Under the Volcano (28 page)

   
M. Laruelle, overpowered by steam,
explanatory fingers in his ears, hadn't heard: "What did you find to talk
about, you two? Vigil and yourself?"
   
"Alcohol. Insanity. Medullary
compression of the gibbus. Our agreements were more or less bilateral."
The Consul, shaking frankly now, normally, peered out through the open doors of
the balcony at the volcanoes over which once more hovered puffs of smoke,
accompanied by the rattle of musketry; and once he cast a passionate glance up
at the mirador, where his untouched drinks lay. "Mass reflexes, but only
the erections of guns, disseminating death," he said, noticing too that
the sounds of the fair were getting louder.
   
"What was that?"
   
"How were you proposing to
entertain the others supposing they had stayed," the Consul almost
shrieked soundlessly, for he had himself dreadful memories of showers that
slithered all over him like soap slipping from quivering fingers, "by
taking a shower?"
   
And the observation plane was coming
back, or Jesus, yes, here, here, out of nowhere, she came whizzing, straight at
the balcony, at the Consul, looking for him perhaps, zooming... Aaaaaaaah!
Berumph.
   
M. Laruelle shook his head; he hadn't
heard a sound, a word. Now he came out of the shower and into another little
recess screened by a curtain which he used as a dressing-room:
   
"Lovely day, isn't it?... I
think we shall have thunder."
   
"No."
   
The Consul on a sudden went to the
telephone, also in a kind of recess (the house seemed fuller of such recesses
today than usual), found the telephone book, and now, shaking all over, opened
it; not Vigil, no, not Vigil, his nerves gibbered, but Guzmán. A.B.C.G. He was
sweating now, terribly; it was suddenly as hot in this little niche as in a
telephone booth in New York during a heat wave; his hands trembled frantically;
666, Cafeasperina; Guzmán. Erikson 34. He had the number, had forgotten it: the
name Zuzugoitea, Zuzugoitea, then Sanabria, came starting out of the book at
him: Erikson 35. Zuzugoitea. He'd already forgotten the number, forgotten the
number, 34, 35, 666: he was turning back the leaves, a large drop of sweat
splashed on the book--this time he thought he saw Vigil's name. But he'd
already taken the receiver off the hook, the receiver off the hook, off the
hook, he held it the wrong way up, speaking, splashing into the earhole, the
mouth-hole, he could not hear--could they hear? see?--the earhole as before:
"¿Qué quieres? Who do you want... God!" he shouted, hanging up. He
would need a drink to do this. He ran for the staircase but half-way up, shuddering,
in a frenzy, started down again; I brought the tray down. No, the drinks are
still up there. He came on the mirador and drank down all the drinks in sight.
He heard music. Suddenly about three hundred head of cattle, dead, frozen stiff
in the postures of the living, sprang on the slope before the house, were gone.
The Consul finished the contents of the cocktail shaker and came downstairs
quietly, picked up a paper-backed book lying on the table, sat down and opened
it with a long sigh. It was Jean Cocteau's La Machine infernale. "Out, mon
enfant, mon petit enfant," he read, "les choses qui paraissent
abominable aux humains, si tu savais, de 'endroit où j'habite, elles ont peu
d'importance." "We might have a drink in the square," he said,
closing the book, then opening it again: sortes Shakespeareanae. "The gods
exist, they are the devil," Baudelaire informed him.
   
He had forgotten Guzmán. Los
Borrachones fell eternally into the flames. M. Laruelle, who hadn't noticed a
thing, appeared again, resplendent in white flannels, took his tennis racket
from the top of a bookcase; the Consul found his stick and his dark glasses,
and they went down the iron spiral staircase together.
   
"Absolutamente necesario!"
Outside the Consul paused, turning...
   
No se puede vivir sin amar, were the
words on the house. In the street there was now not a breath of wind and they
walked a while without speaking, listening to the babel of the fiesta which
grew still louder as they approached the town. Street of the Land of Fire. 666.
   
--M. Laruelle, possibly because he
was walking on the higher part of the banked street, now seemed even taller
than he was, and beside him, below, the Consul felt a moment uncomfortably
dwarfed, childish. Years before in their boyhood this position had been
reversed; then the Consul was the taller. But whereas the Consul had stopped
growing when seventeen at five foot eight or nine, M. Laruelle kept on through
the years under different skies until now he had grown out of the Consul's
reach. Out of reach? Jacques was a boy of whom the Consul could still remember
certain things with affection: the way he pronounced "vocabulary" to
rhyme with "foolery," or "bible" with "runcible."
Runcible spoon. And he'd grown into a man who could shave and put on his socks
by himself. But out of his reach, hardly. Up there, across the years, at his
height of six foot three or four, it did not seem too outlandish to suggest
that his influence still reached him strongly. If not, why the English-looking
tweed coat similar to the Consul's own, those expensive, expressive English
tennis shoes of the kind you could walk in, the English white trousers of
twenty-one inches breadth, the English shirt worn English-fashion open at the
neck, the extraordinary scarf that suggested M. Laruelle had once won a
half-blue at the Sorbonne or something? There was even, in spite of his slight
stoutness, an English, almost an ex-consular sort of litheness about his
movements. Why should Jacques be playing tennis at all? Have you forgotten it,
Jacques, how I myself taught you, that summer long ago, behind the Taskersons',
or at the new public courts in Leasowe? On just such afternoons as this. So
brief their friendship and yet, the Consul thought, how enormous, how
all-permeating, permeating Jacques's whole life, that influence had been, an
influence that showed even in his choice of books, his work--why had Jacques
come to Quauhnahuac in the first place? Was it not much as though he, the
Consul, from afar, had willed it, for obscure purposes of his own? The man he'd
met here eighteen months ago seemed, though hurt in his art and destiny, the
most completely unequivocal and sincere Frenchman he'd ever known. Nor was the
seriousness of M. Laruelle's face, seen now against the sky between houses, compatible
with cynical weakness. Was it not almost as though the Consul had tricked him
into dishonour and misery, willed, even, his betrayal of him?
   
"Geoffrey," M. Laruelle
said suddenly, quietly, "has she really come back?"
   
"It looks like it, doesn't
it?" They both paused, to light their pipes, and the Consul noticed
Jacques was wearing a ring he had not seen, a scarab, of simple design, cut
into a chalcedony: whether Jacques would remove it to play tennis he didn't
know, but the hand that wore it was trembling, while the Consul's was now
steady.
   
"But I mean really come
back," M. Laruelle continued in French as they went forward up the Calle
Tierra del Fuego. "She hasn't merely come down on a visit, or to see you
out of curiosity, or on the basis that you'll just be friends, and so on, if
you don't mind my asking."
   
"As a matter of fact I rather
do."
   
"Get this straight, Geoffrey,
I'm thinking of Yvonne, not you."
   
"Get it a little straighter
still. You're thinking of yourself."
"But today--I can see how that's--I suppose you were tight at the ball. I
didn't go. But if so why aren't you back home thanking God and trying to rest
and sober up instead of making everyone wretched by taking them to Tomalín?
Yvonne looks tired out."
   
The words drew faint weary furrows
across the Consul's mind constantly filling with harmless deliriums.
Nevertheless his French was fluent and rapid:
   
"How do you mean you suppose I
was tight when Vigil told you so on the phone? And weren't you suggesting just
now I take Yvonne to Guanajuato with him? Perhaps you imagined if you could
insinuate yourself into our company on that proposed trip she would
miraculously cease to be tired, even though it's fifty times farther than to
Tomalín."
   
"When I suggested you go it
hadn't quite entered my head she'd only arrived this morning."
   
"Well--I forget whose idea
Tomalín was," the Consul said. Can it be I discussing Yvonne with Jacques,
discussing us like this? Though after all they had done it before. "But I
haven't explained just how Hugh fits into the picture, have--"
   
"--Eggs!" had the jovial
proprietor of the abarrotes called down from the pavement above them to their
right.
   
"Mezcalito!" had somebody
else whizzed past carrying a length of plank, some barfly of his acquaintance;
or was that this morning?
   
--"And on second thoughts I
don't think I'll trouble."
   
Soon the town loomed up before them.
They had reached the foot of Cortés Palace. Near them children (encouraged by a
man also in dark glasses who seemed familiar, and to whom the Consul motioned)
were swinging round and round a telegraph pole on an improvised whirligig, a
little parody of the Great Carrousel up the hill in the square. Higher, on a
terrace of the Palace (because it was also the ayuntamiento), a soldier stood
at case with a rifle; on a still higher terrace dawdled the tourists: vandals
in sandals looking at the murals.
   
The Consul and M. Laruelle had a good
view of the Rivera frescoes from where they were. "You get an impression
from here those tourists can't up here," M. Laruelle said, "they're
too close." He was pointing with his tennis racket. "The slow
darkening of the murals as you look from right to left. It seems somehow to
symbolize the gradual imposition of the Spaniards" conquering will upon
the Indians. Do you see what I mean?"
   
"If you stood at a greater
distance still it might seem to symbolize for you the gradual imposition of the
Americans' conquering friendship from left to right upon the Mexicans,"
the Consul said with a smile, removing his dark glasses, "upon those who
have to look at the frescoes and remember who paid for them."
   
The part of the murals he was gazing
at portrayed, he knew, the Tlahuicans who had died for this valley in which he
lived. The artist had represented them in their battle dress, wearing the masks
and skins of wolves and tigers. As he looked it was as though these figures
were gathering silently together. Now they had become one figure, one immense,
malevolent creature staring back at him. Suddenly this creature appeared to
start forward, then make a violent motion. It might have been, indeed
unmistakably it was, telling him to go away.
   
"See, there's Yvonne and Hugh's
waving at you." M. Laruelle waved back his tennis racket. "Do you know
I think they make rather a formidable couple," he added, with a half
pained, half malicious smile.
   
There they were too, he saw, the
formidable couple, up by the frescoes: Hugh with his foot on the rail of the
Palace balcony, looking over their heads at the volcanoes perhaps: Yvonne with
her back to them now. She was leaning against the rail facing the murals, then
she turned sideways towards Hugh to say something. They did not wave again.
   
M. Laruelle and the Consul decided
against the cliff path. They floated along the base of the Palace then,
opposite the Banco de Crédito y Ejidal, turned left up the steep narrow road
climbing to the square. Toiling, they edged into the Palace wall to let a man
on horseback pass, a fine-featured Indian of the poorer class, dressed in
soiled white loose clothes. The man was singing gaily to himself. But he nodded
to them courteously as if to thank them. He seemed about to speak, reining in
his little horse--on either side of which chinked two saddle-bags, and upon
whose rump was branded the number seven--to a slow walk beside them, as they
ascended the hill. Jingle jingle little surcingle. But the man, riding slightly
in front, did not speak and at the top he suddenly waved his hand and galloped
away, singing.
  
 
The Consul felt a pang. Ah, to have a horse,
and gallop away, singing, away to someone you loved perhaps, into the heart of
all the simplicity and peace in the world; was not that like the opportunity
afforded man by life itself? Of course not. Still, just for a moment, it had
seemed that it was.
   
"What is it Goethe says about
the horse?" he said. "'Weary of liberty he suffered himself to be
saddled and bridled, and was ridden to death for his pains.'"
   
In the plaza the tumult was terrific.
Once again they could scarcely hear one another speak. A boy dashed up to them
selling papers. Sangriento Combate en Mora de Ebro. Los Aviones de los Rebeldes
Bombardean Barcelona. Es inevitable la muerte del Papa. The Consul started;
this time, an instant, he had thought the headlines referred to himself. But of
course it was only the poor Pope whose death was inevitable. As if everyone
else's death were not inevitable too! In the middle of the square a man was
climbing a slippery flagpole in a complicated manner necessitating ropes and
spikes. The huge carrousel, set near the bandstand, was thronged by peculiar
long-nosed wooden horses mounted on whorled pipes, dipping majestically as they
revolved with a slow piston-like circulation. Boys on roller skates, holding to
the stays of the umbrella structure, were being whirled around yelling with
joy, while the uncovered machine driving it hammered away like a steam pump:
then they were whizzing. "Barcelona" and "Valencia" mingled
with the crashes and cries against which the Consul's nerves were wooled.
Jacques was pointing to the pictures on the panels running entirely around the
inner wheel that was set horizontally and attached to the top of the central
revolving pillar. A mermaid reclined in the sea combing her hair and singing to
the sailors of a five-funnelled battleship. A daub which apparently represented
Medea sacrificing her children turned out to be of performing monkeys. Five
jovial-looking stags peered, in all their monarchical unlikelihood, out of a
Scottish glen at them, then went tearing out of sight. While a fine Pancho
Villa with handlebar moustaches galloped for dear life after them all. But
stranger than these was a panel showing lovers, a man and a woman reclining by
a river. Though childish and crude it had about it a somnambulistic quality and
something too of truth, of the pathos of love. The lovers were depicted as
awkwardly askance. Yet one felt that really they were wrapped in each other's
arms by this river at dusk among gold stars. Yvonne, he thought, with sudden
tenderness, where are you, my darling? Darling... For a moment he had thought
her by his side. Then he remembered she was lost; then that no, this feeling
belonged to yesterday, to the months of lonely torment behind him. She was not
lost at all, she was here all the time, here now, or as good as here. The
Consul wanted to raise his head, and shout for joy, like the horseman: she is
here! Wake up, she has come back again! Sweetheart, darling, I love you! A
desire to find her immediately and take her home (where in the garden still lay
the white bottle of Tequila Añejo de Jalisco, unfinished), to put a stop to
this senseless trip, to be, above all, alone with her, seized him, and a
desire, too, to lead immediately again a normal happy life with her, a life,
for instance, in which such innocent happiness as all these good people around
him were enjoying, was possible. But had they ever led a normal happy life? Had
such a thing as a normal happy life ever been possible for them? It had... Yet what
about that belated postcard, now under Laruelle's pillow? It proved the lonely
torment unnecessary, proved, even, he must have wanted it. Would anything
really have been changed had he received the card at the right time? He doubted
it. After all, her other letters--Christ, again, where were they?--had not
changed anything. If he had not read them properly, perhaps. But he had not
read them properly. And soon he would forget about what had been done with the
card. Nevertheless the desire remained--like an echo of Yvonne's own--to find
her, to find her now, to reverse their doom, it was a desire amounting almost
to a resolution... Raise your head, Geoffrey Firmin, breathe your prayer of
thankfulness, act before it is too late. But the weight of a great hand seemed
to be pressing his head down. The desire passed. At the same time, as though a
cloud had come over the sun, the aspect of the fair had completely altered for
him. The merry grinding of the roller skates, the cheerful if ironic music, the
cries of the little children on their goose-necked steeds, the procession of
queer pictures--all this had suddenly become transcendentally awful and tragic,
distant, transmuted, as it were some final impression on the senses of what the
earth was like, carried over into an obscure region of death, a gathering
thunder of immedicable sorrow; the Consul needed a drink...