Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  ‘One always heard they had a therapeutic quality. They always had zoos in Mexico apparently — Moctezuma, courteous fellow, even showed stout Cortés around a zoo. The poor chap thought he was in the infernal regions.’ The Consul had discovered a scorpion on the wall.

  ‘¿Alacrán?’ Yvonne produced.

  ‘It looks like a violin.’

  ‘A curious bird is the scorpion. He cares not for priest nor for poor peon… It’s really a beautiful creature. Leave him be. He’ll only sting himself to death anyway.’ The Consul swung his stick…

  They climbed the Calle Nicaragua, always between the parallel swift streams, past the school with the grey tombstones and the swing like a gallows, past high mysterious walls, and hedges intertwined with crimson flowers, among which marmalade-coloured birds were trapezing, crying raucously. Hugh felt glad of his drinks now, remembering from his boyhood how the last day of the holidays was always worse if you went anywhere, how then time, that one had hoped to bemuse, would at any moment begin to glide after you like a shark following a swimmer. — ¡Boxl said an advertisement. Arena Tomalín. El Balón vs El Redondillo. The Balloon vs the Bouncing Ball — was that? Domingo… But that was for Sunday; while they were only going to a bullthrowing, a purpose in life whose object was not even worth advertising. 666: also said further advertisements for an insecticide, obscure yellow tin plates at the bottom of walls, to the quiet delight of the Consul. Hugh chuckled to himself. So far the Consul was doing superbly. His few ‘necessary drinks’, reasonable or outrageous, had worked wonders. He was walking magnificently erect, shoulders thrown back, chest out: the best thing about it was his deceitful air of infallibility, of the unquestionable, especially when contrasted with what one must look like oneself in cowboy clothes. In his finely cut tweeds (the coat Hugh had borrowed was not much crumpled, and now Hugh had borrowed another one) and blue and white striped old Chagfordian tie, with the barbering Hugh had given him, his thick fair hair neatly slicked back, his freshly trimmed brownish greying beard, his stick, his dark glasses, who would say that he was not, unmistakably, a figure of complete respectability? And if this respectable figure, the Consul might have been saying, appeared to be undergoing from time to time a slight mutation, what of it? who noticed? It might be — for an Englishman in a foreign country always expects to meet another Englishman — merely of nautical origin. If not, his limp, obviously the result of an elephant hunt or an old brush with Padians, excused it. The typhoon spun invisibly in the midst of a tumult of broken pavements: who was aware of its existence, let alone what landmarks in the brain it had destroyed? Hugh was laughing.

  ‘Plingen, plangen, aufgefangen

  Swingen, swangen at my side,

  Pootle, swootle, off to Bootle,

  Nemesis, a pleasant ride,’

  said the Consul mysteriously, and added with heroism, glancing about him:

  ‘It’s really an extraordinarily nice day to take a trip.’

  No se permite fijar anuncios…

  Yvonne was in fact walking alone now: they climbed in a sort of single file, Yvonne ahead, the Consul and Hugh unevenly behind, and whatever their collective distraught soul might be thinking Hugh was oblivious of it, for he had become involved with a fit of laughing, which the Consul was trying not to find infectious. They walked in this manner because a boy was driving some cows past them down the hill, half running; and, as in a dream of a dying Hindu, steering them by their tails. Now there were some goats. Yvonne turned and smiled at him. But these goats were meek and sweet-looking, jangling little bells. Father is waiting for you though. Father has not forgotten. Behind the goats a woman with a black clenched face staggered past them under the weight of a basket loaded with carbon. A peon loped after her down the hill balancing a large barrel of ice-cream on his head and calling apparently for customers, with what hope of success one could not imagine, since he seemed so burdened as to be unable either to look from side to side or to halt.

  ‘It’s true that at Cambridge’, the Consul was saying, tapping Hugh on the shoulder, ‘you may have learned about Guelphs and so on… But did you know that no angel with six wings is ever transformed?’

  ‘I seem to have learned that no bird ever flew with one –’

  ‘Or that Thomas Burnet, author of the Telluris Theoria Sacra, entered Christs in — Cáscaras! Caracoles! Virgen Santísima! Ave María! Fuego, fuego! Ay, qué me matan!’

  With a shattering and fearful tumult a plane slammed down upon them, skimmed the frightened trees, zooming, narrowly missed a mirador, and was gone the next moment, headed in the direction of the volcanoes, from which rolled again the monotonous sound of artillery.

  ‘Acabóse,’ sighed the Consul.

  Hugh suddenly noticed that a tall man (who must have stepped out of the side-road Yvonne had seemed anxious they should take) with sloping shoulders and handsome, rather swarthy features, though he was obviously a European, doubtless in some state of exile, was confronting them, and it was as though the whole of this man, by some curious fiction, reached up to the crown of his perpendicularly raised Panama hat, for the gap below seemed to Hugh still occupied by something, a sort of halo or spiritual property of his body, or the essence of some guilty secret perhaps that he kept under the hat but which was now momentarily exposed, fluttering and embarrassed. He was confronting them, though smiling, it appeared, at Yvonne alone, his blue, bold protuberant eyes expressing an incredulous dismay, his black eyebrows frozen in a comedian’s arch: he hesitated: then this man, who wore his coat open and trousers very high over a stomach they had probably been designed to conceal but merely succeeded in giving the character of an independent tumescence of the lower part of his body, came forward with eyes flashing and mouth under its small black moustache curved in a smile at once false and engaging, yet somehow protective – and somehow, also, increasingly grave — came forward as it were impelled by clockwork, hand out, automatically ingratiating:

  ‘Why Yvonne, what a delightful surprise. Why goodness me, I thought; oh, hullo, old bean –’

  ‘Hugh, this is Jacques Laruelle,’ the Consul was saying. ‘You’ve probably heard me speak about him at one time or another. Jacques, my young brother Hugh: ditto… Il vient d’arriver… or vice versa. How goes it, Jacques? You look as though you needed a drink rather badly.’

  ‘ –’

  ‘ –’

  A minute later M. Laruelle, whose name struck only a very distant chord for Hugh, had taken Yvonne’s arm and was walking in the middle of the road with her up the hill. Probably there was no significance in this. But the Consul’s introduction had been brusque to say the least. Hugh himself felt half hurt and, whatever the cause, a slight appalling sense of tension as the Consul and he slowly fell behind again. Meantime M. Laruelle was saying:

  ‘Why do we not all drop into my “madhouse”; that would be good fun, don’t you think Geoffrey — ah — ah — Hughes?’

  ‘No,’ softly remarked the Consul, behind, to Hugh, who on the other hand now felt almost disposed to laugh once more.

  For the Consul was also saying something cloacal very quietly to himself over and over again. They were following Yvonne and her friend through the dust which now, chased by a lonely gust of wind, was moving along with them up the road, sizzling in petulant ground-swirls to blow away like rain. When the wind died away the water rushing headlong down the gutters here was like a sudden force in the opposite direction.

  M. Laruelle was saying attentively, ahead of them, to Yvonne:

  ‘Yes… Yes… But your bus won’t leave till two-thirty. You have over an hour.’

  — ‘But that does sound like an unusual bloody miracle,’ Hugh said. ‘You mean after all these years –’

  ‘Yeah. It was a great coincidence our meeting here,’ the Consul told Hugh in a changed even tone. ‘But I really think you two ought to get together, you have something in common. Seriously you might enjoy his house, it’s always mildly amusing.’

  ‘Good,’ sa
id Hugh.

  ‘Why, here comes the cartero’, Yvonne called out ahead, half turning round and disengaging her arm from M. Laruelle’s. She was pointing to the corner on the left at the top of the hill where the Calle Nicaragua met the Calle Tierra del Fuego. ‘He’s simply amazing,’ she was saying volubly. ‘The funny thing is that all the postmen in Quauhnahuac look exactly alike. Apparently they’re all from the same family and have been postmen for positively generations. I think this one’s grandfather was a cartero at the time of Maximilian. Isn’t it delightful to think of the post-office collecting all these grotesque little creatures like so many carrier pigeons to dispatch at their will?’

  Why are you so voluble? Hugh wondered: ‘How delightful, for the post-office,’ he said politely. They were all watching the cartero‘s approach. Hugh happened not to have observed any of these unique postmen before. He could not have been five feet in height, and from a distance appeared like an unclassifiable but somehow pleasing animal advancing on all fours. He was wearing a colourless dungaree suit and a battered official cap and Hugh now saw he had a tiny goatee beard. Upon his small wizened face as he lunged down the street towards them in his inhuman yet endearing fashion there was the friendliest expression imaginable. Seeing them he stopped, unshouldered the bag and began to unbuckle it.

  ‘There is a letter, a letter, a letter,’ he was saying when they came up with him, bowing to Yvonne as if he’d last greeted her yesterday, ‘a message por el señor, for your horse,’ he informed the Consul, withdrawing two packages and smiling roguishly as he undid them.

  ‘What? — nothing for Señor Calígula.’

  ‘Ah.’ The cartero flicked through another bundle, glancing at them sideways and keeping his elbows close to his sides in order not to drop the bag. ‘No.’ He put down the bag now altogether, and began to search feverishly; soon letters were spread all over the road. ‘It must be. Here. No. This is. Then this one. Ei ei ei ei ei ei.’

  ‘Don’t bother, my dear fellow,’ the Consul said. ‘Please.’

  But the cartero tried again: ‘Badrona, Diosdado –’

  Hugh too was waiting expectantly, not so much any word from the Globe, which would come if at all by cable, but half in hope, a hope which the postman’s own appearance rendered delightfully plausible, of another minuscule Oaxaqueñian envelope, covered with bright stamps of archers shooting at the sun, from Juan Cerillo. He listened: somewhere, behind a wall, someone was playing a guitar — badly, he was let down; and a dog barked sharply.

  ‘ – Feeshbank, Figueroa, Gómez — no, Quincey, Sandovah, no.’

  At last the good little man gathered up his letters and bowing apologetically, disappointedly, lunged off down the street again. They were all looking after him, and just as Hugh was wondering whether the postman’s behaviour might not have been part of some enormous inexplicable private joke, if really he’d been laughing at them the whole time, though in the kindliest way, he halted, fumbled once more at one of the packages, turned, and trotting back with little yelps of triumph, handed the Consul what looked like a postal card.

  Yvonne, a little ahead again by now, nodded at him over her shoulder, smiling, as to say: ‘Good, you’ve got a letter after all,’ and with her buoyant dancing steps walked on slowly beside M. Laruelle, up the dusty hill.

  The Consul turned the card over twice, then handed it to Hugh.

  ‘Strange –’ he said.

  — It was from Yvonne herself and apparently written at least a year ago. Hugh suddenly realized it must have been posted soon after she’d left the Consul and most probably in ignorance he proposed to remain in Quauhnahuac. Yet curiously it was the card that had wandered far afield: originally addressed to Wells Fargo in Mexico City, it had been forwarded by some error a-broad, gone badly astray in fact, for it was date-stamped from Paris, Gibraltar, and even Algeciras, in Fascist Spain.

  ‘No, read it,’ the Consul smiled.

  Yvonne’s scrawl ran: Darling, why did I leave? Why did you let me? Expect to arrive in the U.S. tomorrow, California two days later. Hope to find a word from you there waiting. Love Y.

  Hugh turned the card over. There was a picture of the leonine Signal Peak on El Paso with Carlsbad Cavern Highway leading over a white fenced bridge between desert and desert. The road turned a little corner in the distance and vanished.

  7

  ON the side of the drunken madly revolving world hurtling at 1.20 p.m. towards Hercules’s Butterfly the house seemed a bad idea, the Consul thought —

  There were two towers, Jacques’s zacualis, one at each end and joined by a catwalk over the roof, which was the glassed-in gable of the studio below. These towers were as if camouflaged (almost like the Samaritan, in fact): blue, grey, purple, vermilion, had once been slashed on in zebra stripes. But time and weather had combined to render the effect from a short distance of a uniform dull mauve. Their tops, reached from the catwalk by twin wooden ladders, and from inside by two spiral staircases, made two flimsy crenellated miradors, each scarcely larger than a bartizan, tiny roofless variants of the observation posts which everywhere commanded the valley in Quauhnahuac.

  On the battlements of the mirador to their left, as the Consul and Hugh confronted the house, with the Calle Nicaragua stretching downhill to their right, now appeared to them two bilious-looking angels. The angels, carved out of pink stone, knelt facing one another in profile against the sky across the intervening crenels, while behind, upon corresponding merlons at the far side, sat solemnly two nameless objects like marzipan cannonballs, evidently constructed from the same material.

  The other mirador was unadorned save by its crenellations and it often struck the Consul that this contrast was somehow obscurely appropriate to Jacques, as indeed was that between the angels and the cannonballs. It was perhaps also significant he should use his bedroom for working whereas the studio itself on the main floor had been turned into a dining-room often no better than a camping-ground for his cook and her relatives.

  Coming closer it could be seen that on the left and somewhat larger tower, below that bedroom’s two windows — which, as if degenerate machicolations, were built askew, like the separated halves of a chevron — a panel of rough stone, covered with large letters painted in gold leaf, had been slightly set into the wall to give a semblance of bas-relief. These gold letters though very thick were merged together most confusingly. The Consul had noticed visitors to the town staring up at them for half an hour at a time. Sometimes M. Laruelle would come out to explain they really spelt something, that they formed that phrase of Frey Luis de León’s the Consul did not at this moment allow himself to recall. Nor did he ask himself why he should have come to be almost more familiar with this extraordinary house than his own as, preceeding M. Laruelle now, who was prodding him cheerfully from behind, he followed Hugh and Yvonne into it, into the studio, empty for once, and up the spiral staircase of its left-hand tower. ‘Haven’t we overshot the drinks?’ he asked, his mood of detachment expiring now he remembered that only a few weeks before he’d sworn never to enter this place again.

  ‘Don’t you ever think of anything else?’ it seemed Jacques had said.

  The Consul made no reply but stepped out into the familiar disorderly room with the askew windows, the degenerate machicolations, now seen from inside, and followed the others obliquely through it to a balcony at the back, into a view of sun-filled valleys and volcanoes, and cloud shadows wheeling across the plain.

  M. Laruelle, however, was already nervously going downstairs. ‘Not for me!’ protested the others. Fools! The Consul took two or three steps after him, a movement apparently without meaning, but it almost constituted a threat: his gaze shifted vaguely up the spiral staircase which continued from the room to the mirador above, then he rejoined Hugh and Yvonne on the balcony.