Under the Volcano (37 page)

   
A man down below wearing an enormous
sombrero had shouted for silence and paddling his arms was addressing them from
the ring. They were being appealed to, either for their continued patience, or
for a rider to volunteer.
   
Yvonne never found out which. For
something extraordinary had happened, something ridiculous, yet with earth-shattering
abruptness--
   
It was Hugh. Leaving his coat behind
he had jumped from the scaffolding into the arena and was now running in the
direction of the bull from which, perhaps in jest, or because they mistook him
for the scheduled rider, the ropes were being whipped as by magic. Yvonne stood
up: the Consul came to his feet beside her.
   
"Good Christ, the bloody
fool!"
   
The second bull, not indifferent as
might have been supposed to the removal of the ropes, and perplexed by the
confused uproar that greeted his rider's arrival, had clambered up bellowing;
Hugh was astride him and already cake-walking crazily in the middle of the
ring.
   
"God damn the stupid ass!"
the Consul said.
   
Hugh was holding the rigging tightly
with one hand and beating the brute's flanks with the other, and doing this
with an expertness Yvonne was astonished to find she was still almost competent
to judge. Yvonne and the Consul sat down again.
   
The bull jumped to the left, then to
the right with both forelegs simultaneously, as though they were strung
together. Then it sank to its knees. It clambered up, angry; Yvonne was aware
of the Consul beside her drinking habanero and then of him corking the bottle.
   
"Christ... Jesus."
   
"It's all right, Geoff. Hugh knows
what he's doing."
   
"The bloody fool..."
   
"Hugh'll be all right--Wherever
he learnt it."
   
"The pimp... the poxbox."
   
It was true that the bull had really
waked up and was doing its best to unseat him. It pawed the earth, galvanized
itself like a frog, even crawled on its belly. Hugh held on fast. The
spectators laughed and cheered, though Hugh, really indistinguishable from a
Mexican now, looked serious, even grim. He leaned back, holding on
determinedly, with feet splayed, heels knocking the sweaty flanks. The charros
galloped across the arena.
   
"I don't think he means to show
off," Yvonne smiled. No, he was simply submitting to that absurd necessity
he felt for action, so wildly exacerbated by the dawdling inhuman day. All his
thoughts now were bringing that miserable bull to its knees. "This is the
way you like to play? This is the way I like to play. You don't like the bull
for some reason? Very well, I don't like the bull either." She felt these
sentiments helping to smite Hugh's mind rigid with concentration upon the
defeat of the bull. And somehow one had little anxiety watching him. One
trusted him implicitly in this situation, just as one trusted in a trick diver,
a tightrope walker, a steeplejack. One felt, even, half ironically, that this
was the kind of thing Hugh might be best fitted to do and Yvonne was surprised
to recall her instant's panic this morning when he had jumped on the parapet of
the bridge over the barranca.
   
"The risk... the fool," the
Consul said, drinking habanero.
   
Hugh's troubles, in fact, were only
beginning. The charros, the man in the sombrero, the child who'd bitten the
first bull's tail, the serape and rag hombres, even the little dog who came
sneaking in again under the fence, were all closing in to increase them; all
had their part.
   
Yvonne was abruptly aware that there
were black clouds climbing the sky from the north-east, a temporary ominous
darkness that lent a sense of evening, thunder sounded in the mountains, a
single grumble, metallic, and a gust of wind raced through the trees, bending
them: the scene itself possessed a remote strange beauty; the white trousers
and bright serapes of the men enticing the bull shining against the dark trees
and lowering sky, the horses, transformed instantly into clouds of dust by
their riders with their scorpion-tailed whips, who leaned far out of their
bucket saddles to throw wildly, ropes anywhere, everywhere. Hugh's impossible
yet somehow splendid performance in the midst of it all, the boy, whose hair was
blowing madly over his face, high up in the tree.
   
The band struck up Guadalajara again
in the wind, and the bull bellowed, his horns caught in the railings through
which, helpless, he was being poked with sticks in what remained of his
testicles, tickled with switches, a machete, and, after getting clear and
re-entangled, a garden rake; dust too and dung was thrown in his red eyes; and
now there seemed no end to this childish cruelty.
   
"Darling," Yvonne whispered
suddenly, "Geoffrey--look at me. Listen to me, I've been... there isn't
anything to keep us here any longer... Geoffrey..."
   
The Consul, pale, without his dark
glasses, was looking at her piteously; he was sweating, his whole frame was
trembling. "No," he said. "No... No," he added, almost
hysterically.
   
"Geoffrey darling... don't
tremble... what are you afraid of? Why don't we go away, now, tomorrow,
today... what's to stop us?"
   
"No..."
   
"Ah, how good you've
been--"
   
The Consul put his arm around her
shoulders, leaning his damp head against her hair like a child, and for a
moment it was as if a spirit of intercession and tenderness hovered over them,
guarding, watching. He said wearily:
   
"Why not. Let's for Jesus
Christ's sweet sake get away. A thousand, a million miles away, Yvonne,
anywhere, so long as it's away. Just away. Away from all this. Christ, from
this."
   
--into a wild sky full of stars at
rising, and Venus and the golden moon at sunrise, and at noon blue mountains
with snow and blue cold rough water--"Do you mean it?"
   
"Do I mean it!"
   
"Darling..." It ran in
Yvonne's mind that all at once they were talking--agreeing hastily--like
prisoners who do not have much time to talk; the Consul took her hand. They sat
closely, hands clasped, with their shoulders touching. In the arena Hugh
tugged; the bull tugged, was free, but furious now, throwing himself at any
place on the fence that reminded him of the pen he'd so prematurely left, and
now, tired, persecuted beyond measure, finding it, hurling himself at the gate
time after time with an incensed, regressive bitterness until, the little dog
barking at his heels, he'd lost it again... Hugh rode the tiring bull round and
round the ring.
   
"This isn't just escaping, I
mean, let's start again really, Geoffrey, really and cleanly somewhere. It
could be like a rebirth."
   
"Yes. Yes it could."
   
"I think I know, I've got it all
clear in my mind at last. Oh Geoffrey, at last I think I have."
   
"Yes, I think I know too."
   
Below them, the bull's horns again
involved the fence.
   
"Darling..." They would
arrive at their destination by train, a train that wandered through an evening
land of fields beside water, an arm of the Pacific--
   
"Yvonne?"
   
"Yes, darling?"
   
"I've fallen down, you know...
Somewhat."
   
"Never mind, darling."
   
.".. Yvonne?"
   
"Yes?"
   
"I love you... Yvonne?"
   
"Oh, I love you too!"
   
"My dear one... My
sweetheart."
   
"Oh, Geoffrey. We could be
happy, we could--"
   
"Yes... We could."
   
--and far across the water, the little
house, waiting--
   
There was a sudden roar of applause
followed by the accelerated clangour of guitars deploying downwind; the bull
had pulled away from the fence and once more the scene was becoming animated:
Hugh and the bull tussled for a moment in the centre of a small fixed circle
the others created by their exclusion from it within the arena; then the whole
was veiled in dust; the pen gate to their left had broken open again, freeing
all the other bulls, including the first one, who was probably responsible;
they were charging out amid cheers, snorting, scattering in every direction.
   
Hugh was eclipsed for a while,
wrestling with his bull in a far corner: suddenly someone on that side
screamed. Yvonne pulled herself from the Consul and stood up.
   
"Hugh... Something's
happened."
   
The Consul stood up unsteadily. He
was drinking from the habanero bottle, drinking, till he almost finished it.
Then he said:
   
"I can't see. But I think it's
the bull'
   
It was still impossible to make out
what was happening on the far side in the dusty confusion of horsemen, bulls,
and ropes. Then Yvonne saw yes it was the bull, which, played out, was lying in
the dust again. Hugh calmly walked off it, bowed to the cheering spectators,
and, dodging other bulls, vaulted over the distant fence. Someone restored his
hat to him.
   
" Geoffrey--" Yvonne began
hurriedly, "I don't expect you to--1 mean--1 know it's going to be--"
   
But the Consul was finishing the
habanero. He left a little for Hugh, however.
 
  
... The sky was blue again overhead as they went down into Tomalín; dark
clouds still gathered behind Popocatepetl, their purple masses shot through
with the bright late sunlight, that fell too on another little silver lake
glittering cool, fresh, and inviting before them, Yvonne had neither seen on
the way, nor remembered.
   
"The Bishop of Tasmania,"
the Consul was saying, "or somebody dying of thirst in the Tasmanian
desert, had a similar experience. The distant prospect of Cradle Mountain had
consoled, him a while, and then he saw this water... Unfortunately it turned
out to be sunlight blazing on myriads of broken bottles."
   
The lake was a broken greenhouse roof
belonging to El Jardín Xicotancatl: only weeds lived in the greenhouse.
   
But their house was in her mind now
as she walked: their home was real: Yvonne saw it at sunrise, in the long
afternoons of south-west winds, and at nightfall she saw it in starlight and
moonlight, covered with snow: she saw it from above, in the forest, with the chimney
and the roof below her, and the foreshortened pier: she saw it from the beach
rising above her, and she saw it, tiny, in the distance, a haven and a beacon
against the trees, from the sea. It was only that the little boat of their
conversation had been moored precariously; she could hear it banging against
the rocks; later she would drag it up farther, where it was safe.--Why was it
though, that right in the centre of her brain, there should be a figure of a
woman having hysterics, jerking like a puppet and banging her fists upon the
ground?
   
"Forward to the Salón
Ofélia," cried the Consul.
   
A hot thundery wind launched itself
at them, spent itself, and somewhere a bell beat out wild tripthongs.
   
Their shadows crawled before them in
the dust, slid down white thirsty walls of houses, were caught violently for a
moment in an elliptical shade, the turning wrenched wheel of a boy's bicycle.
The spoked shadow of the wheel, enormous, insolent, swept away.
   
Now their own shadows fell full
across the square to the raised twin doors of the tavern, Todos Contentos y Yo
También: under the doors they noticed what looked like the bottom of a crutch,
someone leaving. The crutch didn't move; its owner was having an argument at
the door, a last drink perhaps. Then it disappeared: one door of the cantina
was propped back, something emerged.
   
Bent double, groaning with the
weight, an old lame Indian was carrying on his back, by means of a strap looped
over his forehead, another poor Indian, yet older and more decrepit than
himself. He carried the older man and his crutches, trembling in every limb
under this weight of the past, he carried both their burdens.
   
They all stood watching the Indian as
he disappeared with the old man round a bend of the road, into the evening,
shuffling through the grey white dust in his poor sandals...

   
"Mescal," the Consul said, almost absent-mindedly. What had he said?
Never mind. Nothing less than mescal would do. But it mustn't be a serious
mescal, he persuaded himself. "No, Señor Cervantes," he whispered,
"mescal, poquito."
   
Nevertheless, the Consul thought, it
was not merely that he shouldn't have, not merely that, no, it was more as if
he had lost or missed something, or rather, not precisely lost, not necessarily
missed.--It was as if, more, he were waiting for something, and then again, not
waiting.--It was as if, almost, he stood (instead of upon the threshold of the
Salón Ofélia, gazing at the calm pool where Yvonne and Hugh were about to swim)
once more upon that black open station platform, with the cornflowers and
meadowsweet growing on the far side, where after drinking all night he had gone
to meet Lee Maitland returning from Virginia at 7.40 in the morning, gone,
light-headed, light-footed, and in that state of being where Baudelaire's angel
indeed wakes, desiring to meet trains perhaps, but to meet no trains that stop,
for in the angel's mind are no trains that stop, and from such trains none
descends, not even another angel, not even a fair-haired one, like Lee
Maitland.--Was the train late? Why was he pacing the platform? Was it the
second or third train from Suspension Bridge--Suspensión!--the Station Master
had said would be her train? What had the porter said? Could she be on this
train? Who was she? It was impossible that Lee Maitland could be on any such
train. And besides, all these trains were expresses. The railway lines went
into the far distance uphill. A lone bird flapped across the lines far away. To
the right of the level-crossing, at a little distance, stood a tree like a
green exploding sea-mine, frozen. The dehydrated onion factory by the sidings
awoke, then the coal companies. It's a black business but we use you white:
Daemon's Coal... A delicious smell of onion soup in side-streets of Vavin
impregnated the early morning. Grimed sweeps at hand trundled barrows, or were
screening coal. Rows of dead lamps like erect snakes poised to strike along the
platform. On the other side were cornflowers, dandelions, a garbage-can like a
brazier blazing furiously all by itself among meadowsweet. The morning grew
hot. And now, one after one, the terrible trains appeared on top of the raised
horizon, shimmering now, in mirage: first the distant wail, then, the frightful
spouting and spindling of black smoke, a sourceless towering pillar,
motionless, then a round hull, as if not on the lines, as if going the other
way, or as if stopping, as if not stopping, or as if slipping away over the
fields, as if stopping; oh God, not stopping; downhill: clipperty-one
clipperty-one: clipperty-two- clipperty-two: clipperty-three clipperty-three:
clipperty-four clipperty-four: alas, thank God, not stopping, and the lines
shaking, the station flying, the coal dust, black bituminous: lickety-cut
lickety-cut lickety-cut: and then another train, clipperty-one
clipperty-one
 
coming in the other
direction, swaying, whizzing, two feet above the lines, flying, clipperty-two,
with one light burning against the morning, clipperty-three clipperty-three, a
single useless strange eye, red-gold: trains, trains, trains, each driven by a
banshee playing a shrieking nose-organ in D minor; lickety-cut lickety-cut
lickety-cut. But not his train; and not her train. Still, the train would come
doubtless--had the Station Master said the third or fourth train from which
way? Which was north, west? And anyhow, whose north, whose west?... And he must
pick flowers to greet the angel, the fair Virginian descending from the train.
But the embankment flowers would not pick, spurting sap, sticky, the flowers
were on the wrong end of the stalks (and he on the wrong side of the tracks),
he nearly fell into the brazier, the cornflowers grew in the middle of their
stalks, the stalks of meadowsweet--or was it queen's lace?--were too long, his
bouquet was a failure. And how to get back across the tracks--here was a train
now coming in the wrong direction again, clipperty-one clipperty-one, the lines
unreal, not there, walking on air; or rails that did lead somewhere, to unreal
life, or, perhaps, Hamilton, Ontario.--Fool, he was trying to walk along a
single line, like a boy on the kerb: clipperty-two clipperty-two:
clipperty-three clipperty-three: clipperty-four clipperty-four: clipperty-five
clipperty-five: clipperty-six clipperty-six: clipperty-seven; clipperty
seven--trains, trains, trains, trains, converging upon him from all sides of
the horizon, each wailing for its demon lover. Life had no time to waste. Why,
then, should it waste so much of everything else? With the dead cornflowers
before him, at evening--the next moment--the Consul sat in the station tavern
with, a man who'd just tried to sell him three loose teeth. Was it tomorrow he
was supposed to meet the train? What had the Station Master said? Had that been
Lee Maitland herself waving at him frantically from the express? And who had
flung the soiled bundle of tissue papers out of the window? What had he lost?
Why was that idiot sitting there, in a dirty grey suit, and trousers baggy at
the knees, with one bicycle clip, in his long, long baggy grey jacket, and grey
cloth cap, and brown boots, with his thick fleshy grey face, from which three
upper teeth, perhaps the very three teeth, were missing, all on one side, and
thick neck, saying, every few minutes to anyone who came in: "I'm watching
you." "I can see you..." "You won't escape
me."--"If you only kept quiet, Claus, no one'd know you were
crazy..".. That was the time too, in the storm country, when "the
lightning is peeling the poles, Mr Firmin, and biting the wires, sir--you can
taste it afterwards too, in the water, pure sulphur,"--that at four
o'clock each afternoon, preceded, out of the adjacent cemetery, by the
gravedigger--sweating, heavy-footed, bowed, long-jawed and trembling, and
carrying his special tools of death--he would come to this same tavern to meet
Mr Quattras, the Negro bookie from Codrington, in the Barbados. "I'm a
race-track man and I was brought up with whites, so the blacks don't like
me." Mr. Quattras, grinning and sad, feared deportation... But that battle
against death had been won. And he had saved Mr Quattras. That very night, had
it been?--with a heart like a cold brazier standing by a railway platform among
meadowsweet wet with dew: they are beautiful and terrifying, these shadows of
cars that sweep down fences, and sweep zebra-like across the grass path in the
avenue of dark oaks under the moon: a single shadow, like an umbrella on rails,
travelling down a picket fence; portents of doom, of the heart failing... Gone.
Eaten up in reverse by night. And the moon gone. C'était pendant l'horreur
d'une profonde nuit. And the deserted cemetery in the starlight, forsaken by
the grave-digger, drunk now, wandering home across the fields--"I can dig
a grave in three hours if they'll let me,"--the cemetery in the dappled
moonlight of a single street lamp, the deep thick grass, the towering obelisk
lost in the Milky Way. Jull, it said on the monument. What had the Station
Master said? The dead. Do they sleep? Why should they, when we cannot? Mais
tout dort, et l'armée, et les vents, et Neptune. And he had placed the poor
ragged cornflowers reverently on a neglected grave... That was Oakville.--But
Oaxaca or Oakville, what difference? Or between a tavern that opened at four
o'clock in the afternoon, and one that opened (save on holidays) at four
o'clock in the morning?... "I ain't telling you the word of a lie but once
I had a whole vault dug up for $100 and sent to Cleveland!"
   
A corpse will be transported by
express...
   
Oozing alcohol from every pore, the
Consul stood at the open door of the Salón Ofélia. How sensible to have had a
mescal. How sensible! For it was the right, the sole drink to have under the
circumstances. Moreover he had not only proved to himself he was not afraid of
it, he was now fully awake, fully sober again, and well able to cope with
anything that might come his way. But for this slight continual twitching and
hopping within his field of vision, as of innumerable sand fleas, he might have
told himself he hadn't had a drink for months. The only thing wrong with him,
he was too hot.
   
A natural waterfall crashing down
into a sort of reservoir built on two levels--he found the sight less cooling
than grotesquely suggestive of some organized ultimate sweat; the lower level
made a pool where Hugh and Yvonne were still not yet swimming. The water on the
turbulent upper level raced over an artificial falls beyond which, becoming a
swift stream, it wound through thick jungle to spill down a much larger natural
cascada out of sight. After that it dispersed, he recalled, lost its identity,
dribbled, at various places, into the barranca. A path followed the stream
through the jungle and at one place another path branched off to the right
which went to Parián: and the Farolito. Though the first path led you to rich cantina
country too. God knows why. Once, perhaps, in hacienda days, Tomalín had held
some irrigational importance. Then, after the burning of the sugar plantations,
schemes, cleavable and lustrous, evolved for a spa, were abandoned
sulphurously. Later, vague dreams of hydro-electric power hovered in the air,
though nothing had been done about them. Parián was an even greater mystery.
Originally settled by a scattering of those fierce forebears of Cervantes who
had succeeded in making Mexico great even in her betrayal, the traitorous
Tlaxcalans, the nominal capital of the state had been quite eclipsed by
Quauhnahuac since the revolution, and while still an obscure administrative
centre, no one had ever adequately explained its continued existence to him.
One met people going there; few, now he thought about it, ever coming back. Of
course they'd come back, he had himself: there was an explanation. But why
didn't a bus run there, or only grudgingly, and by a strange route? The Consul
started.
   
Near him lurked some hooded
photographers. They were waiting by their tattered machines for the bathers to
leave their boxes. Now two girls were squealing as they came down to the water
in their ancient, hired costumes. Their escorts swaggered along a grey parapet
dividing the pool from the rapids above, obviously deciding not to dive in,
pointing for excuse up at a ladder less springboard, derelict, like some
forgotten victim of tidal catastrophe, in a weeping pepper tree. After a time
they rushed howling down a concrete incline into the pool. The girls bridled,
but waded in after, tittering. Nervous gusts agitated the surface of the baths.
Magenta clouds piled higher against the horizon, though overhead the sky
remained clear.
   
Hugh and Yvonne appeared, grotesquely
costumed. They stood laughing on the brink of the pool--shivering, though the
horizontal rays of the sun lay on them all with solid heat.
   
The photographers took photographs.
   
"Why," Yvonne called out,
"this is like the Horseshoe Falls in Wales."
   
"Or Niagara," observed the
Consul, "circa 1900. What about a trip on the Maid of the Mist,
seventy-five cents with oilskins."
   
Hugh turned round gingerly, hands on
knees.
   
"Yeah. To where the rainbow
ends."
   
"The Cave of the Winds. The
Cascada Sagrada." There were, in fact, rainbows. Though without them the
mescal (which Yvonne couldn't of course have noticed) would have already
invested the place with a magic. The magic was of Niagara Falls itself, not its
elemental majesty, the honeymoon town; in a sweet, tawdry, even hoydenish sense
of love that haunted this nostalgic spray-blown spot. But now the mescal struck
a discord, then a succession of plaintive discords to which the drifting mists
all seemed to be dancing, through the elusive subtleties of ribboned light,
among the detached shreds of rainbows floating. It was a phantom dance of
souls, baffled by these deceptive blends, yet still seeking permanence in the
midst of what was only perpetually evanescent, or eternally lost. Or it was a
dance of the seeker and his goal, here pursuing still the gay colours he did
not know he had assumed, there striving to identify the finer scene of which he
might never realize he was already a part...
   
Dark coils of shadows lay in the
deserted bar-room. They sprang at him. "Otro mescalito. Un poquito!"
The voice seemed to come from above the counter where two wild yellow eyes
pierced the gloom. The scarlet comb, the wattles, then the bronze green
metallic feathers of some fowl standing on the bar, materialized, and
Cervantes, rising playfully from behind it, greeted him with Tlaxcaltecan
pleasure: "Muy fuerte. Muy terreebly," he cackled.
   
Was this the face that launched five
hundred ships, and betrayed Christ into being in the Western Hemisphere? But
the bird appeared tame enough. Half past tree by the cock, that other fellow
had said. And here was the cock. It was a fighting cock. Cervantes was training
it for a fight in Tlaxcala, but the Consul couldn't be interested. Cervantes's
cockerels always lost--he'd attended drunkenly one session in Cuautla; the
vicious little man-made battles, cruel and destructive, yet somehow
bedraggledly inconclusive, each brief as some hideously mismanaged act of
intercourse, disgusted and bored him. Cervantes took the cock away. "Un
bruto," he added.
   
The subdued roar of the falls filled
the room like a ship's engine... Eternity... The Consul, cooler, leaned on the
bar, staring into his second glass of the colourless ether-smelling liquid. To
drink or not to drink.--But without mescal, he imagined, he had forgotten
eternity, forgotten their world's voyage, that the earth was a ship, lashed by
the Horn's tail, doomed never to make her Valparaiso. Or that it was like a
golf ball, launched at Hercules's Butterfly, wildly hooked by a giant out of an
asylum window in hell. Or that it was a bus, making its erratic journey to
Tomalín and nothing. Or that it was like--whatever it would be shortly, after
the next mescal.