Under the Volcano (54 page)

The old woman was plucking at his sleeve and the Consul —
had Yvonne been reading the letters of Heloise and Abelard? —reached out to press an electric bell, the urban yet violent presence of which in these odd little niches never failed to give him a shock. A moment later A Few Fleas entered with a bottle of tequila in one hand and of mescal Xicotancatl in the other but he took the bottles away after pouring their drinks. The Consul nodded to the old woman, motioned to her tequila, drank most of his mescal, and resumed reading. He could not remember whether he had paid or not. — ‘Oh Geoffrey, how bitterly I regret it now. Why did we postpone it? Is it too late? I want your children, soon, at once, I want them. I want your life filling and stirring me. I want your happiness beneath my heart and your sorrows in my eyes and your peace in the fingers of my hand –' The Consul paused, what was she saying? He rubbed his eyes, then fumbled for his cigarettes: Alas; the tragic word droned round the room like a bullet that had passed through him. He read on, smoking; ‘You are walking on the edge of an abyss where I may not follow. I wake to a darkness in which I must follow myself endlessly, hating the I who so eternally pursues and confronts me. If we could rise from our misery, seek each other once more, and find again the solace of each other's lips and eyes. Who is to stand between? Who can prevent?'

The Consul stood up — Yvonne had certainly been reading
something
— bowed to the old woman, and went out into the bar he'd imagined filling up behind him, but which was still fairly deserted. Who indeed was to stand between? He posted himself at the door again, as sometimes before in the deceptive violet dawn: who indeed could prevent? Once more he stared at the square. The same ragged platoon of soldiers still seemed to be crossing it, as in some disrupted movie repeating itself. The corporal still toiled at his copperplate handwriting under the archway, only his lamp was alight. It was getting dark. The police were nowhere to be seen. Though by the
barranca
the same soldier was still asleep under a tree; or wasn't it a soldier, but something else? He looked away. Black clouds were boiling up again, there was a distant breaking of thunder. He breathed the oppressive air in which there was a slight hint of coolness. Who indeed, even now, was to stand between? he thought desperately,
Who indeed even now could prevent? He wanted Yvonne at this moment, to take her in his arms, wanted more than ever to be forgiven, and to forgive: but where should he go? Where would he find her now? A whole unlikely family of indeterminate class were strolling past the door: the grandfather in front, correcting his watch, peering at the dim barracks clock that still said six, the mother laughing and drawing her
rebozo
over her head, mocking the probable storm (up in the mountains two drunken gods standing far apart were still engaged in an endlessly indecisive and wildly swinging game of bumblepuppy with a Burmese gong), the father by himself smiling proudly, contemplatively, clicking his fingers, flicking a speck of dust now from his fine brown shiny boots. Two pretty little children with limpid black eyes were walking between them hand in hand. Suddenly the elder child freed her sister's hand, and turned a succession of cartwheels on the lush grass plot. All of them were laughing. The Consul hated to look at them… They'd gone anyway, thank God. Miserably he wanted Yvonne and did not want her. ‘
¿Quiere María
?' a voice spoke softly behind him.

At first he saw only the shapely legs of the girl who was leading him, now by the constricted power of aching flesh alone, of pathetic trembling yet brutal lust, through the little glass-paned rooms, that grew smaller and smaller, darker and darker, until by the
mingitorio
, the ‘
Señores'
, out of whose evil-smelling gloom broke a sinister chuckle, there was merely a lightless annex no larger than a cupboard in which two men whose faces he couldn't see either were sitting, drinking or plotting.

Then it struck him that some reckless murderous power was drawing him on, forcing him, while he yet remained passionately aware of the all too possible consequences and somehow as innocently unconscious, to do without precaution or conscience what he would never be able to undo or gainsay, leading him irresistibly out into the garden — lightning-filled at this moment, it reminded him queerly of his own house, and also of El Popo, where earlier he had thought of going, only this was grimmer, the obverse of it — leading him through the open door into the darkening room, one of many giving on the
patio
.

So this was it, the final stupid unprophylactic rejection. He could prevent it even now. He would not prevent it. Yet perhaps his familiars, or one of his voices, might have some good advice: he looked about him, listening;
erectis whoribus
. No voices came. Suddenly he laughed: it had been clever of him to trick his voices. They didn't know he was here. The room itself, in which gleamed a single blue electric bulb, was not sordid: at first sight it was a student's room. In fact it closely resembled his old room at college, only this was more spacious. There were the same great doors and a bookcase in a familiar place, with a book open on top of the shelves. In one corner, incongruously, stood a gigantic sabre. Kashmir! He imagined he'd seen the word, then it had gone. Probably he had seen it, for the book, of all things, was a Spanish history of British India. The bed was disorderly and covered with footmarks, even what appeared bloodstains, though this bed too seemed akin to a student's cot. He noticed by it an almost empty bottle of mescal. But the floor was red flagstone and somehow its cold strong logic cancelled the horror; he finished the bottle. The girl who had been shutting the double doors while addressing him in some strange language, possibly Zapotecan, came toward him and he saw she was young and pretty. Lightning silhouetted against the window a face, for a moment curiously like Yvonne's. ‘
Quiere María
,' she volunteered again, and flinging her arms round his neck, drew him down to the bed. Her body was Yvonne's too, her legs, her breasts, her pounding passionate heart, electricity crackled under his fingers running over her, though the sentimental illusion was going, it was sinking into a sea, as though it had not been there, it had become the sea, a desolate horizon with one huge black sailing ship, hull down, sweeping into the sunset; or her body was nothing, an abstraction merely, a calamity, a fiendish apparatus for calamitous sickening sensation; it was disaster, it was the horror of waking up in the morning in Oaxaca, his body fully clothed, at half past three every morning after Yvonne had gone; Oaxaca, and the nightly escape from the sleeping Hotel Francia, where Yvonne and he had once been happy, from the cheap room giving on the balcony high up, to El Infierno, that other Farolito, of trying to find the bottle in the dark, and failing, the vulture
sitting in the washbasin; his steps, noiseless, dead silence outside his hotel room, too soon for the terrible sounds of squealing and slaughter in the kitchen below — of going down the carpeted stairs to the huge dark well of the deserted dining-room once the
patio
, sinking into the soft disaster of the carpet, his feet sinking into heartbreak when he reached the stairs, still not sure he wasn't on the landing — and the stab of panic and self-disgust when he thought of the cold shower-bath back on the left, used only once before, but that was enough — and the silent final trembling approach, respectable, his steps sinking into calamity (and it was this calamity he now, with María, penetrated, the only thing alive in him now this burning boiling crucified evil organ — God is it possible to suffer more than this, out of this suffering something must be born, and what would be born was his own death), for ah, how alike are the groans of love to those of the dying, how alike, those of love, to those of the dying — and his steps sinking, into his tremor, the sickening cold tremor, and into the dark well of the dining-room, with round the corner one dim light hovering above the desk, and the clock — too early —and the letters unwritten, powerless to write, and the calendar saying eternally, powerlessly, their wedding anniversary, and the manager's nephew asleep on the couch, waiting up to meet the early train from Mexico City; the darkness that murmured and was palpable, the cold aching loneliness in the high sounding dining-room, stiff with the dead white grey folded napkins, the weight of suffering and conscience greater (it seemed) than that borne by any man who had survived — the thirst that was not thirst, but itself heartbreak, and lust, was death, death, and death again and death the waiting in the cold hotel dining-room, half whispering to himself, waiting, since El Infierno, that other Farolito, did not open till four in the morning and one could scarcely wait outside — (and this calamity he was now penetrating, it was calamity, the calamity of his own life, the very essence of it he now penetrated, was penetrating, penetrated) —waiting for the Infierno whose one lamp of hope would soon be glowing beyond the dark open sewers, and on the table, in the hotel dining-room, difficult to distinguish, a carafe of water —trembling, trembling, carrying the carafe of water to his lips,
but not far enough, it was too heavy, like his burden of sorrow — ‘
you cannot drink of it
' — he could only moisten his lips, and then — it must have been Jesus who sent me this, it was only He who was following me after all — the bottle of red French wine from Salina Cruz still standing there on the table set for breakfast, marked with someone else's room number, uncorked with difficulty and (watching to see the nephew wasn't watching) holding it with both hands, and letting the blessed ichor trickle down his throat, just a little, for after all one was an Englishman, and still sporting, and then subsiding on the couch too — his heart a cold ache warm to one side — into a cold shivering shell of palpitating loneliness — yet feeling the wine slightly more, as if one's chest were being filled with boiling ice now, or there were a bar of red-hot iron across one's chest, but cold in its effect, for the conscience that rages underneath anew and is bursting one's heart burns so fiercely with the fires of hell a bar of red-hot iron is as a mere chill to it — and the clock ticking forward, with his heart beating now like a snow-muffled drum, ticking, shaking, time shaking and ticking toward El Infierno then — the escape! — drawing the blanket he had secretly brought down from the hotel room over his head, creeping out past the manager's nephew — the escape! — past the hotel desk, not daring to look for mail — ‘it is this silence that frightens me' — (can it be there? Is this me? Alas, self-pitying miserable wretch, you old rascal) past — the escape! — the Indian night-watchman sleeping on the floor in the doorway, and like an Indian himself now, clutching the few pesos he had left, out into the cold walled cobbled city, past — the escape through the secret passage! — the open sewers in the mean streets, the few lone dim street lamps, into the night, into the miracle that the coffins of houses, the landmarks were still there, the escape down the poor broken sidewalks, groaning, groaning — and how alike are the groans of love, to those of the dying, how alike, those of love, to those of the dying! — and the houses so still, so cold, before dawn, till he saw, rounding the corner safe, the one lamp of El Infierno glowing, that was so like the Farolito, then, surprised once more he could ever have reached it, standing inside the place with his back to the wall, and his blanket still over his head, talking to the beggars, the
early workers, the dirty prostitutes, the pimps, the debris and detritus of the streets and the bottom of the earth, but who were yet so much higher than he, drinking just as he had done here in the Farolito, and telling lies, lying — the escape, still the escape! — until the lilac-shaded dawn that should have brought death, and he should have died now too; what have I done?

The Consul's eyes focused a calendar behind the bed. He had reached his crisis at last, a crisis without possession, almost with-out pleasure finally, and what he saw might have been, no, he was sure it was, a picture of Canada. Under a brilliant full moon a stag stood by a river down which a man and a woman were paddling a birch-bark canoe. This calendar was set to the future, for next month, December: where would he be then? In the dim blue light he even made out the names of the Saints for each December day, printed by the numerals: Santa Natalia, Santa Bibiana, S. Francisco Xavier, Santa Sabos, S. Nicolas de Bari, S. Ambrosio: thunder blew the door open, the face of M. Laruelle faded in the door.

In the
mingitorio
a stench like
mercapatan
clapped yellow hands on his face and now, from the urinal walls, uninvited, he heard his voices again, hissing and shrieking and yammering at him: ‘Now you've done it, now you've really done it, Geoffrey Firmin! Even we can help you no longer… Just the same you might as well make the most of it now, the night's still young…'

‘You like María, you like?' A man's voice — that of the chuckler, he recognized — came from the gloom and the Consul, his knees trembling, gazed round him; all he saw at first were slashed advertisements on the slimy feebly lit walls:
Clinica Dr Vigil, Enfermedades Secretas de Ambos Sexos, Vías Urinarias, Trastornos Sexuales, Debilidad Sexual, Derrames Nocturnos, Emisiones Prematuras, Espermatorrea, Impotencia
. 666.
His
versatile companion of this morning and last night might have been informing him ironically all was not yet lost — unfortunately by now he would be well on his way to Guanajuato. He distinguished an incredibly filthy man sitting hunched in the corner on a lavatory seat, so short his trousered feet didn't reach the littered, befouled floor. ‘You like María?' this man croaked again. ‘I send. Me
amigo
.' He farted. ‘Me fliend Englisman
all tine, all tine.' ‘
¿Qué hora
?' asked the Consul, shivering, noticing, in the runnel, a dead scorpion; a sparkle of phosphorescence and it had gone, or had never been there. ‘What's the time?' ‘Sick,' answered the man. ‘No, it er ah half past sick by the cock.' ‘You mean half past six by the clock.' ‘Sí
señor
. Half past sick by the cock.'