Under the Volcano (24 page)

The doctor gave another worried look down the garden and began to laugh quietly, though his whole body was shaking with mirth, his white teeth flashed in the sun, even his immaculate blue suit seemed to be laughing. ‘
Señor
,' he began, biting off his laughter short on his lips, like a child, with his front teeth. ‘Señor Firim,
por favor
, I am sorry, but I must comport myself here like,' he looked round him again, catching his breath, ‘like an apostle. You mean,
señor
,' he went on more evenly, ‘that you are feeling fine this morning, quite like the cat's pyjama's'

‘Well: hardly,' said the Consul, softly as before, casting a suspicious eye for his part in the other direction at some maguey growing beyond the
barranca
, like a battalion moving up a slope under machine-gun fire. ‘Perhaps that's an overstatement. To put it more simply, what would you do for a case of chronic, controlled, all-possessing, and inescapable delirium tremens?'

Dr Vigil started. A half-playful smile hovered at the corner of his lips as he contrived rather unsteadily to roll up his paper into a neat cylindrical tube. ‘You mean, not cats –' he said, and he made a swift rippling circular crawling gesture in front of his eyes with one hand, ‘but rather –'

The Consul nodded cheerfully. For his mind was at rest. He had caught a glimpse of those morning headlines, which seemed entirely concerned with the Pope's illness and the Battle of the Ebro.

‘ –
progresión
,' the doctor was repeating the gesture more slowly with his eyes closed, his fingers crawling separately, curved like claws, his head shaking idiotically. ‘ –
a ratos!
' he pounced. ‘
Si
,' he said, pursing his lips and clapping his hand to his forehead in a motion of mock horror. ‘
Si
,' he repeated. ‘Tereebly… More alcohol is perhaps best,' he smiled.

‘Your doctor tells me that in my case delirium tremens may
not prove fatal,' the Consul, triumphantly himself at last, informed Mr Quincey, who came up just at this moment.

And at the next moment, though not before there had passed between himself and the doctor a barely perceptible exchange of signals, a tiny symbolic mouthward flick of the wrist on the Consul's side as he glanced up at his bungalow, and upon Vigil's a slight flapping movement of the arms extended apparently in the act of stretching, which meant (in the obscure language known only to major adepts in the Great Brotherhood of Alcohol), ‘Come up and have a spot when you've finished,' ‘I shouldn't, for if I do I shall be “flying”, but on second thoughts perhaps I will' — it seemed he was back drinking from his bottle of tequila. And, the moment after, that he was drifting slowly and powerfully through the sunlight back towards the bungalow itself. Accompanied by Mr Quincey's cat, who was following an insect of some sort along his path, the Consul floated in an amber glow. Beyond the house, where now the problems awaiting him seemed already on the point of energetic solution, the day before him stretched out like an illimitable rolling wonderful desert in which one was going, though in a delightful way, to be lost: lost, but not so completely he would be unable to find the few necessary water-holes, or the scattered tequila oases where witty legionnaires of damnation who couldn't understand a word he said, would wave him on, replenished, into that glorious Pariÿn wilderness where man never went thirsty, and where now he was drawn on beautifully by the dissolving mirages past the skeletons like frozen wire and the wandering dreaming lions towards ineluctable personal disaster, always in a delightful way of course, the disaster might even be found at the end to contain a certain element of triumph. Not that the Consul now felt gloomy. Quite the contrary. The outlook had rarely seemed so bright. He became conscious, for the first time, of the extraordinary activity which everywhere surrounded him in his garden: a lizard going up a tree, another kind of lizard coming down another tree, a bottle-green humming-bird exploring a flower, another kind of humming-bird, voraciously at another flower; huge butterflies, whose precise stitched markings reminded one of the blouses in the market, flopping about with
indolent gymnastic grace (much as Yvonne had described them greeting her in Acapulco Bay yesterday, a storm of torn-up multicoloured love-letters, tossing to windward past the saloons on the promenade deck); ants with petals or scarlet blossoms tacking hither and thither along the paths; while from above, below, from the sky, and, it might be, from under the earth, came a continual sound of whistling, gnawing, rattling, even trumpeting. Where was his friend the snake now? Hiding up a pear tree probably. A snake that waited to drop rings on you: whore's shoes. From the branches of these pear trees hung carafes full of a glutinous yellow substance for trapping insects still changed religiously every month by the local horticultural college. (How gay were the Mexicans! The horticulturalists made the occasion, as they made every possible occasion, a sort of dance, bringing their womenfolk with them, flitting from tree to tree, gathering up and replacing the carafes as though the whole thing were a movement in a comic ballet, afterwards lolling about in the shade for hours, as if the Consul himself did not exist.) Then the behaviour of Mr Quincey's cat began to fascinate him. The creature had at last caught the insect but instead of devouring it, she was holding its body, still uninjured, delicately between her teeth, while its lovely luminous wings, still beating, for the insect had not stopped flying an instant, protruded from either side of her whiskers, fanning them. The Consul stooped forward to the rescue. But the animal bounded just out of reach. He stooped again, with the same result. In this preposterous fashion, the Consul stooping, the cat dancing just out of reach, the insect still flying furiously in the cat's mouth, he approached his porch. Finally the cat extended a preparate paw for the kill, opening her mouth, and the insect, whose wings had never ceased to beat, suddenly and marvellously, flew out as might indeed the human soul from the jaws of death, flew up, up, up, soaring over the trees: and at that moment he saw them. They were standing on the porch: Yvonne's arms were full of bougainvillea, which she was arranging in a cobalt ceramic vase.' — but suppose he's absolutely adamant. Suppose he simply won't go… careful, Hugh, it's got spikes on it, and you have to look at everything carefully to be sure there're no
spiders.' ‘Hi there, Suchiquetal !' the Consul shouted gaily, waving his hand, as the cat with a frigid look over her shoulder that said plainly, ‘I didn't want it anyway; I meant to let it go,' galloped away, humiliated, into the bushes. ‘Hi there, Hugh, you old snake in the grass !'

… Why then should he be sitting in the bathroom? Was he asleep? dead? passed out? Was he in the bathroom now or half an hour ago? Was it night? Where were the others? But now he heard some of the others' voices on the porch. Some of the others? It was just Hugh and Yvonne, of course, for the doctor had gone. Yet for a moment he could have sworn the house had been full of people; why, it was still this morning, or barely afternoon, only 12.15 in fact by this watch. At eleven he'd been talking to Mr Quincey. ‘Oh… Oh.' The Consul groaned aloud… It came to him he was supposed to be getting ready to go to Tomalín. But how had he managed to persuade anyone he was sober enough to go to Tomalín? And why, anyhow, Tomalín?

A procession of thought like little elderly animals filed through the Consul's mind, and in his mind too he was steadily crossing the porch again, as he had done an hour ago, immediately after he'd seen the insect flying away out of the cat's mouth.

He had crossed the porch — which Concepta had swept — smiling soberly to Yvonne and shaking hands with Hugh on his way to the icebox, and unfastening it, he knew not only that they'd been talking about him, but, obscurely, from that bright fragment of overheard conversation, its round meaning, just as had he at that moment glimpsed the new moon with the old one in its arms, he might have been impressed by its complete shape, though the rest were shadowy, illumined only by earthlight.

But what had happened then? ‘Oh,' the Consul cried aloud again. ‘Oh.' The faces of the last hour hovered before him, the figures of Hugh and Yvonne and Dr Vigil moving quickly and jerkily now like those of an old silent film, their words mute explosions in the brain. Nobody seemed to be doing anything important; yet everything seemed of the utmost hectic importance, for instance Yvonne saying: ‘We saw an armadillo': —‘What, no Tarsius spectres !' he had replied, then Hugh opening the freezing bottle of Carta Blanca beer for him, prizing off
the fizzing cap on the edge of the parapet and decanting the foam into his glass, the contiguity of which to his strychnine bottle had, it must be admitted now, lost most of its significance…

In the bathroom the Consul became aware he still had with him half a glass of slightly flat beer; his hand was fairly steady, but numbed holding the glass, he drank cautiously, carefully postponing the problem soon to be raised by its emptiness.

–‘Nonsense,' he said to Hugh. And he had added with impressive consular authority that Hugh couldn't leave immediately anyway, at least not for Mexico City, that there was only one bus today, the one Hugh'd come on, which had gone back to the City already, and one train that didn't leave till 11.45 p.m.…

Then: ‘But wasn't it Bougainville, doctor?' Yvonne was asking — and it really was astonishing how sinister and urgent and
inflamed
all these minutiae seemed to him in the bathroom —‘Wasn't it Bougainville who discovered the bougainvillea?' while the doctor bending over her flowers merely looked alert and puzzled, he said nothing save with his eyes which perhaps barely betrayed that he'd stumbled on a ‘situation'. — ‘Now I come to think of it, I believe it was Bougainville. Hence the name,' Hugh observed fatuously, seating himself on the parapet
-‘Si:
you
can
go to the
botica
and so as not to be misunderstood, say
favor de servir una toma de vino quinado o en su defecto una toma de nuez vó.mica, pero
–' Dr Vigil was chuckling, talking to Hugh it must have been, Yvonne having slipped into her room a moment, while the Consul, eavesdropping, was at the icebox for another bottle of beer — then; ‘Oh, I was
So
terrible sick this morning I needed to be holding myself to the street windows,' and to the Consul himself as he returned' — Please forgive my stupid
comport
last night: oh, I have done a lot of stupid things everywhere these last few days, but' — raising his glass of whisky — ‘I will never drink more; I will need two full days of sleeping to recover myself — and then, as Yvonne returned — magnificently giving the whole show away, raising his glass to the Consul again: ‘
Salud
: I hope you are not as sick as I am. You were so
perfectamente borracho
last night I think you
must have killed yourself with drinking. I think even to send a boy after you this morning to knock your door, and find if drinking have not killed you already,' Dr Vigil had said.

A strange fellow: in the bathroom the Consul sipped his flat beer. A strange, decent, generous-hearted fellow, if slightly deficient in tact save on his own behalf. Why couldn't people hold their liquor? He himself had still managed to be quite considerate of Vigil's position in Quincey's garden. In the final analysis there was no one you could trust to drink with you to the bottom of the bowl. A lonely thought. But of the doctor's generosity there was little doubt. Before long indeed, in spite of the necessary ‘two full days of sleeping', he had been inviting them all to come with him to Guanajuato: recklessly he proposed leaving for his holiday by car this evening, after a problematic set of tennis this afternoon with —

The Consul took another sip of beer. ‘Oh,' he shuddered. ‘Oh.' It had been a mild shock last night to discover that Vigil and Jacques Laruelle were friends, far more than embarrassing to be reminded of it this morning… Anyhow, Hugh had turned down the notion of the two-hundred-mile trip to Guanajuato, since Hugh — and how amazingly well, after all, those cowboy clothes seemed to suit his erect and careless bearing! — was now determined to catch that night train; while the Consul had declined on Yvonne's account.

The Consul saw himself again, hovering over the parapet, gazing down at the swimming-pool below, a little turquoise set in the garden. Thou art the grave buried love doth live. The inverted reflections of banana trees and birds, caravans of clouds, moved in it. Wisps of new-mown turf floated on the surface. Fresh mountain water trickled into the pool, which was almost overflowing, from the cracked broken hose whose length was a series of small spouting fountains.

Then Yvonne and Hugh, below, were swimming in the pool…

— ‘
Absolutamente
,' the doctor had said, beside the Consul at the parapet, and attentively lighting a cigarette. ‘I have', the Consul was telling him, lifting his face towards the volcanoes and feeling his desolation go out to those heights where even
now at mid-morning the howling snow would whip the face, and the ground beneath the feet was dead lava, a soulless petrified residue of extinct plasm in which even the wildest and loneliest trees would never take root; ‘I have another enemy round the back you can't see. A sunflower. I know it watches me and I know it hates me.' ‘
Exactamente
,' Dr Vigil said, ‘very posseebly it might be hating you a little less if you would stop from drinking tequila.' ‘Yes, but I'm only drinking beer this morning,' the Consul said with conviction, ‘as you can see for yourself.' ‘
Si, hombre
,' Dr Vigil nodded, who after a few whiskies (from a new bottle) had given up trying to conceal himself from Mr Quincey's house and was standing boldly by the parapet with the Consul. ‘There are', the Consul added, ‘a thousand aspects of this infernal beauty I was talking about, each with its peculiar tortures, each jealous as a woman of all stimulations save its own.' ‘
Naturalmente
,' Dr Vigil said. ‘But I think if you are very serious about your
progresión a ratos
you may take a longer journey even than this proposèd one.' The Consul placed his glass on the parapet while the doctor continued. ‘Me too unless we contain with ourselves never to drink no more. I think,
miamigo
, sickness is not only in body but in that part used to be call: soul.' ‘Soul?' ‘
Precisamente
,' the doctor said, swiftly clasping and unclasping his fingers. ‘But a mesh? Mesh. The nerves are a mesh, like, how do you say it, an eclectic systemë.' ‘Ah, very good,' the Consul said, ‘you mean an electric system.' ‘But after much tequila the eclectic systemè is perhaps
un poco descompuesto, comprenez
, as sometimes in the
cine
:
claro î
' ‘A sort of eclampsia, as it were,' the Consul nodded desperately, removing his glasses, and at this point, the Consul remembered, he had been without a drink nearly ten minutes; the effect of the tequila too had almost gone. He had peered out at the garden, and it was as though bits of his eyelids had broken off and were flittering and jittering before him, turning into nervous shapes and shadows, jumping to the guilty chattering in his mind, not quite voices yet, but they were coming back, they were coming back; a picture of his soul as a town appeared once more before him, but this time a town ravaged and stricken in the black path of his excess and shutting his burning eyes he
had thought of the beautiful functioning of the system in those who were truly alive, switches connected, nerves rigid only in real danger, and in nightmareless sleep now calm, not resting, yet poised: a peaceful village. Christ, how it heightened the torture (and meantime there had been every reason to suppose the others imagined he was enjoying himself enormously) to be aware of all this, while at the same time conscious of the whole horrible disintegrating mechanism, the light now on, now off, now on too glaringly, now too dimly, with the glow of a fitful dying battery — then at last to know the whole town plunged into darkness, where communication is lost, motion mere obstruction, bombs threaten, ideas stampede —