Under the Volcano (46 page)

   
"Granada," said Diosdado,
sharply, in a different, harder pronunciation to the Consul's. He gave him a
searching, an important, suspicious look, then left him again. Now he was
speaking to a group at the other end of the bar. Faces were turned in the
Consul's direction.
   
The Consul carried another drink with
Yvonne's letters into an inner room, one of the boxes in the Chinese puzzle. He
hadn't remembered before they were framed in dull glass, like cashiers' offices
in a bank. In this room he was not really surprised to find the old Tarascan
woman of the Bella Vista this morning. Her tequila, surrounded by dominoes, was
set before her on the round table. Her chicken pecked among them. The Consul
wondered if they were her own; or was it just necessary for her to have
dominoes wherever she happened to be? Her stick with the claw handle hung, as
though alive, on the edge of the table. The Consul moved to her, drank half his
mescal, took off his glasses, then slipped the elastic from the package.
  
 
--"Do you remember tomorrow?" he
read. No, he thought; the words sank like stones in his mind.--It was a fact
that he was losing touch with his situation... He was dissociated from himself,
and at the same time he saw this plainly, the shock of receiving the letters
having in a sense waked him, if only, so to say, from one somnambulism into
another; he was drunk, he was sober, he had a hangover; all at once; it was
after six in the evening, yet whether it was being in the Farolito, or the
presence of the old woman in this glass-framed room where an electric light was
burning, he seemed back in the early morning again: it was almost as if he were
yet another kind of drunkard, in different circumstances, in another country,
to whom something quite different was happening: he was like a man who gets up
half stupefied with liquor at dawn, chattering, "Jesus this is the kind of
fellow I am, Ugh! Ugh!" to see his wife off by an early bus, though it is
too late, and there is the note on the breakfast table. "Forgive me for
being hysterical yesterday, such an outburst was certainly not excused on any
grounds of your having hurt me, don't forget to bring in the milk,"
beneath which he finds written, almost as an afterthought: "Darling, we
can't go on like this, it's too awful, I'm leaving--" and who, instead of
perceiving the whole significance of this, remembers incongruously he told the
barman at too great length last night how somebody's house burned down--and why
has he told him where he lives, now the police will be able to find out--and
why is the barman's name Sherlock? an unforgettable name!--and having a glass
of port and water and three aspirin, which make him sick, reflects that he has
five hours before the pubs open when he must return to that same bar and apologize...
But where did I put my cigarette? and why is my glass of port under the
bathtub? and was that an explosion I heard, somewhere in the house?
   
And encountering his accusing eyes in
another mirror within the little room, the Consul had the queer passing feeling
he'd risen in bed to do this, that he had sprung up and must gibber
"Coriolanus is dead!" or "muddle muddle muddle" or "I
think it was, Oh! Oh!" or something really senseless like "buckets,
buckets, millions of buckets in the soup!" and that he would now (though
he was sitting quite calmly in the Farolito) relapse once more upon the pillows
to watch, shaking in impotent terror at himself, the beards and eyes form in
the curtains, or fill the space between the wardrobe and the ceiling, and hear,
from the street, the soft padding of the eternal ghostly policeman outside--
   
"Do you remember tomorrow? It is
our wedding anniversary... I have not had one word from you since I left. God,
it is this silence that frightens me."
   
The Consul drank some more mescal.
   
"It is this silence that
frightens me--this silence--"
   
The Consul read this sentence over
and over again, the same sentence, the same letter, all of the letters vain as
those arriving on shipboard in port for one lost at sea, because he found some
difficulty in focusing, the words kept blurring and dissembling, his own name
starting out at him: but the mescal had brought him in touch with his situation
again to the extent that he did not now need to comprehend any meaning in the
words beyond their abject confirmation of his own lostness, his own fruitless
selfish ruin, now perhaps finally self-imposed, his brain, before this cruelly
disregarded evidence of what heartbreak he had caused her, at an agonized
standstill.
   
"It is this silence that
frightens me. I have pictured all sorts of tragic things befalling you, it is
as though you were away at war and I were waiting, waiting for news of you, for
the letter, the telegram... but no war could have this power to so chill and terrify
my heart. I send you all my love and my whole heart and all my thoughts and
prayers."--The Consul was aware, drinking, that the woman with the
dominoes was trying to attract his attention, opening her mouth and pointing
into it: now she was subtly moving round the table nearer him.--"Surely
you must have thought a great deal of us, of what we built together, of how
mindlessly we destroyed the structure and the beauty but yet could not destroy
the memory of that beauty. It has been this which has haunted me day and night.
Turning I see us in a hundred places with a hundred smiles. I come into a
street, and you are there. I creep at night to bed and you are waiting for me.
What is there in life besides the person whom one adores and the life one can
build with that person? For the first time I understand the meaning of
suicide... God, how pointless and empty the world is! Days filled with cheap
and tarnished moments succeed each other, restless and haunted nights follow in
bitter routine: the sun shines without brightness, and the moon rises without
light. My heart has the taste of ashes, and my throat is tight and weary with
weeping. What is a lost soul? It is one that has turned from its true path and
is groping in the darkness of remembered ways--"
   
The old woman was plucking at his
sleeve and the Consul--had Yvonne been reading the letters of Heloise and
Abelard?--reached out to press an electric bell, the urban yet violent presence
of which in these odd little niches never failed to give him a shock. A moment
later A Few Fleas entered with a bottle of tequila in one hand and of mescal
Xicotancatl in the other but he took the bottles away after pouring their
drinks. The Consul nodded to the old woman, motioned to her tequila, drank most
of his mescal, and resumed reading. He could not remember whether he had paid
or not.--"Oh Geoffrey, how bitterly I regret it now. Why did we postpone
it? Is it too late? I want your children, soon, at once, I want them. I want
your life filling and stirring me. I want your happiness beneath my heart and
your sorrows in my eyes and your peace in the fingers of my hand--" The
Consul paused, what was she saying? He rubbed his eyes, then fumbled for his
cigarettes: Alas; the tragic word droned round the room like a bullet that had
passed through him. He read on, smoking; "You are walking on the edge of
an abyss where I may not follow. I wake to a darkness in which I must follow
myself endlessly, hating the I who so eternally pursues and confronts me. If we
could rise from our misery, seek each other once more, and find again the
solace of each other's lips and eyes. Who is to stand between? Who can
prevent?"
   
The Consul stood up--Yvonne had
certainly been reading something--bowed to the old woman, and went out into the
bar he'd imagined filling up behind him, but which was still fairly deserted.
Who indeed was to stand between? He posted himself at the door again, as
sometimes before in the deceptive violet dawn: who indeed could prevent? Once
more he stared at the square. The same ragged platoon of soldiers still seemed
to be crossing it, as in some disrupted movie repeating itself. The corporal
still toiled at his copperplate handwriting under the archway, only his lamp
was alight. It was getting dark. The police were nowhere to be seen. Though by
the barranca the same soldier was still asleep under a tree; or wasn't it a
soldier, but something else? He looked away. Black clouds were boiling up
again, there was a distant breaking of thunder. He breathed the oppressive air
in which there was a slight hint of coolness. Who indeed, even now, was to
stand between? he thought desperately,
   
Who indeed even now could prevent? He
wanted Yvonne at this moment, to take her in his arms, wanted more than ever to
be forgiven, and to forgive: but where should he go? Where would he find her
now? A whole unlikely family of indeterminate class were strolling past the
door: the grandfather in front, correcting his watch, peering at the dim
barracks clock that still said six, the mother laughing and drawing her rebozo
over her head, mocking the probable storm (up in the mountains two drunken gods
standing far apart were still engaged in an endlessly indecisive and wildly
swinging game of bumblepuppy with a Burmese gong), the father by himself smiling
proudly, contemplatively, clicking his fingers, flicking a speck of dust now
from his fine brown shiny boots. Two pretty little children with limpid black
eyes were walking between them hand in hand. Suddenly the elder child freed her
sister's hand, and turned a succession of cartwheels on the lush grass plot.
All of them were laughing. The Consul hated to look at them... They'd gone
anyway, thank God. Miserably he wanted Yvonne and did not want her.
"¿Quiere María?" a voice spoke softly behind him.
   
At first he saw only the shapely legs
of the girl who was leading him, now by the constricted power of aching flesh
alone, of pathetic trembling yet brutal lust, through the little glass-paned
rooms, that grew smaller and smaller, darker and darker, until by the
mingitorio, the "Señores," out of whose evil-smelling gloom broke a
sinister chuckle, there was merely a lightless annex no larger than a cupboard
in which two men whose faces he couldn't see either were sitting, drinking or
plotting.
   
Then it struck him that some reckless
murderous power was drawing him on, forcing him, while he yet remained
passionately aware of the all too possible consequences and somehow as
innocently unconscious, to do without precaution or conscience what he would
never be able to undo or gainsay, leading him irresistibly out into the
garden--lightning-filled at this moment, it reminded him queerly of his own
house, and also of El Popo, where earlier he had thought of going, only this
was grimmer, the obverse of it--leading him through the open door into the
darkening room, one of many giving on the patio.
   
So this was it, the final stupid
unprophylactic rejection. He could prevent it even now. He would not prevent
it. Yet perhaps his familiars, or one of his voices, might have some good
advice: he looked about him, listening; erectis whoribus. No voices came!
Suddenly he laughed: it had been clever of him to trick his voices. They didn't
know he was here. The room itself, in which gleamed a single blue electric
bulb, was not sordid: at first sight it was a student's room. In fact it
closely resembled his old room at college, only this was more spacious. There
were the same great doors and a bookcase in a familiar place, with a book open
on top of the shelves. In one corner, incongruously, stood a gigantic sabre.
Kashmir! He imagined he'd seen the word, then it had gone. Probably he had seen
it, for the book, of all things, was a Spanish history of British India. The
bed was disorderly and covered with footmarks, even what appeared bloodstains,
though this bed too seemed akin to a student's cot. He noticed by it an almost
empty bottle of mescal. But the floor was red flagstone and somehow its cold
strong logic cancelled the horror; he finished the bottle. The girl who had been
shutting the double doors while addressing him in some strange language,
possibly Zapotecan, came toward him and he saw she was young and pretty.
Lightning silhouetted against the window a face, for a moment curiously like
Yvonne's. "Quiere María" she volunteered again, and flinging her arms
round his neck, drew him down to the bed. Her body was Yvonne's too, her legs,
her breasts, her pounding passionate heart, electricity crackled under his
fingers running over her, though the sentimental illusion was going, it was
sinking into a sea, as though it had not been there, it had become the sea, a
desolate horizon with one huge black sailing ship, hull down, sweeping into the
sunset; or her body was nothing, an abstraction merely, a calamity, a fiendish
apparatus for calamitous sickening sensation; it was disaster, it was the
horror of waking up in the morning in Oaxaca, his body fully clothed, at half
past three every morning after Yvonne had gone; Oaxaca, and the nightly escape
from the sleeping Hotel Francia, where Yvonne and he had once been happy, from
the cheap room giving on the balcony high up, to El Infierno, that other
Farolito, of trying to find the bottle in the dark, and failing, the vulture
sitting in the washbasin; his steps, noiseless, dead silence outside his hotel
room, too soon for the terrible sounds of squealing and slaughter in the
kitchen below--of going down the carpeted stairs to the huge dark well of the
deserted dining-room once the patio, sinking into the soft disaster of the carpet,
his feet sinking into heartbreak when he reached the stairs, still not sure he
wasn't on the landing--and the stab of panic and self-disgust when he thought
of the cold shower-bath back on the left, used only once before, but that was
enough--and the silent final trembling approach, respectable, his steps sinking
into calamity (and it was this calamity he now, with María, penetrated, the
only thing alive in him now this burning boiling crucified evil organ--God is
it possible to suffer more than this, out of this suffering something must be
born, and what would be born was his own death), for ah, how alike are the
groans of love to those of the dying, how alike, those of love, to those of the
dying--and his steps sinking, into his tremor, the sickening cold tremor, and
into the dark well of the dining-room, with round the corner one dim light
hovering above the desk, and the clock--too early--and the letters unwritten,
powerless to write, and the calendar saying eternally, powerlessly, their
wedding anniversary, and the manager's nephew asleep on the couch, waiting up
to meet the early train from Mexico City; the darkness that murmured and was
palpable, the cold aching loneliness in the high sounding dining-room, stiff
with the dead white grey folded napkins, the weight of suffering and conscience
greater (it seemed) than that borne by any man who had survived--the thirst
that was not thirst, but itself heartbreak, and lust, was death, death, and
death again and death the waiting in the cold hotel dining-room, half
whispering to himself, waiting, since El Infierno, that other Farolito, did not
open till four in the morning and one could scarcely wait outside--(and this
calamity he was now penetrating, it was calamity, the calamity of his own life,
the very essence of it he now penetrated, was penetrating, penetrated)--waiting
for the Infierno whose one lamp of hope would soon be glowing beyond the dark
open sewers, and on the table, in the hotel dining-room, difficult to
distinguish, a carafe of water--trembling, trembling, carrying the carafe of
water to his lips, but not far enough, it was too heavy, like his burden of
sorrow--"you cannot drink of it"--he could only moisten his lips, and
then--it must have been Jesus who sent me this, it was only He who was following
me after all--the bottle of red French wine from Salina Cruz still standing
there on the table set for breakfast, marked with someone else's room number,
uncorked with difficulty and (watching to see the nephew wasn't watching)
holding it with both hands, and letting the blessed ichor trickle down his
throat, just a little, for after all one was an Englishman, and still sporting,
and then subsiding on the couch too--his heart a cold ache warm to one
side--into a cold shivering shell of palpitating loneliness--yet feeling the
wine slightly more, as if one's chest were being filled with boiling ice now,
or there were a bar of red-hot iron across one's chest, but cold in its effect,
for the conscience that rages underneath anew and is bursting one's heart burns
so fiercely with the fires of hell a bar of red-hot iron is as a mere chill to
it--and the clock ticking forward, with his heart beating now like a
snow-muffled drum, ticking, shaking, time shaking and ticking toward El
Infierno then--the escape!