Under the Volcano (10 page)

   
"Didn't I say?" The Consul
watched her. "Beautiful... Brown." Had he said that? "Brown as a
berry. You've been swimming," he added. "You look as though you've
had plenty of sun... There's been plenty of sun here too of course," he
went on. "As usual.., Too much of it. In spite of the rain... Do you know,
I don't like it."
   
"Oh yes you do, really,"
she had apparently replied. "We could get out in the sun, you know."
   
"Well--"
   
The Consul sat on the broken green
rocker facing Yvonne. Perhaps it was just the soul, he thought, slowly emerging
out of the strychnine into a form of detachment, to dispute with Lucretius,
that grew older, while the body could renew itself many times unless it had
acquired an unalterable habit of age. And perhaps the soul thrived on its
sufferings, and upon the sufferings he had inflicted on his wife her soul had
not only thrived but flourished. Ah, and not only upon the sufferings he had
inflicted. What of those for which the adulterous ghost named Cliff he imagined
always as just a morning coat and a pair of striped pyjamas open at the front,
had been responsible? And the child, strangely named Geoffrey too, she had had
by the ghost, two years before her first ticket to Reno, and which would now be
six, had it not died at the age of as many months as many years ago, of
meningitis, in 1932, three years before they themselves had met, and been
married in Granada, in Spain? There Yvonne was at all events, bronzed and
youthful and ageless: she had been at fifteen, she'd told him (that is, about
the time she must have been acting in those Western pictures M. Laruelle, who
had not seen them, adroitly assured one had influenced Eisenstein or somebody),
a girl of whom people said, "She is not pretty but she is going to be
beautiful": at twenty they still said so, and at twenty-seven when she'd
married him it was still true, according to the category through which one
perceived such things of course: it was equally true of her now, at thirty,
that she gave the impression of someone who is still going to be, perhaps just
about to be, beautiful: the same tilted nose, the small ears, the warm brown
eyes, clouded now and hurt-looking, the same wide, full-lipped mouth, warm too
and generous, the slightly weak chin. Yvonne's was the same fresh bright face
that could collapse, as Hugh would say, like a heap of ashes, and be grey. Yet
she was changed. Ah yes indeed! Much as the demoted skipper's lost command,
seen through the barroom window lying out in harbour, is changed. She was no
longer his: someone had doubtless approved her smart slate-blue travelling suit:
it had not been he.
   
Suddenly with a quietly impatient
gesture Yvonne pulled her hat off, and shaking her brown sunbleached hair rose
from the parapet. She settled herself on the daybed, crossing her unusually
beautiful and aristocratic long legs. The daybed emitted a rending guitar crash
of chords. The Consul found his dark glasses and put them on almost playfully.
But it had struck him with remote anguish that Yvonne was still waiting for the
courage to enter the house. He said consularly in a deep false voice:
   
"Hugh ought to be here before
very long if he comes back by the first bus."
   
"What time is the first
bus?"
   
"Half past ten, eleven."
What did it matter? Chimes sounded from the city. Unless of course it seemed
utterly impossible, one dreaded the hour of anyone's arrival unless they were
bringing liquor. What if there had been no liquor in the house, only the
strychnine? Could he have endured it? He would be even now stumbling through
the dusty streets in the growing heat of the day after a bottle; or have
dispatched Concepta. In some tiny bar at a dusty alley corner, his mission
forgotten, he would drink all morning celebrating Yvonne's coming while she
slept. Perhaps he would pretend to be an Icelander or a visitor from the Andes
or Argentina. Far more than the hour of Hugh's arrival was to be dreaded the
issue that was already bounding after him at the gait of Goethe's famous church
bell in pursuit of the child truant from church. Yvonne twisted her
wedding-ring round her finger, once. Did she still wear it for love or for one
of two kinds of convenience, or both? Or, poor girl, was it merely for his, for
their benefit? The swimming-pool ticked on.
 
Might a soul bathe there and be clean or slake its drought?
   
"It's still only eight-thirty."
The Consul took off his glasses again.
   
"Your eyes, you poor
darling--they've got such a glare," Yvonne burst out with: and the church
bell was nearer; now it had loped, clanging, over a stile and the child had
stumbled.
   
"A touch of the goujeers... Just
a touch." Die Glocke Glocke tönt nicht mehr... The Consul traced a pattern
on one of the porch tiles with his dress shoes in which his sockless feet
(sock-less not because as Sr Bustamente the manager of the local cinema would
have it, he'd drunk himself into a position where he could afford no socks, but
because his whole frame was so neuritic with alcohol he found it impossible to
put them on) felt swollen and sore. They would not have, but for the
strychnine, damn the stuff, and this complete cold ugly sobriety it had let him
down into! Yvonne was sitting on the parapet again leaning against a pillar.
She bit her lips, intent on the garden:
   
"Geoffrey this place is a
wreck!"
   
"Mariana and the moated grange
isn't in it." The Consul was winding his wrist-watch. .".. But look
here, suppose for the sake of argument you abandoned a besieged town to the
enemy and then somehow or other not very long afterwards you go back to
it--there's something about my analogy I don't like, but never mind, suppose
you do it--then you can't very well expect to invite your soul into quite the
same green graces, with quite the same dear old welcome here and there, can
you, eh?"
   
"But I didn't abandon--"
   
"Even, I wouldn't say, if that
town seems to be going about its business again, though in a somewhat stricken
fashion, I admit, and its trams running more or less on schedule." The
Consul strapped his watch firmly on his wrist. "Eh?"
   
"--Look at the red bird on the
tree-twigs, Geoffrey! I never saw a cardinal as big as that before."
   
"No." The Consul, all
unobserved, secured the whisky bottle, uncorked it, smelt its contents, and
returned it to the tray gravely, pursing his lips: "You wouldn't have.
Because it isn't a cardinal."
   
"Of course that's a cardinal.
Look at its red breast. It's like a bit of flame!" Yvonne, it was clear to
him, dreaded the approaching scene as much as he, and now felt under some
compulsion to go on talking about anything until the perfect inappropriate
moment arrived, that moment too when, unseen by her, the awful bell would
actually touch the doomed child with giant protruding tongue and hellish
Wesleyan breath. "There, on the hibiscus!"
   
The Consul closed one eye. "He's
a coppery-tailed trogon I believe. And he has no red breast. He's a solitary
fellow who probably lives way off in the Canyon of the Wolves over there, away
off from those other fellows with ideas, so that he can have peace to meditate
about not being a cardinal."
   
"I'm sure it's a cardinal and
lives right here in this garden!"
   
"Have it your own way.
 
Trogon ambiguus ambiguuus
 
is the exact name, I think, the ambiguous
bird! Two ambiguities ought to make an affirmative and this is it, the
coppery-tailed trogon, not the cardinal." The Consul reached out towards
the tray for his empty strychnine glass, but forgetting midway what he proposed
to put in it, or whether it wasn't one of the bottles he wanted first, if only
to smell, and not the glass, he dropped his hand and leaned still farther
forward, turning the movement into one of concern for the volcanoes. He said:
   
"Old Popeye ought to be coming
out again pretty soon."
   
"He seems to be completely
obliterated in spinach at the moment--" Yvonne's voice quivered.
   
The Consul struck a match against
their old jest for the cigarette he had somehow failed to place between his
lips: after a little, finding himself with a dead match, he put it in his
pocket.
   
For a time they confronted each other
like two mute unspeaking forts.
   
The water still trickling into the
pool--God, how deadeningly slowly--filled the silence between them... There was
something else: the Consul imagined he still heard the music of the ball, which
must have long since ceased, so that this silence was pervaded as with a stale
thudding of drums. Parián: that meant drums too. Parián. It was doubtless the
almost tactile absence of the music however, that made it so peculiar the trees
should be apparently shaking to it, an illusion investing not only the garden
but the plains beyond, the whole scene before his eyes, with horror, the horror
of an intolerable unreality. This must be not unlike, he told himself, what
some insane person suffers at those moments when, sitting benignly in the
asylum grounds, madness suddenly ceases to be a refuge and becomes incarnate in
the shattering sky and all his surroundings in the presence of which reason,
already struck dumb, can only bow the head. Does the madman find solace at such
moments, as his thoughts like cannonballs crash through his brain, in the
exquisite beauty of the madhouse garden or of the neighbouring hills beyond the
terrible chimney? Hardly, the Consul felt. As for this particular beauty he
knew it dead as his marriage and as wilfully slaughtered. The sun shining
brilliantly now on all the world before him, its rays picking out the
timberline of Popocatepetl as its summit like a gigantic surfacing whale
shouldered out of the clouds again, all this could not lift his spirit. The
sunlight could not share his burden of conscience, of sourceless sorrow. It did
not know him. Down to his left beyond the plantains the gardener at the
Argentinean ambassador's weekend residence was slashing his way through some
tall grasses, clearing the ground for a badminton court, yet something about this
innocent enough occupation contained a horrible threat against him. The broad
leaves of the plantains themselves dropping gently seemed menacingly savage as
the stretched wings of pelicans, shaking before they fold. The movements of
some more little red birds in the garden, like animated rosebuds, appeared
unbearably jittery and thievish. It was as though the creatures were attached
by sensitive wires to his nerves. When the telephone rang his heart almost
stopped beating.
   
As a matter of fact the telephone was
ringing clearly and the Consul left the porch for the dining-room where, afraid
of the furious thing, he started to speak into the receiver, then, sweating,
into the mouthpiece, talking rapidly--for it was a trunk-call--not knowing what
he was saying, hearing Tom's muted voice quite plainly but turning his
questions into his own answers, apprehensive lest at any moment boiling oil
pour into his eardrums or his mouth: "All right. Good-bye... Oh, say, Tom,
what was the origin of that silver rumour that appeared in the papers yesterday
denied by Washington? I wonder where it came from... What started it? Yes. All
right. Good-bye. Yes, I have, terrible. Oh they did! Too bad. But after all
they own it. Or don't they? Good-bye. They probably will. Yes, that's all
right, that's all right. Good-bye; good-bye!.".. Christ. What does he want
to ring me up at this hour of the morning for. What time is it in America?
Erikson 43?
   
Christ... He hung up the receiver the
wrong way and returned to the porch: no Yvonne; after a moment he heard her in
the bathroom...
   
The Consul was guiltily climbing the
Calle Nicaragua.
   
It was as if he were toiling up some
endless staircase between houses. Or perhaps even old Popeye itself. Never had
it seemed such a long way to the top of this hill. The road with its tossing
broken stones stretched on for ever into the distance like a life of agony. He
thought: 900 pesos = 100 bottles of whisky = 900 ditto tequila. Argal: one
should drink neither tequila nor whisky but mescal. It was hot as a furnace too
out on the street and the Consul sweated profusely. Away! Away! He was not
going very far away, nor to the top of the hill. There was a lane branching to
the left before you reached Jacques's house, leafy, no more than a cart-track
at first, then a switchback, and some where along that lane to the right, not
five minutes' walk, at a dusty corner, waited a cool nameless cantina with
horses probably tethered outside, and a huge white tom cat sleeping below the
counter of whom a whiskerando would say: "He ah work all night mistair and
sleep all day!" And this cantina would be open.
   
This was where he was going (the lane
was plainly in sight now, a dog guarding it) to have in peace a couple of
necessary drinks unspecified in his mind, and be back again before Yvonne had
finished her bath. It was just possible too of course that he might meet--
   
But suddenly the Calle Nicaragua rose
up to meet him.
   
The Consul lay face downward on the
deserted street.
   
--Hugh, is that you old chap lending
the old boy a hand? Thank you so much. For it is perhaps indeed your turn these
days to lend a hand. Not that I haven't always been delighted to help you! I
was even delighted in Paris that time you arrived from Aden in a fix over your carte
d'identité and the passport you so often seem to prefer travelling without and
whose number I remember to this day is 21312. It perhaps gave me all the more
pleasure in that it served a while to take my mind from my own tangled affairs
and moreover proved to my satisfaction, though some of my colleagues were even
then beginning to doubt it, that I was still not so divorced from life as to be
incapable of discharging such duties with dispatch. Why do I say this?--Is it
in part that you should see that I also recognize how close Yvonne and I had
already been brought to disaster before your meeting! Are you listening,
Hugh--do I make myself clear? Clear that I forgive you, as somehow I have never
wholly been able to forgive Yvonne, and that I can still love you as a brother
and respect you as a man. Clear, that I would help you, ungrudgingly, again. In
fact ever since Father went up into the White Alps alone and failed to return,
though they happened to be the Himalayas, and more often than I care to think these
volcanoes remind me of them, just as this valley does of the Valley of the
Indus, and as those old turbaned trees in Taxco do of Srinigar, and just as
Xochimilco--are you listening, Hugh?--of all places when I first came here,
reminded me of those houseboats on the Shalimar you cannot remember, and your
mother, my step-mother died, all those dreadful things seeming to happen at
once as though the in-laws of catastrophe had suddenly arrived from nowhere,
or, perhaps, Damchok, and moved in on us bag and baggage--there has been all
too little opportunity to act, so to say, as a brother to you. Mind you I have
perhaps acted as a father: but you were only an infant then, and seasick, upon
the P. and O., the old erratic Cocanada. But after that and once back in
England there were too many guardians, too many surrogates in Harrogate, too
many establishments and schools, not to mention the war, the struggle to win
which, for as you say rightly it is not yet over, I continue in a bottle and
you with the ideas I hope may prove less calamitous to you than did our
father's to him, or for that matter mine to myself. However all this may
be--still there, Hugh, lending a hand?--I ought to point out in no uncertain
terms that I never dreamed for a moment such a thing as did happen would or
could happen. That I had forfeited Yvonne's trust did not necessarily mean she
had forfeited mine, of which one had a rather different conception. And that I
trusted you goes without saying. Far less could I have dreamed you would attempt
morally to justify yourself on the grounds that I was absorbed in a debauch:
there are certain reasons too, to be revealed only at the day of reckoning, why
you should not have stood in judgement upon me. Yet I am afraid--are you
listening, Hugh?--that long before that day what you did impulsively and have
tried to forget in the cruel abstraction of youth will begin to strike you in a
new and darker light. I am sadly afraid that you may indeed, precisely because
you are a good and simple person at bottom and genuinely respect more than most
the principles and decencies that might have prevented it, fall heir, as you
grow older and your conscience less robust, to a suffering on account of it
more abominable than any you have caused me. How may I help you? How ward it
off? How shall the murdered man convince his assassin he will not haunt him?
Ah, the past is filled up quicker than we know and God has little patience with
remorse! Yet does this help, what I am trying to tell you, that I realize to
what degree I brought all this upon myself? Help, that I am admitting moreover
that to have cast Yvonne upon you in that fashion was a reckless action,
almost, I was going to say, a clownish one, inviting in return the inevitable
bladder on the brain, the mouthful and heartful of sawdust. I sincerely hope
so... Meantime, however, old fellow, my mind, staggering under the influence of
the last half-hour's strychnine, of the several therapeutic drinks before that,
of the numerous distinctly untherapeutic drinks with Dr. Vigil before that, you
must meet Dr. Vigil, I say nothing of his friend Jacques Laruelle to whom for
various reasons I have hitherto avoided introducing you--please remind me to
get back my Elizabethan plays from him--of the two days' and one night's continuous
drinking before that, of the seven hundred and seventy-five and a half--but why
go on? My mind, I repeat, must somehow, drugged though it is, like Don Quixote
avoiding a town invested with his abhorrence because of his excesses there,
take a clear cut around--did I say Dr. Vigil?--"