Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  ‘The risk… the fool,’ the Consul said, drinking habanero.

  Hugh’s troubles, in fact, were only beginning. The charros, the man in the sombrero, the child who’d bitten the first bull’s tail, the serape and rag hombres, even the little dog who came sneaking in again under the fence, were all closing in to increase them; all had their part.

  Yvonne was abruptly aware that there were black clouds climbing the sky from the north-east, a temporary ominous darkness that lent a sense of evening, thunder sounded in the mountains, a single grumble, metallic, and a gust of wind raced through the trees, bending them: the scene itself possessed a remote strange beauty; the white trousers and bright serapes of the men enticing the bull shining against the dark trees and lowering sky, the horses, transformed instantly into clouds of dust by their riders with their scorpion-tailed whips, who leaned far out of their bucket saddles to throw wildly, ropes anywhere, everywhere. Hugh’s impossible yet somehow splendid performance in the midst of it all, the boy, whose hair was blowing madly over his face, high up in the tree.

  The band struck up Guadalajara again in the wind, and the bull bellowed, his horns caught in the railings through which, helpless, he was being poked with sticks in what remained of his testicles, tickled with switches, a machete, and, after getting clear and re-entangled, a garden rake; dust too and dung was thrown in his red eyes; and now there seemed no end to this childish cruelty.

  ‘Darling,’ Yvonne whispered suddenly, ‘Geoffrey — look at me. Listen to me, I’ve been… there isn’t anything to keep us here any longer… Geoffrey…’

  The Consul, pale, without his dark glasses, was looking at her piteously; he was sweating, his whole frame was trembling. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No… No,’ he added, almost hysterically.

  ‘Geoffrey darling… don’t tremble… what are you afraid of? Why don’t we go away, now, tomorrow, today… what’s to stop us?’

  ‘No…’

  ‘Ah, how good you’ve been –’

  The Consul put his arm around her shoulders, leaning his damp head against her hair like a child, and for a moment it was as if a spirit of intercession and tenderness hovered over them, guarding, watching. He said wearily:

  ‘Why not. Let’s for Jesus Christ’s sweet sake get away. A thousand, a million miles away, Yvonne, anywhere, so long as it’s away. Just away. Away from all this. Christ, from this.’

  — into a wild sky full of stars at rising, and Venus and the golden moon at sunrise, and at noon blue mountains with snow and blue cold rough water — ‘Do you mean it?’

  ‘Do I mean it!’

  ‘Darling…’ It ran in Yvonne’s mind that all at once they were talking — agreeing hastily — like prisoners who do not have much time to talk; the Consul took her hand. They sat closely, hands clasped, with their shoulders touching. In the arena Hugh tugged’; the bull tugged, was free, but furious now, throwing himself at any place on the fence that reminded him of the pen he’d so prematurely left, and now, tired, persecuted beyond measure, finding it, hurling himself at the gate time after time with an incensed, regressive bitterness until, the little dog barking at his heels, he’d lost it again… Hugh rode the tiring bull round and round the ring.

  ‘This isn’t just escaping, I mean, let’s start again really, Geoffrey, really and cleanly somewhere. It could be like a rebirth.’

  ‘Yes. Yes it could.’

  ‘I think I know, I’ve got it all clear in my mind at last. Oh Geoffrey, at last I think I have.’

  ‘Yes, I think I know too.’

  Below them, the bull’s horns again involved the fence.

  ‘Darling…’ They would arrive at their destination by train, a train that wandered through an evening land of fields beside water, an arm of the Pacific —

  ‘Yvonne?’

  ‘Yes, darling?’

  ‘I’ve fallen down, you know… Somewhat.’

  ‘Never mind, darling.’

  ‘… Yvonne?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I love you… Yvonne?’

  ‘Oh, I love you too!’

  ‘My dear one… My sweetheart.’

  ‘Oh, Geoffrey. We could be happy, we could –’

  ‘Yes… We could.’

  — and far across the water, the little house, waiting —

  There was a sudden roar of applause followed by the accelerated clangour of guitars deploying downwind; the bull had pulled away from the fence and once more the scene was becoming animated: Hugh and the bull tussled for a moment in the center of a small fixed circle the others created by their exclusion from it within the arena; then the whole was veiled in dust; the pen gate to their left had broken open again, freeing all the other bulls, including the first one, who was probably responsible; they were charging out amid cheers, snorting, scattering in every direction.

  Hugh was eclipsed for a while, wrestling with his bull in a far corner: suddenly someone on that side screamed. Yvonne pulled herself from the Consul and stood up.

  ‘Hugh… Something’s happened.’

  The Consul stood up unsteadily. He was drinking from the habanero bottle, drinking, till he almost finished it. Then he said:

  ‘I can’t see. But I think it’s the bull.’

  It was still impossible to make out what was happening on the far side in the dusty confusion of horsemen, bulls, and ropes. Then Yvonne saw yes it was the bull, which, played out, was lying in the dust again. Hugh calmly walked off it, bowed to the cheering spectators, and, dodging other bulls, vaulted over the distant fence. Someone restored his hat to him.

  ‘Geoffrey –’ Yvonne began hurriedly, ‘I don’t expect you to — I mean — I know it’s going to be –’

  But the Consul was finishing the habanero. He left a little for Hugh, however.

  … The sky was blue again overhead as they went down into Tomalín; dark clouds still gathered behind Popocatepetl, their purple masses shot through with the bright late sunlight, that fell too on another little silver lake glittering cool, fresh, and inviting before them, Yvonne had neither seen on the way, nor remembered.

  ‘The Bishop of Tasmania,’ the Consul was saying, ‘or somebody dying of thirst in the Tasmanian desert, had a similar experience. The distant prospect of Cradle Mountain had consoled him a while, and then he saw this water… Unfortunately it turned out to be sunlight blazing on myriads of broken bottles.’

  The lake was a broken greenhouse roof belonging to El Jardín Xicotancatl : only weeds lived in the greenhouse.

  But their house was in her mind now as she walked: their home was real: Yvonne saw it at sunrise, in the long afternoons of south-west winds, and at nightfall she saw it in starlight and moonlight, covered with snow: she saw it from above, in the forest, with the chimney and the roof below her, and the foreshortened pier: she saw it from the beach rising above her, and she saw it, tiny, in the distance, a haven and a beacon against the trees, from the sea. It was only that the little boat of their conversation had been moored precariously; she could hear it banging against the rocks; later she would drag it up farther, where it was safe. — Why was it though, that right in the centre of her brain, there should be a figure of a woman having hysterics, jerking like a puppet and banging her fists upon the ground?

  ‘Forward to the Salón Ofelia,’ cried the Consul.

  A hot thundery wind launched itself at them, spent itself, and somewhere a bell beat out wild tripthongs.

  Their shadows crawled before them in the dust, slid down white thirsty walls of houses, were caught violently for a moment in an elliptical shade, the turning wrenched wheel of a boy’s bicycle.

  The spoked shadow of the wheel, enormous, insolent, swept away.

  Now their own shadows fell full across the square to the raised twin doors of the tavern, Todos Contentos y Yo También: under the doors they noticed what looked like the bottom of a crutch, someone leaving. The crutch didn’t move; its owner was having an argument at the door, a last drink perhaps. Then it disappeared: one
door of the cantina was propped back, something emerged.

  Bent double, groaning with the weight, an old lame Indian was carrying on his back, by means of a strap looped over his forehead, another poor Indian, yet older and more decrepit than himself. He carried the older man and his crutches, trembling in every limb under this weight of the past, he carried both their burdens.

  They all stood watching the Indian as he disappeared with the old man round a bend of the road, into the evening, shuffling through the grey white dust in his poor sandals…

  10

  ‘MESCAL,’ the Consul said, almost absent-mindedly. What had he said? Never mind. Nothing less than mescal would do. But it musn’t be a serious mescal, he persuaded himself. ‘No, Señor Cervantes,’ he whispered, ‘mescal, poquito.’

  Nevertheless, the Consul thought, it was not merely that he shouldn’t have, not merely that, no, it was more as if he had lost or missed something, or rather, not precisely lost, not necessarily missed. — It was as if, more, he were waiting for something, and then again, not waiting. — It was as if, almost, he stood (instead of upon the threshold of the Salón Ofélia, gazing at the calm pool where Yvonne and Hugh were about to swim) once more upon that black open station platform, with the cornflowers and meadowsweet growing on the far side, where after drinking all night he had gone to meet Lee Maitland returning from Virginia at 7.40 in the morning, gone, light-headed, light-footed, and in that state of being where Baudelaire’s angel indeed wakes, desiring to meet trains perhaps, but to meet no trains that stop, for in the angel’s mind are no trains that stop, and from such trains none descends, not even another angel, not even a fair-haired one, like Lee Maitland. — Was the train late? Why was he pacing the platform? Was it the second or third train from. Suspension Bridge — Suspension ! —the Station Master had said would be her train? What had the porter said? Could she be on this train? Who was she? It was impossible that Lee Maitland could be on any such train. And besides, all these trains were expresses. The railway lines went into the far distance uphill. A lone bird flapped across the lines far away. To the right of the level-crossing, at a little distance, stood a tree like a green exploding sea-mine, frozen. The dehydrated onion factory by the sidings awoke, then the coal companies. It’s a black business but we use you white: Daemon’s Coal… A delicious smell of onion soup in side-streets of Vavin impregnated the early morning. Grimed sweeps at hand trundled barrows, or were screening coal. Rows of dead lamps like erect snakes poised to strike along the platform. On the other side were cornflowers, dandelions, a garbage-can like a brazier blazing furiously all by itself among meadowsweet. The morning grew hot. And now, one after one, the terrible trains appeared on top of the raised horizon, shimmering now, in mirage: first the distant wail, then, the frightful spouting and spindling of black smoke, a sourceless towering pillar, motionless, then a round hull, as if not on the lines, as if going the other way, or as if stopping, as if not stopping, or as if slipping away over the fields, as if stopping; oh God, not stopping; downhill: clipperty-one clipperty-one: clipperty-two clipperty-two: clipperety-three clipperty-three: clipperty-four clipperty-four: alas, thank God, not stopping, and the lines shaking, the station flying, the coal dust, black bituminous: lickety-cut lickety-cut: and men another train, clipperty-one clipperty-one, coming in the other direction, swaying, whizzing, two feet above the lines, flying, clipperty-two, with one light burning against the morning, clipperty-three clipperty-three, a single useless strange eye, red-gold: trains, trains, trains, each driven by a banshee playing a shrieking nose-organ in D minor; lickety-cut lickety-cut lickety-cut. But not his train; and not her train. Still, the train would come doubtless–had the Station Master said the third or fourth train from which way? Which was north, west? And anyhow, whose north, whose west?… And he must pick flowers to greet the angel, the fair Virginian descending from the train. But the embankment flowers would not pick, spurting sap, sticky, the flowers were on the wrong end of the stalks (and he on the wrong side of the tracks), he nearly fell into the brazier, the cornflowers grew in the middle of their stalks, the stalks of meadowsweet — or was it queen’s lace? — were too long, his bouquet was a failure. And how to get back across the tracks — here Was a train now coming in the wrong direction again, clipperty-one clipperty-one, the lines unreal, not there, walking on air; or rails that did lead somewhere, to unreal life, or, perhaps, Hamilton, Ontario. — Fool, he was trying to walk along a single line, like a boy on the kerb : clipperty-two clipperty-two: clipperty-three clipperty-three: clipperty-four clipperty-four: clipperty-five clipperty-five: clipperty-six clipperty-six: clipperty-seven; clipperty seven — trains, trains, trains, trains, converging upon him from all sides of the horizon, each wailing for its demon lover. Life had no time to waste. Why, then, should it waste so much of everything else? With the dead cornflowers before him, at evening — the next moment — the Consul sat in the station tavern with a man who’d just tried to sell him three loose teeth. Was it tomorrow he was supposed to meet the train? What had the Station Master said? Had that been Lee Maitland herself waving at him frantically from the express? And who had flung the soiled bundle of tissue papers out of the window? What had he lost? Why was that idiot sitting there, in a dirty grey suit, and trousers baggy at the knees, with one bicycle clip, in his long, long baggy grey jacket, and grey cloth cap, and brown boots, with his thick fleshy grey face, from which three upper teeth, perhaps the very three teeth, were missing, all on one side, and thick neck, saying, every few minutes to anyone who came in: ‘I’m watching you.’ ‘I can see you…’ ‘You won’t escape me.’ — ‘If you only kept quiet, Claus, no one’d know you were crazy.’… That was the time too, in the storm country, when ‘the lightning is peeling the poles, Mr Firmin, and biting the wires, sir — you can taste it afterwards too, in the water, pure sulphur,’ — that at four o’clock each afternoon, preceded, out of the adjacent cemetery, by the gravedigger — sweating, heavy-footed, bowed, long-jawed and trembling, and carrying his special tools of death — he would come to this same tavern to meet Mr Quattras, the Negro bookie from Codrington, in the Barbados. ‘I’m a race-track man and I was brought up with whites, so the blacks don’t like me.’ Mr. Quattras, grinning and sad, feared deportation… But that battle against death had been won. And he had saved Mr Quattras. That very night, had it been? — with a heart like a cold brazier standing by a railway platform among meadowsweet wet with dew: they are beautiful and terrifying, these shadows of cars that sweep down fences, and sweep zebra-like across the grass path in the avenue of dark oaks under the moon: a single shadow, like an umbrella on rails, travelling down a picket fence; portents of doom, of the heart failing… Gone. Eaten up in reverse by night. And the moon gone. Cétait pendant I’horreur d’une profonde nuit. And the deserted cemetery in the starlight, forsaken by the gravedigger, drunk now, wandering home across the fields — ‘I can dig a grave in the three hours if they’ll let me,’ — the cemetery in the dappled moonlight of a single street lamp, the deep thick grass, the towering obelisk lost in the Milky Way. Jull, it said on the monument. What had the Station Master said? The dead. Do they sleep? Why should they, when we cannot? Mais tout dort, et I’armée, et les vents, et Neptune. And he had placed the poor ragged cornflowers reverently on a neglected grave… That was Oakville. — But Oaxaca or Oakville, what difference? Or between a tavern that opened at four o’clock in the afternoon, and one that opened (save on holidays) at four o’clock in the morning?…‘I ain’t telling you the word of a lie but once I had a whole vault dug up for $100 and sent to Cleveland!’

  A corpse will be transported by express…

  Oozing alcohol from every pore, the Consul stood at the open door of the Salón Ofelia. How sensible to have had a mescal. How sensible ! For it was the right, the sole drink to have under the circumstances. Moreover he had not only proved to himself he was not afraid of it, he was now fully awake, fully sober again, and well able to cope with anything that might come his way. But for
this slight continual twitching and hopping within his field of vision, as of innumerable sand fleas, he might have told himself he hadn’t had a drink for months. The only thing wrong with him, he was too hot.

  A natural waterfall crashing down into a sort of reservoir built on two levels — he found the sight less cooling than grotesquely suggestive of some organized ultimate sweat; the lower level made a pool where Hugh and Yvonne were still not yet swimming. The water on the turbulent upper level raced over an artificial falls beyond which, becoming a swift stream, it wound through thick jungle to spill down a much larger natural cascada out of sight. After that it dispersed, he recalled, lost its identity, dribbled, at various places, into the barranca. A path followed the stream through the jungle and at one place another path branched off to the right which went to Parián and the Farolito. Though the first path led you to rich cantina country too. God knows why. Once, perhaps, in hacienda days, Tomalín had held some irrigational importance. Then, after the burning of the sugar plantations, schemes, cleavable and lustrous, evolved for a spa, were abandoned sulphurously. Later, vague dreams of hydro-electric power hovered in the air, though nothing had been done about them. Parián was an even greater mystery. Originally settled by a scattering of those fierce forebears of Cervantes who had succeeded in making Mexico great even in her betrayal, the traitorous Tlaxcalans, the nominal capital of the state had been quite eclipsed by Quauhnahuac since the revolution, and while still an obscure administrative centre, no one had ever adequately explained its continued existence to him. One met people going there; few, now he thought about it, ever coming back. Of course they’d come back, he had himself: there was an explanation. But why didn’t a bus run there, or only grudgingly, and by a strange route? The Consul started.

  Near him lurked some hooded photographers. They were waiting by their tattered machines for the bathers to leave their boxes. Now two girls were squealing as they came down to the water in their ancient, hired costumes. Their escorts swaggered along a grey parapet dividing the pool from the rapids above, obviously deciding not to dive in, pointing for excuse up at a ladderless springboard, derelict, like some forgotten victim of tidal catastrophe, in a weeping pepper tree. After a time they rushed howling down a concrete incline into the pool. The girls bridled, but waded in after, tittering. Nervous gusts agitated the surface of the baths. Magenta clouds piled higher against the horizon, though overhead the sky remained clear.