Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  ‘I have’, the Consul said, ‘a slight confession to make, Hugh… I cheated a little on the strychnine while you were away.’

  ‘Thalavethiparothiam, is it?’ Hugh observed, pleasantly menacing. ‘Or strength obtained by decapitation. Now then, don’t be careful, as the Mexicans say, I’m going to shave the back of your neck.’

  But first Hugh wiped the razor with some tissue paper, glancing absently through the door into the Consul’s room. The bedroom windows were wide open; the curtains blew inward very gently. The wind had almost dropped. The scents of the garden were heavy about them. Hugh heard the wind starting to blow again on the other side of the house; the fierce breath of the Atlantic, flavoured with wild Beethoven. But here, on the leeward side, those trees one could see through the bathroom window seemed unaware of it. And the curtains were engaged with their own gentle breeze. Like the crew’s washing on board a tramp steamer, strung over number six hatch between sleek derricks lying in grooves, that barely dances in the afternoon sunlight, while abaft the beam not a league away some pitching native craft with violently flapping sails seems wrestling a hurricane, they swayed imperceptibly, as to another control…

  (Why did I stop playing the guitar? Certainly not because, belatedly, one had come to see the point of Phillipson’s picture, the cruel truth it contained… They are losing the Battle of the Ebro – And yet, one might well have seen one’s continuing to play as but another form of publicity stunt, a means of keeping oneself in the limelight, as if those weekly articles for the News of the World were not limelight enough! Or myself with the thing destined to be some kind of incurable ‘love-object’, or eternal troubadour, jongleur, interested only in married women – why? – incapable finally of love altogether… Bloody little man. Who, anyhow, no longer wrote songs. While the guitar as an end in itself at least seemed simply futile; no longer even fun – certainly a childish thing to be put away –)

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Is what right?’

  ‘Do you see that poor exiled maple tree outside there,’ asked the Consul, ‘propped up with those crutches of cedar?’

  ‘No — luckily for you –’

  ‘One of these days, when the wind blows from the other direction, it’s going to collapse.’ The Consul spoke haltingly while Hugh shaved his neck. ‘And do you see that sunflower looking in through the bedroom window? It stares into my room all day.’

  ‘It strolled into your room, do you say?’

  ‘Stares. Fiercely. All day. Like God!’

  (The last time I played it… Strumming in the King of Bohemia, London. Benskin’s Fine Ales and Stouts. And waking, after passing out, to find John and the rest singing unaccompanied that song about the balgine run. What, anyhow, is a balgine run? Revolutionary songs; bogus bolshy; — but why had one never heard such songs before? Or, for that matter, in England, seen such rich spontaneous enjoyment in singing? Perhaps because at any given gathering, one had always been singing oneself. Sordid songs: I Ain’t Got Nobody. Loveless songs: The One That I Love Loves Me… Though John ‘and the rest’ were not, to one’s own experience at least, bogus: no more than who, at sunset walking with the crowd, or receiving bad news, witnessing injustice, once turned and thought, did not believe, turned back and questioned, decided to act… They are winning the Battle of the Ebro! Not for me, perhaps. Yet no wonder indeed if these friends, some of whom now lie dead on Spanish soil, had, as I then understood, really been bored by my pseudo-American twanging, not even good twanging finally, and had only been listening out of politeness — twanging —)

  ‘Have another drink.’ Hugh replenished the toothmug, handed it to the Consul, and picked up for him a copy of El Universal lying on the floor. ‘I think a little more down the side with that beard, and at the base of the neck.’ Hugh stropped the razor thoughtfully.

  ‘A communal drink.’ The Consul passed the toothmug over his shoulder. ‘“Clank of coins irritates at Forth Worth.”’ Holding the paper quite steadily the Consul read aloud from the English page: ‘“Kink unhappy in exile.” I don’t believe it myself. “Town counts dogs’ noses.” I don’t believe that either, do you, Hugh?…

  ‘And — ah — yes!’ he went on,‘ “Eggs have been in a tree at Klamanth Falls for a hundred years, lumberjacks estimate by rings of wood.” Is that the kind of stuff you write nowadays?’

  ‘Almost exactly. Or: Japanese astride all roads from Shanghai. Americans evacuate… That kind of thing. — Sit still.’

  (One had not, however, played it from that day to this… No, nor been happy from that day to this either… A little self-knowledge is a dangerous thing. And anyway, without the guitar, was one any less in the limelight, any less interested in married women — so on, and so forth? One immediate result of giving it up was undoubtedly that second trip to sea, that series of articles, the first for the Globe, on the British Coasting Trade. Then yet another trip — coming to naught spiritually. I ended a passenger. But the articles were a success. Saltcaked smokestacks. Britannia rules the waves. In future my work was looked for with interest… On the other hand why have I always lacked real ambition as a newspaperman? Apparently I have never overcome that antipathy to journalists, the result of my early ardent courtship of them. Besides it cannot be said I shared with my colleagues the necessity of earning a living. There was always the income. As a roving hand I functioned fairly well, still, up to this day, have done so — yet becoming increasingly conscious of loneliness, isolation — aware too of an odd habit of thrusting myself to the fore, then subsiding — as if one remembered one hadn’t the guitar after all… Maybe I bored people with my guitar. But in a sense — who cares? — it strung me to life —)

  ‘Somebody quoted you in the Universal’, the Consul was laughing, ‘some time ago. I just forget about what, I’m afraid… Hugh, how would you like, “at a modest sacrifice”, an “imported pair embroidered street extra large nearly new fur coat”?’

  ‘Sit still.’

  ‘Or a Cadillac for 500 pesos. Original price 200… And what would this mean, do you suppose? “And a white horse also.” Apply at box seven… Strange… Anti-alcoholic fish. Don’t like the sound of that. But here’s something for you. “A centricle apartment suitable for love-nest.” Or alternatively, a “serious, discrete –”’

  ‘ – ha –’

  ‘ – apartment… Hugh, listen to this. “For a young European lady who must be pretty, acquaintanceship with a cultured man, not old, with good positions — ”’

  The Consul was shaking with laughter only, it appeared, and Hugh, laughing too, paused, razor aloft.

  ‘But the remains of Juan Ramírez, the famous singer, Hugh, are still wandering in a melancholy fashion from place to place… Hullo, it says here that “grave objections” have been made to the immodest behaviour of certain police chiefs in Quauhnahuac. “Grave objections to – ” what’s this? — “performing their private functions in public” –’

  (‘Climbed the Parson’s Nose’, one had written, in the visitors’ book at the little Welsh rock-climbing hotel, ‘in twenty minutes. Found the rocks very easy.’ ‘Came down the Parson’s Nose’, some immortal wag had added a day later, ‘in twenty seconds. Found the rocks very hard.’… So now, as I approach the second half of my life, unheralded, unsung, and without a guitar, I am going back to sea again: perhaps these days of waiting are more like that droll descent, to be survived in order to repeat the climb. At the top of the Parson’s Nose you could walk home to tea over the hills if you wished, just as the actor in the Passion Play can get off his cross and go home to his hotel for a Pilsener. Yet in life ascending or descending you were perpetually involved with the mists, the cold and the overhangs, the treacherous rope and the slippery belay; only, while the rope slipped there was sometimes time to laugh. None the less, I am afraid… As I am also of a simple gate, and climbing windy masts in port… Will it be as bad as the first voyage, the harsh reality of which for some reason suggests Yvonne’s farm? One wonder
s how she will feel the first time she sees someone stick a pig… Afraid; and yet not afraid; I know what the sea is like; can it be that I am returning to it with my dreams intact, nay, with dreams that, being without viciousness, are more child-like than before. I love the sea, the pure Norwegian sea. My disillusionment once more is a pose. What am I trying to prove by all this? Accept it; one is a sentimentalist, a muddler, a realist, a dreamer, coward, hypocrite, hero, an Englishman in short, unable to follow out his own metaphors. Tufthunter and pioneer in disguise. Iconoclast and explorer. Undaunted bore undone by trivialities! Why, one asks, instead of feeling stricken in that pub, didn’t I set about learning some of those songs, those precious revolutionary songs. What is to prevent one’s learning more of such songs now, new songs, different songs, anyhow, if only to recapture some early joy in merely singing, and playing the guitar? What have I got out of my life? Contacts with famous men… The occasion Einstein asked me the time, for instance. That summer evening, strolling towards the tumultuous kitchen of St John’s — who is it that behind me has emerged from the rooms of the Professor living in D4? And who is it also strolling towards the Porter’s lodge — where, our orbits crossing, asks me the time? Is this Einstein, up for an honours degree? And who smiles when I say I don’t know… And yet asked me. Yes: the great Jew, who has upset the whole world’s notions of time and space, once leaned down over the side of his hammock strung between Aries and the Circlet of the Western Fish, to ask me, befuddled ex-anti-Semite, and ragged freshman huddled in his gown at the first approach of the evening star, the time. And smiled again when I pointed out the clock neither of us had noticed —)

  ‘ – better than having them perform their public functions in private anyhow, I should have thought,’ Hugh said.

  ‘You might have hit on something there. That is, those birds referred to are not police in the strict sense. As a matter of fact the regular police are –’

  ‘I know, they’re on strike.’

  ‘So of course they must be democratic from your point of view… Just like the army. All right, it’s a democratic army… But meantime these other cads are throwing their weight about a bit. It’s a pity you’re leaving. It might have been a story right down your alley. Did you ever hear of the Union Militar?’

  ‘You mean the pre-war thingmetight, in Spain?’

  ‘I mean here in this state. It’s affiliated to the Military Police, by which they’re covered, so to speak, because the Inspector-General, who is the Military Police, is a member. So is the Jefe de Jardineros, I believe.’

  ‘I heard they were putting up a new statue to Díaz in Oaxaca.’

  ‘ –Just the same,’ pursued the Consul, in a slightly lowered tone, as their conversation continued in the next room, ‘there is this Union Militar, sinarquistas, whatever they’re called, if you’re interested, I’m not personally — and their headquarters used to be in the policía de Séguridad here, though it isn’t any longer, but in Parián somewhere, I heard.’

  Finally the Consul was ready. The only further help he had required was with his socks. Wearing a freshly pressed shirt and a pair of tweed trousers with the jacket to them Hugh had borrowed and now brought in from the porch, he stood gazing at himself in the mirror.

  It was most surprising, not only did the Consul now appear fresh and lively but to be dispossessed of any air of dissipation whatsoever. True, he had not before the haggard look of a depraved worn-out old man: why should he indeed, when he was only twelve years older than Hugh himself? Yet it was as though fate had fixed his age at some unidentifiable moment in the past, when his persistent objective self, perhaps weary of standing askance and watching his downfall, had at last withdrawn from him altogether, like a ship secretly leaving harbour at night. Sinister stories as well as funny and heroic had been told about his brother, whose own early poetic instincts clearly helped the legend. It occurred to Hugh that the poor old chap might be, finally, helpless, in the grip of something against which all his remarkable defences could avail him little. What use were his talons and fangs to the dying tiger? In the clutches, say, to make matters worse, of a boa-constrictor? But apparently this improbable tiger had no intention of dying just yet. On the contrary, he intended taking a little walk, taking the boa-constrictor with him, even to pretend, for a while, it wasn’t there. Indeed, on the face of it, this man of abnormal strength and constitution and obscure ambition, whom Hugh would never know, could never deliver nor make agreement to God for, but in his way loved and desired to help, had triumphantly succeeded in pulling himself together. While what had given rise to all these reflections was doubtless only the photograph on the wall both were now studying, whose presence there at all must surely discount most of those old stories, of a small camouflaged freighter, at which the Consul suddenly gestured with replenished toothmug:

  ‘Everything about the Samaritan was a ruse. See those windlasses and bulkheads. That black entrance that looks as though it might be the entrance to the forecastle, that’s a shift too — there’s an anti-aircraft gun stowed away snugly in there. Over there, that’s the way you go down. Those were my quarters… There’s your quartermaster’s alley. That galley — it could become a battery, before you could say Coclogenus paca Mexico…

  ‘Curiously enough though,’ the Consul peered closer, ‘I cut that picture out of a German magazine,’ and Hugh too was scrutinizing the Gothic writing beneath the photograph: Der englische Dampfer tragt Schutzfarben gegen deutsche U-boote. ‘Only on the next page, I recall, was a picture of the Emden’, the Consul went on, ‘with “So verlies ich der Weltteil unserer Antipoden”, something of that nature, under it. “Our Antipodes”.’ He gave Hugh a sharp glance that might have meant anything. ‘Queer people. But I see you’re interested in my old books all of a sudden… Too bad… I left my Boehme in Paris.’

  ‘I was just looking.’

  At, for God’s sake, A Treatise of Sulphur: written by Michall Sandivogius i.e. anagramatically Divi Leschi Genus Amo; at The Hermetical Triumph or the Victorious Philosophical Stone, a Treatise more compleat and more intelligible than any has been yet, concerning the Hermetical Magistery; at The Secrets Revealed or an Open Entrance to the Sub-Palace of the King, containing the greatest Treasure in Chymistry never yet so plainly discovered, composed by a most famous Englishman styling himself Anonymus or Eyraeneus Philaletha Cosmopolita who by inspiration and reading attained to the Philosopher’s Stone at his age of twenty-three years Anno Domini 1645; at The Musaeum Hermeticum, Reformatum et Amplificatum, Omnes Sopho-Spagyricae artis Discipulos fidelissime erudiens, que pacto Summa illa vera que Lapidis Philosophici Medicina, qua res omnes qualemcunque defectum patientes, instaurantur, inveniri & haberi queat, Continens Tractatus Chimicos xxi Fran-cofurti, Apud Hermannum à Sande LXXVIII; at Sub-Mundanes, or the Elementaries of the Cabbala, reprinted from the text of the Abbé de Villars: Physio-Astro-Mystic: with an Illustrative Appendix from the work Demoniality, wherein is asserted that there are in existence on earth rational creatures besides men…

  ‘Are there?’ Hugh said, holding in his hand this last extraordinary old book — from which emanated a venerable and remote smell — and reflecting: ‘Jewish knowledge!’ while a sudden absurd vision of Mr Bolowski in another life, in a caftan, with a long white beard, and skull-cap, and passionate intent look, standing at a stall in a sort of medieval New Compton Street, reading a sheet of music in which the notes were Hebrew letters, was conjured to his mind.

  ‘Erekia, the one who tears asunder; and they who shriek with a long-drawn cry, Illirikim; Apelki, the misleaders or turners aside; and those who attack their prey by tremulous motion, Dresop; ah, and the distressful painbringing ones, Arekesoli; and one must not forget, either, Burasin, the destroyers by stifling smoky breath; nor Glesi, the one who glistens horribly like an insect; nor Effrigis, the one who quivers in a horrible manner, you’d like Effrigis… nor yet the Mames, those who move by backward motion, nor the movers with a particular creeping motion, Ramisen…’ t
he Consul was saying. ‘The flesh in-clothed and the evil questioners. Perhaps you would not call them precisely rational. But all these at one time or another have visited my bed.’

  They had all of them in a tremendous hurry and the friendliest of humours set off for Tomalín. Hugh, himself somewhat aware of his drinks, was listening in a dream to the Consul’s voice rambling on — Hitler, he pursued, as they stepped out into the Calle Nicaragua — which might have been a story right down his alley, if only he’d shown any interest before — merely wished to annihilate the Jews in order to obtain just such arcana as could be found behind them in his bookshelves — when suddenly in the house the telephone rang.

  ‘No, let it ring,’ the Consul said as Hugh started back. It went on ringing (for Concepta had gone out), the tintinnabulation beating around the empty rooms like a trapped bird; then it stopped.

  As they moved on Yvonne said:

  ‘Why no, Geoff, don’t keep bothering about me, I feel quite rested. But if Tomalín’s too far for either of you, why don’t we go to the zoo?’ She looked at them both darkly and directly and beautifully with her candid eyes under the broad brow, eyes with which she did not quite return Hugh’s smile, though her mouth suggested one. Perhaps she seriously interpreted Geoff’s flow of conversation as a good sign. And perhaps it was! Qualifying it with loyal interest, or at a quick preoccupied tangent with observations upon impersonal change or decay, serapes or carbon or ice, the weather — where was the wind now? they might have a nice calm day after all without too much dust –Yvonne, apparently revived by her swim and taking in everything about her afresh with an objective eye, walked with swiftness and grace and independence, and as though really not tired; yet it struck Hugh she walked by herself. Poor darling Yvonne! Greeting her when she was ready had been like meeting her once again after long absence, but it was also like parting. For Hugh’s usefulness was exhausted, their ‘plot’ subtly lamed by small circumstances, of which not the least was his own continued presence. It would seem impossible now as their old passion to seek without imposture to be alone with her, even with Geoff’s interest at heart. Hugh cast a longing glance down the hill, the way they’d gone this morning. Now they were hastening in the opposite direction. This morning might have been already far in the past, like childhood or the days before the last war; the future was beginning to unwind, the euchred stupid bloody terrific guitar-playing future. Unsuitably girded against it, Hugh felt, noted with a reporter’s measure, Yvonne, barelegged, was wearing instead of her yellow slacks a white tailored sharkskin suit with one button at the waist, and beneath it a brilliant high-necked blouse, like a detail in a Rousseau; the heels of her red shoes clicking laconically on the broken stones appeared neither flat nor high, and she carried a bright red bag. Passing her one would not have suspected agony. One would not have noticed lack of faith, nor questioned that she knew where she was going, nor wondered if she were walking in her sleep. How happy and pretty she looks, one would say. Probably she is going to meet her lover in the Bella Vista! — Women of medium height, slenderly built, mostly divorced, passionate but envious of the male — angel to him as he is bright or dark, yet unconscious destructive succubus of his ambitions — American women, with that rather graceful swift way of walking, with the clean scrubbed tanned faces of children, the skin finely textured with a satin sheen, their hair clean and shining as though just washed, and looking like that, but carelessly done, the slim brown hands that do not rock the cradle, the slender feet — how many centuries of oppression have produced them? They do not care who is losing the Battle of the Ebro, for it is too soon for them to outsnort Job’s warhorse. They see no significance in it, only fools going to death for a —