Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  The street was now absolutely deserted and save for the gushing murmurous gutters that now became like two fierce little streams racing each other, silent: it reminded her, confusedly, of how in her heart’s eye, before she’d met Louis, and when she’d half imagined the Consul back in England, she’d tried to keep Quauhnahuac itself, as a sort of safe footway where his phantom could endlessly pace, accompanied only by her own consoling unwanted shadow, above the rising waters of possible catastrophe.

  Then since the other day Quauhnahuac had seemed, though emptied still, different — purged, swept clean of the past, with Geoffrey here alone, but now in the flesh, redeemable, wanting her help.

  And here Geoffrey indeed was, not only not alone, not only not wanting her help, but living in the midst of her blame, a blame by which, to all appearances, he was curiously sustained —

  Yvonne gripped her bag tightly, suddenly lightheaded and barely conscious of the landmarks the Consul, who seemed recovered in spirits, was silently indicating with his stick: the country lane to the right, and the little church that had been turned into a school with the tombstones and the horizontal bar in the playground, the dark entrance in the ditch — the high walls on both sides had temporarily disappeared altogether — to the abandoned iron mine running under the garden.

  To and fro from school…

  Popocateped

  It was your shining day…

  The Consul hummed. Yvonne felt her heart melting. A sense of a shared, a mountain peace seemed to fall between them; it was false, it was a lie, but for a moment it was almost as though they were returning home from marketing in days past. She took his arm, laughing, they fell into step. And now here were the walls again, and their drive sloping down into the street where no one had allayed the dust, already paddled by early bare feet, and now here was their gate, off its hinges and lying just beyond the entrance, as for that matter it always had lain, defiantly, half hidden under the bank of bougainvillea.

  ‘There now, Yvonne. Come along, darling… We’re almost home!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Strange –’ the Consul said.

  A hideous pariah dog followed them in.

  3

  THE tragedy, proclaimed, as they made their way up the crescent of the drive, no less by the gaping potholes in it than by the tall exotic plants, livid and crepuscular through his dark glasses, perishing on every hand of unnecessary thirst, staggering, it almost appeared, against one another, yet struggling like dying voluptuaries in a vision to maintain some final attitude of potency, or of a collective desolate fecundity, the Consul thought distantly, seemed to be reviewed and interpreted by a person walking at his side suffering for him and saying: ‘Regard: see how strange, how sad, familiar things may be. Touch this tree, once your friend: alas, that that which you have known in the blood should ever seem so strange! Look up at that niche in the wall over there on the house where Christ is still, suffering, who would help you if you asked him: you cannot ask him. Consider the agony of the roses. See, on the lawn Concepta’s coffee beans, you used to say they were Marìa’s, drying in the sun. Do you know their sweet aroma any more? Regard: the plantains with their queer familiar blooms, once emblematic of life, now of an evil phallic death. You do not know how to love these things any longer. All your love is the cantinas now: the feeble survival of a love of life now turned to poison, which only is not wholly poison, and poison has become your daily food, when in the tavern –’

  ‘Has Pedro gone too then?’ Yvonne was holding his arm tightly but her voice was almost natural, he felt.

  ‘Yes, thank God!’

  ‘How about the cats?’

  ‘¡Perro!‘the Consul, removing his glasses, said amiably to the pariah dog that had appeared familiarly at heel. But the animal cowered back down the drive. ‘Though the garden’s a rajah mess, I’m afraid. We’ve been virtually without a gardener at all for months. Hugh pulled up a few weeds. He cleaned out the swimming-pool too… Hear it? It ought to be full today.’ The drive widened to a small arena then debouched into a path cutting obliquely across the narrow sloping lawn, islanded by rose beds, to the ‘front’ door, actually at the back of the low white house which was roofed with imbricated flower-pot-coloured tiles resembling bisected drainpipes. Glimpsed through the trees, with its chimney on the far left, from which rose a thread of dark smoke, the bungalow looked an instant like a pretty little ship lying at anchor. ‘No. Skullduggery and suings for back wages have been my lot. And leaf-cutter ants, several species. The house was broken into one night when I was out. And flood: the drains of Quauhnahuac visited us and left us with something that smelt like the Cosmic Egg till recently. Never mind though, maybe you can –’

  Yvonne disengaged her arm to lift a tentacle from a trumpet vine growing across the path:

  ‘Oh Geoffrey! Where’re my camellias? –’

  ‘God knows.’ The lawn was divided by a dry runnel parallel with the house bridged by a spurious plank. Between floribundia and rose a spider wove an intricate web. With pebbly cries a covey of tyrant flycatchers swept over the house in quick dark flight. They crossed the plank and they were on the ‘stoop’.

  An old woman with a face of a highly intellectual black gnome the Consul always thought (mistress to some gnarled guardian of the mine beneath the garden once, perhaps), and carrying the inevitable mop, the trapeador or American husband, over her shoulder, shuffled out of the ‘front’ door, scraping her feet — the shuffling and the scraping however seemingly unidentified, controlled by separate mechanisms. ‘Here’s Concepta,’ the Consul said. Yvonne: Concepta. Concepta, Señora Firmin.’ The gnome smiled a childlike smile that momentarily transformed its face into an innocent girl’s. Concepta wiped her hands on her apron: she was shaking hands with Yvonne as the Consul hesitated, seeing now, studying with sober interest (though at this point all at once he felt more pleasantly ‘tight’ than at any time since just before that blank period last night) Yvonne’s luggage on the stoop before him, three bags and a hatbox so bespangled with labels they might have burst forth into a kind of bloom, to be saying too, here is your history: Hotel Hilo Honolulu, Villa Carmona Granada, Hotel Theba Algeciras, Hotel Peninsula Gibraltar, Hotel Nazareth Galilee, Hôtel Manchester Paris, Cosmo Hotel London, the s.s. Ile de France, Regis Hotel Canada, Hotel Mexico D.F. —and now the new labels, the newest blossoms: Hotel Astor New York, the Town House Los Angeles, s.s. Pennsylvania, Hotel Mirador Acapulco, the Compañía Mexicana de Aviación. ‘¿El otro señor?’ he was saying to Concepta who shook her head with delighted emphasis. ‘Hasn’t returned yet. All right, Yvonne, I dare say you want your old room. Anyhow Hugh’s in the back one with the machine.’

  ‘The machine?’

  ‘The mowing machine.’

  ‘ – por qué no, agua caliente,’ Concepta’s soft musical humorous voice rose and fell as she shuffled and scraped off with two of the bags.

  ‘So there’s hot water for you, which is a miracle!’

  On the other side of the house the view was suddenly spacious and windy as the sea.

  Beyond the barranca the plains rolled up to the very foot of the volcanoes into a barrier of murk above which rose the pure cone of old Popo, and spreading to the left of it like a University City in the snow the jagged peaks of Ixtaccihuad, and for a moment they stood on the porch without speaking, not holding hands, but with their hands just meeting, as though not quite sure they weren’t dreaming this, each of them separately on their far bereaved cots, their hands but blown fragments of their memories, half afraid to commingle, yet touching over the howling sea at night.

  Immediately below them the small chuckling swimming-pool was still filling from a leaky hose connected with a hydrant, though it was almost full; they had painted it themselves once, blue on the sides and the bottom; the paint had scarcely faded and mirroring the sky, aping it, the water appeared a deep turquoise. Hugh had trimmed about the pool’s edges but the garden sloped off beyond into an indescribable confusion of
briars from which the Consul averted his eyes: the pleasant evanescent feeling of tightness was wearing off…

  He glanced absently round the porch which also embraced briefly the left side of the house, the house Yvonne hadn’t yet entered at all, and now as in answer to his prayer Concepta was approaching them down its length. Concepta’s gaze was fixed steadfastly on the tray she was carrying and she glanced neither to right nor left, neither at the drooping plants, dusty and gone to seed on the low parapet, nor at the stained hammock, nor the bad melodrama of the broken chair, nor the disembowelled day-bed, nor the uncomfortable stuffed Quixotes tilting their straw mounts on the house wall, shuffling slowly nearer them through the dust and dead leaves she hadn’t yet swept from the ruddy tiled floor.

  ‘Concepta knows my habits, you see.’ The Consul regarded the tray now on which were two glasses, a bottle of Johnny Walker, half full, a soda siphon, a jarro of melting ice, and the sinister-looking bottle, also half full, containing a dull red concoction like bad claret, or perhaps cough mixture. ‘However this is the strychnine. Will you have a whisky and soda?… The ice seems to be for your benefit anyway. Not even a straight wormwood?’ The Consul shifted the tray from the parapet to a wicker table Concepta had just brought out.

  ‘Good heavens, not for me, thank you.’

  ‘ – A straight whisky then. Go ahead. What have you got to lose?’

  ‘… Let me have some breakfast first!’

  ‘ – She might have said yes for once’, a voice said in the Consul’s ear at this moment with incredible rapidity, ‘for now of course poor old chap you want horribly to get drunk all over again don’t you the whole trouble being as we see it that Yvonne’s long-dreamed-of coming alas but put away the anguish my boy there’s nothing in it’, the voice gabbled on, ‘has in itself created the most important situation in your life save one namely the far more important situation it in turn creates of your having to have five hundred drinks in order to deal with it,’ the voice he recognized of a pleasant and impertinent familiar, perhaps horned, prodigal of disguise, a specialist in casuistry, and who added severely, ‘but are you the man to weaken and have a drink at this critical hour Geoffrey Firmin you are not you will fight it have already fought down this temptation have you not you have not then I must remind you did you not last night refuse drink after drink and finally after a nice little sleep even sober up altogether you didn’t you did you didn’t you did we know afterwards you did you were only drinking enough to correct your tremor a masterly self-control she does not and cannot appreciate!’

  ‘I don’t feel you believe in the strychnine somehow,’ the Consul said, with quiet triumph (there was an immense comfort however in the mere presence of the whisky bottle) pouring himself from the sinister bottle a half-tumblerful of his mixture. I have resisted temptation for two and a half minutes at least: my redemption is sure. ‘Neither do I believe in the strychnine, you’ll make me cry again, you bloody fool Geoffrey Firmin, I’ll kick your face in, O idiot!’ That was yet another familiar and the Consul raised his glass in token of recognition and drank half its contents thoughtfully. The strychnine — he had ironically put some ice in it — tasted sweet, rather like cassis; it provided perhaps a species of subliminal stimulus, faintly perceived: the Consul, who was still standing, was aware too of a faint feeble wooling of his pain, contemptible….

  ‘But can’t you see you cabrón that she is thinking that the first thing you think of after she has arrived home like this is a drink even if it is only a drink of strychnine the intrusive necessity for which and juxtaposition cancels its innocence so you see you might as well in the face of such hostility might you not start now on the whisky instead of later not on the tequila where is it by the way all right all right we know where it is that would be the beginning of the end though a damned good end perhaps but whisky the fine old healthful throat-smarting fire of your wife’s ancestors nació 1820 y siguiendo tan campante and afterwards you might perhaps have some beer good for you too and full of vitamins for your brother will be here and it is an occasion and this is perhaps the whole point for celebration of course it is and while drinking the whisky and later the beer you could nevertheless still be tapering off poco a poco as you must but everyone knows it’s dangerous to attempt it too quickly still keeping up Hugh’s good work of straightening you out of course you would!’ It was his first familiar again and the Consul sighing put the tumbler down on the tray with a defiantly steady hand.

  ‘What was that you said?’ he asked Yvonne.

  ‘I said three times,’ Yvonne was laughing, ‘for Pete’s sake have a decent drink. You don’t have to drink that stuff to impress me… I’ll just sit here and cheer.’

  ‘What?’ She was sitting on the parapet gazing over the valley with every semblance of interested enjoyment. It was dead calm in the garden itself. But the wind must have suddenly changed; Ixta had vanished while Popocateped was almost wholly obscured by black horizontal columns of cloud, like smoke drawn across the mountain by several trains running parallel. ‘Will you say that again?’ The Consul took her hand.

  They were embracing, or so it all but seemed, passionately: somewhere, out of the heavens, a swan, transfixed, plummeted to earth. Outside the cantina El Puerto del Sol in Independencia the doomed men would be already crowding into the warmth of the sun, waiting for the shutters to roll up with a crash of trumpets…

  ‘No, I’ll stick to the old medicine, thanks.’ The Consul had almost fallen backwards on to his broken green rocking-chair. He sat soberly facing Yvonne. This was the moment then, yearned for under beds, sleeping in the corners of bars, at the edge of dark woods, lanes, bazaars, prisons, the moment when — but the moment, stillborn, was gone: and behind him the ursa horribilis of the night had moved nearer. What had he done? Slept somewhere, that much was certain. Tak: tok: help: help: the swimming-pool ticked like a clock. He had slept: what else? His hand searching in his dress trousers pockets felt the hard edge of a clue. The card he brought to light said:

  Arturo Díaz Vigil

  Médico Cirujano y Partero

  Enfermedades de Niños

  Indisposiciones Nerviosas

  Consultas de 12 a 2 y de 4 a 7

  Av. Revolución Numero 8.

  ‘ – Have you really come back? Or have you just come to see me?’ the Consul was asking Yvonne gently as he replaced the card.

  ‘Here I am, aren’t I?’ Yvonne said merrily,’ even with a slight note of challenge.

  ‘Strange,’ the Consul commented, half trying to rise for the drink Yvonne had ratified in spite of himself and the quick voice that protested: ‘You bloody fool Geoffrey Firmin, I’ll kick your face in if you do, if you have a drink I’ll cry, O idiot!’ ‘Yet it’s awfully courageous of you. What if — I’m in a frightfully jolly mess, you know.’

  ‘But you look amazingly well I thought. You’ve no idea how well you look.’ (The Consul had absurdly flexed his biceps, feeling them: ‘Still strong as a horse, so to speak, strong as a horse!’) ‘How do I look?’ She seemed to have said. Yvonne averted her face a little, keeping it in profile.

  ‘Didn’t I say?’ The Consul watched her. ‘Beautiful… Brown.’ Had he said that? ‘Brown as a berry. You’ve been swimming,’ he added. ‘You look as though you’ve had plenty of sun… There’s been plenty of sun here too of course,’ he went on. ‘As usual… Too much of it. In spite of the rain… Do you know, I don’t like it.’

  ‘Oh yes you do, really,’ she had apparently replied. ‘We could get out in the sun, you know.’

  ‘Well –’

  The Consul sat on the broken green rocker facing Yvonne. Perhaps it was just the soul, he thought, slowly emerging out of the strychnine into a form of detachment, to dispute with Lucretius, that grew older, while the body could renew itself many times unless it had acquired an unalterable habit of age. And perhaps the soul thrived on its sufferings, and upon the sufferings he had inflicted on his wife her soul had not only thrived but flourished. Ah
, and not only upon the sufferings he had inflicted. What of those for which the adulterous ghost named Cliff he imagined always as just a morning coat and a pair of striped pyjamas open at the front, had been responsible? And the child, strangely named Geoffrey too, she had had by the ghost, two years before her first ticket to Reno, and which would now be six, had it not died at the age of as many months as many years ago, of meningitis, in 1932, three years before they themselves had met, and been married in Granada, in Spain? There Yvonne was at all events, bronzed and youthful and ageless: she had been at fifteen, she’d told him (that is, about the time she must have been acting in those Western pictures M. Laruelle, who had not seen them, adroitly assured one had influenced Eisenstein or somebody), a girl of whom people said, ‘She is not pretty but she is going to be beautiful’: at twenty they still said so, and at twenty-seven when she’d married him it was still true, according to the category through which one perceived such things of course: it was equally true of her now, at thirty, that she gave the impression of someone who is still going to be, perhaps just about to be, ‘beautiful’: the same tilted nose, the small ears, the warm brown eyes, clouded now and hurt-looking, the same wide, full-lipped mouth, warm too and generous, the slightly weak chin. Yvonne’s was the same fresh bright face that could collapse, as Hugh would say, like a heap of ashes, and be grey. Yet she was changed. Ah yes indeed! Much as the demoted skipper’s lost command, seen through the bar-room window lying out in harbour, is changed. She was no longer his: someone had doubtless approved her smart slate-blue travelling suit: it had not been he.