Under the Volcano (12 page)

 
or belladonna or whatever it is
of Hugh's?" The Consul got up with his empty glass and began to walk
around the room. He was not so much aware of having done by default anything
fatal (it wasn't as if, for instance, he'd thrown his whole life away) as
something merely foolish, and at the same time, as it were, sad. Yet there
seemed a call for some amends. He either thought or said:
   
"Well, tomorrow perhaps I'll
drink beer only. There's nothing like beer to straighten you out, and a little
more strychnine, and then the next day just beer--I'm sure no one will object
if I drink beer. This Mexican stuff is particularly full of vitamins, I
gather... For I can see it really is going to be somewhat of an occasion, this
reunion of us all, and then perhaps when my nerves are back to normal again,
I'll go off it completely. And then, who knows," he brought up by the
door, "I might get down to work again and finish my book!"
   
But the door was still a door and it
was shut: and now ajar. Through it, on the porch he saw the whisky bottle,
slightly smaller and emptier of hope than the Burke's Irish, standing
forlornly. Yvonne had not opposed a snifter: he had been unjust to her. Yet was
that any reason why he should be unjust also to the bottle? Nothing in the
world was more terrible than an empty bottle! Unless it was an empty glass. But
he could wait: yes, sometimes he knew when to leave it alone. He wandered back
to the bed thinking or saying:
   
"Yes: I can see the reviews now.
Mr Firmin's sensational new data on Atlantis! The most extraordinary thing of
its kind since Donnelly! Interrupted by his untimely death... Marvellous. And
the chapters on the alchemists! Which beat the Bishop of Tasmania to a frazzle.
Only that's not quite the way they'll put it. Pretty good, eh? I might even
work in something about Coxcox and Noah. I've got a publisher interested too;
in Chicago--interested but not concerned, if you understand me, for it's really
a mistake to imagine such a book could ever become popular. But it's amazing
when you come to think of it how the human spirit seems to blossom in the
shadow of the abattoir! How--to say nothing of all the poetry--not far enough
below the stockyards to escape altogether the reek of the porterhouse of
tomorrow, people can be living in cellars the life of the old alchemists of
Prague! Yes: living among the cohabitations of Faust himself, among the
litharge and agate and hyacinth and pearls. A life which is amorphous, plastic
and crystalline. What am I talking about? Copula Maritalis? Or from alcohol to
alkahest. Can you tell me?... Or perhaps I might get myself another job, first
of course being sure to insert an advertisement in the
 
Universal : will accompany corpse to any
place in the east!"
   
Yvonne was sitting up half reading
her magazine, her nightgown slightly pulled aside showing where her warm tan
faded into the white skin of her breast, her arms outside the covers and one
hand turned downward from the wrist hanging over the edge of the bed
listlessly: as he approached she turned this hand palm upward in an involuntary
movement, of irritation perhaps, but it was like an unconscious gesture of
appeal: it was more: it seemed to epitomize, suddenly, all the old
supplication, the whole queer secret dumb show of incommunicable tendernesses
and loyalties and eternal hopes of their marriage. The Consul felt his tearducts
quicken. But he had also felt a sudden peculiar sense of embarrassment, a
sense, almost, of indecency that he, a stranger, should be in her room. This
room! He went to the door and looked out. The whisky bottle was still there.
   
But he made no motion towards it,
none at all, save to put on his dark glasses. He was conscious of new aches
here and there, of, for the first time, the impact of the Calle Nicaragua.
Vague images of grief and tragedy flickered in his mind. Somewhere a butterfly
was flying out to sea: lost. La Fontaine's duck had loved the white hen, yet
after escaping together from the dreadful farmyard through the forest to the
lake it was the duck that swam: the hen, following, drowned. In November 1895,
in convict dress, from two o'clock in the afternoon till half past, handcuffed,
recognized, Oscar Wilde stood on the centre platform at Clapham Junction...
   
When the Consul returned to the bed
and sat down on it Yvonne's arms were under the covers while her face was
turned to the wall. After a while he said with emotion, his voice grown hoarse
again:
   
"Do you remember how the night
before you left we actually made a date like a couple of strangers to meet for
dinner in Mexico City?"
   
Yvonne gazed at the wall:
   
"You didn't keep it."
   
"That was because I couldn't
remember the name of the restaurant at the last moment. All I knew was that it
was in the Via Dolorosa somewhere. It was the one we'd discovered together the
last time we were in the city. I went into all the restaurants in the Via
Dolorosa looking for you and not finding you I had a drink in each one."
   
"Poor Geoffrey."
   
"I must have phoned back the
Hotel Canada from each restaurant. From the cantina of each restaurant. God
knows how many times, for I thought you might have returned there. And each
time they said the same thing, that you'd left to meet me, but they didn't know
where. And finally they became pretty damned annoyed. I can't imagine why we
stayed at the Canada instead of the Regis--do you remember how they kept
mistaking me there, with my beard, for that wrestler?... Anyhow, there I was
wandering around from place to place, wrestling, and thinking all the while I
could prevent you from going the next morning, if I could only find you!"
   
"Yes."
   
(If you could only find her! Ah, how
cold it was that night, and bitter, with a howling wind and wild steam blowing
from the pavement gratings where the ragged children were making to sleep early
under their poor newspapers. Yet none was more homeless than you, as it grew
later and colder and darker, and still you had not found her! And a sorrowful
voice seemed to be wailing down the street at you with the wind calling its
name: Via Dolorosa, Via Dolorosa! And then somehow it was early the next
morning directly after she had left the Canada--you brought one of her
suitcases down yourself though you didn't see her off--and you were sitting in
the hotel bar drinking mescal with ice in it that chilled your stomach, you
kept swallowing the lemon pips, when suddenly a man with the look of an
executioner came from the street dragging two little fawns shrieking with
fright into the kitchen. And later you heard them screaming, being slaughtered
probably. And you thought: better not remember what you thought. And later still,
after Oaxaca, when you had returned here to Quauhnahuac, through the anguish of
that return--circling down from the Tres Marías in the Plymouth, seeing the
town below through the mist, and then the town itself, the landmarks, your soul
dragged past them as at the tail of a runaway horse--when you returned here--)
   
"The cats had died," he
said, "when I got back--Pedro insisted it was typhoid. Or rather, poor old
Oedipuss died the very day you left apparently, he'd already been thrown down
the barranca while little Pathos was lying in the garden under the plantains
when I arrived looking even sicker than when we first picked her out of the
gutter; dying, though no one could make out what of: María claimed it was a
broken heart--" "Cheery little matter," Yvonne answered in a
lost hard tone with her face still turned to the wall.
   
"Do you remember your song, I
won't sing it: 'No work has been done by the little cat, no work has been done
by the big cat, no work has been done, by any-one!'" the Consul heard
himself ask; tears of sorrow came to his eyes, he removed his dark glasses
quickly and buried his face on her shoulder. No, but Hugh, she
began--"Never mind Hugh" he had not meant to elicit this, to thrust
her back against the pillows; he felt her body stiffen, becoming hard and cold.
Yet her consent did not seem from weariness only, but to a solution for one
shared instant beautiful as trumpets out of a clear sky...
   
But he could feel now, too, trying
the prelude, the preparatory nostalgic phrases on his wife's senses, the image
of his possession, like that jewelled gate the desperate neophyte, Yesod-bound,
projects for the thousandth time on the heavens to permit passage of his astral
body, fading, and slowly, inexorably, that of a cantina, when in dead silence
and peace it first opens in the morning, taking its place. It was one of those
cantinas that would be opening now, at nine o'clock: and he was queerly
conscious of his own presence there with the angry tragic words, the very words
which might soon be spoken, glaring behind him. This image faded also: he was
where he was, sweating now, glancing once--but never ceasing to play the
prelude, the little one-fingered introduction to the unclassifiable composition
that might still just follow--out of the window at the drive, fearful himself
lest Hugh appear there, then he imagined he really saw him at the end of it
coming through the gap, now that he distinctly heard his step in the gravel...
No one. But now, now he wanted to go, passionately he wanted to go, aware that
the peace of the cantina was changing to its first fevered preoccupation of the
morning: the political exile in the corner discreetly sipping orange crush, the
accountant arriving, accounts gloomily surveyed, the iceblock dragged in by a
brigand with an iron scorpion, the one bartender slicing lemons, the other,
sleep in his eyes, sorting beer bottles. And now, now he wanted to go, aware
that the place was filling with people not at any other time part of the
cantina's community at all, people eructating, exploding, committing nuisances,
lassoes over their shoulders, aware too of the debris from the night before,
the dead matchboxes, lemon peel, cigarettes open like tortillas, the dead
packages of them swarming in filth and sputum. Now that the clock over the
mirror would say a little past nine, and the news-vendors of La Prensa and El
Universal were stamping in, or standing in the corner at this very moment
before the crowded grimed mingitorio with the shoeblacks who carried their shoe-stools
in their hands, or had left them balanced between the burning foot-rail and the
bar, now he wanted to go! Ah none but he knew how beautiful it all was, the
sunlight, sunlight, sunlight flooding the bar of El Puerto del Sol, flooding
the watercress and oranges, or falling in a single golden line as if in the act
of conceiving a God, falling like a lance straight into a block of ice--
   
"Sorry, it isn't any good I'm
afraid." The Consul shut the door behind him and a small rain of plaster
showered on his head. A Don Quixote fell from the wall. He picked up the sad
straw knight...
   
And then the whisky bottle: he drank
fiercely from it.
   
He had not forgotten his glass
however, and into it he was now pouring himself chaotically a long drink of his
strychnine mixture, half by mistake, he'd meant to pour the whisky.
"Strychnine is an aphrodisiac. Perhaps it will take immediate effect. It
still may not be too late." He had sunk through, it almost felt, the green
cane rocking-chair.
   
He just managed to reach his glass
left on the tray and held it now in his hands, weighing it, but--for he was
trembling again, not slightly, but violently, like a man with Parkinson's
disease or palsy--unable to bring it to his lips. Then without drinking he set
it on the parapet. After a while, his whole body quaking, he rose deliberately
and poured, somehow, into the other unused tumbler Concepta had not removed,
about a half quartern of whisky. Nació 1820 y siguiendo tan campante.
Siguiendo. Born 1896 and still going flat. I love you, he murmured, gripping
the bottle with both hands as he replaced it on the tray. He now brought the
tumbler filled with whisky back to his chair and sat with it in his hands,
thinking. Presently without having drunk from this glass either he set it on
the parapet next to his strychnine. He sat watching both the glasses. Behind
him in the room he heard Yvonne crying.
   
"--Have you forgotten the
letters Geoffrey Firmin the letters she wrote till her heart broke why do you
sit there trembling why do you not go back to her now she will understand after
all it hasn't always been that way toward the end perhaps but you could laugh
at this you could laugh at it why do you think she is weeping it is not for
that alone you have done this to her my boy the letters you not only have never
answered you didn't you did you didn't you did then where is your reply but
have never really read where are they now they are lost Geoffrey Firmin lost or
left somewhere even we do not know where--"
   
The Consul reached forward and
absentmindedly managed a sip of whisky; the voice might have been either of his
familiars or--
   
Hullo, good morning.
   
The instant the Consul saw the thing
he knew it an hallucination and he sat, quite calmly now, waiting for the object
shaped like a dead man and which seemed to be lying flat on its back by his
swimming-pool, with a large sombrero over its face, to go away. So the
"other" had come again. And now gone, he thought: but no, not quite,
for there was still something there, in some way connected with it, or here, at
his elbow, or behind his back, in front of him now; no, that too, whatever it
was, was going: perhaps it had only been the coppery-tailed trogon stirring in
the bushes, his "ambiguous bird" that was now departing quickly on
creaking wings, like a pigeon once it was in flight, heading for its solitary
home in the Canyon of the Wolves, away from the people with ideas.