Under the Volcano (27 page)

   
Then they returned to Yvonne
abruptly. Had he really forgotten her, he wondered. He looked round the room
again. Ah, in how many rooms, upon how many studio couches, among how many
books, had they found their own love, their marriage, their life together, a
life which, in spite of its many disasters, its total calamity indeed--and in
spite too of any slight element of falsehood in its inception on her side, her
marriage partly into the past, into her Anglo-Scottish ancestry, into the visioned
empty ghost-whistling castles in Sutherland, into an emanation of gaunt lowland
uncles chumbling shortbread at six o'clock in the morning--had not been without
triumph. Yet for how brief a time. Far too soon it had begun to seem too much
of a triumph, it had been too good, too horribly unimaginable to lose,
impossible finally to bear: it was as if it had become itself its own
foreboding that it could not last, a foreboding that was like a presence too,
turning his steps towards the taverns again. And how could one begin all over
again, as though the Café Chagrin, the Farolito, had never been? Or without
them? Could one be faithful to Yvonne and the Farolito both?--Christ, oh pharos
of the world, how, and with what blind faith, could one find one's way back,
fight one's way back, now, through the tumultuous horrors of five thousand
shattering awakenings, each more frightful than the last, from a place where
even love could not penetrate, and save in the thickest flames there was no
courage? On the wall the drunks eternally plunged. But one of the little Mayan
idols seemed to be weeping...
   
"Ei ei ei ei," M. Laruelle
was saying, not unlike the little postman, coming, stamping up the stairs;
cocktails, despicable repast. Unperceived the Consul did an odd thing; he took
the postcard he'd just received from Yvonne and slipped it under Jacques's
pillow. She emerged from the balcony. "Hullo, Yvonne, where is
Hugh?--sorry I've been so long. Let's get on the roof, shall we?" Jacques
continued.
   
Actually all the Consul's reflections
had not occupied seven minutes. Still, Laruelle seemed to have been away
longer. He saw, following them, following the drinks up the spiral staircase,
that in addition to the cocktail shaker and glasses there were canapés and
stuffed olives on the tray. Perhaps despite all his seductive aplomb, Jacques
had really gone downstairs frightened by the whole business and completely
beside himself. While these elaborate preparations were merely the excuse for
his flight. Perhaps also it was quite true, the poor fellow had really loved
Yvonne--"Oh, God," the Consul said, reaching the mirador, to which
Hugh had almost simultaneously ascended, climbing, as they approached, the last
rungs of the wooden ladder from the catwalk, "God, that the dream of dark
magician in his visioned cave, even while his hand shakes in its last
decay--that's the bit I like--were the true end of this so lousy world... You
shouldn't have gone to all this trouble, Jacques."
   
He took the binoculars from Hugh, and
now, his drink upon a vacant merlon between the marzipan objects, he gazed
steadily over the country. But oddly he had not touched this drink. And the
calm mysteriously persisted. It was as if they were standing on a lofty
golf-tee somewhere. What a beautiful hole this would make, from here to a green
out into those trees on the other side of the barranca, that natural hazard
which some hundred and fifty yards away could be carried by a good full spoon
shot, soaring... Plock. The Golgotha Hole. High up, an eagle drove downwind in
one. It had shown lack of imagination to build the local course back up there,
remote from the barranca. Golf = gouffre = gulf. Prometheus would retrieve lost
balls. And on that other side what strange fairways could be contrived, crossed
by lone railway lines, humming with telegraph poles, glistening with crazy lies
on embankments, over the hills and far away, like youth, like life itself, the
course plotted all over these plains, extending far beyond Tomalín, through the
jungle, to the Farolito, the nineteenth hole... The Case is Altered.
   
"No, Hugh," he said,
adjusting the lenses but without turning round, "Jacques means the film he
made out of Alastor before he went to Hollywood, which he shot in a bathtub,
what he could of it, and apparently struck the rest together with sequences of
ruins cut out of old travelogues, and a jungle hoiked out of In dunkelste
Africa, and a swan out of the end of some old Corinne Griffith--Sarah
Bernhardt, she was in it too, I understand, while all the time the poet was
standing on the shore, and the orchestra was supposed to be doing its best with
the Sacre du Printemps. I think I forgot the fog." Their laughter somewhat
cleared the air.
   
"But beforehand you do have
certain wisions, as a German director friend of mine used to say, of what your
film should be like," Jacques was telling them, behind him, over by the
angels. "But afterwards, that is another story... As for the fog, that is
after all the cheapest commodity in any studio."
   
"Didn't you make any films in
Hollywood?" Hugh asked, who a moment ago had almost drifted into a
political argument with M. Laruelle.
   
"Yes... But I refuse to see
them."
   
But what on earth was he, the Consul,
the Consul wondered, continuing to look out for there on those plains, in that
tumulose landscape, through Jacques's binoculars? Was it for some figment of
himself, who had once enjoyed such a simple healthy stupid good thing as golf,
as blind holes, for example, driving up into a high wilderness of sand-dunes,
yes, once with Jacques himself? To climb, and then to see, from an eminence,
the ocean with the smoke on the horizon, then, far below, resting near the pin
on the green, his new Silver King, twinkling. Ozone!--The Consul could no
longer play golf: his few efforts of recent years had proved disastrous... I
should have become a sort of Donne of the fairways at least. Poet of the
unreplaced turf.--Who holds the flag while I hole out in three? Who hunts my
Zodiac Zone along the shore? And who, upon that last and final green, though I
hole out in four, accepts my ten and three score... Though I have more. The
Consul dropped the glasses at last and turned round. And still he had not
touched his drink.
   
"Alastor, Alastor," Hugh
strolled over to him saying. "Who is, was, why, and/or wrote Alastor,
anyway?"
   
"Percy Bysshe Shelley." The
Consul leaned against the mirador beside Hugh. "Another fellow with
ideas... The story I like about Shelley is the one where he just let himself
sink to the bottom of the sea--taking several books with him of course--and
just stayed there, rather than admit he couldn't swim."
   
"Geoffrey don't you think Hugh
ought to see something of the fiesta," suddenly Yvonne was saying from the
other side, "since it's his last day? Especially if there's native
dancing?"
   
So it was Yvonne who was
"extricating them from all this," just when the Consul was proposing
to stay. "I wouldn't know," he said. "Won't we get native
dancing and things in Tomalín? Would you like to, Hugh?"
   
"Sure. Of course. Anything you
say." Hugh got down awkwardly from the parapet. "There's still about
an hour before the bus leaves, isn't there?"
   
"I'm sure Jacques will forgive
us if we rush off," Yvonne was saying almost desperately.
   
"Let me see you downstairs
safely then." Jacques controlled his voice. "It's too early for the
fête to be very much but you ought to see Rivera's murals, Hughes, if you
haven't already."
   
"Aren't you coming,
Geoffrey?" Yvonne turned on the staircase. "Please come," her
eyes said.
   
"Well, fiestas aren't my strong
suit. You run along and I'll meet you at the terminal in time for the bus. I
have to talk to Jacques here anyway."
   
But they had all gone downstairs and
the Consul was alone on the mirador. And yet not alone. For Yvonne had left a
drink on the merlon by the angels, poor Jacques's was in one of the crenels,
Hugh's was on the side parapet. And the cocktail shaker was not empty. Moreover
the Consul had not touched his own drink. And still, now, he did not drink. The
Consul felt with his right hand his left bicep under his coat. Strength--of a
kind--but how to give oneself courage? That fine droll courage of Shelley's;
no, that was pride. And pride bade one go on, either go on and kill oneself, or
"straighten out," as so often before, by oneself, with the aid of
thirty bottles of beer and staring at the ceiling. But this time it was
different. What if courage here implied admission of total defeat, admission
that one couldn't swim, admission indeed (though just for a second the thought
was not too bad) into a sanatorium? No, to whatever end, it wasn't merely a
matter of being "got away." No angels nor Yvonne nor Hugh could help
him here. As for the demons, they were inside him as well as outside; quiet at
the moment--taking their siesta perhaps--he was none the less surrounded by
them and occupied; they were in possession. The Consul looked at the sun. But
he had lost the sun: it was not his sun. Like the truth, it was well-nigh
impossible to face; he did not want to go anywhere near it, least of all, sit
in its light, facing it. "Yet I shall face it." How? When he not only
lied to himself, but himself believed the lie and lied back again to those
lying factions, among whom was not even their own honour. There was not even a
consistent basis to his self-deceptions. How should there be then to his
attempts at honesty? "Horror," he said. "Yet I will not give
in." But who was I, how find that I, where had I gone? "Whatever I
do, it shall be deliberately." And deliberately, it was true, the Consul
still refrained from touching his drink. "The will of man is
unconquerable." Eat? I should eat. So the Consul ate half a canapé. And
when M. Laruelle returned the Consul was still gazing drinklessly--where was he
gazing? He didn't know himself. "Do you remember when we went to
Cholula," he said," how much dust there was?"
   
The two men faced each other in
silence. "I don't want to speak to you at all really," the Consul
added after a moment. "For that matter I wouldn't mind if this was the
last time I ever saw you... Did you hear me?"
   
"Have you gone mad?" M.
Laruelle exclaimed at last. "Am I to understand that your wife has come
back to you, something I have seen you praying and howling for under the
table--really under the table... And that you treat her indifferently as this,
and still continue only to care where the next drink's coming from?"
   
To this unanswerable and staggering
injustice the Consul had no word; he reached for his cocktail, he held it,
smelt it: but somewhere, where it would do little good, a hawser did not give
way: he did not drink; he almost smiled pleasantly at M. Laruelle. You might as
well start now as later, refusing the drinks. You might as well start now; as
later. Later.
   
The phone rang out and M. Laruelle
ran down the staircase. The Consul sat with his face buried in his hands a
while, then, leaving his drink still untouched, leaving, yes, all the drinks
untouched, he descended to Jacques's room.
   
M. Laruelle hung up the phone:
"Well," he said, "I didn't know you two were acquainted."
He took off his coat and began to undo his tie. "That was my doctor,
asking about you. He wants to know if you are not dead already."
   
"Oh... Oh, that was Vigil, was
it?"
   
"Arturo Diaz Vigil. Médico.
Cirujano... Et cetera!"
   
"Ah," the Consul said
guardedly, running his ringer round the inside of his collar. "Yes. I met
him for the first time last night. As a matter of fact he was along at my house
this morning."
   
M. Laruelle discarded his shirt
thoughtfully, saying: "We're getting in a set before he goes on his
holiday."
   
The Consul, sitting down, imagined
that weird gusty game of tennis under the hard Mexican sunlight, the tennis
balls tossed in a sea of error--hard going for Vigil, but what would he care
(and who was Vigil?--the good fellow seemed by now unreal to him as some figure
one would forbear to greet for fear he was not your acquaintance of the
morning, so much as the living double of the actor seen on the screen that
afternoon) while the other prepared to enter a shower which, with that queer
architectural disregard for decorum exhibited by a people who value decorum
above all else, was built in a little recess splendidly visible from both the
balcony and the head of the staircase.
   
"He wants to know if you have
changed your mind, if you and Yvonne will ride with him to Guanajuato after
all... Why don't you?"
   
"How did he know I was
here?" The Consul sat up, shaking a little again, though amazed for an
instant at his mastery of the situation, that here it turned out there actually
was someone named Vigil, who had invited one to come to Guanajuato.
   
"How? How else... I told him.
It's a pity you didn't meet him long ago. That man might really be of some help
to you."
   
"You might find... You can be of
some help to him today." The Consul closed his eyes, hearing the doctor's
voice again distinctly: "But now that your esposa has come back. But now
that your esposa has come back... I would work you with." "What?"
He opened his eyes... But the abominable impact on his whole being at this
moment of the fact that that hideously elongated cucumiform bundle of blue
nerves and gills below the steaming un-selfconscious stomach had sought its
pleasure in his wife's body brought him trembling to his feet. How loathsome,
how incredibly loathsome was reality. He began to walk around the room, his
knees giving way every step with a jerk. Books, too many books. The Consul
still didn't see his Elizabethan plays. Yet there was everything else, from Les
Joyeuses Bourgeoises de Windsor to Agrippa d'Aubigné and Collin d'Harleville,
from Shelley to Touchard-Lafosse and Tristan l'Hermite. Beaucoup de bruit pour
rien! Might a soul bathe there or quench its draught? It might. Yet in none of
these books would one find one's own suffering. Nor could they show you how to
look at an ox-eye daisy. "But what could have made you tell Vigil I was
here, if you didn't know he knew me?" he asked, almost with a sob.