Under the Volcano (48 page)

   
"You make a the map of the
Spain? You Bolsheviki prick? You member of the Brigade Internationale and stir
up trouble?"
   
"No," answered the Consul
firmly, decently, but now somewhat agitated. "Absolutamente no."
   
"¿Ab-so-lut-a-mente hey?"
The policeman, with another wink at Diosdado, imitated the Consul's manner. He
came round to the correct side of the bar again, bringing the sombre man with
him who didn't say a word or drink but merely stood there, looking stern, as
did the Elephant, opposite them now, angrily drying glasses. "All,"
he drawled, and "right!" the policeman added with tremendous
emphasis, slapping the Consul on the back. "All right. Come on my
friend--" he invited him. "Drink. Drink a all you ah want to have. We
have been looking for you," he went on in a loud, half bantering, drunken
tone. "You have murdered a man and escaped through seven states. We want
to found out about you. We have founded out--it is right?--you desert your ship
at Vera Cruz? You say you have money. How much money a you have got?"
   
The Consul took out a crumpled note
and replaced it in his pocket. "Fifty pesos, hey. Perhaps that not enough
money. What are you for? ¿Inglés? ¿Español? ¿Americano? ¿Alemán? ¿Russish? You
come a from the you-are-essy-essy? What for are you do?"
   
"I no spikker the English--hey,
what's your names?" someone else asked him loudly at his elbow, and the
Consul turned to see another policeman dressed much like the first, only
shorter, heavy-jowled, with little cruel eyes in an ashen pulpy clean-shaven
face. Though he carried sidearms both his trigger finger and his right thumb
were missing. As he spoke he made an obscene rolling movement of his hips and
winked at the first policeman and at Diosdado though avoiding the eyes of the
man in tweeds. "Progresión al culo," he added, for no reason the
Consul knew of, still rolling his hips.
   
"He is the Chief of
Municipality," the first policeman explained heartily to the Consul.
"This man want to know ah your name. ¿Como se llama?"
   
"Yes, what's your names?"
shouted the second policeman, who had taken a drink from the bar, but not
looking at the Consul and still rolling his hips.
 
  
"Trotsky," gibed someone from the far end of the counter, and
the Consul, beard-conscious, flushed.
   
"Blackstone," he answered
gravely, and indeed, he asked himself, accepting another mescal, had he not and
with a vengeance come to live among the Indians? The only trouble was one was
very much afraid these particular Indians might turn out to be people with
ideas too. "William Blackstone."
   
"Why ah are you," shouted
the fat policeman, whose own name was something like Zuzugoitea, "What ah
are you for?" And he repeated the catechism of the first policeman, whom
he seemed to imitate in everything." "¿Inglés? ¿Alemán?"
   
The Consul shook his head. "No.
Just William Blackstone."
   
"You are Juden?" the first
policeman demanded.
   
"No. Just Blackstone," the
Consul repeated, shaking his head, "William Blackstone. Jews are seldom
very borracho'
   
"You are--ah--a borracho,
hey," the first policeman said, and everyone laughed--several others, his
henchmen evidently, had joined them though the Consul couldn't distinguish them
clearly--save the inflexible indifferent man in tweeds. "He is the Chief
of Gardens," the first policeman explained, continuing; "That man is
Jefe de Jardineros." And there was a certain awe in his tone." I am
chief too, I am Chief of Rostrums," he added, but almost reflectively, as
if he meant "I am only Chief of Rostrums."
   
"And I--" began the Consul.
   
"Am perfectamente
borracho," finished the first policeman, and everyone roared again save
the Jefe de Jardineros.
   
"Y yo--" repeated the
Consul, but what was he saying? And who were these people, really? Chief of
what Rostrums, Chief of what Municipality, above all, Chief of what Gardens?
Surely this silent man in tweeds, sinister too, though apparently the only one
unarmed in the group, wasn't the one responsible for all those little public
gardens. Albeit the Consul was prompted by a shadowy prescience he already had
concerning the claimants to these titular pretensions. They were associated in
his mind with the Inspector General of the State and also as he had told Hugh
with the Unión Militar. Doubtless he'd seen them here before in one of the
rooms or at the bar, but certainly never at such close quarters as this.
However so many questions he was unable to answer were being showered upon him
by so many different people this significance was almost forgotten. He
gathered, though, that the respected Chief of Gardens, to whom at this moment
he sent a mute appeal for help, might be even "higher" than the
Inspector-General himself. The appeal was answered by a blacker look than ever:
at the same time the Consul knew where he'd seen him before; the Chief of
Gardens might have been the image of himself when, lean, bronzed, serious,
beardless, and at the crossroads of his career, he had assumed the
Vice-Consulship in Granada. Innumerable tequilas and mescals were being brought
and the Consul drank everything in sight without regard for ownership,
"It's not enough to say they were at the El Amor de los Amores
together," he heard himself repeating--it must have been in answer to some
insistent demand for the story of this afternoon, though why it should be made
at all he didn't know--"What matters is how the thing happened. Was the
peon--perhaps he wasn't quite a peon--drunk? Or did he fail from his horse?
Perhaps the thief just recognized a boon companion who owed him a drink or
two--"
   
Thunder growled outside the Farolito.
He sat down. It was an order. Everything was growing very chaotic. The bar was
now nearly full. Some of the drinkers had come from the graveyards, Indians in
loose-fitting clothes. There were dilapidated soldiers with among them here and
there a more smartly dressed officer. He distinguished in the glass rooms
bugles and green lariats moving. Several dancers had entered dressed in long
black cloaks streaked with luminous paint to represent skeletons. The Chief of
Municipality was standing behind him now. The Chief of Rostrums was standing
too, talking on his right with the Jefe de Jardineros, whose name, the Consul had
discovered, was Fructuoso Sanabria. "Hullo, qué tal?" asked the
Consul. Someone was sitting next him with his back half turned who also seemed
familiar. He looked like a poet, some friend of his college days. Fair hair
fell over his fine forehead. The Consul offered him a drink which this young
man not only refused, in Spanish, but rose to refuse, making a gesture with his
hand of pushing the Consul away, then moving, with angry half-averted face, to
the far end of the bar. The Consul was hurt. Again he sent a mute appeal for
help to the Chief of Gardens: he was answered by an implacable, an almost final
look. For the first time the Consul scented the tangibility of his danger. He
knew Sanabria and the first policemen were discussing him with the utmost hostility,
deciding what to do with him. Then he saw they were trying to catch the Chief
of Municipality's attention. They were breasting their way, just the two of
them, behind the bar again to a telephone he hadn't noticed, and the curious
thing about this telephone was that it seemed to be working properly. The Chief
of Rostrums did the talking: Sanabria stood by grimly, apparently giving
instructions. They were taking their time, and realizing the call would be
about him, whatever its nature, the Consul, with a slow burning pain of
apprehension, felt again how lonely he was, that all around him in spite of the
crowd, the uproar, slightly muted at a gesture from Sanabria, stretched a
solitude like the wilderness of grey heaving Atlantic conjured to his eyes a
little while since with María, only this time no sail was in sight. The mood of
mischievousness and release had vanished completely. He knew he'd half hoped
all along Yvonne would come to rescue him, knew, now, it was too late, she
would not come. Ah, if Yvonne, if only as a daughter, who would understand and
comfort him, could only be at his side now! Even if but to lead him by the
hand, drunkenly homeward through the stone fields, the forests--not interfering
of course with his occasional pulls at the bottle, and ah, those burning
draughts in loneliness, he would miss them, wherever he was going, they were
perhaps the happiest things his life had known!--as he had seen the Indian
children lead their fathers home on Sundays. Instantly, consciously, he forgot
Yvonne again. It ran in his head he could perhaps leave the Farolito at this
moment by himself, unnoticed and without difficulty, for the Chief of
Municipality was still deep in conversation, while the backs of the two other
policemen at the telephone were turned, yet he made no move. Instead, leaning
his elbows on the bar, he buried his face in his hands.
   
He saw again in his mind's eye that
extraordinary picture on Laruelle's wall, Los Borrachones, only now it took on
a somewhat different aspect. Might it have another meaning, that picture,
unintentional as its humour, beyond the symbolically obvious? He saw those
people like spirits appearing to grow more free, more separate, their
distinctive noble faces more distinctive, more noble, the higher they ascended
into the light; those florid people resembling huddled fiends, becoming more
like each other, more joined together, more as one fiend, the farther down they
hurled into the darkness. Perhaps all this wasn't so ludicrous. When he had
striven upwards, as at the beginning with Yvonne, had not the
"features" of life seemed to grow more clear, more animated, friends
and enemies more identifiable, special problems, scenes, and with them the
sense of his own reality, more separate from himself? And had it not turned out
that the farther down he sank, the more those features had tended to dissemble,
to cloy and clutter, to become finally little better than ghastly caricatures
of his dissimulating inner and outer self, or of his struggle, if struggle there
were still? Yes, but had he desired it, willed it, the very material world,
illusory though that was, might have been a confederate, pointing the wise way.
Here would have been no devolving through failing unreal voices and forms of
dissolution that became more and more like one Voice to a death more dead than
death itself, but an infinite widening, an infinite evolving and extension of
boundaries, in which the spirit was an entity, perfect and whole: ah, who knows
why man, however beset his chance by lies, has been offered love? Yet it had to
be faced, down, down he had gone, down till--it was not the bottom even now, he
realized. It was not the end quite yet. It was as if his fall had been broken
by a narrow ledge, a ledge from which he could neither climb up nor down, on
which he lay bloody and half stunned, while far below him the abyss yawned,
waiting. And on it as he lay he was surrounded in delirium by these phantoms of
himself, the policemen, Fructuoso Sanabria, that other man who looked like a poet,
the luminous skeletons, even the rabbit in the corner and the ash and sputum on
the filthy floor--did not each correspond, in a way he couldn't understand yet
obscurely recognized, to some fraction of his being? And he saw dimly too how
Yvonne's arrival, the snake in the garden, his quarrel with Laruelle and later
with Hugh and Yvonne, the infernal machine, the encounter with Señora Gregorio,
the finding of the letters, and much beside, how all the events of the day
indeed had been as indifferent tufts of grass he had half-heartedly clutched at
or stones loosed on his downward flight, which were still showering on him from
above. The Consul produced his blue package of cigarettes with the wings on
them: Alas! He raised his head again; no, he was where he was, there was
nowhere to fly to. And it was as if a black dog had settled on his back,
pressing him to his seat.
   
The Chief of Gardens and the Chief of
Rostrums were still waiting by the telephone, perhaps for the right number.
Probably they would be calling the Inspector-General: but what if they'd
forgotten him, the Consul--what if they weren't phoning about him at all? He
remembered his dark glasses he had removed to read Yvonne's letters and, some
fatuous notion of disguise crossing his mind, put them on. Behind him the Chief
of Municipality was still engrossed; now once more, he could go. With the aid
of his dark glasses, what could be simpler? He could go--only he needed another
drink; one for the road. Moreover he realized he was wedged in by a solid mass
of people and that, to make matters worse, a man sitting at the bar next him
wearing a dirty sombrero on the back of his head and a cartridge belt hanging
low down his trousers had clutched him by the arm affectionately; it was the
pimp, the stool pigeon, of the mingitorio. Hunched in almost precisely the same
posture as before, he had apparently been talking to him for the last five
minutes.
   
"My friend for my," he was
babbling. "All dees men nothing for you, or for me. All dees men--nothing
for you, or for me! All dees men, son of a bitch... Sure, you Englisman!"
He clutched the Consul's arm more firmly. "All my! Mexican men: all tine
Englisman, my friend, Mexican! I don't care son of a bitch American: no good
for you, or for me, my Mexican all tine, all tine, all tine--eh?--"
   
The Consul withdrew his arm but was
immediately clutched on his left by a man of uncertain nationality, cross-eyed
with drink, who resembled a sailor. "You limey," he stated flatly,
swivelled round his stool. "I'm from the county of Pope," yelled this
unknown man, very slowly, putting his arm now through the Consul's. "What
do you think? Mozart was the man what writ the Bible. You're here to the off
down there. Man here, on the earth, shall be equal. And let there be tranquillity.
Tranquillity means peace. Peace on earth, of all men--"