Under the Volcano (7 page)

   
"God knows I've seen you like
this before," her thoughts were saying, her love was saying, through the
gloom of the bar, "too many times for it to be a surprise anyhow. You are
denying me again. But this time there is a profound difference. This is like an
ultimate denial--oh Geoffrey, why can't you turn back? Must you go on and on
for ever into this stupid darkness, seeking it, even now, where I cannot reach
you, ever on into the darkness of the sundering, of the severance!--Oh
Geoffrey, why do you do it!"
   
"But look here, hang it all, it
is not altogether darkness," the Consul seemed to be saying in reply to her,
gently, as he produced a half-filled pipe and with the utmost difficulty lit
it, and as her eyes followed his as they roved around the bar, not meeting
those of the barman, who had gravely, busily effaced himself into the
background, "you misunderstand me if you think it is altogether darkness I
see, and if you insist on thinking so, how can I tell you why I do it? But if
you look at that sunlight there, ah, then perhaps you'll get the answer, see,
look at the way it falls through the window: what beauty can compare to that of
a cantina in the early morning? Your volcanoes outside? Your stars--Ras
Algethi? Antares raging south south-east? Forgive me, no. Not so much the
beauty of this one necessarily, which, a regression on my part, is not perhaps
properly a cantina, but think of all the other terrible ones where people go
mad that will soon be taking down their shutters, for not even the gates of
heaven, opening wide to receive me, could fill me with such celestial
complicated and hopeless joy as the iron screen that rolls up with a crash, as
the unpadlocked jostling jalousies which admit those whose souls tremble with
the drinks they carry unsteadily to their lips. All mystery, all hope, all
disappointment, yes, all disaster, is here, beyond those swinging doors. And,
by the way, do you see that old woman from Tarasco sitting in the corner, you
didn't before, but do you now?" his eyes asked her, gazing round him with
the bemused unfocused brightness of a lover's, his love asked her, "how,
unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old woman
from Tarasco who plays dominoes at seven o'clock in the morning?"
   
It was true, it was almost uncanny,
there was someone else in the room she hadn't noticed until the Consul, without
a word, had glanced behind them: now Yvonne's eyes came to rest on the old
woman, who was sitting in the shadow at the bar's one table. On the edge of the
table her stick, made of steel with some animal's claw for a handle, hung like
something alive. She had a little chicken on a cord which she kept under her
dress over her heart. The chicken peeped out with pert, jerky, sidelong
glances. She set the little chicken on a table near her where it pecked among
the dominoes, uttering tiny cries. Then she replaced it, drawing her dress
tenderly over it. But Yvonne looked away. The old woman with her chicken and
the dominoes chilled her heart. It was like an evil omen.
   
--"Talking of corpses"--the
Consul poured himself another whisky and was signing a chit book with a
somewhat steadier hand while Yvonne sauntered towards the
door--"personally I'd like to be buried next to William Blackstone--"
He pushed the book back for Fernando, to whom mercifully he had not attempted
to introduce her. "The man who went to live among the Indians. You know
who he was, of course?" The Consul stood half turned towards her,
doubtfully regarding this new drink he had not picked up.
   
"--Christ, if you want it,
Alabama, go ahead and take it... I don't want it. But if you wish it, you go and
take it."
   
"Absolutamente necesario--"
   
The Consul left half of it.
   
Outside, in the sunlight, in the
backwash of tabid music from the still-continuing ball, Yvonne waited again,
casting nervous glances over her shoulder at the main entrance of the hotel
from which belated revellers like half-dazed wasps out of a hidden nest issued
every few moments while, on the instant, correct, abrupt, army and navy,
consular, the Consul, with scarce a tremor now, found a pair of dark glasses
and put them on.
   
"Well," he said, "the
taxis seem to have all disappeared. Shall we walk?"
   
"Why what's happened to the
car?" So confused by apprehension of meeting any acquaintance was she,
Yvonne had almost taken the arm of another man wearing dark glasses, a ragged
young Mexican leaning against the hotel wall to whom the Consul, slapping his
stick over his wrist and with something enigmatic in his voice observed:
"Buenas tardes, señor." Yvonne started forward quickly. "Yes,
let's walk."
   
The Consul took her arm with
courtliness (the ragged Mexican with the dark glasses had been joined, she
noticed, by another man with a shade over one eye and bare feet who had been
leaning against the wall farther down, to whom the Consul also remarked
"Buenas tardes," but there were no more guests coming out of the
hotel, only the two men who'd politely called "Buenas" after them
standing there nudging each other as if to say: "He said 'Buenas tardes',
what a card he is!") and they set off obliquely through the square. The
fiesta wouldn't start till much later and the streets that remembered so many
other Days of the Dead were fairly deserted. The bright banners, the paper
streamers, flashed: the great wheel brooded under the trees, brilliant,
motionless. Even so the town around and below them was already full of sharp
remote noises like explosions of rich colour. ¡Box! said an advertisement.
ARENA TOMALÍN. Frente al Jardín Xicoténcatl. Domingo 8 de Noviembre de 1938. 4
Emocionantes Peleas.
   
Yvonne tried to keep herself from asking:
   
"Did you smack the car up
again?"
   
"As a matter of fact I've lost
it."
   
"Lost it!"
   
"It's a pity because--but look
here, dash it all, aren't you terribly tired, Yvonne?"
   
"Not in the least! I should
think you're the one to be--"
   
--¡ Box! Preliminar a 4 Rounds, El
TURCO (Gonzalo Calderón de Par. de 52 kilos) vs EL OSO (de Par. de 53 kilos).
   
"I had a million hours of sleep
on the boat! And I'd far rather walk, only--"
   
"Nothing. Just a touch of
rheumatiz.--Or is it the sprue? I'm glad to get some circulation going in the
old legs."
   
--¡Box! Evento Especial a 5 rounds,
en los que el vencedor pasará al grupo de Semi-Finales, TOMA AGUERO (El
Invencible Indio de Quauhnahuac de 57 kilos, que acaba de llegar de la Capital
de la República). ARENA TOMALÍN. Frente al Jardín Xicoténcatl.
   
" It's a pity about the car
because we might have gone to the boxing," said the Consul, who was
walking almost exaggeratedly erect.
   
"I hate boxing."
   
"--But that's not till next
Sunday anyhow... I heard they had some kind of a bullthrowing on today over at
Tomalín.--Do you remember--"
   
"No!"
   
The Consul, with no more recognition
than she, held up one finger in dubious greeting to an individual resembling a
carpenter, running past them wagging his head and carrying a sawed length of
grained board under his arm and who threw, almost chanted, a laughing word at
him that sounded like: "¡Mescalito!"
   
The sunlight blazed down on them,
blazed on the eternal ambulance whose headlights were momentarily transformed
into a blinding magnifying glass, glazed on the volcanoes--she could not look
at them now. Born in Hawaii, she'd had volcanoes in her life before, however.
Seated on a park bench under a tree in the square, his feet barely touching the
ground, the little public scribe was already crashing away on a giant
typewriter.
   
"I am taking the only way out,
semicolon," the Consul offered cheerfully and soberly in passing.
"Good-bye, full stop. Change of paragraph, change of chapter, change of
worlds--"
   
The whole scene about her--the names
on the shops surrounding the square: La China Poblana, hand-embroidered
dresses, the advertisements: Baños de la Libertad, Los mejores de la Capital y
los únicos en donde nunca falta el agua, Estufas especiales para Damas y
Caballeros: and Sr Panadero: Sí quiere hacer buen pan exija las harinas
"Princesa Donaji"--striking Yvonne as so strangely familiar all over
again and yet so sharply strange after the year's absence, the severance of
thought and body, mode of being, became almost intolerable for a moment.
"You might have made use of him to answer some of my letters," she
said.
   
"Look, do you remember what
María used to call it?" The Consul, with his stick, was indicating through
the trees the little American grocery store, catercorner to Cortez Palace.
"Peegly Weegly."
   
"I won't," Yvonne thought,
hurrying on and biting her lips. "I won't cry."
   
The Consul had taken her arm.
"I'm sorry, I never thought."
   
They emerged on the street again:
when they had crossed it she was grateful for the excuse suggested by the
printer's shop window for readjustment. They stood, as once, looking in. The
shop, adjacent to the Palace, but divided from it by the breadth of a steep
narrow street desperate as a winze, was opening early. From the mirror within
the window an ocean creature so drenched and coppered by sun and winnowed by
sea-wind and spray looked back at her she seemed, even while making the
fugitive motions of Yvonne's vanity, somewhere beyond human grief charioting
the surf. But the sun turned grief to poison and a glowing body only mocked the
sick heart, Yvonne knew, if the sun-darkened creature of waves and sea margins
and windows did not! In the window itself, on either side of this abstracted
gaze of her mirrored face, the same brave wedding invitations she remembered
were ranged, the same touched-up prints of extravagantly floriferous brides,
but this time there was something she hadn't seen before, which the Consul now
pointed out with a murmur of "Strange," peering closer: a
photographic enlargement, purporting to show the disintegration of a glacial
deposit in the Sierra Madre, of a great rock split by forest fires. This
curious, and curiously sad picture--to which the nature of the other exhibits
lent an added ironic poignance--set behind and above the already spinning
flywheel of the presses, was called: La Despedida.
   
They moved on past the front of
Cortez Palace, then down its blind side began to descend the cliff that
traversed it width-ways. Their path made the short cut to the Calle Tierra del
Fuego which curved below to meet them but the cliff was little better than a
rubbish heap with smouldering debris and they had to pick their way carefully.
Yvonne breathed more freely though, now they were leaving the centre of the
town behind. La Despedida, she thought. The Parting. After the damp and
detritus had done their work both severed halves of that blasted rock would
crumble to earth. It was inevitable, so it said on the picture... Was it really?
Wasn't there some way of saving the poor rock whose immutability so short a
time ago no one would have dreamed of doubting! Ah, who would have thought of
it then as other than a single integrated rock? But granted it had been split,
was there no way before total disintegration should set in of at least saving
the severed halves? There was no way. The violence of the fire which split the
rock apart had also incited the destruction of each separate rock, cancelling
the power that might have held them unities. Oh, but why--by some fanciful
geologic thaumaturgy, couldn't the pieces be welded together again? She longed
to heal the cleft rock. She was one of the rocks and she yearned to save the
other, that both might be saved. By a superlapidary effort she moved herself
nearer it, poured out her pleas, her passionate tears, told all her
forgiveness: the other rock stood unmoved. "That's all very well," it
said, "but it happens to be your fault, and as for myself, I propose to
disintegrate as I please!"
   
"--in Tortu," the Consul
was saying, though Yvonne was not following, and now they had come out in the
Calle Tierra del Fuego itself, a rough narrow dusty street that, deserted,
looked quite unfamiliar. The Consul was beginning to shake again.
   
"Geoffrey, I'm so thirsty, why
don't we stop and have a drink?"
   
"Geoffrey, let's be reckless
this once and get tight together before breakfast!"
   
Yvonne said neither of these things.
   
--The Street of the Land of Fire! To
their left, raised high above road level, were uneven sidewalks with rough
steps hewn in them. The whole little thoroughfare, slightly humpbacked in the
centre where the open sewers had been filled in, was banked sharply down to the
right as though it had once sideslipped in an earthquake. On this side
one-storied houses with tiled roofs and oblong barred windows stood flush with
the street but seemingly below it. On the other, above them, they were passing
small shops, sleepy, though mostly opening or, like the "Molino para
Nixtamal, Morelense," open: harness shops, a milk shop under its sign
Lechería (brothel, someone insisted it meant, and she hadn't seen the joke),
dark interiors with strings of tiny sausages, chorizos, hanging over the
counters where you could also buy goat cheese or sweet quince wine or cacao,
into one of which the Consul was now, with a "momentito"
disappearing. "Just go on and I'll catch you up. I won't be a jiffy."
   
Yvonne walked on past the place a
short distance, then retraced her steps. She had not entered any of these shops
since their first week in Mexico and the danger of being recognized in the
abarrotes was slight. Nevertheless, repenting her tardy impulse to follow the
Consul in, she waited outside, restless as a little yacht turning at anchor.
The opportunity to join him ebbed. A mood of martyrdom stole upon her. She
wanted the Consul to see her, when he emerged, waiting there, abandoned and
affronted. But glancing back the way they had come she forgot Geoffrey an
instant.--It was unbelievable. She was in Quauhnahuac again! There was Cortez
Palace and there, high on the cliff, a man standing gazing over the valley who
from his air of martial intentness might have been Cortez himself. The man
moved, spoiling the illusion. Now he looked less like Cortez than the poor
young man in the dark glasses who'd been leaning against the wall of the Bella
Vista.