Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  ‘Get up on the roof, you people, or stay on the porch, just make yourselves at home,’ came from downstairs. ‘There’s a pair of binoculars on the table there — er — Hughes… I won’t be a minute.’

  ‘Any objection if I go on the roof?’ Hugh asked them.

  ‘Don’t forget the binoculars!’

  Yvonne and the Consul were alone on the flying balcony. From where they stood the house seemed situated half-way up a cliff rising steeply from the valley stretched out below them. Leaning round they saw the town itself, built as on top of this cliff, overhanging them. The clubs of flying machines waved silently over the roofs, their motions like gesticulations of pain. But the cries and music of the fair reached them at this moment clearly. Far away the Consul made out a green corner, the golf course, with little figures working their way round the side of the cliff, crawling… Golfing scorpions. The Consul remembered the card in his pocket, and apparently he had made a movement towards Yvonne, desiring to tell her about it, to say something tender to her concerning it, to turn her towards him, to kiss her. Then he realized that without another drink shame for this morning would prevent his looking in her eyes. ‘What do you think, Yvonne,’ he said, ‘with your astronomical mind –’ Could it be he, talking to her like this, on an occasion like this! Surely not, it was a dream. He was pointing up at me town.’ — With your astronomical mind,’ he repeated, but no, he had not said it: ‘doesn’t all that revolving and plunging up there somehow suggest to you the voyaging of unseen planets, of unknown moons hurtling backwards?’ He had said nothing.

  ‘Please Geoffrey –’ Yvonne laid her hand on his arm. ‘Please, please believe me, I didn’t want to be drawn into this. Let’s make some excuse and get away as quickly as possible… I don’t mind how many drinks you have after,’ she added.

  ‘I wasn’t aware I’d said anything about drinks now or after. It’s you that have put the thought into my head. Or Jacques, whom I can hear breaking — or should we say, crushing? — the ice down below.’

  ‘Haven’t you got any tenderness or love left for me at all?’ Yvonne asked suddenly, almost piteously, turning round on him, and he thought: Yes, I do love you, I have all the love in the world left for you, only that love seems so far away from me and so strange too, for it is as though I could almost hear it, a droning or a weeping, but far, far away, and a sad lost sound, it might be either approaching or receding, I can’t tell which. ‘Don’t you think of anything except of how many drinks you’re going to have?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Consul (but wasn’t it Jacques who’d just asked him this?), ‘yes, I do — oh my God, Yvonne!’

  ‘Please, Geoffrey –’

  Yet he could not face her. The clubs of the flying machines seen out of the corner of his eye, now seemed as if belabouring him all over. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘are you asking me to extricate us from all this, or are you starting to exhort me again about drinking?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not exhorting you, really I’m not. I’ll never exhort you again. I’ll do anything you ask.’

  ‘Then –’ he had begun in anger.

  But a look of tenderness came over Yvonne’s face and the Consul thought once more of the postcard in his pocket. It ought to have been a good omen. It could be the talisman of their immediate salvation now. Perhaps it would have been a good omen if only it had arrived yesterday or at the house this morning. Unfortunately one could not now conceive of it as having arrived at any other moment. And how could he know whether it was a good omen or not without another drink?

  ‘But I’m back,’ she was apparently saying. ‘Can’t you see it? We’re here together again, it’s us. Can’t you see that?’ Her lips were trembling, she was almost crying.

  Then she was close to him, in his arms, but he was gazing over her head.

  ‘Yes, I can see,’ he said, only he couldn’t see, only hear, the droning, the weeping, and feel, feel the unreality. ‘I do love you. Only –’ ‘I can never forgive you deeply enough’: was that what was in his mind to add?

  – And yet, he was thinking all over again, and all over again as for the first time, how he had suffered, suffered, suffered without her; indeed such desolation, such a desperate sense of abandonment, bereavement, as during this last year without Yvonne, he had never known in his life, unless it was when his mother died. But this present emotion he had never experienced with his mother suffered, suffered, suffered with-this urgent desire to hurt, to provoke, at a time when forgiveness alone could save the day, this, rather, had commenced with his stepmother, so that she would have to cry: ‘I can’t eat, Geoffrey, the food sticks in my throat!’ It was hard to forgive, hard, hard to forgive. Harder still, not to say how hard it was, I hate you. Even now, of all times. Even though here was God’s moment, the chance to agree, to produce the card, to change everything; or there was but a moment left… Too late. The Consul had controlled his tongue. But he felt his mind divide and rise, like the two halves of a counterpoised drawbridge, ticking, to permit passage of these noisome thoughts. ‘Only my heart –’ he said.

  ‘Your heart, darling?’ she asked anxiously.

  ‘Nothing –’

  ‘Oh my poor sweetheart, you must be so weary!’

  ‘Momentito,’ he said, disengaging himself.

  He strolled back into Jacques’s room, leaving Yvonne on the porch. Laruelle’s voice floated up from downstairs. Was it here he had been betrayed? This very room, perhaps, had been filled with her cries of love. Books (among which he did not see his Elizabethan plays) were strewn all over the floor and on the side of the studio couch nearest the wall, were stacked, as by some half-repenting poltergeist, almost to the ceiling. What if Jacques, approaching his design with Tarquin’s ravishing strides, had disturbed this potential avalanche! Grisly Orozco charcoal drawings, of an unexampled horrendousness, snarled down from the walls. In one, executed by a hand of indisputable genius, harpies grappled on a smashed bedstead among broken bottles of tequila, gnashing their teeth. No wonder; the Consul, peering closer, sought in vain for a sound bottle. He sought in vain around Jacques’s room too. There were two ruddy Riveras. Expressionless Amazons with feet like legs of mutton testified to the oneness of the toilers with the earth. Over the chevron-shaped windows, which looked down the Calle Tierra del Fuego, hung a terrifying picture he hadn’t seen before, and took at first to be a tapestry. Called Los Borrachones — why not Los Borrachos? — it resembled something between a primitive and a prohibitionist poster, remotely under the influence of Michelangelo. In fact, he now saw, it really amounted to a prohibitionist poster, though of a century or so back, half a century, God knows what period. Down, headlong into hades, selfish and florid-faced, into a tumult of fire-spangled fiends, Medusae, and belching monstrosities, with swallow-dives or awkwardly, with dread backward leaps, shrieking among falling bottles and emblems of broken hopes, plunged the drunkards; up, up, flying palely, selflessly into the light towards heaven, soaring sublimely in pairs, male sheltering female, shielded themselves by angels with abnegating wings, shot the sober. Not all were in pairs however, the Consul noted. A few lone females on the upgrade were sheltered by angels only. It seemed to him these females were casting half-jealous glances downward after their plummeting husbands, some of whose faces betrayed the most unmistakable relief. The Consul laughed, a trifle shakily. It was ridiculous, but still — had anyone ever given a good reason why good and evil should not be thus simply delimited? Elsewhere in Jacques’s room cuneiform stone idols squatted like bulbous infants: on one side of the room there was even a line of them chained together. One part of the Consul continued to laugh, in spite of himself, and all this evidence of lost wild talents, at the thought of Yvonne confronted in the aftermath of her passion by a whole row of fettered babies.

  ‘How are you getting on up there, Hugh?’ he called up the staircase.

  ‘I think I’ve got Parian in pretty good focus.’

  Yvonne was reading on the balcony, and the Consul gazed back at L
os Bonachones. Suddenly he felt something never felt before with such shocking certainty. It was that he was in hell himself. At the same time he became possessed of a curious calm. The inner ferment within him, the squalls and eddies of nervousness, were held again in check. He could hear Jacques moving downstairs and soon he would have another drink. That would help, but it was not the thought which calmed him. Parian — the Farolito! he said to himself. The Lighthouse, the lighthouse that invites the storm, and lights it! After all, some time during the day, when they were at the bullthrowing perhaps, he might break away from the others and go there, if only for five minutes, if only for one drink. That prospect filled him with an almost healing love and at this moment, for it was part of the calm, the greatest longing he had ever known. The Farolito! It was a strange place, a place really of the late night and early dawn, which as a rule, like that one other terrible cantina in Oaxaca, did not open till four o’clock in the morning. But today being the holiday for the dead it would not close. At first it had appeared to him tiny. Only after he had grown to know it well had he discovered how far back it ran, that it was really composed of numerous little rooms, each smaller and darker than the last, opening one into another, the last and darkest of all being no larger than a cell. These rooms struck him as spots where diabolical plots must be hatched, atrocious murders planned; here, as when Saturn was in Capricorn, life reached bottom. But here also great wheeling thoughts hovered in the brain; while the potter and the field-labourer alike, early risen, paused a moment in the paling doorway, dreaming… He saw it all now, the enormous drop on one side of the cantina into the barranca that suggested Kubla Khan: the proprietor, Ramón Diosdado, known as the Elephant, who was reputed to have murdered his wife to cure her neurasthenia, the beggars, hacked by war and covered with sores, one of whom one night after four drinks from the Consul had taken him for the Christ, and falling down on his knees before him, had pinned swiftly under his coat-lapel two medallions, joined to a tiny worked bleeding heart like a pin-cushion, portraying the Virgin of Guadalupe. ‘I ah give you the Saint!’ He saw all this, feeling the atmosphere of the cantina enclosing him already with its certainty of sorrow and evil, and with its certainty of something else too, that escaped him. But he knew: it was peace. He saw the dawn again, watched with lonely anguish from that open door, in the violet-shaded light, a slow bomb bursting over the Sierra Madre — Sonnenaufgangl – the oxen harnessed to their carts with wooden disc wheels patiently waiting outside for their drivers, in the sharp cool pure air of heaven. The Consul’s longing was so great his soul was locked with the essence of the place as he stood and he was gripped by thoughts like those of the mariner who, sighting the faint beacon of Start Point after a long voyage, knows that soon he will embrace his wife.

  Then they returned to Yvonne abruptly. Had he really forgotten her, he wondered. He looked round the room again. Ah, in how many rooms, upon how many studio couches, among how many books, had they found their own love, their marriage, their life together, a life which, in spite of its many disasters, its total calamity indeed — and in spite too of any slight element of falsehood in its inception on her side, her marriage partly into the past, into her Anglo-Scottish ancestry, into the visioned empty ghost-whistling castles in Sutherland, into an emanation of gaunt lowland uncles chumbling shortbread at six o’clock in the morning — had not been without triumph. Yet for how brief a time. Far too soon it had begun to seem too much of a triumph, it had been too good, too horribly unimaginable to lose, impossible finally to bear: it was as if it had become itself its own foreboding that it could not last, a foreboding that was like a presence too, turning his steps towards the taverns again. And how could one begin all over again, as though the Café Chagrin, the Farolito, had never been? Or without them? Could one be faithful, to Yvonne and the Farolito both? — Christ, oh pharos of the world, how, and with what blind faith, could one find one’s way back, fight one’s way back, now, through the tumultuous horrors of five thousand shattering awakenings, each more frightful than the last, from a place where even love could not penetrate, and save in the thickest flames there was no courage? On the wall the drunks eternally plunged. But one of the little Mayan idols seemed to be weeping…

  ‘Ei ei ei ei,’ M. Laruelle was saying, not unlike the little postman, coming, stamping up the stairs; cocktails, despicable repast. Unperceived the Consul did an odd thing; he took the postcard he’d just received from Yvonne and slipped it under Jacques’s pillow. She emerged from the balcony. ‘Hullo, Yvonne, where is Hugh? — sorry I’ve been so long. Let’s get on the roof, shall we?’ Jacques continued.

  Actually all the Consul’s reflections had not occupied seven minutes. Still, Laruelle seemed to have been away longer. He saw, following them, following the drinks up the spiral staircase, that in addition to the cocktail shaker and glasses there were canapés and stuffed olives on the tray. Perhaps despite all his seductive aplomb, Jacques had really gone downstairs frightened by the whole business and completely beside himself. While these elaborate preparations were merely the excuse for his flight. Perhaps also it was quite true, the poor fellow had really loved Yvonne — ‘Oh, God,’ the Consul said, reaching the mirador, to which Hugh had almost simultaneously ascended, climbing, as they approached, the last rungs of the wooden ladder from the catwalk, ‘God, that the dream of dark magician in his visioned cave, even while his hand shakes in its last decay — that’s the bit I like — were the true end of this so lousy world… You shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble, Jacques.’

  He took the binoculars from Hugh, and now, his drink upon a vacant merlon between the marzipan objects, he gazed steadily over the country. But oddly he had not touched this drink. And the calm mysteriously persisted. It was as if they were standing on a lofty golf-tee somewhere. What a beautiful hole this would make, from here to a green out into those trees on the other side of the barranca, that natural hazard which some hundred and fifty yards away could be carried by a good full spoon shot, soaring… Plock. The Golgotha Hole. High up, an eagle drove downwind in one. It had shown lack of imagination to build the local course back up there, remote from the barranca. Golf = gouffre = gulf. Prometheus would retrieve lost balls. And on that other side what strange fairways could be contrived, crossed by lone railway lines, humming with telegraph poles, glistening with crazy lies on embankments, over the hills and far away, like youth, like life itself, the course plotted all over these plains, extending far beyond Tomalín, through the jungle, to the Farolito, the nineteenth hole… The Case is Altered.

  ‘No, Hugh,’ he said, adjusting the lenses but without turning round, ‘Jacques means the film he made out of Alastor before he went to Hollywood, which he shot in a bathtub, what he could of it, and apparently struck the rest together with sequences of ruins cut out of old travelogues, and a jungle hoiked out of In dunkelste Africa, and a swan out of the end of some old Corinne Griffith — Sarah Bernhardt, she was in it too, I understand, while all the time the poet was standing on the shore, and the orchestra was supposed to be doing its best with the Sacre du Printemps. I think I forgot the fog.’

  Their laughter somewhat cleared the air.

  ‘But beforehand you do have certain wisions, as a German director friend of mine used to say, of what your film should be like,’ Jacques was telling them, behind him, over by the angels. ‘But afterwards, that is another story… As for the fog, that is after all the cheapest commodity in any studio.’

  ‘Didn’t you make any films in Hollywood?’ Hugh asked, who a moment ago had almost drifted into a political argument with M. Laruelle.

  ‘Yes… But I refuse to see them.’

  But what on earth was he, the Consul, the Consul wondered, continuing to look out for there on those plains, in that tumulose landscape, through Jacques’s binoculars? Was it for some figment of himself, who had once enjoyed such a simple healthy stupid good thing as golf, as blind holes, for example, driving up into a high wilderness of sand-dunes, yes, once with Jacque
s himself? To climb, and then to see, from an eminence, the ocean with the smoke on the horizon, then, far below, resting near the pin on the green, his new Silver King, twinkling. Ozone! — The Consul could no longer play golf: his few efforts of recent years had proved disastrous… I should have become a sort of Donne of the fairways at least. Poet of the unreplaced turf. — Who holds the flag while I hole out in three? Who hunts my Zodiac Zone along the shore? And who, upon that last and final green, though I hole out in four, accepts my ten and three score… Though I have more. The Consul dropped the glasses at last and turned round. And still he had not touched his drink.

  ‘Alastor, Alastor,’ Hugh strolled over to him saying. ‘Who is, was, why, and/or wrote Alastor, anyway?’

  ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley.’ The Consul leaned against the mirador beside Hugh. ‘Another fellow with ideas… The story I like about Shelley is the one where he just let himself sink to the bottom of the sea — taking several books with him of course —and just stayed there, rather than admit he couldn’t swim.’

  ‘Geoffrey don’t you think Hugh ought to see something of the fiesta,’ suddenly Yvonne was saying from the other side, ‘since it’s his last day? Especially if there’s native dancing?’

  So it was Yvonne who was ‘extricating them from all this’, just when the Consul was proposing to stay. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said. ‘Won’t we get native dancing and things in Tomalín? Would you like to, Hugh?’

  ‘Sure. Of course. Anything you say.’ Hugh got down awkwardly from the parapet. ‘There’s still about an hour before the bus leaves, isn’t there?’

  ‘I’m sure Jacques will forgive us if we rush off,’ Yvonne was saying almost desperately.

  ‘Let me see you downstairs safely then.’ Jacques controlled his voice. ‘It’s too early for the fête to be very much but you ought to see Rivera’s murals, Hughes, if you haven’t already.’