Under the Volcano (41 page)

   
"You have that superstition in
Mexico?" Hugh asked.
   
"Sí, señor," Cervantes
nodded, "the fantasy is that when three friends take fire with the same
match, the last die before the other two. But in war it is impossible because
many soldiers have only one match."
   
"Feurstick," said Hugh,
shielding yet another light for the Consul. "The Norwegians have a better
name for matches."
   
--It was growing darker, the guitar
player, it seemed, was sitting in the corner, wearing dark glasses, they had
missed this bus back, if they'd meant to take it, the bus that was going to
take them home to Tlaxcala, but it seemed to the Consul that, over the coffee,
he had, all at once, begun to talk soberly, brilliantly, and fluently again,
that he was, indeed, in top form, a fact he was sure was making Yvonne,
opposite him, happy once more. Feurstick, Hugh's Norwegian word, was still in
his head. And the Consul was taking about the Indo-Aryans, the Iranians and the
sacred fire, Agni, called down from heaven, with his firesticks, by the priest.
He was talking of soma, Amrita, the nectar of immortality, praised in one whole
book of the Rig Veda--bhang, which was, perhaps, much the same thing as mescal
itself, and, changing the subject here, delicately, he was talking of Norwegian
architecture, or rather how much architecture, in Kashmir, was almost, so to
speak, Norwegian, the Hamadan mosque for instance, wooden, with its tall
tapering spires, and ornaments pendulous from the eaves. He was talking of the
Borda gardens in Quauhnahuac, opposite Bustamente's cinema, and how much they,
for some reason, always reminded him of the terrace of the Nishat Bagh. The
Consul was talking about the Vedic Gods, who were not properly
anthropomorphized, whereas Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl... Or were they not?
In any event the Consul, once more, was talking about the sacred fire, the
sacrificial fire, of the stone soma press, the sacrifices of cakes and oxen and
horses, the priest chanting from the Veda, how the drinking rites, simple at
first, became more and more complicated as time went on, the ritual having to
be carried out with meticulous care, since one slip--tee hee!--would render the
sacrifice invalid. Soma, bhang, mescal, ah yes, mescal, he was back upon that
subject again, and now from it, had departed almost as cunningly as before. He
was talking of the immolation of wives, and the fact that, at the time he was
referring to, in Taxila, at the mouth of the Khyber Pass, the widow of a
childless man might contract a Levirate marriage with her brother-in-law. The
Consul found himself claiming to see an obscure relation, apart from any purely
verbal one, between Taxila and Tlaxcala itself: for when that great pupil of Aristotle's--Yvonne--Alexander,
arrived in Taxila, had he not Cortez-like already been in communication with
Ambhi, Taxila's king, who likewise had seen in an alliance with a foreign
conqueror, an excellent chance of undoing a rival, in this case not Moctezuma
but the Paurave monarch, who ruled the country between the Jhelma and the
Chenab? Tlaxcala... The Consul was talking, like Sir Thomas Browne, of
Archimedes, Moses, Achilles, Methuselah, Charles V, and Pontius Pilate. The
Consul was talking furthermore of Jesus Christ, or rather of Yus Asaf who,
according to the Kashmiri legend, was Christ--Christ, who had, after being
taken down from the cross, wandered to Kashmir in search of the lost tribes of
Israel, and died there, in Srinagar--
   
But there was a slight mistake. The
Consul was not talking. Apparently not. The Consul had not uttered a single
word. It was all an illusion, a whirling cerebral chaos, out of which, at last,
at long last, at this very instant, emerged, rounded and complete, order:
   
"The act of a madman or a
drunkard, old bean," he said, "or of a man labouring under violent
excitement seems less free and more inevitable to the one who knows the mental
condition of the man who performed the action, and more free and less inevitable
to the one who does not know it."
   
It was like a piece on a piano, it
was like that little bit in seven flats, on the black keys--it was what, more
or less, he now remembered, he'd gone to the excusado in the first place in
order to remember, to bring off pat--it was perhaps also like Hugh's quotation
from Matthew Arnold on Marcus Aurelius, like that little piece one had learned,
so laboriously, years ago, only to forget whenever one particularly wanted to
play it, until one day one got drunk in such a way that one's fingers
themselves recalled the combination and, miraculously, perfectly, unlocked the
wealth of melody; only here Tolstoy had supplied no melody.
   
"What?" Hugh said.
   
"Not at all. I always come back
to the point, and take a thing up where it has been left off. How else should I
have maintained myself so long as Consul? When we have absolutely no
understanding of the causes of an action--I am referring, in case your mind has
wandered to the subject of your own conversation, to the events of the
afternoon--the causes, whether vicious or virtuous or what not, we ascribe,
according to Tolstoy, a greater element of free will to it. According to
Tolstoy then, we should have had less reluctance in interfering than we
did..."
   
"All cases without exception in
which our conception of free will and necessity varies depend on three
considerations," the Consul said. "You can't get away from it."
   
"Moreover, according to
Tolstoy," he went on, "before we pass judgement on the thief--if
thief he were--we would have to ask ourselves: what were his connexions with
other thieves, ties of family, his place in time, if we know even that, his
relation to the external world, and to the consequences leading to the act...
Cervantes!"
   
"Of course we're taking time to
find out all this while the poor fellow just goes on dying in the road,"
Hugh was saying. "How did we get on to this? No one had an opportunity to
interfere till after the deed was done. None of us saw him steal the money, to
the best of my knowledge. Which crime are you talking about anyway, Geoff? If
other crime there were... And the fact that we did nothing to stop the thief is
surely beside the point that we did nothing really to save the man's
life."
   
"Precisely," said the
Consul, "I was talking about interference in general, I think. Why should
we have done anything to save his life? Hadn't he a right to die, if he wanted
to?... Cervantes--mescal--no, parras, por favor... Why should anybody interfere
with anybody? Why should anybody have interfered with the Tlaxcalans, for
example, who were perfectly happy by their own stricken in years trees, among
the web-footed fowl in the first lagoon--"
   
"What web-footed fowl in what
lagoon? "
   
"Or more specifically perhaps,
Hugh, I was talking of nothing at all... Since supposing we settled
anything--ah, ignoratio elenchi, Hugh, that's what. Or the fallacy of supposing
a point proved or disproved by argument which proves or disproves something not
at issue. Like these wars. For it seems to me that almost everywhere in the
world these days there has long since ceased to be anything fundamental to man
at issue at all... Ah, you people with ideas!
   
"Ah, ignoratio elenchi!... All
this, for instance, about going to fight for Spain?...and poor little defenceless
China! Can't you see there's a sort of determinism about the fate of nations?
They all seem to get what they deserve in the long run."
   
"Well...."
   
A gust of wind moaned round the house
with an eerie sound like a northerner prowling among the tennis nets in
England, jingling the rings.
   
"Not exactly original."
   
"Not long ago it was poor little
defenceless Ethiopia. Before that, poor little defenceless Flanders. To say
nothing of course of the poor little defenceless Belgian Congo. And tomorrow it
will be poor little defenceless Latvia. Or Finland. Or Piddiedeedee. Or even
Russia. Read history. Go back a thousand years. What is the use of interfering
with its worthless stupid course? Like a barranca, a ravine, choked up with
refuse, that winds through the ages, and peters out in a--What in God's name
has all the heroic resistance put up by poor little defenceless peoples all
rendered defenceless in the first place for some well-calculated and criminal
reason--"
   
"Hell, I told you that--"
   
"--to do with the survival of
the human spirit? Nothing whatsoever. Less than nothing. Countries,
civilizations, empires, great hordes perish for no reason at all, and their
soul and meaning with them, that one old man perhaps you never heard of, and
who never heard of them, sitting boiling in Timbuktu, proving the existence of
the mathematical correlative of ignoratio elenchi with obsolete instruments,
may survive!"
   
"For Christ's sake," said
Hugh.
   
"Just go back to Tolstoy's
day--Yvonne, where are you going?"
   
"Out."
   
"Then it was poor little
defenceless Montenegro. Poor little defenceless Serbia. Or back a little
farther still, Hugh, to your Shelley's, when it was poor little defenceless
Greece--Cervantes!"
   
"--As it will be again, of
course. Or to Boswell's--poor little defenceless Corsica! Shades of
 
Paoli and Monboddo. Applesquires and fairies
strong for freedom. As always. And Rousseau--not douanier--knew he was talking
nonsense--"
   
" I should like to know what the
bloody hell it is you imagine you're talking!"
   
"Why can't people mind their own
damned business!"
   
"Or say what they mean? "
   
"It was something else, I grant
you. The dishonest mass rationalization of motive," justification of the
common pathological itch. Of the motives for interference; merely a passion for
fatality half the time. Curiosity. Experience--very natural... But nothing
constructive at bottom, only acceptance really, a piddling contemptible
acceptance of the state of affairs that flatters one into feeling thus noble or
useful!"
   
"But my God it's against such a
state of affairs that people like the Loyalists--"
   
"But with calamity at the end of
it! There must be calamity because otherwise the people who did the interfering
would have to come back and cope with their responsibilities for a
change--"
   
"Just let a real war come along
and then see how bloodthirsty chaps like you are!"
   
"Which would never do. Why all
you people who talk about going to Spain and fighting for freedom--Cervantes!--should
learn by heart what Tolstoy said about that kind of thing in War and Peace,
that conversation with the volunteers in the train--"
   
"But anyhow that was in--"
   
"Where the first volunteer, I
mean, turned out to be a bragging degenerate obviously convinced after he'd
been drinking that he was doing something heroic--what are you laughing at,
Hugh?"
   
"It's funny."
   
"And the second was a man who
had tried everything and been a failure in all of them. And the third--"
Yvonne abruptly returned and the Consul, who had been shouting, slightly
lowered his voice, "an artillery man, was the only one who struck him at
first favourably. Yet what did he turn out to be? A cadet who'd failed in his
examinations. All of them, you see, misfits, all good for nothing, cowards,
baboons, meek wolves, parasites, every man jack of them, people afraid to face
their own responsibilities, fight their own fight, ready to go anywhere, as
Tolstoy well perceived--"
   
"Quitters?" Hugh said.
"Didn't Karamazov or whoever he was believe that the action of those
volunteers was nevertheless an expression of the whole soul of the Russian
people?--Mind you, I appreciate that a diplomatic corps which merely remains in
San Sebastian hoping Franco will win quickly instead of returning to Madrid to
tell the British Government the truth of what's really going on in Spain can't
possibly consist of quitters!"
   
"Isn't your desire to fight for
Spain, for fiddlededee, for Timbuktu, for China, for hypocrisy, for bugger all,
for any hokery pokery that a few moose-headed idiot sons choose to call
freedom--of course there is nothing of the sort, really--"
   
"If--"
   
"If you've really read War and
Peace, as you claim you have, why haven't you the sense to profit by it, I
repeat?"
   
"At any rate," said Hugh,
"I profited by it to the extent of being able to distinguish it from Anna
Karenina"
   
"Well, Anna Karenina then
..." the Consul paused.
   
"Cervantes!"--and Cervantes
appeared, with his fighting cock, evidently fast asleep, under his arm.
"Muy fuerte" he said, "muy terreebly," passing through the
room, un bruto!--"But as I implied, you bloody people, mark my words, you
don't mind your own business any better at home, let alone in foreign
countries. Geoffrey darling, why don't you stop drinking, it isn't too
late--that sort of thing. Why isn't it? Did I say so?" What was he saying?
The Consul listened to himself almost in surprise at this sudden cruelty, this
vulgarity. And in a moment it was going to get worse. "I thought it was all
so splendidly and legally settled that it was. It's only you that insists it
isn't."
   
"Oh Geoffrey--"
   
--Was the Consul saying this? Must he
say it?--It seemed he must. "For all you know it's only the knowledge that
it most certainly is too late that keeps me alive at all... You're all the
same, all of you, Yvonne, Jacques, you, Hugh, trying to interfere with other
people's lives, interfering, interfering--why should anyone have interfered
with young Cervantes here, for example, given him an interest in cock
fighting?--and that's precisely what's bringing about disaster in the world, to
stretch a point, yes, quite a point, all because you haven't got the wisdom and
the simplicity and the courage, yes, the courage, to take any of the, to take--"