Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Is that so?’

  They were all plodding downhill towards a river — even the dog, lulled in a woolly soliloquy, was plodding — and now they were in it, the first cautious heavy step forward, then the hesitation, then the surging onward, the lurching surefootedness below one that was yet so delicate there derived a certain sensation of lightness, as if the mare were swimming, or floating through the air, bearing one across with the divine surety of a Cristoferus, rather than by fallible instinct. The dog swam ahead, fatuously important; the foals, nodding solemnly, swayed along behind up to their necks: sunlight sparkled on the calm water, which further downstream where the river narrowed broke into furious little waves, swirling and eddying close inshore against black rocks, giving an effect of wildness, almost of rapids; low over their heads an ecstatic lightning of strange birds manoeuvred, looping-the-loop and immelmaning at unbelievable speed, aerobatic as new-born dragon-flies. The opposite shore was thickly wooded. Beyond the gently sloping bank, a little to the left of what was apparently the cavernous entrance to the continuation of their lane, stood a pulquería, decorated, above its wooden twin swing-doors (which from a distance looked not unlike the immensely magnificent chevrons of an American army sergeant), with gaily coloured fluttering ribbons. Pulques Finos, it said in faded blue letters on the oyster-white adobe wall: La Sepultura. A grim name: but doubtless it had some humorous connotation. An Indian sat with his back against the wall, his broad hat half down over his face, rested outside in the sunshine. His horse, or a horse, was tethered near him to a tree and Hugh could see from midstream the number seven branded on its rump. An advertisement for the local cinema was stuck on the tree: Las Manos de Orlac con Peter Lorre. On the roof of the pulquería a toy wind-mill, of the kind one saw in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, was twirling restlessly in the breeze. Hugh said:

  ‘Your horse doesn’t want to drink, Yvonne, just to look at her reflection. Let her. Don’t yank at her head.’

  ‘I wasn’t. I know that too,’ Yvonne said, with an ironic little smile.

  They zigzagged slowly across the river; the dog, swimming like an otter, had almost reached the opposite bank. Hugh became aware of a question in the air.

  ‘ – you’re our house guest, you know.’

  ‘Por favor.’ Hugh inclined his head.

  ‘ – would you like to have dinner out and go to a movie? Or will you brave Concepta’s cooking?’

  ‘What what?’ Hugh had been thinking, for some reason, of his first week at his public school in England, a week of not knowing what one was supposed to do or to answer to any question, but of being carried on by a sort of pressure of shared ignorance into crowded halls, activities, marathons, even exclusive isolations, as when he had found himself once riding on horseback with the headmaster’s wife, a reward, he was told, but for what he had never found out. ‘No, I think I should hate to go to a movie, thank you very much,’ he laughed.

  ‘It’s a strange little place — you might find it fun. The news-reels used to be about two years old and I shouldn’t think it’s changed any. And the same features come back over and over again. Cimarron and the Gold Diggers of 1930 and oh — last year we saw a travelogue, Come to Sunny Andalusia, by way of news from Spain –’

  ‘Blimey,’ Hugh said.

  ‘And the lighting is always failing.’

  ‘I think I’ve seen the Peter Lorre movie somewhere. He’s a great actor but it’s a lousy picture. Your horse doesn’t want to drink, Yvonne. It’s all about a pianist who has a sense of guilt because he thinks his hands are a murderer’s or something and keeps washing the blood off them. Perhaps they really are a murderer’s, but I forget.’

  ‘It sounds creepy.’

  ‘I know, but it isn’t.’

  On the other side of the river their horses did want to drink and they paused to let them. Then they rode up the bank into the lane. This time the hedges were taller and thicker and twined with convolvulus. For that matter they might have been in England, exploring some little-known bypath of Devon or Cheshire. There was little to contradict the impression save an occasional huddled conclave of vultures up a tree. After climbing steeply through woodland the lane levelled off. Presently they reached more open country and fell into a canter. — Christ, how marvellous this was, or rather Christ, how he wanted to be deceived about it, as must have Judas, he thought — and here it was again, damn it — if ever Judas had a horse, or borrowed, stole one more likely, after that Madrugada of all Madrugadas, regretting then that he had given the thirty pieces of silver back — what is that to us, see thou to that, the bastardos had said — when now he probably wanted a drink, thirty drinks (like Geoff undoubtedly would this morning), and perhaps even so he had managed a few on credit, smelling the good smells of leather and sweat, listening to the pleasant clopping of the horses’ hooves and thinking, how joyous all this could be, riding on like this under the dazzling sky of Jerusalem — and forgetting for an instant, so that it really was joyous —how splendid it all might be had I only not betrayed that man last night, even though I know perfectly well I was going to, how good indeed, if only it had not happened though, if only it were not so absolutely necessary to go out and hang oneself —

  And here indeed it was again, the temptation, the cowardly, the future-corruptive serpent: trample on it, stupid fool. Be Mexico. Have you not passed through the river? In the name of God be dead. And Hugh actually did ride over a dead garter snake, embossed on the path like a belt to a pair of bathing trunks. Or perhaps it was a Gila monster.

  They had emerged on the outermost edge of what looked like a spacious, somewhat neglected park, spreading down on their right, or what had once been a huge grove, planted with lofty majestic trees. They reined in and Hugh, behind, rode slowly by himself for a while… The foals separated him from Yvonne, who was staring blankly ahead as if insensible to their surroundings. The grove seemed to be irrigated by artificially banked streams, which were choked with leaves — though by no means all the trees were deciduous and underneath were frequent dark pools of shadow — and was lined with walks. Their lane had in fact become one of these walks. A noise of shunting sounded on the left; the station couldn’t be far off; probably it was hidden behind that hillock over which hung a plume of white steam. But a railway track, raised above scrub-land, gleamed through the trees to their right; the line apparently made a wide detour round the whole place. They rode past a dried-up fountain below some broken steps, its basin filled with twigs and leaves. Hugh sniffed: a strong raw smell, he couldn’t identify at first, pervaded the air. They were entering the vague precincts of what might have been a French château. The building, half hidden by trees, lay in a sort of courtyard at me end of the grove, which was closed by a row of cypresses growing behind a high wall, in which a massive gate, straight ahead of them, stood open. Dust was blowing across the gap. Cerveceria Quauhnahuac: Hugh now saw written in white letters on the side of the château. He halloed and waved at Yvonne to halt. So the château was a brewery, but of a very odd type —one that hadn’t quite made up its mind not to be an open-air restaurant and beer garden. Outside in the courtyard two or three round tables (more likely to provide against the occasional visits of semi-official ‘tasters’), blackened and leaf covered, were set beneath immense trees not quite familiar enough for oaks, not quite strangely tropical either, which were perhaps not really very old, but possessed an indefinable air of being immemorial, of having been planted centuries ago by some emperor, at least, with a golden trowel. Under these trees, where their cavalcade stopped, a little girl was playing with an armadillo.

  Out of the brewery itself, which at close quarters appeared quite different, more like a mill, sliced, oblong, which emitted a sudden mill-like clamour, and on which flitted and slid mill-wheel-like reflections of sunlight on water, cast from a nearby stream, out of a glimpse of its very machinery, now issued a pied man, visored, resembling a gamekeeper, bearing two foaming tankards of dark Ge
rman beer. They had not dismounted and he handed the beer up to them.

  ‘God, that’s cold,’ Hugh said, ‘good though.’ The beer had a piercing taste, half metallic, half earthy, like distilled loam. It was so cold that it hurt.

  ‘Buenos días, muchacha.’ Yvonne, tankard in hand, was smiling down at the child with the armadillo. The gamekeeper vanished through an ostiole back into the machinery; closing away its clamour from them, as might an engineer on shipboard. The child was crouching on her haunches holding the armadillo and apprehensively eyeing the dog, who however lay at a safe distance watching the foals inspect the rear of the plant. Each time the armadillo ran off, as if on tiny wheels, the little girl would catch it by its long whip of a tail and turn it over. How astonishingly soft and helpless it appeared then! Now she righted the creature and set it going once more, some engine of destruction perhaps that after millions of years had come to this. ‘¿Cuánto?’ Yvonne asked.

  Catching the animal again the child piped:

  ‘Cincuenta centavos?

  ‘You don’t really want it, do you?’ Hugh — like General Winfield Scott, he thought privately, after emerging from the ravines of the Cerro Gordo — was sitting with one leg athwart the pommel.

  Yvonne nodded in jest: ‘I’d adore it. It’s perfectly sweet.’

  ‘You couldn’t make a pet of it. Neither can the kid: that’s why she wants to sell it.’ Hugh sipped his beer. ‘I know about armadillos.’

  ‘Oh so do I!’ Yvonne shook her head mockingly, opening her eyes very wide. ‘But everything!’

  ‘Then you know that if you let the thing loose in your garden it’ll merely tunnel down into the ground and never come back.’

  Yvonne was still half-mockingly shaking her head, her eyes wide. ‘Isn’t he a darling?’

  Hugh swung his leg back and sat now with his tankard propped on the pommel looking down at the creature with its big mischievous nose, iguana’s tail, and helpless speckled belly, a Martian infant’s toy. ‘No, muchas gracias,’ he said firmly to the little girl who, indifferent, did not retreat. ‘It’ll not only never come back, Yvonne, but if you try to stop it it will do its damnedest to pull you down the hole too.’ He turned to her, eyebrows raised, and for a time they watched each other in silence. ‘As your friend W. H. Hudson, I think it was, found out to his cost,’ Hugh added. A leaf fell off a tree somewhere behind them with a crash, like a sudden footstep. Hugh drank a long cold draught. ‘Yvonne,’ he said, ‘do you mind if I ask you straight out if you are divorced from Geoff or not?’

  Yvonne choked on her beer; she wasn’t holding the reins at all, which were looped round her pommel, and her horse gave a small lurch forward, then halted before Hugh had time to reach for the bridle.

  ‘Do you mean to go back to him or what? Or have you already gone back?’ Hugh’s mare had also taken a sympathetic step forward. ‘Forgive my being so blunt, but I feel in a horribly false position. — I’d like to know precisely what the situation is.’

  ‘So would I.’ Yvonne did not look at him.

  ‘Then you don’t know whether you have divorced him or not?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve — divorced him,’ she answered unhappily.

  ‘But you don’t know whether you’ve gone back to him or not?’

  ‘Yes. No… Yes. I’ve gone back to him all right all right.’

  Hugh was silent while another leaf fell, crashed and hung tilted, balanced in the undergrowth. ‘Then wouldn’t it be rather simpler for you if I went away immediately,’ he asked her gently, ‘instead of staying on a little while as I’d hoped? —I’d been thinking of going to Oaxaca for a day or two any-how –’

  Yvonne had raised her head at the word Oaxaca. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, it might. Though, oh Hugh, I don’t like to say it, only –’

  ‘Only what?’

  ‘Only please don’t go away till we’ve talked it over. I’m so frightened.’

  Hugh was paying for the beers, which were only twenty centavos; thirty less than the armadillo, he thought. ‘Or do you want another?’ He had to raise his voice above the renewed clamour of the plant: dungeons: dungeons: dungeons: it said,

  ‘I can’t finish this one. You finish it for me.’

  Their cavalcade moved off again slowly, out of the courtyard, through the massive gate into the road beyond. As by common consent they turned right, away from the railway station. A camión was approaching behind them from the town and Hugh reined in beside Yvonne while the dog herded the foals along the ditch. The bus — Tomalín: Zócalo — disappeared, clanging round a corner.

  ‘That’s one way to get to Pariÿn.’ Yvonne averted her face from the dust.

  ‘Wasn’t that the Tomalín bus?’

  ‘Just the same it’s the easiest way to get to Pariÿn. I think there is a bus goes straight there, but from the other end of the town, and by another road, from Tepalzanco.’

  ‘There seems to be something sinister about Parián.’

  ‘It’s a very dull place actually. Of course it’s the old capital of the state. Years ago there used to be a huge monastery there, I believe — rather like Oaxaca in that respect. Some of the shops and even the cantinas are part of what were once the monks’ quarters. But it’s quite a ruin.’

  ‘I wonder what Weber sees in it,’ Hugh said. They left the cypresses and the plant behind. Having come, unwarned, to a gateless level-crossing they turned right once more, this time heading homeward.

  They were riding abreast down the railway lines Hugh had seen from the grove, flanking the grove in almost the opposite direction to the way they had approached. On either side a low embankment sloped to a narrow ditch, beyond which stretched scrub-land. Above them telegraph wires twanged and whined: guitarra guitarra guitarra: which was, perhaps, a better thing to say than dungeons. The railway — a double track but of narrow gauge — now divagated away from the grove, for no apparent reason, then wandered back again parallel to it. A little farther on, as if to balance matters, it made a similar deviation towards the grove. But in the distance it curved away in a wide leftward sweep of such proportions one felt it must logically come to involve itself again with the Tomalín road. This was too much for the telegraph poles that strode straight ahead arrogantly and were lost from sight.

  Yvonne was smiling. ‘I see you look worried. There’s really a story for your Globe in this line.’

  ‘I can’t make out what sort of damn thing it is at all.’

  ‘It was built by you English. Only the company was paid by the kilometre.’

  Hugh laughed loudly. ‘How marvellous. You don’t mean it was laid out in this cockeyed fashion just for the sake of the extra mileage, do you?’

  ‘That’s what they say. Though I don’t suppose it’s true.’

  ‘Well, well. I’m disappointed. I’d been thinking it must be some delightful Mexican whimsey. It certainly gives one to think however.’

  ‘Of the capitalist system?’ There was again a hint of mockery about Yvonne’s smile.

  ‘It reminds one of some story in Punch… Did you know there was a place called Punch in Kashmir by the by?’ (Yvonne murmured, shaking her head.)’ — Sorry, I’ve forgotten what I was going to say.’

  ‘What do you think about Geoffrey?’ Yvonne asked the question at last. She was leaning forward, resting on the pommel, watching him sideways. ‘Hugh, tell me the truth. Do you think there’s any — well — hope for him?’ Their mares were picking their way delicately along this unusual lane, the foals keeping farther ahead than before, glancing round from time to time for approbation at their daring. The dog ran ahead of the foals though he never failed to dodge back periodically to see all was well. He was sniffing busily for snakes among the metals.

  ‘About his drinking, do you mean?’

  ‘Do you think there’s anything I can do?’

  Hugh looked down at some blue wildflowers like forget-me-nots that had somehow found a place to grow between the sleepers on the track. These innocents had their pro
blem too: what is this frightful dark sun that roars and strikes at our eyelids every few minutes? Minutes? Hours more likely. Perhaps even days: the lone semaphores seemed permanently up, it might be sadly expeditious to ask about trains oneself. ‘I dare say you’ve heard about his “strychnine”, as he calls it,’ Hugh said. ‘The journalist’s cure. Well, I actually got the stuff by prescription from some guy in Quauhnahuac who knew you both at one time.’

  ‘Dr Guzman?’

  ‘Yes, Guzmán. I think that was the name. I tried to persuade him to see Geoff. But he refused to waste time on him. He said simply that so far as he knew there was nothing wrong with Papa and never had been save that he wouldn’t make up his mind to stop drinking. That seems plain enough and I dare say it’s true.’