Under the Volcano Read online

  The Consul now felt himself in a position to entertain, for a minute, the illusion that all really was ‘normal’. Yvonne would probably be asleep: no point in disturbing her yet. And it was fortunate he’d remembered about the almost full tequila bottle: now he had a chance to straighten up a little, which he never could have done on the porch, before greeting her again. There was altogether too much difficulty involved, under the circumstances, in drinking on the porch; it was a good thing a man knew where to have a quiet drink when he wanted it, without being disturbed, etc. etc.… All these thoughts were passing through his mind — which, so to say, nodding gravely, accepted them with the most complete seriousness — while he gazed back up his garden. Oddly enough, it did not strike him as being nearly so ‘ruined’ as it had earlier appeared. Such chaos as might exist even lent an added charm. He liked the exuberance of the unclipped growth at hand. Whereas farther away, the superb plantains flowering so finally and obscenely, the splendid trumpet vines, brave and stubborn pear trees, the papayas planted around the swimming-pool and beyond, the low white bungalow itself covered by bougainvillea, its long porch like the bridge of a ship, positively made a little vision of order, a vision, however, which inadvertently blended at this moment, as he turned by accident, into a strangely subaqueous view of the plains and the volcanoes with a huge indigo sun multitudinously blazing south-south-east. Or was it north-north-west? He noted it all without sorrow, even with a certain ecstasy, lighting a cigarette, an Alas (though he repeated the word ‘Alas’ aloud mechanically), then, the alcohol sweat pouring off his brows like water, he began to walk down the path towards the fence separating his garden from the little new public one beyond that truncated his property.

  In this garden, which he hadn’t looked at since the day Hugh arrived, when he’d hidden the bottle, and which seemed carefully and lovingly kept, there existed at the moment certain evidence of work left uncompleted: tools, unusual tools, a murderous machete, an oddly shaped fork, somehow nakedly impaling the mind, with its twisted tines glittering in the sunlight, were leaning against the fence, as also was something else, a sign uprooted or new, whose oblong pallid face stared through the wire at him. ¿Le gusta este jardin? it asked…

  ¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDÍN?

  ¿QUE ES SUYO?

  ¡EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!

  The Consul stared back at the black words on the sign without moving. You like this garden? Why is it yours? We evict those who destroy! Simple words, simple and terrible words, words which one took to the very bottom of one’s being, words which, perhaps a final judgement on one, were nevertheless unproductive of any emotion whatsoever, unless a kind of colourless cold, a white agony, an agony chill as that iced mescal drunk in the Hotel Canada on the morning of Yvonne’s departure.

  However he was drinking tequila again now — and with no very clear idea how he’d returned so quickly and found the bottle. Ah, the subtle bouquet of pitch and teredos! Careless of being observed this time, he drank long and deeply, then stood — and he had been observed too, by his neighbour Mr Quincey, who was watering flowers in the shade of their common fence to the left beyond the briars — stood facing his bungalow once more. He felt hemmed in. Gone was the little dishonest vision of order. Over his house, above the spectres of neglect that now refused to disguise themselves, the tragic wings of untenable responsibilities hovered. Behind him, in the other garden, his fate repeated softly: ‘Why is it yours?… Do you like this garden?… We evict those who destroy!’ Perhaps the sign didn’t mean quite that — for alcohol sometimes affected the Consul’s Spanish adversely (or perhaps the sign itself, inscribed by some Aztec, was wrong) — but it was near enough. Coming to an abrupt decision he dropped the tequila into the undergrowth again and turned back towards the public garden, walking with an attempted ‘easy’ stride.

  Not that he had any intention of ‘verifying’ the words on the sign, which certainly seemed to have more question marks than it should have; no, what he wanted, he now saw very clearly, was to talk to someone: that was necessary: but it was more, merely, than that; what he wanted involved something like the grasping, at this moment, of a brilliant opportunity, or more accurately, of an opportunity to be brilliant, an opportunity evinced by that apparition of Mr Quincey through the briars which, now upon his right, he must circumvent in order to reach him. Yet this opportunity to be brilliant was, in turn, more like something else, an opportunity to be admired; even, and he could at least thank the tequila for such honesty, however brief its duration, to be loved. Loved precisely for what was another question: since he’d put it to himself he might answer: loved for my reckless and irresponsible appearance, or rather for the fact that, beneath that appearance, so obviously burns the fire of genius, which, not so obviously, is not my genius but in an extraordinary manner that of my old and good friend, Abraham Taskerson, the great poet, who once spoke so glowingly of my potentialities as a young man.

  And what he wanted then, ah then (he had turned right without looking at the sign and was following the path along the wire fence), what he wanted then, he thought, casting one yearning glance at the plains — and at this moment he could have sworn that a figure, the details of whose dress he did not have time to make out before it departed, but apparently in some kind of mourning, had been standing, head bowed in deepest anguish, near the centre of the public garden — what you want then, Geoffrey Firmin, if only as an antidote against such routine hallucinations, is, why it is, nothing less than to drink; to drink, indeed, all day, just as the clouds once more bid you, and yet not quite; again it is more subtle than this; you do not wish merely to drink, but to drink in a particular place and in a particular town.

  Parián !… It was a name suggestive of old marble and the gale-swept Cyclades. The Farolito in Pariÿn, how it called to him with its gloomy voices of the night and early dawn. But the Consul (he had inclined right again leaving the wire fence behind) realized he wasn’t yet drunk enough to be very sanguine about his chances of going there; the day offered too many immediate — pitfalls ! It was the exact word… He had almost fallen into the barranca, an unguarded section of whose hither bank — the ravine curved sharply down here towards the Alcapancingo road to curve again below and follow its direction, bisecting the public garden — added at this juncture a tiny fifth side to his estate. He paused, peeping, tequila-unafraid, over the bank. Ah the frightful cleft, the eternal horror of opposites ! Thou mighty gulf, insatiate cormorant, deride me not, though I seem petulant to fall into thy chops. One was, come to that, always stumbling upon the damned thing, this immense intricate donga cutting right through the town, right, indeed, through the country, in places a two-hundred-foot sheer drop into what pretended to be a churlish river during the rainy season, but which, even now, though one couldn’t see the bottom, was probably beginning to resume its normal role of general Tartarus and gigantic jakes. It was, perhaps, not so frightening here: one might even climb down, if one wished, by easy stages of course, and taking the occasional swig of tequila on the way, to visit the cloacal Prometheus who doubtless inhabited it. The Consul walked on more slowly. He had come face to face with his house again and simultaneously to the path skirting Mr Quincey’s garden. On his left beyond their common fence, now at hand, the green lawns of the American, at the moment being sprinkled by innumerable small whizzing hoses, swept down parallel with his own briars. Nor could any English turf have appeared smoother or lovelier. Suddenly overwhelmed by sentiment, as at the same time by a violent attack of hiccups, the Consul stepped behind a gnarled fruit tree rooted on his side but spreading its remnant of shade over the other, and leaned against it, holding his breath. In this curious way he imagined himself hidden from Mr Quincey, working farther up, but he soon forgot all about Quincey in spasmodic admiration of his garden… Would it happen at the end, and would this save one, that old Popeye would begin to seem less desirable than a slag-heap in Chester-le-Street, and that mighty Johnsonian prospect, the road to England, would
stretch out again in the Western Ocean of his soul? And how peculiar that would be! How strange the landing at Liverpool, the Liver Building seen once more through the misty rain, that murk smelling already of nosebags and Caegwyrle Ale — the familiar deep-draughted cargo steamers, harmoniously masted, still sternly sailing outward bound with the tide, worlds of iron hiding their crews from the weeping black-shawled women on the piers: Liverpool, whence sailed so often during the war under sealed orders those mysterious submarine catchers Q-boats, fake freighters turning into turreted men-of-war at a moment’s notice, obsolete peril of submarines, the snouted voyagers of the sea’s unconscious…

  ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume.’

  ‘Hicket,’ said the Consul, taken aback by the premature rediscovery, at such close quarters, of the tall slightly stooping figure, in khaki shirt and grey flannel trousers, sandalled, immaculate, grey-haired, complete, fit, a credit to Soda Springs, and carrying a watering-can, who was regarding him distastefully through horn-rimmed spectacles from the other side of the fence. ‘Ah, good morning, Quincey.’

  ‘What’s good about it?’ the retired walnut grower asked suspiciously, continuing his work of watering his flower beds, which were out of range of the ceaselessly swinging hoses.

  The Consul gestured towards his briars, and perhaps unconsciously also in the direction of the tequila bottle. ‘I saw you from over there… I was just out inspecting my jungle, don’t you know.’

  ‘You are doing what?’ Mr Quincey glanced at him over the top of the watering-can as if to say: I have seen all this going on; I know all about it because I am God, and even when God was much older than you are he was nevertheless up at this time and fighting it, if necessary, while you don’t even know whether you’re up or not yet, and even if you have been out all night you are certainly not fighting it, as I would be, just as I would be ready to fight anything or anybody else too, for that matter, at the drop of a hat !

  ‘And I’m afraid it really is a jungle too,’ pursued the Consul, ‘in fact I expect Rousseau to come riding out of it at any moment on a tiger.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Mr Quincey said, frowning in a manner that might have meant: And God never drinks before breakfast either.

  ‘On a tiger,’ the Consul repeated.

  The other gazed at him a moment with the cold sardonic eye of the material world. ‘I expect so,’ he said sourly. ‘Plenty tigers. Plenty elephants too… Might I ask you if the next time you inspect your jungle you’d mind being sick on your own side of the fence?’

  ‘Hicket,’ answered the Consul simply. ‘Hicket,’ he snarled, laughing, and, trying to take himself by surprise, he thwacked himself hard in the kidneys, a remedy which, strangely, seemed to work. ‘Sorry I gave that impression, it was merely this damned hiccups ! –’

  ‘So I observe,’ Mr Quincey said, and perhaps he too had cast a subtle glance towards the ambush of the tequila bottle.

  ‘And the funny dung is,’ interrupted the Consul, ‘I scarcely touched anything more than Tehuacan water all night… By the way; how did you manage to survive the ball?’

  Mr Quincey stared at him evenly, then began to refill his watering can from a hydrant nearby.

  ‘Just Tehuacan,’ the Consul continued. ‘And a little gaseosa. That ought to take you back to dear old Soda Springs, eh? —tee hee I — yes, I’ve cut liquor right out these days.’

  The other resumed his watering, sternly moving on down the fence, and the Consul, not sorry to leave the fruit tree, to which he had noticed clinging the sinister carapace of a seven-year locust, followed him step by step.

  ‘Yes, I’m on the wagon now,’ he commented, ‘in case you didn’t know.’

  ‘The funeral wagon, I’d say, Firmin,’ Mr Quincey muttered testily.

  ‘By the way, I saw one of those little garter snakes just a moment ago,’ the Consul broke out.

  Mr Quincey coughed or snorted but said nothing.

  ‘And it made me think… Do you know, Quincey, I’ve often wondered whether there isn’t more in the old legend of the Garden of Eden, and so on, than meets the eye. What if Adam wasn’t really banished from the place at all? That is, in the sense we used to understand it –’ The walnut grower had looked up and was fixing him with a steady gaze that seemed, however, directed at a point rather below the Consul’s midriff —‘What if his punishment really consisted’, the Consul continued with warmth, ‘in his having to go on living there, alone, of course — suffering, unseen, cut off from God… Or perhaps’, he added, in more cheerful vein, ‘perhaps Adam was the first property owner and God, the first agrarian, a kind of Cárdenas, in fact — tee hee ! — kicked him out. Eh? Yes,’ the Consul chuckled, aware, moreover, that all this was possibly not so amusing under the existing historical circumstances, ‘for it’s obvious to everyone these days — don’t you think so, Quincey? — that the original sin was to be an owner of property…’

  The walnut grower was nodding at him, almost imperceptibly, but not it seemed in any agreement; his realpolitik eye was still concentrated upon that same spot below his midriff and looking down the Consul discovered his open fly. Licentia vatum indeed! ‘Pardon me, jadoubej he said, and making the adjustment continued, laughing, returning to his first theme mysteriously unabashed by his recusancy. ‘Yes, indeed. Yes… And of course the real reason for that punishment — his being forced to go on living in the garden, I mean, might well have been that the poor fellow, who knows, secretly loathed the place! Simply hated it, and had done so all along. And that the Old Man found this out —’

  ‘Was it my imagination, or did I see your wife up there a while ago?’ patiently said Mr Quincey.

  ‘ – and no wonder ! To hell with the place ! Just think of all the scorpions and leafcutter ants — to mention only a few of the abominations he must have had to put up with! What?’ the Consul exclaimed as the other repeated his question. ‘In the garden? Yes — that is, no. How do you know? No, she’s asleep as far as I –’

  ‘Been away quite a time, hasn’t she?’ the other asked mildly, leaning forward so that he could see, more clearly, the Consul’s bungalow. ‘Your brother still here?’

  ‘Brother? Oh. you mean Hugh… No, he’s in Mexico City.’

  ‘I think you’ll find he’s got back.’

  The Consul now glanced up at the house himself. ‘Hicket,’ he said briefly, apprehensively.

  ‘I think he went out with your wife,’ the walnut grower added.

  ‘ – Hullo-hullo-look-who-comes-hullo-my-little-snake-in-the-grass-my-little-anguish-in-herba –’ the Consul at this moment greeted Mr Quincey’s cat, momentarily forgetting its owner again as the grey, meditative animal, with a tail so long it trailed on the ground, came stalking through the zinnias: he stooped, patting his thighs — ‘hello-pussy-my-little-Priapusspuss, my-little-Oedipusspusspuss,’ and the cat, recognizing a friend and uttering a cry of pleasure, wound through the fence and rubbed against the Consul’s legs, purring. ‘My little Xicotancatl.’ The Consul stood up. He gave two short whistles while below him the cat’s ears twirled. ‘She thinks I’m a tree with a bird in it,’ he added.