Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  Yet in the Earthly Paradise, what had he done? He had made few friends. He had acquired a Mexican mistress with whom he quarrelled, and numerous beautiful Mayan idols he would be unable to take out of the country, and he had –

  M. Laruelle wondered if it was going to rain: it sometimes, though rarely, did at this time of year, as last year for instance, it rained when it should not. And those were storm clouds in the south. He imagined he could smell the rain, and it ran in his head he would enjoy nothing better than to get wet, soaked through to the skin, to walk on and on through this wild country in his clinging white flannels getting wetter and wetter and wetter. He watched the clouds: dark swift horses surging up the sky. A black storm breaking out of its season! That was what love was like, he thought; love which came too late. Only no sane calm succeeded it, as when the evening fragrance or slow sunlight and warmth returned to the surprised land! M. Laruelle hastened his steps still farther. And let such love strike you dumb, blind, mad, dead — your fate would not be altered by your simile. Tonnerre de theu… It slaked no thirst to say what love was like which came too late.

  The town was almost directly to his right now and above him, for M. Laruelle had been walking gradually downhill since leaving the Casino de la Selva. From the field he was crossing he could see, over the trees on the slope of the hill, and beyond the dark castled shape of Cortez Palace, the slowly revolving Ferris wheel, already lit up, in the square of Quauhna-huac; he thought he could distinguish the sound of human laughter rising from its bright gondolas and, again, that faint intoxication of voices singing, diminishing, dying in the wind, inaudible finally. A despondent American tune, the St Louis Blues, or some such, was borne across the fields to him, at times a soft wind-blown surge of music from which skimmed a spray of gabbling, that seemed not so much to break against as to be thumping the walls and towers of the outskirts; then with a moan it would be sucked back into the distance. He found himself in the lane that led away through the brewery to the Tomalín road. He came to the Alcapancingo road. A car was passing and as he waited, face averted, for the dust to subside, he recalled that time motoring with Yvonne and the Consul along the Mexican lake-bed, itself once the crater of a huge volcano, and saw again the horizon softened by dust, the buses whizzing past through the whirling dust, the shuddering boys standing on the backs of the lorries holding on for grim death, their faces bandaged against the dust (and there was a magnificence about this, he always felt, some symbolism for the future, for which such truly great preparation had been made by a heroic people, since all over Mexico one could see those thundering lorries with those young builders in them, standing erect, their trousers flapping hard, legs planted wide, firm) and in the sunlight, on the round hill, the lone section of dust advancing, the dust-darkened hills by the lake like islands in driving rain. The Consul, whose old house M. Laruelle now made out on the slope beyond the barranca, had seemed happy enough too then, wandering around Cholula with its three hundred and six churches and its two barber shops, the ‘Toilet’ and the ‘Harem’, and climbing the ruined pyramid later, which he had proudly insisted was the original Tower of Babel. How admirably he had concealed what must have been the babel of his thoughts!

  Two ragged Indians were approaching M. Laruelle through the dust; they were arguing, but with the profound concentration of university professors wandering in summer twilight through the Sorbonne. Their voices, the gestures of their refined grimy hands, were unbelievably courtly, delicate. Their carriage suggested the majesty of Aztec princes, their faces obscure sculpturings on Yucatecan ruins:

  ‘–perfectamente borracho–’

  ‘ –completamente fantástico—’

  ‘Si, hombre, la vida impersonal–’

  ‘Claro, hombre–’

  ‘!Positivamente!’

  ‘Buenas noches’

  ‘Buenas noches.’

  They passed into the dusk. The Ferris wheel sank from sight: the sounds of the fair, the music, instead of coming closer, had temporarily ceased. M. Laruelle looked into the west; a knight of old, with tennis racket for shield and pocket torch for scrip, he dreamed a moment of battles the soul survived to wander there. He had intended turning down another lane to the right, that led past the model farm where the Casino de la Selva grazed its horses, directly into his street, the Calle Nicaragua. But on a sudden impulse he turned left along the road running by the prison. He felt an obscure desire on his last night to bid farewell to the ruin of Maximilian’s Palace.

  To the south an immense archangel, black as thunder, beat up from the Pacific. And yet, after all, the storm contained its own secret calm… His passion for Yvonne (whether or not she’d ever been much good as an actress was beside the point, he’d told her the truth when he said she would have been more than good in any film he made) had brought back to his heart, in a way he could not have explained, the first time that alone, walking over the meadows from Saint Près, the sleepy French village of backwaters and locks and grey disused watermills where he was lodging, he had seen, rising slowly and wonderfully and with boundless beauty above the stubble fields blowing with wildflowers, slowly rising into the sunlight, as centuries before the pilgrims straying over those same fields had watched them rise, the twin spires of Chartres Cathedral. His love had brought a peace, for all too short a while, that was strangely like the enchantment, the spell, of Chartres itself, long ago, whose every side-street he had come to love and café where he could gaze at the Cathedral eternally sailing against the clouds, the spell not even the fact he was scandalously in debt there could break. M. Laruelle walked on swiftly towards the Palace. Nor had any remorse for the Consul’s plight broken that other spell fifteen years later here in Quauhnahuac! for that matter, M. Laruelle reflected, what had reunited the Consul and himself for a time, even after Yvonne left, was not, on either side, remorse. It was perhaps, partly, more the desire for that illusory comfort, about as satisfying as biting on an aching tooth, to be derived from the mutual unspoken pretence that Yvonne was still here.

  — Ah, but all these things might have seemed a good enough reason for putting the whole earth between themselves and Quauhnahuac! Yet neither had done so. And now M. Laruelle could feel their burden pressing upon him from outside, as if somehow it had been transferred to these purple mountains all around him, so mysterious, with their secret mines of silver, so withdrawn, yet so close, so still, and from these mountains emanated a strange melancholy force that tried to hold him here bodily, which was its weight, the weight of many things, but mostly that of sorrow.

  He passed a field where a faded blue Ford, a total wreck, had been pushed beneath a hedge on a slope: two bricks had been set under its front wheels against involuntary departure. What are you waiting for, he wanted to ask it, feeling a sort of kinship, an empathy, for those tatters of ancient hood flapping… Darling, why did I leave? Why did you let me? It was not to M. Laruelle that these words on that long-belated postcard of Yvonne’s had been addressed, that postcard which the Consul must have maliciously put under his pillow some time on that last morning — but how could one ever be sure when? — as though the Consul had calculated it all, knowing M. Laruelle would discover it at the precise moment that Hugh, distraughtly, would call from Parián. Parián! To his right towered the prison walls. Up on the watchtower, just visible above them, two policemen peered east and west with binoculars. M. Laruelle crossed a bridge over the river, then took a short cut through a wide clearing in the woods evidently being laid out as a botanical garden. Birds came swarming out of the southeast: small, black, ugly birds, yet too long, something like monstrous insects, something like crows, with awkward long tails, and an undulating, bouncing, laboured flight. Shatterers of the twilight hour, they were flapping their way feverishly home, as they did every evening, to roost within the fresno trees in the zócalo, which until nightfall would ring with their incessant drilling mechanic screech. Straggling, the obscene concourse hushed and peddled by. By the time he reached the Palace th
e sun had set.

  In spite of his amour propre he immediately regretted having come. The broken pink pillars, in the half-light, might have been waiting to fall down on him: the pool, covered with green scum, its steps torn away and hanging by one rotting clamp, to close over his head. The shattered evil-smelling chapel, overgrown with weeds, the crumbling walls, splashed with urine, on which scorpions lurked — wrecked entablature, sad archivolt, slippery stones covered with excreta — this place, where love had once brooded, seemed part of a nightmare. And Laruelle was tired of nightmares. France, even in Austrian guise, should not transfer itself to Mexico, he thought. Maximilian had been unlucky in his palaces too, poor devil. Why did they have to call that other fatal palace in Trieste also the Miramar, where Carlotta went insane, and everyone who ever lived there from the Empress Elizabeth of Austria to the Archduke Ferdinand had met with a violent death? And yet, how they must have loved this land, these two lonely empurpled exiles, human beings finally, lovers out of their element — their Eden, without either knowing quite why, beginning to turn under their noses into a prison and smell like a brewery, their only majesty at last that of tragedy. Ghosts. Ghosts, as at the Casino, certainly lived here. And a ghost who still said: ‘It is our destiny to come here, Carlotta. Look at this rolling glorious country, its hills, its valleys, its volcanoes beautiful beyond belief. And to think that it is ours! Let us be good and constructive and make ourselves worthy of it!’ Or there were ghosts quarrelling: ‘No, you loved yourself, you loved your misery more than I. You did this deliberately to us.’ ‘I?’ ‘You always had people to look after you, to love you, to use you, to lead you. You listened to everyone save me, who really loved you.’ ‘No, you’re the only person I’ve ever loved.’ ‘Ever? You loved only yourself.’ ‘No, it was you, always you, you must believe me, please: you must remember how we were always planning to go to Mexico. Do you remember?… Yes, you are right. I had my chance with you. Never a chance like that again! I’ And suddenly they were weeping together, passionately, as they stood.

  But it was the Consul’s voice, not Maximilian’s, M. Laruelle could almost have heard in the Palace: and he remembered as he walked on, thankful he had finally struck the Calle Nicaragua even at its farthest end, the day he’d stumbled upon the Consul and Yvonne embracing there; it was not very long after their arrival in Mexico and how different the Palace had seemed to him then! M. Laruelle slackened his pace. The wind had dropped. He opened his English tweed coat (bought however from High Life, pronounced Eetchleef, Mexico City) and loosened his blue polka-dotted scarf. The evening was unusually oppressive. And how silent. Not a sound, not a cry reached his ears now. Nothing but the clumsy suction of his footsteps… Not a soul in sight. M. Laruelle felt slightly chafed too, his trousers bound him. He was getting too fat, had already got too fat in Mexico, which suggested another odd reason some people might have for taking up arms, that would never find its way into the newspapers. Absurdly, he swung his tennis racket in the air, through the motions of a serve, a return: but it was too heavy, he had forgotten about the press. He passed the model farm on his right, the buildings, the fields, the hills shadowy now in the swiftly gathering gloom. The Ferris wheel came into view again, just the top, silently burning high on the hill, almost directly in front of him, then the trees rose up over it. The road, which was terrible and full of pot-holes, went steeply downhill here; he was approaching the little bridge over the barranca, the deep ravine. Half-way across the bridge he stopped; he lit a new cigarette from the one he’d been smoking, and leaned over the parapet, looking down. It was too dark to see the bottom, but: here was finality indeed, and cleavage! Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner. Dormitory for vultures and city Moloch! When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country, though the coincidence could hardly have impressed anyone then! It was on this bridge the Consul had once suggested to him he make a film about Atlantis. Yes, leaning over. just like this, drunk but collected, coherent, a little mad, a little impatient — it was one of those occasions when the Consul had drunk himself sober — he had spoken to him about the spirit of the abyss, the god of storm, ‘huracán’, that ‘testified so suggestively to intercourse between opposite sides of the Atlantic’. Whatever he had meant.

  Though it was not the first occasion the Consul and he had stood looking into an abyss. For there had always been, ages ago — and how could one now forget it? — the ‘Hell Bunker’: and that other encounter there which seemed to bear some obscure relation to the later one in Maximilian’s Palace… Had his discovery of the Consul here in Quauhnahuac really been so extraordinary, the discovery that his old English playmate — he could scarcely call him ‘schoolmate’ — whom he hadn’t seen for nearly a quarter of a century was actually living in his street, and had been, without his knowledge, for six weeks? Probably not; probably it was just one of those meaningless correspondences that might be labelled: ‘favourite trick of the gods’. But how vividly, again, that old seaside holiday in England came back to him!

  – M. Laruelle, who had been born in Languion, in the Moselle country, but whose father, a rich philatelist of remote habits, had moved to Paris, usually spent his summer holidays as a boy with his parents in Normandy. Courseulles, in Calvados, on the English Channel, was not a fashionable resort. Far from it. There were a few windy battered pensions, miles of desolate sand-dunes, and the sea was cold. But it was to Courseulles, nevertheless, in the sweltering summer of 1911, that the family of the famous English poet, Abraham Taskerson, had come, bringing with them. the strange little Anglo-Indian orphan, a broody creature of fifteen, so shy and yet so curiously self-contained, who wrote poetry that old Taskerson (who’d stayed at home) apparently encouraged him with, and who sometimes burst out crying if you mentioned in his presence the word ‘father’ or ‘mother’. Jacques, about the same age, had felt oddly attracted to him: and since the other Taskerson boys — at least six, mostly older and, it would appear, all of a tougher breed, though they were in fact collateral relatives of young Geoffrey Firmin — tended to band together and leave the lad alone, he saw a great deal of him. They wandered together along the shore with a couple of old ‘cleeks’ brought from England and some wretched gutta-percha golf balls, to be driven on their last afternoon gloriously into the sea. ‘Joffrey’ became ‘The Old Bean’. Laruelle mère, to whom, however, he was ‘that beautiful English young poet’, liked him too. Taskerson mère had taken a fancy to the French boy: the upshot was Jacques was asked to spend September in England with the Taskersons, where Geoffrey would be staying till the commencement of his school term. Jacques’s father, who planned sending him to an English school till he was eighteen, consented. Particularly he admired the erect manly carriage of the Taskersons… And that was how M. Laruelle came to Leasowe.

  It was a kind of grown-up, civilized version of Courseulles on the English north-west coast. The Taskersons lived in a comfortable house whose back garden abutted on a beautiful, undulating golf course bounded on the far side by the sea. It looked like the sea; actually it was the estuary, seven miles wide, of a river: white horses westward marked where the real sea began. The Welsh mountains, gaunt and black and cloudy, with occasionally a snow peak to remind Geoff of India, lay across the river. During the week, when they were allowed to play, the course was deserted: yellow ragged sea poppies fluttered in the spiny sea grass. On the shore were the remains of an antediluvian forest with ugly black stumps showing, and farther up an old stubby deserted lighthouse. There was an island in the estuary, with a windmill on it like a curious black flower, which you could ride out to at low tide on a donkey. The smoke of freighters outward bound from Liverpool hung low on the horizon. There was a feeling of space and emptiness. Only at week-ends did a certain disadvantage appear in their site: although the season was drawing to a close and the grey hydropathic hotels along the promenades were empty
ing, the golf course was packed all day with Liverpool brokers playing foursomes. From Saturday morning till Sunday night a continuous hail of golf balls flying out of bounds bombarded the roof. Then it was a pleasure to go out with Geoffrey into the town, which was still full of laughing pretty girls, and walk through the sunlit windy streets or to look at one of the comical Pierrot shows on the beach. Or best of all they would sail on the marine lake in a borrowed twelve-foot yacht managed expertly by Geoffrey.

  For Geoffrey and he were — as at Courseulles — left much to themselves. And Jacques now understood more clearly why he’d seen so little of the Taskersons in Normandy. Those boys were unprecedented, portentous walkers. They thought nothing of walking twenty-five or thirty miles in a day. But what seemed stranger still, considering none was above school age, they were also unprecedented, portentous drinkers. In a mere five-mile walk they would stop at as many ‘pubs’ and drink a pint or two of powerful beer in each. Even the youngest, who had not turned fifteen, would get through his six pints in an afternoon. And if anyone was sick, so much the better for him. That made room for more. Neither Jacques, who had a weak stomach — though he was used to a certain amount of wine at home — nor Geoffrey, who disliked the taste of beer, and besides attended a strict Wesleyan school, could stand this medieval pace. But indeed the whole family drank inordinately. Old Taskerson, a kindly sharp man, had lost the only one of his sons who’d inherited any degree of literary talent; every night he sat brooding in his study with the door open, drinking hour after hour, his cats on his lap, his evening newspaper crackling distant disapproval of the other sons, who for their part sat drinking hour after hour in the dining-room. Mrs Taskerson, a different woman at home, where she perhaps felt less necessity of making a good impression, sat with her sons, her pretty face flushed, half disapproving too, but nevertheless cheerfully drinking everyone else under the table. It was true the boys usually had a head start. — Not that they were the sort ever to be seen staggering about outside in the street. It was a point of honour with them that, the drunker they became, the more sober they should appear. As a rule they walked fabulously upright, shoulders thrown back, eyes front, like guardsmen on duty, only, towards the end of the day, very very slowly, with that same ‘erect manly carriage’, in short, that had so impressed M. Laruelle’s father. Even so it was by no means an unusual occurrence in the morning to discover the entire household sleeping on the dining-room floor. Yet no one seemed to feel any the worse for it. And the pantry was always bulging with barrels of beer to be tapped by anyone who did. Healthy and strong, the boys ate like lions. They devoured appalling messes of fried sheep’s stomachs and pudding known as black or blood puddings, a sort of conglomerate offal rolled in oatmeal that Jacques feared might be intended at least partly for his benefit — boudin, don’t you know, Jacques — while the Old Bean, now often referred to as ‘that Firmin’, sat bashful and out of place, his glass of pale bitter untouched, shyly trying to make conversation with Mr Taskerson.