Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  Hugh and Yvonne appeared, grotesquely costumed. They stood laughing on the brink of the pool — shivering, though the horizontal rays of the sun lay on them all with solid heat.

  The photographers took photographs.

  ‘Why,’ Yvonne called out, ‘this is like the Horseshoe Falls in Wales.’

  ‘Or Niagara’, observed the Consul, ‘circa 1900. What about a trip on the Maid of the Mist, seventy-five cents with oilskins.’

  Hugh turned round gingerly, hands on knees.

  ‘Yeah. To where the rainbow ends.’

  ‘The Cave of the Winds. The Cascada Sagrada.’

  There were, in fact, rainbows. Though without them the mescal (which Yvonne couldn’t of course have noticed) would have already invested the place with a magic. The magic was of Niagara Falls itself, not its elemental majesty, the honeymoon town; in a sweet, tawdry, even hoydenish sense of love that haunted this nostalgic spray-blown spot. But now the mescal struck a discord, then a succession of plaintive discords to which the drifting mists all seemed to be dancing, through the elusive subtleties of ribboned light, among the detached shreds of rainbows floating. It was a phantom dance of souls, baffled by these deceptive blends, yet still seeking permanence in the midst of what was only perpetually evanescent, or eternally lost. Or it was a dance of the seeker and his goal, here pursuing still the gay colours he did not know he had assumed, there striving to identify the finer scene of which he might never realize he was already a part…

  Dark coils of shadows lay in the deserted bar-room. They sprang at him.‘Otro mescalito. Un poquito.’ The voice seemed to come from above the counter where two wild yellow eyes pierced the gloom. The scarlet comb, the wattles, then the bronze green metallic feathers of some fowl standing on the bar, materialized, and Cervantes, rising playfully from behind it, greeted him with Tlaxcaltecan pleasure: ‘Muy fuerte. Muy terreebly,’ he cackled.

  Was this the face that launched five hundred ships, and betrayed Christ into being in the Western Hemisphere? But the bird appeared tame enough. Half past tree by the cock, that other fellow had said. And here was the cock. It was a fighting cock. Cervantes was training it for a fight in Tlaxcala, but the Consul couldn’t be interested. Cervantes’s cockerels always lost —he’d attended drunkenly one session in Cuautla; the vicious little man-made battles, cruel and destructive, yet somehow bedraggledly inconclusive, each brief as some hideously mismanaged act of intercourse, disgusted and bored him. Cervantes took the cock away. ‘Un bruto,’ he added.

  The subdued roar of the falls filled the room like a ship’s engine… Eternity… The Consul, cooler, leaned on the bar, staring into his second glass of the colourless ether-smelling liquid. To drink or not to drink. — But without mescal, he imagined, he had forgotten eternity, forgotten their world’s voyage, that the earth was a ship, lashed by the Horn’s tail, doomed never to make her Valparaiso. Or that it was like a golf ball, launched at Hercules’s Butterfly, wildly hooked by a giant out of an asylum window in hell. Or that it was a bus, making its erratic journey to Tomalín and nothing. Or that it was like —whatever it would be shortly, after the next mescal.

  Still, there had not yet been a ‘next’ mescal. The Consul stood, his hand as if part of the glass, listening, remembering… Suddenly he heard, above the roar, the clear sweet voices of the young Mexicans outside: the voice of Yvonne too, dear, intolerable — and different, after the first mescal — shortly to be lost.

  Why lost?… The voices were as if confused now with the blinding torrent of sunlight which poured across the open doorway, turning the scarlet flowers along the path into flaming swords. Even almost bad poetry is better than life, the muddle of voices might have been saying, as, now, he drank half his drink.

  The Consul was aware of another roaring, though it came from inside his head: clipperty-one: the American Express, swaying, bears the corpse through the green meadows. What is man but a little soul holding up a corpse? The soul! Ah, and did she not too have her savage and traitorous Tlaxcalans, her Cortés and her noches tristes, and, sitting within her innermost citadel in chains, drinking chocolate, her pale Moctezuma?

  The roaring rose, died away, rose again; guitar chords mingled with the shouting of many voices, calling, chanting, like native women in Kashmir, pleading, above the noise of the maelstrom: ‘Borrrrraaacho,’ they wailed. And the dark room with its flashing doorway rocked under his feet.

  ‘ – what do you think, Yvonne, if sometime we climb that baby, Popo I mean –’

  ‘Good heavens why ! Haven’t you had enough exercise for one –’

  ‘ – might be a good idea to harden your muscles first, try a few small peaks.’

  They were joking. But the Consul was not joking. His second mescal had become serious. He left it still unfinished on the counter, Señor Cervantes was beckoning from a far corner.

  A shabby little man with a black shade over one eye, wearing a black coat, but a beautiful sombrero with long gay tassels down the back, he seemed, however savage at heart, in almost as highly nervous a state as himself. What magnetism drew these quaking ruined creatures into his orbit? Cervantes led the way behind the bar, ascended two steps, and pulled a curtain aside. Poor lonely fellow, he wanted to show him round his house again. The Consul made the steps with difficulty. One small room occupied by a huge brass bedstead. Rusty rifles in a rack on the wall. In one corner, before a tiny porcelain Virgin, burned a little lamp. Really a sacramental candle, it diffused a ruby shimmer through its glass into the room, and cast a broad yellow flickering cone on the ceiling: the wick was burning low. ‘Mistair,’ Cervantes tremulously pointed to it. ‘Señor. My grand-father tell me never to let her go out.’ Mescal tears came to the Consul’s eyes, and he remembered sometime during last night’s debauch going with Dr Vigil to a church in Quauhnahuac he didn’t know, with sombre tapestries, and strange votive pictures, a compassionate Virgin floating in the gloom, to whom he prayed, with muddily beating heart, he might have Yvonne again. Dark figures, tragic and isolated, stood about the church, or were kneeling — only the bereaved and lonely went there. ‘She is the Virgin for those who have nobody with,’ the doctor told him, inclining his head towards the image. ‘And for mariners on the sea.’ Then he knelt in the dirt and placing his pistol — for Dr Vigil always went armed to Red Cross Balls — on the floor beside him, said sadly, ‘Nobody come here, only those who have nobody them with.’ Now the Consul made this Virgin the other who had answered his prayer and as they stood in silence before her, prayed again. ‘Nothing is altered and in spite of God’s mercy I am still alone. Though my suffering seems senseless I am still in agony. There is no explanation of my life.’ Indeed there was not, nor was this what he’d meant to convey. ‘Please let Yvonne have her dream — dream? — of a new life with me — please let me believe that all that is not an abominable self-deception,’ he tried… ‘Please let me make her happy, deliver me from this dreadful tyranny of self. I have sunk low. Let me sink lower still, that I may know the truth. Teach me to love again, to love life.’ That wouldn’t do either… ‘Where is love? Let me truly suffer. Give me back my purity, the knowledge of the Mysteries, that I have betrayed and lost. — Let me be truly lonely, that I may honestly pray. Let us be happy again somewhere, if it’s only together, if it’s only out of this terrible world. Destroy the world!’ he cried in his heart. The Virgin’s eyes were turned down in benediction, but perhaps she hadn’t heard. — The Consul had scarcely noticed that Cervantes had picked up one of the rifles. ‘I love hunting.’ After replacing it he opened the bottom drawer of a wardrobe which was squeezed in another corner. The drawer was chock full of books, including the History of Tlaxcala, in ten volumes. He shut it immediately. ‘I am an insignificant man, and I do not read these books to prove my insignificance,’ he said proudly. ‘Sí hombre,’ he went on, as they descended to the bar again, ‘as I told you, I obey my grandfather. He tell me to marry my wife. So I call my wife my mother.’ He produced a photograph of a child
lying in a coffin and laid it on the counter. ‘I drank all day.’

  ‘ – snow goggles and an alpenstock. You’d look awfully nice with –’

  ‘ – and my face all covered with grease. And a woollen cap pulled right down over my eyes –’

  Hugh’s voice came again, then Yvonne’s, they were dressing, and conversing loudly over the tops of their bathing boxes, not six feet away, beyond the wall:

  ‘ – hungry now, aren’t you?’

  ‘ – a couple of raisins and half a prune!’

  ‘ – not forgetting the limes –’

  The Consul finished his mescal: all a pathetic joke, of course, still, this plan to climb Popo, if just the kind of thing Hugh would have found out about before arriving, while neglecting so much else: yet could it be that the notion of climbing the volcano had somehow struck them as having the significance of a lifetime together? Yes, there it rose up before them, with all its hidden dangers, pitfalls, ambiguities, deceptions, portentous as what they could imagine for the poor brief self-deceived space of a cigarette was their own destiny — or was Yvonne simply, alas, happy?

  ‘ – where is it we start from, Amecameca –’

  ‘To prevent mountain sickness.’

  ‘ – though quite a pilgrimage at that, I gather! Geoff and I thought of doing it, years ago. You go on horseback first, to Tlamancas –’

  ‘ – at midnight, at the Hotel Fausto!’

  ‘What would you all prefer? Cauliflowers or pootootsies,’ the Consul, innocent, drinkless in a booth, greeted them, frowning; the supper at Emmaus, he felt, trying to disguise his distant mescal voice as he studied the bill of fare provided him by Cervantes. ‘Or extramapee syrup. Onans in garlic soup on egg…

  ‘Pep with milk? Or what about a nice Filete de Huachinango rebozado tartar con German friends?’

  Cervantes had handed Yvonne and Hugh each a menu but they were sharing hers: ‘Dr Moise von Schmidthaus’s special soup,’ Yvonne pronounced the words with gusto.

  ‘I think a pepped petroot would be about my mark,’ said the Consul, ‘after those onans.’

  ‘Just one,’ the Consul went on, anxious, since Hugh was laughing so loudly, for Cervantes’s feelings, ‘but please note the German friends. They even get into the filet.’

  ‘What about the tartar?’ Hugh inquired.

  ‘Tlaxcala!’ Cervantes, smiling, debated between them with trembling pencil. ‘sí, I am Tlaxcaltecan… You like eggs, señora. Stepped on eggs. Muy sabrosos. Divorced eggs? For fish, sliced of filet with peas. Vol-au-vent à la reine. Somersaults for the queen. Or you like poxy eggs, poxy in toast. Or veal liver tavernman? Pimesan chike chup? Or spectral chicken of the house? Youn’ pigeon. Red snappers with a fried tartar, you like?’

  ‘Ha, the ubiquitous tartar,’ Hugh exclaimed.

  ‘I think the spectral chicken of the house would be even more terrific, don’t you?’ Yvonne was laughing, the foregoing bawdry mostly over her head however, the Consul felt, and still she hadn’t noticed anything.

  ‘Probably served in its own ectoplasm.’

  ‘Sí, you like sea-sleeves in his ink? Or tunny fish? Or an exquisite mole? Maybe you like fashion melon to start? Fig mermelade? Brambleberry con crappe Gran Duc? Omele he sourpusse, you like? You like to drink first a gin fish? Nice gin fish? Silver fish? Sparkenwein?’

  ‘Madre?’ the Consul asked, ‘What’s this madre here? — You like to eat your mother, Yvonne?’

  ‘Badre, señor. Fish también. Yautepec fish. Muy sabroso. You like?’

  ‘What about it, Hugh — do you want to wait for the fish that dies?’

  ‘I’d like a beer.’

  ‘Cerveza, sí, Moctezuma? Dos Equis? Carta Blanca?’

  At last they all decided on clam chowder, scrambled eggs, the spectral chicken of the house, beans, and beer. The Consul at first had ordered only shrimps, and a hamburger sandwich but yielded to Yvonne’s: ‘Darling, won’t you eat more than that, I could eat a youn’ horse,’ and their hands met across the table.

  And then, for the second time that day, their eyes, in a long look, a long look of longing. Behind her eyes, beyond her, the Consul, an instant, saw Granada, and the train waltzing from Algeciras over the plains of Andalusia, chufferty pupperty, chufferty pupperty, the low dusty road from the station past the old bull-ring and the Hollywood bar and into the town, past the British Consulate and convent of Los Angeles up past the Washington Irving Hotel (You can’t escape me, I can see you, England must return again to New England for her values !), the old number seven train running there: evening, and the stately horse cabs clamber up through the gardens slowly, plod through the arches, mounting past where the eternal beggar is playing on a guitar with three strings, through the gardens, gardens, gardens everywhere, up, up, to the marvellous traceries of the Alhambra (which bored him) past the well where they had met, to the América Pensión; and up, up, now they were climbing themselves, up to the Generalife Gardens, and now from the Generalife Gardens to the Moorish tomb on the extreme summit of the hill; here they plighted their troth…

  The Consul dropped his eyes at last. How many bottles since then? In how many glasses, how many bottles had he hidden himself, since then alone? Suddenly he saw them, the bottles of aguardiente, of anís, of jerez, of Highland Queen, the glasses, a babel of glasses — towering, like the smoke from the train that day — built to the sky, then falling, the glasses toppling and crashing, falling downhill from the Generalife Gardens, the bottles breaking, bottles of Oporto, tinto, blanco, bottles of Pernod, Oxygénée, absinthe, bottles smashing, bottles cast aside, falling with a thud on the ground in parks, under benches, beds, cinema seats, hidden in drawers at Consulates, bottles of Calvados dropped and broken, or bursting into smithereens, tossed into garbage heaps, flung into the sea, the Mediterranean, the Caspian, the Carribbean, bottles floating in the ocean, dead Scotchmen on the Atlantic highlands — and now he saw them, smelt them, all, from the very beginning – bottles, bottles, bottles, and glasses, glasses, glasses, of bitter, of Dubonnet, of Falstaff, Rye, Johnny Walker, Vieux Whisky, blanc Canadien, the apéritifs, the digestifs, the demis, the dobles, the noch ein Herr Obèrs, the et glas Araks, the tusen taks, the bottles, the bottles, the beautiful bottles of tequila, and the gourds, gourds, gourds, the millions of gourds of beautiful mescal… The Consul sat very still. His conscience sounded muffled with the roar of water. It whacked and whined round the wooden frame-house with the spasmodic breeze, massed, with the thunderclouds over the trees, seen through the windows, its factions. How indeed could he hope to find himself to begin again when, somewhere, perhaps, in one of those lost or broken bottles, in one of those glasses, lay, for ever, the solitary clue to his identity? How could he go back and look now, scrabble among the broken glass, under the eternal bars, under the oceans?

  Stop! Look ! Listen! How drunk, or how drunkly sober undrunk, can you calculate you are now, at any rate? There had been those drinks at Señora Gregorio’s, no more than two certainly. And before? Ah, before! But later, in the bus, he’d only had that sip of Hugh’s habanero, then, at the bullthrowing, almost finished it. It was this that made him tight again, but tight in a way he didn’t like, in a worse way than in the square even, the tightness of impending unconsciousness, of seasickness, and it was from this sort of tightness — was it? — he’d tried to sober up by taking those mescalitos on the sly. But the mescal, the Consul realized, had succeeded in a manner somewhat outside his calculations. The strange truth was, he had another hangover. There was something in fact almost beautiful about the frightful extremity of that condition the Consul now found himself in. It was a hangover like a great dark ocean swell finally rolled up against a foundering steamer, by countless gales to windward that have long since blown themselves out. And from all this it was not so much necessary to sober up again, as once more to wake, yes, as to wake, so much as to —

  ‘Do you remember this morning, Yvonne, when we were crossing the river, there was a pulquería on the othe
r side, called La Sepultura or something, and there was an Indian sitting with his back against the wall, with his hat over his face, and his horse tethered to a tree, and there was a number seven branded on the horse’s hipbone –’

  ‘ – saddlebags –’

  … Cave of the Winds, seat of all great decisions, little Cythère of childhood, eternal library, sanctuary bought for a penny or nothing, where else could man absorb and divest himself of so much at the same time? The Consul was awake all right, but he was not, at the moment apparently, having dinner with the others, though their voices came plainly enough. The toilet was all of grey stone, and looked like a tomb — even the seat was cold stone. ‘It is what I deserve… It is what I am,’ thought the Consul. ‘Cervantes,’ he called, and Cervantes, surprisingly, appeared, half round the corner — there was no door to the stone tomb — with the fighting cock, pretending to struggle, under his arm, chuckling:

  ‘ – Tlaxcala!’

  ‘ – or perhaps it was on his rump–’

  After a moment, comprehending the Consul’s plight, Cervantes advised:

  ‘A stone, hombre, I bring you a stone.’

  ‘Cervantes!’

  ‘ – branded–’

  ‘… clean yourself on a stone, señor’

  — The meal had started well too, he remembered now, a minute or so since, despite everything, and: ‘Dangerous Clam Magoo,’ he had remarked at the onset of the chowder. ‘And our poor spoiling brains and eggs at home!’ had he not commiserated, at the apparition, swimming in exquisite mole, of the spectral chicken of the house? They had been discussing the man by the roadside and the thief in the bus, then: ‘Excusado.’ Ana this, this grey final Consulate, this Franklin Island of the soul, was the excusado. Set apart from the bathing places, convenient yet hidden from view, it was doubtless a purely Tlaxcaltecan fantasy, Cervantes’s own work, built to remind him of some cold mountain village in a mist. The Consul sat, fully dressed however, not moving a muscle. Why was he here? Why was he always more or less, here? He would have been glad of a mirror, to ask himself that question. But there was no mirror. Nothing but stone. Perhaps there was no time either, in this stone retreat. Perhaps this was the eternity that he’d been making so much fuss about, eternity already, of the Svidrigailov variety, only instead of a bath-house in the country full of spiders, here it turned out to be a stone monastic cell wherein sat — strange! —who but himself?