Under the Volcano (50 page)

   
Daily... Londres Presse. Collect
antisemitic campaign mex-press propetition... textile manufacture's unquote...
German behind...interiorwards. What was this?... news... jews... country
belief... power ends conscience... unquote stop Firmin.
   
"No. Blackstone," the
Consul said.
   
"¿Como se llama? Your name is
Firmin. It say there: Firmin. It say you are Juden."
   
"I don't give a damn what it
says anywhere. My name's Blackstone, and I'm not a journalist. True, vero, I'm
a writer, an escritor, only on economic matters," the Consul wound up.
   
"Where your papers? What for you
have no papers?" The Chief of Rostrums asked, pocketing Hugh's cable.
"Where your pasaporte? What need for you to make disguise?"
   
The Consul removed his dark glasses.
Mutely to him, between sardonic thumb and forefinger, the Chief of Gardens held
out the card: Federación Anarquista Ibérica, it said. Sr Hugo Firmin.
   
"No comprendo," the Consul
took the card and turned it over. "Blackstone's my name. I am a writer,
not an anarchist."
   
"Writer? You antichrista. Sí,
you antichrista prik." The Chief of Rostrums snatched back the card and
pocketed it. "And Juden," he added. He slipped the elastic from
Yvonne's letters and, moistening his thumb, ran through them, glancing sideways
once more at the envelopes. "Chingar. What for you tell lies?" he
said almost sorrowfully. "Cabrón. What for you lie? It say here too: your
name is Firmin." It struck the Consul that the legionnaire Weber, who was
still in the bar, though at a distance, was staring at him with a remote
speculation, but he looked away again. The Chief of Municipality regarded the
Consul's watch, which he held in the palm of one mutilated hand, while he
scratched himself between the thighs with the other, fiercely. "Here,
oiga." The Chief of Rostrums withdrew a ten-peso note from the Consul's
case, crackled it, and threw it on the counter. "Chingao." Winking at
Diosdado he replaced the case in his own pocket with the Consul's other things.
Then Sanabria spoke for the first time to him.
   
"I am afraid you must come to
prison," he said simply in English. He went back to the phone.
   
The Chief of Municipality rolled his
hips and gripped the Consul's arm. The Consul shouted at Diosdado in Spanish,
shaking himself loose. He managed to reach his hand over the bar but Diosdado
struck it away. A Few Fleas began to yap. A sudden noise from the corner
startled everyone. Yvonne and Hugh perhaps, at last. He turned round quickly,
still free of the Chief: it was only the uncontrollable face on the bar-room
floor, the rabbit, having a nervous convulsion, trembling all over, wrinkling
its nose and scuffing disapprovingly. The Consul caught sight of the old woman
with the rebozo: loyally, she hadn't gone. She was shaking her head at him,
frowning sadly, and he now realized she was the same old woman who'd had the
dominoes.
   
"What for you lie?" the
Chief of Rostrums repeated in a glowering voice. "You say your name is
Black. No es Black." He shoved him backwards toward the door. "You
say you are a writer." He shoved him again. "You no are writer."
He pushed the Consul more violently, but the Consul stood his ground. "You
are no a de writer, you are de espider, and we shoota de espiders in
Mejico." Some military policemen watched with concern. The newcomers were
breaking up. Two pariah dogs ran around in the bar. A woman clutched her baby
to her, terrified. "You no writer." The Chief caught him by the
throat. "You Al Capón. You a Jew chingao." The Consul shook himself
free again. "You are a spider."
   
Abruptly the radio, which, as Sanabria
finished with the phone again, Diosdado had turned full blast, shouted in
Spanish the Consul translated to himself in a flash, shouted like orders yelled
in a gale of wind, the only orders that will save the ship: "Incalculable
are the benefits civilization has brought us, incommensurable the productive
power of all classes of riches originated by the inventions and discoveries of
science. Inconceivable the marvellous creations of the human sex in order to
make men more happy, more free, and more perfect. Without parallel the
crystalline and fecund fountains of the new life which still remains closed to
the thirsty lips of the people who follow in their griping and bestial
tasks."
   
Suddenly the Consul thought he saw an
enormous rooster flapping before him, clawing and crowing. He raised his hands
and it merded on his face. He struck the returning Jefe de Jardineros straight
between the eyes. "Give me those letters back!" he heard himself
shouting at the Chief of Rostrums, but the radio drowned his voice, and now a
peal of thunder drowned the radio. "You poxboxes. You coxcoxes. You killed
that Indian. You tried to kill him and make it look like an accident," he
roared. "You're all in it. Then more of you came up and took his horse. Give
me my papers back."
   
"Papers. Cabrón. You har no
papers." Straightening himself the Consul saw in the Chief of Rostrum's
expression a hint of M. Laruelle and he struck at it. Then he saw himself the
Chief of Gardens again and struck that figure; then in the Chief of Municipality
the policeman Hugh had refrained from striking this afternoon and he struck
this figure too. The clock outside quickly chimed seven times. The cock flapped
before his eyes, blinding him. The Chief of Rostrums took him by the coat.
Someone else seized him from behind. In spite of his struggles he was being
dragged towards the door. The fair man who had turned up again helped shove him
towards it; and Diosdado, who had vaulted ponderously over the bar; and A Few
Fleas, who kicked him viciously on die shins. The Consul snatched a machete
lying on a table near the entrance and brandished it wildly. "Give me back
those letters!" he cried. Where was that bloody cock? He would chop off
its head. He stumbled backwards out into the road. People taking tables laden
with gaseosas in from the storm stopped to watch. The beggars turned their
heads dully. The sentinel outside the barracks stood motionless. The Consul
didn't know what he was saying: "Only the poor, only through God, only the
people you wipe your feet on, the poor in spirit, old men carrying their
fathers and philosophers weeping in the dust. America perhaps, Don
Quixote--" he was still brandishing the sword, it was that sabre really,
he thought, in María's room--"if only you'd stop interfering, stop walking
in your sleep, stop sleeping with my wife, only the beggars and the
accursed." The machete fell with a rattle. The Consul felt himself
stumbling backwards until he fell over a tussock of grass. "You stole that
horse," he repeated.
   
The Chief of Rostrums was looking
down at him. Sanabria stood by silent, grimly rubbing his cheek.
"Norteamericano, eh," said the Chief. "Ingles. You Jew." He
narrowed his eyes. "What the hell you think you do around here? You
pelado, eh? It's no good for your health. I shoot de twenty people." It
was half a threat, half confidential. "We have found out--on the
telephone--is it right?--that you are a criminal. You want to be a policeman? I
make you policeman in Mexico."
   
The Consul rose slowly to his feet,
swaying. He caught sight of the horse, tethered near him. Only now he saw it
more vividly and as a whole, electrified: the corded mouth, the shaved wooden
pommel behind which tape was hanging, the saddlebags, the mats under the belt,
the sore and the glossy shine on the hipbone, the number seven branded on the
rump, the stud behind the saddlebuckle glittering like a topaz in the light
from the cantina. He staggered towards it.
   
"I blow you wide open from your
knees up, you Jew chingao," warned the Chief of Rostrums, grasping him by
the collar, and the Chief of Gardens, standing by, nodded gravely. The Consul,
shaking himself free, tore frantically at the horse's bridle. The Chief of
Rostrums stepped aside, hand on his holster. He drew his pistol. With his free
hand he waved away some tentative onlookers. "I blow you wide open from
your knees up, you cabrón," he said, "you pelado."
   
"No, I wouldn't do that,"
said the Consul quietly, turning round. "That's a Colt--17, isn't it? It
throws a lot of steel shavings."
   
The Chief of Rostrums pushed the
Consul back out of the light, took two steps forward, and fired. Lightning
flashed like an inchworm going down the sky and the Consul, reeling, saw above
him for a moment the shape of Popocatepetl, plumed with emerald snow and
drenched with brilliance. The Chief fired twice more, the shots spaced,
deliberate. Thunderclaps crashed on the mountains and then at hand. Released,
the horse reared; tossing its head, it wheeled round and plunged neighing into
the forest.
  
 
At first the Consul felt a queer relief. Now
he realized he had been shot. He fell on one knee, then, with a groan, flat on
his face in the grass. "Christ," he remarked, puzzled, "this is
a dingy way to die."
   
A bell spoke out:
   
Dolente... dolore!
 
  
It was raining softly. Shapes hovered by him, holding his hand, perhaps
still trying to pick his pockets, or to help, or merely curious. He could feel
life slivering out of him like liver, ebbing into the tenderness of the grass.
He was alone. Where was everybody? Or had there been no one? Then a face shone
out of the gloom, a mask of compassion. It was the old fiddler, stooping over
him. "Compañero--" he began. Then he had vanished.
   
Presently the word pelado began to
fill his whole consciousness. That had been Hugh's word for the thief: now
someone had flung the insult at him. And it was as if, for a moment, he had
become the pelado, the thief--yes, the pilferer of meaningless muddled ideas
out of which his rejection of life had grown, who had worn his two or three
little bowler hats, his disguises, over these abstractions: now the realest of
them all was close. But someone had called him compañero too, which was better,
much better. It made him happy. These thoughts drifting through his mind were accompanied
by music he could hear only when he listened carefully. Mozart was it? The
Siciliana. Finale of the D minor quartet by Moses. No, it was something
funereal, of Gluck's perhaps, from Alcestis. Yet there was a Bach-like quality
to it. Bach? A clavichord, heard from far away, in England in the seventeenth
century. England. The chords of a guitar too, half lost, mingled with the
distant clamour of a waterfall and what sounded like the cries of love.
   
He was in Kashmir, he knew, lying in
the meadows near running water among violets and trefoil, the Himalayas beyond,
which made it all the more remarkable he should suddenly be setting out with
Hugh and Yvonne to climb Popocatepetl. Already they had drawn ahead. "Can
you pick bougainvillea?" he heard Hugh say, and, "Be careful,"
Yvonne replied, "It's got spikes on it and you have to look at everything
to be sure there're no spiders." "We shoota de espiders in
Mexico," another voice muttered. And with this Hugh and Yvonne had gone.
He suspected they had not only climbed Popocatepetl but were by now far beyond
it. Painfully he trudged the slope of the foothills toward Amecameca alone.
With ventilated snow goggles, with alpenstock, with mittens and a wool cap
pulled over his ears, with pockets full of dried prunes and raisins and nuts,
with a jar of rice protruding from one coat pocket, and the Hotel Fausto's
information from the other, he was utterly weighed down. He could go no
farther. Exhausted, helpless, he sank to the ground. No one would help him even
if they could. Now he was the one dying by the wayside where no good Samaritan
would halt. Though it was perplexing there should be this sound of laughter in
his ears, of voices: ah, he was being rescued at last. He was in an ambulance
shrieking through the jungle itself, racing uphill past the timberline toward
the peak--and this was certainly one way to get there!--while those were
friendly voices around him, Jacques's and Vigil's, they would make allowances,
would set Hugh and Yvonne's minds at rest about him. "No se puede vivir
sin amar," they would say, which would explain everything, and he repeated
this aloud. How could he have thought so evil of the world when succour was at
hand all the time? And now he had reached the summit. Ah, Yvonne, sweetheart,
forgive me! Strong hands lifted him. Opening his eyes, he looked down,
expecting to see, below him, the magnificent jungle, the heights, Pico de
Orizabe, Malinche, Cofre de Perote, like those peaks of his life conquered one
after another before this greatest ascent of all had been successfully, if
unconventionally, completed. But there was nothing there: no peaks, no life, no
climb. Nor was this summit a summit exactly: it had no substance, no firm base.
It was crumbling too, whatever it was, collapsing, while he was falling,
falling into the volcano, he must have climbed it after all, though now there
was this noise of foisting lava in his ears, horribly, it was in eruption, yet
no, it wasn't the volcano, the world itself was bursting, bursting into black spouts
of villages catapulted into space, with himself falling through it all, through
the inconceivable pandemonium of a million tanks, through the blazing of ten
million burning bodies, falling, into a forest, falling--
   
Suddenly he screamed, and it was as
though this scream were being tossed from one tree to another, as its echoes
returned, then, as though the trees themselves were crowding nearer, huddled
together, closing over him, pitying...
   
Somebody threw a dead dog after him
down the ravine.
   
¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDÍN?