Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  ‘What is it Goethe says about the horse?’ he said. ‘“Weary of liberty he suffered himself to be saddled and bridled, and was ridden to death for his pains.”’

  In the plaza the tumult was terrific. Once again they could scarcely hear one another speak. A boy dashed up to them selling papers. Sangriento Combate en Mora de Ebro. Los Aviones de los Rebeldes Bombardean Barcelona. Es inevitable la muerte del Papa. The Consul started; this time, an instant, he had thought the headlines referred to himself. But of course it was only the poor Pope whose death was inevitable. As if everyone else’s death were not inevitable too! In the middle of the square a man was climbing a slippery flagpole in a complicated manner necessitating ropes and spikes. The huge carrousel, set near the bandstand, was thronged by peculiar long-nosed wooden horses mounted on whorled pipes, dipping majestically as they revolved with a slow piston-like circulation. Boys on roller skates, holding to the stays of the umbrella structure, were being whirled around yelling with joy, while the uncovered machine driving it hammered away like a steam pump: then they were whizzing. ‘Barcelona’ and ‘Valencia’ mingled with the crashes and cries against which the Consul’s nerves were wooled. Jacques was pointing to the pictures on the panels running entirely around the inner wheel that was set horizontally and attached to the top of the central revolving pillar. A mermaid reclined in the sea combing her hair and singing to the sailors of a five-funnelled battleship. A daub which apparently represented Medea sacrificing her children turned out to be of performing monkeys. Five jovial-looking stags peered, in all their monarchical unlikelihood, out of a Scottish glen at them, then went tearing out of sight. While a fine Pancho Villa with handlebar moustaches galloped for dear life after them all. But stranger than these was a panel showing lovers, a man and a woman reclining by a river. Though childish and crude it had about it a somnambulistic quality and something too of truth, of the pathos of love. The lovers were depicted as awkwardly askance. Yet one felt that really they were wrapped in each other’s arms by this river at dusk among gold stars. Yvonne, he thought, with sudden tenderness, where are you, my darling? Darling… For a moment he had thought her by his side. Then he remembered she was lost; then that no, this feeling belonged to yesterday, to the months of lonely torment behind him. She was not lost at all, she was here all the time, here now, or as good as here. The Consul wanted to raise his head, and shout for joy, like the horseman: she is here! Wake up, she has come back again! Sweetheart, darling, I love you! A desire to find her immediately and take her home (where in the garden still lay the white bottle of Tequila Añejo de Jalisco, unfinished), to put a stop to this senseless trip, to be, above all, alone with her, seized him, and a desire, too, to lead immediately again a normal happy life with her, a life, for instance, in which such innocent happiness as all these good people around him were enjoying, was possible. But had they ever led a normal happy life? Had such a thing as a normal happy life ever been possible for them? It had… Yet what about that belated postcard, now under Laruelle’s pillow? It proved the lonely torment unnecessary, proved, even, he must have wanted it. Would any-thing really have been changed had he received the card at the right time? He doubted it. After all, her other letters — Christ, again, where were they? — had not changed anything. If he had not read them properly, perhaps. But he had not read them properly. And soon he would forget about what had been done with the card. Nevertheless the desire remained — like an echo of Yvonne’s own — to find her, to find her now, to reverse their doom, it was a desire amounting almost to a resolution… Raise your head, Geoffrey Firmin, breathe your prayer of thankfulness, act before it is too late. But the weight of a great hand seemed to be pressing his head down. The desire passed. At the same time, as though a cloud had come over the sun, the aspect of the fair had completely altered for him. The merry grinding of the roller skates, the cheerful if ironic music, the cries of the little children on their goose-necked steeds, the procession of queer pictures — all this had suddenly become transcendentally awful and tragic, distant, transmuted, as it were some final impression on the senses of what the earth was like, carried over into an obscure region of death, a gathering thunder of immedicable sorrow; the Consul needed a drink…

  — ‘Tequila,’ he said.‘¿Una?’ the boy said sharply, and M. Laruelle called for gaseosa.

  ’Sí, señores.’ The boy swept the table. ‘Una tequila y una gaseosa.’ He brought immediately a bottle of El Nilo for M. Laruelle together with salt, chile, and a saucer of sliced lemons.

  The café, which was in the centre of a little railed-in garden at the edge of the square among trees, was called the Paris. And in fact it was reminiscent of Paris. A simple fountain dripped near. The boy brought them camarones, red shrimps in a saucer, and had to be told again to get the tequila.

  At last it arrived.

  ‘Ah –’ the Consul said, though it was the chalcedony ring that had been shaking.

  ‘Do you really like it?’ M. Laruelle asked him, and the Consul, sucking a lemon, felt the fire of the tequila run down his spine like lightning striking a tree which thereupon, miraculously, blossoms.

  ‘What are you shaking for?’ the Consul asked him.

  M. Laruelle stared at him, he gave a nervous glance over his shoulder, he made as if absurdly to twang his tennis racket on his toe, but remembering the press, stood it up against his chair awkwardly.

  ‘What are you afraid of –’ the Consul was mocking him.

  ‘I admit, I feel confused…’ M. Laruelle cast a more protracted glance over his shoulder. ‘Here, give me some of your poison.’ He leaned forward and took a sip of the Consul’s tequila and remained bent over the thimble-shaped glass of terrors, a moment since brimming.

  ‘Like it?’

  ‘ – like Oxygénée, and petrol… If I ever start to drink that stuff, Geoffrey, you’ll know I’m done for.’

  ‘It’s mescal with me… Tequila, no, that is healthful… and delightful. Just like beer. Good for you. But if I ever start to drink mescal again, I’m afraid, yes, that would be the end,’ the Consul said dreamily.

  ‘Name of a name of God,’ shuddered M. Laruelle.

  ‘You’re not afraid of Hugh, are you?’ The Consul, mocking, pursued — while it struck him that all the desolation of the months following Yvonne’s departure were now mirrored in the other’s eyes. ‘Not jealous of him, by any chance, are you?’

  ‘Why should –’

  ‘But you are thinking, aren’t you, that in all this time I have never once told you the truth about my life.’ the Consul said, ‘isn’t that right?’

  ‘No… For perhaps once or twice, Geoffrey, without knowing it, you have told the truth. No, I truly want to help. But, as usual, you don’t give me a chance.’

  ‘I have never told you the truth. I know it, it is worse than terrible. But as Shelley says, the cold world shall not know. And the tequila hasn’t cured your trembling.’

  ‘No, I am afraid,’ M. Laruelle said.

  ‘But I thought you were never afraid…Un otro tequila,’ the Consul told the boy, who came running, repeating sharply,’ — uno?’

  M. Laruelle glanced round after the boy as if it had been in his mind to say‘dos’: ‘I’m afraid of you,’ he said, ‘Old Bean.’

  The Consul heard, after half the second tequila, every now and then, familiar well-meaning phrases. ‘It’s hard to say this. As man to man, I don’t care who she is. Even if the miracle has occurred. Unless you cut it out altogether.’

  The Consul however was looking past M. Laruelle at the flying-boats which were at a little distance: the machine itself was feminine, graceful as a ballet dancer, its iron skirts of gondolas whirling higher and higher. Finally it whizzed round with a tense whipping and whining, then its skirts drooped chastely again when for a time there was stillness, only the breeze stirring them. And how beautiful, beautiful, beautiful —

  ‘For God’s sake. Go home to bed… Or stay here. I’ll find the others. And tell them you’
re not going…’

  ‘But I am going,’ the Consul said, commencing to take one of the shrimps apart. ‘Not camarones,’ he added. ‘Cabrones. That’s what the Mexicans call them.’ Placing his thumbs at the base of both ears he waggled his fingers.’ Cabrón. You too, perhaps… Venus is a horned star.’

  ‘What about the damage you’ve done, to her life… After all your howling… If you’ve got her back! — If you’ve got this chance –’

  ‘You are interfering with my great battle,’ the Consul said, gazing past M. Laruelle at an advertisement at the foot of the fountain: Peter horre en has Manos de Orlac, a las 6.30 p.m. ‘I have to have a drink or two now, myself — so long as it isn’t mescal of course — else I shall become confused, like yourself.’

  ‘ – the truth is, I suppose, that sometimes, when you’ve calculated the amount exactly, you do see more clearly,’ M. Laruelle was admitting a minute later.

  ‘Against death.’ The Consul sank back easily in his chair. ‘My battle for the survival of the human consciousness.’

  ‘But certainly not the things so important to us despised sober people, on which the balance of any human situation depends. It’s precisely your inability to see them, Geoffrey, that turns them into the instruments of the disaster you have created yourself. Your Ben Jonson, for instance, or perhaps it was Christopher Marlowe, your Faust man, saw the Carthaginians fighting on his big toe-nail. That’s like the kind of clear seeing you indulge in. Everything seems perfectly clear, because indeed it is perfectly clear, in terms of the toe-nail.’

  ‘Have a devilled scorpion,’ invited the Consul, pushing over the camarones with extended arm. ‘A bedevilled cabrón.’

  ‘I admit the efficacy of your tequila — but do you realize that while you’re battling against death, or whatever you imagine you’re doing, while what is mystical in you is being released, or whatever it is you imagine is being released, while you’re enjoying all this, do you realize what extraordinary allowances are being made for you by the world which has to cope with you, yes, are even now being made by me?’

  The Consul was gazing upward dreamily at the Ferris wheel near them, huge, but resembling an enormously magnified child’s structure of girders and angle brackets, nuts and bolts, in Meccano; tonight it would be lit up, its steel twigs caught in the emerald pathos of the trees; the wheel of the law, rolling; and it bore thinking of too that the carnival was not going in earnest now. What a hullabaloo there would be later 1 His eye fell on another little carrousel, a dazzle-painted wobbling child’s toy, and he saw himself as a child making up his mind to go on it, hesitating, missing the next opportunity, and the next, missing all the opportunities finally, until it was too late. What opportunities, precisely, did he mean? A voice on the radio somewhere began to sing a song: Samaritana mía, alma pía, bebe en tu boca linda, then went dead. It had sounded like Samaritana.

  ‘And you forget what you exclude from this, shall we say, feeling of omniscience. And at night, I imagine, or between drink and drink, which is a sort of night, what you have excluded, as if it resented that exclusion, returns –’

  ‘I’ll say it returns,’ the Consul said, listening at this point. ‘There are other minor deliriums too, meteora, which you can pick out of the air before your eyes, like gnats. And this is what people seem to think is the end… But d.t.’s are only the beginning, the music round the portal of the Qliphoth, the overture, conducted by the God of Flies… Why do people see rats? These are the sort of questions that ought to concern the world, Jacques. Consider the word remorse. Remors. Mordeo, mor-dere. La Mordida! Agenbite too… And why rongeur? Why all this biting, all those rodents, in the etymology?’

  ‘Facilis est descensus Averno… It’s too easy.’

  ‘You deny the greatness of my battle? Even if I win. And I shall certainly win, if I want to,’ the Consul added, aware of a man near them standing on a step-ladder nailing a board to a tree.

  ‘Je crois que le vautour est doux à Promethée et que les Ixion se plaisent en Enfers.’

  — ¡Box!

  ‘To say nothing of what you lose, lose, lose, are losing, man. You fool, you stupid fool… You’ve even been insulated from the responsibility of genuine suffering… Even the suffering you do endure is largely unnecessary. Actually spurious. It lacks the very basis you require of it for its tragic nature. You deceive yourself. For instance that you’re drowning your sorrows… Because of Yvonne and me. But Yvonne knows. And so do I. And so do you. That Yvonne wouldn’t have been aware. If you hadn’t been so drunk all the time. To know what she was doing. Or care. And what’s more. The same thing is bound to happen again you fool it will happen again if you don’t pull yourself together. I can see the writing on the wall. Hullo.’

  M. Laruelle wasn’t there at all; he had been talking to himself. The Consul stood up and finished his tequila. But the writing was there, all right, if not on the wall. The man had nailed his board to the tree.

  The Consul realized, leaving the Paris, he was in a state of drunkenness, so to speak, rare with him. His steps teetered to the left, he could not make them incline to the right. He knew in which direction he was going, towards the Bus Terminal, or rather the little dark cantina adjacent to it kept by the widow Gregorio, who herself was half English and had lived in Manchester, and to whom he owed fifty centavos he’d suddenly made up his mind to pay back. But simply he could not steer a straight course there… Oh we all walk the wibberley wobberley —

  Thes Faustus… The Consul looked at his watch. Just for one moment, one horrible moment in the Paris, he had thought it night, that it was one of those days the hours slid by like corks bobbing astern, and the morning was carried away by the wings of the angel of night, all in a trice, but tonight quite the reverse seemed to be happening: it was still only five to two. It was already the longest day in his entire experience, a lifetime; he had not only not missed the bus, he would have plenty of time for more drinks. If only he were not drunk! The Consul strongly disapproved of this drunkenness.

  Children accompanied him, gleefully aware of his plight. Money, money, money, they gibbered. O.K. mistair! Where har you go? Their cries grew discouraged, fainter, utterly disappointed as they clung to his trousers leg. He would have liked to give them something. Yet he did not wish to draw more attention to himself. He had caught sight of Hugh and Yvonne, trying their hands at a shooting gallery. Hugh was shooting, Yvonne watched; phut, pssst, pfffing; and Hugh brought down a procession of wooden ducks.

  The Consul stumbled on without being seen, passing a booth where you could have your photograph taken with your sweetheart against a terrifying thunderous background, lurid and green, with a charging bull, and Popocatepetl in eruption, past, his face averted, the shabby little closed British Consulate, where the lion and the unicorn on the faded blue shield regarded him mournfully. This was shameful. But we are still at your service, in spite of all, they seemed to say. Dieu et mon droit. The children had given him up. However he had lost his bearings. He was reaching the edge of the fair. Mysterious tents were shut up here, or lying collapsed, enfolded on themselves. They appeared almost human, the former kind awake, expectant; the latter with the wrinkled crumpled aspect of men asleep, but longing even in unconsciousness to stretch their limbs. Farther on at the final frontiers of the fair, it was the day of the dead indeed. Here the tent booths and galleries seemed not so much asleep as lifeless, beyond hope of revival. Yet there were faint signs of life after all, he saw.

  At a point outside the plaza’s periphery, half on the pavement, there was another, utterly desolated, ‘safe’ roundabout. The little chairs circulated beneath a frilled canvas pyramid that twirled slowly for half a minute, then stopped, when it looked just like the hat of the bored Mexican who tended it. Here it was, this little Popocateped, nestling far away from the swooping flying-machines, far from the Great Wheel, existing — for whom did it exist, the Consul wondered. Belonging neither to the children nor the adults it stood, untenanted, as one
might imagine the whirligig of adolescence as resting deserted, if youth suspected it of offering an excitement so apparently harmless, choosing rather what in the proper square swooned in agonizing ellipses beneath some gigantic canopy.

  The Consul walked on a little farther, still unsteadily; he thought he had his bearings again, then stopped:

  ¡BRAVA ATRACCIÓN! IO C. MÁQUINA INFERNAL

  he read, half struck by some coincidence in this. Wild attraction. The huge looping-the-loop machine, empty, but going full blast over his head in this dead section of the fair, suggested some huge evil spirit, screaming in its lonely hell, its limbs writhing, smiting the air like flails of paddlewheels. Obscured by a tree, he hadn’t seen it before. The machine stopped also…

  ‘ – Mistair. Money money money.’ ‘Mistair ! Where har you go?’

  The wretched children had spotted him again; and his penalty for avoiding them was to be drawn inexorably, though with as much dignity as possible, into boarding the monster. And now, his ten centavos paid to a Chinese hunchback in a retiform visored tennis cap, he was alone, irrevocably and ridiculously alone, in a little confession box. After a while, with violent bewildering convulsions, the thing started to go. The confession boxes, perched at the end of menacing steel cranks, zoomed upwards and heavily fell. The Consul’s own cage hurled up again with a powerful thrusting, hung for a moment upside down at the top, while the other cage, which significantly was empty, was at the bottom, then, before this situation had been grasped, crashed down, paused a moment at the other extremity, only to be lifted upwards again cruelly to the highest point where for an interminable, intolerable period of suspension, it remained motionless. — The Consul, like that poor fool who was bringing light to the world, was hung upside down over it, with only a scrap of woven wire between himself and death. There, above him, poised the world, with its people stretching out down to him, about to fall off the road on to his head, or into the sky. 999. The people hadn’t been there before. Doubtless, following the children, they had assembled to watch him. Obliquely he was aware that he was without physical fear of death, as he would have been without fear at this moment of anything else that might sober him up; perhaps this had been his main idea. But he did not like it. This was not amusing. It was doubtless an-other example of Jacques’s — Jacques? — unnecessary suffering. And it was scarcely a dignified position for an ex-representative of His Majesty’s government to find himself in, though it was symbolic, of what he could not conceive, but it was undoubtedly symbolic. Jesus. All at once, terribly, the confession boxes had begun to go in reverse: Oh, the Consul said, oh; for the sensation of falling was now as if terribly behind him, unlike anything, beyond experience; certainly this recessive unwinding was not like looping-the-loop in a plane, where the movement was quickly over, the only strange feeling one of increased weight; as a sailor he disapproved of that feeling too, but this — ah, my God! Everything was falling out of his pockets, was being wrested from him, torn away, a fresh article at each whirling, sickening, plunging, retreating, unspeakable circuit, his notecase, pipe, keys, his dark glasses he had taken off, his small change he did not have time to imagine being pounced on by the children after all, he was being emptied out, returned empty, his stick, his passport — had that been his passport? He didn’t know if he’d brought it with him. Then he remembered he had brought it. Or hadn’t brought it. It could be difficult even for a Consul to be without a passport in Mexico. Ex-consul. What did it matter? Let it go I There was a kind of fierce delight in this final acceptance. Let everything go! Everything particularly that provided means of ingress or egress, went bond for, gave meaning or character, or purpose or identity to that frightful bloody nightmare he was forced to carry around with him everywhere upon his back, that went by the name of Geoffrey Firmin, late of His Majesty’s Navy, later still of His Majesty’s Consular Service, later still of — Suddenly it struck him that the Chinaman was asleep, that the children, the people had gone, that this would go on for ever; no one could stop the machine… It was over.