Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  ‘Aren’t you coming, Geoffrey?’ Yvonne turned on the staircase. ‘Please come,’ her eyes said.

  ‘Well, fiestas aren’t my strong suit. You run along and I’ll meet you at the terminal in time for the bus. I have to talk to Jacques here anyway.’

  But they had all gone downstairs and the Consul was alone on the mirador. And yet not alone. For Yvonne had left a drink on the merlon by the angels, poor Jacques’s was in one of the crenels, Hugh’s was on the side parapet. And the cocktail shaker was not empty. Moreover the Consul had not touched his own drink. And still, now, he did not drink. The Consul felt with his right hand his left bicep under his coat. Strength — of a kind —but how to give oneself courage? That fine droll courage of Shelley’s; no, that was pride. And pride bade one go on, either go on and kill oneself, or ‘straighten out’, as so often before, by oneself with the aid of thirty bottles of beer and staring at the ceiling. But this time it was different. What if courage here implied admission of total defeat, admission that one couldn’t swim, admission indeed (though just for a second the thought was not too bad) into a sanatorium? No, to whatever end, it wasn’t merely a matter of being ‘got away’. No angels nor Yvonne nor Hugh could help him here. As for the demons, they were inside him as well as outside; quiet at the moment —taking their siesta perhaps — he was none the less surrounded by them and occupied; they were in possession. The Consul looked at the sun. But he had lost the sun: it was not his sun. Like the truth, it was well-nigh impossible to face; he did not want to go anywhere near it, least of all, sit in its light, facing it. ‘Yet I shall face it.’ How? When he not only lied to himself, but himself believed the lie and lied back again to those lying factions, among whom was not even their own honour. There was not even a consistent basis to his self-deceptions. How should there be then to his attempts at honesty? ‘Horror,’ he said. ‘Yet I will not give in.’ But who was I, how find that I, where had ‘I’ gone? ‘Whatever I do, it shall be deliberately.’ And deliberately, it was true, the Consul still refrained from touching his drink. ‘The will of man is unconquerable.’ Eat? I should eat. So the Consul ate half a canapé. And when M. Laruelle returned the Consul was still gazing drinklessly — where was he gazing? He didn’t know himself. ‘Do you remember when we went to Cholula,’ he said, ‘how much dust there was?’

  The two men faced each other in silence. ‘I don’t want to speak to you at all really,’ the Consul added after a moment. ‘For that matter I wouldn’t mind if this was the last time I ever saw you… Did you hear me?’

  ‘Have you gone mad?’ M. Laruelle exclaimed at last. ‘Am I to understand that your wife has come back to you, something I have seen you praying and howling for under the table — really under the table… And that you treat her indifferently as this, and still continue only to care where the next drink’s coming from?’

  To this unanswerable and staggering injustice the Consul had no word; he reached for his cocktail, he held it, smelt it: but somewhere, where it would do little good, a hawser did not give way: he did not drink; he almost smiled pleasantly at M. Laruelle. You might as well start now as later, refusing the drinks. You might as well start now; as later. Later.

  The phone rang out and M. Laruelle ran down the staircase. The Consul sat with his face buried in his hands a while, then, leaving his drink still untouched, leaving, yes, all the drinks untouched, he descended to Jacques’s room.

  M. Laruelle hung up the phone: ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know you two were acquainted.’ He took off his coat and began to undo his tie. ‘That was my doctor, asking about you. He wants to know if you are not dead already.’

  ‘Oh… Oh, that was Vigil, was it?’

  ‘Arturo Díaz Vigil. Médico. Cirujano… Et cetera!’

  ‘Ah,’ the Consul said guardedly, running his finger round the inside of his collar. ‘Yes. I met him for the first time last night. As a matter of fact he was along at my house this morning.’

  M. Laruelle discarded his shirt thoughtfully, saying: ‘We’re getting in a set before he goes on his holiday.’

  The Consul, sitting down, imagined that weird gusty game of tennis under the hard Mexican sunlight, the tennis balls tossed in a sea of error — hard going for Vigil, but what would he care (and who was Vigil? — the good fellow seemed by now unreal to him as some figure one would forbear to greet for fear he was not your acquaintance of the morning, so much as the living double of the actor seen on the screen that afternoon) while the other prepared to enter a shower which, with that queer architectural disregard for decorum exhibited by a people who value decorum above all else, was built in a little recess splendidly visible from both the balcony and the head of the staircase.

  ‘He wants to know if you have changed your mind, if you and Yvonne will ride with him to Guanajuato after all… Why don’t you?’

  ‘How did he know I was here?’ The Consul sat up, shaking a little again, though amazed for an instant at his mastery of the situation, that here it turned out there actually was someone named Vigil, who had invited one to come to Guanajuato.

  ‘How? How else… I told him. It’s a pity you didn’t meet him long ago. That man might really be of some help to you.’

  ‘You might find… You can be of some help to him today.’ The Consul closed his eyes, hearing the doctor’s voice again distinctly: ‘But now that your esposa has come back. But now that your esposa has come back… I would work you with.’ ‘What?’ He opened his eyes… But the abominable impact on his whole being at this moment of the fact that that hideously elongated cucumiform bundle of blue nerves and gills below the steaming un-selfconscious stomach had sought its pleasure in his wife’s body brought him trembling to his feet. How loathsome, how incredibly loathsome was reality. He began to walk around the room, his knees giving way every step with a jerk. Books, too many books. The Consul still didn’t see his Elizabethan plays. Yet there was everything else, from Les Joyeuses Bourgeoises de Windsor to Agrippa d’Aubigné and Collin d’Harleville, from Shelley to Touchard — Lafosse and Tristan l’Hermite. Beaucoup de bruit pour rien! Might a soul bathe there or quench its draught? It might. Yet in none of these books would one find one’s own suffering. Nor could they show you how to look at an ox-eye daisy. ‘But what could have made you tell Vigil I was here, if you didn’t know he knew me?’ he asked, almost with a sob.

  M. Laruelle, overpowered by steam, explanatory fingers in his ears, hadn’t heard: ‘What did you find to talk about, you two? Vigil and yourself?’

  ‘Alcohol. Insanity. Medullary compression of the gibbus. Our agreements were more or less bilateral.’ The Consul, shaking frankly now, normally, peered out through the open doors of the balcony at the volcanoes over which once more hovered puffs of smoke, accompanied by the rattle of musketry; and once he cast a passionate glance up at the mirador, where his untouched drinks lay. ‘Mass reflexes, but only the erections of guns, disseminating death,’ he said, noticing too that the sounds of the fair were getting louder.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘How were you proposing to entertain the others supposing they had stayed,’ the Consul almost shrieked soundlessly, for he had himself dreadful memories of showers that slithered all over him like soap slipping from quivering fingers, ‘by taking a shower?’

  And the observation plane was coming back, or Jesus, yes, here, here, out of nowhere, she came whizzing, straight at the balcony, at the Consul, looking for him perhaps, zooming… Aaaaaaaah! Berumph.

  M. Laruelle shook his head; he hadn’t heard a sound, a word. Now he came out of the shower and into another little recess screened by a curtain which he used as a dressing-room:

  ‘Lovely day, isn’t it?… I think we shall have thunder.’

  ‘No.’

  The Consul on a sudden went to the telephone, also in a kind of recess (the house seemed fuller of such recesses today than usual), found the telephone book, and now, shaking all over, opened it; not Vigil, no, not Vigil, his nerves gibbered, but Guzm
án. A.B.C.G. He was sweating now, terribly; it was suddenly as hot in this little niche as in a telephone booth in New York during a heat wave; his hands trembled frantically; 666, Cafeasperina; Guzmán. Erikson 34. He had the number, had forgotten it: the name Zuzugoitea, Zuzugoitea, then Sanabria, came starting out of the book at him: Erikson 35. Zuzugoitea. He’d already forgotten the number, forgotten the number, 34, 35, 666: he was turning back the leaves, a large drop of sweat splashed on the book — this time he thought he saw Vigil’s name. But he’d already taken the receiver off the hook, the receiver off the hook, off the hook, he held it the wrong way up, speaking, splashing into the earhole, the mouth-hole, he could not hear — could they hear? see? — the earhole as before:’¿Qué quieres? Who do you want… God!’ he shouted, hanging up. He would need a drink to do this. He ran for the staircase but half-way up, shuddering, in a frenzy, started down again; I brought the tray down. No, the drinks are still up there. He came on the mirador and drank down all the drinks in sight. He heard music. Suddenly about three hundred head of cattle, dead, frozen stiff in the postures of the living, sprang on the slope before the house, were gone. The Consul finished the contents of the cocktail shaker and came downstairs quietly, picked up a paper-backed book lying on the table, sat down and opened it with a long sigh. It was Jean Cocteau’s La Machine infernale. ‘Oui, mon enfant, mon petit enfant,’ he read,’les choses qui paraissent abominable aux humains, si tu savais, de l’endroit ou j’habite, elles ont peu d’importance.’ ‘We might have a drink in the square,’ he said, closing the book, then opening it again: sortes Shakespeareanae. ‘The gods exist, they are the devil,’ Baudelaire informed him.

  He had forgotten Guzmán. Los Borrachones fell eternally into the flames. M. Laruelle, who hadn’t noticed a thing, appeared again, resplendent in white flannels, took his tennis racket from the top of a bookcase; the Consul found his stick and his dark glasses, and they went down the iron spiral staircase together.

  ‘Absolutamente necesario.’ Outside the Consul paused, turning…

  No se puede vivir sin amar, were the words on the house. In the street there was now not a breath of wind and they walked a while without speaking, listening to the babel of the fiesta which grew still louder as they approached the town. Street of the Land of Fire. 666.

  — M. Laruelle, possibly because he was walking on the higher part of the banked street, now seemed even taller than he was, and beside him, below, the Consul felt a moment uncomfortably dwarfed, childish. Years before in their boyhood this position had been reversed; then the Consul was the taller. But whereas the Consul had stopped growing when seventeen at five foot eight or nine, M. Laruelle kept on through the years under different skies until now he had grown out of the Consul’s reach. Out of reach? Jacques was a boy of whom the Consul could still remember certain things with affection: the way he pronounced ‘vocabulary’ to rhyme with ‘foolery’, or ‘bible’ with ‘runcible’. Runcible spoon. And he’d grown into a man who could shave and put on his socks by himself. But out of his reach, hardly. Up there, across the years, at his height of six foot three or four, it did not seem too outlandish to suggest that his influence still reached him strongly. If not, why the English-looking tweed coat similar to the Consul’s own, those expensive, expressive English tennis shoes of the kind you could walk in, the English white trousers of twenty-one inches breadth, the English shirt worn English-fashion open at the neck, the extraordinary scarf that suggested M. Laruelle had once won a half-blue at the Sorbonne or something? There was even, in spite of his slight stoutness, an English, almost an ex-consular sort of litheness about his movements. Why should Jacques be playing tennis at all? Have you forgotten it, Jacques, how I myself taught you, that summer long ago, behind the Taskersons’, or at the new public courts in Leasowe? On just such afternoons as this. So brief their friendship and yet, the Consul thought, how enormous, how all-permeating, permeating Jacques’s whole life, that influence had been, an influence that showed even in his choice of books, his work — why had Jacques come to Quauhnahuac in the first place? Was it not much as though he, the Consul, from afar, had willed it, for obscure purposes of his own? The man he’d met here eighteen months ago seemed, though hurt in his art and destiny, the most completely unequivocal and sincere Frenchman he’d ever known. Nor was the seriousness of M. Laruelle’s face, seen now against the sky between houses, compatible with cynical weakness. Was it not almost as though the Consul had tricked him into dishonour and misery, willed, even, his betrayal of him?

  ‘Geoffrey,’ M. Laruelle said suddenly, quietly, ‘has she really come back?’

  ‘It looks like it, doesn’t it?’ They both paused, to light their pipes, and the Consul noticed Jacques was wearing a ring he had not seen, a scarab, of simple design, cut into a chalcedony: whether Jacques would remove it to play tennis he didn’t know, but the hand that wore it was trembling, while the Consul’s was now steady.

  ‘But I mean really come back’ M. Laruelle continued in French as they went forward up the Calle Tierra del Fuego. ‘She hasn’t merely come down on a visit, or to see you out of curiosity, or on the basis that you’ll just be friends, and so on, if you don’t mind my asking.’

  ‘As a matter of fact I rather do.’

  ‘Get this straight, Geoffrey, I’m thinking of Yvonne, not you.’

  ‘Get it a little straighter still. You’re thinking of yourself.’

  ‘But today — I can see how that’s — I suppose you were tight at the ball. I didn’t go. But if so why aren’t you back home thanking God and trying to rest and sober up instead of making everyone wretched by taking them to Tomalin? Yvonne looks tired out.’

  The words drew faint weary furrows across the Consul’s mind constantly filling with harmless deliriums. Nevertheless his French was fluent and rapid:

  ‘How do you mean you suppose I was tight when Vigil told you so on the phone? And weren’t you suggesting just now I take Yvonne to Guanajuato with him? Perhaps you imagined if you could insinuate yourself into our company on that proposed trip she would miraculously cease to be tired, even though it’s fifty times farther than to Tomalín.’

  ‘When I suggested you go it hadn’t quite entered my head she’d only arrived this morning.’

  ‘Well — I forget whose idea Tomalin was,’ the Consul said. Can it be I discussing Yvonne with Jacques, discussing us like this? Though after all they had done it before. ‘But I haven’t explained just how Hugh fits into the picture, have –’

  ‘ – Eggs!!’had the jovial proprietor of the abarrotes called down from the pavement above them to their right.

  ‘Mescalito!’ had somebody else whizzed past carrying a length of plank, some barfly of his acquaintance; or was that this morning?

  — ‘And on second thoughts I don’t think I’ll trouble.’

  Soon the town loomed up before them. They had reached the foot of Cortés Palace. Near them children (encouraged by a man also in dark glasses who seemed familiar, and to whom the Consul motioned) were swinging round and round a telegraph pole on an improvised whirligig, a little parody of the Great Carrousel up the hill in the square. Higher, on a terrace of the Palace (because it was also the ayuntamiento), a soldier stood at case with a rifle; on a still higher terrace dawdled the tourists: vandals in sandals looking at the murals.

  The Consul and M. Laruelle had a good view of the Rivera frescoes from where they were. ‘You get an impression from here those tourists can’t up here,’ M. Laruelle said, ‘they’re too close.’ He was pointing with his tennis racket. ‘The slow darkening of the murals as you look from right to left. It seems somehow to symbolize the gradual imposition of the Spaniards’ conquering will upon the Indians. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘If you stood at a greater distance still it might seem to symbolize for you the gradual imposition of the Americans’ conquering friendship from left to right upon the Mexicans,’ the Consul said with a smile, removing his dark glasses, ‘upon those who have to look at th
e frescoes and remember who paid for them.’

  The part of the murals he was gazing at portrayed, he knew, the Tlahuicans who had died for this valley in which he lived. The artist had represented them in their battle dress, wearing the masks and skins of wolves and tigers. As he looked it was as though these figures were gathering silently together. Now they had become one figure, one immense, malevolent creature staring back at him. Suddenly this creature appeared to start forward, then make a violent motion. It might have been, indeed unmistakably it was, telling him to go away.

  ‘See, there’s Yvonne and Hugues waving at you.’ M. Laruelle waved back his tennis racket. Do you know I think they make rather a formidable couple,’ he added, with a half pained, half malicious smile.

  There they were too, he saw, the formidable couple, up by the frescoes: Hugh with his foot on the rail of the Palace balcony, looking over their heads at the volcanoes perhaps: Yvonne with her back to them now. She was leaning against the rail facing the murals, then she turned sideways towards Hugh to say something. They did not wave again.

  M. Laruelle and the Consul decided against the cliff path. They floated along the base of the Palace then, opposite the Banco de Crédito y Ejidal, turned left up the steep narrow road climbing to the square. Toiling, they edged into the Palace wall to let a man on horseback pass, a fine-featured Indian of the poorer class, dressed in soiled white loose clothes. The man was singing gaily to himself. But he nodded to them courteously as if to thank them. He seemed about to speak, reining in his little horse — on either side of which chinked two saddle-bags, and upon whose rump was branded the number seven — to a slow walk beside them, as they ascended the hill. Jingle jingle little surcingle. But the man, riding slightly in front, did not speak and at the top he suddenly waved his hand and galloped away, singing.

  The Consul felt a pang. Ah, to have a horse, and gallop away, singing, away to someone you loved perhaps, into the heart of all the simplicity and peace in the world; was not that like the opportunity afforded man by life itself? Of course not. Still, just for a moment, it had seemed that it was.