Under the Volcano Read online

  Suddenly with a quietly impatient gesture Yvonne pulled her hat off, and shaking her brown sunbleached hair rose from the parapet. She settled herself on the daybed, crossing her unusually beautiful and aristocratic long legs. The daybed emitted a rending guitar crash of chords. The Consul found his dark glasses and put them on almost playfully. But it had struck him with remote anguish that Yvonne was still waiting for the courage to enter the house. He said consularly in a deep false voice:

  ‘Hugh ought to be here before very long if he comes back by the first bus.’

  ‘What time is the first bus?’

  ‘Half past ten, eleven.’ What did it matter? Chimes sounded from the city. Unless of course it seemed utterly impossible, one dreaded the hour of anyone’s arrival unless they were bringing liquor. What if there had been no liquor in the house, only the strychnine? Could he have endured it? He would be even now stumbling through the dusty streets in the growing heat of the day after a bottle; or have dispatched Concepta. In some tiny bar at a dusty alley corner, his mission forgotten, he would drink all morning celebrating Yvonne’s coming while she slept. Perhaps he would pretend to be an Icelander or a visitor from the Andes or Argentina. Far more than the hour of Hugh’s arrival was to be dreaded the issue that was already bounding after him at the gait of Goethe’s famous church bell in pursuit of the child truant from church. Yvonne twisted her wedding-ring round her finger, once. Did she still wear it for love or for one of two kinds of convenience, or both? Or, poor girl, was it merely for his, for their benefit? The swimming-pool ticked on. Might a soul bathe there and be clean or slake its drought?

  ‘It’s still only eight-thirty.’ The Consul took off his glasses again.

  ‘Your eyes, you poor darling — they’ve got such a glare,’ Yvonne burst out with: and the church bell was nearer; now it had loped, clanging, over a stile and the child had stumbled.

  ‘A touch of the goujeers… Just a touch.’ Die Glocke Glocke tönt nicht mehr… The Consul traced a pattern on one of the porch tiles with his dress shoes in which his sockless feet (sock-less not because as Sr Bustamente the manager of the local cinema would have it, he’d drunk himself into a position where he could afford no socks, but because his whole frame was so neuritic with alcohol he found it impossible to put them on) felt swollen and sore. They would not have, but for the strychnine, damn the stuff, and this complete cold ugly sobriety it had let him down into! Yvonne was sitting on the parapet again leaning against a pillar. She bit her lips, intent on the garden:

  ‘Geoffrey this place is a wreck!’

  ‘Mariana and the moated grange isn’t in it.’ The Consul was winding his wrist-watch. ‘… But look here, suppose for the sake of argument you abandoned a besieged town to the enemy and then somehow or other not very long afterwards you go back to it — there’s something about my analogy I don’t like, but never mind, suppose you do it — then you can’t very well expect to invite your soul into quite the same green graces, with quite the same dear old welcome here and there, can you, eh?’

  ‘But I didn’t abandon –’

  ‘Even, I wouldn’t say, if that town seems to be going about its business again, though in a somewhat stricken fashion, I admit, and its trams running more or less on schedule.’ The Consul strapped his watch firmly on his wrist. ‘Eh?’

  ‘ – Look at the red bird on the tree-twigs, Geoffrey! I never saw a cardinal as big as that before.’

  ‘No.’ The Consul, all unobserved, secured the whisky bottle, uncorked it, smelt its contents, and returned it to the tray gravely, pursing his lips : ‘ You wouldn’t have. Because it isn’t a cardinal.’

  ‘Of course that’s a cardinal. Look at its red breast. It’s like a bit of flame!’ Yvonne, it was clear to him, dreaded the approaching scene as much as he, and now felt under some compulsion to go on talking about anything until the perfect inappropriate moment arrived, that moment too when, unseen by her, the awful bell would actually touch the doomed child with giant protruding tongue and hellish Wesleyan breath. ‘There, on the hibiscus!’

  The Consul closed one eye. ‘He’s a coppery-tailed trogon I believe. And he has no red breast. He’s a solitary fellow who probably lives way off in the Canyon of the Wolves over there, away off from those other fellows with ideas, so that he can have peace to meditate about not being a cardinal.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s a cardinal and lives right here in this garden!’

  ‘Have it your own way. Trogon ambiguus ambiguus is the exact name, I think, the ambiguous bird! Two ambiguities ought to make an affirmative and this is it, the coppery-tailed trogon, not the cardinal.” The Consul reached out towards the tray for his empty strychnine glass, but forgetting midway what he proposed to put in it, or whether it wasn’t one of the bottles he wanted first, if only to smell, and not the glass, he dropped his hand and leaned still farther forward, turning the movement into one of concern for the volcanoes. He said:

  ‘Old Popeye ought to be coming out again pretty soon.’

  ‘He seems to be completely obliterated in spinach at the moment –’ Yvonne’s voice quivered.

  The Consul struck a match against their old jest for the cigarette he had somehow failed to place between his lips: after a little, finding himself with a dead match, he put it in his pocket.

  For a time they confronted each other like two mute unspeaking forts.

  The water still trickling into the pool — God, how deadeningly slowly — filled the silence between them… There was something else: the Consul imagined he still heard the music of the ball, which must have long since ceased, so that this silence was pervaded as with a stale thudding of drums. Pariah: that meant drums too. Parián. It was doubtless the almost tactile absence of the music however, that made it so peculiar the trees should be apparently shaking to it, an illusion investing not only the garden but the plains beyond, the whole scene before his eyes, with horror, the horror of an intolerable unreality. This must be not unlike, he told himself, what some insane person suffers at those moments when, sitting benignly in the asylum grounds, madness suddenly ceases to be a refuge and becomes incarnate in the shattering sky and all his surroundings in the presence of which reason, already struck dumb, can only bow the head. Does the madman find solace at such moments, as his thoughts like cannonballs crash through his brain, in the exquisite beauty of the madhouse garden or of the neighbouring hills beyond the terrible chimney? Hardly, the Consul felt. As for this particular beauty he knew it dead as his marriage and as wilfully slaughtered. The sun shining brilliantly now on all the world before him, its rays picking out the timber-line of Popocateped as its summit like a gigantic surfacing whale shouldered out of the clouds again, all this could not lift his spirit. The sunlight could not share his burden of conscience, of sourceless sorrow. It did not know him. Down to his left beyond the plantains the gardener at the Argentinian ambassador’s week-end residence was slashing his way through some tall grasses, clearing the ground for a badminton court, yet something about this innocent enough occupation contained a horrible threat against him. The broad leaves of the plantains themselves dropping gently seemed menacingly savage as the stretched wings of pelicans, shaking before they fold. The movements of some more little red birds in the garden, like animated rosebuds, appeared unbearably jittery and thievish. It was as though the creatures were attached by sensitive wires to his nerves. When the telephone rang his heart almost stopped beating.

  As a matter of fact the telephone was ringing clearly and the Consul left the porch for the dining-room where, afraid of the furious thing, he started to speak into the receiver, then, sweating, into the mouthpiece, talking rapidly — for it was a trunk-call — not knowing what he was saying, hearing Tom’s muted voice quite plainly but turning his questions into his own answers, apprehensive lest at any moment boiling oil pour into his eardrums or his mouth:’ All right. Good-bye… Oh, say, Tom, what was the origin of that silver rumour that appeared in the papers yesterday denied by Washington?
I wonder where it came from… What started it? Yes. All right. Good-bye. Yes, I have, terrible. Oh they did! Too bad. But after all they own it. Or don’t they? Good-bye. They probably will. Yes, that’s all right, that’s all right. Good-bye; good-bye!’… Christ. What does he want to ring me up at this hour of the morning for. What time is it in America? Erikson 43?

  Christ… He hung up the receiver the wrong way and returned to the porch: no Yvonne; after a moment he heard her in the bathroom…

  The Consul was guiltily climbing the Calle Nicaragua.

  It was as if he were toiling up some endless staircase between houses. Or perhaps even old Popeye itself. Never had it seemed such a long way to the top of this hill. The road with its tossing broken stones stretched on for ever into the distance like a life of agony. He thought: 900 pesos = 100 bottles of whisky = 900 ditto tequila. Argal: one should drink neither tequila nor whisky but mescal. It was hot as a furnace too out on the street and the Consul sweated profusely. Away! Away! He was not going very far away, nor to the top of the hill. There was a lane branching to the left before you reached Jacques’s house, leafy, no more than a cart-track at first, then a switchback, and somewhere along that lane to the right, not five minutes’ walk, at a dusty corner, waited a cool nameless cantina with horses probably tethered outside, and a huge white torn cat sleeping below the counter of whom a whiskerando would say: ‘He ah work all night mistair and sleep all day!’ And this cantina would be open,

  This was where he was going (the lane was plainly in sight now, a dog guarding it) to have in peace a couple of necessary drinks unspecified in his mind, and be back again before Yvonne had finished her bath. It was just possible too of course that he might meet —

  But suddenly the Calle Nicaragua rose up to meet him.

  The Consul lay face downward on the deserted street.

  -Hugh, is that you old chap lending the old boy a hand? Thank you so much. For it is perhaps indeed your turn these days to lend a hand. Not that I haven’t always been delighted to help you! I was even delighted in Paris that time you arrived from Aden in a fix over your carte d’identité and the passport you so often seem to prefer travelling without and whose number I remember to this day is 21312. It perhaps gave me all the more pleasure in that it served a while to take my mind from my own tangled affairs and moreover proved to my satisfaction, though some of my colleagues were even then beginning to doubt it, that I was still not so divorced from life as to be incapable of discharging such duties with dispatch. Why do I say this? — Is it in part that you should see that I also recognize how close Yvonne and I had already been brought to disaster before your meeting! Are you listening, Hugh — do I make myself clear? Clear that I forgive you, as somehow I have never wholly been able to forgive Yvonne, and that I can still love you as a brother and respect you as a man. Clear, that I would help you, ungrudgingly, again. In fact ever since Father went up into the White Alps alone and failed to return, though they happened to be the Himalayas, and more often than I care to think these volcanoes remind me of them, just as this valley does of the Valley of the Indus, and as those old turbaned trees in Taxco do of Srinigar, and just as Xochimilco — are you listening, Hugh? — of all places when I first came here, reminded me of those houseboats on the Shalimar you cannot remember, and your mother, my step-mother died, all those dreadful things seeming to happen at once as though the in-laws of catastrophe had suddenly arrived from nowhere, or, perhaps, Damchok, and moved in on us bag and baggage — there has been all too little opportunity to act, so to say, as a brother to you. Mind you I have perhaps acted as a father: but you were only an infant then, and seasick, upon the P. and O., the old erratic Cocanada. But after that and once back in England there were too many guardians, too many surrogates in Harrogate, too many establishments and schools, not to mention the war, the struggle to win which, for as you say rightly it is not yet over, I continue in a bottle and you with the ideas I hope may prove less calamitous to you than did our father’s to him, or for that matter mine to myself. However all this may be — still there, Hugh, lending a hand? — I ought to point out in no uncertain terms that I never dreamed for a moment such a thing as did happen would or could happen. That I had forfeited Yvonne’s trust did not necessarily mean she had forfeited mine, of which one had a rather different conception. And that I trusted you goes without saying. Far less could I have dreamed you would attempt morally to justify yourself on the grounds that I was absorbed in a debauch: there are certain reasons too, to be revealed only at the day of reckoning, why you should not have stood in judgement upon me. Yet I am afraid — are you listening, Hugh? — that long before that day what you did impulsively and have tried to forget in the cruel abstraction of youth will begin to strike you in a new and darker light. I am sadly afraid that you may indeed, precisely because you are a good and simple person at bottom and genuinely respect more than most the principles and decencies that might have prevented it, fall heir, as you grow older and your conscience less robust, to a suffering on account of it more abominable than any you have caused me. How may I help you? How ward it off? How shall the murdered man convince his assassin he will not haunt him? Ah, the past is filled up quicker than we know and God has little patience with remorse! Yet does this help, what I am trying to tell you, that I realize to what degree I brought all this upon myself? Help, that I am admitting moreover that to have cast Yvonne upon you in that fashion was a reckless action, almost, I was going to say, a clownish one, inviting in return the inevitable bladder on the brain, the mouthful and heartful of sawdust. I sincerely hope so… Meantime, however, old fellow, my mind, staggering under the influence of the last half-hour’s strychnine, of the several therapeutic drinks before that, of the numerous distinctly untherapeutic drinks with Dr Vigil before that, you must meet Dr Vigil, I say nothing of his friend Jacques Laruelle to whom for various reasons I have hitherto avoided introducing you — please remind me to get back my Elizabethan plays from him — of the two days’ and one night’s continuous drinking before that, of the seven hundred and seventy-five and a half — but why go on? My mind, I repeat, must somehow, drugged though it is, like Don Quixote avoiding a town invested with his abhorrence because of his excesses there, take a clear cut around — did I say Dr Vigil? –’

  ‘I say I say what’s the matter there?’ The English ‘King’s, Parade’ voice, scarcely above him, called out from behind the steering wheel, the Consul saw now, of an extremely long low car drawn up beside him, murmurous: an M.G. Magna, or some such.

  ‘Nothing.’ The Consul sprang to his feet instantly sober as a judge. ‘Absolutely all right.’

  ‘Can’t be all right, you were lying right down in the road there, what?’ The English face, now turned up toward him, was rubicund, merry, kindly, but worried, above the English striped tie, mnemonic of a fountain in a great court.

  The Consul brushed the dust from his clothes; he sought for wounds in vain; there was not a scratch. He saw the fountain distinctly. Might a soul bathe there and be clean or slake its drought?

  ‘All right, apparently,’ he said, ‘thanks very much.’

  ‘But damn it all I say you were lying right down in the road there, might have run over you, there must be something wrong, what? No?’ The Englishman switched his engine off. ‘I say, haven’t I seen you before or something.’

  ‘ –’

  ‘ –’

  ‘Trinity.’ The Consul found his own voice becoming involuntarily a little more ‘English’. ‘Unless–’

  ‘Caius.’

  ‘But you’re wearing a Trinity tie-’ the Consul remarked with a polite note of triumph.

  ‘Trinity?… Yes. It’s my cousin’s, as a matter of fact.’ The Englishman peered down his chin at the tie, his red merry face become a shade redder. ‘We’re going to Guatemala… Wonderful country this. Pity about all this oil business, isn’t it? Bad show. — Are you sure there’s no bones broken or anything, old man?’

  ‘No. There are no bo
nes broken,’ the Consul said. But he was trembling.

  The Englishman leaned forward fumbling as for the engine switch again. ‘Sure you’re all right? We’re staying at the Bella Vista Hotel, not leaving until this afternoon. I could take you along there for a little shuteye… Deuced nice pub I must say but deuced awful row going on all night. I suppose you were at the ball — is that it? Going the wrong way though, aren’t you? I always keep a bottle of something in the car for an emergency… No. Not Scotch. Irish. Burke’s Irish. Have a nip? But perhaps you’d-’

  ‘Ah…’ The Consul was taking a long draught. ‘Thanks a million.’

  ‘Go ahead… Go ahead…’

  ‘Thanks.’ The Consul handed back the bottle. ‘A million.’

  ‘Well, cheerio.’ The Englishman restarted his engine. ‘Cheerio man. Don’t go lying down in roads. Bless my soul you’ll get run over or run in or something, damn it all. Dreadful road too. Splendid weather, isn’t it?’ The Englishman drove away up the hill, waving his hand.

  ‘If you’re ever in any kind of a jam yourself,’ the Consul cried after him recklessly,’ I’m — wait, here’s my card –’

  ‘Bungho!’

  — It was not Dr Vigil’s card the Consul still held in his hand: but it was certainly not his own. Compliments of the Venezuelan Government. What was this? The Venezuelan Government will appreciate… Wherever could this have sprung from? The Venezuelan Government will appreciate an acknowledgement to the Mnisterio de Relaciones Exteriores. Caracas, Venezuela. Well, now, Caracas — well, why not?