Under the Volcano (6 page)

   
Or is it because right through hell
there is a path, as Blake well knew, and though I may not take it, sometimes
lately in dreams I have been able to see it? And here is one strange effect my
lawyer's news has had upon me. I seem to see now, between mescals, this path,
and beyond it strange vistas, like visions of a new life together we might
somewhere lead. I seem to see us living in some northern country, of mountains
and hills and blue water; our house is built on an inlet and one evening we are
standing, happy in one another, on the balcony of this house, looking over the
water. There are sawmills half hidden by trees beyond and under the hills on the
other side of the inlet, what looks like an oil refinery, only softened and
rendered beautiful by distance.
   
It is a light blue moonless summer
evening, but late, perhaps ten o'clock, with Venus burning hard in daylight, so
we are certainly somewhere far north, and standing on this balcony, when from
beyond along the coast comes the gathering thunder of a long many-engined
freight train, thunder because though we are separated by this wide strip of
water from it, the train is rolling eastward and the changing wind veers for
the moment from an easterly quarter, and we face east, like Swedenborg's
angels, under a sky clear save where far to the north-east over distant
mountains whose purple has faded, lies a mass of almost pure white clouds,
suddenly, as by light in an alabaster lamp, illumined from within by gold
lightning, yet you can hear no thunder, only the roar of the great train with
its engines and its wide shunting echoes as it advances from the hills into the
mountains: and then all at once a fishing-boat with tall gear comes running
round the point like a white giraffe, very swift and stately, leaving directly
behind it a long silver scalloped rim of wake, not visibly moving inshore, but
now stealing ponderously beachward towards us, this scrolled silver rim of wash
striking the shore first in the distance, then spreading all along the curve of
beach, its growing thunder and commotion now joined to the diminishing thunder
of the train, and now breaking reboant on our beach, while the floats, for there
are timber diving floats, are swayed together, everything jostled and
beautifully ruffled and stirred and tormented in this rolling sleeked silver,
then little by little calm again, and you see the reflection of the remote
white thunderclouds in the water, and now the lightning within the white clouds
in deep water, as the fishing-boat itself with a golden scroll of travelling
light in its silver wake beside it reflected from the cabin vanishes round the
headland, silence, and then again, within the white white distant alabaster
thunderclouds beyond the mountains, the thunderless gold lightning in the blue
evening, unearthly...
   
And as we stand looking all at once
comes the wash of another unseen ship, like a great wheel, the vast spokes of
the wheel whirling across the bay--
   
(Several mescals later.) Since
December 1937, and you went, and it is now I hear the spring of 1938, I have
been deliberately struggling against my love for you. I dared not submit to it.
I have grasped at every root and branch which would help me across this abyss
in my life by myself but I can deceive myself no longer. If I am to survive I
need your help. Otherwise, sooner or later, I shall fall. Ah, if only you had
given me something in memory to hate you for so finally no kind thought of you
would ever touch me in this terrible place where I am! But instead you sent me
those letters. Why did you send the first ones to Wells Fargo in Mexico City,
by the way? Can it be you didn't realize I was still here?--Or--if in Oaxaca--that
Quauhnahuac was still my base. That is very peculiar. It would have been so
easy to find out too. And if you'd only written me right away also, it might
have been different--sent me a postcard even, out of the common anguish of our
separation, appealing simply to us, in spite of all, to end the absurdity
immediately--somehow, anyhow--and saying we loved each other, something, or a
telegram, simple. But you waited too long--or so it seems now, till after
Christmas--Christmas!--and the New Year, and then what you sent I couldn't
read. No: I have scarcely been once free enough from torment or sufficiently
sober to apprehend more than the governing design of any of these letters. But
I could, can feel them. I think I have some of them on me. But they are too
painful to read, they seem too long digested. I shall not attempt it now. I
cannot read them. They break my heart. And they came too late anyway. And now I
suppose there will be no more.
   
Alas, but why have I not pretended at
least that I had read them, accepted some meed of retraction in the fact that
they were sent? And why did I not send a telegram or some word immediately? Ah,
why not, why not, why not? For I suppose you would have come back in due course
if I had asked you? But this is what it is to live in hell. I could not, cannot
ask you. I could not, cannot send a telegram. I have stood here, and in Mexico
City, in the Compañía Telegráfica Mexicana, and in Oaxaca, trembling and
sweltering in the post office and writing telegrams all afternoon, when I had
drunk enough to steady my hand, without having sent one. And I once had some
number of yours and actually called you long distance to Los Angeles though
without success. And another time the telephone broke down. Then why do I not
come to America myself? I am too ill to arrange about the tickets, to suffer
the shaking delirium of the endless weary cactus plains. And why go to America
to die? Perhaps I would not mind being buried in the United States. But I think
I would prefer to die in Mexico.
 
  
Meantime do you see me as still working on
the book, still trying to answer such questions as: Is there any ultimate
reality, external, conscious, and ever-present, etc. etc., that can be realized
by any such means that may be acceptable to all creeds and religions and
suitable to all climes and countries? Or do you find me between Mercy and
Understanding, between Chesed and Binah (but still at Chesed)--my equilibrium,
and equilibrium is all, precarious--balancing, teetering over the awful
unbridgeable void, the all-but-unretraceable path of God's lightning back to
God? as if I ever were in Chesed! More like the Qliphoth. When I should have
been producing obscure volumes of verse entitled the Triumph of Humpty Dumpty
or the Nose with the Luminous Dong! Or at best, like Clare, "weaving
fearful vision.".. A frustrated poet in every man. Though it is perhaps a
good idea under the circumstances to pretend at least to be proceeding with
one's great work on "Secret Knowledge," then one can always say when
it never comes out that the tide explains this deficiency.
   
--But alas for the Knight of Sorry
Aspect! For oh, Yvonne, I am so haunted continuously by the thought of your
songs, of your warmth and merriment, of your simplicity and comradeship, of
your abilities in a hundred ways, your fundamental sanity, your untidiness,
your equally excessive neatness--the sweet beginnings of our marriage. Do you
remember the Strauss song we used to sing? Once a year the dead live for one
day. Oh come to me again as once in May. The Generalife Gardens and the
Alhambra Gardens. And shadows of our fate at our meeting in Spain. The
Hollywood bar in Granada. Why Hollywood? And the nunnery there: why Los
Angeles? And in Malaga, the Pension Mexico. And yet nothing can ever take the place
of the unity we once knew and which Christ alone knows must still exist
somewhere. Knew even in Paris--before Hugh came. Is this an illusion too? I am
being completely maudlin certainly. But no one can take your place; I ought to
know by now, I laugh as I write this, whether I love you or not... Sometimes I
am possessed by a most powerful feeling, a despairing bewildered jealousy
which, when deepened by drink, turns into a desire to destroy myself by my own
imagination--not at least to be the prey of--ghosts--
   
(Several mescalitos later and dawn in
the Farolito)... Time is a fake healer anyhow. How can anyone presume to tell
me about you? You cannot know the sadness of my life. Endlessly haunted waking
and sleeping by the thought that you may need my help, which I cannot give, as
I need yours, which you cannot, seeing you in visions and in every shadow, I
have been compelled to write this," which I shall never send, to ask you
what we can do. Is not that extraordinary? And yet--do we not owe it ourselves,
to that self we created, apart from us, to try again? Alas, what has happened
to the love and understanding we once had! What is going to happen to it--what
is going to happen to our hearts? Love is the only thing which gives meaning to
our poor ways on earth: not precisely a discovery, I am afraid. You will think
I am mad, but this is how I drink too, as if I were taking an eternal
sacrament. Oh Yvonne, we cannot allow what we created to sink down to oblivion
in this dingy fashion--
   
Lift up your eyes unto the hills, I
seem to hear a voice saying. Sometimes, when I see the little red mail plane
fly in from Acapulco at seven in the morning over the strange hills, or more
probably hear, lying trembling, shaking, and dying in bed (when I am in bed at
that time)--just a tiny roar and gone--as I reach out babbling for the glass of
mescal, the drink that I can never believe even in raising to my lips is real,
that I have had the marvellous foresight to put within easy reach the night
before, I think that you will be on it, on that plane every morning as it goes
by, and will have come to save me. Then the morning goes by and you have not
come. But oh, I pray for this now, that you will come. On second thoughts I do
not see why from Acapulco. But for God's sake, Yvonne, hear me, my defences are
down, at the moment they are down--and there goes the plane, I heard it in the
distance then, just for an instant, beyond Tomalín--come back, come back. I
will stop drinking, anything. I am dying without you. For Christ Jesus"
sake Yvonne come back to me, hear me, it is a cry, come back to me, Yvonne, if
only for a day...
   
M. Laruelle began very slowly to fold
up the letter again, smoothing the creases carefully between finger and thumb,
then almost without thinking he had crumpled it up. He sat holding the crumpled
paper in one fist on the table staring, deeply abstracted, around him. In the
last five minutes the scene within the cantina had wholly changed. Outside the
storm seemed over but the Cervecería XX meantime had filled with peasants,
evidently refugees from it. They were not sitting at the tables, which were
empty--for while the show had still not recommenced most of the audience had
filed back into the theatre, now fairly quiet as in immediate anticipation of
it--but crowded by the bar. And there was a beauty and a sort of piety about
this scene. In the cantina both the candles and the dim electric lights still
burned. A peasant held two little girls by the hand while the floor was covered
with baskets, mostly empty and leaning against each other, and now the barman
was giving the younger of the two children an orange: someone went out, the
little girl sat on the orange, the jalousie door swung and swung and swung. M.
Laruelle looked at his watch--Vigil would not come for half an hour yet--and
again at the crumpled pages in his hand. The fresh coolness of rain-washed air
came through the jalousie into the cantina and he could hear the rain dripping
off the roofs and the water still rushing down the gutters in the street and
from the distance once more the sounds of the fair. He was about to replace the
crumpled letter in the book when, half absently, yet on a sudden definite
impulse, he held it into the candle flame. The flare lit up the whole cantina
with a burst of brilliance in which the figures at the bar--that he now saw
included besides the little children and the peasants who were quince or cactus
farmers in loose white clothes and wide hats, several women in mourning from
the cemeteries and dark-faced men in dark suits with open collars and their
ties undone--appeared, for an instant, frozen, a mural: they had all stopped
talking and were gazing round at him curiously^ all save the barman who seemed
momentarily about to object, then lost interest as M. Laruelle set the writhing
mass in an ashtray, where beautifully conforming it folded upon itself, a
burning castle, collapsed, subsided to a ticking hive through which sparks like
tiny red worms crawled and flew, while above a few grey wisps of ashes floated
in the thin smoke, a dead husk now, faintly crepitant... Suddenly from outside,
a bell spoke out, then ceased abruptly:
 
dolente... dolore!
 
Over the town,
in the dark tempestuous night, backwards revolved the luminous wheel.

... "A corpse will be transported by express!"
   
The tireless resilient voice that had
just lobbed this singular remark over the Bella Vista bar window-sill into the
square was, though its owner remained unseen, unmistakable and achingly
familiar as the spacious flower-boxed balconied hotel itself, and as unreal,
Yvonne thought.
   
"But why, Fernando, why should a
corpse be transported by express, do you suppose?"
   
The Mexican taxi-driver, familiar
too, who'd just picked up her bags--there'd been no taxi at the tiny Quauhnahuac
airfield though, only the bumptious station wagon that insisted on taking her
to the Bella Vista--put them down again on the pavement as to assure her: I
know why you're here, but no one's recognized you except me, and I won't give
you away. "Sí señora," he chuckled. "Señora--El Cónsul."
Sighing, he inclined his head with a certain admiration towards the bar window.
"¡Qué hombre!"
   
"--on the other hand, damn it,
Fernando, why shouldn't it? Why shouldn't a corpse be transported by
express?"
   
" Absolutamente necesario"
   
" --Just a bunch of Alladamnbama
farmers! "
   
The last was yet another voice. So
the bar, open all night for the occasion, was evidently full. Ashamed, numb
with nostalgia and anxiety, reluctant to enter the crowded bar, though equally
reluctant to have the taxi-driver go in for her, Yvonne, her consciousness so
lashed by wind and air and voyage she still seemed to be travelling, still
sailing into Acapulco harbour yesterday evening through a hurricane of immense
and gorgeous butterflies swooping seaward to greet the Pennsylvania--at first
it was as though fountains of multicoloured stationery were being swept out of
the saloon lounge--glanced defensively round the square, really tranquil in the
midst of this commotion, of the butterflies still zigzagging overhead or past
the heavy open ports, endlessly vanishing astern, their square, motionless and
brilliant in the seven o'clock morning sunlight, silent yet somehow poised,
expectant, with one eye half open already, the merry-go-rounds, the Ferris
wheel, lightly dreaming, looking forward to the fiesta later--the ranged rugged
taxis too that were looking forward to something else, a taxi strike that
afternoon, she'd been confidentially informed. The zócalo was just the same in
spite of its air of slumbering Harlequin. The old bandstand stood empty, the
equestrian statue of the turbulent Huerta rode under the nutant trees wild-eyed
evermore, gazing over the valley beyond which, as if nothing had happened and
it was November 1936 and not November 1938, rose, eternally, her volcanoes, her
beautiful, beautiful volcanoes. Ah, how familiar it all was: Quauhnahuac, her
town of cold mountain water swiftly running. Where the eagle stops! Or did it
really mean, as Louis said, near the wood? The trees, the massive shining
depths of these ancient fresno trees, how had she ever lived without them? She
drew a deep breath, the air had yet a hint about it of dawn, the dawn this
morning at Acapulco--green and deep purple high above and gold scrolled back to
reveal a river of lapis where the horn of Venus burned so fiercely she could
imagine her dim shadow cast from its light on the airfield, the vultures
floating lazily up there above the brick-red horizon into whose peaceful
foreboding the little plane of the Compañía Mexicana de Aviación had ascended,
like a minute red demon, winged emissary of Lucifer, the windsock below
streaming out its steadfast farewell.
   
She took in the zócalo with a long
final look--the untenanted ambulance that might not have moved since she'd last
been here, outside the Servicio de Ambulancia within Cortez Palace, the huge
paper poster strung between two trees which said Hotel Bella Vista Gran Baile
Noviembre 1938 a Beneficio de la Cruz Roja. Los Mejores Artistas del radio en acción.
No falte Vd., beneath which some of the guests were returning home, pallid and
exhausted as the music that struck up at this moment and reminded her the ball
was still proceeding--then entered the bar silently, blinking, myopic in the
swift leathery perfumed alcoholic dusk, the sea that morning going in with her,
rough and pure, the long dawn rollers advancing, rising, and crashing down to
glide, sinking, in colourless ellipses over the sand, while early pelicans
hunting turned and dived, dived and turned and dived again into the spume,
moving with the precision of planets, the spent breakers racing back to their
calm; flotsam was scattered all along the beach: she had heard, from the small
boats tossing in the Spanish Main, the boys, like young Tritons, already
beginning to blow on their mournful conch shells...
   
The bar was empty, however.
   
Or rather it contained one figure.
Still in his dress clothes, which weren't particularly dishevelled, the Consul,
a lock of fair hair falling over his eyes and one hand clasped in his short
pointed beard, was sitting sideways with one foot on the rail of an adjacent
stool at the small right-angled counter, half leaning over it and talking
apparently to himself, for the barman, a sleek dark lad of about eighteen,
stood at a little distance against a glass partition that divided the room
(from yet another bar, she remembered now, giving on a side-street) and didn't
have the air of listening. Yvonne stood there silently by the door, unable to
make a move, watching, the roar of the plane still with her, the buffeting of
wind and air as they left the sea behind, the roads below still climbing and
dropping, the little towns still steadily passing with their humped churches.
Quauhnahuac with all its cobalt swimming pools rising again obliquely to meet
her. But the exhilaration of her flight, of mountain piled on mountain, the
terrific onslaught of sunlight while the earth turned yet in shadow, a river
flashing, a gorge winding darkly beneath, the volcanoes abruptly wheeling into
view from the glowing east, the exhilaration and the longing had left her.
Yvonne felt her spirit that had flown to meet this man's as if already sticking
to the leather. She saw she was mistaken about the barman: he was listening
after all. That is, while he mightn't understand what Geoffrey (who was, she
noticed, wearing no socks) was talking about, he was waiting, his towelled
hands overhauling the glasses ever more slowly, for an opening to say or do
something. He set the glass he was drying down. Then he picked up the Consul's
cigarette, which was consuming itself in an ashtray at the counter edge,
inhaled it deeply, closing his eyes with an expression of playful ecstasy,
opened them and pointed, scarcely exhaling now the slow billowing smoke from
his nostrils and mouth, at an advertisement for
 
Cafeaspirina , a woman wearing a scarlet brassiere lying on a scrolled
divan, behind the upper row of tequila añejo bottles. "Absolutamente
necesario," he said, and Yvonne realized it was the woman, not the
 
Cafeaspirina , he meant (the Consul's phrase
doubtless) was absolutely necessary. But he hadn't attracted the Consul's
attention, so he closed his eyes again with the same expression, opened them,
replaced the Consul's cigarette, and, still exuding smoke, pointed once more to
the advertisement--next to it she noticed one for the local cinema, simply, has
Manos de Orlac, con Peter Lorre--and repeated: "Absolutamente necesario!
   
"A corpse, whether adult or
child," the Consul had resumed, after briefly pausing to laugh at this
pantomime, and to agree, with a kind of agony, "Sí, Fernando,
absolutamente necesario"--and it is a ritual, she thought, a ritual
between them, as there were once rituals between us, only Geoffrey has gotten a
little bored with it at last--resumed his study of a blue and red Mexican
National Railways time-table. Then he looked up abruptly and saw her, peering
short-sightedly about him before recognizing her, standing there, a little
blurred probably because the sunlight was behind her, with one hand thrust
through the handle of her scarlet bag resting on her hip, standing there as she
knew he must see her, half jaunty, a little diffident.
   
Still holding the time-table the
Consul built himself to his feet as she came forward. "--Good God."
   
Yvonne hesitated but he made no move
towards her; she slipped quietly on to a stool beside him; they did not kiss.
   
"Surprise party. I've come
back... My plane got in an hour ago."
   
"--when Alabama comes through we
ask nobody any questions," came suddenly from the bar on the other side of
the glass partition: "We come through with heels flying!"
   
"--From Acapulco, Hornos... I
came by boat, Geoff, from San Pedro--Panama Pacific. The Pennsylvania.
Geoff--"
   
"--bull-headed Dutchmen! The sun
parches the lips and they crack. Oh Christ, it's a shame! The horses all go
away kicking in the dust! I wouldn't have it. They plugged "em too. They
don't miss it. They shoot first and ask questions later. You're goddam right.
And that's a nice thing to say. I take a bunch of goddamned farmers, then ask
them no questions. Righto!--smoke a cool cigarette--"
   
" Don't you love these early
mornings?" The Consul's voice, but not his hand, was perfectly steady as
now he put the timetable down. "Have, as our friend next door
suggests," he inclined his head towards the partition, "a--" the
name on the trembling, offered, and rejected cigarette package struck her:
Alas! "--"
   
The Consul was saying with gravity:
"Ah, Hornos.--But why come via Cape Horn? It has a bad habit of wagging
its tail, sailors tell me. Or does it mean ovens?"
   
"--Calle Nicaragua, cincuenta
dos." Yvonne pressed a tostón on a dark god by this time in possession of
her bags who bowed and disappeared obscurely.
   
"What if I didn't live there any
longer." The Consul, sitting down again, was shaking so violently he had
to hold the bottle of whisky he was pouring himself a drink from with both
hands. "Have a drink?"
   
Or should she? She should: even
though she hated drinking in the morning she undoubtedly should: it was what
she had made up her mind to do if necessary, not to have one drink alone but a
great many drinks with the Consul. But instead she could feel the smile leaving
her face that was struggling to keep back the tears she had forbidden herself
on any account, thinking and knowing Geoffrey knew she was thinking: "I
was prepared for this, I was prepared for it." "You have one and I'll
cheer," she found herself saying. (As a matter of fact she had been
prepared for almost anything. After all, what could one expect? She had told
herself all the way down on the ship, a ship because she would have time on
board to persuade herself her journey was neither thoughtless nor precipitate,
and on the plane when she knew it was both, that she should have warned him,
that it was abominably unfair to take him by surprise.) "Geoffrey,"
she went on, wondering if she seemed pathetic sitting there, all her carefully
thought-out speeches, her plans and tact so obviously vanishing in the gloom,
or merely repellent--she felt slightly repellent--because she wouldn't have a
drink. "What have you done? I wrote you and wrote you. I wrote till my
heart broke. What have you done with your--"
   
"--life," came from beyond
the glass partition. "What a life! Christ, it's a shame! Where I come from
they don't run. We're going through busting this way--"
   
"--No. I thought of course you'd
returned to England, when you didn't answer. What have you done? Oh Geoff--have
you resigned from the service?"
   
"--went down to Fort Sale. Took
your shoeshot. And took your Brownings.--Jump, jump, jump, jump, jump--see, get
it--"
   
"I ran into Louis in Santa
Barbara. He said you were still here."
   
"--and like hell you can, you
can't do it, and that's what you do in Alabama! "
   
"Well, actually I've only been
away once." The Consul took a long shuddering drink, then sat down again
beside her. "To Oaxaca.--Remember Oaxaca?"
   
"--Oaxaca?--"
   
"--Oaxaca.--"
   
--The word was like a breaking heart,
a sudden peal of stifled bells in a gale, the last syllables of one dying of
thirst in the desert. Did she remember Oaxaca! The roses and the great tree,
was that, the dust and the buses to Etla and Nochitlán? and: "damas
acompañadas de un caballero, gratis." Or at night their cries of love,
rising into the ancient fragrant Mayan air, heard only by ghosts? In Oaxaca
they had found each other once. She was watching the Consul who seemed less on
the defensive than in process while straightening out the leaflets on the bar
of changing mentally from the part played for Fernando to the part he would
play for her, watching him almost with amazement: "Surely this cannot be
us," she cried in her heart suddenly. "This cannot be us--say that it
is not, somebody, this cannot be us here!"--Divorce. What did the word
really mean? She'd looked it up in the dictionary, on the ship: to sunder, to
sever. And divorced meant: sundered, severed. Oaxaca meant divorce. They had
not been divorced there but that was where the Consul had gone when she left,
as if into the heart of the sundering, of the severance. Yet they had loved one
another! But it was as though their love were wandering over some desolate
cactus plain, far from here, lost, stumbling and falling, attacked by wild
beasts, calling for help--dying, to sigh at last, with a kind of weary peace:
Oaxaca--
   
-'The strange thing about this little
corpse, Yvonne," the Consul was saying, "is that it must be
accompanied by a person holding its hand: no, sorry. Apparently not its hand,
just a first-class ticket." He held up, smiling, his own right hand which
shook as with a movement of wiping chalk from an imaginary blackboard.
"It's really the shakes that make this kind of life insupportable. But
they will stop: I was only drinking enough so they would. Just the necessary,
the therapeutic drink." Yvonne looked back at him. "--but the shakes
are the worst of course," he was going on. "You get to like the other
after a while, and I'm really doing very well, I'm much better than I was six
months ago, very much better than I was, say, in Oaxaca"--noticing a
curious familiar glare in his eyes that always frightened her, a glare turned
inward now like one of those sombrely brilliant cluster-lamps down the hatches
of the Pennsylvania on the work of unloading, only this was a work of
spoliation: and she felt a sudden dread lest this glare, as of old, should
swing outward, turn upon her.