Under the Volcano (31 page)

   
He held out his hand, then dropped
it--Good God, what had come over him? For an instant he'd thought he was
looking at his own mother. Now he found himself struggling with his tears, that
he wanted to embrace Señora Gregorio, to cry like a child, to hide his face on
her bosom. " Adiós," he said, and seeing a tequila on the counter
just the same, he drank it rapidly.
   
Señora Gregorio took his hand and
held it. "Life changes, you know," she said, gazing at him intently.
"You can never drink of it. I think I see you with your esposa again soon.
I see you laughing together in some kernice place where you laugh." She
smiled. "Far away. In some kernice place where all those troubles you har
now will har--" The Consul started: what was Señora Gregorio saying?
"Adiós," she added in Spanish, "I have no house only a shadow.
But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours."
   
"Thank you."
   
"Sank you."
   
"Not sank you, Señora Gregorio,
thank you."
   
"Sank you."
   
The coast looked clear: yet when the
Consul pushed out cautiously through the jalousie doors he almost fell over Dr.
Vigil. Fresh and impeccable in his tennis clothes, he was hurrying by,
accompanied by Mr Quincey and the local cinema manager, Señor Bustamente. The
Consul drew back, fearful now of Vigil, of Quincey, of being seen coming out of
the cantina, but they appeared not to notice him as they glided past the
Tomalín camion, which had just arrived, their elbows working like jockeys,
chattering unceasingly. He suspected their conversation to be entirely about
him; what could be done with him, they were asking, how many drinks had he put
away at the Gran Baile last night? Yes, there they were, even going towards the
Bella Vista itself, to get a few more "opinions" about him. They
flitted here and there, vanished...
   
Es inevitable la muerte del Papa.

   
DOWNHILL...
   
"Let in the clutch, step on the
gas," the driver threw a smile over his shoulder. "Sure, Mike,"
he went on Irish-American for them.
   
The bus, a 1918 Chevrolet, jerked
forward with a noise like startled poultry. It wasn't full, save for the
Consul, who spread himself, in a good mood, drunk-sober-uninhibited; Yvonne sat
neutral but smiling: they'd started anyhow. No wind; yet a gust lifted the
awnings along the street. Soon they were rolling in a heavy sea of chaotic
stone. They passed tall hexagonal stands pasted with advertisements for Yvonne's
cinema: Las Manos de Orlac. Elsewhere posters for the same film showed a
murderer's hands laced with blood.
   
They advanced slowly, past the Baños
de la Libertad, the Casa Brandes (La Primera en el Ramo de Electricidad), a
hooded hooting intruder through the narrow tilted streets. At the market they
stopped for a group of Indian women with baskets of live fowl. The women's
strong faces were the colour of dark ceramic ware. There was a massiveness in
their movements as they settled themselves. Two or three had cigarette stubs
behind their ears, another chewed an old pipe. Their good-humoured faces of old
idols were wrinkled with sun but they did not smile.
   
--"Look! O.K." the driver
of the bus invited Hugh and Yvonne, who were changing places, producing, from
beneath his shirt where they'd been nestling, little secret ambassadors of
peace, of love, two beautiful white tame pigeons. "My--ah--my aerial
pigeons."
   
They had to scratch the heads of the
birds who, arching their backs proudly, shone as with fresh white paint. (Could
he have known, as Hugh, from merely smelling the latest headlines had known,
how much nearer even in these moments the Government were to losing the Ebro,
that it would now be a matter of days before Modesto withdrew altogether?) The
driver replaced the pigeons under his white open shirt: "To keep them
warm. Sure, Mike. Yes, sir," he told them."Vámonos!"
   
Someone laughed as the bus lurched
off; the faces of the other passengers slowly cracked into mirth, the camión
was welding the old women into a community. The clock over the market arch,
like the one in Rupert Brooke, said ten to three; but it was twenty to. They
rambled and bounced into the main highway, the Avenida de la Revolución, past
offices whose windows proclaimed, while the Consul nodded his head
deprecatingly, Dr. Arturo Diaz Vigil, Médico Cirujano y Partero, past the
cinema itself.--The old women didn't look as though they knew about the Battle
of the Ebro either. Two of them were holding an anxious conversation, in spite
of the clatter and squeak of the patient floorboards, about the price of fish.
Used to tourists, they took no notice of them. Hugh conveyed to the Consul:
   
"How are the rajah shakes?"
   
Inhumaciones: the Consul, laughingly
pinching one ear, was pointing for answer at the undertakers' jolting by, where
a parrot, head cocked, looked down from its perch suspended in the entrance,
above which a sign inquired:
   
Quo Vadis?
   
Where they were going immediately was
down, at a snail's pace, by a secluded square with great old trees, their
delicate leaves like new spring green. In the garden under the trees were doves
and a small black goat. ¿Le gusta este jardín, que es suyo? ¡Evite que sus
hijos lo destruyan! Do you like this garden, the notice said, that is yours?
See to it that your children do not destroy it!
   
... There were no children, however,
in the garden; just a man sitting alone on a stone bench. This man was
apparently the devil himself, with a huge dark red face and horns, fangs, and his
tongue hanging out over his chin, and an expression of mingled evil, lechery,
and terror. The devil lifted his mask to spit, rose, and shambled through the
garden with a dancing, loping step towards a church almost hidden by the trees.
There was a sound of clashing machetes. A native dance was going on beyond some
awnings by the church, on the steps of which two Americans, Yvonne and he had
seen earlier, were watching on tiptoe, craning their necks.
   
"Seriously," Hugh repeated
to the Consul, who seemed calmly to have accepted the devil, while Hugh
exchanged a look of regret with Yvonne, for they had seen no dancing in the
zócalo, and it was now too late to get out.
   
"Quod semper, quod ubique, quod
ab omnibus!"
   
They were crossing a bridge at the bottom
of the hill, over the ravine. It appeared overtly horrendous here. In the bus
one looked straight down, as from the maintruck of a sailing ship, through
dense foliage and wide leaves that did not at all conceal the treachery of the
drop; its steep banks were thick with refuse, which even hung on the bushes.
Turning, Hugh saw a dead dog right at the bottom, nuzzling the refuse; white
bones showed through the carcass. But above was the blue sky and Yvonne looked
happy when Popocatepetl sprang into view, dominating the landscape for a while
as they climbed the hill beyond. Then it dropped out of sight around a corner.
It was a long circuitous hill. Half-way up, outside a gaudily decorated tavern,
a man in a blue suit and strange headgear, swaying gently and eating half a
melon, awaited the bus. From the interior of this tavern, which was called El
Amor de los Amores, came a sound of singing. Hugh caught sight of what appeared
to be armed policemen drinking at the bar. The camión slithered, banking with wheels
locked to a stop alongside the sidewalk.
   
The driver dashed into the tavern,
leaving the tilted camión; which meanwhile the man with the melon had boarded,
throbbing away to itself. The driver emerged; he hurled himself back on to the
vehicle, jamming it almost simultaneously into gear. Then, with an amused
glance over his shoulder at the man, and a look to his trusting pigeons, he
urged his bus up the hill:
   
"Sure, Mike. Sure. O.K.
boy."
   
The Consul was pointing back at the
El Amor de los Amores:
   
"Viva Franco... That's one of
your Fascist joints, Hugh."
   
"So?"
   
"That hophead's the brother of
the proprietor, I believe. I can tell you this much... He's not an aerial
pigeon." "A what?...Oh."
   
"You may not think it, but he's
a Spaniard."
   
The seats ran lengthwise and Hugh
looked at the man in the blue suit opposite, who had been talking thickly to
himself, who now, drunk, drugged, or both, seemed sunk in stupor. There was no
conductor on the bus. Perhaps there would be one later, evidently fares were to
be paid the driver on getting off, so none bothered him. Certainly his
features, high, prominent nose and firm chin, were of strongly Spanish cast.
His hands--in one he still clutched the gnawed half-melon--were huge, capable
and rapacious. Hands of the conquistador, Hugh thought suddenly. But his
general aspect suggested less the conquistador than, it was Hugh's perhaps too
neat idea, the confusion that tends eventually to overtake conquistadores. His
blue suit was of quite expensive cut, the open coat, it appeared, shaped at the
waist. Hugh had noticed his broad-cuffed trousers draped well over expensive
shoes. The shoes however--which had been shined that morning but were soiled
with saloon sawdust--were full of holes. He wore no tie. His handsome purple
shirt, open at the neck, revealed a gold crucifix. The shirt was torn and in
places hung out over his trousers. And for some reason he wore two hats, a kind
of cheap Homburg fitting neatly over the broad crown of his sombrero.
   
"How do you mean Spaniard?"
Hugh said.
   
"They came over after the
Moroccan war," the Consul said. "A pelado," he added, smiling.
   
The smile referred to an argument
about this word he'd had with Hugh, who'd seen it defined somewhere as a
shoeless illiterate. According to the Consul, this was only one meaning:
pelados were indeed "peeled ones," the stripped, but also those who
did not have to be rich to prey on the really poor. For instance those
half-breed petty politicians who will, in order to get into office just for one
year, in which year they hope to put by enough to forswear work the rest of
their lives, do literally anything whatsoever, from shining shoes, to acting as
one who was not an "aerial pigeon." Hugh understood this word finally
to be pretty ambiguous. A Spaniard, say, could interpret it as Indian, the
Indian he despised, used, made drunk. The Indian, however, might mean Spaniard
by it. Either might mean by it anyone who made a show of himself. It was
perhaps one of those words that had actually been distilled out of conquest,
suggesting, as it did, on the one hand thief, on the other exploiter.
Interchangeable ever were the terms of abuse with which the aggressor
discredits those about to be ravaged!
   
The hill behind them, the bus was stopping
opposite the foot of an avenue, with fountains, leading to a hotel: the Casino
de la Selva. Hugh made out tennis courts, and white figures moving, the
Consul's eyes pointed--there were Dr. Vigil and M. Laruelle. M. Laruelle, if it
was he, tossed a ball high into the blue, smacked it down, but Vigil walked
right past it, crossing to the other side.
   
Here the American highway really
began; and they enjoyed a brief stretch of good road. The camión reached the
railway station, sleepy, signals up, points locked in somnolence. It was closed
like a book. Unusual pullmans snored along a siding. On the embankment Pearce
oiltanks were pillowed. Their burnished silver lightning alone was awake,
playing hide-and-seek among the trees. And on that lonely platform tonight he
himself would stand, with his pilgrim's bundle.
   
QUAUHNAHUAC
   
"How are you?" (meaning how
much more!) Hugh smiled, leaning over to Yvonne.
   
"This is such fun--"
   
Like a child Hugh wanted everyone to
be happy on a trip. Even had they been going to the cemetery he would have
wanted them to be happy. But Hugh felt more as if, fortified by a pint of
bitter, he were going to play in some important "away" match for a
school fifteen in which he'd been included at the last minute: when the dread,
hard as nails and boots, of the foreign twenty-five line, of the whiter, taller
goalposts, expressed itself in a strange exaltation, an urgent desire to
chatter. The noonday languor had passed him by: yet the naked realities of the
situation, like the spokes of a wheel, were blurred in motion towards unreal
high events. This trip now seemed to him the best of all possible ideas. Even
the Consul seemed still in a good mood. But communication between them all soon
became again virtually impossible; the American highway rolled away into the
distance.
   
They left it abruptly, rough stone
walls shut out the view. Now they were rattling between leafy hedges full of
wild flowers with deep royal bluebells. Possibly, another kind of convolvulus.
Green and white clothing hung on the cornstalks outside the low grass-roofed
houses. Here the bright blue flowers climbed right up into the trees that were
already snowy with blooms.
   
To their right, beyond a wall that
suddenly became much higher, now lay their grove of the morning. And here,
announced by its smell of beer, was the Cervecería Quauhnahuac itself. Yvonne
and Hugh, around the Consul, exchanged a look of encouragement and friendship.
The massive gate was still open. How swiftly they clattered past! Yet not
before Hugh had seen again the blackened and leaf-covered tables and, in the
distance, the fountain choked with leaves. The little girl with the armadillo
had gone, but the visored man resembling a gamekeeper was standing alone in the
courtyard, his hands behind his back, watching them. Along the wall the
cypresses stirred gently together, enduring their dust.
   
Beyond the level-crossing the Tomalín
road became smoother for a time. A cool breeze blew gratefully through the
windows into the hot camión. Over the plains to their right wound now the
interminable narrow-gauge railway, where--though there were twenty-one other
paths they might have taken!--they had ridden home abreast. And there were the
telegraph poles refusing, for ever, that final curve to the left, and striding
straight ahead... In the square too they'd talked of nothing but the Consul.
What a relief, and what a joyful relief for Yvonne, when he'd turned up at the
Terminal after all!--But the road was rapidly growing much worse again, it was
now well-nigh impossible to think, let alone talk--
   
They jogged on into ever rougher and
rougher country. Popocatepetl came in view, an apparition already circling
away, that beckoned them forward. The ravine appeared once more on the scene,
patiently creeping after them in the distance. The camión crashed down a
pothole with a deafening jolt that threw Hugh's soul between his teeth. And
then crashed into, and over, a second series of deeper potholes:
   
"This is like driving over the
moon," he tried to say to Yvonne.
   
She couldn't hear... He noticed new
fine lines about her mouth, a weariness that had not been there in Paris. Poor
Yvonne! May she be happy. May everything come, somehow, right. May we all be
happy. God bless us. Hugh now wondered if he should produce, from his inside
pocket, a very small pinch bottle of habanero he had acquired, against
emergency, in the square, and frankly offer the Consul a drink. But he
obviously didn't need it yet. A faint calm smile played about the Consul's lips
which from time to time moved slightly, as if, in spite of the racket, the
swaying and jolting, and their continually being sent sprawling against one
another, he were solving a chess problem, or reciting something to himself.