Under the Volcano Read online

  The track sank level with the scrub-land, then below it, so that the embankments were now above them.

  ‘It isn’t drinking, somehow,’ Yvonne said suddenly. ‘But why does he do it?’

  ‘Perhaps now you’ve come back like this he’ll stop.’

  ‘You don’t sound very hopeful.’

  ‘Yvonne, listen to me. So obviously there are a thousand things to say and there isn’t going to be time to say most of them. It’s difficult to know where to begin. I’m almost completely in the dark. I wasn’t even sure you were divorced till five minutes ago. I don’t know –’ Hugh clicked his tongue at his horse but held her back. ‘As for Geoff,’ he went on, ‘I simply have no idea what he’s been doing or how much he’s been drinking. Half the time you can’t tell when he’s tight anyway.’

  ‘You couldn’t say that if you were his wife.’

  ‘Wait a minute. — My attitude towards Geoff was simply the one I’d take towards some brother scribe with a godawful hangover. But while I’ve been in Mexico City I’ve been saying to myself: ¿Cui bono? What’s the good? Just sobering him up for a day or two’s not going to help. Good God, if our civilization were to sober up for a couple of days it’d the of remorse on the third –’

  ‘That’s very helpful,’ Yvonne said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Besides after a while one begins to feel, if a man can hold his liquor as well as that why shouldn’t he drink?’ Hugh leaned over and patted her horse. ‘No, seriously, why don’t both of you get out, though? Out of Mexico. There’s no reason for you to stay any longer, is there? Geoff loathed the consular service anyway.’ For a moment Hugh watched one of the foals standing silhouetted against the sky on top of the embankment. ‘You’ve got money.’

  ‘You’ll forgive me when I tell you this, Hugh. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to see you. But I tried to get Geoffrey to leave this morning before you came back.’

  ‘It was no go, eh?’

  ‘Maybe it wouldn’t have worked anyhow. We tried it before, this getting away and starting all over. But Geoffrey said something this morning about going on with his book — for the life of me I don’t know whether he’s still writing one or not, he’s never done any work on it since I’ve known him, and he’s never let me see scarcely any of it, still, he keeps all those reference books with him — and I thought –’

  ‘Yes,’ Hugh said, ‘how much does he really know about all this alchemy and cabbala business? How much does it mean to him?’

  ‘That’s just what I was going to ask you. I’ve never been able to find out –’

  ‘Good lord, I don’t know…’ Hugh added with almost avuncular relish: ‘Maybe he’s a black magician!’

  Yvonne smiled absently, flicking her reins against the pommel. The track emerged into the open and once more the embankments sloped down on either side. High overhead sailed white sculpturings of clouds, like billowing concepts in the brain of Michelangelo. One of the foals had strayed from the track into the scrub. Hugh repeated the ritual of whistling, the foal hauled itself back up the bank and they were a company again, trotting smartly along the meandering selfish little railroad. ‘Hugh,’ Yvonne said, ‘I had an idea coming down on the boat… I don’t know whether — I’ve always dreamed of having a farm somewhere. A real farm, you know, with cows and pigs and chickens — and a red barn and silos and fields of corn and wheat.’

  ‘What, no guinea-fowl? I might have a dream like that in a week or two,’ Hugh said. ‘Where does the farm come in?’

  ‘Why — Geoffrey and I might buy one.’

  ’Buy one?’

  ‘Is that so fantastic?’

  ‘I suppose not, but where?’ Hugh’s pint-and-a-half of strong beer was beginning to take pleasurable effect, and all at once he gave a guffaw that was more like a sneeze. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘it was just the notion of Geoff among the alfalfa, in overalls and a straw hat, soberly hoeing, that got me a moment.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have to be as soberly as all that. I’m not an ogre.’ Yvonne was laughing too, but her dark eyes, that had been shining, were opaque and withdrawn.

  ‘But what if Geoff hates farms? Perhaps the mere sight of a cow makes him seasick.’

  ‘Oh no. We often used to talk about having a farm in the old days.’

  ‘Do you know anything about farming?’

  ‘No.’ Yvonne abruptly, delightfully, dismissed the possibility, leaning forward and stroking her mare’s neck. ‘But I wondered if we mightn’t get some couple who’d lost their own farm or something actually to run it for us and live on it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought it exactly a good point in history to begin to prosper as the landed gentry, but still maybe it is. Where’s this farm to be?’

  ‘Well… What’s to stop us going to Canada, for instance?’

  ‘… Canada?… Are you serious? Well, why not, but –’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  They had now reached the place where the railway took its wide leftward curve and they descended the embankment. The grove had dropped behind but there was still thick woodland to their right (above the centre of which had appeared again the almost friendly landmark of the prison watchtower) and stretching far ahead. A road showed briefly along the margin of the woods. They approached this road slowly, following the single-minded thrumming telegraph poles and picking a difficult course through the scrub.

  ‘I mean why Canada more than British Honduras? Or even Tristan da Cunha? A little lonely perhaps, though an admirable place for one’s teeth, I’ve heard. Then there’s Gough Island, hard by Tristan. That’s uninhabited. Still, you might colonize it. Or Sokotra, where the frankincense and myrrh used to come from and the camels climb like chamois — my favourite island in the Arabian Sea.’ But Hugh’s tone though amused was not altogether sceptical as he touched on these fantasies, half to himself, for Yvonne rode a little in front; it was as if he were after all seriously grappling with the problem of Canada while at the same time making an effort to pass off the situation as possessing any number of adventurous whimsical solutions. He caught up with her.

  ‘Hasn’t Geoffrey mentioned his genteel Siberia to you lately?’ she said. ‘You surely haven’t forgotten he owns an island in British Columbia?’

  ‘On a lake, isn’t it? Pineaus Lake. I remember. But there isn’t any house on it, is there? And you can’t graze cattle on fircones and hardpan.’

  ‘That’s not the point, Hugh.’

  ‘Or would you propose to camp on it and have your farm elsewhere?’

  ‘Hugh, listen –’

  ‘But suppose you could only buy your farm in some place like Saskatchewan,’ Hugh objected. An idiotic verse came into his head, keeping time with the horse’s hooves:

  Oh take me back to Poor Fish River,

  Take me back to Onion Lake,

  You can keep the Guadalquivir,

  Como you may likewise take.

  Take me back to dear old Horsefly,

  Aneroid or Gravelburg.…

  ‘In some place with a name like Product. Or even Dumble,’ he went on. ‘There must be a Dumble. In fact I know there’s a Dumble.’

  ‘All right. Maybe it is ridiculous. But at least it’s better than sitting here doing nothing!’ Almost crying, Yvonne angrily urged her horse into a brief wild canter, but the terrain was too rough; Hugh reined in beside her and they halted together.

  ‘I’m awfully, dreadfully sorry.’ Contrite, he took her bridle. ‘I was just being more than unusually bloody stupid.’

  ‘Then you do think it’s a good idea?’ Yvonne brightened slightly, even contriving again an air of mockery.

  ‘Have you ever been to Canada?’ he asked her.

  ‘I’ve been to Niagara Falls.’

  They rode on, Hugh still holding her bridle. ‘I’ve never been to Canada at all. But a Canuck in Spain, a fisherman pal of mine with the Macs-Paps, used to keep telling me it was the most terrific place in the world. British Columbia, at any rate.’
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  ‘That’s what Geoffrey used to say too.’

  ‘Well, Geoff’s liable to be vague on the subject. But here’s what McGoff told me. This man was a Pict. Suppose you land in Vancouver, as seems reasonable. So far not so good. McGoff didn’t have much use for modern Vancouver. According to him it has a sort of Pango Pango quality mingled with sausage and mash and generally a rather Puritan atmosphere. Everyone fast asleep and when you prick them a Union Jack flows out of the hole. But no one in a certain sense lives there. They merely as it were pass through. Mine the country and quit. Blast the land to pieces, knock down the trees and send them rolling down Burrard Inlet… As for drinking, by the way, that is beset,’ Hugh chuckled, ‘everywhere beset by perhaps favourable difficulties. No bars, only beer parlours so uncomfortable and cold that serve beer so weak no self-respecting drunkard would show his nose in them. You have to drink at home, and when you run short it’s too far to get a bottle –’

  ‘But–’ They were both laughing.

  ‘But wait a minute.’ Hugh looked up at the sky of New Spain. It was a day like a good Joe Venuti record. He listened to the faint steady droning of the telegraph poles and the wires above them that sang in his heart with his pint-and-a-half of beer. At this moment the best and easiest and most simple thing in the world seemed to be the happiness of these two people in a new country. And what counted seemed probably the swiftness with which they moved. He thought of the Ebro. Just as a long-planned offensive might be defeated in its first few days by unconsidered potentialities that have now been given time to mature, so a sudden desperate move might succeed precisely because of the number of potentialities it destroys at one fell swoop…

  ‘The thing to do’, he went on, ‘is to get out of Vancouver as fast as possible. Go down one of the inlets to some fishing village and buy a shack slap spang on the sea, with only foreshore rights, for, say a hundred dollars. Then live on it this winter for about sixty a month. No phone. No rent. No consulate. Be a squatter. Call on your pioneer ancestors. Water from the well. Chop your own wood. After all, Geoff’s as strong as a horse. And perhaps he’ll be able really to get down to his book and you can have your stars and the sense of the seasons again; though you can sometimes swim late as November. And get to know the real people: the Seine fishermen, the old boatbuilders, the trappers, according to McGoff the last truly free people left in the world. Meantime you can get your island fixed up and find out about your farm, which previously you’ll have used as a decoy for all you’re worth, if you still want it by then –’

  ‘Oh Hugh, yes —’

  He all but shook her horse with enthusiasm. ‘I can see your shack now. It’s between the forest and the sea and you’ve got a pier going down to the water over rough stones, you know, covered with barnacles and sea anemones and starfish. You’ll have to go through the woods to the store.’ Hugh saw the store in his mind’s eye. The woods will be wet. And occasionally a tree will come crashing down. And sometimes there will be a fog and that fog will freeze. Then your whole forest will become a crystal forest. The ice crystals on the twigs will grow like leaves. Then pretty soon you’ll be seeing the jack-in-the-pulpits and then it will be spring.

  They were galloping… Bare level plain had taken the place of the scrub and they’d been cantering briskly, the foals prancing delightedly ahead, when suddenly the dog was a shoulder-shrugging streaking fleece, and as their mares almost imperceptibly fell into the long untrammelled undulating strides, Hugh felt the sense of change, the keen elemental pleasure one experienced too on board a ship which, leaving the choppy waters of the estuary, gives way to the pitch and swing of the open sea. A faint carillon of bells sounded in the distance, rising and falling, sinking back as if into the very substance of the day. Judas had forgotten; nay, Judas had been, somehow, redeemed.

  They were galloping parallel to the road which was hedgeless and on ground level, then the thudding regular thunder of the hooves struck abruptly hard and metallic and dispersed and they were clattering on the road itself; it bore away to the right skirting the woods round a sort of headland jutting into the plain.

  ‘We’re on the Calle Nicaragua again,’ Ivonne shouted gaily, ‘almost!’

  At a full gallop they were approaching the Malebolge once more, the serpentine barranca, though at a point much farther up than where they’d first crossed it; they were trotting side by side over a white-fenced bridge: then, all at once, they were in the ruin. Yvonne was in it first, the animals seeming to be checked less by the reins than by their own decision, possibly nostalgic, possibly even considerate, to halt. They dismounted. The ruin occupied a considerable stretch of the grassy roadside on their right hand. Near them was what might once have been a chapel, with grass on which the dew still sparkled growing through the floor. Elsewhere were the remains of a wide stone porch with low crumbled balustrades. Hugh, who had quite lost his bearings, secured their mares to a broken pink pillar that stood apart from the rest of the desuetude, a meaningless mouldering emblem.

  ‘What is all this ex-splendour anyway?’ he said.

  ‘Maximilian’s Palace. The summer one, I think. I believe all that grove effect by the brewery was once part of his grounds too.’ Yvonne looked suddenly ill at ease.

  ‘Don’t you want to stop here?’ he had asked her.

  ‘Sure. It’s a good idea. I’d like a cigarette,’ she said hesitantly. ‘But we’ll have to stroll down a ways for Carlotta’s favourite view.’

  ‘The emperor’s mirador certainly has seen better days.’ Hugh, rolling Yvonne a cigarette, glanced absently round the place, which appeared so reconciled to its own ruin no sadness touched it; birds perched on the blasted towers and dilapidated masonry over which clambered the inevitable blue convolvulus; the foals with their guardian dog resting near were meekly grazing in the chapel: it seemed safe to leave them…

  ‘Maximilian and Carlotta, eh?’ Hugh was saying. ‘Should Juarez have had the man shot or not?’

  ‘It’s an awfully tragic story.’

  ‘He should have had old thingmetight, Díaz, shot at the same time and made a job of it.’

  They came to the headland and stood gazing back the way they had come, over the plains, the scrub, the railway, the Tomalín road. It was blowing here, a dry steady wind. Popocateped and Ixtaccihuad. There they lay peacefully enough beyond the valley; the firing had ceased. Hugh felt a pang. On the way down he’d entertained a quite serious notion of finding time to climb Popo, perhaps even with Juan Cerillo —

  ‘There’s your moon for you still,’ he pointed it out again, a fragment blown out of the night by a cosmic storm.

  ‘Weren’t those wonderful names’, she said, ‘the old astronomers gave the places on the moon?’

  ‘The Marsh of Corruption. That’s the only one I can remember.’

  ‘Sea of Darkness… Sea of Tranquillity…’

  They stood side by side without speaking, the wind tearing cigarette smoke over their shoulders; from here the valley too resembled a sea, a galloping sea. Beyond the Tomalín road the country rolled and broke its barbarous waves of dunes and rocks in every direction. Above the foothills, spiked along their rims with firs, like broken bottles guarding a wall, a white onrush of clouds might have been poised breakers. But behind the volcanoes themselves he saw now that storm clouds were gathering. ‘Sokotra,’ he thought, ‘my mysterious island in the Arabian Sea, where the frankincense and myrrh used to come from, and no one has ever been –’

  There was something in the wild strength of this landscape, once a battlefield, that seemed to be shouting at him, a presence born of that strength whose cry his whole being recognized as familiar, caught and threw back into the wind, some youthful password of courage and pride — the passionate, yet so nearly always hypocritical, affirmation of one’s soul perhaps, he thought, of the desire to be, to do, good, what was right. It was as though he were gazing now beyond this expanse of plains and beyond the volcanoes out to the wide rolling blue ocean itself, feeli
ng it in his heart still, the boundless impatience, the immeasurable longing.

  5

  BEHIND them walked the only living thing that shared their pilgrimage, the dog. And by degrees they reached the briny sea. Then, with souls well disciplined they reached the northern region, and beheld, with heaven aspiring hearts, the mighty mountain Himavat… Whereupon the lake was lapping, the lilacs were blowing, the chenars were budding, the mountains were glistening, the waterfalls were playing, the spring was green, the snow was white, the sky was blue, the fruit blossoms were clouds: and he was still thirsty. Then the snow was not glistening, the fruit blossoms were not clouds, they were mosquitoes, the Himalayas were hidden by dust, and he was thirstier than ever. Then the lake was blowing, the snow was blowing, the waterfalls were blowing, the fruit blossoms were blowing, the seasons were blowing — blowing away — he was blowing away himself, whirled by a storm of blossoms into the mountains, where now the rain was falling. But this rain, that fell only on the mountains, did not assuage his thirst. Nor was he after all in the mountains. He was standing, among cattle, in a stream. He was resting, with some ponies, knee-deep beside him in the cool marshes. He was lying face downward drinking from a lake that reflected the white-capped ranges, the clouds piled five miles high behind the mighty mountain Himavat: the purple chenars and a village nestling among the mulberries. Yet his thirst still remained unquenched. Perhaps because he was drinking, not water, but lightness, and promise of lightness —how could he be drinking promise of lightness? Perhaps because he was drinking, not water, but certainty of brightness — how could he be drinking certainty of brightness? Certainty of brightness, promise of lightness, of light, light, light, and again, of light, light, light, light, lightl

  … The Consul, an inconceivable anguish of horripilating hangover thunderclapping about his skull, and accompanied by a protective screen of demons gnattering in his ears, became aware that in the horrid event of his being observed by his neighbours it could hardly be supposed he was just sauntering down his garden with some innocent horticultural object in view. Nor even that he was sauntering. The Consul, who had waked a moment or two ago on the porch and remembered everything immediately, was almost running. He was also lurching. In vain he tried to check himself, plunging his hands, with an extraordinary attempt at nonchalance, in which he hoped might appear more than a hint of consular majesty, deeper into the sweat-soaked pockets of his dress trousers. And now, rheumatisms discarded, he really was running… Might he not, then, be reasonably suspected of a more dramatic purpose, of having assumed, for instance, the impatient buskin of a William Blackstone leaving the Puritans to dwell among the Indians, or the desperate mien of his friend Wilson when he so magnificently abandoned the University Expedition to disappear, likewise in a pair of dress trousers, into the jungles of darkest Oceania, never to return? Not very reasonably. For one thing, if he continued much farther in this present direction towards the bottom of his garden any such visioned escape into the unknown must shortly be arrested by what was, for him, an unscalable wire fence. ‘Do not be so foolish as to imagine you have no object, however. We warned you, we told you so, but now that in spite of all our pleas you have got yourself into this deplorable –’ He recognized the tone of one of his familiars, faint among the other voices as he crashed on through the metamorphoses of dying and reborn hallucinations, like a man who does not know he has been shot from behind.‘ — condition,’ the voice went on severely, ‘you have to do something about it. Therefore we are leading you towards the accomplishment of this something.’ ‘I’m not going to drink,’ the Consul said, halting suddenly. ‘Or am I? Not mescal anyway.’ ‘Of course not, the bottle’s just there, behind that bush. Pick it up.’ ‘I can’t,’ he objected — ‘That’s right, just take one drink, just the necessary, the therapeutic drink: perhaps two drinks.’ ‘God,’ the Consul said. ‘Ah. Good. God. Christ.’ ‘Then you can say it doesn’t count.’ ‘It doesn’t. It isn’t mescal.’ ‘Of course not, it’s tequila, You might have another.’ ‘Thanks, I will.’ The Consul palsiedly readjusted the bottle to his lips.’Bliss. Jesus. Sanctuary… Horror,’ he added.’ — Stop. Put that bottle down, Geoffrey Firmin, what are you doing to yourself?’ another voice said in his ear so loudly he turned round. On the path before him a little snake he had thought a twig was rustling off into the bushes and he watched it a moment through his dark glasses, fascinated. It was a real snake all right. Not that he was much bothered by anything so simple as snakes, he reflected with a degree of pride, gazing straight into the eyes of a dog. It was a pariah dog and disturbingly familiar. ‘Perro,’ he repeated, as it still stood there — but had not this incident occurred, was it not now, as it were, occurring an hour or two ago, he thought in a flash. Strange. He dropped the bottle which was of white corrugated glass — Tequila Añejo de Jalisco, it said on the label —out of sight into the undergrowth, looking about him. All seemed normal again. Anyway, both snake and dog had gone. And the voices had ceased…