Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  Closing his eyes again, standing there, glass in hand, he thought for a minute with a freezing detached almost amused calm of the dreadful night inevitably awaiting him whether he drank much more or not, his room shaking with daemonic orchestras, the snatches of fearful tumultuous sleep, interrupted by voices which were really dogs barking, or by his own name being continually repeated by imaginary parties arriving, the vicious shouting, the strumming, the slamming, the pounding, the battling with insolent archfiends, the avalanche breaking down the door, the proddings from under the bed, and always, outside, the cries, the wailing, the terrible music, the dark’s spinets: he returned to the bar.

  Diosdado, the Elephant, had just entered from the back. The Consul watched him discard his black coat, hang it in the closet, then feel in the breast pocket of his spotless white shirt for a pipe protruding from it. He took this out and began to fill it from a package of Country Club el Bueno Tono tobacco. The Consul remembered now about his pipe: here it was, no doubt about that.

  ‘Sí, sí, mistair,’ he replied, listening with bent head to the Consul’s query. ‘Claro. No — my ah peeper no Inglese. Monterey peeper. You were — ah –borracho one day then.¿No señor?’

  ‘¿Como no?’ said the Consul.

  ‘Twice a day.’ ‘You was dronk three times a day,’ Diosdado said, and his look, the insult, the implied extent of his downfall, penetrated the Consul. ‘Then you’ll be going back to America now,’ he added, rummaging behind the bar.

  ‘I — no— por qué?’

  Diosdado suddenly slapped a fat package of envelopes fastened with elastic on the bar counter.‘¿— es suyo?’ he asked directly.

  Where are the letters Geoffrey Firmin the letters the letters she wrote till her heart broke? Here were the letters, here and nowhere else: these were the letters and this the Consul knew immediately without examining the envelopes. When he spoke he could not recognize his own voice:

  ‘Sí, señor, muchas gracias,’ he said.

  ‘De nada, señor.’ The Godgiven turned away.

  La rame inutile fatigua vainement une mer immobile… The Consul could not move for a full minute. He could not even make a move toward a drink. Then he began to trace sideways in spilled liquor a little map on the bar. Diosdado came back and watched with interest.‘España,’ the Consul said, then his Spanish failing him, ‘You are Spanish,señor?’

  ‘Sí, sí, señor, sí,’ said Diosdado, watching, but in a new tone. ‘Español. España.’

  ‘These letters you gave me — see? — are from my wife, my esposa. ¿Claro? This is where we met. In Spain. You recognize it, your old home, you know Andalusia? That, up there, that’s the Guadalquivir. Beyond there, the Sierra Morena. Down there’s Almería. Those,’ he traced with his finger, ‘lying between, are the Sierra Nevada mountains. And there’s Granada. That is the place. The very place we met.’ The Consul smiled.

  ‘Granada,’ said Diosdado, sharply, in a different, harder pronunciation to the Consul’s. He gave him a searching, an important, suspicious look, then left him again. Now he was speaking to a group at the other end of the bar. Faces were turned in the Consul’s direction.

  The Consul carried another drink with Yvonne’s letters into an inner room, one of the boxes in the Chinese puzzle. He hadn’t remembered before they were framed in dull glass, like cashiers’ offices in a bank. In this room he was not really surprised to find the old Tarascan woman of the Bella Vista this morning. Her tequila, surrounded by dominoes, was set before her on the round table. Her chicken pecked among them. The Consul wondered if they were her own; or was it just necessary for her to have dominoes wherever she happened to be? Her stick with the claw handle hung, as though alive, on the edge of the table. The Consul moved to her, drank half his mescal, took off his glasses, then slipped the elastic from the package.

  — ‘Do you remember tomorrow?’ he read. No, he thought; the words sank like stones in his mind. — It was a fact that he was losing touch with his situation… He was dissociated from himself, and at the same time he saw this plainly, the shock of receiving the letters having in a sense waked him, if only, so to say, from one somnambulism into another; he was drunk, he was sober, he had a hangover; all at once; it was after six in the evening, yet whether it was being in the Farolito, or the presence of the old woman in this glass-framed room where an electric light was burning, he seemed back in the early morning again: it was almost as if he were yet another kind of drunkard, in different circumstances, in another country, to whom something quite different was happening: he was like a man who gets up half stupefied with liquor at dawn, chattering, ‘Jesus this is the kind of fellow I am, Ugh! Ugh!’ to see his wife off by an early bus, though it is too late, and there is the note on the breakfast table. ‘Forgive me for being hysterical yesterday, such an outburst was certainly not excused on any grounds of your having hurt me, don’t forget to bring in the milk,’ beneath which he finds written, almost as an afterthought: ‘Darling, we can’t go on like this, it’s too awful, I’m leaving –’ and who, instead of perceiving the whole significance of this, remembers incongruously he told the barman at too great length last night how somebody’s house burned down — and why has he told him where he lives, now the police will be able to find out — and why is the barman’s name Sherlock? an unforgettable name! — and having a glass of port and water and three aspirin, which make him sick, reflects that he has five hours before the pubs open when he must return to that same bar and apologize… But where did I put my cigarette? and why is my glass of port under the bathtub? and was that an explosion I heard, somewhere in the house?

  And encountering his accusing eyes in another mirror within the little room, the Consul had the queer passing feeling he’d risen in bed to do this, that he had sprung up and must gibber ‘Coriolanus is dead!’ or ‘muddle muddle muddle’ or ‘I think it. was, Oh! Oh!’ or something really senseless like ‘buckets, buckets, millions of buckets in the soup!’ and that he would now (though he was sitting quite calmly in the Farolito) relapse once more upon the pillows to watch, shaking in impotent terror at himself, the beards and eyes form in the curtains, or fill the space between the wardrobe and the ceiling, and hear, from the street, the soft padding of the eternal ghostly policeman outside —

  ‘Do you remember tomorrow? It is our wedding anniversary… I have not had one word from you since I left. God, it is this silence that frightens me.’

  The Consul drank some more mescal.

  ‘It is this silence that frightens me — this silence –’

  The Consul read this sentence over and over again, the same sentence, the same letter, all of the letters vain as those arriving on shipboard in port for one lost at sea, because he found some difficulty in focusing, the words kept blurring and dissembling, his own name starting out at him: but the mescal had brought him in touch with his situation again to the extent that he did not now need to comprehend any meaning in the words beyond their abject confirmation of his own lostness, his own fruitless selfish ruin, now perhaps finally self-imposed, his brain, before this cruelly disregarded evidence of what heartbreak he had caused her, at an agonized standstill.

  ‘It is this silence that frightens me. I have pictured all sorts of tragic things befalling you, it is as though you were away at war and I were waiting, waiting for news of you, for the letter, the telegram… but no war could have this power to so chill and terrify my heart. I send you all my love and my whole heart and all my thoughts and prayers.’ — The Consul was aware, drinking, that the woman with the dominoes was trying to attract his attention, opening her mouth and pointing into it: now she was subtly moving round the table nearer him. — ‘Surely you must have thought a great deal of us, of what we built together, of how mindlessly we destroyed the structure and the beauty but yet could not destroy the memory of that beauty. It has been this which has haunted me day and night. Turning I see us in a hundred places with a hundred smiles. I come into a street, and you are there. I creep at night
to bed and you are waiting for me. What is there in life besides the person whom one adores and the life one can build with that person? For the first time I understand the meaning of suicide… God, how pointless and empty the world is I Days filled with cheap and tarnished moments succeed each other, restless and haunted nights follow in bitter routine: the sun shines without brightness, and the moon rises without light. My heart has the taste of ashes, and my throat is tight and weary with weeping. What is a lost soul? It is one that has turned from its true path and is groping in the darkness of remembered ways –’

  The old woman was plucking at his sleeve and the Consul — had Yvonne been reading the letters of Heloise and Abelard? —reached out to press an electric bell, the urban yet violent presence of which in these odd little niches never failed to give him a shock. A moment later A Few Fleas entered with a bottle of tequila in one hand and of mescal Xicotancatl in the other but he took the bottles away after pouring their drinks. The Consul nodded to the old woman, motioned to her tequila, drank most of his mescal, and resumed reading. He could not remember whether he had paid or not. — ‘Oh Geoffrey, how bitterly I regret it now. Why did we postpone it? Is it too late? I want your children, soon, at once, I want them. I want your life filling and stirring me. I want your happiness beneath my heart and your sorrows in my eyes and your peace in the fingers of my hand –’ The Consul paused, what was she saying? He rubbed his eyes, then fumbled for his cigarettes: Alas; the tragic word droned round the room like a bullet that had passed through him. He read on, smoking; ‘You are walking on the edge of an abyss where I may not follow. I wake to a darkness in which I must follow myself endlessly, hating the I who so eternally pursues and confronts me. If we could rise from our misery, seek each other once more, and find again the solace of each other’s lips and eyes. Who is to stand between? Who can prevent?’

  The Consul stood up — Yvonne had certainly been reading something — bowed to the old woman, and went out into the bar he’d imagined filling up behind him, but which was still fairly deserted. Who indeed was to stand between? He posted himself at the door again, as sometimes before in the deceptive violet dawn: who indeed could prevent? Once more he stared at the square. The same ragged platoon of soldiers still seemed to be crossing it, as in some disrupted movie repeating itself. The corporal still toiled at his copperplate handwriting under the archway, only his lamp was alight. It was getting dark. The police were nowhere to be seen. Though by the barranca the same soldier was still asleep under a tree; or wasn’t it a soldier, but something else? He looked away. Black clouds were boiling up again, there was a distant breaking of thunder. He breathed the oppressive air in which there was a slight hint of coolness. Who indeed, even now, was to stand between? he thought desperately, Who indeed even now could prevent? He wanted Yvonne at this moment, to take her in his arms, wanted more than ever to be forgiven, and to forgive: but where should he go? Where would he find her now? A whole unlikely family of indeterminate class were strolling past the door: the grandfather in front, correcting his watch, peering at the dim barracks clock that still said six, the mother laughing and drawing her rebozo over her head, mocking the probable storm (up in the mountains two drunken gods standing far apart were still engaged in an endlessly indecisive and wildly swinging game of bumblepuppy with a Burmese gong), the father by himself smiling proudly, contemplatively, clicking his fingers, flicking a speck of dust now from his fine brown shiny boots. Two pretty little children with limpid black eyes were walking between them hand in hand. Suddenly the elder child freed her sister’s hand, and turned a succession of cartwheels on the lush grass plot. All of them were laughing. The Consul hated to look at them… They’d gone anyway, thank God. Miserably he wanted Yvonne and did not want her. ‘¿Quiere María?’ a voice spoke softly behind him.

  At first he saw only the shapely legs of the girl who was leading him, now by the constricted power of aching flesh alone, of pathetic trembling yet brutal lust, through the little glass-paned rooms, that grew smaller and smaller, darker and darker, until by the mingitorio, the ‘Señores’, out of whose evil-smelling gloom broke a sinister chuckle, there was merely a lightless annex no larger than a cupboard in which two men whose faces he couldn’t see either were sitting, drinking or plotting.

  Then it struck him that some reckless murderous power was drawing him on, forcing him, while he yet remained passionately aware of the all too possible consequences and somehow as innocently unconscious, to do without precaution or conscience what he would never be able to undo or gainsay, leading him irresistibly out into the garden — lightning-filled at this moment, it reminded him queerly of his own house, and also of El Popo, where earlier he had thought of going, only this was grimmer, the obverse of it — leading him through the open door into the darkening room, one of many giving on the patio.

  So this was it, the final stupid unprophylactic rejection. He could prevent it even now. He would not prevent it. Yet perhaps his familiars, or one of his voices, might have some good advice: he looked about him, listening; erectis whoribus. No voices came. Suddenly he laughed: it had been clever of him to trick his voices. They didn’t know he was here. The room itself, in which gleamed a single blue electric bulb, was not sordid: at first sight it was a student’s room. In fact it closely resembled his old room at college, only this was more spacious. There were the same great doors and a bookcase in a familiar place, with a book open on top of the shelves. In one corner, incongruously, stood a gigantic sabre. Kashmir! He imagined he’d seen the word, then it had gone. Probably he had seen it, for the book, of all things, was a Spanish history of British India. The bed was disorderly and covered with footmarks, even what appeared bloodstains, though this bed too seemed akin to a student’s cot. He noticed by it an almost empty bottle of mescal. But the floor was red flagstone and somehow its cold strong logic cancelled the horror; he finished the bottle. The girl who had been shutting the double doors while addressing him in some strange language, possibly Zapotecan, came toward him and he saw she was young and pretty. Lightning silhouetted against the window a face, for a moment curiously like Yvonne’s. ‘Quiere María,’ she volunteered again, and flinging her arms round his neck, drew him down to the bed. Her body was Yvonne’s too, her legs, her breasts, her pounding passionate heart, electricity crackled under his fingers running over her, though the sentimental illusion was going, it was sinking into a sea, as though it had not been there, it had become the sea, a desolate horizon with one huge black sailing ship, hull down, sweeping into the sunset; or her body was nothing, an abstraction merely, a calamity, a fiendish apparatus for calamitous sickening sensation; it was disaster, it was the horror of waking up in the morning in Oaxaca, his body fully clothed, at half past three every morning after Yvonne had gone; Oaxaca, and the nightly escape from the sleeping Hotel Francia, where Yvonne and he had once been happy, from the cheap room giving on the balcony high up, to El Infierno, that other Farolito, of trying to find the bottle in the dark, and failing, the vulture sitting in the washbasin; his steps, noiseless, dead silence outside his hotel room, too soon for the terrible sounds of squealing and slaughter in the kitchen below — of going down the carpeted stairs to the huge dark well of the deserted dining-room once the patio, sinking into the soft disaster of the carpet, his feet sinking into heartbreak when he reached the stairs, still not sure he wasn’t on the landing — and the stab of panic and self-disgust when he thought of the cold shower-bath back on the left, used only once before, but that was enough — and the silent final trembling approach, respectable, his steps sinking into calamity (and it was this calamity he now, with María, penetrated, the only thing alive in him now this burning boiling crucified evil organ — God is it possible to suffer more than this, out of this suffering something must be born, and what would be born was his own death), for ah, how alike are the groans of love to those of the dying, how alike, those of love, to those of the dying — and his steps sinking, into his tremor, the sickening cold tremor, a
nd into the dark well of the dining-room, with round the corner one dim light hovering above the desk, and the clock — too early —and the letters unwritten, powerless to write, and the calendar saying eternally, powerlessly, their wedding anniversary, and the manager’s nephew asleep on the couch, waiting up to meet the early train from Mexico City; the darkness that murmured and was palpable, the cold aching loneliness in the high sounding dining-room, stiff with the dead white grey folded napkins, the weight of suffering and conscience greater (it seemed) than that borne by any man who had survived — the thirst that was not thirst, but itself heartbreak, and lust, was death, death, and death again and death the waiting in the cold hotel dining-room, half whispering to himself, waiting, since El Infierno, that other Farolito, did not open till four in the morning and one could scarcely wait outside — (and this calamity he was now penetrating, it was calamity, the calamity of his own life, the very essence of it he now penetrated, was penetrating, penetrated) —waiting for the Infierno whose one lamp of hope would soon be glowing beyond the dark open sewers, and on the table, in the hotel dining-room, difficult to distinguish, a carafe of water —trembling, trembling, carrying the carafe of water to his lips, but not far enough, it was too heavy, like his burden of sorrow — ‘you cannot drink of it’ — he could only moisten his lips, and then — it must have been Jesus who sent me this, it was only He who was following me after all — the bottle of red French wine from Salina Cruz still standing there on the table set for breakfast, marked with someone else’s room number, uncorked with difficulty and (watching to see the nephew wasn’t watching) holding it with both hands, and letting the blessed ichor trickle down his throat, just a little, for after all one was an Englishman, and still sporting, and then subsiding on the couch too — his heart a cold ache warm to one side — into a cold shivering shell of palpitating loneliness — yet feeling the wine slightly more, as if one’s chest were being filled with boiling ice now, or there were a bar of red-hot iron across one’s chest, but cold in its effect, for the conscience that rages underneath anew and is bursting one’s heart burns so fiercely with the fires of hell a bar of red-hot iron is as a mere chill to it — and the clock ticking forward, with his heart beating now like a snow-muffled drum, ticking, shaking, time shaking and ticking toward El Infierno then — the escape! — drawing the blanket he had secretly brought down from the hotel room over his head, creeping out past the manager’s nephew — the escape! — past the hotel desk, not daring to look for mail — ‘it is this silence that frightens me’ — (can it be there? Is this me? Alas, self-pitying miserable wretch, you old rascal) past — the escape! — the Indian night-watchman sleeping on the floor in the doorway, and like an Indian himself now, clutching the few pesos he had left, out into the cold walled cobbled city, past — the escape through the secret passage! — the open sewers in the mean streets, the few lone dim street lamps, into the night, into the miracle that the coffins of houses, the landmarks were still there, the escape down the poor broken sidewalks, groaning, groaning — and how alike are the groans of love, to those of the dying, how alike, those of love, to those of the dying! — and the houses so still, so cold, before dawn, till he saw, rounding the corner safe, the one lamp of El Infierno glowing, that was so like the Farolito, then, surprised once more he could ever have reached it, standing inside the place with his back to the wall, and his blanket still over his head, talking to the beggars, the early workers, the dirty prostitutes, the pimps, the debris and detritus of the streets and the bottom of the earth, but who were yet so much higher than he, drinking just as he had done here in the Farolito, and telling lies, lying — the escape, still the escape! — until the lilac-shaded dawn that should have brought death, and he should have died now too; what have I done?