Under the Volcano (19 page)

   
"Qué t--" began the Consul.
   
"Por favor," broke in the
other hoarsely, placing a well-manicured though shaky finger to his lips, and
with a slightly worried look up the garden.
   
The Consul nodded. "Of course.
You're looking so fit, I see
 
you
 
can't have been at the ball last night,"
he added loudly and loyally, following the other's gaze, though Mr Quincey, who
after all could not have been so fit, was still nowhere to be seen.
   
He had probably been turning off the
hoses at the main hydrant--and how absurd to have suspected a "plan"
when it was so patently an informal call and the doctor had just happened to
notice Quincey working in the garden from the drive. He lowered his voice.
"All the same, might I take this opportunity of asking you what you
prescribe for a slight case of katzenjammer?"
   
The doctor gave another worried look
down the garden and began to laugh quietly, though his whole body was shaking
with mirth, his white teeth flashed in the sun, even his immaculate blue suit
seemed to be laughing. "Señor" he began, biting off his laughter
short on his lips, like a child, with his front teeth. "Señor Firmin, por
favor" I am sorry, but I must comport myself here like," he looked
round him again, catching his breath, "like an apostle. You mean,
señor" he went on more evenly, "that you are feeling fine this
morning, quite like the cat's pyjama's."
   
"Well: hardly," said the
Consul, softly as before, casting a suspicious eye for his part in the other
direction at some maguey growing beyond the barranca, like a battalion moving
up a slope under machine-gun fire. "Perhaps that's an overstatement. To
put it more simply, what would you do for a case of chronic, controlled,
all-possessing, and inescapable delirium tremens?"
   
Dr. Vigil started. A half-playful
smile hovered at the corner of his lips as he contrived rather unsteadily to
roll up his paper into a neat cylindrical tube. "You mean, not
cats--" he said, and he made a swift rippling circular crawling gesture in
front of his eyes with one hand, "but rather—"
   
The Consul nodded cheerfully. For his
mind was at rest. He had caught a glimpse of those morning headlines, which
seemed entirely concerned with the Pope's illness and the Battle of the Ebro.
   
"--progresión" the doctor
was repeating the gesture more slowly with his eyes closed, his fingers
crawling separately, curved like claws, his head shaking idiotically. "--a
ratos!" he pounced. "Sí," he said, pursing his lips and clapping
his hand to his forehead in a motion of mock horror. "Sí," he
repeated. "Tereebly... More alcohol is perhaps best," he smiled.
   
"Your doctor tells me that in my
case delirium tremens may not prove fatal," the Consul, triumphantly
himself at last, informed Mr Quincey, who came up just at this moment.
   
And at the next moment, though not
before there had passed between himself and the doctor a barely perceptible
exchange of signals, a tiny symbolic mouthward flick of the wrist on the
Consul's side as he glanced up at his bungalow, and upon Vigil's a slight
flapping movement of the arms extended apparently in the act of stretching,
which meant (in the obscure language known only to major adepts in the Great
Brotherhood of Alcohol), "Come up and have a spot when you've
finished," "I shouldn't, for if I do I shall be 'flying,' but on
second thoughts perhaps I will"--it seemed he was back drinking from his
bottle of tequila. And, the moment after, that he was drifting slowly and
powerfully through the sunlight back towards the bungalow itself. Accompanied
by Mr Quincey's cat, who was following an insect of some sort along his path,
the Consul floated in an amber glow. Beyond the house, where now the problems
awaiting him seemed already on the point of energetic solution, the day before
him stretched out like an illimitable rolling wonderful desert in which one was
going, though in a delightful way, to be lost: lost, but not so completely he
would be unable to find the few necessary water-holes, or the scattered tequila
oases where witty legionnaires of damnation who couldn't understand a word he
said, would wave him on, replenished, into that glorious Parián wilderness
where man never went thirsty, and where now he was drawn on beautifully by the
dissolving mirages past the skeletons like frozen wire and the wandering
dreaming lions towards ineluctable personal disaster, always in a delightful
way of course, the disaster might even be found at the end to contain a certain
element of triumph. Not that the Consul now felt gloomy. Quite the contrary.
The outlook had rarely seemed so bright. He became conscious, for the first
time, of the extraordinary activity which everywhere surrounded him in his
garden: a lizard going up a tree, another kind of lizard coming down another
tree, a bottle-green humming-bird exploring a flower, another kind of
humming-bird, voraciously at another flower; huge butterflies, whose precise
stitched markings reminded one of the blouses in the market, flopping about
with indolent gymnastic grace (much as Yvonne had described them greeting her
in Acapulco Bay yesterday, a storm of torn-up multicoloured love-letters,
tossing to windward past the saloons on the promenade deck); ants with petals
or scarlet blossoms tacking hither and thither along the paths; while from
above, below, from the sky, and, it might be, from under the earth, came a
continual sound of whistling, gnawing, rattling, even trumpeting. Where was his
friend the snake now? Hiding up a pear tree probably. A snake that waited to
drop rings on you: whore's shoes. From the branches of these pear trees hung
carafes full of a glutinous yellow substance for trapping insects still changed
religiously every month by the local horticultural college. (How gay were the
Mexicans! The horticulturalists made the occasion, as they made every possible
occasion, a sort of dance, bringing their womenfolk with them, flitting from
tree to tree, gathering up and replacing the carafes as though the whole thing
were a movement in a comic ballet, afterwards lolling about in the shade for
hours, as if the Consul himself did not exist.) Then the behaviour of Mr
Quincey's cat began to fascinate him. The creature had at last caught the
insect but instead of devouring it, she was holding its body, still uninjured,
delicately between her teeth, while its lovely luminous wings, still beating,
for the insect had not stopped flying an instant, protruded from either side of
her whiskers, fanning them. The Consul stooped forward to the rescue. But the
animal bounded just out of reach. He stooped again, with the same result. In
this preposterous fashion, the Consul stooping, the cat dancing just out of
reach, the insect still flying furiously in the cat's mouth, he approached his
porch. Finally the cat extended a preparate paw for the kill, opening her
mouth, and the insect, whose wings had never ceased to beat, suddenly and
marvellously, flew out as might indeed the human soul from the jaws of death,
flew up, up, up, soaring over the trees: and at that moment he saw them. They
were standing on the porch: Yvonne's arms were full of bougainvillea, which she
was arranging in a cobalt ceramic vase. "--but suppose he's absolutely
adamant. Suppose he simply won't go... careful, Hugh, it's got spikes on it,
and you have to look at everything carefully to be sure there're no
spiders." "Hi there, Suchiquetal!" the Consul shouted gaily,
waving his hand, as the cat with a frigid look over her shoulder that said
plainly, "I didn't want it anyway; I meant to let it go," galloped
away, humiliated, into the bushes. "Hi there, Hugh, you old snake in the
grass!"
   
... Why then should he be sitting in
the bathroom? Was he asleep? dead? passed out? Was he in the bathroom now or
half an hour ago? Was it night? Where were the others? But now he heard some of
the others' voices on the porch. Some of the others? It was just Hugh and
Yvonne, of course, for the doctor had gone. Yet for a moment he could have
sworn the house had been full of people; why, it was still this morning, or
barely afternoon, only 12.15 in fact by his watch. At eleven he'd been talking
to Mr Quincey. "Oh... Oh." The Consul groaned aloud... It came to him
he was supposed to be getting ready to go to Tomalín. But how had he managed to
persuade anyone he was sober enough to go to Tomalín? And why, anyhow, Tomalín?
   
A procession of thought like little
elderly animals filed through the Consul's mind, and in his mind too he was
steadily crossing the porch again, as he had done an hour ago, immediately
after he'd seen the insect flying away out of the cat's mouth.
   
He had crossed the porch--which
Concepta had swept--smiling soberly to Yvonne and shaking hands with Hugh on
his way to the icebox, and unfastening it, he knew not only that they'd been
talking about him, but, obscurely, from that bright fragment of overheard
conversation, its round meaning, just as had he at that moment glimpsed the new
moon with the old one in its arms, he might have been impressed by its complete
shape, though the rest were shadowy, illumined only by earthlight.
   
But what had happened then?
"Oh," the Consul cried aloud again. "Oh." The faces of the
last hour hovered before him, the figures of Hugh and Yvonne and Dr. Vigil
moving quickly and jerkily now like those of an old silent film, their words
mute explosions in the brain. Nobody seemed to be doing anything important; yet
everything seemed of the utmost hectic importance, for instance Yvonne saying:
"We saw an armadillo"--"What, no Tarsius spectres!" he had
replied, then Hugh opening the freezing bottle of Carta Blanca beer for him,
prizing off the fizzing cap on the edge of the parapet and decanting the foam
into his glass, the contiguity of which to his strychnine bottle had, it must
be admitted now, lost most of its significance...
   
In the bathroom the Consul became
aware he still had with him half a glass of slightly flat beer; his hand was
fairly steady, but numbed holding the glass, he drank cautiously, carefully
postponing the problem soon to be raised by its emptiness.
   
--"Nonsense," he said to
Hugh. And he had added with impressive consular authority that Hugh couldn't
leave immediately anyway, at least not for Mexico City, that there was only one
bus today, the one Hugh'd come on, which had gone back to the City already, and
one train that didn't leave till 11.45 p.m....
   
Then: "But wasn't it
Bougainville, doctor?" Yvonne was asking--and it really was astonishing
how sinister and urgent and
 
inflamed
 
all these minutiae
seemed to him in the bathroom--"Wasn't it Bougainville who discovered the
bougainvillea?" while the doctor bending over her flowers merely looked
alert and puzzled, he said nothing save with his eyes which perhaps barely
betrayed that he'd stumbled on a "situation."--"Now I come to
think of it, I believe it was Bougainville. Hence the name," Hugh observed
fatuously, seating himself on the parapet--"Sí: you
 
can
 
go
to the botica and so as not to be misunderstood, say favor de servir una toma
de vino quinado o en su defecto una toma de nuez vómica, pero--" Dr. Vigil
was chuckling, talking to Hugh it must have been, Yvonne having slipped into
her room a moment, while the Consul, eavesdropping, was at the icebox for
another bottle of beer--then; "Oh, I was so terrible sick this morning I
needed to be holding myself to the street windows, and to the Consul himself as
he returned. "--Please forgive my stupid
 
comport
 
last night: oh, I have
done a lot of stupid things everywhere these last few days, but"--raising
his glass of whisky--"I will never drink more; I will need two full days
of sleeping to recover myself"--and then, as Yvonne
returned--magnificently giving the whole show away, raising his glass to the
Consul again: "Salud: I hope you are not as sick as I am. You were so
perfectamente borracho last night I think you must have killed yourself with
drinking. I think even to send a boy after you this morning to knock your door,
and find if drinking have not killed you already," Dr. Vigil had said.
   
A strange fellow: in the bathroom the
Consul sipped his flat beer. A strange, decent, generous-hearted fellow, if
slightly deficient in tact save on his own behalf. Why couldn't people hold
their liquor? He himself had still managed to be quite considerate of Vigil's
position in Quincey's garden. In the final analysis there was no one you could
trust to drink with you to the bottom of the bowl. A lonely thought. But of the
doctor's generosity there was little doubt. Before long indeed, in spite of the
necessary "two full days of sleeping," he had been inviting them all
to come with him to Guanajuato: recklessly he proposed leaving for his holiday
by car this evening, after a problematic set of tennis this afternoon with--
   
The Consul took another sip of beer.
"Oh," he shuddered. "Oh." It had been a mild shock last
night to discover that Vigil and Jacques Laruelle were friends, far more than
embarrassing to be reminded of it this morning... Anyhow, Hugh had turned down
the notion of the two-hundred-mile trip to Guanajuato, since Hugh--and how
amazingly well, after all, those cowboy clothes seemed to suit his erect and
careless bearing!--was now determined to catch that night train; while the
Consul had declined on Yvonne's account.
   
The Consul saw himself again,
hovering over the parapet, gazing down at the swimming-pool below, a little
turquoise set in the garden. Thou art the grave where buried love doth live.
The inverted reflections of banana trees and birds, caravans of clouds, moved
in it. Wisps of new-mown turf floated on the surface. Fresh mountain water
trickled into the pool, which was almost overflowing, from the cracked broken
hose whose length was a series of small spouting fountains.