Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  It was difficult at first to understand what ‘that Firmin’ was doing at all with such an unlikely family. He had no tastes in common with the Taskerson lads and he was not even at the same school. Yet it was easy to see that the relatives who sent him had acted with the best of motives. Geoffrey’s ‘nose was always in a book’, so that ‘Cousin Abraham’, whose work had a religious turn, should be the ‘very man’ to assist him. While as for the boys themselves they probably knew as little about them as Jacques’s own family: they won all the language prizes at school, and all the athletic ones: surely these fine hearty fellows would be ‘just the thing’ to help poor Geoffrey over his shyness and stop him ‘wool-gathering’ about his father and India. Jacques’s heart went out to the poor Old Bean. His mother had died when he was a child, in Kashmir, and, within the last year or so, his father, who’d married again, had simply, yet scandalously, disappeared. Nobody in Kashmir or elsewhere knew quite what had happened to him. One day he had walked up into the Himalayas and vanished, leaving Geoffrey, at Srinagar, with his half-brother, Hugh, then a baby in arms, and his stepmother. Then, as if that were not enough, the stepmother died too, leaving the two children alone in India. Poor Old Bean. He was really, in spite of his queerness, so touched by any kindness done to him. He was even touched by being called ‘that Firmin’. And he was devoted to old Taskerson. M. Laruelle felt that in his way he was devoted to all the Taskersons and would have defended them to the death. There was some thing disarmingly helpless and at the same time so loyal about him. And after all, the Taskerson boys had, in their monstrous bluff English fashion, done their best not to leave him out and to show him their sympathy on his first summer holiday in England. It was not their fault if he could not drink seven pints in fourteen minutes or walk fifty miles without dropping. It was partly due to them that Jacques himself was here to keep him company. And they had perhaps partly succeeded in making him overcome his shyness. For from the Taskersons the Old Bean had at least learned, as Jacques with him, the English art of ‘picking up girls’. They had an absurd Pierrot song, sung preferably in Jacques’s French accent.

  Jacques and he walked along the promenade singing:

  Oh we allll WALK ZE wibberlee wobberlee WALK

  And we alll TALK ZE wibberlee wobberlee TALK

  And we alll WEAR wibberlee wobberlee TIES

  And-look-at-all-ze-pretty-girls-with-wibberlee-wobberlee eyes. Oh

  We allll SING ZE wibberlee wobberlee SONG

  Until ze day is dawn-ing,

  And-we-all-have-zat-wibberlee-wobberlee-wobberlce-wibberlee-wibberlee-wobberlee feeling

  In ze morning.

  Then the ritual was to shout ‘Hi’ and walk after some girl whose admiration you imagined, if she happened to turn round, you had aroused. If you really had and it was after sunset you took her walking on the golf course, which was full, as the Taskersons put it, of good ‘sitting-out places’. These were in the main bunkers or gulleys between dunes. The bunkers were usually full of sand, but they were windproof, and deep; none deeper than the ‘Hell Bunker’. The Hell Bunker was a dreaded hazard, fairly near the Taskersons’ house, in the middle of the long sloping eighth fairway. It guarded the green in a sense, though at a great distance, being far below it and slightly to the left. The abyss yawned in such a position as to engulf the third shot of a golfer like Geoffrey, a naturally beautiful and graceful player, and about the fifteenth of a duffer like Jacques. Jacques and the Old Bean had often decided that the Hell Bunker would be a nice place to take a girl, though wherever you took one, it was understood nothing very serious happened. There was, in general, about the whole business of ‘picking up’ an air of innocence. After a while the Old Bean, who was a virgin to put it mildly, and Jacques, who pretended he was not, fell into the habit of picking up girls on the promenade, walking to the golf course, separating there, and meeting later. There were, oddly, fairly regular hours at the Taskersons’. M. Laruelle didn’t know to this day why there was no understanding about the Hell Bunker. He had certainly no intention of playing Peeping Tom on Geoffrey. He had happened with his girl, who bored him, to be crossing the eighth fairway towards Leasowe Drive when both were startled by voices coming from the bunker. Then the moonlight disclosed the bizarre scene from which neither he nor the girl could turn their eyes. Laruelle would have hurried away but neither of them — neither quite aware of the sensible impact of what was occurring in the Hell Bunker —could control their laughter. Curiously, M. Laruelle had never remembered what anyone said, only the expression on Geoffrey’s face in the moonlight and the awkward grotesque way the girl had scrambled to her feet, then, that both Geoffrey and he behaved with remarkable aplomb. They all went to a tavern with some queer name, as ‘The Case is Altered’. It was patently the first time the Consul had ever been into a bar on his own initiative; he ordered Johnny Walkers all round loudly, but the waiter, encountering the proprietor, refused to serve them and they were turned out as minors. Alas, their friendship did not for some reason survive these two sad, though doubtless providential little frustrations. M. Laruelle’s father had meantime dropped the idea of sending him to school in England. The holiday fizzled out in desolation and equinoctial gales. It had been a melancholy dreary parting at Liverpool and a dreary melancholy journey down to Dover and back home, lonesome as an onion peddler, on the sea-swept channel boat to Calais —

  M. Laruelle straightened, instantly becoming aware of activity, to step just in time from the path of a horseman who had reined up sideways across the bridge. Darkness had fallen like the House of Usher. The horse stood blinking in the leaping headlights of a car, a rare phenomenon so far down the Calle Nicaragua, that was approaching from the town, rolling like a ship on the dreadful road. The rider of the horse was so drunk he was sprawling all over his mount, his stirrups lost, a feat in itself considering their size, and barely managing to hold on by the reins, though not once did he grasp the pommel to steady himself. The horse reared wildly, rebellious — half fearful, half contemptuous, perhaps, of its rider — then it catapulted in the direction of the car: the man, who seemed to be falling straight backwards at first, miraculously saved himself only to slip to one side like a trick rider, regained the saddle, slid, slipped, fell backwards — just saving himself each time, but always with the reins, never with the pommel, holding them in one hand now, the stirrups still unrecovered as he furiously beat the horse’ s flanks with the machete he had withdrawn from a long curved scabbard. Meantime the headlights had picked out a family straggling down the hill, a man and a woman in mourning, and two neatly dressed children, whom the woman drew in to the side of the road as the horseman fled on, while the man stood back against the ditch. The car halted, dimming its lights for the rider, then came towards M. Laruelle and crossed the bridge behind him. It was a powerful silent car, of American build, sinking deeply on its springs, its engine scarcely audible, and the sound of the horse’s hooves rang out plainly, receding now, slanting up the ill-lit Calle Nicaragua, past the Consul’s house, where there would be a light in the window M. Laruelle didn’t want to see — for long after Adam had left the garden the light in Adam’s house burned on — and the gate was mended, past the school on the left, and the spot where he had met Yvonne with Hugh and Geoffrey that day — and he imagined the rider as not pausing even at Laruelle’s own house, where his trunks lay mountainous and still only half packed, but galloping recklessly round the corner into the Calle Tierra del Fuego and on, his eyes wild as those soon to look on death, through the town — and this too, he thought suddenly, this maniacal vision of senseless frenzy, but controlled, not quite uncontrolled, somehow almost admirable, this too, obscurely, was the Consul…

  M. Laruelle passed up the hill: he stood, tired, in the town below the square. He had not, however, climbed the Calle Nicaragua. In order to avoid his own house he had taken a cut to the left just beyond the school, a steep broken circuitous path that wound round behind the zócalo. People stared at him curiously as
he sauntered down the Avenida de la Revolución, still encumbered with his tennis racket. This street, pursued far enough, would lead back to the American highway again and the Casino de la Selva; M. Laruelle smiled: at this rate he could go on travelling in an eccentric orbit round his house for ever. Behind him now, the fair, which he’d given scarcely a glance, whirled on. The town, colourful even at night, was brilliantly lit, but only in patches, like a harbour. Windy shadows swept the pavements. And occasional trees in the shadow seemed as if drenched in coal dust, their branches bowed beneath a weight of soot. The little bus clanged by him again, going the other way now, braking hard on the steep hill, and without a tail light. The last bus to Tomalín. He passed Dr Vigil’ s windows on the far side: Dr Arturo Díaz Vigil, Médico Cirujano y Partero, Facultad de México, de la Escuela Médico Militar, Enfermedades de Niños, Indisposiciones nerviosas — and how politely all this differed from the notices one encountered in the mingitorios! — Consultas de 12 a 2 y 4 a 7. slight overstatement, he thought. Newsboys ran past selling copies of Quauhnahuac Nuevo, the pro-Almazán, pro-Axis sheet put out, they said, by the tiresome Unión Militar. Un avión de combate Francés derribado por un caza Alemán. Los trabajadores de Australia abogan por la paz. ¿Quiere V d? — a placard asked him in a shop window — vestirse con elegancia y ala última moda de Europa y los Estados Unidos? M. Laruelle walked on down the hill. Outside the barracks two soldiers, wearing French army helmets and grey faded purple uniforms laced and interlaced with green lariats, paced on sentry duty. He crossed the street. Approaching the cinema he became conscious all was not as it should be, that there was a strange unnatural excitement in the air, a kind of fever. It had grown on the instant much cooler. And the cinema was dark, as though no picture were playing tonight. On the other hand a large group of people, not a queue, but evidently some of the patrons from the cine itself, who had come prematurely flooding out, were standing on the pavement and under the arcature listening to a loudspeaker mounted on a van blaring the Washington Post March. Suddenly there was a crash of thunder and the street lights twitched off. So the lights of the cine had gone already. Rain, M. Laruelle thought. But his desire to get wet had deserted him. He put his tennis racket under his coat and ran. A troughing wind all at once engulfed the street, scattering old newspapers and blowing the naphtha flares on the tortilla stands flat: there was a savage scribble of lightning over the hotel opposite the cinema, followed by another peal of thunder. The wind was moaning, everywhere people were running, mostly laughing, for shelter. M. Laruelle could hear the thunderclaps crashing on the mountains behind him. He just reached the theatre in time. The rain was falling in torrents.

  He stood, out of breath, under the shelter of the theatre entrance which was, however, more like the entrance to some gloomy bazaar or market. Peasants were crowding in with baskets. At the box office, momentarily At the box office, momentarily vacated, the , the door left half open, a frantic hen sought admission. Everywhere people were flashing torches or striking matches. The van with the loudspeaker slithered away into the rain and thunder. Las Manos de Orlac, said a poster: 6 y 8.30. Las Manos de Orlac, con Peter Lorre.

  The street lights came on again, though the theatre still remained dark. M. Laruelle fumbled for a cigarette. The hands of Orlac… How, in a flash, that had brought back the old days of the cinema, he thought, indeed his own delayed student days, the days of the Student of Prague, and Wiene and Werner Kraũss and Karl Grüne, the Ufa days when a defeated Germany was winning the respect of the cultured world by the pictures she was making. Only then it had been Conrad Veidt in Orlac. Strangely, that particular film had been scarcely better than the present version, a feeble Hollywood product he’d seen some years before in Mexico City or perhaps — M. Laruelle looked around him — perhaps at this very theatre. It was not impossible. But so far as he remembered not even Peter Lorre had been able to salvage it and he didn’t want to see it again… Yet what a complicated endless tale it seemed to tell, of tyranny and sanctuary, that poster looming above him now, showing the murderer Orlac! An artist with a murderer’s hands; that was the ticket, the hieroglyphic of the times. For really it was Germany itself that, in the gruesome degradation of a bad cartoon, stood over him. — Or was it, by some uncomfortable stretch of the imagination, M. Laruelle himself?

  The manager of the cine was standing before him, cupping, with that same lightning-swift, fumbling-thwarting courtesy exhibited by Dr Vigil, by all Latin Americans, a match for his cigarette: his hair, innocent of raindrops, which seemed almost lacquered, and a heavy perfume emanating from him, betrayed his daily visit to the peluquería; he was impeccably dressed in striped trousers and a black coat, inflexibly muy correcto, like most Mexicans of his type, despite earthquake and thunderstorm. He threw the match away now with a gesture that was not wasted, for it amounted to a salute. ‘Come and have a drink,’ he said.

  ‘The rainy season dies hard,’ M. Laruelle smiled as they elbowed their way through into a little cantina which abutted on the cinema without sharing its frontal shelter. The cantina, known as the Cervecería XX, and which was also Vigil’s ‘place where you know’, was lit by candles stuck in bottles on the bar and on the few tables along the walls. The tables were all full.

  ‘Chingar,’ the manager said, under his breath, preoccupied, alert, and gazing about him: they took their places standing at the end of the short bar where there was room for two. ‘I am very sorry the function must be suspended. But the wires have decomposed. Chingado. Every blessed week something goes wrong with the lights. Last week it was much worse, really terrible. You know we had a troupe from Panama City here trying out a show for Mexico.’

  ‘Do you mind my –’

  ‘No, hombre,’ laughed the other — M. Laruelle had asked Sr Bustamente, who’d now succeeded in attracting the barman’s attention, hadn’t he seen the Orlac picture here before and if so had he revived it as a hit. ‘¿— uno —?’

  M. Laruelle hesitated: Tequila,’ then corrected himself:’ No, anís — anís, por favor, señor.’

  ‘Y una —ah— gaseosa,’ Sr Bustamente told the barman. ‘No, señor,’ he was fingering appraisingly, still preoccupied, the stuff of M. Laruelle’s scarcely wet tweed jacket. ‘Compañero, we have not revived it. It has only returned. The other day I show my latest news here too: believe it, the first newsreels from the Spanish war, that have come back again.’

  ‘I see you get some modern pictures still though,’ M. Laruelle (he had just declined a seat in the autoridades box for the second showing, if any) glanced somewhat ironically at a garish three-sheet of a German film star, though the features seemed carefully Spanish, hanging behind the bar: La simpatiquísima y encantadora María Landrock, notable artista alemana que pronto habremos de ver en sensacional Film.

  ‘ – un momentito, señor. Con permiso…’

  Sr Bustamente went out, not through the door by which they had entered, but through a side entrance behind the bar immediately on their right, from which a curtain had been drawn back, into the cinema itself. M. Laruelle had a good view of the interior. From it, exactly indeed as though the show were in progress, came a beautiful uproar of bawling children and hawkers selling fried potatoes and frijoles. It was difficult to believe so many had left their seats. Dark shapes of pariah dogs prowled in and out of the stalls. The lights were not entirely dead : they glimmered, a dim reddish orange, flickering. On the screen, over which clambered an endless procession of torchlit shadows, hung, magically projected upside down, a faint apology for the ‘suspended function’; in the autoridades box three cigarettes were lit on one match. At the rear where reflected light caught the lettering SALIDA of the exit he just made out the anxious figure of Sr Bustamente taking to his office. Outside it thundered and rained. M. Laruelle sipped his water-clouded anís which was first greenly chilling then rather nauseating. Actually it was not at all like absinthe. But his tiredness had left him and he began to feel hungry. It was already seven o’clock. Though Vigil an
d he would probably dine later at the Gambrinus or Charley’s Place. He selected, from a saucer, a quarter lemon and sucked it reflectively, reading a calendar which, next to the enigmatic María Landrock, behind the bar portrayed the meeting of Cortez and Moctezuma in Tenochtitlán: El último Emperador Azteca, it said below, Moctezuma y Hernán Cortés representativo de la raza hispaña, quedan frente a frente: dos razas y dos civilizaciones que habían llegado a un alto grado de perfección se mezclan para integrar el núcleo de nuestra nacionalidad actual. But Sr Bustamente was coming back, carrying, in one uplifted hand above a press of people by the curtain, a book…