Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  ‘Why ah are you,’ shouted the fat policeman, whose own name was something like Zuzugoitea, ‘What ah are you for?’ And he repeated the catechism of the first policeman, whom he seemed to imitate in everything. ‘¿Inglés? ¿Alemán?’

  The Consul shook his head. ‘No. Just William Blackstone.’

  ‘You are Juden?’ the first policeman demanded.

  ‘No. Just Blackstone,’ the Consul repeated, shaking his head, ‘William Blackstone. Jews are seldom very borracho.’

  ‘You are — ah — a borracho, hey,’ the first policeman said, and everyone laughed — several others, his henchmen evidently, had joined them though the Consul couldn’t distinguish them clearly — save the inflexible indifferent man in tweeds. ‘He is the Chief of Gardens,’ the first policeman explained, continuing; ‘That man is Jefe de Jardineros.’ And there was a certain awe in his tone. ‘I am chief too, I am Chief of Rostrums,’ he added, but almost reflectively, as if he meant’ I am only Chief of Rostrums’.

  ‘And I –’ began the Consul.

  ‘Am perfectamente borracho,’ finished the first policeman, and everyone roared again save the Jefe de Jardineros.

  ‘Y yo –’ repeated the Consul, but what was he saying? And who were these people, really? Chief of what Rostrums, Chief of what Municipality, above all, Chief of what Gardens? Surely this silent man in tweeds, sinister too, though apparently the only one unarmed in the group, wasn’t the one responsible for all those little public gardens. Albeit the Consul was prompted by a shadowy prescience he already had concerning the claimants to these titular pretensions. They were associated in his mind with the Inspector General of the State and also as he had told Hugh with the Unión Militar. Doubtless he’d seen them here before in one of the rooms or at the bar, but certainly never at such close quarters as this. However so many questions he was unable to answer were being showered upon him by so many different people this significance was almost forgotten. He gathered, though, that the respected Chief of Gardens, to whom at this moment he sent a mute appeal for help, might be even ‘higher’ than the Inspector-General himself. The appeal was answered by a blacker look than ever: at the same time the Consul knew where he’d seen him before; the Chief of Gardens might have been the image of himself when, lean, bronzed, serious, beardless, and at the crossroads of his career, he had assumed the Vice-Consulship in Granada. Innumerable tequilas and mescals were being brought and the Consul drank everything in sight without regard for ownership. ‘It’s not enough to say they were at the El Amor de los Amores together,’ he heard himself repeating — it must have been in answer to some insistent demand for the story of this afternoon, though why it should be made at all he didn’t know — ‘What matters is how the thing happened. Was the peon — perhaps he wasn’t quite a peon — drunk? Or did he fall from his horse? Perhaps the thief just recognized a boon companion who owed him a drink or two –’

  Thunder growled outside the Farolito. He sat down. It was an order. Everything was growing very chaotic. The bar was now nearly full. Some of the drinkers had come from the graveyards, Indians in loose-fitting clothes. There were dilapidated soldiers with among them here and there a more smartly dressed officer. He distinguished in the glass rooms bugles and green lariats moving. Several dancers had entered dressed in long black cloaks streaked with luminous paint to represent skeletons. The Chief of Municipality was standing behind him now. The Chief of Rostrums was standing too, talking on his right with the Jefe de Jardineros, whose name, the Consul had discovered, was Fructuoso Sanabria. ‘Hullo, qué tal?’ asked the Consul. Someone was sitting next him with his back half turned who also seemed familiar. He looked like a poet, some friend of his college days. Fair hair fell over his fine forehead. The Consul offered him a drink which this young man not only refused, in Spanish, but rose to refuse, making a gesture with his hand of pushing the Consul away, then moving, with angry half-averted face, to the far end of the bar. The Consul was hurt. Again he sent a mute appeal for help to the Chief of Gardens: he was answered by an implacable, an almost final look. For the first time the Consul scented the tangibility of his danger. He knew Sanabria and the first policemen were discussing him with the utmost hostility, deciding what to do with him. Then he saw they were trying to catch the Chief of Municipality’s attention. They were breasting their way, just the two of them, behind the bar again to a telephone he hadn’t noticed, and the curious tiling about this telephone was that it seemed to be working properly. The Chief of Rostrums did the talking: Sanabria stood by grimly, apparently giving instructions. They were taking their time, and realizing the call would be about him, whatever its nature, the Consul, with a slow burning pain of apprehension, felt again how lonely he was, that all around him in spite of the crowd, the uproar, slightly muted at a gesture from Sanabria, stretched a solitude like the wilderness of grey heaving Atlantic conjured to his eyes a little while since with María, only this time no sail was in sight. The mood of mischievousness and release had vanished completely. He knew he’d half hoped all along Yvonne would come to rescue him, knew, now, it was too late, she would not come. Ah, if Yvonne, if only as a daughter, who would understand and comfort him, could only be at his side now! Even if but to lead him by the hand, drunkenly homeward through the stone fields, the forests — not interfering of course with his occasional pulls at the bottle, and ah, those burning draughts in loneliness, he would miss them, wherever he was going, they were perhaps the happiest things his life had known I — as he had seen the Indian children lead their fathers home on Sundays. Instantly, consciously, he forgot Yvonne again. It ran in his head he could perhaps leave the Farolito at this moment by himself, unnoticed and without difficulty, for the Chief of Municipality was still deep in conversation, while the backs of the two other policemen at the telephone were turned, yet he made no move. Instead, leaning his elbows on the bar, he buried his face in his hands.

  He saw again in his mind’s eye that extraordinary picture on Laruelle’s wall, Los Borrachones, only now it took on a somewhat different aspect. Might it have another meaning, that picture, unintentional as its humour, beyond the symbolically obvious? He saw those people like spirits appearing to grow more free, more separate, their distinctive noble faces more distinctive, more noble, the higher they ascended into the light; those florid people resembling huddled fiends, becoming more like each other, more joined together, more as one fiend, the farther down they hurled into the darkness. Perhaps all this wasn’t so ludicrous. When he had striven upwards, as at the beginning with Yvonne, had not the ‘features’ of life seemed to grow more clear, more animated, friends and enemies more identifiable, special problems, scenes, and with them the sense of his own reality, more separate from himself? And had it not turned out that the farther down he sank, the more those’ features had tended to dissemble, to cloy and clutter, to become finally little better than ghastly caricatures of his dissimulating inner and outer self, or of his struggle, if struggle there were still? Yes, but had he desired it, willed it, the very material world, illusory though that was, might have been a confederate, pointing the wise way. Here would have been no devolving through failing unreal voices and forms of dissolution that became more and more like one voice to a death more dead than death itself, but an infinite widening, an infinite evolving and extension of boundaries, in which the spirit was an entity, perfect and whole: ah, who knows why man, however beset his chance by lies, has been offered love? Yet it had to be faced, down, down he had gone, down till — it was not the bottom even now, he realized. It was not the end quite yet. It was as if his fall had been broken by a narrow ledge, a ledge from which he could neither climb up nor down, on which he lay bloody and half stunned, while far below him the abyss yawned, waiting. And on it as he lay he was surrounded in delirium by these phantoms of himself, the policemen, Fructuoso Sanabria, that other man who looked like a poet, the luminous skeletons, even the rabbit in the corner and the ash and sputum on the filthy floor — did not each correspond, i
n a way he couldn’t understand yet obscurely recognized, to some fraction of his being? And he saw dimly too how Yvonne’s arrival, the snake in the garden, his quarrel with Laruelle and later with Hugh and Yvonne, the infernal machine, the encounter with Señora Gregorio, the finding of the letters, and much beside, how all the events of the day indeed had been as indifferent tufts of grass he had half-heartedly clutched at or stones loosed on his downward flight, which were still showering on him from above. The Consul produced his blue package of cigarettes with the wings on them: Alas! He raised his head again; no, he was where he was, there was nowhere to fly to. And it was as if a black dog had settled on his back, pressing him to his seat.

  The Chief of Gardens and the Chief of Rostrums were still waiting by the telephone, perhaps for the right number. Probably they would be calling the Inspector-General: but what if they’d forgotten him, the Consul — what if they weren’t phoning about him at all? He remembered his dark glasses he had removed to read Yvonne’s letters and, some fatuous notion of disguise crossing his mind, put them on. Behind him the Chief of Municipality was still engrossed; now once more, he could go. With the aid of his dark glasses, what could be simpler? He could go — only he needed another drink; one for the road. Moreover he realized he was wedged in by a solid mass of people and that, to make matters worse, a man sitting at the bar next him wearing a dirty sombrero on the back of his head and a cartridge belt hanging low down his trousers had clutched him by the arm affectionately; it was the pimp, the stool pigeon, of the mingitorio. Hunched in almost precisely the same posture as before, he had apparently been talking to him for the last five minutes.

  ‘My friend for my,’ he was babbling. ‘All dees men nothing for you, or for me. All dees men — nothing for you, or for me! All dees men, son of a bitch… Sure, you Englisman !’ He clutched the Consul’s arm more firmly. ‘All my I Mexican men: all tine Englisman, my friend, Mexican! I don’t care son of a bitch American: no good for you, or for me, my Mexican all tine, all tine, all tine – eh? –’

  The Consul withdrew his arm but was immediately clutched on his left by a man of uncertain nationality, cross-eyed with drink, who resembled a sailor. ‘You limey,’ he stated flatly, swivelled round his stool. ‘I’m from the county of Pope,’ yelled this unknown man, very slowly, putting his arm now through the Consul’s. ‘What do you think? Mozart was the man what writ the Bible. You’re here to the off down there. Man here, on the earth, shall be equal. And let there be tranquillity. Tranquillity means peace. Peace on earth, of all men –’

  The Consul freed himself: the pimp clutched him again. Almost for succour, he gazed about him. The Chief of Municipality was still engaged. In the bar the Chief of Rostrums was telephoning once more; Sanabria stood at his elbow directing. Squeezed against the pimp’s chair another man the Consul took for American, who was continually squinting over his shoulder as though expecting somebody, was saying to no one in especial: ‘Winchester! Hell, that’s something else. Don’t tell me. Righto! The Black Swan is in Winchester. They captured me on the German side of the camp and at the same side of the place where they captured me is a girls’ school. A girl teacher. She gave it to me. And you can take it. And you can have it.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the pimp, still clutching the Consul. He was speaking across him, half to the sailor. ‘My friend — was a matter for you? My looking for you all tine. My England man, all tine, all one, sure, sure. Excu. This man telling me my friend for you all tine. You like he? — This man very much money. This man — right or wrong, sure; Mexican is my friend or Inglés. American god damn son of a bitch for you or for me, or for any tine.’

  The Consul was drinking with these macabre people inextricably. When he gazed round on this occasion he met, cognizant of him, the Chief of Municipality’s hard little cruel eyes. He gave up trying to understand what the illiterate sailor, who seemed an even obscurer fellow than the stool pigeon, was talking about. He consulted his watch: still only a quarter to seven. Time was circumfluent again too, mescal-drugged. Feeling the eyes of Señor Zuzugoitea still boring into his neck he produced once more, importantly, defensively, Yvonne’s letters. With his dark glasses on they appeared for some reason clearer.

  ‘And the off of man here what there will be let the Lord be with us all the time,’ bellowed the sailor, ‘there’s my religion spoke in those few words. Mozart was the man that writ the Bible. Mozart wrote the old testimony. Stay by that and you’ll be all right. Mozart was a lawyer.’

  — ‘Without you I am cast out, severed. I am an outcast from myself, a shadow’ —

  ‘Weber’s my name. They captured me in Flanders. You would doubt me more or less. But if they captured me now! — When Alabama came through, we came through with heels flying. We ask nobody no questions because down there we don’t run. Christ, if you want ’em go ahead and take ’em. But if you want Alabama, that bunch.’ The Consul looked up; the man, Weber, was singing. ‘I’m just a country b-hoy. I don’t know a damn thing.’ He saluted his reflection in the mirror. ‘Soldat de la Légion Ètrangère.’

  — ‘There I met some people I must tell you about, for perhaps the thought of these people held before us like a prayer for absolution may strengthen us once more to nourish the flame which can never go out, but burns now so fearfully low.’

  — ‘Yes sir. Mozart was a lawyer. And don’t dispute me no more. Here to the off of God. I would dispute my imcomprehensible stuff!’

  ‘ – de la Légion Ètrangère. Vous n’avez pas de nation. La France est votre mére. Thirty miles out of Tangier, banging in pretty well. Captain Dupont’s orderly… He was a son of a bitch from Texas. Never will tell his name. It was Fort Adamant.’

  ‘ – !Mar Cantábrico! —’

  — ‘You are one born to walk in the light. Plunging your head out of the white sky you flounder in an alien element. You think you are lost, but it is not so, for the spirits of light will help you and bear you up in spite of yourself and beyond all opposition you may offer. Do I sound mad? I sometimes think I am. Seize the immense potential Strength you fight, which is within your body and ever so much more strongly within your soul, restore to me the sanity that left when you forgot me, when you sent me away, when you turned your footsteps towards a different path, a stranger route which you have trod apart…’

  ‘He turreted out this underground place here. Fifth squadron of the French Foreign Legion. They give ’em the spreadeagle. Soldat de la Légion Ètrangère.’ Weber saluted himself in the mirror again and clicked his heels. ‘The sun parches the lips and they crack. Oh Christ, it’s a shame: the horses all go away kicking in the dust. I wouldn’t have it. They plugged ’em too.’

  ‘I am perhaps God’s loneliest mortal. I do not have the companionship in drink you find, however unsatisfactory. My wretchedness is locked up within me. You used to cry to me to help you. The plea I send to you is far more desperate. Help me, yes, save me, from all that is enveloping, threatening, trembling, and ready to pour over my head.’

  ‘ – man what wrote the Bible. You got to study deep down to know that Mozart writ the Bible. But I’ll tell you, you can’t think with me. I’ve got an awful mind,’ the sailor was telling the Consul. ‘And I hope you the same. I hope you will have good. Only to hell on me,’ he added, and suddenly despairing, this sailor rose and reeled out.

  ‘American no good for me no. American no good for Mexican. These donkey, these man,’ the pimp said contemplatively, staring after him, and then at the legionnaire, who was examining a pistol that lay in his palm like a bright jewel. ‘All my, Mexican man. All tine England man, my friend Mexican.’ He summoned A Few Fleas and, ordering more drinks, indicated the Consul would pay. ‘I don’t care son of a bitch American no good for you, or for me. My Mexican, all tine, all tine, all tine: eh?’ he declared.

  ‘¿Quiere usted la salvación de México?’ suddenly asked a radio from somewhere behind the bar. ‘¿Quiere usted que Cristo sea nuestro Rey?’ and the Consul saw that the Chief of
Rostrums had stopped phoning but was still standing in the same place with the Chief of Gardens.

  ‘No.’

  — ‘Geoffrey, why don’t you answer me? I can only believe that my letters have not reached you. I have put aside all my pride to beg your forgiveness, to offer you mine. I cannot, I will not believe that you have ceased to love me, have forgotten me. Or can it be that you have some misguided idea that I am better off without you, that you are sacrificing yourself that I may find happiness with someone else? Darling, sweetheart, don’t you realize that is impossible? We can give each other so much more than most people can, we can marry again, we can build forward…’

  — ‘You are my friend for all tine. Me pay for you and for me and for this man. This man is friend for me and for this man,’ and the pimp slapped the Consul, at this moment taking a long drink, calamitously on the back. ‘Want he?’

  — ‘And if you no longer love me and do not wish me to come back to you, will you not write and tell me so? It is the silence that is killing me, the suspense that reaches out of that silence and possesses my Strength and my spirit. Write and tell me that your life is the one you want, that you are gay, or are wretched, or are content or restless. If you have lost the feel of me write of the weather, or the people we know, the streets you walk in, the altitude. — Where are you, Geoffrey? I do not know where you are. Oh, it is all too cruel. Where did we go, I wonder? In what far place do we still walk, hand in hand?’ —

  The voice of the stool pigeon now became clear, rising above the clamour — the Babel, he thought, the confusion of tongues, remembering again as he distinguished the sailor’s remote, returning voice, the trip to Cholula: ‘You telling me or am I telling you? Japan no good for U.S., for America… No bueno. Mehican, diez y ocho. All tine Mehican gone in war for U.S.A. Sure, sure, yes… Give me cigarette for me. Give me match for my. My Mehican war gone for England all tine –’