Under the Volcano Page 18

  ‘I wouldn’t wonder,’ retorted Mr Quincey, who was refilling his watering can at the hydrant.

  ‘Animals not fit for food and kept only for pleasure, curiosity, or whim — eh? — as William Blackstone said — you’ve heard of him of course! –’ The Consul was somehow on his haunches half talking to the cat, half to the walnut grower, who had paused to light a cigarette. ‘Or was that another William Black-stone?’ He addressed himself now directly to Mr Quincey, who was paying no attention. ‘He’s a character I’ve always liked. I think it was William Blackstone. Or so Abraham… Anyway, one day he arrived in what is now, I believe — no matter — somewhere in Massachusetts. And lived there quietly among the Indians. After a while the Puritans settled on the other side of the river. They invited him over; they said it was healthier on that side, you see. Ah, these people, these fellows with ideas,’ he told the cat, ‘old William didn’t like them — no he didn’t —so he went back to live among the Indians, so he did. But the Puritans found him out, Quincey, trust them. Then he disappeared altogether — God knows where… Now, little cat’, the Consul tapped his chest indicatively, and the cat, its face swelling, body arched, important, stepped back, ‘the Indians are in here.’

  ‘They sure are,’ sighed Mr Quincey, somewhat in the manner of a quietly exacerbated sergeant-major, ‘along with all those snakes and pink elephants and them tigers you were talking about.’

  The Consul laughed, his laughter having a humourless sound, as though the part of his mind that knew all this essentially a burlesque of a great and generous man once his friend knew also how hollow the satisfaction afforded him by the performance. ‘Not real Indians… And I didn’t mean in the garden; but in here.’ He tapped his chest again. ‘Yes, just the final frontier of consciousness, that’s all. Genius, as I’m so fond of saying,’ he added, standing up, adjusting his tie and (he did not think further of the tie) squaring his shoulders as if to go with a decisiveness that, also borrowed on this occasion from the same source as the genius and his interest in cats, left him abruptly as it had been assumed,’ — genius will look after itself.’

  Somewhere in the distance a clock was striking; the Consul still stood there motionless. ‘Oh, Yvonne, can I have forgotten you already, on this of all days?’ Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one strokes. By his watch it was a quarter to eleven. But the clock hadn’t finished: it struck twice more, two wry, tragic notes: bing-bong: whirring. The emptiness in the air after filled with whispers: alas, alas. Wings, it really meant.

  ‘Where’s your friend these days — I never can remember his name — that French fellow?’ Mr Quincey had asked a moment ago.

  ‘Laruelle?’ The Consul’s voice came from far away. He was aware of vertigo; closing his eyes wearily he took hold of the fence to steady himself. Mr Quincey’s words knocked on his consciousness — or someone actually was knocking on a door —fell away, then knocked again, louder. Old De Quincey; the knocking on the gate in Macbeth. Knock, knock, knock: who’s there? Cat. Cat who? Catastrophe. Catastrophe who? Catastro-physicist. What, is it you, my little popocat? Just wait an eternity till Jacques and I have finished murdering sleep? Katabasis to cat abysses. Cat hartes atratus… Of course, he should have know it, these were the final moments of the retiring of the human heart, and of the final entrance of the fiendish, the night insulated — just as the real De Quincey (that mere drug fiend, he thought opening his eyes — he found he was looking straight over towards the tequila bottle) imagined the murder of Duncan and the others insulated, self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion… But where had Quincey gone? And my God, who was this advancing behind the morning paper to his rescue across the lawn, where the breath of the hoses had suddenly failed as if by magic, if not Dr Guzman?

  If not Guzmán, if not, it could not be, but it was, it certainly was no less a figure than that of his companion the night before, Dr Vigil; and what on earth would he be doing here? As the figure approached closer the Consul felt an increasing uneasiness. Quincey was his patient doubtless. But in that case why wasn’t the doctor in the house? Why all this secretive prowling about the garden? It could only mean one thing: Vigil’s visit had somehow been timed to coincide with his own probable visit to the tequila (though he had fooled them neatly there), with the object, naturally, of spying upon him, of obtaining some information about him, some clue to the nature of which might all too conceivably be found within the pages of that accusing newspaper: ‘Old Samaritan case to be reopened, Commander Firmin believed in Mexico.’ ‘Firmin found guilty, acquitted, cries in box.’ ‘Firmin innocent, but bears guilt of world on shoulders.’ ‘Body of Firmin found drunk in bunker’, such monstrous headlines as these indeed took instant shape in the Consul’s mind, for it was not merely El Universal the doctor was reading, it was his fate; but the creatures of his more immediate conscience were not to be denied, they seemed silently to accompany that morning paper too, withdrawing to one side (as the doctor came to a standstill, looking about him) with averted heads, listening, murmuring now: ‘You cannot lie to us. We know what you did last night.’ What had he done though? He saw again clearly enough — as Dr Vigil, recognized him with a smile, closed his paper and hastened towards him — the doctor’s consulting-room in the Avenida de la Revolución, visited for some drunken reason in the early hours of the morning, macabre with its pictures of ancient Spanish surgeons, their goat faces rising queerly from ruffs resembling ectoplasm, roaring with laughter as they performed inquisitorial operations; but since all this was retained as a mere vivid setting completely detached from his own activity, and since it was about all he did remember, he could scarcely take comfort from not seeming to appear within it in any vicious role. Not so much comfort, at least, as had just been afforded him by Vigil’s smile, nor half so much as was now afforded him when the doctor, upon reaching the spot lately vacated by the walnut grower, halted, and, suddenly, bowed to him profoundly from the waist; bowed once, twice, thrice, mutely yet tremendously assuring the Consul that after all no crime had been committed during the night so great he was still not worthy of respect.

  Then, simultaneously, the two men groaned.

  ‘Quét —‘began the Consul.

  ‘Por favor,’ broke in the other hoarsely, placing a well-manicured though shaky finger to his lips, and with a slightly worried look up the garden.

  The Consul nodded. ‘Of course. You’re looking so fit, I see you can’t have been at the ball last night,’ he added loudly and loyally, following the other’s gaze, though Mr Quincey, who after all could not have been so fit, was still nowhere to be seen. He had probably been turning off the hoses at the main hydrant — and how absurd to have suspected a ‘plan’ when it was so patently an informal call and the doctor had just happened to notice Quincey working in the garden from the drive. He lowered his voice. ‘All the same, might I take this opportunity of asking you what you prescribe for a slight case of katzenjammer?’

  The doctor gave another worried look down the garden and began to laugh quietly, though his whole body was shaking with mirth, his white teeth flashed in the sun, even his immaculate blue suit seemed to be laughing. ‘Señor,’ he began, biting off his laughter short on his lips, like a child, with his front teeth. ‘Señor Firim, por favor, I am sorry, but I must comport myself here like,’ he looked round him again, catching his breath, ‘like an apostle. You mean, señor,’ he went on more evenly, ‘that you are feeling fine this morning, quite like the cat’s pyjama’s’

  ‘Well: hardly,’ said the Consul, softly as before, casting a suspicious eye for his part in the other direction at some maguey growing beyond the barranca, like a battalion moving up a slope under machine-gun fire. ‘Perhaps that’s an overstatement. To put it more simply, what would you do for a case of chronic, controlled, all-possessing, and inescapable delirium tremens?’

  Dr Vigil started. A half-playful smile hovered at the corner of his lips as he contrived rather unsteadily to roll up his paper into a neat
cylindrical tube. ‘You mean, not cats –’ he said, and he made a swift rippling circular crawling gesture in front of his eyes with one hand, ‘but rather –’

  The Consul nodded cheerfully. For his mind was at rest. He had caught a glimpse of those morning headlines, which seemed entirely concerned with the Pope’s illness and the Battle of the Ebro.

  ‘ – progresión,’ the doctor was repeating the gesture more slowly with his eyes closed, his fingers crawling separately, curved like claws, his head shaking idiotically. ‘ – a ratos!’ he pounced. ‘Si,’ he said, pursing his lips and clapping his hand to his forehead in a motion of mock horror. ‘Si,’ he repeated. ‘Tereebly… More alcohol is perhaps best,’ he smiled.

  ‘Your doctor tells me that in my case delirium tremens may not prove fatal,’ the Consul, triumphantly himself at last, informed Mr Quincey, who came up just at this moment.

  And at the next moment, though not before there had passed between himself and the doctor a barely perceptible exchange of signals, a tiny symbolic mouthward flick of the wrist on the Consul’s side as he glanced up at his bungalow, and upon Vigil’s a slight flapping movement of the arms extended apparently in the act of stretching, which meant (in the obscure language known only to major adepts in the Great Brotherhood of Alcohol), ‘Come up and have a spot when you’ve finished,’ ‘I shouldn’t, for if I do I shall be “flying”, but on second thoughts perhaps I will’ — it seemed he was back drinking from his bottle of tequila. And, the moment after, that he was drifting slowly and powerfully through the sunlight back towards the bungalow itself. Accompanied by Mr Quincey’s cat, who was following an insect of some sort along his path, the Consul floated in an amber glow. Beyond the house, where now the problems awaiting him seemed already on the point of energetic solution, the day before him stretched out like an illimitable rolling wonderful desert in which one was going, though in a delightful way, to be lost: lost, but not so completely he would be unable to find the few necessary water-holes, or the scattered tequila oases where witty legionnaires of damnation who couldn’t understand a word he said, would wave him on, replenished, into that glorious Pariÿn wilderness where man never went thirsty, and where now he was drawn on beautifully by the dissolving mirages past the skeletons like frozen wire and the wandering dreaming lions towards ineluctable personal disaster, always in a delightful way of course, the disaster might even be found at the end to contain a certain element of triumph. Not that the Consul now felt gloomy. Quite the contrary. The outlook had rarely seemed so bright. He became conscious, for the first time, of the extraordinary activity which everywhere surrounded him in his garden: a lizard going up a tree, another kind of lizard coming down another tree, a bottle-green humming-bird exploring a flower, another kind of humming-bird, voraciously at another flower; huge butterflies, whose precise stitched markings reminded one of the blouses in the market, flopping about with indolent gymnastic grace (much as Yvonne had described them greeting her in Acapulco Bay yesterday, a storm of torn-up multicoloured love-letters, tossing to windward past the saloons on the promenade deck); ants with petals or scarlet blossoms tacking hither and thither along the paths; while from above, below, from the sky, and, it might be, from under the earth, came a continual sound of whistling, gnawing, rattling, even trumpeting. Where was his friend the snake now? Hiding up a pear tree probably. A snake that waited to drop rings on you: whore’s shoes. From the branches of these pear trees hung carafes full of a glutinous yellow substance for trapping insects still changed religiously every month by the local horticultural college. (How gay were the Mexicans! The horticulturalists made the occasion, as they made every possible occasion, a sort of dance, bringing their womenfolk with them, flitting from tree to tree, gathering up and replacing the carafes as though the whole thing were a movement in a comic ballet, afterwards lolling about in the shade for hours, as if the Consul himself did not exist.) Then the behaviour of Mr Quincey’s cat began to fascinate him. The creature had at last caught the insect but instead of devouring it, she was holding its body, still uninjured, delicately between her teeth, while its lovely luminous wings, still beating, for the insect had not stopped flying an instant, protruded from either side of her whiskers, fanning them. The Consul stooped forward to the rescue. But the animal bounded just out of reach. He stooped again, with the same result. In this preposterous fashion, the Consul stooping, the cat dancing just out of reach, the insect still flying furiously in the cat’s mouth, he approached his porch. Finally the cat extended a preparate paw for the kill, opening her mouth, and the insect, whose wings had never ceased to beat, suddenly and marvellously, flew out as might indeed the human soul from the jaws of death, flew up, up, up, soaring over the trees: and at that moment he saw them. They were standing on the porch: Yvonne’s arms were full of bougainvillea, which she was arranging in a cobalt ceramic vase.’ — but suppose he’s absolutely adamant. Suppose he simply won’t go… careful, Hugh, it’s got spikes on it, and you have to look at everything carefully to be sure there’re no spiders.’ ‘Hi there, Suchiquetal !’ the Consul shouted gaily, waving his hand, as the cat with a frigid look over her shoulder that said plainly, ‘I didn’t want it anyway; I meant to let it go,’ galloped away, humiliated, into the bushes. ‘Hi there, Hugh, you old snake in the grass !’

  … Why then should he be sitting in the bathroom? Was he asleep? dead? passed out? Was he in the bathroom now or half an hour ago? Was it night? Where were the others? But now he heard some of the others’ voices on the porch. Some of the others? It was just Hugh and Yvonne, of course, for the doctor had gone. Yet for a moment he could have sworn the house had been full of people; why, it was still this morning, or barely afternoon, only 12.15 in fact by this watch. At eleven he’d been talking to Mr Quincey. ‘Oh… Oh.’ The Consul groaned aloud… It came to him he was supposed to be getting ready to go to Tomalín. But how had he managed to persuade anyone he was sober enough to go to Tomalín? And why, anyhow, Tomalín?

  A procession of thought like little elderly animals filed through the Consul’s mind, and in his mind too he was steadily crossing the porch again, as he had done an hour ago, immediately after he’d seen the insect flying away out of the cat’s mouth.

  He had crossed the porch — which Concepta had swept — smiling soberly to Yvonne and shaking hands with Hugh on his way to the icebox, and unfastening it, he knew not only that they’d been talking about him, but, obscurely, from that bright fragment of overheard conversation, its round meaning, just as had he at that moment glimpsed the new moon with the old one in its arms, he might have been impressed by its complete shape, though the rest were shadowy, illumined only by earthlight.

  But what had happened then? ‘Oh,’ the Consul cried aloud again. ‘Oh.’ The faces of the last hour hovered before him, the figures of Hugh and Yvonne and Dr Vigil moving quickly and jerkily now like those of an old silent film, their words mute explosions in the brain. Nobody seemed to be doing anything important; yet everything seemed of the utmost hectic importance, for instance Yvonne saying: ‘We saw an armadillo’: —‘What, no Tarsius spectres !’ he had replied, then Hugh opening the freezing bottle of Carta Blanca beer for him, prizing off the fizzing cap on the edge of the parapet and decanting the foam into his glass, the contiguity of which to his strychnine bottle had, it must be admitted now, lost most of its significance…

  In the bathroom the Consul became aware he still had with him half a glass of slightly flat beer; his hand was fairly steady, but numbed holding the glass, he drank cautiously, carefully postponing the problem soon to be raised by its emptiness.

  –‘Nonsense,’ he said to Hugh. And he had added with impressive consular authority that Hugh couldn’t leave immediately anyway, at least not for Mexico City, that there was only one bus today, the one Hugh’d come on, which had gone back to the City already, and one train that didn’t leave till 11.45 p.m.…

  Then: ‘But wasn’t it Bougainville, doctor?’ Yvonne was asking — and it really was
astonishing how sinister and urgent and inflamed all these minutiae seemed to him in the bathroom —‘Wasn’t it Bougainville who discovered the bougainvillea?’ while the doctor bending over her flowers merely looked alert and puzzled, he said nothing save with his eyes which perhaps barely betrayed that he’d stumbled on a ‘situation’. — ‘Now I come to think of it, I believe it was Bougainville. Hence the name,’ Hugh observed fatuously, seating himself on the parapet -‘Si: you can go to the botica and so as not to be misunderstood, say favor de servir una toma de vino quinado o en su defecto una toma de nuez vó.mica, pero –’ Dr Vigil was chuckling, talking to Hugh it must have been, Yvonne having slipped into her room a moment, while the Consul, eavesdropping, was at the icebox for another bottle of beer — then; ‘Oh, I was So terrible sick this morning I needed to be holding myself to the street windows,’ and to the Consul himself as he returned’ — Please forgive my stupid comport last night: oh, I have done a lot of stupid things everywhere these last few days, but’ — raising his glass of whisky — ‘I will never drink more; I will need two full days of sleeping to recover myself — and then, as Yvonne returned — magnificently giving the whole show away, raising his glass to the Consul again: ‘Salud: I hope you are not as sick as I am. You were so perfectamente borracho last night I think you must have killed yourself with drinking. I think even to send a boy after you this morning to knock your door, and find if drinking have not killed you already,’ Dr Vigil had said.

  A strange fellow: in the bathroom the Consul sipped his flat beer. A strange, decent, generous-hearted fellow, if slightly deficient in tact save on his own behalf. Why couldn’t people hold their liquor? He himself had still managed to be quite considerate of Vigil’s position in Quincey’s garden. In the final analysis there was no one you could trust to drink with you to the bottom of the bowl. A lonely thought. But of the doctor’s generosity there was little doubt. Before long indeed, in spite of the necessary ‘two full days of sleeping’, he had been inviting them all to come with him to Guanajuato: recklessly he proposed leaving for his holiday by car this evening, after a problematic set of tennis this afternoon with —