Under the Volcano (15 page)

"It's the wheee-u that does it.
The dying fall of the whinny." They passed the goat, two fierce
cornucopias over a hedge. There could be no mistaking it. Laughing they tried
to decide if it had turned off the Calle Nicaragua at the other lane or at its
juncture with the Alcapancingo road. The goat was cropping at the edge of a
field and lifted towards them, now, a Machiavellian eye, but did not move
farther, watching them.
 
I may have
missed that time. I am still on the warpath however.
 
The new lane, peaceful, quite shady,
deep-rutted, and despite the dry spell full of pools, beautifully reflecting
the sky, wandered on between clumps of trees and broken hedges screening
indeterminate fields, and now it was as though they were a company, a caravan,
carrying, for their greater security, a little world of love with them as they
rode along. Earlier it had promised to be too hot: but just enough sun warmed
them, a soft breeze caressed their faces, the countryside on either hand smiled
upon them with deceptive innocence, a drowsy hum rose up from the morning, the
mares nodded, there were the foals, here was the dog, and it is all a bloody
lie, he thought: we have fallen inevitably into it, it is as if, upon this one
day in the year, the dead come to life, or so one was reliably informed on the
bus, this day of visions and miracles, by some contrariety we have been allowed
for one hour a glimpse of what never was at all, of what never can be since
brotherhood was betrayed, the image of our happiness, of that it would be
better to think could not have been. Another thought struck Hugh. And yet I do
not expect, ever in my life, to be happier than I am now. No peace I shall ever
find but will be poisoned as these moments are poisoned--
   
"Firmin, you are a poor sort of
good man." The voice might have come from an imaginary member of their
caravan, and Hugh pictured Juan Cerillo distinctly now, tall, and riding a
horse much too small for him, without stirrups, so that his feet nearly touched
the ground, his wide ribboned hat on the back of his head, and a typewriter in
a box slung around his neck resting on the pommel; in one free hand he held a
bag of money, and a boy was running along beside him in the dust. Juan Cerillo!
He had been one of the fairly rare overt human symbols in Spain of the generous
help Mexico had actually given; he had returned home before Brihuega. Trained
as a chemist, he worked for a Credit Bank in Oaxaca with the Ejido, delivering
money on horseback to finance the collective effort of remote Zapotecan
villages; frequently beset by bandits murderously yelling Viva el Cristo Rey,
shot at by enemies of Cárdenas in reverberating church towers, his daily job
was equally an adventure in a human cause, which Hugh had been invited to
share. For Juan had written, express, his letter in a bravely stamped envelope
of thumbnail size--the stamps showed archers shooting at the sun--written that
he was well, back at work, less than a hundred miles away, and now as each
glimpse of the mysterious mountains seemed to mourn this opportunity lost to
Geoff and the
 
Noemijolea , Hugh seemed
to hear his good friend rebuking him. It was the same plangent voice that had
said once, in Spain, of his horse left in Cuscatlán:
   
"My poor horse, she will be
biting, biting all the time." But now it spoke of the Mexico of Juan's
childhood, of the year Hugh was born. Juarez had lived and died. Yet was it a
country with free speech, and the guarantee of life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness? A country of brilliantly muralled schools, and where even each
little cold mountain village had its stone open-air stage, and the land was
owned by its people free to express their native genius? A country of model
farms; of hope?--It was a country of slavery, where human beings were sold like
cattle, and its native peoples, the Yaquis, the Papagos, the Tomasachics,
exterminated through deportation, or reduced to worse than peonage, their lands
in thrall or the hands of foreigners. And in Oaxaca lay the terrible Valle
Nacional where Juan himself, a bona-fide slave aged seven, had seen an older
brother beaten to death, and another, bought for forty-five pesos, starved to
death in seven months, because it was cheaper this should happen, and the
slave-holder buy another slave, than simply have one slave better fed merely
worked to death in a year. All this spelt Porfirio Diaz: rurales everywhere,
jefes políticos, and murder, the extirpation of liberal political institutions,
the army an engine of massacre, an instrument of exile. Juan knew this, having
suffered it; and more. For later in the revolution, his mother was murdered.
And later still Juan himself killed his father, who had fought with Huerta, but
turned traitor. Ah, guilt and sorrow had dogged Juan's footsteps too, for he
was not a Catholic who could rise refreshed from the cold bath of confession.
Yet the banality stood: that the past was irrevocably past. And conscience had been
given man to regret it only in so far as that might change the future. For man,
every man, Juan seemed to be telling him, even as Mexico, must ceaselessly
struggle upward. What was life but a warfare and a stranger's sojourn?
Revolution rages too in the tierra caliente of each human soul. No peace but
that must pay full toll to hell--
   
"Is that so?"
   
"Is that so?"
   
They were all plodding downhill
towards a river--even the dog, lulled in a woolly soliloquy, was plodding--and
now they were in it, the first cautious heavy step forward, then the
hesitation, then the surging onward, the lurching surefootedness below one that
was yet so delicate there derived a certain sensation of lightness, as if the
mare were swimming, or floating through the air, bearing one across with the
divine surety of a Cristoferus, rather than by fallible instinct. The dog swam
ahead, fatuously important; the foals, nodding solemnly, swayed along behind up
to their necks: sunlight sparkled on the calm water, which further downstream
where the river narrowed broke into furious little waves, swirling and eddying
close inshore against black rocks, giving an effect of wildness, almost of
rapids; low over their heads an ecstatic lightning of strange birds manoeuvred,
looping-the-loop and immelmaning at unbelievable speed, aerobatic as new-born
dragon-flies. The opposite shore was thickly wooded. Beyond the gently sloping
bank, a little to the left of what was apparently the cavernous entrance to the
continuation of their lane, stood a pulquería, decorated, above its wooden twin
swing-doors (which from a distance looked not unlike the immensely magnificent
chevrons of an American army sergeant), with gaily coloured fluttering ribbons.
Pulques Finos, it said in faded blue letters on the oyster-white adobe wall: La
Sepultura. A grim name: but doubtless it had some humorous connotation. An
Indian sat with his back against the wall, his broad hat half down over his
face, rested outside in the sunshine. His horse, or a horse, was tethered near
him to a tree and Hugh could see from midstream the number seven branded on its
rump. An advertisement for the local cinema was stuck on the tree: Las Manos de
Orlac con Peter Lorre. On the roof of the pulquería a toy windmill, of the kind
one saw in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, was twirling restlessly in the breeze. Hugh
said:
   
"Your horse doesn't want to
drink, Yvonne, just to look at her reflection. Let her. Don't yank at her
head."
   
"I wasn't. I know that
too," Yvonne said, with an ironic little smile.
   
They zigzagged slowly across the
river; the dog, swimming like an otter, had almost reached the opposite bank.
Hugh became aware of a question in the air.
   
"--you're our house guest, you
know."
   
"Por favor." Hugh inclined
his head.
   
"--would you like to have dinner
out and go to a movie? Or will you brave Concepta's cooking?"
   
"What what?" Hugh had been
thinking, for some reason, of his first week at his public school in England, a
week of not knowing what one was supposed to do or to answer to any question,
but of being carried on by a sort of pressure of shared ignorance into crowded
halls, activities, marathons, even exclusive isolations, as when he had found
himself once riding on horseback with the headmaster's wife, a reward, he was
told, but for what he had never found out. "No, I think I should hate to
go to a movie, thank you very much," he laughed.
   
"It's a strange little
place--you might find it fun. The news-reels used to be about two years old and
I shouldn't think it's changed any. And the same features come back over and
over again.
 
Cimarron and the Gold
Diggers of 1930
 
and oh--last year we saw
a travelogue,
 
Come to Sunny
Andalusia
 
by way of news from
Spain--"
   
"Blimey," Hugh said.
   
"And the lighting is always
failing."
   
"I think I've seen the Peter
Lorre movie somewhere. He's a great actor but it's a lousy picture. Your horse
doesn't want to drink, Yvonne. It's all about a pianist who has a sense of
guilt because he thinks his hands are a murderer's or something and keeps
washing the blood off them. Perhaps they really are a murderer's, but I
forget."
   
"It sounds creepy."
   
"I know, but it isn't."
   
On the other side of the river their
horses did want to drink and they paused to let them. Then they rode up the
bank into the lane. This time the hedges were taller and thicker and twined
with convolvulus. For that matter they might have been in England, exploring
some little-known bypath of Devon or Cheshire. There was little to contradict
the impression save an occasional huddled conclave of vultures up a tree. After
climbing steeply through woodland the lane levelled off. Presently they reached
more open country and fell into a canter.--Christ, how marvellous this was, or
rather Christ, how he wanted to be deceived about it, as must have Judas, he
thought--and here it was again, damn it--if ever Judas had a horse, or
borrowed, stole one more likely, after that Madrugada of all Madrugadas,
regretting then that he had given the thirty pieces of silver back--what is
that to us, see thou to that, the bastardos had said--when now he probably
wanted a drink, thirty drinks (like Geoff undoubtedly would this morning), and
perhaps even so he had managed a few on credit, smelling the good smells of
leather and sweat, listening to the pleasant clopping of the horses' hooves and
thinking, how joyous all this could be, riding on like this under the dazzling
sky of Jerusalem--and forgetting for an instant, so that it really
 
was
 
joyous--how splendid it all might be had I only not betrayed that man
last night, even though I know perfectly well I was going to, how good indeed,
if only it had not happened though, if only it were not so absolutely necessary
to go out and hang oneself--
   
And here indeed it was again, the temptation,
the cowardly, the future-corruptive serpent: trample on it, stupid fool. Be
Mexico. Have you not passed through the river? In the name of God be dead. And
Hugh actually did ride over a dead garter snake, embossed on the path like a
belt to a pair of bathing trunks. Or perhaps it was a Gila monster.
   
They had emerged on the outermost
edge of what looked like a spacious, somewhat neglected park, spreading down on
their right, or what had once been a huge grove, planted with lofty majestic
trees. They reined in and Hugh, behind, rode slowly by himself for a while...
The foals separated him from Yvonne, who was staring blankly ahead as if
insensible to their surroundings. The grove seemed to be irrigated by
artificially banked streams, which were choked with leaves--though by no means
all the trees were deciduous and underneath were frequent dark pools of
shadow--and was lined with walks. Their lane had in fact become one of these
walks. A noise of shunting sounded on the left; the station couldn't be far
off; probably it was hidden behind that hillock over which hung a plume of
white steam. But a railway track, raised above scrub-land, gleamed through the
trees to their right; the line apparently made a wide detour round the whole
place. They rode past a dried-up fountain below some broken steps, its basin
filled with twigs and leaves. Hugh sniffed: a strong raw smell, he couldn't
identify at first, pervaded the air. They were entering the vague precincts of
what might have been a French chateau. The building, half hidden by trees, lay
in a sort of courtyard at the end of the grove, which was closed by a row of
cypresses growing behind a high wall, in which a massive gate, straight ahead
of them, stood open. Dust was blowing across the gap. Cervecería Quauhnahuac:
Hugh now saw written in white letters on the side of the chateau. He halloed
and waved at Yvonne to halt. So the chateau was a brewery, but of a very odd
type--one that hadn't quite made up its mind not to be an open-air restaurant
and beer garden. Outside in the courtyard two or three round tables (more
likely to provide against the occasional visits of semi-official
"tasters"), blackened and leaf covered, were set beneath immense
trees not quite familiar enough for oaks, not quite strangely tropical either,
which were perhaps not really very old, but possessed an indefinable air of
being immemorial, of having been planted centuries ago by some emperor, at
least, with a golden trowel. Under these trees, where their cavalcade stopped,
a little girl was playing with an armadillo.
   
Out of the brewery itself, which at
close quarters appeared quite different, more like a mill, sliced, oblong,
which emitted a sudden mill-like clamour, and on which flitted and slid
mill-wheel-like reflections of sunlight on water, cast from a nearby stream,
out of a glimpse of its very machinery, now issued a pied man, visored,
resembling a gamekeeper, bearing two foaming tankards of dark German beer. They
had not dismounted and he handed the beer up to them.