Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  The mountains that had been lost from sight now stood ahead again as they walked on through the dwindling forest. — Yet Yvonne still hung back.

  Far away to the south-east the low leaning horn of moon, their pale companion of the morning, was setting finally, and she watched it — the dead child of the earth! — with a strange hungry supplication. — The Sea of Fecundity, diamond-shaped, and the sea of Nectar, pentagonal in form, and Frascatorius with its north wall broken down, the giant west wall of Endymion, elliptical near the Western limb; the Leibnitz mountains at the Southern Horn, and east of Proclus, the Marsh of a Dream. Hercules and Atlas stood there, in the midst of cataclysm, beyond our knowledge —

  The moon had gone. A hot gust of wind blew in their faces and lightning blazed white and jagged in the north-east: thunder spoke, economically; a poised avalanche…

  The path growing steeper inclined still further to their right and began to twist through scattered sentinels of trees, tall and lone, and enormous cactus, whose writhing innumerable spined hands, as the path turned, blocked the view on every side. It grew so dark it was surprising not to find blackest night in the world beyond.

  Yet the sight that met their eyes as they emerged on the road was terrifying. The massed black clouds were still mounting the twilight sky. High above them, at a vast height, a dreadfully vast height, bodiless black birds, more like skeletons of birds, were drifting. Snowstorms drove along the summit of Ixtaccihuatl, obscuring it, while its mass was shrouded by cumulus. But the whole precipitous bulk of Popocatepetl seemed to be coming towards them, travelling with the clouds, leaning forward over the valley on whose side, thrown into relief by the curious melancholy light, shone one little rebellious hilltop with a tiny cemetery cut into it.

  The cemetery was swarming with people visible only as their candle flames.

  But suddenly it was as if a heliograph of lightning were stammering messages across the wild landscape; and they made out, frozen, the minute black and white figures themselves. And now, as they listened for the thunder, they heard them: soft cries and lamentations, wind-borne, wandering down to them. The mourners were chanting over the graves of their loved ones, playing guitars softly or praying. A sound like windbells, a ghostly tintinnabulation, reached their ears.

  A titanic roar of thunder overwhelmed it, rolling down the valleys. The avalanche had started. Yet it had not overwhelmed the candle flames. There they still gleamed, undaunted, a few moving now in procession. Some of the mourners were filing off down the hillside.

  Yvonne felt with gratitude the hard road beneath her feet. The lights of the Hotel y Restaurant El Popo sprang up. Over a garage next door an electric sign, was stabbing: Euzkadi.– A radio somewhere was playing wildly hot music at an incredible speed.

  American cars stood outside the restaurant ranged before the cul-de-sac at the edge of the jungle, giving the place something of the withdrawn, waiting character that pertains to a border at night, and a border of sorts there was, not far from here, where the ravine, bridged away to the right on the outskirts of the old capital, marked the state line.

  On the porch, for an instant, the Consul sat dining quietly by himself. But only Yvonne had seen him. They threaded their way through the round tables and into a bare ill-defined bar where the Consul sat frowning in a corner with three Mexicans. But none save Yvonne noticed him. The barman had not seen the Consul. Nor had the assistant manager, an unusually tall Japanese also the cook, who recognized Yvonne. Yet even as they denied all knowledge of him (and though by this time Yvonne had quite made up her mind he was in the Farolito) the Consul was disappearing round every corner, and going out of every door. A few tables set along the tiled floor outside the bar were deserted, yet here the Consul also sat dimly, rising at their approach. And out behind by the patio it was the Consul who pushed his chair back and came forward, bowing, to meet them.

  In fact, as often turns out for some reason in such places, there were not enough people in the El Popo to account for the number of cars outside.

  Hugh was casting round him, half for the music, which seemed coming from a radio in one of the cars and which sounded like absolutely nothing on earth in this desolate spot, an abysmal mechanic force out of control that was running itself to death, was breaking up, was hurtling into dreadful trouble, had abruptly ceased.

  The patio of the pub was a long rectangular garden overgrown with flowers and weeds. Verandas, half in darkness, and arched on their parapets, giving them an effect of cloisters, ran down either side. Bedrooms opened off the verandas. The light from the restaurant behind picked out, here and there, a scarlet flower, a green shrub, with unnatural vividness. Two angry-looking macaws with bright ruffled plumage sat in iron rings between the arches.

  Lightning, flickering, fired the windows a moment; wind crepitated the leaves and subsided, leaving a hot void in which the trees thrashed chaotically. Yvonne leaned against an arch and took off her hat; one of the cockatoos screeched and she pressed the palms of her hands against her ears, pressing them harder as the thunder started again, holding them there with her eyes shut absently until it stopped, and the two bleak beers Hugh ordered had arrived.

  ‘Well,’ he was saying, ‘this is somewhat different from the Cervecería Quauhnahuac… Indeed !… Yes, I guess I’ll always remember this morning. The sky was so blue, wasn’t it?’

  ‘And the woolly dog and the foals that came with us and the river with those swift birds overhead –’

  ‘How far to the Farolito now?’

  ‘About a mile and a half. We can cut nearly a mile if we take the forest path.’

  ‘In the dark?’

  ‘We can’t wait very long if you’re going to make the last bus back to Quauhnahuac. It’s after six now. I can’t drink this beer, can you?’

  ‘No. It tastes like gun-metal — hell — Christ,’ Hugh said, ‘let’s –’

  ‘Have a different drink,’ Yvonne proposed, half ironically.

  ‘Couldn’t we phone?’

  ‘Mescal,’ Yvonne said brightly.

  The air was so full of electricity it trembled.

  ‘Comment?’

  ‘Mescal, por favor,’ Yvonne repeated, shaking her head solemnly, sardonically. ‘I’ve always wanted to find out what Geoffrey sees in it.’

  ‘¿Cómo no? let’s have two mescals.’

  But Hugh had still not returned when the two drinks were brought by a different waiter questioning the gloom, who, balancing the tray on one palm, switched on another light.

  The drinks Yvonne had had at dinner and during the day, relatively few though they’d been, lay like swine on her soul: some moments passed before she reached out her hand and drank.

  Sickly, sullen, and ether-tasting, the mescal produced at first no warmth in her stomach, only, like the beer, a coldness, a chill. But it worked. From the porch outside a guitar, slightly out of tune, struck up La Paloma, a Mexican voice was singing, and the mescal was still working. It had in the end the quality of a good hard drink. Where was Hugh? Had he found the Consul here, after all? No: she knew he was not here. She gazed round the EI Popo, a soulless draughty death that ticked and groaned, as Geoff himself once said — a bad ghost of an American road-house; but it no longer appeared so awful. She selected a lemon from the table and squeezed a few drops into her glass and all this took her an inordinately long time to do.

  All at once she became conscious she was laughing unnaturally to herself, something within her was smouldering, was on fire: and once more, too, in her brain a picture shaped of a woman ceaselessly beating her fists on the ground…

  But no, it was not herself that was on fire. It was the house of her spirit. It was her dream. It was the farm, it was Orion, the Pleiades, it was their house by the sea. But where was the fire? It was the Consul who had been the first to notice it. What were these crazy thoughts, thoughts without form or logic? She stretched out her hand for the other mescal, Hugh’s mescal, and the fire went out, was overwhelmed by a sudde
n wave through her whole being of desperate love and tenderness for the Consul.

  — very dark and clear with an onshore wind, and the sound of surf you couldn’t see, deep in the spring night the summer stars were overhead, presage of summer, and the stars bright; clear and dark, and the moon had not risen; a beautiful strong clean onshore wind, and then the waning moon rising over the water, and later, inside the house, the roar of unseen surf beating in the night–-

  ‘How do you like the mescal?’

  Yvonne jumped up. She had been almost crouching over Hugh’s drink; Hugh, swaying, stood over her, carrying under his arm a long battered key-shaped canvas case.

  ‘What in the world have you got there?’ Yvonne’s voice was blurred and remote.

  Hugh put the case on the parapet. Then he laid on the table an electric torch. It was a boy scout contraption like a ship’s ventilator with a metal ring to slip your belt through. ‘I met the fellow on the porch Geoff was so bloody rude to in the Salón Ofelia and I bought this from him. But he wanted to sell his guitar and get a new one so I bought that too. Only ocho pesos cincuenta –’

  ‘What do you want a guitar for? Are you going to play the Internationale or something on it, on board your ship?’ Yvonne said.

  ‘How’s the mescal?’ Hugh said again.

  ‘Like ten yards of barbed-wire fence. It nearly took the top of my head off. Here, this is yours, Hugh, what’s left of it.’

  Hugh sat down: ‘I had a tequila outside with the guitar hombre’…

  ‘Well,’ he added, ‘I’m definitely not going to try and get to Mexico City tonight, and that once decided there’re various things we might do about Geoff.’

  ‘I’d rather like to get tight,’ Yvonne said.

  ‘Como tu quieras. It might be a good idea.’

  ‘Why did you say it would be a good idea to get tight?’ Yvonne was asking over the new mescals; then, ‘What did you get a guitar for?’ she repeated.

  ‘To sing with. To give people the lie with maybe.’

  ‘What are you so strange for, Hugh? To give what people what lie?’

  Hugh tilted back his chair until it touched the parapet behind him, then sat like that, smoking, nursing his mescal in his lap.

  ‘The kind of lie Sir Walter Raleigh meditates, when he addresses his soul. “The truth shall be thy warrant. Go, since I needs must die. And give the world the lie. Say to the court it glows, and shines like rotten wood. Say to the church it shows, what’s good and doth no good. If Church and Court reply, then give them both the lie.” That sort of thing, only slightly different.’

  ‘You’re dramatizing yourself, Hugh. Salud y pesetas.’

  ‘Salud y pesetas.’

  ‘Salud y pesetas.’

  He stood, smoking, drink in hand, leaning against the dark monastic archway and looking down at her:

  ‘But on the contrary,’ he was saying, ‘we do want to do good, to help, to be brothers in distress. We will even condescend to be crucified, on certain terms. And are, for that matter, regularly, every twenty years or so. But to an Englishman it’s such terribly bad form to be a bona-fide martyr. We may respect with one part of our minds the integrity, say, of men like Gandhi, or Nehru. We may even recognize that their selflessness, by example, might save us. But in our hearts we cry “Throw the bloody little man in the river”. Or “Set Barabbas free!” “O’Dwyer for ever!”Jesus! — It’s even pretty bad form for Spain to be a martyr too; in a very different way of course… And if Russia should prove –’

  Hugh was saying all this while Yvonne was scanning a document he’d just skimmed on to the table for her. It was an old soiled and creased menu of the house simply, that seemed to have been picked up from the floor, or spent a long period in someone’s pocket, and this she read, with alcoholic deliberation, several times:

  This much was typed in blue and underneath it — she made out with the same deliberation — was a design like a small wheel round the inside of which was written ‘Lotería Nacional Para La Beneficencia Pùblica’, making another circular frame, within which appeared a sort of trade or hallmark representing a happy mother caressing her child.

  The whole left side of the menu was taken up by a full-length lithographic portrait of a smiling young woman surmounted by the announcement that Hotel Restaurant El Popo se observa la más estricta moralidad, siendo esta disposición de su proprietario una garantía para el pasajero, que llegue en compañía: Yvonne studied this woman: she was buxom and dowdy, with a quasi-American coiffure, and she was wearing a long, confetti-coloured print dress: with one hand she was beckoning roguishly, while with the other she held up a block of ten lottery tickets, on each of which a cowgirl was riding a bucking horse and (as if these ten minute figures were Yvonne’s own reduplicated and half-forgotten selves waving good-bye to herself) waving her hand.

  ‘Well,’ she said.

  ‘No, I meant on the other side,’ Hugh said.

  Yvonne turned the menu over and then sat staring blankly.

  The back of the menu was almost covered by the Consuls handwriting at its most chaotic. At the top on the left was written:

  This was signed G. Firmin. It was a small bill left here by the Consul some months ago, a chit he’d made out for himself —No, I just paid it, said Hugh, who was now sitting beside her.

  But below this ‘reckoning’ was written, enigmatically, dearth… filth… earth, below that was a long scrawl of which one could make nothing. In the center of the paper were seen these words: rope… cope… grope, then, of a cold cell, while on the right, the parent and partial explanation of these prodigals, appeared what looked a poem in process of composition, an attempt at some kind of sonnet perhaps, but of a wavering and collapsed design, and so crossed out and scrawled over and stained, defaced, and surrounded with scratchy drawings — of a club, a wheel, even a long black box like a coffin — as to be almost indecipherable; at last it had this semblance:

  Some years ago he started to escape

  … has been… escaping ever since

  Not knowing his pursuers gave up hope

  Of seeing him (dance) at the end of a rope

  Hounded by eyes and thronged terrors now the lens

  Of glaring world that shunned even his defence

  Reading him strictly in the preterite tense

  Spent no… thinking him not worth

  (Even)… the price of a cold cell.

  There would have been a scandal at his death

  Perhaps. No more man this. Some tell

  Strange hellish tales of this poor foundered soul

  Who once fled north…

  Who once fled north, she thought. Hugh was saying:

  ’Vámonos.’

  Yvonne said yes.

  Outside the wind was blowing with an odd shrillness. A loose shutter somewhere banged and banged, and the electric sign over the garage prodded the night: Euzkadi —

  The clock above it – man’s public inquiry of the hour! — said twelve to seven: ‘Who once fled north.’ The diners had left the porch of the El Popo…

  Lightning as they started down the steps was followed by volleys of thunder almost at once, dispersed and prolonged. Piling black clouds swallowed the stars to the north and east; Pegasus pounded up the sky unseen; but overhead it was still clear: Vega, Deneb, Altair; through the trees, towards the west, Hercules. ‘Who once fled north,’ she repeated. — Straight ahead of them beside the road was a ruined Grecian temple, dim, with two tall slender pillars, approached by two broad steps: or there had been a moment this temple, with its exquisite beauty of pillars, and, perfect in balance and proportion, its broad expanse of steps, that became now two beams of windy light from the garage, falling across the road, and the pillars, two telegraph poles.

  They turned into the path. Hugh, with his torch, projected a phantom target, expanding, becoming enormous, and that swerved and transparently tangled with the cactus. The path narrowed and they walked, Hugh behind, in single file, the luminous t
arget sliding before them in sweeping concentric ellipticities, across which her own wrong shadow leaped, or the shadow of a giantess. — The candelabras appeared salt grey where the flashlight caught them, too stiff and fleshy to be bending with the wind, in a slow multitudinous heaving, an inhuman cackling of scales and spines.

  ‘Who once fled north…’

  Yvonne now felt cold sober: the cactus fell away, and the path, still narrow, through tall trees and undergrowth, seemed easy enough.

  ‘Who once fled north.’ But they were not going north, they were going to the Farolito. Nor had the Consul fled north then, he’d probably gone of course, just as tonight, to the Farolito. ‘There might have been a scandal at his death.’ The treetops made a sound like water rushing over their heads. ‘At his death.’