Under the Volcano (17 page)

   
"Oh no. We often used to talk
about having a farm in the old days."
   
"Do you know anything about
farming?"
   
"No." Yvonne abruptly,
delightfully, dismissed the possibility, leaning forward and stroking her
mare's neck. "But I wondered if we mightn't get some couple who'd lost
their own farm or something actually to run it for us and live on it."
   
"I wouldn't have thought it
exactly a good point in history to begin to prosper as the landed gentry, but
still maybe it is. Where's this farm to be?"
   
"Well... What's to stop us going
to Canada, for instance?"
   
."..
 
Canada? ... Are you serious? Well, why not,
but--"
   
"Perfectly."
   
They had now reached the place where
the railway took its wide leftward curve and they descended the embankment. The
grove had dropped behind but there was still thick woodland to their right
(above the centre of which had appeared again the almost friendly landmark of
the prison watchtower) and stretching far ahead. A road showed briefly along
the margin of the woods. They approached this road slowly, following the
single-minded thrumming telegraph poles and picking a difficult course through
the scrub.
   
" I mean why Canada more than
British Honduras? Or even Tristan da Cunha? A little lonely perhaps, though an
admirable place for one's teeth, I've heard. Then there's Gough Island, hard by
Tristan. That's uninhabited. Still, you might colonize it. Or Sokotra, where
the frankincense and myrrh used to come from and the camels climb like chamois--my
favourite island in the Arabian Sea." But Hugh's tone though amused was
not altogether sceptical as he touched on these fantasies, half to himself, for
Yvonne rode a little in front; it was as if he were after all seriously
grappling with the problem of Canada while at the same time making an effort to
pass off the situation as possessing any number of adventurous whimsical
solutions. He caught up with her.
   
"Hasn't Geoffrey mentioned his
genteel Siberia to you lately?" she said. "You surely haven't
forgotten he owns an island in British Columbia?"
   
"On a lake, isn't it? Pineaus
Lake. I remember. But there isn't any house on it, is there? And you can't
graze cattle on fircones and hardpan."
   
"That's not the point,
Hugh."
   
"Or would you propose to camp on
it and have your farm elsewhere?"
   
"Hugh, listen--"
   
"But suppose you could only buy
your farm in some place like Saskatchewan," Hugh objected. An idiotic
verse came into his head, keeping time with the horse's hooves:
   
Oh take me back to Poor Fish River,
Take me back to Onion Lake,
You can keep the Guadalquivir,
Como you may likewise take.
Take me back to dear old Horsefly,
Aneroid or Gravelburg....
   
"In some place with a name like
Product. Or even Dumble," he went on. "There must be a Dumble. In
fact I know there's a Dumble."
   
"All right. Maybe it
 
is
 
ridiculous. But at least it's better than sitting here doing
nothing!" Almost crying, Yvonne angrily urged her horse into a brief wild
canter, but the terrain was too rough; Hugh reined in beside her and they
halted together.
   
"I'm awfully, dreadfully
sorry." Contrite, he took her bridle. "I was just being more than
unusually bloody stupid."
   
"Then you
 
do
 
think it's a good idea?" Yvonne brightened slightly, even contriving
again an air of mockery.
   
"Have you ever been to
Canada?" he asked her.
   
"I've been to Niagara
Falls."
   
They rode on, Hugh still holding her
bridle. "I've never been to Canada at all. But a Canuck in Spain, a
fisherman pal of mine with the Macs-Paps, used to keep telling me it was the
most terrific place in the world. British Columbia, at any rate."
   
"That's what Geoffrey used to
say too."
   
"Well, Geoff's liable to be
vague on the subject. But here's what McGoff told me. This man was a Pict.
Suppose you land in Vancouver, as seems reasonable. So far not so good. McGoff
didn't have much use for modern Vancouver. According to him it has a sort of
Pango Pango quality mingled with sausage and mash and generally a rather
Puritan atmosphere. Everyone fast asleep and when you prick them a Union Jack
flows out of the hole. But no one in a certain sense lives there. They merely
as it were pass through. Mine the country and quit. Blast the land to pieces,
knock down the trees and send them rolling down Burrard Inlet... As for
drinking, by the way, that is beset," Hugh chuckled, "everywhere
beset by perhaps favourable difficulties. No bars, only beer parlours so
uncomfortable and cold that serve beer so weak no self-respecting drunkard would
show his nose in them. You have to drink at home, and when you run short it's
too far to get a bottle--"
   
"But--" They were both
laughing.
   
"But wait a minute." Hugh
looked up at the sky of New Spain. It was a day like a good Joe Venuti record.
He listened to the faint steady droning of the telegraph poles and the wires
above them that sang in his heart with his pint-and-a-half of beer. At this
moment the best and easiest and most simple thing in the world seemed to be the
happiness of these two people in a new country. And what counted seemed
probably the swiftness with which they moved. He thought of the Ebro. Just as a
long-planned offensive might be defeated in its first few days by unconsidered
potentialities that have now been given time to mature, so a sudden desperate
move might succeed precisely because of the number of potentialities it
destroys at one fell swoop...
   
"The thing to do," he went
on, "is to get out of Vancouver as fast as possible. Go down one of the
inlets to some fishing village and buy a shack slap spang on the sea, with only
foreshore rights, for, say a hundred dollars. Then live on it this winter for
about sixty a month. No phone. No rent. No consulate. Be a squatter. Call on
your pioneer ancestors. Water from the well. Chop your own wood. After all,
Geoff's as strong as a horse. And perhaps he'll be able really to get down to
his book and you can have your stars and the sense of the seasons again; though
you can sometimes swim late as November. And get to know the real people: the
Seine fishermen, the old boat builders, the trappers, according to McGoff the
last truly free people left in the world. Meantime you can get your island
fixed up and find out about your farm, which previously you'll have used as a
decoy for all you're worth, if you still want it by then--" "Oh
Hugh,
 
yes --"
   
He all but shook her horse with
enthusiasm. "I can see your shack now. It's between the forest and the sea
and you've got a pier going down to the water over rough stones, you know,
covered with barnacles and sea anemones and starfish. You'll have to go through
the woods to the store." Hugh saw the store in his mind's eye.
 
The woods will be wet. And occasionally a
tree will come crashing down. And sometimes there will be a fog and that fog
will freeze. Then your whole forest will become a crystal forest. The ice
crystals on the twigs will grow like leaves. Then pretty soon you'll be seeing
the jack-in-the-pulpits and then it will be spring.
   
They were galloping... Bare level
plain had taken the place of the scrub and they'd been cantering briskly, the
foals prancing delightedly ahead, when suddenly the dog was a
shoulder-shrugging streaking fleece, and as their mares almost imperceptibly
fell into the long untrammelled undulating strides, Hugh felt the sense of
change, the keen elemental pleasure one experienced too on board a ship which,
leaving the choppy waters of the estuary, gives way to the pitch and swing of
the open sea. A faint carillon of bells sounded in the distance, rising and
falling, sinking back as if into the very substance of the day. Judas had
forgotten; nay, Judas had been, somehow, redeemed.
   
They were galloping parallel to the
road which was hedgeless and on ground level, then the thudding regular thunder
of the hooves struck abruptly hard and metallic and dispersed and they were
clattering on the road itself; it bore away to the right skirting the woods
round a sort of headland jutting into the plain. "We're on the Calle
Nicaragua again," Yvonne shouted gaily, "almost!"
  
 
At a full gallop they were approaching the
Malebolge once more, the serpentine barranca, though at a point much farther up
than where they'd first crossed it; they were trotting side by side over a
white-fenced bridge: then, all at once, they were in the ruin. Yvonne was in it
first, the animals seeming to be checked less by the reins than by their own
decision, possibly nostalgic, possibly even considerate, to halt. They
dismounted. The ruin occupied a considerable stretch of the grassy roadside on
their right hand. Near them was what might once have been a chapel, with grass
on which the dew still sparkled growing through the floor. Elsewhere were the
remains of a wide stone porch with low crumbled balustrades. Hugh, who had
quite lost his bearings, secured their mares to a broken pink pillar that stood
apart from the rest of the desuetude, a meaningless mouldering emblem.
   
"What is all this ex-splendour
anyway?" he said.
   
"Maximilian's Palace. The summer
one, I think. I believe all that grove effect by the brewery was once part of
his grounds too." Yvonne looked suddenly ill at ease.
   
"Don't you want to stop
here?" he had asked her.
   
"Sure. It's a good idea. I'd
like a cigarette," she said hesitantly. "But we'll have to stroll
down a ways for Carlotta's favourite view."
   
"The emperor's mirador certainly
has seen better days." Hugh, rolling Yvonne a cigarette, glanced absently
round the place, which appeared so reconciled to its own ruin no sadness
touched it; birds perched on the blasted towers and dilapidated masonry over
which clambered the inevitable blue convolvulus; the foals with their guardian
dog resting near were meekly grazing in the chapel: it seemed safe to leave
them...
   
"Maximilian and Carlotta,
eh?" Hugh was saying. "Should Juarez have had the man shot or
not?"
   
"It's an awfully tragic
story."
   
"He should have had old
thingmetight, Díaz, shot at the same time and made a job of it."
   
They came to the headland and stood
gazing back the way they had come, over the plains, the scrub, the railway, the
Tomalín road. It was blowing here, a dry steady wind. Popocatepetl and
Ixtaccihuatl. There they lay peacefully enough beyond the valley; the firing
had ceased. Hugh felt a pang. On the way down he'd entertained a quite serious
notion of finding time to climb Popo, perhaps even with Juan Cerillo--
   
"There's your moon for you
still," he pointed it out again, a fragment blown out of the night by a
cosmic storm.
   
"Weren't those wonderful
names," she said, "the old astronomers gave the places on the
moon?"
   
"The Marsh of Corruption. That's
the only one I can remember."
   
"Sea of Darkness... Sea of
Tranquillity..."
   
They stood side by side without
speaking, the wind tearing cigarette smoke over their shoulders; from here the
valley too resembled a sea, a galloping sea. Beyond the Tomalín road the
country rolled and broke its barbarous waves of dunes and rocks in every
direction. Above the foothills, spiked along their rims with firs, like broken
bottles guarding a wall, a white onrush of clouds might have been poised
breakers. But behind the volcanoes themselves he saw now that storm clouds were
gathering. "Sokotra," he thought, "my mysterious island in the
Arabian Sea, where the frankincense and myrrh used to come from, and no one has
ever been--"
   
There was something in the wild
strength of this landscape, once a battlefield, that seemed to be shouting at
him, a presence born of that strength whose cry his whole being recognized as
familiar, caught and threw back into the wind, some youthful password of
courage and pride--the passionate, yet so nearly always hypocritical,
affirmation of one's soul perhaps, he thought, of the desire to be, to do,
good, what was right. It was as though he were gazing now beyond this expanse
of plains and beyond the volcanoes out to the wide rolling blue ocean itself,
feeling it in his heart still, the boundless impatience, the immeasurable
longing.

   
 
Behind them walked the only living thing
that shared their pilgrimage, the dog. And by degrees they reached the briny
sea. Then, with souls well disciplined they reached the northern region, and
beheld, with heaven aspiring hearts, the mighty mountain Himavat... Whereupon
the lake was lapping, the lilacs were blowing, the chenars were budding, the
mountains were glistening, the waterfalls were playing, the spring was green,
the snow was white, the sky was blue, the fruit blossoms were clouds: and he
was still thirsty. Then the snow was not glistening, the fruit blossoms were
not clouds, they were mosquitoes, the Himalayas were hidden by dust, and he was
thirstier than ever. Then the lake was blowing, the snow was blowing, the
waterfalls were blowing, the fruit blossoms were blowing, the seasons were
blowing--blowing away--he was blowing away himself, whirled by a storm of
blossoms into the mountains, where now the rain was falling. But this rain,
that fell only on the mountains, did not assuage his thirst. Nor was he after
all in the mountains. He was standing, among cattle, in a stream. He was
resting, with some ponies, knee-deep beside him in the cool marshes. He was
lying face downward drinking from a lake that reflected the white-capped
ranges, the clouds piled five miles high behind the mighty mountain Himavat:
the purple chenars and a village nestling among the mulberries. Yet his thirst
still remained unquenched. Perhaps because he was drinking, not water, but
lightness, and promise of lightness--how could he be drinking promise of
lightness? Perhaps because he was drinking, not water, but certainty of
brightness--how could he be drinking certainty of brightness? Certainty of
brightness, promise of lightness, of light, light, light, and again, of light,
light, light, light, light!
   
... The Consul, an inconceivable
anguish of horripilating hangover thunderclapping about his skull, and
accompanied by a protective screen of demons gnattering in his ears, became
aware that in the horrid event of his being observed by his neighbours it could
hardly be supposed he was just sauntering down his garden with some innocent
horticultural object in view. Nor even that he was sauntering. The Consul, who
had waked a moment or two ago on the porch and remembered everything
immediately, was almost running. He was also lurching. In vain he tried to check
himself, plunging his hands, with an extraordinary attempt at nonchalance, in
which he hoped might appear more than a hint of consular majesty, deeper into
the sweat-soaked pockets of his dress trousers. And now, rheumatisms discarded,
he really was running... Might he not, then, be reasonably suspected of a more
dramatic purpose, of having assumed, for instance, the impatient buskin of a
William Blackstone leaving the Puritans to dwell among the Indians, or the
desperate mien of his friend Wilson when he so magnificently abandoned the
University Expedition to disappear, likewise in a pair of dress trousers, into
the jungles of darkest Oceania, never to return? Not very reasonably. For one
thing, if he continued much farther in this present direction towards the
bottom of his garden any such visioned escape into the unknown must shortly be
arrested by what was, for him, an unscalable wire fence. "Do not be so
foolish as to imagine you have no object, however. We warned you, we told you
so, but now that in spite of all our pleas you have got yourself into this
deplorable--" He recognized the tone of one of his familiars, faint among
the other voices as he crashed on through the metamorphoses of dying and reborn
hallucinations, like a man who does not know he has been shot from behind.
"--condition," the voice went on severely, "you have to do
something about it. Therefore we are leading you towards the accomplishment of
this something." "I'm not going to drink," the Consul said,
halting suddenly. "Or am I? Not mescal anyway." "Of course not,
the bottle's just there, behind that bush. Pick it up." "I
can't," he objected--"That's right, just take one drink, just the
necessary, the therapeutic drink: perhaps two drinks." "God,"
the Consul said. "Ah. Good. God. Christ." "Then you can say it
doesn't count." "It doesn't. It isn't mescal." "Of course
not, it's tequila. You might have another." "Thanks, I will."
The Consul palsiedly readjusted the bottle to his lips. "Bliss. Jesus.
Sanctuary... Horror," he added. "--Stop. Put that bottle down,
Geoffrey Firmin, what are you doing to yourself?" another voice said in
his ear so loudly he turned round. On the path before him a little snake he had
thought a twig was rustling off into the bushes and he watched it a moment through
his dark glasses, fascinated. It was a real snake all right. Not that he was
much bothered by anything so simple as snakes, he reflected with a degree of
pride, gazing straight into the eyes of a dog. It was a pariah dog and
disturbingly familiar. "Perro," he repeated, as it still stood
there--but had not this incident occurred, was it not now, as it were,
occurring an hour or two ago, he thought in a flash. Strange. He dropped the
bottle which was of white corrugated glass--Tequila Añejo de Jalisco, it said
on the label--out of sight into the undergrowth, looking about him. All seemed
normal again. Anyway, both snake and dog had gone. And the voices had ceased...
   
The Consul now felt himself in a
position to entertain, for a minute, the illusion that all really was
"normal." Yvonne would probably be asleep: no point in disturbing her
yet. And it was fortunate he'd remembered about the almost full tequila bottle:
now he had a chance to straighten up a little, which he never could have done
on the porch, before greeting her again. There was altogether too much
difficulty involved, under the circumstances, in drinking on the porch; it was
a good thing a man knew where to have a quiet drink when he wanted it, without
being disturbed, etc. etc.... All these thoughts were passing through his
mind--which, so to say, nodding gravely, accepted them with the most complete
seriousness--while he gazed back up his garden. Oddly enough, it did not strike
him as being nearly so "ruined" as it had earlier appeared. Such
chaos as might exist even lent an added charm. He liked the exuberance of the
unclipped growth at hand. Whereas farther away, the superb plantains flowering
so finally and obscenely, the splendid trumpet vines, brave and stubborn pear
trees, the papayas planted around the swimming-pool and beyond, the low white
bungalow itself covered by bougainvillea, its long porch like the bridge of a
ship, positively made a little vision of order, a vision, however, which
inadvertently blended at this moment, as he turned by accident, into a
strangely subaqueous view of the plains and the volcanoes with a huge indigo
sun multitudinously blazing south-south-east. Or was it north-north-west? He
noted it all without sorrow, even with a certain ecstasy, lighting a cigarette,
an Alas (though he repeated the word "Alas!" aloud mechanically),
then, the alcohol sweat pouring off his brows like water, he began to walk down
the path towards the fence separating his garden from the little new public one
beyond that truncated his property.
   
In this garden, which he hadn't
looked at since the day Hugh arrived, when he'd hidden the bottle, and which
seemed carefully and lovingly kept, there existed at the moment certain
evidence of work left uncompleted: tools, unusual tools, a murderous machete,
an oddly shaped fork, somehow nakedly impaling the mind, with its twisted tines
glittering in the sunlight, were leaning against the fence, as also was
something else, a sign uprooted or new, whose oblong pallid face stared through
the wire at him. ¿Le gusta este jardín? it asked...
   
¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDÍN?
¿QUE ES SUYO?
   
¡EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!
   
The Consul stared back at the black
words on the sign without moving. You like this garden? Why is it yours? We
evict those who destroy! Simple words, simple and terrible words, words which
one took to the very bottom of one's being, words which, perhaps a final
judgement on one, were nevertheless unproductive of any emotion whatsoever,
unless a kind of colourless cold, a white agony, an agony chill as that iced
mescal drunk in the Hotel Canada on the morning of Yvonne's departure.
   
However he was drinking tequila again
now--and with no very clear idea how he'd returned so quickly and found the
bottle. Ah, the subtle bouquet of pitch and teredos! Careless of being observed
this time, he drank long and deeply, then stood--and he had been observed too,
by his neighbour Mr Quincey, who was watering flowers in the shade of their
common fence to the left beyond the briars--stood facing his bungalow once
more. He felt hemmed in. Gone was the little dishonest vision of order. Over
his house, above the spectres of neglect that now refused to disguise
themselves, the tragic wings of untenable responsibilities hovered. Behind him,
in the other garden, his fate repeated softly: "Why is it yours?... Do you
like this garden?... We evict those who destroy!" Perhaps the sign didn't
mean quite that--for alcohol sometimes affected the Consul's Spanish adversely
(or perhaps the sign itself, inscribed by some Aztec, was wrong)--but it was
near enough. Coming to an abrupt decision he dropped the tequila into the
undergrowth again and turned back towards the public garden, walking with an
attempted "easy" stride.
   
Not that he had any intention of
"verifying" the words on the sign, which certainly seemed to have
more question marks than it should have; no, what he wanted, he now saw very
clearly, was to talk to someone: that was necessary: but it was more, merely,
than that; what he wanted involved something like the grasping, at this moment,
of a brilliant opportunity, or more accurately, of an opportunity to be
brilliant, an opportunity evinced by that apparition of Mr Quincey through the
briars which, now upon his right, he must circumvent in order to reach him. Yet
this opportunity to be brilliant was, in turn, more like something else, an
opportunity to be admired; even, and he could at least thank the tequila for
such honesty, however brief its duration, to be loved. Loved precisely for what
was another question: since he'd put it to himself he might answer: loved for
my reckless and irresponsible appearance, or rather for the fact that, beneath
that appearance, so obviously burns the fire of genius, which, not so
obviously, is not my genius but in an extraordinary manner that of my old and
good friend, Abraham Taskerson, the great poet, who once spoke so glowingly of
my potentialities as a young man.
   
And what he wanted then, ah then (he
had turned right without looking at the sign and was following the path along
the wire fence), what he wanted then, he thought, casting one yearning glance
at the plains--and at this moment he could have sworn that a figure, the
details of whose dress he did not have time to make out before it departed, but
apparently in some kind of mourning, had been standing, head bowed in deepest
anguish, near the centre of the public garden--what you want then, Geoffrey
Firmin, if only as an antidote against such routine hallucinations, is, why it
is, nothing less than to drink; to drink, indeed, all day, just as the clouds
once more bid you, and yet not quite; again it is more subtle than this; you do
not wish merely to drink, but to drink in a particular place and in a
particular town.
   
Parián!... It was a name suggestive of
old marble and the gale-swept Cyclades. The Farolito in Parián, how it called
to him with its gloomy voices of the night and early dawn. But the Consul (he
had inclined right again leaving the wire fence behind) realized he wasn't yet
drunk enough to be very sanguine about his chances of going there; the day
offered too many immediate--pitfalls! It was the exact word... He had almost
fallen into the barranca, an unguarded section of whose hither bank--the ravine
curved sharply down here towards the Alcapancingo road to curve again below and
follow its direction, bisecting the public garden--added at this juncture a
tiny fifth side to his estate. He paused, peeping, tequila-unafraid, over the
bank. Ah the frightful cleft, the eternal horror of opposites! Thou mighty
gulf, insatiate cormorant, deride me not, though I seem petulant to fall into
thy chops. One was, come to that, always stumbling upon the damned thing, this
immense intricate donga cutting right through the town, right, indeed, through
the country, in places a two-hundred-foot sheer drop into what pretended to be
a churlish river during the rainy season, but which, even now, though one
couldn't see the bottom, was probably beginning to resume its normal role of
general Tartarus and gigantic jakes. It was, perhaps, not so frightening here:
one might even climb down, if one wished, by easy stages of course, and taking
the occasional swig of tequila on the way, to visit the cloacal Prometheus who
doubtless inhabited it. The Consul walked on more slowly. He had come face to
face with his house again and simultaneously to the path skirting Mr Quincey's
garden. On his left beyond their common fence, now at hand, the green lawns of
the American, at the moment being sprinkled by innumerable small whizzing hoses,
swept down parallel with his own briars. Nor could any English turf have
appeared smoother or lovelier. Suddenly overwhelmed by sentiment, as at the
same time by a violent attack of hiccups, the Consul stepped behind a gnarled
fruit tree rooted on his side but spreading its remnant of shade over the
other, and leaned against it, holding his breath. In this curious way he
imagined himself hidden from Mr Quincey, working farther up, but he soon forgot
all about Quincey in spasmodic admiration of his garden... Would it happen at
the end, and would this save one, that old Popeye would begin to seem less
desirable than a slag-heap in Chesterle-Street, and that mighty Johnsonian
prospect, the road to England, would stretch out again in the Western Ocean of his
soul? And how peculiar that would be! How strange the landing at Liverpool, the
Liver. Building seen once more through the misty rain, that murk smelling
already of nosebags and Caegwyrle Ale--the familiar deep-draughted cargo
steamers, harmoniously masted, still sternly sailing outward bound with the
tide, worlds of iron hiding their crews from the weeping black-shawled women on
the piers: Liverpool, whence sailed so often during the war under sealed orders
those mysterious submarine catchers Q-boats, fake freighters turning into
turreted men-of-war at a moment's notice, obsolete peril of submarines, the
snouted voyagers of the sea's unconscious...