Under the Volcano Read online

  M. Laruelle, conscious of shock, was turning the book over and over in his hands. Then he laid it on the bar counter and took a sip of anís. ‘Bueno, muchas gracias, señor,’ he said.

  ‘De nada,’ Sr Bustamente answered in a lowered tone; he waved aside with a sweeping somehow inclusive gesture, a sombre pillar advancing bearing a tray of chocolate skulls. ‘Don’t know how long, maybe two, maybe three years aquí.’

  M. Laruelle glanced in the flyleaf again, then shut the book on the counter. Above them the rain slammed on the cinema roof. It was eighteen months since the Consul had lent him the thumbed maroon volume of Elizabethan plays. At that time Geoffrey and Yvonne had been separated for perhaps five months. Six more must elapse before she would return. In the Consul’s garden they drifted gloomily up and down among the roses and the plumbago and the waxplants ‘like dilapidated préservatifs’, the Consul had remarked with a diabolical look at him, a look at the same time almost official, that seemed now to have said :’ I know, Jacques, you may never return the book, but suppose I lend it you precisely for that reason, that some day you may be sorry you did not. Oh, I shall forgive you then, but will you be able to forgive yourself? Not merely for not having returned it, but because the book will by then have become an emblem of what even now it is impossible to return.’ M. Laruelle had taken the book. He wanted it because for sometime he had been carrying at the back of his mind the notion of making in France a modern film version of the Faustus story with some such character as Trotsky for its protagonist: as a matter of fact he had not opened the volume till this minute. Though the Consul had several times asked him for it later he had missed it that same day when he must have left it behind in the cinema. M. Laruelle listened to the water booming down the gutters beneath the one jalousie door of the Cervecería XX which opened into a side-street in the far left-hand corner. A sudden thunderclap shook the whole building and the sound echoed away like coal sliding down a chute.

  ‘You know, señor he said suddenly, ‘that this isn’t my book.’

  ‘I know,’ Sr Bustamente replied, but softly, almost in a whisper: ‘I think your amigo, it was his.’ He gave a little confused cough, an appoggiatura. ‘Your amigo, the bicho –’ Sensitive apparently to M. Laruelle’s smile he interrupted himself quietly. ‘I did not mean bitch; I mean bicho, the one with the blue eyes.’ Then, as if there were any longer doubt of whom he spoke, he pinched his chin and drew downward from it an imaginary beard. ‘Your amigo — ah — Señor Firmin. El Cónsul. The Americano.’

  ‘No. He wasn’t American.’ M. Laruelle tried to raise his voice a little. It was hard, for everyone in the cantina had stopped talking and M. Laruelle noticed that a curious hush had also fallen in the theatre. The light had now completely failed and he stared over Sr Bustamente’s shoulder past the curtain into a graveyard darkness, stabbed by flashes of torchlight like heat lightning, but the vendors had lowered their voices, the children had stopped laughing and crying while the diminished audience sat slackly and bored yet patient before the dark screen, suddenly illuminated, swept, by silent grotesque shadows of giants and spears and birds, then dark again, the men along the right-hand balcony, who hadn’t bothered to move or come downstairs, a solid frieze carved into the wall, serious, moustachioed men, warriors waiting for the show to begin, for a glimpse of the murderer’s bloodstained hands.

  ‘No?’ Sr Bustamente said softly. He took a sip of his gaseosa, looking too into the dark theatre and then, preoccupied again, around the cantina. ‘But was it true, then, he was a Consul? For I remember him many time sitting here drinking : and often, the poor guy, he have no socks.’

  M. Laruelle laughed shortly. ‘Yes, he was the British Consul here.’ They spoke subduedly in Spanish, and Sr Bustamente despairing for another ten minutes of the lights, was persuaded to a glass of beer while M. Laruelle himself took a soft drink.

  But he had not succeeded in explaining the Consul to the gracious Mexican. The lights had dimly come on again both in the theatre and the cantina, though the show had not recommenced, and M. Laruelle sat alone at a vacated corner table of the Cervecería XX with another anís before him. His stomach would suffer for it: it was only during the last year he had been drinking so heavily. He sat rigidly, the book of Elizabethan plays closed on the table, staring at his tennis racket propped against the back of the seat opposite he was keeping for Dr Vigil. He felt rather like someone lying in a bath after all the water has run out, witless, almost dead. Had he only gone home he might have finished his packing by now. But he had not been able to even make the decision to say good-bye to Sr Bustamente. It was still raining, out of season, over Mexico, the dark waters rising outside to engulf his own zacuali in the Calle Nicaragua, his useless tower against the coming of the second flood. Night of the Culmination of the Pleiades! I What, after all, was a Consul that one was mindful of him? Sr Bustamente, who was older than he looked, had remembered the days of Porfirio Díaz, the days when, in America, every small town along the Mexican border harboured a ‘Consul’. Indeed Mexican Consuls were to be found even in villages hundreds of miles from that border. Consuls were expected to look after the interests of trade between countries — were they not? But towns in Arizona that did not do ten dollars’ worth of trade a year with Mexico had Consuls maintained by Díaz. Of course, they were not Consuls but spies. Sr Bustamente knew because before the revolution his own father, a liberal and a member of the Ponciano Arriaga, had been held for three months in prison at Douglas, Arizona (in spite of which Sr Bustamente himself was going to vote for Almazán), on the orders of a Díaz-maintained Consul. Was it not then reasonable to suppose, he had hinted, without offence, and perhaps not altogether seriously, Señor Firmin was such a Consul, not, it was true, a Mexican Consul, nor of quite the same breed as those others, but an English Consul who could scarcely claim to have the interests of British trade at heart in a place where there were ño British interests and no Englishmen, the less so when it was considered that England had severed diplomatic relations with Mexico?

  Actually Sr Bustamente seemed half convinced that M. Laruelle had been taken in, that Señor Firmin had really been a sort of spy, or, as he put it, spider. But nowhere in the world were there people more human or readily moved to sympathy than the Mexicans, vote as they might for Almazán. Sr Bustamente was prepared to be sorry for the Consul even as a spider, sorry in his heart for the poor lonely dispossessed trembling soul that had sat drinking here night after night, abandoned by his wife (though she came back, M. Laruelle almost cried aloud, that was the extraordinary thing, she came back!) and possibly, remembering the socks, even by his country, and wandering hat-less and desconsolado and beside himself around the town pursued by other spiders who, without his ever being quite certain of it, a man in dark glasses he took to be a loafer here, a man lounging on the other side of the road he thought was a peon there, a bald boy with ear-rings swinging madly on a creaking hammock there, guarded every street and alley entrance, which, even a Mexican would no longer believe (because it was not true, M. Laruelle said) but which was still quite possible, as Sr Bustamente’s father would have assured him, let him start something and find out, just as his father would have assured him that he, M. Laruelle, could not cross the border in a cattle truck, say, without ‘their’ knowing it in Mexico City before he arrived and having already decided what ‘they’ were going to do about it. Certainly Sr Bustamente did not know the Consul well, though it was his habit to keep his eyes open, but the whole town knew him by sight, and the impression he gave, or gave that last year anyway, apart from being always muy borracho of course, was of a man living in continual terror of his life. Once he had run into the cantina El Bosque, kept by the old woman Gregorio, now a widow, shouting something like ‘Sanctuario!’ that people were after him, and the widow, more terrified than he, had hidden him in the back room for half the afternoon. It was not the widow who’d told him that but Señor Gregorio himself before he died, whose brother was his, Sr Bustamente’s
, gardener, because Señora Gregorio was half English or American herself and had had some difficult explanations to make both to Señor Gregorio and his brother Bernardino. And yet, if the Consul were a ‘spider’, he was one no longer and could be forgiven. After all, he was simpático himself. Had he not seen him once in this very bar give all his money to a beggar taken by the police?

  – But the Consul also was not a coward, M. Laruelle had interrupted, perhaps irrelevantly, at least not the kind to be craven about his life. On the contrary he was an extremely brave man, no less than a hero in fact, who had won, for conspicuous gallantry in the service of his country during the last war, a coveted medal. Nor with all his faults was he at bottom a vicious man. Without knowing quite why M. Laruelle felt he might have actually proved a great force for good. But Sr Bustamente had never said he was a coward. Almost reverently Sr Bustamente pointed out that being a coward and afraid for one’s life were two different things in Mexico. And certainly the Consul was not vicious but an hombre noble. Yet might not just such a character and distinguished record as M. Laruelle claimed was his have precisely qualified him for the excessively dangerous activities of a spider? It seemed useless to try and explain to Sr Bustamente that the poor Consul’s job was merely a retreat, that while he had intended originally to enter the Indian Civil Service, he had in fact entered the Diplomatic Service only for one reason and another to be kicked downstairs into ever remoter consulships, and finally into the sinecure in Quauhnahuac as a position where he was least likely to prove a nuisance to the Empire, in which, with one part of his mind at least, M. Laruelle suspected he so passionately believed.

  But why had all this happened? he asked himself now. ¿Quién sabe? He risked another anís, and at the first sip a scene, probably rather inaccurate (M. Laruelle had been in the artillery during the last war, survived by him in spite of Guillaume Apollinaire’s being for a time his commanding officer), was conjured to his mind. A dead calm on the line, but the s. s. Samaritan, if she should have been on the line, was actually far north of it. Indeed for a steamer bound from Shanghai to Newcastle, New South Wales, with a cargo of antimony and quicksilver and wolfram she had for some time been steering a rather odd course. Why, for instance, had she emerged into the Pacific Ocean out of the Bungo Strait in Japan south of Shikoku and not far from the East China Sea? For days now, not unlike a stray sheep on the immeasurable green meadows of waters, she had been keeping an offing from various interesting islands far out of her path. Lot’s Wife and Arzobispo. Rosario and Sulphur Island. Volcano Island and St Augustine. It was somewhere between Guy Rock and the Euphrosyne Reef that she first sighted the periscope and sent her engines full speed astern. But when the submarine surfaced she hove to. An unarmed merchantman, the Samaritan put up no fight. Before the boarding party from the submarine reached her, however, she suddenly changed her temper. As if by magic the sheep turned to a dragon belching fire. The U-boat did not even have time to dive. Her entire crew was captured. The Samaritan, who had lost her captain in the engagement, sailed on, leaving the submarine burning helplessly, a smoking cigar a-glow on the vast surface of the Pacific.

  And in some capacity obscure to M. Laruelle — for Geoffrey had not been in the merchant service but, arrived via the yacht club and something in salvage, a naval lieutenant, or God knows perhaps by that time a lieutenant-commander — the Consul had been largely responsible for this escapade. And for it, or gallantry connected with it, he had received the British Distinguished Service Order or Cross.

  But there was a slight hitch apparently. For whereas the submarine’s crew became prisoners of war when the Samaritan (which was only one of the ship’s names, albeit that the Consul liked best) reached port, mysteriously none of her officers was among them. Something had happened to those German officers, and what had happened was not pretty. They had, it was said, been kidnapped by the Samaritan’s stokers and burned alive in the furnaces.

  M. Laruelle thought of this. The Consul loved England and as a young man may have subscribed — though it was doubtful, this being rather more in those days the prerogative of non-combatants — to the popular hatred of the enemy. But he was a man of honour and probably no one supposed for a moment he had ordered the Samaritan’s stokers to put the Germans in the furnace. None dreamed that such an order given would have been obeyed. But the fact remained the Germans had been put there and it was no use saying that was the best place for them. Someone must take the blame.

  So the Consul had not received his decoration without first being court-martialled. He was acquitted. It was not at all clear to M. Larulle why he and no one else should have been tried. Yet it was easy to think of the Consul as a kind of more lachrymose pseudo ‘Lord Jim’ living in a self-imposed exile, brooding, despite his award, over his lost honour, his secret, and imagining that a stigma would cling to him because of it throughout his whole life. Yet this was far from the case. No stigma clung to him evidently. And he had shown no reluctance in discussing the incident with M. Laruelle, who years before had read a guarded article concerning it in the Paris-Soir. He had even been enormously funny about it. ‘People simply did not go round’, he said, ‘putting Germans in furnaces.’ It was only once or twice during those later months when drunk that to M. Laruelle’s astonishment he suddenly began proclaiming not only his guilt in the matter but that he’d always suffered horribly on account of it. He went much further. No blame attached to the stokers. No question arose of any order given them. Flexing his muscles he sardonically announced the single-handed accomplishment himself of the deed. But by this time the poor Consul had already lost almost all capacity for telling the truth and his life had become a quixotic oral fiction. Unlike ‘Jim’ he had grown rather careless of his honour and the German officers were merely an excuse to buy another bottle of mescal. M. Laruelle told the Consul as much, and they quarrelled grotesquely, becoming estranged again — when bitterer things had not estranged them — and remained so till the last —indeed at the very last it had been wickedly, sorrowfully worse than ever — as years before at Leasowe.

  Then will I headlong fly into the earth:

  Earth, gape ! it will not harbour me!

  M. Laruelle had opened the book of Elizabethan plays at random and for a moment he sat oblivious of his surroundings, gazing at the words that seemed to have the power of carrying his own mind downward into a gulf, as in fulfilment on his own spirit of the threat Marlowe’s Faustus had cast at his despair. Only Faustus had not said quite that. He looked more closely at the passage. Faustus had said: ‘Then will I headlong run into the earth’, and ‘O, no, it will not –’ That was not so bad. Under the circumstances to run was not so bad as to fly. Intaglioed in the maroon leather cover of the book was a golden faceless figurine also running, carrying a torch like the elongated neck and head and open beak of the sacred ibis. M. Laruelle sighed, ashamed of himself. What had produced the illusion, the elusive flickering candlelight, coupled with the dim, though now less dim, electric light, or some correspondence, maybe, as Geoff liked to put it, between the subnormal world and the abnormally suspicious? How the Consul had delighted in the absurd game too: sortes Shakespeareanae… And what wonders I have done all Germany can witness. Enter Wagner, solus… Ick sal you wat suggen, Hans. Dis skip, dat comen from Candy, is als vol, by God’s sacrament, van sugar, almonds, cambrick, end alle dingen, towsand, towsand ding. M. Laruelle closed the book on Dekker’s comedy, then, in the face of the barman who was watching him, strained dishcloth over his arm, with quiet amazement, shut his eyes, and opening the book again twirled one finger in the air, and brought it down firmly upon a passage he now held up to the light:

  Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,

  And burnèd is Apollo’s laurel bough,

  That sometimes grew within this learnèd man,

  Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall —

  Shaken, M. Laruelle replaced the book on the table, closing it with the fingers and thumb of one hand,
while with the other hand he reached to the floor for a folded sheet of paper that had fluttered out of it. He picked the paper up between two fingers and unfolded it, turning it over. Hotel Bella Vista, he read. There were really two sheets of uncommonly thin hotel note-paper that had been pressed flat in the book, long but narrow and crammed on both sides with meaningless writing in pencil. At first glance it did not appear a letter. But there was no mistaking, even in the uncertain light, the hand, half crabbed, half generous, and wholly drunken, of the Consul himself, the Greek e’s, flying buttresses of d’s, the t’s like lonely wayside crosses save where they crucified the entire word, the words themselves slanting steeply downhill, though the individual characters seemed as if resisting the descent, braced, climbing the other way. M. Laruelle felt a qualm. For he saw now that it was indeed a letter of sorts, though one that the writer undoubtedly had little intention, possibly no capability for the further tactile effort, of posting:

  … Night: and once again, the nightly grapple with death, the room shaking with daemonic orchestras, the snatches of fearful sleep, the voices outside the window, my name being continually repeated with scorn by imaginary parties arriving, the dark’s spin-nets. As if there were not enough real noises in these nights the colour of grey hair. Not like the rending tumult of American cities, the noise of the unbandaging of great giants in agony. But the howling pariah dogs, the cocks that herald dawn all night, the drumming, the moaning that will be found later white plumage huddled on telegraph wires in back gardens or fowl roosting in apple trees, the eternal sorrow that never sleeps of great Mexico. For myself I like to take my sorrow into the shadow of old monasteries, my guilt into cloisters and under tapestries, and into the misericordes of unimaginable cantinas where sad-faced potters and legless beggars drink at dawn, whose cold jonquil beauty one rediscovers in death. So that when you left, Yvonne, I went to Oaxaca. There is no sadder word. Shall I tell you, Yvonne, of the terrible jouney there through the desert over the narrow gauge railway on the rack of a third-class carriage bench, the child whose life its mother and I saved by rubbing its belly with tequila out of my bottle, or of how, when I went to my room in the hotel where we once were happy, the noise of slaughtering below in the kitchen drove me out into the glare of the street, and later, that night, there was a vulture sitting in the washbasin? Horrors portioned to a giant nerve! No, my secrets are of the grave and must be kept. And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell.