Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  ‘Oh Geoffrey –’

  — Was the Consul saying this? Must he say it? — It seemed he must. ‘For all you know it’s only the knowledge that it most certainly is too late that keeps me alive at all… You’re all the same, all of you, Yvonne, Jacques, you, Hugh, trying to interfere with other people’s lives, interfering, interfering — why should anyone have interfered with young Cervantes here, for example, given him an interest in cock fighting? — and that’s precisely what’s bringing about disaster in the world, to stretch a point, yes, quite a point, all because you haven’t got the wisdom and the simplicity and the courage, yes, the courage, to take any of the, to take –’

  ‘See here, Geoffrey –’

  ‘What have you ever done for humanity, Hugh, with all your oratio obliqua about the capitalist system, except talk, and thrive on it, until your soul stinks?’

  ‘Shut up, Geoff, for the love of Mike!’

  ‘For that matter, both your souls stink! Cervantes!’

  ‘Geoffrey, please sit down,’ Yvonne seemed, to have said wearily, ‘you’re making such a scene.’

  ‘No, I’m not, Yvonne. I’m talking very calmly. As when I ask you, what have you ever done for anyone but yourself?’ Must the Consul say this? He was saying, had said it: ‘Where are the children I might have wanted? You may suppose I might have wanted them. Drowned. To the accompaniment of the rattling of a thousand douche bags. Mind you, you don’t pretend to love “humanity”, not a bit of it! You don’t even need an illusion, though you do have some illusions unfortunately, to help you deny the only natural and good function you have. Though on second thoughts it might be better if women had no functions at all!’

  ‘Don’t be a bloody swine, Geoffrey.’ Hugh rose.

  ‘Stay where you bloody are,’ ordered the Consul. ‘Of course I see the romantic predicament you two are in. But even if Hugh makes the most of it again it won’t be long, it won’t be long, before he realizes he’s only one of the hundred or so other ninney-hammers with gills like codfish and veins like racehorses — prime as goats all of them, hot as monkeys, salt as wolves in pride! No, one will be enough…’

  A glass, fortunately empty, fell to the floor and was smashed.

  ‘As if he plucked up kisses by the roots and then laid his leg over her thigh and sighed. What an uncommon time you two must have had, paddling palms and playing bubbies and titties all day under cover of saving me… Jesus. Poor little defenceless me —I hadn’t thought of that. But, you see, it’s perfectly logical, what it comes down to: I’ve got my own piddling little fight for freedom on my hands. Mummy, let me go back to the beautiful brothel! Back to where those triskeles are strumming, the infinite trismus…

  ‘True, I’ve been tempted to talk peace. I’ve been beguiled by your offers of a sober and non-alcoholic Paradise. At least I suppose that’s what you’ve been working around towards all day. But now I’ve made up my melodramatic little mind, what’s left of it, just enough to make up. Cervantes! That far from wanting it, thank you very much, on the contrary, I choose — Tlax –’ Where was he? ‘Tlax — Tlax –’

  … It was as if, almost, he were standing upon that black open station platform, where he had gone — had he gone? — that day after drinking all night 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 no one descends, not even another angel, nor 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! — ‘Tlax –’ the Consul repeated. ‘I choose–’

  He was in a room, and suddenly in this room, matter was disjunct: a doorknob was standing a little way out from the door. A curtain floated in by itself, unfastened, ‘unattached to anything. The idea struck him it had come in to strangle him. An orderly little clock behind the bar called him to his senses, its ticking very loud: Tlax: tlax: tlax: tlax:… Half past five. Was that all? ‘Hell,’ he finished absurdly. ‘Because –’ He produced a twenty-peso note and laid it on the table.

  ‘I like it,’ he called to them, through the open window, from outside. Cervantes stood behind the bar, with scared eyes, holding the cockerel. ‘I love hell. I can’t wait to get back there. In fact I’m running. I’m almost back there already.’

  He was running too, in spite of his limp, calling back to them crazily, and the queer thing was, he wasn’t quite serious, running toward the forest, which was growing darker and darker, tumultuous above — a rush of air swept out of it, and the weeping pepper tree roared.

  He stopped after a while: all was calm. No one had come after him. Was that good? Yes, it was good, he thought, his heart pounding. And since it was so good he would take the path to Parián, to the Farolito.

  Before him the volcanoes, precipitous, seemed to have drawn nearer. They towered up over the jungle, into the lowering sky —massive interests moving up in the background.

  11

  SUNSET. Eddies of green and orange birds scattered aloft with ever wider circlings like rings on water. Two little pigs disappeared into the dust at a gallop. A woman passed swiftly, balancing on her head, with the grace of a Rebecca, a small light bottle…

  Then, the Salón Ofelia at last behind them, there was no more dust. And their path became straight, leading on through the roar of water past the bathing place, where, reckless, a few late bathers lingered, toward the forest.

  Straight ahead, in the north-east, lay the volcanoes, the towering dark clouds behind them steadily mounting the heavens.

  — The storm, that had already dispatched its outriders, must have been travelling in a circle: the real onset was yet to come. Meantime the wind had dropped and it was lighter again, though the sun had gone down at their back slightly to their left, in the south-west, where a red blaze fanned out into the sky over their heads.

  The Consul had not been in the Todos Contentos y Yo También. And now, through the warm twilight, Yvonne was walking before Hugh, purposely too fast for talking. None the less his voice (as earlier that day the Consul’s own) pursued her.

  ‘You know perfectly well I won’t just run away and abandon him,’ she said.

  ‘Christ Jesus, this never would have happened if I hadn’t been here!’

  ‘Something else would probably have happened.’

  The jungle closed over them and the volcanoes were blotted out. Yet it was still not dark. From the stream racing along beside them a radiance was cast. Big yellow flowers, resembling chrysanthemums, shining like stars through the gloom, grew on either side of the water. Wild bougainvillea, brick-red in the half-light, occasionally a bush with white handbells, tongue downwards, started out at them, every little while a notice nailed to a tree, a whittled, weather-beaten arrow pointing, with the words hardly visible: a la Cascada —

  Farther on worn-out ploughshares and the rusted and twisted chassis of abandoned American cars bridged the stream which they kept always to their left.

  The sound of the falls behind was now lost in that of the cascade ahead. The air was full of spray and moisture. But for the tumult one might almost have heard things growing as the torrent rushed through the wet heavy foliage that sprang up everywhere around them from the alluvial soil.

  All at once, above them, they saw the sky again. The clouds, no longer red, had become a peculiar luminous blue-white, drifts and depths of them, as though illumined by moon rather than sunlight, between which roared still the deep fathomless cobalt of afternoon.

  Birds were sailing up there, ascending higher and higher. Infernal bird of Prometheus!

  They were vultures, that on earth so jealously contend with one another, defiling themselves with blood and filth, but who were yet capable of rising, like this, above the storms, to heights shared only by the condor, above the summit
of the Andes —

  Down the south-west stood the moon itself, preparing to follow the sun below the horizon. On their left, through the trees beyond the stream appeared low hills, like those at the foot of the Calle Nicaragua; they were purple and sad. At their foot, so near Yvonne made out a faint rustling, cattle moved on the sloping fields among gold cornstalks and striped mysterious tents.

  Before them, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl continued to dominate the north-east, the Sleeping Woman now perhaps the more beautiful of the two, with jagged angles of blood-red snow on its summit, fading as they watched, whipped with darker rock shadows, the summit itself seeming suspended in mid-air, floating among the curdling ever mounting black clouds.

  Chimborazo, Popocatepetl — so ran the poem the Consul liked — had stolen his heart away! But in the tragic Indian legend Popocatepetl himself was strangely the dreamer: the fires of his warrior’s love, never extinct in the poet’s heart, burned eternally for Ixtaccihuatl, whom he had no sooner found than lost, and whom he guarded in her endless sleep…

  They had reached the limit of the clearing, where the path divided in two. Yvonne hesitated. Pointing to the left, as it were straight on, another aged arrow on a tree repeated: a la Cascada. But a similar arrow on another tree pointed away from the stream down a path to their right: a Pariàn.

  Yvonne knew where she was now, but the two alternatives, the two paths, stretched out before her on either side like the arms — the oddly dislocated thought struck her — of a man being crucified.

  If they chose the path to their right they would reach Parián much sooner. On the other hand, the main path would bring them to the same place finally, and, what was more to the point, past, she felt sure, at least two other cantinas.

  They chose the main path: the striped tents, the cornstalks dropped out of sight, and the jungle returned, its damp earthy leguminous smell rising about them with the night.

  This path, she was thinking, after emerging on a sort of main highway near a restaurant-cantina named the Rum-Popo or the El Popo, took, upon resumption (if it could be called the same path), a short cut at right angles through the forest to Parián, across to the Farolito itself, as it might be the shadowy crossbar from which the man’s arms were hanging.

  The noise of the approaching falls was now like the awakening voices downwind of five thousand bobolinks in an Ohio savannah. Toward it the torrent raced furiously, fed from above, where, down the left bank, transformed abruptly into a great wall of vegetation, water was spouting into the stream through thickets festooned with convolvuli on a higher level than the topmost trees of the jungle. And it was as though one’s spirit too were being swept on by the swift current with the uprooted trees and smashed bushes in a débâcle towards that final drop.

  They came to the little cantina El Petate. It stood, at a short distance from the clamorous falls, its lighted windows friendly against the twilight, and was at present occupied, she saw as her heart leaped and sank, leaped again, and sank, only by the barman and two Mexicans, shepherds or quince farmers, deep in conversation, and leaning against the bar. — Their mouths opened and shut soundlessly, their brown hands traced patterns in the air, courteously.

  The El Petate, which from where she stood resembled a sort of complicated postage stamp, surcharged on its outside walls with its inevitable advertisements for Moctezuma, Criollo, Cafeas-pirina, Mentholatum — no se rasque las picaduras de los insectos! — was about all remaining, the Consul and she’d once been told, of the formerly prosperous village of Anochtitlán, which had burned, but which at one time extended to the westward, on the other side of the stream.

  In the smashing din she waited outside. Since leaving the Salón Ofélia and up to this point, Yvonne had felt herself possessed of the most complete detatchment. But now, as Hugh joined the scene within the cantina — he was asking the two Mexicans questions, describing Geoffrey’s beard to the barman, he was describing Geoffrey’s beard to the Mexicans, he was asking the barman questions, who, with two fingers had assumed, jocosely, a beard — she became conscious she was laughing unnaturally to herself; at the same time she felt, crazily, as if something within her were smouldering, had taken fire, as if her whole being at any moment were going to explode.

  She started back. She had stumbled over a wooden structure close to the Petate that seemed to spring at her. It was a wooden cage, she saw by the light from the windows, in which crouched a large bird.

  It was a small eagle she had startled, and which was now shivering in the damp and dark of its prison. The cage was set between the cantina and a low thick tree, really two trees embracing one another: an amate and a sabina. The breeze blew spray in her face. The falls sounded. The intertwined roots of the two tree lovers flowed over the ground toward the stream, ecstatically seeking it, though they didn’t really need it; the roots might as well have stayed where they were, for all around them nature was out-doing itself in extravagant fructification. In the taller trees beyond there was a cracking, a rebellious tearing, and a rattling, as of cordage; boughs like booms swung darkly and stiffly about her, broad leaves unfurled. There was a sense of black conspiracy, like ships in harbour before a storm, among these trees, suddenly through which, far up in the mountains, lightning flew, and the light in the cantina flickered off, then on again, then off. No thunder followed. The storm was a distance away once more. Yvonne waited in nervous apprehension: the lights came on and Hugh — how like a man, oh God! but perhaps it was her own fault for refusing to come in — was having a quick drink with the Mexicans. There the bird was still, a long-winged dark furious shape, a little world of fierce despairs and dreams, and memories of floating high above Popocatepetl, mile on mile, to drop through the wilderness and alight, watching, in the timberline ghosts of ravaged mountain trees. With hurried quivering hands Yvonne began to unfasten the cage. The bird fluttered out of it and alighted at her feet, hesitated, took flight to the roof of El Petate, then abruptly flew off through the dusk, not to the nearest tree, as might have been supposed, but up — she was right, it knew it was free — up soaring, with a sudden cleaving of pinions into the deep dark blue pure sky above, in which at that moment appeared one star. No compunction touched Yvonne. She felt only an inexplicable secret triumph and relief: no one would ever know she had done this; and then, stealing over her, the sense of utter heartbreak and loss.

  Lamplight shone across the tree roots; the Mexicans stood in the open door with Hugh, nodding at the weather and pointing on down the path, while within the cantina the barman helped himself to a drink from under the bar.

  — ‘No!…’ Hugh shouted against the tumult. ‘He hasn’t been there at all! We might try this other place though!’

  ‘_’

  ‘On the road!’

  Beyond the El Petate their path veered to the right past a dog-kennel to which an anteater nuzzling the black earth was chained. Hugh took Yvonne’s arm.

  ‘See the anteater? Do you remember the armadillo?’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten, anything!’

  Yvonne said this, as they fell into step, not knowing quite what she meant. Wild woodland creatures plunged past them in the undergrowth, and everywhere she looked in vain for her eagle, half hoping to see it once more. The jungle was thinning out gradually. Rotting vegetation lay about them, and there was a smell of decay; the barranca couldn’t be far off. Then the air blew strangely warmer and sweeter, and the path was steeper. The last time Yvonne had come this way she’d heard a whip-poor-will. Whip-poor-will, whip-peri-will, the plaintive lonely voice of spring at home had said, and calling one home — to where? To her father’s home in Ohio? And what should a whip-poor-will be doing so far from home itself in a dark Mexican forest? But the whip-poor-will, like love and wisdom, had no home; and perhaps, as the Consul had then added, it was better here than routing around Cayenne, where it was supposed to winter.

  They were climbing, approaching a little hilltop clearing; Yvonne could see the sky. But she couldn’t
get her bearings. The Mexican sky had become strange and tonight the stars found for her a message even lonelier than that remembered one of the poor nestless whip-poor-will. Why are we here, they seemed to say, in the wrong place, and all the wrong shape, so far away, so far, so far away from home? From what home? When had not she, Yvonne, come home? But the stars by their very being consoled her. And walking on she felt her mood of detachment returning. Now Yvonne and Hugh were high enough to see, through the trees, the stars low down on the western horizon.

  Scorpio, setting… Sagittarius, Capricornus; ah, there, here they were, after all, in their right places, their configurations all at once right, recognized, their pure geometry scintillating, flawless. And tonight as five thousand years ago they would rise and set: Capricorn, Aquarius, with, beneath, lonely Fomalhaut; Pisces; and the Ram; Taurus, with Aldebaran and the Pleiades. ‘As Scorpio sets in the south-west, the Pleiades are rising in the north-east.” ‘As Capricorn sets in the west, Orion rises in the east. And Cetus, the Whale, with Mira.’ Tonight, as ages hence, people would say this, or shut their doors on them, turn in bereaved agony from them, or towards them with love saying: “That is our star up there, yours and mine’; steer by them above the clouds or lost at sea, or standing in the spray on the forecastle head, watch them, suddenly, careen, put their faith or lack of it in them; train, in a thousand observatories, feeble telescopes upon them, across whose lenses swam mysterious swarms of stars and clouds of dead dark stars, catastrophes of exploding suns, or giant Antares raging to its end — a smouldering ember yet five hundred times greater than the earth’s sun. And the earth itself still turning on its axis and revolving around that sun, the sun revolving around the luminous wheel of this galaxy, the countless unmeasured jewelled wheels of countless unmeasured galaxies turning, turning, majestically, into infinity, into eternity, through all of which all life ran on — all this, long after she herself was dead, men would still be reading in the night sky, and as the earth turned through those distant seasons, and they watched the constellations still rising, culminating, setting, to rise again — Aries, Taurus, Gemini, the Crab, Leo, Virgo, the Scales and the Scorpion, Capricorn the Sea-goat and Aquarius the Water Bearer, Pisces, and once more, triumphantly, Aries! — would they not, too, still be asking the hopeless eternal question: to what end? What force drives this sublime celestial machinery? Scorpio, setting… And rising, Yvonne thought, unseen behind the volcanoes, those whose culmination was at midnight tonight, as Aquarius set; and some would watch with a sense of fleeting, yet feeling their diamonded brightness gleam an instant on the soul, touching all within that in memory was sweet or noble or courageous or proud, as high overhead appeared, flying softly like a flock of birds towards Orion, the beneficent Pleiades…