Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  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 brassière 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, Las 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 shortsightedly 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 I –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 – 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.

  ‘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 Jardin Xicotancatl. 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 Calderónde Par. de 52 kilos) us EL OSO (de Par.de 5J kilos).

  ‘I had a million hours of sleep on the boat I And I’d far rather walk, only –’

  ‘Nothing. Just a touch of rheumatiz. — O 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 AGÜERO (El Invencible Indio de Quauhnahuac de 57 kilos, que acaba de llegar de la Capital de ‘la República), ARENA TOMALÍN. Frente al JardínXicotancatl.

  ‘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: ¡Mes-calito¡’

  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 volc
anoes 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: Si 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 Maria 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.