Under the Volcano (36 page)

 
  
The bull pulled against the opposing forces of ropes a while longer,
then subsided gloomily, swinging his head from side to side with those
shuffling sweeps along the ground, into the dust where, temporarily defeated
but watchful, he resembled some fantastic insect trapped at the centre of a
huge vibrating web... Death, or a sort of death, just as it so often was in
life; and now, once more, resurrection. The charros, making strange knotty
passes at the bull with their lariats, were rigging him for his eventual rider,
wherever, and whoever, he might be.
   
--"Thank you." Hugh had
passed her the pinch bottle of habanero also absently. She took a sip and gave
it to the Consul who sat holding the bottle gloomily in his hands without
drinking. And had he not, too, met her at the Bus Terminal?
   
Yvonne glanced around the grandstand:
there was not, so far as she could see, in this whole gathering one other woman
save a gnarled old Mexican selling pulque. No, she was wrong. An American
couple had just climbed up the scaffolding farther down, a woman in a dove-grey
suit, and a man with hornrimmed spectacles, a slight stoop, and hair worn long
at the back, who looked like an orchestra conductor; it was the couple Hugh and
she had seen before in the zócalo, at a corner Novedades buying huaraches and
strange rattles and masks, and then later, from the bus, on the church steps,
watching the natives dancing. How happy they seemed in one another; lovers they
were, or on their honeymoon. Their future would stretch out before them pure
and untrammelled as a blue and peaceful lake, and thinking of this Yvonne's
heart felt suddenly light as that of a boy on his summer holidays, who rises in
the morning and disappears into the sun.
   
Instantly Hugh's shack began to take
form in her mind. But it was not a shack--it was a home! It stood, on
wide-girthed strong legs of pine, between the forest of pine and high, high
waving alders and tall slim birches, and the sea. There was the narrow path
that wound down through the forest from the store, with salmonberries and
thimbleberries and wild blackberry bushes that on bright winter nights of frost
reflected a million moons; behind the house was a dogwood tree that bloomed
twice in the year with white stars. Daffodils and snowdrops grew in the little
garden. There was a wide porch where they sat on spring mornings, and a pier
going right out into the water. They would build this pier themselves when the
tide was out, sinking the posts one by one down the steep slanting beach. Post
by post they'd build it until one day they could dive from the end into the
sea. The sea was blue and cold and they would swim every day, and every day
climb back up a ladder on to their pier, and run straight along it into their
house. She saw the house plainly now; it was small and made of silvery
weathered shingles, it had a red door, and casement windows, open to the sun.
She saw the curtains she had made herself, the Consul's desk, his favourite old
chair, the bed, covered with brilliant Indian blankets, the yellow light of the
lamps against the strange blue of long June evenings, the crab-apple tree that
half supported the open sunny platform where the Consul would work in summer,
the wind in the dark trees above and the surf beating along the shore on stormy
autumn nights; and then the mill-wheel reflections of sunlight on water, as
Hugh described those on the Cervecería Quauhnahuac, only sliding down the front
of their house, sliding, sliding, over the windows, the walls, the reflections
that, above and behind the house, turned the pine boughs into green chenille:
and at night they stood on their pier and watched the constellations, Scorpio
and Triangulum, Bootes and the Great Bear, and then the millwheel reflections
would be of moonlight on water ceaselessly sliding down the wooden walls of
silver overlapping shingles, the moonlight that on the water also embroidered
their waving windows--
   
And it was possible. It was possible!
It was all there, waiting for them. If only she were alone with Geoffrey so she
could tell him of it! Hugh, his cowboy hat on the back of his head, his feet in
their high-heeled boots on the seat in front, seemed now an interloper, a
stranger, part of the scene below. He was watching the rigging of the bull with
intense interest, but becoming conscious of her gaze, his eyelids drooped
nervously and he sought and found his cigarette package, corroborating its
emptiness more with his fingers than his eyes.
   
Down in the arena a bottle was passed
among the men on horseback who handed it to the others working on the bull. Two
of the horsemen galloped about the ring aimlessly. The spectators bought
lemonade, fruit, potato chips, pulque. The Consul himself made as if to buy
some pulque but changed his mind, fingering the habanero bottle.
   
More drunks interfered, wanting to
ride the bull again; they lost interest, became sudden horse fanciers, lost
that concern too, and were chased out, careening.
   
The giant returned with the belching
squealing Rocket, vanished, was sucked away by it. The crowd grew silent, so
silent she could almost make out some sounds that might have been the fair
again, in Quauhnahuac.
   
Silence was as infectious as mirth,
she thought, an awkward silence in one group begetting a loutish silence in
another, which in turn induced a more general, meaningless silence in a third,
until it had spread everywhere. Nothing in the world is more powerful than one
of these sudden strange silences--
   
--the house, dappled with misty light
that fell softly through the small new leaves, and then the mist rolling away
across the water, and the mountains, still white with snow appearing sharp and
clear against the blue sky, and blue wood-smoke from the driftwood fire curling
out of the chimney; the sloping shingled woodshed on whose roof the dogwood
blossoms fell, the wood packed with beauty inside; the axe, the trowels, the
rake, the spade, the deep, cool well with its guardian figure, a flotsam, a
wooden sculpture of the sea, fixed above it; the old kettle, the new kettle, the
teapot, the coffee pot, the double boilers, the saucepans, the cupboard.
Geoffrey worked outside, longhand, as he liked to do, and she sat typing at a
desk by the window--for she would learn to type, and transcribe all his
manuscripts from the slanting script with its queer familiar Greek e's and odd
t's into neat clean pages--and as she worked she would see a seal rise out of
the water, peer round, and sink soundlessly. Or a heron, that seemed made of
cardboard and string, would flap past heavily, to alight majestically on a rock
and stand there, tall and motionless. Kingfishers and swallows flitted past the
eaves or perched on their pier. Or a seagull would glide past perched on a
piece of floating driftwood, his head in his wing, rocking, rocking with the
motion of the sea... They would buy all their food, just as Hugh said, from a
store beyond the woods, and see nobody, save a few fishermen, whose white boats
in winter they would see pitching at anchor in the bay. She would cook and
clean and Geoffrey would chop the wood and bring the water from the well. And
they would work and work on this book of Geoffrey's, which would bring him
world fame. But absurdly they would not care about this; they would continue to
live, in simplicity and love, in their home between the forest and the sea. And
at half-tide they would look down from their pier and see, in the shallow lucid
water, turquoise and vermilion and purple starfish, and small brown velvet
crabs sidling among barnacled stones brocaded like heart-shaped pin-cushions.
While at weekends, out on the inlet, every little while, ferry-boats would pass
ferrying song upstream--
   
The spectators sighed with relief,
there was a leafy rustling among them, something, Yvonne couldn't see what, had
been accomplished down below. Voices began to buzz, the air to tingle once more
with suggestions, eloquent insults, repartee.
   
The bull was clambering to its feet
with its rider, a fat tousle-headed Mexican, who seemed rather impatient and
irritated with the whole business. The bull too looked irritated and now stood
quite still.
   
A string band in the grandstand
opposite struck up Guadalajara out of tune. Guadalajara, Guadalajara, half the
band was singing...
   
"Guadalajara," Hugh slowly
pronounced each syllable.
   
Down up, down down up, down down up,
banged the guitars, while the rider glowered at them, then, with a furious
look, took a firmer grip of the rope round the bull's neck, jerked it, and for
a moment the animal actually did what was apparently expected of it, convulsing
itself violently, like a rocking-machine, and giving little leaps into the air
with all four feet. But presently it relapsed into its old, cruising gait.
Ceasing to participate altogether, it was no longer difficult to ride, and
after one ponderous circuit of the arena, headed straight back for its pen
which, opened by the pressure of the crowd on the fences, it'd doubtless been
secretly longing for all the time, trotting back into it with suddenly
positive, twinkling innocent hooves.
   
Everyone laughed as at a poor joke:
it was laughter keyed to and somewhat increased by a further misfortune, the
premature appearance of another bull, who, driven at a near gallop from the
open pen by the cruel thrusts and pokes and blows intended to arrest him, on
reaching the ring stumbled, and fell headlong into the dust.
   
The first bull's rider, glum and
discredited, had dismounted in the pen: and it was difficult not to feel sorry
for him too, as he stood by the fence scratching his head, explaining his
failure to one of the boys standing, marvellously balanced, on the top
railing--
   
--and perhaps even this month, if
there had been a late Indian summer, she would stand on their porch looking
down over Geoffrey's work, over his shoulder into the water and see an
archipelago, islands of opalescent foam and branches of dead bracken--yet
beautiful, beautiful--and the reflected alder trees, almost bare now, casting
their sparse shadows over the brocaded stones like pincushions, over which the
brocaded crabs scuttled among a few drowned leaves--
   
The second bull made two feeble
attempts to get up, and lay down again; a lone horseman galloped across the
ring swinging a rope and shouting at it in a husky tone: "Booa, shooa,
booa"--other charros appeared with more ropes; the little dog came
scampering up from nowhere, scuttling about in circles; but it did no good.
Nothing definite happened and nothing seemed likely to budge the second bull
who was roped casually where it lay.
   
Everybody became resigned to another
long wait, another long silence, while below, and with a bad conscience, they
halfheartedly set about rigging the second bull.
   
"See the old unhappy bull,"
the Consul was saying, "in the plaza beautiful. Do you mind if I have a
very small drink, darling, a poquitin... No? Thank you. Waiting with a wild
surmise for the ropes that tantalize--"
   
--and gold leaves too, on the
surface, and scarlet, one green, waltzing downstream with her cigarette, while
a fierce autumn sun glared up from beneath the stones--
   
"Or waiting with seven--why
not?--wild surmises, for the rope which tantalizes. Stout Cortes ought to come
into the next bit, gazing at the horrific, who was the least pacific of all
men... Silent on a peak in Quauhnahuac. Christ, what a disgusting
performance--"
   
"Isn't it?" Yvonne said,
and turning away thought she saw standing opposite below the band, the man in
dark glasses who'd been outside the Bella Vista this morning and then later--or
had she imagined it?--standing up beside Cortez Palace. "Geoffrey, who's
that man?"
   
"Strange about the bull,"
the Consul said. "He's so elusive.--There's your enemy, but he doesn't
want to play ball today. He lies down... Or just falls down; see, he's quite
forgotten he's your enemy now, so you think, and pat him... Actually... Next
time you meet him you might not recognize him as an enemy at all."
   
"Es ist vielleicht an ox,"
Hugh muttered.
   
"An oxymoron... Wisely
foolish."
   
The animal lay supine as before, but
momentarily abandoned. People were huddled down below in argumentative groups.
Horsemen also arguing continued to whoop about the ring. Yet there was no
definite action, still less any indication that such was forthcoming. Who was
going to ride the second bull? seemed the main question in the air. But then
what of the first bull, who was raising Cain in the pen and was even with
difficulty being restrained from taking the field again. Meanwhile the remarks
around her echoed the contention in the arena. The first rider hadn't been given
a fair chance, verdad? No hombre, he shouldn't even have been given that
chance. No hombre, he should be given another. Imposseebly, another rider was
scheduled. Vero, he wasn't present, or couldn't come, or was present but wasn't
going to ride, or wasn't present but was trying hard to get here,
verdad?--still, that didn't change the arrangement or give the first rider his
opportunity to try again.
   
Drunks were as anxious as ever to
deputize; one was mounted on the bull now, pretending to ride it already,
though it hadn't moved a fraction. He was dissuaded by the first rider, who
looked very sulky: just in time: at that moment the bull woke up and rolled
over.
   
The first rider was on the point now,
in spite of all comments, of trying again when--no; he had been too bitterly
insulted, and wasn't going to ride on any account. He walked away over towards
the fence, to do some more explaining to the boy still balanced on top.