And yet not over. On terra firma the world continued to spin madly round; houses, whirligigs, hotels, cathedrals, cantinas, volcanoes: it was difficult to stand up at all. He was conscious of people laughing at him but, what was more surprising, of his possessions being restored to him, one by one. The child who had his notecase withdrew it from him playfully before returning it. No: she still had something in her other hand, a crumpled paper. The Consul thanked her for it firmly. Some telegram of Hugh’s. His stick, his glasses, his pipe, unbroken; yet not his favourite pipe; and no passport. Well, definitely he could not have brought it. Putting his other things back in his pockets he turned a corner, very unsteadily, and slumped down on a bench. He replaced his dark glasses, set his pipe in his mouth, crossed his legs, and, as the world gradually slowed down, assumed the bored expression of an English tourist sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens.
Children, he thought, how charming they were at heart. The very same kids who had besieged him for money, had now brought him back even the smallest of his small change and then, touched by his embarrassment, had scurried away without waiting for a reward. Now he wished he had given them something. The little girl had gone also. Perhaps this was her exercise book open on the bench. He wished he had not been so brusque with her, that she would come back, so that he could give her the book. Yvonne and he should have had children, would have had children, could have had children, should have…
In the exercise book he made out with difficulty:
Escruch is an old man. He lives in London. He lives alone in a large house. Scrooge is a rich man but he never gives to the poor. His is a miser. No one loves Scrooge and Scrooge loves no one. He has no friends. He is alone in the world. The man (el hombre): the house (la casa): the poor (los pobres): he lives (él vive): he gives (él da): he has no friends (él no tiene amigos): he loves (él ama): old (viejo): large (grande): no one (nadie): rich (rico): Who is Scrooge? Where does he live? Is Scrooge rich or poor? Has he friends? How does he live? Alone. World. On.
At last the earth had stopped spinning with the motion of the Infernal Machine. The last house was still, the last tree rooted again. It was seven minutes past two by his watch. And he was cold stone sober. How horrible was the feeling. The Consul closed the exercise book: bloody old Scrooge; how queer to meet him here!
— Gay looking soldiers, grimy as sweeps, strolled up and down the avenues with a jaunty unmilitary gait. Their officers, smartly uniformed, sat on benches, leaning forward over their swagger canes as if petrified by remote strategical thoughts. An Indian carrier with a towering load of chairs loped along the Avenida Guerrero. A madman passed, wearing, in the manner of a lifebelt, an old bicycle tyre. With a nervous movement he continually shifted the injured tread round his neck. He muttered to the Consul, but waiting neither for reply nor reward, took off the tyre and flung it far ahead of him towards a booth, then followed unsteadily, stuffing something in his mouth from a tin bait jar. Picking up the tyre he flung it far ahead again, repeating this process, to the irreducible logic of which he appeared eternally committed, until out of sight.
The Consul felt a clutch at his heart and half rose. He had caught sight of Hugh and Yvonne again at a booth; she was buying tortilla from an old woman. While the woman plastered the tortilla for her with cheese and tomato sauce, a touchingly dilapidated little policeman, doubtless one on strike, with cap askew, in soiled baggy trousers, leggings, and a coat several sizes too large for him, tore off a piece of lettuce and, with a consummately courteous smile, handed it to her. They were having a splendid time, it was obvious. They ate their tortillas, grinning at each other as the sauce dripped from their fingers; now Hugh had brought out his handkerchief; he was wiping a smear from Yvonne’s cheek, while they roared with laughter, in which the policeman joined. What had happened to their plot now, their plot to get him away? Never mind. The clutch at his heart had become a cold iron grip of persecution which had been stayed only by a certain relief; for how, had Jacques communicated his little anxieties to them, would they now be here, laughing? Still, one never knew; and a policeman was a policeman, even if on strike, and friendly, and the Consul was more afraid of the police than death. He placed a small stone upon the child’s exercise book, leaving it on the bench, and dodged behind a stall to avoid them. He got a glimpse through the boards of the man still half-way up the slippery pole, neither near enough to the top nor the bottom to be certain of reaching either in comfort, avoided a huge turtle dying in two parallel streams of blood on the pavement outside a sea-food restaurant, and entered E1 Bosque with a steady gait, as once before, similarly obsessed, at a run: there was no sign of the bus yet; he had twenty minutes, probably more.
The Terminal Cantina El Bosque, however, seemed so dark that even with his glasses off he had to stop dead…Mi ritrovai in una bosca oscura— or selva} No matter. The Cantina was well named, ‘The Boskage’. This darkness, though, was associated in his mind with velvet curtains, and there they were, behind the shadowy bar, velvet or velveteen curtains, too dirty and full of dust to be black, partially screening the entrance to the back room, which one could never be sure was private. For some reason the fiesta had not overflowed in here; the place — a Mexican relative of the English ‘Jug and Bottle’, chiefly dedicated to those who drank ‘off’ the premises, in which there was only one spindly iron table and two stools at the bar, and which, facing east, became progressively darker as the sun, to those who noticed such things, climbed higher into the sky — was deserted, as usual at this hour. The Consul groped his way forward. ‘Señora Gregorio,’ he called softly, yet with an agonized impatient quaver in his voice. It had been difficult to find his voice at all; he now needed another drink badly. The word echoed through the back of the house; Gregorio; there was no answer. He sat down, while gradually the shapes about him became more clearly defined, shapes of barrels behind the bar, of bottles. Ah, the poor turtle! — The thought struck at a painful tangent. —There were big green barrels of jerez, habanero, Catalán, parras, zarzamora, málaga, durazno, membrillo, raw alcohol at a peso a litre, tequila, mescal, rumpope. As he read these names and, as if it were a dreary dawn outside, the cantina grew lighter to his eyes, he heard voices in his ears again, a single voice above the muted roar of the fair: ‘Geoffrey Firmin, this is what it is like to die, just this and no more, an awakening from a dream in a dark place, in which, as you see, are present the means of escape from yet another nightmare. But the choice is up to you. You are not invited to use those means of escape; it is left up to your judgement; to obtain them it is necessary only to –’ ‘Señora Gregorio,’ he repeated, and the echo came back: ‘Orio.’
In one corner of the bar someone had apparently once begun a small mural, aping the Great Mural in the Palace, two or three figures only, peeling and inchoate Tlahuicans. — There was the sound of slow, dragging footsteps from behind; the widow appeared, a little old woman wearing an unusually long and shabby rustling black dress. Her hair that he recalled as grey seemed to have been recently hennaed, or dyed red, and though it hung untidily in front, it was twisted up at the back into a Psyche knot. Her face, which was beaded with perspiration, evinced the most extraordinary waxen pallor; she looked careworn, wasted with suffering, yet at the sight of the Consul her tired eyes gleamed, kindling her whole expression to one of wry amusement in which there appeared also both a determination and a certain weary expectancy. ‘Mescal posseebly,’ she said, in a queer, chanting half-bantering tone, ‘Mescal imposseebly.’ But she made no move to draw the Consul a drink, perhaps because of his debt, an objection he immediately disposed of by laying a tostón on the counter. She smiled almost slyly as she edged towards the mescal barrel.
‘No, tequila, por favor,’ he said.
‘Un obsequio’ — she handed him the tequila. ‘Where do you laugh now?’
‘I still laugh in the Calle Nicaragua, cincuenta dos,’ the Consul replied, smiling. ‘You mean “live”, Señora Gregorio, not “laugh”, con permiso.’
‘Remember,’ Señora Gregorio corrected him gently, slowly, ‘remember my English. Well, so it is,’ she sighed, drawing a small glass of málaga for herself from the barrel chalked with that name. ‘Here’s to your love. What’s my names?’ She pushed towards him a saucer filled with salt that was speckled with orange-coloured pepper.
‘La mismo’ The Consul drank the tequila down. ‘Geoffrey Firmin.’
Señora Gregorio brought him a second tequila; for a time they regarded one another without speaking. ‘So it is,’ she repeated at last, sighing once more; and there was pity in her voice for the Consul. ‘So it is. You must take it as it come. It can’t be helped.’
‘No, it can’t be helped.’
‘If you har your wife you would lose all things in that love,’ Señora Gregorio said, and the Consul, understanding that somehow this conversation was being taken up where it had been left off weeks before, probably at the point where Yvonne had abandoned him for the seventh time that evening, found himself not caring to change the basis of shared misery on which their relationship rested — for Gregorio had really abandoned her before he died — by informing her his wife had come back, was indeed, perhaps, not fifty feet away. ‘Both minds is occupied in one thing, so you can’t lose it,’ she continued sadly.
‘Sí,’ said the Consul.
‘So it is. If your mind is occupied with all things, then you never lose your mind. Your minds, your life — your everything in it. Once when I was a girl I never used to think I live like I laugh now. I always used to dream about kernice dreams. Nice domes, nice clothes, nice hairts — “Everything is good for me just now” it was one time, theatres, but everything — now, I don’t think of but nothing but trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble; and trouble comes… So it is.’
‘Sí, Señora Gregorio.’
‘Of course I was a kernice girl from home,’ she was saying. ‘This –’ she glanced contemptuously round the dark little bar, ‘was never in my mind. Life changes, you know, you can never drink of it.’
‘Not “drink of it”, Señora Gregorio, you mean “think of it”.’
‘Never drink of it. Oh, well,’ she said, pouring out a litre of raw alcohol for a poor noseless peon who had entered silently and was standing in a corner, ‘a kernice life among kernice people and now what?’
Señora Gregorio shuffled off into the back room, leaving the Consul alone. He sat with his second large tequila untouched for some minutes. He imagined himself drinking it yet had not the will to stretch out his hand to take it, as if it were something once long and tediously desired but which, an overflowing cup suddenly within reach, had lost all meaning. The cantina’s emptiness, and a strange ticking like that of some beetle, within that emptiness, began to get on his nerves; he looked at his watch: only seventeen minutes past two. This was where the Tick was coming from. Again he imagined himself taking the drink: again his will failed him. Once the swing door opened, someone glanced round quickly to satisfy himself, went out: was that Hugh, Jacques? Whoever it was had seemed to possess the features of both, alternately. Somebody else entered and, though the next instant the Consul felt this was not the case, went right through into the back room, peering round furtively. A starving pariah dog with the appearance of having lately been skinned had squeezed itself in after the last man; it looked up at the Consul with beady, gentle eyes. Then, thrusting down its poor wrecked dinghy of a chest, from which raw withered breasts drooped, it began to bow and scrape before him. Ah, the ingress of the animal kingdom I Earlier it had been the insects; now these were closing in upon him again, these animals, these people without ideas: ‘Dispense usted, por Dios,’ he whispered to the dog, then wanting to say something kind, added, stooping, a phrase read or heard in youth or childhood: ‘For God sees how timid and beautiful you really are, and the thoughts of hope that go with you like little white birds –’
The Consul stood up and suddenly declaimed to the dog:
‘Yet this day, pichicho, shalt thou be with me in –’ But the dog hopped away in terror on three legs and slunk under the door.
The Consul finished his tequila in one gulp; he went to the counter. ‘Señora Gregorio,’ he called; he waited, casting his eyes about the cantina, which seemed to have grown very much lighter. And the echo came back: ‘Crio.’ — Why, the mad pictures of the wolves ! He had forgotten they were here. The materialized pictures, six or seven of considerable length, completed, in the defection of the muralist, the decoration of El Bosque. They were precisely the same in every detail. All showed the same sleigh being pursued by the same pack of wolves. The wolves hunted the occupants of the sleigh the entire length of the bar and at intervals right round the room, though neither sleigh nor wolves budged an inch in the process. To what red tartar, oh mysterious beast? Incongruously, the Consul was reminded of Rostov’s wolf hunt in War and Peace— ah, that incomparable party afterwards at the old uncle’s, the sense of youth, the gaiety, the love! At the same time he remembered having been told that wolves never hunted in packs at all. Yes, indeed, how many patterns of life were based on kindred misconceptions, how many wolves do we feel on our heels, while our real enemies go in sheepskin by? ‘Señora Gregorio,’ he said again, and saw that the widow was returning, dragging her feet, though it was perhaps too late, there would not be time for another tequila.
He held out his hand, then dropped it — Good God, what had come over him? For an instant he’d thought he was looking at his own mother. Now he found himself struggling with his tears, that he wanted to embrace Señora Gregorio, to cry like a child, to hide his face on her bosom. ‘Adiós,’ he said, and seeing a tequila on the counter just the same, he drank it rapidly.
Señora Gregorio took his hand and held it. ‘Life changes, you know,’ she said, gazing at him intently. ‘You can never drink of it. I think I’see you with your esposa again soon. I see you laughing together in some kernice place where you laugh.’ She smiled. ‘Far away. In some kernice place where all those troubles you har now will har –’ The Consul started: what was Señora Gregorio saying? ‘Adiós she added in Spanish, ‘I have no house only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Sank you.’
‘Not sank you, Señora Gregorio, thank you.’
‘Sank you.’
The coast looked clear: yet when the Consul pushed out cautiously through the jalousie doors he almost fell over Dr Vigil. Fresh and impeccable in his tennis clothes, he was hurrying by, accompanied by Mr Quincey and the local cinema manager, Señor Bustamente. The Consul drew back, fearful now of Vigil, of Quincey, of being seen coming out of the cantina, but they appeared not to notice him as they glided past the Tomalin camión, which had just arrived, their elbows working like jockeys, chattering unceasingly. He suspected their conversation to be entirely about him; what could be done with him, they were asking, how many drinks had he put away at the Gran Baile last night? Yes, there they were, even going towards the Bella Vista itself, to get a few more ‘opinions’ about him. They flitted here and there, vanished…
Es inevitable la muerte del Papa.
8
DOWNHILL…
‘Let in the clutch, step on the gas,’ the driver threw a smile over his shoulder. ‘Sure, Mike,’ he went on Irish-American for them.
The bus, a 1918 Chevrolet, jerked forward with a noise like startled poultry. It wasn’t full, save for the Consul, who spread himself, in a good mood, drunk-sober-uninhibited; Yvonne sat neutral but smiling: they’d started anyhow. No wind; yet a gust lifted the awnings along the street. Soon they were rolling in a heavy sea of chaotic stone. They passed tall hexagonal stands pasted with advertisements for Yvonne’s cinema: Las Manos de Orlac. Elsewhere posters for the same film showed a murderer’s hands laced with blood.
Under the Volcano Page 28
