Under the Volcano Read online

  They moved on past the front of Cortez Palace, then down its blind side began to descend the cliff that traversed it width-ways. Their path made the short cut to the Calle Tierra del Fuego which curved below to meet them but the cliff was little better than a rubbish heap with smouldering debris and they had to pick their way carefully. Yvonne breathed more freely though, now they were leaving the centre of the town behind. La Despedida, she thought. The Parting ! After the damp and detritus had done their work both severed halves of that blasted rock would crumble to earth. It was inevitable, so it said on the picture… Was it really? Wasn’t there some way of saving the poor rock whose immutability so short a time ago no one would have dreamed of doubting! Ah, who would have thought of it then as other than a single integrated rock? But granted it had been split, was there no way before total disintegration should set in of at least saving the severed halves? There was no way. The violence of the fire which split the rock apart had also incited the destruction of each separate rock, cancelling the power that might have held them unities. Oh, but why — by some fanciful geologic thaumaturgy, couldn’t the pieces be welded together again! She longed to heal the cleft rock. She was one of the rocks and she yearned to save the other, that both might be saved. By a superlapidary effort she moved herself nearer it, poured out her pleas, her passionate tears, told all her forgiveness: the other rock stood unmoved. ‘That’s all very well,’ it said, ‘but it happens to be your fault, and as for myself, I propose to disintegrate as I please!’

  ‘ – in Tortu,’ the Consul was saying, though Yvonne was not following, and now they had come out in the Calle Tierra del Fuego itself, a rough narrow dusty street that, deserted, looked quite unfamiliar. The Consul was beginning to shake again.

  ‘Geoffrey, I’m so thirsty, why don’t we stop and have a drink?’

  ‘Geoffrey, let’s be reckless this once and get tight together before breakfast!’

  Yvonne said neither of these things.

  — The Street of the Land of Fire! To their left, raised high above road level, were uneven sidewalks with rough steps hewn in them. The whole little thoroughfare, slightly humpbacked in the centre where the open sewers had been filled in, was banked sharply down to the right as though it had once sideslipped in an earthquake. On this side one-storied houses with tiled roofs and oblong barred windows stood flush with the street but seemingly below it. On the other, above them, they were passing small shops, sleepy, though mostly opening or, like the ‘Molino para Nixtamal, Morelense’, open: harness shops, a milk shop under its sign Lecheria (brothel, someone insisted it meant, and she hadn’t seen the joke), dark interiors with strings of tiny sausages, chorizos, hanging over the counters where you could also buy goat cheese or sweet quince wine or cacao, into one of which the Consul was ⁅now, with a’‘momentito’‘, disappearing. ‘Just go on and I’ll catch you up. I won’t be a jiffy.’

  Yvonne walked on past the place a short distance, then retraced her steps. She had not entered any of these shops since their first week in Mexico and the danger of being recognized in the abarrotes was slight. Nevertheless, repenting her tardy impulse to follow the Consul in, she waited outside, restless as a little yacht turning at anchor. The opportunity to join him ebbed. A mood of martyrdom stole upon her. She wanted the Consul to see her, when he emerged, waiting there, abandoned and affronted. But glancing back the way they had come she forgot Geoffrey an instant. — It was unbelievable. She was in Quauhnahuac again! There was Cortez Palace and there, high on the cliff, a man standing gazing over the valley who from his air of martial intentness might have been Cortez himself. The man moved, spoiling the illusion. Now he looked less like Cortez than the poor young man in the dark glasses who’d been leaning against the wall of the Bella Vista.

  ‘You-are-a-man-who-like-much-Vine!’ now issued powerfully from the abarrotes into the peaceful street, followed by a roar of incredibly good-humoured but ruffianly male laughter. ‘You are —diablo!’ There was a pause in which she heard the Consul saying something. ‘Eggs!’ the good-humoured voice exploded again. ‘You —two diablos! You tree diablos.’ The voice crackled with glee.‘Eggs!’ Then: ‘Who is the beautiful layee?— Ah, you are — ah five diablos, you ah — Eggs!’ ludicrously followed the Consul, who appeared at this moment, calmly smiling, on the pavement above Yvonne.

  ‘In Tortu’, he was saying as, steadier again, he fell into step beside her, ‘the ideal University, where no application whatsoever, so I have heard on good authority, nothing, not even athletics, is allowed to interfere with the business of — look out I… drinking.’

  It came sailing out of nowhere, the child’s funeral, the tiny lace-covered coffin followed by the band: two saxophones, bass guitar, a fiddle, playing of all things ‘La Cucaracha’, the women behind, very solemn, while several paces back a few hangers-on were joking, straggling along in the dust almost at a run.

  They stood to one side while the little cortège slanted by swiftly in the direction of the town, then walked on in silence not looking at one another. The banking of the street now became less acute and the sidewalks and the shops dropped away. To the left there was only a low blank wall with vacant lots behind it, whereas to the right the houses had turned into low open shanties filled with black carbon. Yvonne’s heart, that had been struggling with an insufferable pang, suddenly missed a beat. Though one might not think it they were approaching the residental district, their own terrain.

  ‘Do look where you’re going, Geoffrey!’ But it was Yvonne who had stumbled rounding the right-angled corner into the Calle Nicaragua. The Consul regarded her without expression as she stared up into the sun at the bizarre house opposite them near the head of their street, with two towers and a connecting catwalk over the ridgepole, at which someone else, a peon with his back turned, was also gazing curiously.

  ‘Yes, it’s still there, it hasn’t budged an inch,’ he said, and now they had passed the house to their left with its inscription on the wall she didn’t want to see and were walking down the Calle Nicaragua.

  ‘Yet the street looks different somehow.’ Yvonne relapsed into silence again. Actually she was making a tremendous effort to control herself. What she could not have explained was that recently in her picture of Quauhnahuac this house hadn’t been here at all! On the occasions imagination had led her with Geoffrey down the Calle Nicaragua lately, never once, poor phantoms, had they been confronted with Jacques’s zacuali. It had vanished some time before, leaving not a trace, it was as if the house had never existed, just as in the mind of a murderer, it may happen, some prominent landmark in the vicinity of his crime becomes obliterated, so that on returning to the neighbourhood, once so familiar, he scarcely knows where to turn. But the Calle Nicaragua didn’t really look different. Here it was, still cluttered up with large grey loose stones, full of the same lunar potholes, and in that well-known state of frozen eruption that resembled repair but which in fact only testified facetiously to the continued deadlock betwen the Municipality and the property owners here over its maintenance. Calle Nicaragua! — the name, despite everything, sang plangently within her: only that ridiculous shock at Jacques’s house could account for her feeling, with one part of her mind, calm as she did about it.

  The road, broad, sidewalkless, ran with increasing steepness downhill, mostly between high walls overhung by trees, though at the moment there were more little carbon shanties to their right, down to a leftward curve some three hundred yards away where roughly the same distance again above their own house it was lost from sight. Trees blocked the view beyond of low rolling hills. Nearly all the large residences were on their left, built far back from the road towards the barranca in order to face the volcanoes across the valley. She saw the mountains again in the distance through a gap between two estates, a small field bounded by a barbed-wire fence and overflowing with tall spiny grasses tossed wildly together as by a big wind that had abruptly ceased. There they were, Popocateped and Ixtaccihuad, remote ambassadors of M
auna Loa, Mokuaweoweo: dark clouds now obscured their base. The grass, she thought, wasn’t as green as it should be at the end of the rains: there must have been a dry spell, though the gutters on either side of the road were brimful of rushing mountain water and –

  ‘And he’s still there too. He hasn’t budged an inch either.’ The Consul without turning was nodding back in the direction of M. Laruelle’s house.

  ‘Who — who hasn’t –’ Yvonne faltered. She glanced behind her: there was only the peon who had stopped looking at the house and was going into an alleyway.

  ‘Jacques.’

  ‘Jacques!’

  ‘That’s right. In fact we’ve had terrific times together. We’ve been slap through everything from Bishop Berkeley to the four o’clock mirabilis jalapa.’

  ‘You do what?’

  ‘The Diplomatic Service.’ The Consul had paused and was lighting his pipe. ‘Sometimes I really think there’s something to be said for it.’

  ‘ –’

  He stopped to float a match down the brimming gutter and somehow they were moving, even hurrying on: she heard be-musedly the swift angry click and crunch of her heels on the road and the Consul’s seemingly effortless voice at her shoulder.

  ‘For instance had you ever been British attaché to the White Russian Embassy in Zagreb in 1922, and I’ve always thought a woman like you would have done very well as attaché to the White Russian Embassy in Zagreb in 1922, though God knows how it managed to survive that long, you might have acquired a certain, I don’t say technique exactly, but a mien, a mask, a way, at any rate, of throwing a look into your face at a moment’s notice of sublime dishonest detachment.’

  ‘ –’

  ‘Although I can very well see how it strikes you — how the picture of our implied indifference, Jacques’s and mine that is, I mean, strikes you, as being even more indecent than that, say, Jacques shouldn’t have left when you did or that we shouldn’t have dropped the friendship.

  ‘_’

  ‘But had you, Yvonne, ever been on the bridge of a British Q-ship, and I’ve always thought a woman like you would have been very good on the bridge of a British Q-ship — peering at the Tottenham Court Road through a telescope, only figuratively speaking of course, day in and day out, counting the waves, you might have learnt –’

  ‘Please look where you’re going!’

  ‘Though had you of course ever been Consul to Cuckolds-haven, that town cursed by the lost love of Maximilian and Carlotta, then, why then –’

  — —¡!BOX!ARENA TOMALÍN. EL BALÓN VS EL REDONDILLO.

  ‘But I don’t think I finished about the little.corpse. What is really so astonishing about him is that he has to be checked, actually checked, to the U.S. Border of Exit. While the charges for him are equivalent to two adult passengers –’

  ‘ –’

  ‘However since you don’t seem to want to listen to me, here’s something else perhaps I ought to tell you.’

  ‘ –’

  ‘Something else, I repeat, very important, that perhaps I ought to tell you.’

  ‘Yes. What is it?’

  ‘About Hugh.’

  Yvonne said at last:

  ‘You’ve heard from Hugh. How is he?’

  ‘He’s staying with me.’

  —!BOX! ARENA TOMALÍN. FRENTE AL JARDIN XICOTAN-CATL. Domingo 8 de Noviembre de 1938. 4 Emocionantes Peleas. EL BALÓN VS EL REDONDILLO.

  Las Manos de Orlac. Con Peter Lorre.

  ‘What!’ Yvonne stopped dead.

  ‘It seems he’s been in-America this time on a cattle ranch,’ the Consul was saying rather gravely as somehow, anyhow, they moved on, but this time more slowly. ‘Why, heaven knows. It couldn’t be he was learning to ride, but still, he turned up about a week ago in a distinctly unpukka outfit, looking like Hoot S. Hart in the Riders to the Purple Sage. Apparently he’d teleported himself, or been deported, from America by cattle-truck. I don’t pretend to know how the Press get by in these matters. Or maybe it was a bet… Anyhow he got as far as Chihuahua with the cattle, and some gun-running gun-toting pal by the name of — Weber? — I forget, anyway, I didn’t meet him, flew him the rest of the way.’ The Consul knocked out his pipe on his heel, smiling. ‘It seems everyone comes flying to see me these days.’

  ‘But — but Hugh — I don’t understand –’

  ‘He’d lost his clothes en route but it wasn’t carelessness, if you can believe it, only that they wanted to make him pay higher duty at the border than they were worth, so quite naturally he left them behind. He hadn’t lost his passport however, which was unusual perhaps because he’s still somehow with —though I haven’t the foggiest in what capacity — the London Globe… Of course you knew he’s become quite famous lately. For the second time, in case you weren’t aware of the first.’

  ‘Did he know about our divorce?’ Yvonne managed to ask.

  The Consul shook his head. They walked on slowly, the Consul looking at the ground.

  ‘Did you tell him?’

  The Consul was silent, walking more and more slowly. ‘What did I say?’ he said at length.

  ‘Nothing, Geoff.’

  ‘Well, he knows now that we’re separated, of course.’ The Consul decapitated a dusty coquelicot poppy growing by the side of the gutter with his stick. ‘But he expected us both to be here. I gather he had some idea we might let — but I avoided telling him the divorce had gone through. That is, I think I did. I meant to avoid it. So far as I know, honestly, I hadn’t got around to telling him when he left.’

  ‘Then he’s not staying with you any longer.’

  The Consul burst out in a laugh that became a cough. ‘Oh yes he is! He most certainly is… In fact, I nearly passed out altogether under the stress of his salvage operations. Which is to say he’s been trying to “straighten me out”. Can’t you see it? Can’t you recognize his fine Italian hand? And he almost literally succeeded right off with some malevolent strychnine compound he produced. But’, just for one moment the Consul seemed to have difficulty placing one foot before another,‘ to be more concrete, actually he did have a better reason for staying than to play Theodore Watts Dunton. To my Swinburne.’ The Consul decapitated another poppy. ‘Mute Swinburne. He’d got wind of some story while vacationing on the ranch and came after it here like a red rag after a bull. Didn’t I tell you that?… Which — didn’t I say so before? — is why he’s gone off to Mexico City.’

  After a while Yvonne said weakly, scarcely hearing herself speak: ‘Well, we may have a little time together, mayn’t we?’

  ‘¿Quien sabé?’

  ‘But you mean he’s in the City now,’ she covered hastily.

  ‘Oh, he’s throwing up the job — he might be home now. At any rate he’ll be back today, I think. He says he wants “action”. Poor old chap, he’s wearing a very popular front indeed these days.’ Whether the Consul was being sincere or not he added, sympathetically enough, it sounded, ‘And God alone knows what will be the end of that romantic little urge in him.’

  ‘And how will he feel’, Yvonne asked bravely all at once, ‘when he sees you again?’

  ‘Yes, well, not much difference, not enough time to show, but I’d just been about to say’, the Consul went on with a slight hoarseness, ‘that the terrific times, Laruelle’s and mine, I mean, ceased on the advent of Hugh.’ He was poking at the dust with his stick, making little patterns for a minute as he went along, like a blind man. ‘They were mostly mine because Jacques as a weak stomach and is usually sick after three drinks and after four he would start to play the Good Samaritan, and after five Theodore Watts Dunton too… So that I appreciated, so to speak, a change of technique. At least to the extent that I find I shall be grateful now, on Hugh’s behalf, if you’d say nothing to him –’

  ‘Oh –’

  The Consul cleared his throat. ‘Not that I have been drinking much of course in his absence, and not that I’m not absolutely cold stone sober now, as you can readily see.’


  ‘Oh yes indeed,’ Yvonne smiled, full of thoughts that had already swept her a thousand miles in frantic retreat from all this. Yet she was walking on slowly beside him. And deliberately as a climber on a high unguarded place looks up at the pine trees above on the precipice and comforts himself by saying: ‘Never mind about the drop below me, how very much worse if I were on top of one of those pines up there!’ she forced herself out of the moment: she stopped thinking: or she thought about the street again, remembering her last poignant glimpse of it — and how even more desperate things had seemed then! —at the beginning of that fateful journey to Mexico City, glancing back from the now lost Plymouth as they turned the corner, crashing, crunching down on its springs into the potholes, stopping dead, then crawling, leaping forward again, keeping in, it didn’t matter on which side, to the walls. They were higher than she recalled and covered with bougainvillea; massive smouldering banks of bloom. Over them she could see the crests of trees, their boughs heavy and motionless, and occasionally a watch-tower, the eternal mirador of Pariÿn state, set among them, the houses invisible here below the walls and from on top too, she’d once taken the trouble to find out, as if shrunken down inside their patios, the miradors cut off, floating above like lonely rooftrees of the soul. Nor could you distinguish the houses much better through the wrought-iron lacework of the high gates, vaguely reminiscent of New Orleans, locked in these walls on which were furtively pencilled lovers’ trysts, and which so often concealed less Mexico than a Spaniard’s dream of home. The gutter on the right ran underground a while and another of those low shanties built on the street frowned at her with its dark open sinister bunkers — where Maria used to fetch their carbon. Then the water tumbled out into the sunlight and on the other side, through a gap in the walls, Popocateped emerged alone. Without her knowing it they had passed the corner and the entrance to their house was in sight.