Under the Volcano (16 page)

‘What's the use of escaping', he drew the moral with complete seriousness, ‘from ourselves?'

Yvonne had sunk back in bed patiently. But now she stretched forward and stabbed out her cigarette in the tray of a tall grey tin-work ashstand shaped like an abstract representation of a swan. The swan's neck had become slightly unravelled but it bowed gracefully, tremulously at her touch as she answered:

‘All right, Geoffrey: suppose we forget it until you're feeling better: we can cope with it in a day or two, when you're sober.'

‘But good lord!'

The Consul sat perfectly still staring at the floor while the enormity of the insult passed into his soul. As if, as if, he were not sober now ! Yet there was some elusive subtlety in the impeachment that still escaped him. For he was not sober. No, he was not, not at this very moment he wasn't ! But what had that to do with a minute before, or half an hour ago? And what right had Yvonne to assume it, assume either that he was not sober now, or that, far worse, in a day or two he
would
be sober? And even if he were not sober now, by what fabulous stages, comparable indeed only to the paths and spheres of the Holy Cabbala itself, had he reached
this
stage again, touched briefly once before this morning, this stage at which alone he could, as she put it, ‘cope', this precarious precious stage, so arduous to maintain, of being drunk in which alone he was sober! What right had she, when he had sat suffering the tortures of the damned and the madhouse on her behalf for fully twenty-five minutes on end without having a decent drink, even to hint that he was anything but, to her eyes, sober? Ah, a woman could not know the perils, the complications, yes, the
importance
of a drunkard's life ! From what conceivable standpoint of rectitude did she imagine she could judge what was
anterior to her arrival? And she knew nothing whatever of what all too recently he had gone through, his fall in the Calle Nicaragua, his aplomb, coolness, even bravery there — the Burke's Irish whiskey ! What a world 1 And the trouble was she had now spoiled the moment. Because the Consul now felt that he might have been capable, remembering Yvonne's ‘perhaps I'll have one after breakfast', and all that implied, of saying, in a minute (but for her remark and yes, in spite of any salvation), ‘Yes, by all means you are right: let us go!' But who could agree with someone who was so certain you were going to be sober the day after tomorrow? It wasn't as though either, upon the most superficial plane, it were not well known that no one could tell when he was drunk. Just like the Taskersons: God bless them. He was not the person to be seen reeling about in the street. True he might lie down in the street, if need be, like a gentleman, but he would not reel. Ah, what a world it was, that trampled down the truth and drunkards alike! A world full of bloodthirsty people, no less ! Bloodthirsty, did I hear you say bloodthirsty, Commander Firmin?

‘But my lord, Yvonne, surely you know by this time I can't get drunk however much I drink,' he said almost tragically, taking an abrupt swallow of strychnine. ‘Why, do you think I
like
swilling down this awful
nux vomica
or belladonna or whatever it is of Hugh's?' The Consul got up with his empty glass and began to walk around the room. He was not so much aware of having done by default anything fatal (it wasn't as if, for instance, he'd thrown his whole life away) as something merely foolish, and at the same time, as it were, sad. Yet there seemed a call for some amends. He either thought or said:

‘Well, tomorrow perhaps I'll drink beer only. There's nothing like beer to straighten you out, and a little more strychnine, and then the next day just beer — I'm sure no one will object if I drink beer. This Mexican stuff is particularly full of vitamins, I gather… For I can see it really is going to be somewhat of an occasion, this reunion of us all, and then perhaps when my nerves are back to normal again, I'll go off it completely. And then, who knows', he brought up by the door, ‘I might get down to work again and finish my book!'

But the door was still a door and it was shut: and now ajar. Through it, on the porch he saw the whisky bottle, slightly smaller and emptier of hope than the Burke's Irish, standing forlornly. Yvonne had not opposed a snifter: he had been unjust to her. Yet was that any reason why he should be unjust also to the bottle? Nothing in the world was more terrible than an empty bottle! Unless it was an empty glass. But he could wait: yes, sometimes he knew when to leave it alone. He wandered back to the bed thinking or saying:

‘Yes: I can see the reviews now. Mr Firmin's sensational new data on Atlantis! The most extraordinary thing of its kind since Donnelly ! Interrupted by his untimely death… Marvellous. And the chapters on the alchemists I Which beat the Bishop of Tasmania to a frazzle. Only that's not quite the way they'll put it. Pretty good, eh? I might even work in something about Coxcox and Noah. I've got a publisher interested too; in Chicago — interested but not concerned, if you understand me, for it's really a mistake to imagine such a book could ever become popular. But it's amazing when you come to think of it how the human spirit seems to blossom in the shadow of the
abattoir
! How — to say nothing of all the poetry — not far enough below the stockyards to escape altogether the reek of the porterhouse of tomorrow, people can be living in cellars the life of the old alchemists of Prague ! Yes: living among the cohabitations of Faust himself, among the litharge and agate and hyacinth and pearls. A life which is amorphous, plastic and crystalline. What am I talking about? Copula Maritalis? Or from alcohol to alkahest. Can you tell me?… Or perhaps I might get myself another job, first of course being sure to insert an advertisement in the
Universal:
will accompany corpse to any place in the east!'

Yvonne was sitting up half reading her magazine, her nightgown slightly pulled aside showing where her warm tan faded into the white skin of her breast, her arms outside the covers and one hand turned downward from the wrist hanging over the edge of the bed listlessly: as he approached she turned this hand palm upward in an involuntary movement, of irritation perhaps, but it was like an unconscious gesture of appeal: it
was more: it seemed to epitomize, suddenly, all the old supplication, the whole queer secret dumb show of incommunicable tendernesses and loyalties and eternal hopes of their marriage. The Consul felt his tearducts quicken. But he had also felt a sudden peculiar sense of embarrassment, a sense, almost, of indecency that he, a stranger, should be in her room. This room ! He went to the door and looked out. The whisky bottle was still there.

But he made no motion towards it, none at all, save to put on his dark glasses. He was conscious of new aches here and there, of, for the first time, the impact of the Calle Nicaragua. Vague images of grief and tragedy flickered in his mind. Somewhere a butterfly was flying out to sea: lost. La Fontaine's duck had loved the white hen, yet after escaping together from the dreadful farmyard through the forest to the lake it was the duck that swam: the hen, following, drowned. In November 1895, in convict dress, from two o'clock in the afternoon till half past, handcuffed, recognized, Oscar Wilde stood on the centre platform at Clapham Junction…

When the Consul returned to the bed and sat down on it Yvonne's arms were under the covers while her face was turned to the wall. After a while he said with emotion, his voice grown hoarse again:

‘Do you remember how the night before you left we actually made a date like a couple of strangers to meet for dinner in Mexico City?'

Yvonne gazed at the wall:

‘You didn't keep it.'

‘That was because I couldn't remember the name of the restaurant at the last moment. All I knew was that it was in the Via Dolorosa somewhere. It was the one we'd discovered together the last time we were in the city. I went into all the restaurants in the Via Dolorosa looking for you and not finding you I had a drink in each one.'

‘Poor Geoffrey.'

‘I must have phoned back the Hotel Canada from each restaurant. From the
cantina
of each restaurant. God knows how many times, for I thought you might have returned there. And
each time they said the same thing, that you'd left to meet me, but they didn't know where. And finally they became pretty damned annoyed. I can't imagine why we stayed at the Canada instead of the Regis — do you remember how they kept mistaking me there, with my beard, for that wrestler?… Anyhow, there I was wandering around from place to place, wrestling, and thinking all the while I could prevent you from going the next morning, if I could only find you!'

‘Yes.'

(If you could only find her ! Ah, how cold it was that night, and bitter, with a howling wind and wild steam blowing from the pavement gratings where the ragged children were making to sleep early under their poor newspapers. Yet none was more homeless than you, as it grew later and colder and darker, and still you had not found her ! And a sorrowful voice seemed to be wailing down the street at you with the wind calling its name: Via Dolorosa, Via Dolorosa! And then somehow it was early the next morning directly after she had left the Canada —you brought one of her suitcases down yourself though you didn't see her off — and you were sitting in the hotel bar drinking
mescal
with ice in it that chilled your stomach, you kept swallowing the lemon pips, when suddenly a man with the look of an executioner came from the street dragging two little fawns shrieking with fright into the kitchen. And later you heard them screaming, being slaughtered probably. And you thought: better not remember what you thought. And later still, after Oaxaca, when you had returned here to Quauhnahuac, through the anguish of that return — circling down from the Tres Marías in the Plymouth, seeing the town below through the mist, and then the town itself, the landmarks, your soul dragged past them as at the tail of a runaway horse — when you returned here–)

‘The cats had died', he said, ‘when I got back — Pedro insisted it was typhoid. Or rather, poor old Oedipuss died the very day you left apparently, he'd already been thrown down the
barranca
while little Pathos was lying in the garden under the plantains when I arrived looking even sicker than when we first picked her out of the gutter; dying, though no one could
make out what of: Maria claimed it was a broken heart –'

‘Cheery little matter,' Yvonne answered in a lost hard tone with her face still turned to the wall.

‘Do you remember your song, I won't sing it: “No work has been done by the little cat, no work has been done by the big cat, no work has been done, by an-y-one ! ”' the Consul heard himself ask; tears of sorrow came to his eyes, he removed his dark glasses quickly and buried his face on her shoulder. No, but Hugh, she began — ‘Never mind Hugh,' he had not meant to elicit this, to thrust her back against the pillows; he felt her body stiffen, becoming hard and cold. Yet her consent did not seem from weariness only, but to a solution for one shared instant beautiful as trumpets out of a clear sky…

But he could feel now, too, trying the prelude, the preparatory nostalgic phrases on his wife's senses, the image of his possession, like that jewelled gate the desperate neophyte, Yesod-bound, projects for the thousand time on the heavens to permit passage of his astral body, fading, and slowly, inexorably, that of a
cantina
, when in dead silence and peace it first opens in the morning, taking its place. It was one of those
cantinas
that would be opening now, at nine o'clock: and he was queerly conscious of his own presence there with the angry tragic words, the very words which might soon be spoken, glaring behind him. This image faded also: he was where he was, sweating now, glancing once — but never ceasing to play the prelude, the little one-fingered introduction to the unclassifiable composition that might still just follow — out of the window at the drive, fearful himself lest Hugh appear there, then he imagined he really saw him at the end of it coming through the gap, now that he distinctly heard his step in the gravel… No one. But now, now he wanted to go, passionately he wanted to go, aware that the peace of the
cantina
was changing to its first fevered preoccupation of the morning: the political exile in the corner discreetly sipping orange crush, the accountant arriving, accounts gloomily surveyed, the iceblock dragged in by a brigand with an iron scorpion, the one bartender slicing lemons, the other, sleep in his eyes, sorting beer bottles. And now, now he wanted to go, aware that the place was filling
with people not at any other time part of the
cantina's
community at all, people eructating, exploding, committing nuisances, lassoes over their shoulders, aware too of the debris from the night before, the dead matchboxes, lemon peel, cigarettes open like tortillas, the dead packages of them swarming in filth and sputum. Now that the clock over the mirror would say a little past nine, and the news-vendors of
La Prensa
and
El Universal
were stamping in, or standing in the corner at this very moment before the crowded grimed
mingitorio
with the shoeblacks who carried their shoe-stools in their hands, or had left them balanced between the burning foot-rail and the bar, now he wanted to go ! Ah none but he knew how beautiful it all was, the sunlight, sunlight, sunlight flooding the bar of El Puerto del Sol, flooding the watercress and oranges, or falling in a single golden line as if in the act of conceiving a God, falling like a lance straight into a block of ice —

‘Sorry, it isn't any good I'm afraid.' The Consul shut the door behind him and a small rain of plaster showered on his head. A Don Quixote fell from the wall. He picked up the sad straw knight…

And then the whisky bottle: he drank fiercely from it.

He had not forgotten his glass however, and into it he was now pouring himself chaotically a long drink of his strychnine mixture, half by mistake, he'd meant to pour the whisky. ‘Strychnine is an aphrodisiac. Perhaps it will take immediate effect. It still may not be too late.' He had sunk through, it almost felt, the green cane rocking-chair.