Under the Volcano Read online

  The Consul took another sip of beer. ‘Oh,’ he shuddered. ‘Oh.’ It had been a mild shock last night to discover that Vigil and Jacques Laruelle were friends, far more than embarrassing to be reminded of it this morning… Anyhow, Hugh had turned down the notion of the two-hundred-mile trip to Guanajuato, since Hugh — and how amazingly well, after all, those cowboy clothes seemed to suit his erect and careless bearing! — was now determined to catch that night train; while the Consul had declined on Yvonne’s account.

  The Consul saw himself again, hovering over the parapet, gazing down at the swimming-pool below, a little turquoise set in the garden. Thou art the grave buried love doth live. The inverted reflections of banana trees and birds, caravans of clouds, moved in it. Wisps of new-mown turf floated on the surface. Fresh mountain water trickled into the pool, which was almost overflowing, from the cracked broken hose whose length was a series of small spouting fountains.

  Then Yvonne and Hugh, below, were swimming in the pool…

  — ‘Absolutamente,’ the doctor had said, beside the Consul at the parapet, and attentively lighting a cigarette. ‘I have’, the Consul was telling him, lifting his face towards the volcanoes and feeling his desolation go out to those heights where even now at mid-morning the howling snow would whip the face, and the ground beneath the feet was dead lava, a soulless petrified residue of extinct plasm in which even the wildest and loneliest trees would never take root; ‘I have another enemy round the back you can’t see. A sunflower. I know it watches me and I know it hates me.’ ‘Exactamente,’ Dr Vigil said, ‘very posseebly it might be hating you a little less if you would stop from drinking tequila.’ ‘Yes, but I’m only drinking beer this morning,’ the Consul said with conviction, ‘as you can see for yourself.’ ‘Si, hombre,’ Dr Vigil nodded, who after a few whiskies (from a new bottle) had given up trying to conceal himself from Mr Quincey’s house and was standing boldly by the parapet with the Consul. ‘There are’, the Consul added, ‘a thousand aspects of this infernal beauty I was talking about, each with its peculiar tortures, each jealous as a woman of all stimulations save its own.’ ‘Naturalmente,’ Dr Vigil said. ‘But I think if you are very serious about your progresión a ratos you may take a longer journey even than this proposèd one.’ The Consul placed his glass on the parapet while the doctor continued. ‘Me too unless we contain with ourselves never to drink no more. I think, miamigo, sickness is not only in body but in that part used to be call: soul.’ ‘Soul?’ ‘Precisamente,’ the doctor said, swiftly clasping and unclasping his fingers. ‘But a mesh? Mesh. The nerves are a mesh, like, how do you say it, an eclectic systemë.’ ‘Ah, very good,’ the Consul said, ‘you mean an electric system.’ ‘But after much tequila the eclectic systemè is perhaps un poco descompuesto, comprenez, as sometimes in the cine: claro î’ ‘A sort of eclampsia, as it were,’ the Consul nodded desperately, removing his glasses, and at this point, the Consul remembered, he had been without a drink nearly ten minutes; the effect of the tequila too had almost gone. He had peered out at the garden, and it was as though bits of his eyelids had broken off and were flittering and jittering before him, turning into nervous shapes and shadows, jumping to the guilty chattering in his mind, not quite voices yet, but they were coming back, they were coming back; a picture of his soul as a town appeared once more before him, but this time a town ravaged and stricken in the black path of his excess and shutting his burning eyes he had thought of the beautiful functioning of the system in those who were truly alive, switches connected, nerves rigid only in real danger, and in nightmareless sleep now calm, not resting, yet poised: a peaceful village. Christ, how it heightened the torture (and meantime there had been every reason to suppose the others imagined he was enjoying himself enormously) to be aware of all this, while at the same time conscious of the whole horrible disintegrating mechanism, the light now on, now off, now on too glaringly, now too dimly, with the glow of a fitful dying battery — then at last to know the whole town plunged into darkness, where communication is lost, motion mere obstruction, bombs threaten, ideas stampede —

  The Consul had now finished his glass of flat beer. He sat gazing at the bathroom wall in an attitude like a grotesque parody of an old attitude in meditation. ‘I am very much interested in insanes.’ That was a strange way to start a conversation with a fellow who’d just stood you a drink. Yet that was precisely how the doctor, in the Bella Vista bar, had started their conversation the previous night. Could it be Vigil considered his practised eye had detected approaching insanity (and this was funny too, recalling his thoughts on the subject earlier, to conceive of it as merely approaching) as some who have watched wind and weather all their lives can prophesy, under a fair sky, the approaching storm, the darkness that will come galloping out of nowhere across the fields of the mind? Not that there could be said to be a very fair sky either in that connexion. Yet how interested would the doctor have been in one who felt himself being shattered by the very forces of the universe? What cataplasms have laid on his soul? What did even the hierophants of science know of the fearful potencies of, for them, unvintageable evil? The Consul wouldn’t have needed a practised eye to detect on this wall, or any other, a mene-Tekel-Peres for the world, compared to which mere insanity was drop in the bucket. Yet who would ever have believed that some obscure man, sitting at the centre of the world in a bathroom, say, thinking solitary miserable thoughts, was authoring their doom, that, even while he was thinking, it was as if behind the scenes certain strings were being pulled, and whole continents burst into flame, and calamity moved nearer — just as now, at this moment perhaps, with a sudden jolt and grind, calamity had moved nearer, and, without the Consul’s knowing it, outside the sky had darkened. Or perhaps it was not a man at all, but a child, a little child, innocent as that other Geoffrey had been, who sat as up in an organ loft somewhere playing, pulling out all the stops at random, and kingdoms divided and fell, and abominations dropped from the sky — a child innocent as that infant sleeping in the coffin which had slanted past them down the Calle Tierra del Fuego…

  The Consul lifted his glass to his lips, tasted its emptiness again, then set it on the floor, still wet from the feet of the swimmers. The uncontrollable mystery on the bathroom floor. He remembered that the next time he had returned to the porch with a bottle of Carta Blanca, though for some reason this now seemed a terribly long time ago, in the past — it was as if something he could not put his finger on had mysteriously supervened to separate drastically that returning figure from himself sitting in the bathroom (the figure on the porch, for all its damnation, seemed younger, to have more freedom of movement, choice, to have, if only because it held a full glass of beer once more, a better chance of a future) — Yvonne, youthful and pretty-looking in her white satin bathing-suit, had been wandering on tiptoe round the doctor, who was saying:

  ‘Señora Firmin, I am really disappoint though you cannot come me with.’

  The Consul and she had exchanged a look of understanding, it almost amounted to, then Yvonne was swimming again, below, and the doctor was saying to the Consul:

  ‘Guanajuato is sited in a beautiful circus of steepy hills.’

  ‘Guanajuato,’ the doctor was saying, ‘you will not believe me, how she can lie there, like the old golden jewel on the breast of our grandmother.’

  ‘Guanajuato,’ Dr Vigil said, ‘the streets. How can you resist the names of the streets? Street of Kisses. Street of Singing Frogs. The Street of the Little Head. Is not that revolting?’

  ‘Repellent,’ the Consul said. ‘Isn’t Guanajuato the place they bury everybody standing up?’ — ah, and this was where he had remembered about the bullthrowing and, feeling a return of energy, had called down to Hugh, who was sitting thoughtfully by the edge of the pool in the Consul’s swimming-trunks. ‘To-malin’s quite near Pariÿn, where your pal was going,’ he said. ‘We might even go on there.’ And then to the doctor, ‘Perhaps you might come too… I left my favourite pipe in Pariÿn. Whic
h I might get back, with luck. In the Farolito.’ And the doctor had said:’Wheee, es un infierno,’ while Yvonne, lifting up a corner of her bathing-cap to hear better, said meekly, ‘Not a bullfight?’ And the Consul: ‘No, a bullthrowing. If you’re not too tired?’

  But the doctor could not of course come to Tomalín with them, though this was never discussed, since just then the conversation was violently interrupted by a sudden terrific detonation, that shook the house and sent birds skimming panic-stricken all over the garden. Target practice in the Sierra Madre. The Consul had been half aware of it in his sleep earlier. Puffs of smoke were drifting high over the rocks below Popo at the end of the valley. Three black vultures came tearing through the trees low over the roof with soft hoarse cries like the cries of love. Driven at unaccustomed speed by their fear they seemed almost to capsize, keeping close together but balancing at different angles to avoid collision. Then they sought another tree to wait in and the echoes of gunfire swept back over the house, soaring higher and higher and growing fainter while somewhere a clock was striking nineteen. Twelve o’clock, and the Consul said to the doctor: ‘Ah, that the dream of the dark magician in his visioned cave, even while his hand-that’s the bit I like-shakes in its last decay, were the true end of this so lovely world. Jesus. Do you know, compañero, I sometimes have the feeling that it’s actually sinking, like Atlantis, beneath my feet. Down, down to the frightful “poulps”. Meropis of Theopompus… And the ignivome mountains.’ And the doctor who was nodding gloomily said: ‘SI, that is tequila. Hombre, un poco de cerveza, un poco de vino, but never no more tequila. Never no more mescal.’ And then the doctor was whispering: ‘But hombre, now that your esposa has come back.’ (It seemed that Dr Vigil had said this several times, only with a different look on his face: ‘But hombre, now that your esposa has come back.’) And then he was going: ‘I did not need to be inquisitive to be knowing you might have wishèd my advice. No hombre, as I say last night, I am not so interested in moneys. – Con permiso, the plaster he no good.’ A little shower of plaster had, indeed, rained down on the doctor’s head. Then: ‘Hasta la vista’ ‘Adió.s’ ‘Muchas gracias’ ‘Thank you so much’ ‘Sorry we couldn’t come’ ‘Have a good time,’ from the swimming-pool. ‘Hasta la vista’ again, then silence.

  And now the Consul was in the bathroom getting ready to go to Tomalín. ‘Oh…’ he said, ‘Oh…’ But, you see, nothing so dire has happened after all. First to wash. Sweating and trembling again, he took off his coat and shirt. He had turned on the water in the basin. Yet for some obscure reason he was standing under the shower, waiting in an agony for the shock of cold water that never came. And he was still wearing his trousers.

  The Consul sat helplessly in the bathroom, watching the insects which lay at different angles from one another on the wall, like ships out in the roadstead. A caterpillar started to wriggle toward him, peering this way and that, with interrogatory antennae. A large cricket, with polished fuselage, clung to the curtain, swaying it slightly and cleaning its face like a cat, its eyes on stalks appearing to revolve in its head. He turned, expecting the caterpillar to be much nearer, but it too had turned, just slightly shifting its moorings. Now a scorpion was moving slowly across towards him. Suddenly the Consul rose, trembling in every limb. But it wasn’t the scorpion he cared about. It was that, all at once, the thin shadows of isolated nails, the stains of murdered mosquitoes, the very scars and cracks of the wall, had begun to swarm, so that, wherever he looked, another insect was born, wriggling instantly toward his heart. It was as if, and this was what was most appalling, the whole insect world had somehow moved nearer and now was closing, rushing in upon him. For a moment the bottle of tequila at the bottom of the garden gleamed on his soul, then the Consul stumbled into his bedroom.

  Here there was no longer that terrible visible swarming, yet –lying now on the bed – it still seemed to persist in his mind, much as the vision of the dead man earlier had persisted, a kind of seething, from which, as from the persistent rolling of drums heard by some great dying monarch, occasionally a half-recognizable voice dissociated itself:

  -Stop it, for God’s sake, you fool. Watch your step. We can’t help you any more.

  —I would like the privilege of helping you, of your friendship. I would work you with. I do not care a damn for moneys anyway.

  –What, is this you, Geoffrey? Don’t you remember me? Your old friend, Abe. What have you done, my boy?

  —Ha ha, you’re for it now. Straightened out — in a coffin! Yeah.

  —My son, my son!

  —My lover. Oh come to me again as once in May.

  6

  —NEL mezzo del bloody cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai in… Hugh flung himself down on the porch daybed.

  A strong warm gusty wind howled over the garden. Refreshed by his swim and a lunch of turkey sandwiches, the cigar Geoff had given him earlier partially shielded by the parapet, he lay watching the clouds speeding across the Mexican skies. How fast they went, how far too fast I In the middle of our life, in the middle of the bloody road of our life…

  Twenty-nine clouds. At twenty-nine a man was in his thirtieth year. And he was twenty-nine. And now at last, though the feeling had perhaps been growing on him all morning, he knew what it felt like, the intolerable impact of this knowledge that might have come at twenty-two, but had not, that ought at least to have come at twenty-five, but still somehow had not, this knowledge, hitherto associated only with people tottering on the brink of the grave and A. E. Housman, that one could not be young for ever — that indeed, in the twinkling of an eye, one was not young any longer. For in less than four years, passing so swiftly today’s cigarette seemed smoked yesterday, one would be thirty-three, in seven more, forty; in forty-seven, eighty. Sixty-seven years seemed a comfortingly long time but then he would be a hundred. I am not a prodigy any longer. I have no excuse any longer to behave in this irresponsible fashion. I am not such a dashing fellow after all. I am not young. On the other hand : I am a prodigy. I am young. I am a dashing fellow. Am I not? You are a liar, said the trees tossing in the garden. You are a traitor, rattled the plantain leaves. And a coward too, put in some fitful sounds of music that might have meant that in the zócalo the fair was beginning. And they are losing the Battle of the Ebro. Because of you, said the wind. A traitor even to your journalist friends you like to run down and who are really courageous men, admit it — Ahhh! Hugh, as if to rid himself of these thoughts, turned the radio dial back and forth, trying to get San Antonio (‘I am none of these things really.’ ‘I have done nothing to warrant all this guilt.’ ‘I am no worse than anybody else…’); but it was no good. All his resolutions of this morning were to no avail. It seemed useless to struggle any further with these thoughts, better to let them have their way. At least they would take his mind from Yvonne for a time, if they only led back to her in the end. Even Juan Cerillo failed him now, as did, at this moment, San Antonio: two Mexican voices on different wavelengths were breaking in. For everything you have done up to now has been dishonest, the first might have been saying. What about the way you treated poor old Bolowski, the music publisher, remember his shabby little shop in Old Compton Street, off the Tottenham Court Road? Even what you persuade yourself is the best thing about you, your passion for helping the Jews, has some basis in a dishonourable action of your own. Small wonder, since he so charitably forgave you, that you forgave him his skulduggery, to the point of being prepared to lead the whole Jewish race out of Babylon itself… No: I am much afraid there is little enough in your past, which will come to your aid against the future. Not even the seagull? said Hugh…

  The seagull — pure scavenger of the empyrean, hunter of edible stars –I rescued that day as a boy when it was caught in a fence on the cliffside and was beating itself to death, blinded by snow, and though it attacked me, I drew it out unharmed, with one hand by its feet, and for one magnificent moment held it up in the sunlight, before it soared away on angelic wings over the freezin
g estuary?

  The artillery started blasting away in the foothills again. A train hooted somewhere, like an approaching steamer; perhaps the very train Hugh’d be taking tonight. From the bottom of the swimming-pool below a reflected small sun blazed and nodded among the inverted papayas. Reflections of vultures a mile deep wheeled upside down and were gone. A bird, quite close really, seemed to be moving in a series of jerks across the glittering summit of Popocateped – the wind, in fact, had dropped, which was as well for his cigar. The radio had gone dead too, and Hugh gave it up, settling himself back on the daybed.

  Not even the seagull was the answer of course. The seagull had been spoilt already by his dramatizing it. Nor yet the poor little hot-dog man. That bitter December night he had met him trudging down Oxford Street with his new wagon – the first hot-dog wagon in London, and he had been pushing it around for a whole month without selling a single hot dog. Now with a family to support and Christmas approaching he was on his uppers. Shades of Charles Dickens! It was perhaps the newness of me wretched wagon he’d been cozened into buying that seemed so awful. But how could he expect, Hugh asked him, as above them the monstrous deceptions twitched on and off, and around them the black soulless buildings stood wrapped in a cold dream of their own destruction (they had halted by a church from whose sooty wall a figure of Christ on the cross had been removed leaving only the scar and the legend: Is it nothing to you all ye who pass by?) how could he expect to sell anything so revolutionary as a hot dog in Oxford Street? He might as well try ice-cream at the South Pole. No, the idea was to camp outside a pub down a back alley, and that not any pub, but the Fitzroy Tavern in Charlotte Street, chock full of starving artists drinking themselves to death simply because their souls pined away, each night between eight and ten, for lack of just such a thing as a hot dog. That was the place to go!