Under the Volcano (9 page)

   
The street was now absolutely
deserted and save for the gushing murmurous gutters that now became like two
fierce little streams racing each other, silent: it reminded her, confusedly,
of how in her heart's eye, before she'd met Louis, and when she'd half imagined
the Consul back in England, she'd tried to keep Quauhnahuac itself, as a sort
of safe footway where his phantom could endlessly pace, accompanied only by her
own consoling unwanted shadow, above the rising waters of possible catastrophe.
   
Then since the other day Quauhnahuac
had seemed, though emptied still, different--purged, swept clean of the past,
with Geoffrey here alone, but now in the flesh, redeemable, wanting her help.
   
And here Geoffrey indeed was, not
only not alone, not only not wanting her help, but living in the midst of her
blame, a blame by which, to all appearances, he was curiously sustained--
   
Yvonne gripped her bag tightly,
suddenly lightheaded and barely conscious of the landmarks the Consul, who
seemed recovered in spirits, was silently indicating with his stick: the country
lane to the right, and the little church that had been turned into a school
with the tombstones and the horizontal bar in the playground, the dark entrance
in the ditch--the high walls on both sides had temporarily disappeared
altogether--to the abandoned iron mine running under the garden.
   
To and fro from school..
   
Popocatepetl
   
It was your shining day...
   
The Consul hummed. Yvonne felt her
heart melting. A sense of a shared, a mountain peace seemed to fall between
them; it was false, it was a lie, but for a moment it was almost as though they
were returning home from marketing in days past. She took his arm, laughing,
they fell into step. And now here were the walls again, and their drive sloping
down into the street where no one had allayed the dust, already paddled by
early bare feet, and now here was their gate, off its hinges and lying just
beyond the entrance, as for that matter it always had lain, defiantly, half
hidden under the bank of bougainvillea.
   
"There now, Yvonne. Come along,
darling... We're almost home!"
   
"Yes."
   
"Strange--" the Consul
said. A hideous pariah dog followed them in.

   
The tragedy, proclaimed, as they made their way up the crescent of the drive,
no less by the gaping potholes in it than by the tall exotic plants, livid and
crepuscular through his dark glasses, perishing on every hand of unnecessary
thirst, staggering, it almost appeared, against one another, yet struggling
like dying voluptuaries in a vision to maintain some final attitude of potency,
or of a collective desolate fecundity, the Consul thought distantly, seemed to
be reviewed and interpreted by a person walking at his side suffering for him
and saying: "Regard: see how strange, how sad, familiar things may be.
Touch this tree, once your friend: alas, that that which you have known in the
blood should ever seem so strange! Look up at that niche in the wall over there
on the house where Christ is still, suffering, who would help you if you asked
him: you cannot ask him. Consider the agony of the roses. See, on the lawn
Concepta's coffee beans, you used to say they were María's, drying in the sun.
Do you know their sweet aroma any more? Regard: the plantains with their queer
familiar blooms, once emblematic of life, now of an evil phallic death. You do
not know how to love these things any longer. All your love is the cantinas
now: the feeble survival of a love of life now turned to poison, which only is
not wholly poison, and poison has become your daily food, when in the
tavern--"
   
"Has Pedro gone too then?"
Yvonne was holding his arm tightly but her voice was almost natural, he felt.
   
"Yes, thank God!"
   
"How about the cats?"
   
"Perro!" the Consul,
removing his glasses, said amiably to the pariah dog that had appeared
familiarly at heel. But the animal cowered back down the drive. "Though
the garden's a rajah mess, I'm afraid. We've been virtually without a gardener
at all for months. Hugh pulled up a few weeds. He cleaned out the swimming-pool
too... Hear it? It ought to be full today." The drive widened to a small
arena then debouched into a path cutting obliquely across the narrow sloping
lawn, islanded by rose beds, to the "front" door, actually at the
back of the low white house which was roofed with imbricated flower-pot-coloured
tiles resembling bisected drainpipes. Glimpsed through the trees, with its
chimney on the far left, from which rose a thread of dark smoke, the bungalow
looked an instant like a pretty little ship lying at anchor. "No.
Skulduggery and suings for back wages have been my lot. And leaf-cutter ants,
several species. The house was broken into one night when I was out. And flood:
the drains of Quauhnahuac visited us and left us with something that smelt like
the Cosmic Egg till recently. Never mind though, maybe you can--"
   
Yvonne disengaged her arm to lift a
tentacle from a trumpet vine growing across the path:
   
"Oh Geoffrey! Where're my
camellias?--"
   
"God knows." The lawn was
divided by a dry runnel parallel with the house bridged by a spurious plank.
Between floribundia and rose a spider wove an intricate web. With pebbly cries
a covey of tyrant flycatchers swept over the house in quick dark flight. They
crossed the plank and they were on the "stoop."
   
An old woman with a face of a highly
intellectual black gnome the Consul always thought (mistress to some gnarled
guardian of the mine beneath the garden once, perhaps), and carrying the
inevitable mop, the trapeador or American husband, over her shoulder, shuffled
out of the "front" door, scraping her feet--the shuffling and the
scraping however seemingly unidentified, controlled by separate mechanisms.
"Here's Concepta," the Consul said. Yvonne: "Concepta. Concepta,
Señora Firmin." The gnome smiled a childlike smile that momentarily
transformed its face into an innocent girl's. Concepta wiped her hands on her
apron: she was shaking hands with Yvonne as the Consul hesitated, seeing now,
studying with sober interest (though at this point all at once he felt more
pleasantly "tight" than at any time since just before that blank
period last night) Yvonne's luggage on the stoop before him, three bags and a
hatbox so bespangled with labels they might have burst forth into a kind of
bloom, to be saying too, here is your history: Hotel Hilo Honolulu, Villa
Carmona Granada, Hotel Theba Algeciras, Hotel Peninsula Gibraltar, Hotel
Nazareth Galilee, Hotel Manchester Paris, Cosmo Hotel London, the S.S. Ile de
France, Regis Hotel Canada, Hotel Mexico D.F.--and now the new labels, the
newest blossoms: Hotel Astor New York, the Town House Los Angeles, S.S.
Pennsylvania, Hotel Mirador Acapulco, the Compañía Mexicana de Aviación.
"¿El otro señor?" he was saying to Concepta who shook her head with
delighted emphasis. "Hasn't returned yet. A right, Yvonne, I dare say you
want your old room. Anyhow Hugh's in the back one with the machine."
   
"The machine?"
   
"The mowing machine."
   
"--por qué no, agua
caliente," Concepta's soft musical humorous voice rose and fell as she
shuffled and scraped off with two of the bags.
   
"So there's hot water for you,
which is a miracle!"
   
On the other side of the house the
view was suddenly spacious and windy as the sea.
   
Beyond the barranca the plains rolled
up to the very foot of the volcanoes into a barrier of murk above which rose
the pure cone of old Popo, and spreading to the left of it like a University
City in the snow the jagged peaks of Ixtaccihuatl, and for a moment they stood
on the porch without speaking, not holding hands, but with their hands just
meeting, as though not quite sure they weren't dreaming this, each of them
separately on their far bereaved cots, their hands but blown fragments of their
memories, half afraid to commingle, yet touching over the howling sea at night.
   
Immediately below them the small
chuckling swimming-pool was still filling from a leaky hose connected with a
hydrant, though it was almost full; they had painted it themselves once, blue
on the sides and the bottom; the paint had scarcely faded and mirroring the
sky, aping it, the water appeared a deep turquoise. Hugh had trimmed about the
pool's edges but the garden sloped off beyond into an indescribable confusion
of briars from which the Consul averted his eyes: the pleasant evanescent
feeling of tightness was wearing off...
   
He glanced absently round the porch
which also embraced briefly the left side of the house, the house Yvonne hadn't
yet entered at all, and now as in answer to his prayer Concepta was approaching
them down its length. Concepta's gaze was fixed steadfastly on the tray she was
carrying and she glanced neither to right nor left, neither at the drooping
plants, dusty and gone to seed on the low parapet, nor at the stained hammock,
nor the bad melodrama of the broken chair, nor the disembowelled day-bed, nor
the uncomfortable stuffed Quixote's tilting their straw mounts on the house
wall, shuffling slowly nearer them through the dust and dead leaves she hadn't
yet swept from the ruddy tiled floor.
   
"Concepta knows my habits, you
see." The Consul regarded the tray now on which were two glasses, a bottle
of Johnny Walker, half full, a soda siphon, a jarro of melting ice, and the
sinister-looking bottle, also half full, containing a dull red concoction like
bad claret, or perhaps cough mixture. "However this is the strychnine.
Will you have a whisky and soda?... The ice seems to be for your benefit
anyway. Not even a straight wormwood?" The Consul shifted the tray from
the parapet to a wicker table Concepta had just brought out.
   
"Good heavens, not for me, thank
you."
   
"--A straight whisky then. Go
ahead. What have you got to lose?"
   
.".. Let me have some breakfast
first!"
   
"--She might have said yes for
once," a voice said in the Consul's ear at this moment with incredible
rapidity, "for now of course poor old chap you want horribly to get drunk
all over again don't you the whole trouble being as we see it that Yvonne's
long-dreamed-of coming alas but put away the anguish my boy there's nothing in
it," the voice gabbled on, "has in itself created the most important
situation in your life save one namely the far more important situation it in
turn creates of your having to have five hundred drinks in order to deal with
it," the voice he recognized of a pleasant and impertinent familiar,
perhaps horned, prodigal of disguise, a specialist in casuistry, and who added
severely, "but are you the man to weaken and have a drink at this critical
hour Geoffrey Firmin you are not you will fight it have already fought down
this temptation have you not you have not then I must remind you did you not
last night refuse drink after drink and finally after a nice little sleep even
sober up altogether you didn't you did you didn't you did we know afterwards
you did you were only drinking enough to correct your tremor a masterly self-control
she does not and cannot appreciate it"
   
"I don't feel you believe in the
strychnine somehow," the Consul said, with quiet triumph (there was an
immense comfort however in the mere presence of the whisky bottle) pouring
himself from the sinister bottle a half-tumblerful of his mixture. I have
resisted temptation for two and a half minutes at least: my redemption is sure.
"Neither do I believe in the strychnine, you'll make me cry again, you
bloody fool Geoffrey Firmin, I'll kick your face in, O idiot!" That was
yet another familiar and the Consul raised his glass in token of recognition
and drank half its contents thoughtfully. The strychnine--he had ironically put
some ice in it--tasted sweet, rather like cassis; it provided perhaps a species
of subliminal stimulus, faintly perceived: the Consul, who was still standing,
was aware too of a faint feeble wooling of his pain, contemptible....
   
"But can't you see you cabrón
that she is thinking that the first thing you think of after she has arrived
home like this is a drink even if it is only a drink of strychnine the
intrusive necessity for which and juxtaposition cancels its innocence so you
see you might as well in the face of such hostility might you not start now on
the whisky instead of later not on the tequila where is it by the way all right
all right we know where it is that would be the beginning of the end though a
damned good end perhaps but whisky the fine old healthful throat-smarting fire
of your wife's ancestors nació 1820 y siguiendo tan campante and afterwards you
might perhaps have some beer good for you too and full of vitamins for your
brother will be here and it is an occasion and this is perhaps the whole point
for celebration of course it is and while drinking the whisky and later the
beer you could nevertheless still be tapering off poco a poco as you must but
everyone knows it's dangerous to attempt it too quickly still keeping up Hugh's
good work of straightening you out of course you would!" It was his first
familiar again and the Consul sighing put the tumbler down on the tray with a
defiantly steady hand.
   
"What was that you said?"
he asked Yvonne.
   
"I said three times,"
Yvonne was laughing, "for Pete's sake have a decent drink. You don't have
to drink that stuff to impress me... I'll just sit here and cheer."
   
"What?" She was sitting on
the parapet gazing over the valley with every semblance of interested
enjoyment. It was dead calm in the garden itself. But the wind must have
suddenly changed; Ixta had vanished while Popocatepetl was almost wholly
obscured by black horizontal columns of cloud, like smoke drawn across the
mountain by several trains running parallel. "Will you say that
again?" The Consul took her hand.
   
They were embracing, or so it all but
seemed, passionately: somewhere, out of the heavens, a swan, transfixed,
plummeted to earth. Outside the cantina El Puerto del Sol in Independencia the
doomed men would be already crowding into the warmth of the sun, waiting for
the shutters to roll up with a crash of trumpets...
   
"No, I'll stick to the old
medicine, thanks." The Consul had almost fallen backwards on to his broken
green rocking-chair. He sat soberly facing Yvonne. This was the moment then,
yearned for under beds, sleeping in the corners of bars, at the edge of dark
woods, lanes, bazaars, prisons, the moment when--but the moment, stillborn, was
gone: and behind him the ursa horribilis of the night had moved nearer. What
had he done? Slept somewhere, that much was certain. Tak: Tok: help: help: the
swimming-pool ticked like a clock. He had slept: what else? His hand searching
in his dress trousers pockets felt the hard edge of a clue. The card he brought
to light said:
   
Arturo Diaz Vigil
   
Medico Cirujano y Partero
   
Enfermedades de Niños
   
Indisposiciones Nerviosas
   
Consultas de 12 a 2 y de 4 a 7
   
Av. Revolución Numero 8.
   
"--Have you really come back? Or
have you just come to see me?" the Consul was asking Yvonne gently as he
replaced the card.
   
"Here I am, aren't I?" Yvonne
said merrily, even with a slight note of challenge.
   
"Strange," the Consul
commented, half trying to rise for the drink Yvonne had ratified in spite of
himself and the quick voice that protested: "You bloody fool Geoffrey
Firmin, I'll kick your face in if you do, if you have a drink I'll cry, O
idiot!" "Yet it's awfully courageous of you. What if--I'm in a
frightfully jolly mess, you know."
   
"But you look amazingly well I
thought. You've no idea how well you look." (The Consul had absurdly
flexed his biceps, feeling them: "Still strong as a horse, so to speak,
strong as a horse!") "How do I look?" She seemed to have said.
Yvonne averted her face a little, keeping it in profile.