Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  The Consul’s eyes focused a calendar behind the bed. He had reached his crisis at last, a crisis without possession, almost with-out pleasure finally, and what he saw might have been, no, he was sure it was, a picture of Canada. Under a brilliant full moon a stag stood by a river down which a man and a woman were paddling a birch-bark canoe. This calendar was set to the future, for next month, December: where would he be then? In the dim blue light he even made out the names of the Saints for each December day, printed by the numerals: Santa Natalia, Santa Bibiana, S. Francisco Xavier, Santa Sabos, S. Nicolas de Bari, S. Ambrosio: thunder blew the door open, the face of M. Laruelle faded in the door.

  In the mingitorio a stench like mercapatan clapped yellow hands on his face and now, from the urinal walls, uninvited, he heard his voices again, hissing and shrieking and yammering at him: ‘Now you’ve done it, now you’ve really done it, Geoffrey Firmin! Even we can help you no longer… Just the same you might as well make the most of it now, the night’s still young…’

  ‘You like María, you like?’ A man’s voice — that of the chuckler, he recognized — came from the gloom and the Consul, his knees trembling, gazed round him; all he saw at first were slashed advertisements on the slimy feebly lit walls: Clinica Dr Vigil, Enfermedades Secretas de Ambos Sexos, Vías Urinarias, Trastornos Sexuales, Debilidad Sexual, Derrames Nocturnos, Emisiones Prematuras, Espermatorrea, Impotencia. 666. His versatile companion of this morning and last night might have been informing him ironically all was not yet lost — unfortunately by now he would be well on his way to Guanajuato. He distinguished an incredibly filthy man sitting hunched in the corner on a lavatory seat, so short his trousered feet didn’t reach the littered, befouled floor. ‘You like María?’ this man croaked again. ‘I send. Me amigo.’ He farted. ‘Me fliend Englisman all tine, all tine.’ ‘¿Qué hora?’ asked the Consul, shivering, noticing, in the runnel, a dead scorpion; a sparkle of phosphorescence and it had gone, or had never been there. ‘What’s the time?’ ‘Sick,’ answered the man. ‘No, it er ah half past sick by the cock.’ ‘You mean half past six by the clock.’ ‘Sí señor. Half past sick by the cock.’

  666. – The pricked peetroot, pickled betroot; the Consul, arranging his dress, laughed grimly at the pimp’s reply — or was he some sort of stool pigeon, in the strictest sense of that term? And who was it had said earlier, half past tree by the cock? How had the man known he was English, he wondered, taking his laughter back through the glass-paned rooms, out through the filling bar to the door again — perhaps he worked for the Unión Militar, squatting at stool all day in the Seguridad jakes eavesdropping on the prisoners’ conversation, while pimping was just a sideline. He might have found out from him about María, whether she was — but he didn’t want to know. He’d been right about the time though. The clock on the Comisaría de Policía, annular, imperfectly luminous, said, as if it had just moved forward with a jerk, a little after six-thirty, and the Consul corrected his watch, which was slow. It was now quite dark. Yet the same ragged platoon still seemed to be marching across the square. The corporal was no longer writing, however. Outside the prison stood a single motionless sentinel. The archway behind him was suddenly swept by wild light. Beyond, by the cells, the shadow of a policeman’s lantern was swinging against the wall. The evening was filled by odd noises, like those of sleep. The roll of a drum somewhere was a revolution, a cry down the street someone being murdered, brakes grinding far away a soul in pain. The plucked chords of a guitar hung over his head. A bell clanged frantically in the distance. Lightning twitched. Half past sick by the cock… In British Columbia, in Canada, on cold Pineaus Lake, where his island had long since become a wilderness of laurel and Indian Pipe, of wild strawberry and Oregon holly, he remembered the strange Indian belief prevailing that a cock would crow over a drowned body. How dread the validation that silver February evening long ago when, as acting Lithuanian Consul to Vernon, he had accompanied the search party in the boat, and the bored rooster had roused himself to crow shrilly seven times! The dynamite charges had apparently disturbed nothing, they were sombrely rowing for shore through the cloudy twilight, when suddenly, protruding from the water, they had seen what looked at first like a glove – the hand of the drowned Lithuanian. British Columbia, the genteel Siberia, that was neither genteel nor a Siberia, but an undiscovered, perhaps an undiscoverable paradise, that might have been a solution, to return there, to build, if not on his island, somewhere there, a new life with Yvonne. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Or why hadn’t she? Or had that been what she was getting at this afternoon, and which had half communicated itself to his mind? My little grey home in the west. Now it seemed to him he had often thought of it before, in this precise spot where he was standing. But now too at least this much was clear. He couldn’t go back to Yvonne if he wanted to. The hope of any new life together, even were it miraculously offered again, could scarcely survive in the arid air of an estranged postponement to which it must now, on top of everything else, be submitted for brutal hygienic reasons alone. True, those reasons were without quite secure basis as yet, but for another purpose that eluded him they had to remain unassailable. All solutions now came up against their great Chinese wall, forgiveness among them. He laughed once more, feeling a strange release, almost a sense of attainment. His mind was clear. Physically he seemed better too. It was as if, out of an ultimate contamination, he had derived strength. He felt free to devour what remained of his life in peace. At the same time a certain gruesome gaiety was creeping into this mood, and, in an extraordinary way, a certain lightheaded mischievousness. He was aware of a desire at once for complete glutted oblivion and for an innocent youthful fling. ‘Alas’, a voice seemed to be saying also in his ear, ‘my poor little child, you do not feel any of these things really, only lost, only homeless.’

  He started. In front of him tied to a small tree he hadn’t noticed, though it was right opposite the cantina on the other side of the path, stood a horse cropping the lush grass. Something familiar about the beast made him walk over. Yes — exactly as he thought. He could mistake by now neither the number seven branded on the rump nor the leather saddle charactered in that fashion. It was the Indian’s horse, the horse of the man he’d first seen today riding it singing into the sunlit world, then abandoned, left dying by the roadside. He patted the animal which twitched its ears and went on cropping imperturbably —perhaps not so imperturbably; at a rumble of thunder the horse, whose saddlebags he noticed had been mysteriously restored, whinnied uneasily, shaking all over. When just as mysteriously those saddlebags no longer chinked. Unbidden, an explanation of this afternoon’s events came to the Consul. Hadn’t it turned out to be a policeman into which all those abominations he’d observed a little while since had melted, a policeman leading a horse in this direction? Why should not that horse be this horse? It had been those vigilante hombres who’d turned up on the road this afternoon, and here in Parián, as he’d told Hugh, was their headquarters. How Hugh would relish this, could he be here! The police — ah, the fearful police — or rather not the real police, he corrected himself, but those Unión Militar fellows were at the bottom, in an insanely complicated manner but still at the bottom, of the whole business. He felt suddenly sure of this. As if out of some correspondence between the subnormal world itself and the abnormally suspicious delirious one within him the truth had sprung — sprung like a shadow however, which —

  ‘¿Qué hacéis aquí?’

  ‘Nada,’ he said, and smiled at the man resembling a Mexican sergeant of police who had snatched the bridle from his hands. ‘Nothing. Veo que la tierra anda; estoy esperando que pase mi casa por aquí para meterme en ella,’ he brilliantly managed. The brasswork on the amazed policeman’s uniform buckles caught the light from the doorway of the Farolito, then, as he turned, the leather on his sam-browne caught it, so that it was glossy as a plantain leaf, and lastly his boots, which shone like dull silver. The Consul laughed: just to glance at him was to feel th
at mankind was on the point of being saved immediately. He repeated the good Mexican joke, not quite right, in English, patting the policeman, whose jaw had dropped in bewilderment and who was eyeing him blankly, on the arm. ‘I learn that the world goes round so I am waiting here for my house to pass by.’ He held out his hand. ‘Amigo,’ he said.

  The policeman grunted, brushing the Consul’s hand off. Then, giving him quick suspicious glances over his shoulder, he fastened the horse more securely to the tree. In those swift glances there was something serious indeed, the Consul was aware, something that bade him escape at his peril. Slightly hurt, he now remembered too, the look Diosdado had given him. But the Consul felt neither serious nor like escaping. Nor did his feelings change as he found himself impelled by the policeman from behind towards the cantina, beyond which, by lightning, the east briefly appeared, in onrush, a towering thunderhead. Preceding him through the door, it actually struck the Consul that the sergeant was trying to be polite. He stood aside quite nimbly, bidding, with a gesture, the other go first. ‘Mi amigo,’ he repeated. The policeman shoved him in and they made for one end of the bar which was empty.

  ‘¿Americano, eh?’ this policeman said now firmly. ‘Wait, aquí. ¿Comprende, señor?’ He went behind the bar to speak with. Diosdado.

  The Consul unsuccessfully tried to intrude, on his conduct’s behalf, a cordial note of explanation for the Elephant, who appeared grim as if he’d just murdered another of his wives to cure her neurasthenia. Meantime, A Few Fleas, temporarily otiose, and with surprising charity, slid him a mescal along the counter. People were looking at him again. Then the policeman confronted him from the other side of the bar. ‘They say there ees trouble about you no pay,’ he said, ‘you no pay for — ah —Mehican whisky. You no pay for Mehican girl. You no have money, hey?’

  ‘Zicker,’ said the Consul, whose Spanish, in spite of a temporary insurgence, he knew virtually gone. ‘Sí. Yes. Mucho dinero,’ he added, placing a peso on the counter for A Few Fleas. He saw that the policeman was a heavy-necked handsome man with a black gritty moustache, flashing teeth, and a rather consciously swashbuckling manner. He was joined at this moment by a tall slim man in well-cut American tweeds with a hard sombre face and long beautiful hands. Glancing periodically at the Consul he spoke in undertones with Diosdado and the policeman. This man, who looked pure-bred Castilian, seemed familiar and the Consul wondered where he had seen him before. The policeman, disengaging himself from him, leaned over with his elbows on the bar, talking to the Consul. ‘You no have money, hey, and now you steal my horse.’ He winked at the Godgiven. ‘What for you ah run away with Mehican caballo? for to no pay Mehican money — hey?’

  The Consul stared at him. ‘No. Decidedly not. Of course I wasn’t going to steal your horse. I was merely looking at it, admiring it.’

  ‘What for you want to look at Mehican caballo? For why?’ The policeman laughed suddenly, with real merriment, slapping his thighs — obviously he was a good fellow and the Consul, feeling the ice was broken, laughed too. But the policeman obviously enough was also quite drunk, so it was difficult to gauge the quality of this laughter. While the faces of both Diosdado and the man in tweeds remained black and stern. ‘You make a the map of the Spain,’ the policeman persisted, controlling his laughter finally. ‘You know ah Spain?’

  ‘Comment non,’ the Consul said. So Diosdado had told him about the map, yet surely that was an innocently sad enough thing to have done. ‘Oui. Es muy asombrosa.’ No, this wasn’t Pernambuco: definitely he ought not to speak Portuguese. ‘Jawohl. Correcto, señor,’ he finished. ‘Yes, I know Spain.’

  ‘You make a the map of the Spain? You Bolsheviki prick? You member of the Brigade Internationale and stir up trouble?’

  ‘No,’ answered the Consul firmly, decendy, but now somewhat agitated. ‘Absolutamente no.’

  ‘¿Ab-so-luua-mente hey?’ The policeman, with another wink at Diosdado, imitated the Consul’s manner. He came round to the correct side of the bar again, bringing the sombre man with him who didn’t say a word or drink but merely stood there, looking stern, as did the Elephant, opposite them now, angrily drying glasses. ‘All’, he drawled, and ‘right!’ the policeman added with tremendous emphasis, slapping the Consul on the back. ‘All right. Come on my friend –’ he invited him. ‘Drink. Drink a all you ah want to have. We have been looking for you,’ he went on in a loud, half bantering, drunken tone. ‘You have murdered a man and escaped through seven states. We want to found out about you. We have founded out — it is right? — you desert your ship at Vera Cruz? You say you have money. How much money a you have got?’

  The Consul took out a crumpled note and replaced it in his pocket. ‘Fifty pesos, hey. Perhaps that not enough money. What are you for? ¿Inglés? ¿Español? ¿Americano? ¿Alemán? ¿Russish? You come a from the you-are-essy-essy? What for are you do?’

  ‘I no spikker the English — hey, what’s your names?’ someone else asked him loudly at his elbow, and the Consul turned to see another policeman dressed much like the first, only shorter, heavy-jowled, with little cruel eyes in an ashen pulpy cleanshaven face. Though he carried sidearms both his trigger finger and his right thumb were missing. As he spoke he made an obscene rolling movement of his hips and winked at the first policeman and at Diosdado though avoiding the eyes of the man in tweeds. ‘Progresión al culo,’ he added, for no reason the Consul knew of, still rolling his hips.

  ‘He is the Chief of Municipality,’ the first policeman explained heartily to the Consul. ‘This man want to know ah your name. ¿Cómo se llama?’

  ‘Yes, what’s your names?’ shouted the second policeman, who had taken a drink from the bar, but not looking at the Consul and still rolling his hips.

  ‘Trotsky,’ gibed someone from the far end of the counter, and the Consul, beard-conscious, flushed.

  ‘Blackstone,’ he answered gravely, and indeed, he asked himself, accepting another mescal, had he not and with a vengeance come to live among the Indians? The only trouble was one was very much afraid these particular Indians might turn out to be people with ideas too. ‘William Blackstone.’