a murderer's hands laced with blood.

They advanced slowly, past the Baños de la Libertad, the Casa Brandes (La Primera en el Ramo de Electricidad), a hooded hooting intruder through the narrow tilted streets. At the market they stopped for a group of Indian women with baskets of live fowl. The women's strong faces were the colour of dark ceramic ware. There was a massiveness in their movements as they settled themselves. Two or three had cigarette stubs behind their ears, another chewed an old pipe. Their good-humoured faces of old idols were wrinkled with sun but they did not smile.

— ‘Look! O.K.,' the driver of the bus invited Hugh and Yvonne, who were changing places, producing, from beneath his shirt where they'd been nestling, little secret ambassadors of peace, of love, two beautiful white tame pigeons. ‘My — ah —my aerial pigeons.'

They had to scratch the heads of the birds who, arching their backs proudly, shone as with fresh white paint. (Could he have known, as Hugh, from merely smelling the latest headlines had known, how much nearer even in these moments the Government were to losing the Ebro, that it would now be a matter of
days before Modesto withdrew altogether?) The driver replaced the pigeons under his white open shirt: ‘To keep them warm. Sure, Mike. Yes, sir,' he told them.'
Vâmonos!
'

Someone laughed as the bus lurched off!; the faces of the other passengers slowly cracked into mirth, the
camión
was welding the old women into a community. The clock over the market arch, like the one in Rupert Brooke, said ten to three; but it was twenty to. They rambled and bounced into the main highway, the Avenida de la Revolución, past offices whose windows proclaimed, while the Consul nodded his head deprecatingly, Dr Arturo Díaz Vigil, Médico Cirujano y Partero, past the cinema itself. — The old women didn't look as though they knew about the Battle of the Ebro either. Two of them were holding an anxious conversation, in spite of the clatter and squeak of the patient floorboards, about the price of fish. Used to tourists, they took no notice of them. Hugh conveyed to the Consul:

‘How are the rajah shakes?'

Inhumaciones
: the Consul, laughingly pinching one ear, was pointing for answer at the undertakers' jolting by, where a parrot, head cocked, looked down from its perch suspended in the entrance, above which a sign inquired:

Quo Vadis
?

Where they were going immediately was down, at a snail's pace, by a secluded square with great old trees, their delicate leaves like new spring green. In the garden under the trees were doves and a small black goat.
¿Le gusta este jardin, que es suyo? ¡Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan!
Do you like this garden, the notice said, that is yours? See to it that your children do not destroy it!

… There were no children, however, in the garden; just a man sitting alone on a stone bench. This man was apparently the devil himself, with a huge dark red face and horns, fangs, and his tongue hanging out over his chin, and an expression of mingled evil, lechery, and terror. The devil lifted his mask to spit, rose, and shambled through the garden with a dancing, loping step towards a church almost hidden by the trees. There was a sound of clashing machetes. A native dance was going on beyond some awnings by the church, on the steps of which two
Americans, Yvonne and he had seen earlier, were watching on tiptoe, craning their necks. ‘Seriously,' Hugh repeated to the Consul, who seemed calmly to have accepted the devil, while Hugh exchanged a look of regret with Yvonne, for they had seen no dancing in the
zócalo
, and it was now too late to get out.

‘
Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus
.'

They were crossing a bridge at the bottom of the hill, over the ravine. It appeared overtly horrendous here. In the bus one looked straight down, as from the maintruck of a sailing ship, through dense foliage and wide leaves that did not at all conceal the treachery of the drop; its steep banks were thick with refuse, which even hung on the bushes. Turning, Hugh saw a dead dog right at the bottom, nuzzling the refuse; white bones showed through the carcass. But above was the blue sky and Yvonne looked happy when Popocatepetl sprang into view, dominating the landscape for a while as they climbed the hill beyond. Then it dropped out of sight around a corner. It was a long circuitous hill. Half-way up, outside a gaudily decorated tavern, a man in a blue suit and strange headgear, swaying gently and eating half a melon, awaited the bus. From the interior of this tavern, which was called El Amor de los Amores, came a sound of singing. Hugh caught sight of what appeared to be armed policemen drinking at the bar. The
camión
slithered, banking with wheels locked to a stop alongside the sidewalk.