Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  ‘Now you see what sort of creatures we are, Hugh. Eating things alive. That’s what we do. How can you have much respect for mankind, or any belief in the social struggle?’

  Despite this, Hugh was apparently saying, remotely, calmly, after a while: ‘I once saw a Russian film about a revolt of some fishermen… A shark was netted with a shoal of other fish and killed… This struck me as a pretty good symbol of the Nazi system which, even though dead, continues to go on swallowing live struggling men and women!’

  ‘It would do just as well for any other system… Including the Communist system.’

  ‘See here, Geoffrey –’

  ‘See here, old bean,’ the Consul heard himself saying, ‘to have against you Franco, or Hitler, is one thing, but to have Actinium, Argon, Beryllium, Dysprosium, Nobium, Palladium, Praseodymium –’

  ‘Look here, Geoff –’

  ‘ – Ruthenium, Samarium, Silicon, Tantalum, Tellurium, Terbium, Thorium –’

  ‘See here –’

  ‘ – Thulium, Titanium, Uranium, Vanadium, Virginium, Xenon, Ytterbium, Yttrium, Zirconium, to say nothing of Europium and Germanium — ahip! — and Columbium! — against you, and all the others, is another.’ The Consul finished his beer.

  Thunder suddenly sprang again outside with a clap and bang, slithering.

  Despite which Hugh seemed to be saying, calmly, remotely, ‘See here, Geoffrey. Let’s get this straight once and for all. Communism to me is not, essentially, whatever its present phase, a system at all. It is simply a new spirit, something which one day may or may not seem as natural as the air we breathe. I seem to have heard that phrase before. What I have to say isn’t original either. In fact were I to say it five years from now it would probably be downright banal. But to the best of my knowledge, no one has yet called in Matthew Arnold to the support of their argument. So I am going to quote Matthew Arnold for you, partly because you don’t think I am capable of quoting Matthew Arnold. But that’s where you’re quite wrong. My notion of what we call –’

  ‘Cervantes !’

  ‘ – is a spirit in the modern world playing a part analogous to that of Christianity in the old. Matthew Arnold says, in his essay on Marcus Aurelius –’

  ‘Cervantes, por Christ sake –’

  ‘“Far from this, the Christianity which those emperors aimed at repressing was, in their conception of it, something philosophically contemptible, politically subversive, and morally abominable. As men they sincerely regarded it much as well-conditioned people, with us, regard Mormonism: as rulers, they regarded it much as liberal statesmen, with us, regard the Jesuits. A kind of Mormonism —”’

  ‘ –’

  ‘“— constituted as a vast secret society, with obscure aims of political and social subversion, was what Antoninus Pius —”’

  ‘Cervantes!’

  ‘“The inner and moving cause of the representation lay, no doubt, in this, that Christianity was a new spirit in the Roman world, destined to act in that world as its dissolvent; and it was inevitable that Christianity —”’

  ‘Cervantes,’ the Consul interrupted, ‘you are Oaxaqueñian?’

  ‘No, señor. I am Tlaxcalan, Tlaxcala.’

  ‘You are,’ said the Consul. ‘Well, hombre, and are there not stricken in years trees in Tlaxcala?’

  ‘Sí, sí, hombre. Stricken in years trees. Many trees.’

  ‘And Ocotlán. Santuario de Ocotlán. Is not that in Tlaxcala?’

  ‘Sí, sí, señor, si, Santuario de Ocotlán,’ said Cervantes, moving back toward the counter.

  ‘And Matlalcuayatl.’

  ‘Sí, hombre. Matlalcuayatl… Tlaxcala.’

  ‘And lagoons?’

  ‘Sí… many lagoons.’

  ‘And are there not many web-footed fowl in these lagoons?’

  ‘Sí, señor. Muy fuerte… In Tlaxcala.’

  ‘Well then,’ said the Consul, turning round on the others, ‘what’s wrong with my plan? What’s wrong with all you people? Aren’t you going to Vera Cruz after all, Hugh?’

  Suddenly a man started to play the guitar in the doorway angrily, and once again Cervantes came forward: ‘Black Flowers is the name of that song.’ Cervantes was about to beckon the man to come in. ‘It say: I suffer, because your lips say only lies and they have death in a kiss.’

  ‘Tell him to go away,’ the Consul said. ‘Hugh — cuántos trenes hay el día para Vera Cruz?’

  The guitar player changed his tune:

  ‘This is a farmer’s song,’ said Cervantes, ‘for oxen.’

  ‘Oxen, we’ve had enough oxen for one day. Tell him to go far away, por favor,’ said the Consul. ‘My God, what’s wrong with you people? Yvonne, Hugh… It’s a perfectly good idea, a most practical idea. Don’t you see it’ll kill two birds with one stone — a stone, Cervantes !… Tlaxcala is on the way to Vera Cruz, Hugh, the true cross… This is the last time we’ll be seeing you, old fellow. For all I know… We could have a celebration. Come on now, you can’t lie to me, I’m watching you… Change at San Martín Texmelucán in both ways…’

  Thunder, single, exploded in mid-air just outside the door and Cervantes came hurrying forward with the coffee: he struck matches for their cigarettes: ‘La superstición dice’, he smiled, striking a fresh one for the Consul, ‘que cuando tres amigos prenden su cigarro con la misma cerilla, el último muere antes que los otros dos.’

  ‘You have that superstition in Mexico?’ Hugh asked.

  ‘Sí, señor,’ Cervantes nodded, ‘the fantasy is that when three friends take fire with the same match, the last die before the other two. But in war it is impossible because many soldiers have only one match.’

  ‘Feurstick,’ said Hugh, shielding yet another light for the Consul. ‘The Norwegians have a better name for matches.’

  — It was growing darker, the guitar player, it seemed, was sitting in the corner, wearing dark glasses, they had missed this bus back, if they’d meant to take it, the bus that was going to take them home to Tlaxcala, but it seemed to the Consul that, over the coffee, he had, all at once, begun to talk soberly, brilliantly, and fluently again, that he was, indeed, in top form, a fact he was sure was making Yvonne, opposite him, happy once more. Feurstick, Hugh’s Norwegian word, was still in his head. And the Consul was taking about the Indo-Aryans, the Iranians and the sacred fire, Agni, called down from heaven, with his firesticks, by the priest. He was talking of soma, Amrita, the nectar of immortality, praised in one whole book of the Rig Veda — bhang, which was, perhaps, much the same thing as mescal itself, and, changing the subject here, delicately, he was talking of Norwegian architecture, or rather how much architecture, in Kashmir, was almost, so to speak, Norwegian, the Hamadan mosque for instance, wooden, with its tall tapering spires, and ornaments pendulous from the eaves. He was talking of the Borda gardens in Quauhnahuac, opposite Bustamente’s cinema, and how much they, for some reason, always reminded him of the terrace of the Nishat Bagh. The Consul was talking about the Vedic Gods, who were not properly anthropomorphized, whereas Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl… Or were they not? In any event the Consul, once more, was talking about the sacred fire, the sacrificial fire, of the stone soma press, the sacrifices of cakes and oxen and horses, the priest chanting from the Veda, how the drinking rites, simple at first, became more and more complicated as time went on, the ritual having to be carried out with meticulous care, since one slip — tee hee!– would render the sacrifice invalid. Soma, bhang, mescal, ah yes, mescal, he was back upon that subject again, and now from it, had departed almost as cunningly as before. He was talking of the immolation of wives, and the fact that, at the time he was referring to, in Taxila, at the mouth of the Khyber Pass, the widow of a childless man might contract a Levirate marriage with her brother-in-law. The Consul found himself claiming to see an obscure relation, apart from any purely verbal one, between Taxila and Tlaxcala itself: for when that great pupil of Aristotle’s — Yvonne — Alexander, arrived in Taxila, had he not Corte
z-like already been in communication with Ambhi, Taxila’s king, who likewise had seen in an alliance with a foreign conqueror, an excellent chance of undoing a rival, in this case not Moctezuma but the Paurave monarch, who ruled the country between the Jhelma and the Chenab? Tlaxcala… The Consul was talking, like Sir Thomas Browne, of Archimedes, Moses, Achilles, Methuselah, Charles V, and Pontius Pilate. The Consul was talking furthermore of Jesus Christ, or rather of Yus Asaf who, according to the Kashmiri legend, was Christ — Christ, who had, after being taken down from the cross, wandered to Kashmir in search of the lost tribes of Israel, and died there, in Srinagar —

  But there was a slight mistake. The Consul was not talking. Apparently not. The Consul had not uttered a single word. It was all an illusion, a whirling cerebral chaos, out of which, at last, at long last, at this very instant, emerged, rounded and complete, order:

  ‘The act of a madman or a drunkard, old bean,’ he said, ‘or of a man labouring under violent excitement seems less free and more inevitable to the one who knows the mental condition of the man who performed the action, and more free and less inevitable to the one who does not know it.’

  It was like a piece on a piano, it was like that little bit in seven flats, on the black keys — it was what, more or less, he now remembered, he’d gone to the excusado in the first place in order to remember, to bring off pat — it was perhaps also like Hugh’s quotation from Matthew Arnold on Marcus Aurelius, like that little piece one had learned, so laboriously, years ago, only to forget whenever one particularly wanted to play it, until one day one got drunk in such a way that one’s fingers themselves recalled the combination and, miraculously, perfectly, unlocked the wealth of melody; only here Tolstoy had supplied no melody.

  ‘What?’ Hugh said.

  ‘Not at all. I always come back to the point, and take a thing up where it has been left off. How else should I have maintained myself so long as Consul? When we have absolutely no understanding of the causes of an action — I am referring, in case your mind has wandered to the subject of your own conversation, to the events of the afternoon — the causes, whether vicious or virtuous or what not, we ascribe, according to Tolstoy, a greater element of free will to it. According to Tolstoy then, we should have had less reluctance in interfering than we did…

  ‘“All cases without exception in which our conception of free will and necessity varies depend on three considerations”,’ the Consul said. ‘You can’t get away from it.

  ‘Moreover, according to Tolstoy,’ he went on, ‘before we pass judgement on the thief — if thief he were — we would have to ask ourselves: what were his connexions with other thieves, ties of family, his place in time, if we know even that, his relation to the external world, and to the consequences leading to the act… Cervantes!’

  ‘Of course we’re taking time to find out all this while the poor fellow just goes on dying in the road,’ Hugh was saying. ‘How did we get on to this? No one had an opportunity to interfere till after the deed was done. None of us saw him steal the money, to the best of my knowledge. Which crime are you talking about anyway, Geoff? If other crime there were… And the fact that we did nothing to stop the thief is surely beside the point that we did nothing really to save the man’s life.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said the Consul, ‘I was talking about interference in general, I think. Why should we have done anything to save his life? Hadn’t he a right to die, if he wanted to?… Cervantes — mescal — no, parras, por favor… Why should anybody interfere with anybody? Why should anybody have interfered with the Tlaxcalans, for example, who were perfectly happy by their own stricken in years trees, among the web-footed fowl in the first lagoon –’

  ‘What web-footed fowl in what lagoon?’

  ‘Or more specifically perhaps, Hugh, I was talking of nothing at all… Since supposing we settled anything — ah, ignoratio elenchi, Hugh, that’s what. Or the fallacy of supposing a point proved or disproved by argument which proves or disproves something not at issue. Like these wars. For it seems to me that almost everywhere in the world these days there has long since ceased to be anything fundamental to man at issue at all… Ah, you people with ideas!

  ‘Ah, ignoratio elenchil… All this, for instance, about going to fight for Spain… and poor little defenceless China! Can’t you see there’s a sort of determinism about the fate of nations? They all seem to get what they deserve in the long run.’

  ‘Well.…’

  A gust of wind moaned round the house with an eerie sound like a northener prowling among the tennis nets in England, jingling the rings.

  ‘Not exactly original.’

  ‘Not long ago it was poor little defenceless Ethiopia. Before that, poor little defenceless Flanders. To say nothing of course of the poor little defenceless Belgian Congo. And tomorrow it will be poor little defenceless Latvia. Or Finland. Or Piddledee-dee. Or even Russia. Read history. Go back a thousand years. What is the use of interfering with its worthless stupid course? Like a barranca, a ravine, choked up with refuse, that winds through the ages, and peters out in a — What in God’s name has all the heroic resistance put up by poor little defenceless peoples all rendered defenceless in the first place for some well-calculated and criminal reason –’

  ‘Hell, I told you that–’

  ‘ – to do with the survival of the human spirit? Nothing whatsoever. Less than nothing. Countries, civilizations, empires, great hordes perish for no reason at all, and their soul and meaning with them, that one old man perhaps you never heard of, and who never heard of them, sitting boiling in Timbuktu, proving the existence of the mathematical correlative of ignoratio elenchi with obsolete instruments, may survive.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Hugh.

  ‘Just go back to Tolstoy’s day — Yvonne, where are you going?’

  ‘Out.’

  ‘Then it was poor little defenceless Montenegro. Poor little defenceless Serbia. Or back a little farther still, Hugh, to your Shelley’s, when it was poor little defenceless Greece — Cervantes! — As it will be again, of course. Or to Boswell’s — poor little defenceless Corsica! Shades of Paoli and Monboddo. Apple-squires and fairies strong for freedom. As always. And Rousseau — not douanier — knew he was talking nonsense –’

  ‘I should like to know what the bloody hell it is you imagine you’re talking!’

  ‘Why can’t people mind their own damned business!’

  ‘Or say what they mean?’

  ‘It was something else, I grant you. The dishonest mass rationalization of motive, justification of the common pathological itch. Of the motives for interference; merely a passion for fatality half the time. Curiosity. Experience — very natural… But nothing constructive at bottom, only acceptance really, a piddling contemptible acceptance of the state of affairs that flatters one into feeling thus noble or useful!’

  ‘But my God it’s against such a state of affairs that people like the Loyalists –’

  ‘But with calamity at the end of it! There must be calamity because otherwise the people who did the interfering would have to come back and cope with their responsibilities for a change–’

  ‘Just let a real war come along and then see how bloodthirsty chaps like you are !’

  ‘Which would never do. Why all you people who talk about going to Spain and fighting for freedom — Cervantes! — should learn by heart what Tolstoy said about that kind of thing in War and Peace, that conversation with the volunteers in the train –’

  ‘But anyhow that was in –’

  ‘Where the first volunteer, I mean, turned out to be a bragging degenerate obviously convinced after he’d been drinking that he was doing something heroic — what are you laughing at, Hugh?’

  ‘It’s funny.’

  ‘And the second was a man who had tried everything and been a failure in all of them. And the third –’ Yvonne abruptly returned and the Consul, who had been shouting, slightly lowered his voice, ‘an artillery man, was the only one
who struck him at first favourably. Yet what did he turn out to be? A cadet who’d failed in his examinations. All of them, you see, misfits, all good for nothing, cowards, baboons, meek wolves, parasites, every man jack of them, people afraid to face their own responsibilities, fight their own fight, ready to go anywhere, as Tolstoy well perceived –’

  ‘Quitters?’ Hugh said. ‘Didn’t Katamasov or whoever he was believe that the action of those volunteers was nevertheless an expression of the whole soul of the Russian people? — Mind you, I appreciate that a diplomatic corps which merely remains in San Sebastian hoping Franco will win quickly instead of returning to Madrid to tell the British Government the truth of what’s really going on in Spain can’t possibly consist of quitters!’

  ‘Isn’t your desire to fight for Spain, for fiddlededee, for Timbuktu, for China, for hypocrisy, for bugger all, for any hokery pokery that a few moose-headed idiot sons choose to call freedom — of course there is nothing of the sort, really –’

  ‘If –’

  ‘If you’ve really read War and Peace, as you claim you have, why haven’t you the sense to profit by it, I repeat?’

  ‘At any rate,’ said Hugh, ‘I profited by it to the extent of being able to distinguish it from Anna Karenina.’

  ‘Well, Anna Karenina then…’ the Consul paused. ‘Cervantes !’ — and Cervantes appeared, with his fighting cock, evidently fast asleep, under his arm. ‘Muy fuerte,’ he said, ‘muy terreebly,’ passing through the room, ‘un bruto.’ — ‘But as I implied, you bloody people, mark my words, you don’t mind your own business any better at home, let alone in foreign countries. Geoffrey darling, why don’t you stop drinking, it isn’t too late —that sort of thing. Why isn’t it? Did I say so?’ What was he saying? The Consul listened to himself almost in surprise at this sudden cruelty, this vulgarity. And in a moment it was going to get worse. ‘I thought it was all so splendidly and legally settled that it was. It’s only you that insists it isn’t.’