— ‘Where are you, Geoffrey? If I only knew where you were, if I only knew that you wanted me, you know I would have long since been with you. For my life is irrevocably and for ever bound to yours. Never think that by releasing me you will be free. You would only condemn us to an ultimate hell on earth. You would only free something else to destroy us both. I am frightened, Geoffrey. Why do you not tell me what has happened? What do you need? And my God, what do you wait for? What release can be compared to the release of love? My thighs ache to embrace you. The emptiness of my body is the famished need of you. My tongue is dry in my mouth for the want of our speech. If you let anything happen to yourself you will be harming my flesh and mind. I am in your hands now. Save –’
‘Mexican works, England works, Mexican works, sure, French works. Why speak English? Mine Mexican. Mexican United States he sees Negros — de comprende — Detroit, Houston, Dallas…’
‘¿Quere usted la salvación de Meéxico? ¿Quiere usted que Crsto sea nuestro Rey?’
‘No.’
The Consul looked up, pocketing his letters. Someone near him was playing a fiddle loudly. A patriarchal toothless old Mexican with a thin wiry beard, encouraged ironically from behind by the Chief of Municipality, was sawing away almost in his ear at the Star Spangled Banner. But he was also saying something to him privately. ‘¿Americano? This bad place for you. Deese hombres, malos, Cacos. Bad people here. Brutos. No bueno for anyone. Comprendo. I am a potter,’ he pursued urgently, his face close to the Consul’s. ‘I take you to my home. I ah wait outside.’ The old man, still playing wildly though rather out of tune, had gone, way was being made for him through the crowd, but his place, somehow between the Consul and the pimp, had been taken by an old woman who, though respectably enough dressed with a fine rebozo thrown over her shoulders, was behaving in a distressing fashion, plunging her hand restlessly into the Consul’s pocket, which he as restlessly removed, thinking she wanted to rob him. Then he realized she too wanted to help. ‘No good for you,’ she whispered. ‘Bad place. Muy malo. These man no friend of Mexican people.’ She nodded toward the bar, in which the Chief of Rostrums and Sanabria still stood. ‘They no policía. They diablos. Murderers. He kill ten old men. He kill twenty viejos.’ She peered behind her nervously, to see if the Chief of Municipality was watching her, then took from her shawl a clockwork skeleton. She set this on the counter before A Few Fleas, who was watching intently, munching a marzipan coffin.’ Vámonos,’ she muttered to the Consul, as the skeleton, set in motion, jigged’on the bar, to collapse flaccidly. But the Consul only raised his glass.‘ Gracias, buena amigo,’ he said, without expression. Then the old woman had gone. Meantime the conversation about him had grown even more foolish and intemperate. The pimp was pawing at the Consul from the other side, where the sailor had been. Diosdado was serving ochas, raw alcohol in steaming herb tea: there was the pungent smell too, from the glass rooms, of marijuana. ‘All deese men and women telling me these men my friend for you. Ah me gusta gusta gusta… You like me like? I pay for dis man all tine,’ the pimp rebuked the legionnaire, who was on the point of offering the Consul a drink. ‘My friend of England man! My for Mexican all! American no good for me no. American no good for Mexican. These donkey, these man. These donkey. No savee nada. Me pay for all you drinkee. You no American You England. O.K. life for your pipe?’
‘No gracias,’ the Consul said lighting it himself and looking meaningly at Diosdado, from whose shirt pocket his other pipe was protruding again. ‘I happen to be American, and I’m getting rather bored by your insults.’
‘¿Quiere usted la salvación de México? ¿Quiere usted que Cristo sea nuestro Rey?’
‘No.’
‘These donkey. Goddamn son of a bitch for my.’
‘One, two, tree, four, five, twelve, sixee, seven — it’s a long, longy, longy, longy — way to Tipperaire.’
‘Noch ein habanero — ’
’ — Bolshevisten —’
‘Buenas tardes, señores,’ the Consul greeted the Chief of Gardens and the Chief of Rostrums returning from the phone.
They were standing beside him. Soon, preposterous things were being said between them again without adequate reason: answers, it seemed to him, given by him to questions that while they had perhaps not been asked, nevertheless hung in the air. And as for some answers others gave, when he turned round, no one was there. Lingeringly, the bar was emptying for la comida; yet a handful of mysterious strangers had already entered to take the others’ places. No thought of escape now touched the Consul’s mind. Both his will, and time, which hadn’t advanced five minutes since he was last conscious of it, were paralysed. The Consul saw someone he recognized: the driver of the bus that afternoon. He had arrived at that stage of drunkenness where it becomes necessary to shake hands with everyone. The Consul too found himself shaking hands with the drver. ‘¿Dónde están vuestras palomas?’ he asked him. Suddenly, at a nod from Sanabria, the Chief of Rostrums plunged his hands into the Consul’s pockets. ‘Time you pay for — ah — Mehican whisky,’ he said loudly, taking out the Consul’s notecase with a wink at Diosdado. The Chief of Municipality made his obscene circular movement of the hips. ‘Progresión al culo — ’ he began. The Chief of Rostrums had abstracted the package of Yvonne’s letters: he glanced sideways at this without removing the elastic the Consul had replaced.’ Chingao, cabrón’ His eyes consulted Sanabria who, silent, stern, nodded again. The Chief brought out another paper, and a card he didn’t know he possessed, from the Consul’s jacket pocket. The three policemen put their heads together over the bar, reading the paper. Now the Consul, baffled, was reading this paper himself:
Daily… Londres Presse. Collect antisemitic campaign mex-press propetition… textile manufacture’s unquote… German behind… interiorwards. What was this?… news… jews… country belief… power ends conscience… unquote stop Firmin.
‘No. Blackstone,’ the Consul said.
‘¿Cómo se llama? Your name is Firmin. It say there: Firmin. It say you are Juden.’
‘I don’t give a damn what it says anywhere. My name’s Black-stone, and I’m not a journalist. True, vero, I’m a writer, an escritor, only on economic matters,’ the Consul wound up.
‘Where your papers? What for you have no papers?’ The Chief of Rostrums asked, pocketing Hugh’s cable. ‘Where your pasaporte? What need for you to make disguise?’
The Consul removed his dark glasses. Mutely to him, between sardonic thumb and forefinger, the Chief of Gardens held out the card: Federación Anarquista Ibérica, it said. Sr Hugo Firmin.
‘No comprendo,’ the Consul took the card and turned it over. ‘Blackstone’s my name. I am a writer, not an anarchist.’
‘Wrider? You antichrista. Si, you antichrista prik.’ The Chief of Rostrums snatched back the card and pocketed it. ‘And Juden,’ he added. He slipped the elastic from Yvonne’s letters and, moistening his thumb, ran through them, glancing sideways once more at the envelopes.’ Chingar. What for you tell lies?’ he said almost sorrowfully. ‘Cabrón. What for you lie? It say here too: your name is Firmin.’ It struck the Consul that the legionnaire Weber, who was still in the bar, though at a distance, was staring at him with a remote speculation, but he looked away again. The Chief of Municipality regarded the Consul’s watch, which he held in the palm of one mutilated hand, while he scratched himself between the thighs with the other, fiercely. ‘Here, oiga.’ The Chief of Rostrums withdrew a ten-peso note from the Consul’s case, crackled it, and threw it on the counter. ‘Chingao.’ Winking at Diosdado he replaced the case in his own pocket with the Consul’s other things. Then Sanabria spoke for the first time to him.
‘I am afraid you must come to prison,’ he said simply in English. He went back to the phone.
The Chief of Municipality rolled his hips and gripped the Consul’s arm. The Consul shouted at Diosdado in Spanish, shaking himself loose. He managed to reach his hand over the bar but Diosdado struck it away. A Few Fleas began t
o yap. A sudden noise from the corner startled everyone. Yvonne and Hugh perhaps, at last. He turned round quickly, still free of the Chief: it was only the uncontrollable face on the bar-room floor, the rabbit, having a nervous convulsion, trembling all over, wrinkling its nose and scuffing disapprovingly. The Consul caught sight of the old woman with the rebozo: loyally, she hadn’t gone. She was shaking her head at him, frowning sadly, and he now realized she was the same old woman who’d had the dominoes.
‘What for you lie?’ the Chief of Rostrums repeated in a glowering voice. ‘You say your name is Black. No es Black.’ He shoved him backwards toward the door. ‘You say you are a wrider.’ He shoved him again. ‘You no are wrider.’ He pushed the Consul more violently, but the Consul stood his ground. ‘You are no a de wrider, you are de espider, and we shoota de espiders in Méjico.’ Some military policemen watched with concern. The newcomers were breaking up. Two pariah dogs ran around in the bar. A woman clutched her baby to her, terrified. ‘You no wrider.’ The Chief caught him by the throat. ‘You Al Capón. You a Jew chingao.’ The Consul shook himself free again. ‘You are a spider.’
Abruptly the radio, which, as Sanabria finished with the phone again, Diosdado had turned full blast, shouted in Spanish the Consul translated to himself in a flash, shouted like orders yelled in a gale of wind, the only orders that will save the ship: ‘Incalculable are the benefits civilization has brought us, incommensurable the productive power of all classes of riches originated by the inventions and discoveries of science. Inconceivable the marvellous creations of the human sex in order to make men more happy, more free, and more perfect. Without parallel the crystalline and fecund fountains of the new life which still remains closed to the thirsty lips of the people who follow in their griping and bestial tasks.’
Suddenly the Consul thought he saw an enormous rooster flapping before him, clawing and crowing. He raised his hands and it merded on his face. He struck the returning Jefe de Jardineros straight between the eyes. ‘Give me those letters back!’ he heard himself shouting at the Chief of Rostrums, but the radio drowned his voice, and now a peal of thunder drowned the radio. ‘You poxboxes. You coxcoxes. You killed that Indian. You tried to kill him and make it look like an accident,’ he roared. ‘You’re all in it. Then more of you came up and took his horse. Give me my papers back.’
‘Papers. Cabrón. You har no papers.’ Straightening himself the Consul saw in the Chief of Rostrum’s expression a hint of M. Laruelle and he struck at it. Then he saw himself the Chief of Gardens again and struck that figure; then in the Chief of Municipality the policeman Hugh had refrained from striking this afternoon and he struck this figure too. The clock outside quickly chimed seven times. The cock flapped before his eyes, blinding him. The Chief of Rostrums took him by the coat. Someone else seized him from behind. In spite of his struggles he was being dragged towards the door. The fair man who had turned up again helped shove him towards it; and Diosdado, who had vaulted ponderously over the bar; and A Few Fleas, who kicked him viciously on the shins. The Consul snatched a machete lying on a table near the entrance and brandished it wildly. ‘Give me back those letters!’ he cried. Where was that bloody cock? He would chop off its head. He stumbled backwards out into the road. People taking tables laden with gaseosas in from the storm stopped to watch. The beggars turned their heads dully. The sentinel outside the barracks stood motionless. The Consul didn’t know what he was saying: ‘Only the poor, only through God, only the people you wipe your feet on, the poor in spirit, old men carrying their fathers and philosophers weeping in the dust. America perhaps, Don Quixote –’ he was still brandishing the sword, it was that sabre really, he thought, in María’s room — ‘if only you’d stop interfering, stop walking in your sleep, stop sleeping with my wife, only the beggars and the accursed.’ The machete fell with a rattle. The Consul felt himself stumbling backwards until he fell over a tussock of grass. ‘You stole that horse,’ he repeated.
The Chief of Rostrums was looking down at him. Sanabria stood by silent, grimly rubbing his cheek.’ Norteamericano, eh,’ said the Chief. ‘Inglés. You Jew.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘What the hell you think you do around here? You pelado, eh? It’s no good for your health. I shoot de twenty people.’ It was half a threat, half confidential. ‘We have found out — on the telephone — is it right? — that you are a criminal. You want to be a policeman? I make you policeman in Mexico.’
The Consul rose slowly to his feet, swaying. He caught sight of the horse, tethered near him. Only now he saw it more vividly and as a whole, electrified: the corded mouth, the shaved wooden pommel behind which tape was hanging, the saddlebags, the mats under the belt, the sore and the glossy shine on the hipbone, the number seven branded on the rump, the stud behind the saddlebuckle. glittering like a topaz in the light from the cantina. He staggered towards it.
‘I blow you wide open from your knees up, you Jew chingao,’ warned the Chief of Rostrums, grasping him by the collar, and the Chief of Gardens, standing by, nodded gravely. The Consul, shaking himself free, tore frantically at the horse’s bridle. The Chief of Rostrums stepped aside, hand on his holster. He drew his pistol. With his free hand he waved away some tentative onlookers. ‘I blow you wide open from your knees up, you cabrón,’ he said, ‘you pelado.’
‘No, I wouldn’t do that,’ said the Consul quietly, turning round. ‘That’s a Colt 17, isn’t it? It throws a lot of steel shavings.’
The Chief of Rostrums pushed the Consul back out of the light, took two steps forward, and fired. Lightning flashed like an inchworm going down the sky and the Consul, reeling, saw above him for a moment the shape of Popocateped, plumed with emerald snow and drenched with brilliance. The Chief fired twice more, the shots spaced, deliberate. Thunderclaps crashed on the mountains and then at hand. Released, the horse reared; tossing its head, it wheeled round and plunged neighing into the forest.
At first the Consul felt a queer relief. Now he realized he had been shot. He fell on one knee, then, with a groan, flat on his face in the grass. ‘Christ,’ he remarked, puzzled, ‘this is a dingy way to die.’
A bell spoke out:
Dolente… dolorel
It was raining softly. Shapes hovered by him, holding his hand, perhaps still trying to pick his pockets, or to help, or merely curious. He could feel life slivering out of him like liver, ebbing into the tenderness of the grass. He was alone. Where was everybody? Or had there been no one? Then a face shone out of the gloom, a mask of compassion. It was the old fiddler, stooping over him. ‘Compañero — ’ he began. Then he had vanished.
Presently the word pelado began to fill his whole consciousness. That had been Hugh’s word for the thief: now someone had flung the insult at him. And it was as if, for a moment, he had become the pelado, the thief — yes, the pilferer of meaningless muddled ideas out of which his rejection of life had grown, who had worn his two or three little bowler hats, his disguises, over these abstractions: now the realest of them all was close. But someone had called him compañero too, which was better, much better. It made him happy. These thoughts drifting through his mind were accompanied by music he could hear only when he listened carefully. Mozart was it? The Siciliana. Finale of the D minor quartet by Moses. No, it was something funereal, of Gluçk’s perhaps, from Alcestis. Yet there was a Bach-like quality to it. Bach? A clavichord, heard from far away, in England in the seventeenth century. England. The chords of a guitar too, half lost, mingled with the distant clamour of a waterfall and what sounded like the cries of love.
He was in Kashmir, he knew, lying in the meadows near running water among violets and trefoil, the Himalayas beyond, which made it all the more remarkable he should suddenly be setting out with Hugh and Yvonne to climb Popocateped. Already they had drawn ahead. ‘Can you pick bougainvillea?’ he heard Hugh say, and, ‘Be careful,’ Yvonne replied, ‘it’s got spikes on it and you have to look at everything to be sure there’re no spiders.’ ‘We shoota de espiders in Méjico,’ another
voice muttered. And with this Hugh and Yvonne had gone. He suspected they had not only climbed Popocatepetl but were by now far beyond it. Painfully he trudged the slope of the foothills toward Amecameca alone. With ventilated snow goggles, with alpenstock, with mittens and a wool cap pulled over his ears, with pockets full of dried prunes and raisins and nuts, with a jar of rice protruding from one coat pocket, and the Hotel Fausto’s information from the other, he was utterly weighed down. He could go no farther. Exhausted, helpless, he sank to the ground. No one would help him even if they could. Now he was the one dying by the wayside where no good Samaritan would halt. Though it was perplexing there should be this sound of-laughter in his ears, of voices: ah, he was being rescued at last. He was in an ambulance shrieking through the jungle itself, racing uphill past the timberline toward the peak — and this was certainly one way to get there! — while those were friendly voices around him, Jacques’s and Vigil’s, they would make allowances, would set Hugh and Yvonne’s minds at rest about him. ‘No se puede vivir sin amar,’ they would say, which would explain everything, and he repeated this aloud. How could he have thought so evil of the world when succour was at hand all the time? And now he had reached the summit. Ah, Yvonne, sweetheart, forgive me I Strong hands lifted him. Opening his eyes, he looked down, expecting to see, below him, the magnificent jungle, the heights, Pico de Orizabe, Malinche, Cofre de Perote, like those peaks of his life conquered one after another before this greatest ascent of all had been successfully, if unconventionally, completed. But there was nothing there: no peaks, no life, no climb. Nor was this summit a summit exactly: it had no substance, no firm base. It was crumbling too, whatever it was, collapsing, while he was falling, falling into the volcano, he must have climbed it after all, though now there was this noise’of foisting lava in his ears, horribly, it was in eruption, yet no, it wasn’t the volcano, the world itself was bursting, bursting into black spouts of villages catapulted into space, with himself falling through it all, through the inconceivable pandemonium of a million tanks, through the blazing of ten million burning bodies, falling, into a forest, falling —
Under the Volcano Page 44
