Under the Volcano

To
MARGERIE, MY WIFE

Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man; the power that crosses
the white sea, driven by the stormy south wind, making a path under surges that
threaten to engulf him; and Earth, the eldest of the gods, the immortal,
unwearied, doth he wear, turning the soil with the offspring of horses, as the
ploughs go to and fro from year to year.
And the light-hearted race of birds, and the tribes of savage beasts, and the
sea-brood of the deep, he snares in the meshes of his woven toils, he leads
captive, man excellent in wit. And he masters by his arts the beast whose lair
is in the wilds, who roams the hills; he tames the horse of shaggy mane, he
puts the yoke upon its neck, he tames the tireless mountain bull.
And speech, and wind-swift thought, and all the moods that mould a state, hath
he taught himself; and how to flee the arrows of the frost, when it is hard
lodging under the clear sky, and the arrows of the rushing rain; yea, he hath
resource for all; without resource he meets nothing that must come; only
against Death shall he call for aid in vain; but from baffling maladies he hath
devised escape.

Sophocles—
Antigone

Now I blessed the condition of the dog and toad, yea, gladly would I have been
in the condition of the dog or horse, for I knew they had no soul to perish
under the everlasting weight of Hell or Sin, as mine was like to do. Nay, and
though I saw this, felt this, and was broken to pieces with it, yet that which
added to my sorrow was, that I could not find with all my soul that I did
desire deliverance.

John Bunyan--
Grace Abounding for the
Chief of Sinners

Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen.
Whosoever unceasingly strives upward... him can we save.

Goethe

Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming
between them a number of valleys and plateaux. Overlooking one of these
valleys, which is dominated by two volcanoes, lies, six thousand feet above
sea-level, the town of Quauhnahuac. It is situated well south of the Tropic of
Cancer, to be exact, on the nineteenth parallel, in about the same latitude as
the Revillagigedo Islands to the west in the Pacific, or very much farther
west, the southernmost tip of Hawaii--and as the port of Tzucox to the east on
the Atlantic seaboard of Yucatan near the border of British Honduras, or very
much farther east, the town of Juggernaut, in India, on the Bay of Bengal.
   
The walls of the town, which is built
on a hill, are high, the streets and lanes tortuous and broken, the roads
winding. A fine American-style highway leads in from the north but is lost in
its narrow streets and comes out a goat track. Quauhnahuac possesses eighteen
churches and fifty-seven cantinas. It also boasts a golf course and no fewer
than four hundred swimming-pools, public and private, filled with the water
that ceaselessly pours down from the mountains, and many splendid hotels.
   
The Hotel Casino de la Selva stands
on a slightly higher hill just outside the town, near the railway station. It
is built far back from the main highway and surrounded by gardens and terraces
which command a spacious view in every direction. Palatial, a certain air of
desolate splendour pervades it. For it is no longer a Casino. You may not even
dice for drinks in the bar. The ghosts of ruined gamblers haunt it. No one ever
seems to swim in the magnificent Olympic pool. The springboards stand empty and
mournful. Its jai-alai courts are grass-grown and deserted. Two tennis courts
only are kept up in the season.
   
Towards sunset on the Day of the Dead
in November 1939, two men in white flannels sat on the main terrace of the
Casino drinking anís. They had been playing tennis, followed by billiards, and
their rackets, rainproofed, screwed in their presses--the doctor's triangular,
the other's quadrangular--lay on the parapet before them. As the processions
winding from the cemetery down the hillside behind the hotel came closer the
plangent sounds of their chanting were borne to the two men; they turned to
watch the mourners, a little later to be visible only as the melancholy lights
of their candles, circling among the distant trussed cornstalks. Dr. Arturo
Diaz Vigil pushed the bottle of Anís del Mono over to M. Jacques Laruelle, who
now was leaning forward intently.
   
Slightly to the right and below them,
below the gigantic red evening, whose reflection bled away in the deserted
swimming pools scattered everywhere like so many mirages, lay the peace and
sweetness of the town. It seemed peaceful enough from where they were sitting.
Only if one listened intently, as M. Laruelle was doing now, could one
distinguish a remote confused sound--distinct yet somehow inseparable from the
minute murmuring, the tintinnabulation of the mourners--as of singing, rising
and falling, and a steady trampling--the bangs and cries of the fiesta that had
been going on all day.
   
M. Laruelle poured himself another
anís. He was drinking anís because it reminded him of absinthe. A deep flush
had suffused his face, and his hand trembled slightly over the bottle, from
whose label a florid demon brandished a pitchfork at him.
   
"--I meant to persuade him to go
away and get déalcoholisé," Dr Vigil was saying. He stumbled over the word
in French and continued in English. "But I was so sick myself that day
after the ball that I suffer, physical, really. That is very bad, for we
doctors must comport ourselves like apostles. You remember, we played tennis
that day too. Well, after I looked the Consul in his garden I sended a boy down
to see if he would come for a few minutes and knock my door, I would appreciate
it to him, if not, please write me a note, if drinking have not killed him
already."
   
M. Laruelle smiled.
   
"But they have gone," the
other went on, "and yes, I think to ask you too that day if you had looked
him at his house."
   
"He was at my house when you
telephoned, Arturo."
   
"Oh, I know, but we got so
horrible drunkness that night before, so perfectamente borracho, that it seems
to me, the Consul is as sick as I am." Dr. Vigil shook his head.
"Sickness is not only in body, but in that part used to be call soul. Poor
your friend he spend his money on earth in such continuous tragedies."
   
M. Laruelle finished his drink. He
rose and went to the parapet; resting his hands one on each tennis racket, he
gazed down and around him: the abandoned jai-alai courts, their bastions
covered with grass, the dead tennis courts, the fountain, quite near in the
centre of the hotel avenue, where a cactus farmer had reined up his horse to
drink. Two young Americans, a boy and a girl, had started a belated game of
ping-pong on the veranda of the annex below. What had happened just a year ago
today seemed already to belong in a different age. One would have thought the
horrors of the present would have swallowed it up like a drop of water. It was
not so. Though tragedy was in the process of becoming unreal and meaningless it
seemed one was still permitted to remember the days when an individual life
held some value and was not a mere misprint in a communiqué. He lit a
cigarette. Far to his left, in the northeast, beyond the valley and the
terraced foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental, the two volcanoes,
Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, rose clear and magnificent into the sunset.
Nearer, perhaps ten miles distant, and on a lower level than the main valley,
he made out the village of Tomalín, nestling behind the jungle, from which rose
a thin blue scarf of illegal smoke, someone burning wood for carbon. Before
him, on the other side of the American highway, spread fields and groves,
through which meandered a river, and the Alcapancingo road. The watchtower of a
prison rose over a wood between the river and the road which lost itself farther
on where the purple hills of a Dore Paradise sloped away into the distance.
Over in the town the lights of Quauhnahuac's one cinema, built on an incline
and standing out sharply, suddenly came on, flickered off, came on again.
"No se puede vivir sin amar," M. Laruelle said... "As that
estúpido inscribed on my house."
   
"Come, amigo, throw away your
mind," Dr. Vigil said behind him.
   
"--But hombre, Yvonne came back!
That's what I shall never understand. She came back to the man!" M.
Laruelle returned to the table where he poured himself and drank a glass of
Tehuacan mineral water. He said:
   
"Salud y pesetas."
   
"Y tiempo para gastarlas,"
his friend returned thoughtfully.
   
M. Laruelle watched the doctor
leaning back in the steamer chair, yawning, the handsome, impossibly handsome,
dark imperturbable Mexican face, the kind deep brown eyes, innocent too, like
the eyes of those wistful beautiful Oaxaquenan children one saw in Tehuantepec
(that ideal spot where the women did the work while the men bathed in the river
all day), the slender small hands and delicate wrists, upon the back of which
it was almost a shock to see the sprinkling of coarse black hair. "I threw
away my mind long ago, Arturo," he said in English, withdrawing his cigarette
from his mouth with refined nervous fingers on which he was aware he wore too
many rings. "What I find more--" M. Laruelle noted the cigarette was
out and gave himself another anís.
   
"Con permiso! Dr. Vigil conjured
a flaring lighter out of his pocket so swiftly it seemed it must have been
already ignited there, that he had drawn a flame out of himself, the gesture
and the igniting one movement; he held the light for M. Laruelle. "Did you
never go to the church for the bereaved here," he asked suddenly,
"where is the Virgin for those who have nobody with?"
   
M. Laruelle shook his head.
   
"Nobody go there. Only those who
have nobody them with," the doctor said, slowly. He pocketed the lighter
and looked at his watch, turning his wrist upwards with a neat flick.
"Allons-nous-en," he added, "vámonos," and laughed
yawningly with a series of nods that seemed to carry his body forward until his
head was resting between his hands. Then he rose and joined M. Laruelle at the
parapet, drawing deep breaths. "Ah, but this is the hour I love, with the
sun coming down, when ail the man began to sing and all the dogs to
bark--"
   
M. Laruelle laughed. While they had
been talking the sky had grown wild and stormy to the south; the mourners had
left the slope of the hill. Sleepy vultures, high overhead, deployed down-wind.
"About eight-thirty then, I might go to the cine for an hour."
   
"Bueno. I will see you this
night then, in the place where you know. Remember, I still do not believe you
are leaving tomorrow." He held out his hand which M. Laruelle grasped
firmly, loving him. "Try and come tonight, if not, please understand I am
always interested in your health."
   
"Hasta la vista."
   
"Hasta la vista."
   
--Alone, standing beside the highway
down which he had driven four years before on the last mile of that long,
insane, beautiful journey from Los Angeles, M. Laruelle also found it hard to
believe he was really going. Then the thought of tomorrow seemed well-nigh
overwhelming. He had paused, undecided which way to walk home, as the little
overloaded bus--Tomalín Zócalo--jounced past him downhill towards the barranca
before climbing into Quauhnahuac. He was loth to take the same direction
tonight. He crossed the street, making for the station. Although he would not be
travelling by train the sense of departure, of its imminence, came heavily
about him again as, childishly avoiding the locked points, he picked his path
over the narrow-gauge lines. Light from the setting sun glanced off the oil
tanks on the grass embankment beyond. The platform slept. The tracks were
vacant, the signals up. There was little to suggest that any train ever arrived
at this station, let alone left it:
   
   
QUAUHNAHUAC
   
   
Yet a little less than a year ago the
place had been the scene of a parting he would never forget. He had not liked
the Consul's half-brother at their first encounter when he'd come with Yvonne
and the Consul himself to M. Laruelle's house in the Calle Nicaragua, any more,
he felt now, than Hugh had liked him. Hugh's odd appearance--though such was
the overwhelming effect of meeting Yvonne again, he did not obtain even the
impression of oddity so strongly that he was able later in Parián immediately
to recognize him--had merely seemed to caricature the Consul's amiable
half-bitter description of him. So this was the child M. Laruelle vaguely
remembered hearing about years before! In half an hour he'd dismissed him as an
irresponsible bore, a professional indoor Marxman, vain and self-conscious
really, but affecting a romantic extroverted air. While Hugh, who for various
reasons had certainly not been "prepared" by the Consul to meet M.
Laruelle, doubtless saw him as an even more precious type of bore, the elderly
aesthete, a confirmedly promiscuous bachelor, with a rather unctuous possessive
manner towards women. But three sleepless nights later an eternity had been
lived through: grief and bewilderment at an unassimilable catastrophe had drawn
them together. In the hours which followed his response to Hugh's telephone call
from Parián M. Laruelle learned much about Hugh: his hopes, his fears, his
self-deceptions, his despairs. When Hugh left, it was as if he had lost a son.
   
Careless of his tennis clothes, M.
Laruelle climbed the embankment. Yet he was right, he told himself, as reaching
the top he paused for breath, right, after the Consul had been
"discovered" (though meantime the grotesquely pathetic situation had
developed where there was not, on probably the first occasion when one had been
so urgently needed, a British Consul in Quauhnahuac to appeal to), right in
insisting Hugh should waive all conventional scruples and take every advantage
of the curious reluctance of the "police" to hold him--their anxiety,
it all but appeared, to be rid of him just when it seemed highly logical they
should detain him as a witness, at least in one aspect of what now at a
distance one could almost refer to as the "case"--and at the earliest
possible moment join that ship providentially awaiting him at Vera Cruz. M. Laruelle
looked back at the station; Hugh left a gap. In a sense he had decamped with
the last of his illusions. For Hugh, at twenty-nine, still dreamed, even then,
of changing the world (there was no other way of saying this) through his
actions--just as Laruelle, at forty-two, had still then not quite given up hope
of changing it through the great films he proposed somehow to make. But today
these dreams seemed absurd and presumptuous. After all he had made great films
as great films went in the past. And so far as he knew they had not changed the
world in the slightest. However he had acquired a certain identity with Hugh.
Like Hugh he was going to Vera Cruz; and like Hugh too, he did not know if his
ship would ever reach port...
   
M. Laruelle's way led through half-cultivated
fields bordered by narrow grass paths, trodden by cactus farmers coming home
from work. It was thus far a favourite walk, though not taken since before the
rains. The leaves of cacti attracted with their freshness; green trees shot by
evening sunlight might have been weeping willows tossing in the gusty wind
which had sprung up; a lake of yellow sunlight appeared in the distance below
pretty hills like loaves. But there was something baleful now about the
evening. Black clouds plunged up to the south. The sun poured molten glass on
the fields. The volcanoes seemed terrifying in the wild sunset. M. Laruelle
walked swiftly, in the good heavy tennis shoes he should have already packed,
swinging his tennis racket. A sense of fear had possessed him again, a sense of
being, after all these years, and on his last day here, still a stranger. Four
years, almost five, and he still felt like a wanderer on another planet. Not
that that made it any the less hard to be leaving, even though he would soon,
God willing, see Paris again. Ah well! He had few emotions about the war, save
that it was bad. One side or the other would win. And in either case life would
be hard. Though if the Allies lost it would be harder. And in either case one's
own battle would go on.