Under the Volcano (36 page)

‘You deny the greatness of my battle? Even if I win. And I shall certainly win, if I want to,' the Consul added, aware of a man near them standing on a step-ladder nailing a board to a tree.

‘
Je crois que le vautour est doux à Promethée et que les Ixion se plaisent en Enfers
.'

— ¡Box!

‘To say nothing of what you lose, lose, lose, are losing, man. You fool, you stupid fool… You've even been insulated from the responsibility of genuine suffering… Even the suffering you do endure is largely unnecessary. Actually spurious. It lacks the very basis you require of it for its tragic nature. You deceive yourself. For instance that you're drowning your sorrows… Because of Yvonne and me. But Yvonne knows. And so do I. And so do you. That Yvonne wouldn't have been aware. If you hadn't been so drunk all the time. To know what she was doing. Or care. And what's more. The same thing is bound to happen again you fool it will happen again if you don't pull yourself together. I can see the writing on the wall. Hullo.'

M. Laruelle wasn't there at all; he had been talking to himself. The Consul stood up and finished his tequila. But the writing was there, all right, if not on the wall. The man had nailed his board to the tree.

The Consul realized, leaving the Paris, he was in a state of drunkenness, so to speak, rare with him. His steps teetered to the left, he could not make them incline to the right. He knew in which direction he was going, towards the Bus Terminal, or rather the little dark
cantina
adjacent to it kept by the widow Gregorio, who herself was half English and had lived in Manchester, and to whom he owed fifty centavos he'd suddenly made up his mind to pay back. But simply he could not steer a straight course there…
Oh we all walk the wibberley wobberley
—

Thes Faustus
… The Consul looked at his watch. Just for one moment, one horrible moment in the Paris, he had thought it night, that it was one of those days the hours slid by like corks bobbing astern, and the morning was carried away by the wings of the angel of night, all in a trice, but tonight quite the reverse seemed to be happening: it was still only five to two. It was already the longest day in his entire experience, a lifetime; he had not only not missed the bus, he would have plenty of time for more drinks. If only he were not drunk! The Consul strongly disapproved of this drunkenness.

Children accompanied him, gleefully aware of his plight. Money, money, money, they gibbered. O.K. mistair! Where har you go? Their cries grew discouraged, fainter, utterly disappointed as they clung to his trousers leg. He would have liked to give them something. Yet he did not wish to draw more attention to himself. He had caught sight of Hugh and Yvonne, trying their hands at a shooting gallery. Hugh was shooting, Yvonne watched;
phut, pssst, pfffing
; and Hugh brought down a procession of wooden ducks.

The Consul stumbled on without being seen, passing a booth where you could have your photograph taken with your sweetheart against a terrifying thunderous background, lurid and green, with a charging bull, and Popocatepetl in eruption, past, his face averted, the shabby little closed British Consulate, where the lion and the unicorn on the faded blue shield regarded him mournfully. This was shameful. But we are still at your service,
in spite of all, they seemed to say.
Dieu et mon droit
. The children had given him up. However he had lost his bearings. He was reaching the edge of the fair. Mysterious tents were shut up here, or lying collapsed, enfolded on themselves. They appeared almost human, the former kind awake, expectant; the latter with the wrinkled crumpled aspect of men asleep, but longing even in unconsciousness to stretch their limbs. Farther on at the final frontiers of the fair, it was the day of the dead indeed. Here the tent booths and galleries seemed not so much asleep as lifeless, beyond hope of revival. Yet there were faint signs of life after all, he saw.

At a point outside the
plaza's
periphery, half on the pavement, there was another, utterly desolated, ‘safe' roundabout. The little chairs circulated beneath a frilled canvas pyramid that twirled slowly for half a minute, then stopped, when it looked just like the hat of the bored Mexican who tended it. Here it was, this little Popocateped, nestling far away from the swooping flying-machines, far from the Great Wheel, existing — for whom did it exist, the Consul wondered. Belonging neither to the children nor the adults it stood, untenanted, as one might imagine the whirligig of adolescence as resting deserted, if youth suspected it of offering an excitement so apparently harmless, choosing rather what in the proper square swooned in agonizing ellipses beneath some gigantic canopy.

The Consul walked on a little farther, still unsteadily; he thought he had his bearings again, then stopped:

¡BRAVA ATRACCIÓN! IO C. MÁQUINA INFERNAL

he read, half struck by some coincidence in this. Wild attraction. The huge looping-the-loop machine, empty, but going full blast over his head in this dead section of the fair, suggested some huge evil spirit, screaming in its lonely hell, its limbs writhing, smiting the air like flails of paddlewheels. Obscured by a tree, he hadn't seen it before. The machine stopped also…

‘ – Mistair. Money money money.' ‘Mistair ! Where har you go?'

The wretched children had spotted him again; and his penalty
for avoiding them was to be drawn inexorably, though with as much dignity as possible, into boarding the monster. And now, his ten centavos paid to a Chinese hunchback in a retiform visored tennis cap, he was alone, irrevocably and ridiculously alone, in a little confession box. After a while, with violent bewildering convulsions, the thing started to go. The confession boxes, perched at the end of menacing steel cranks, zoomed upwards and heavily fell. The Consul's own cage hurled up again with a powerful thrusting, hung for a moment upside down at the top, while the other cage, which significantly was empty, was at the bottom, then, before this situation had been grasped, crashed down, paused a moment at the other extremity, only to be lifted upwards again cruelly to the highest point where for an interminable, intolerable period of suspension, it remained motionless. — The Consul, like that poor fool who was bringing light to the world, was hung upside down over it, with only a scrap of woven wire between himself and death. There, above him, poised the world, with its people stretching out down to him, about to fall off the road on to his head, or into the sky. 999. The people hadn't been there before. Doubtless, following the children, they had assembled to watch him. Obliquely he was aware that he was without physical fear of death, as he would have been without fear at this moment of anything else that might sober him up; perhaps this had been his main idea. But he did not like it. This was not amusing. It was doubtless an-other example of Jacques's — Jacques? — unnecessary suffering. And it was scarcely a dignified position for an ex-representative of His Majesty's government to find himself in, though it was symbolic, of what he could not conceive, but it was undoubtedly symbolic. Jesus. All at once, terribly, the confession boxes had begun to go in reverse: Oh, the Consul said, oh; for the sensation of falling was now as if terribly behind him, unlike anything, beyond experience; certainly this recessive unwinding was not like looping-the-loop in a plane, where the movement was quickly over, the only strange feeling one of increased weight; as a sailor he disapproved of that feeling too, but this — ah, my God! Everything was falling out of his pockets, was being wrested from him, torn away, a fresh article at each whirling,
sickening, plunging, retreating, unspeakable circuit, his notecase, pipe, keys, his dark glasses he had taken off, his small change he did not have time to imagine being pounced on by the children after all, he was being emptied out, returned empty, his stick, his passport — had that been his passport? He didn't know if he'd brought it with him. Then he remembered he had brought it. Or hadn't brought it. It could be difficult even for a Consul to be without a passport in Mexico. Ex-consul. What did it matter? Let it go I There was a kind of fierce delight in this final acceptance. Let everything go! Everything particularly that provided means of ingress or egress, went bond for, gave meaning or character, or purpose or identity to that frightful bloody nightmare he was forced to carry around with him everywhere upon his back, that went by the name of Geoffrey Firmin, late of His Majesty's Navy, later still of His Majesty's Consular Service, later still of — Suddenly it struck him that the Chinaman was asleep, that the children, the people had gone, that this would go on for ever; no one could stop the machine… It was over.

And yet not over. On terra firma the world continued to spin madly round; houses, whirligigs, hotels, cathedrals,
cantinas
, volcanoes: it was difficult to stand up at all. He was conscious of people laughing at him but, what was more surprising, of his possessions being restored to him, one by one. The child who had his notecase withdrew it from him playfully before returning it. No: she still had something in her other hand, a crumpled paper. The Consul thanked her for it firmly. Some telegram of Hugh's. His stick, his glasses, his pipe, unbroken; yet not his favourite pipe; and no passport. Well, definitely he could not have brought it. Putting his other things back in his pockets he turned a corner, very unsteadily, and slumped down on a bench. He replaced his dark glasses, set his pipe in his mouth, crossed his legs, and, as the world gradually slowed down, assumed the bored expression of an English tourist sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens.

Children, he thought, how charming they were at heart. The very same kids who had besieged him for money, had now brought him back even the smallest of his small change and
then, touched by his embarrassment, had scurried away without waiting for a reward. Now he wished he had given them something. The little girl had gone also. Perhaps this was her exercise book open on the bench. He wished he had not been so brusque with her, that she would come back, so that he could give her the book. Yvonne and he should have had children, would have had children, could have had children, should have…

In the exercise book he made out with difficulty:

Escruch is an old man. He lives in London. He lives alone in a large house. Scrooge is a rich man but he never gives to the poor. His is a miser. No one loves Scrooge and Scrooge loves no one. He has no friends. He is alone in the world. The man
(el hombre)
: the house
(la casa)
: the poor
(los pobres)
: he lives
(él vive)
: he gives
(él da)
: he has no friends
(él no tiene amigos)
: he loves
(él ama)
: old
(viejo)
: large
(grande)
: no one
(nadie):
rich
(rico):
Who is Scrooge? Where does he live? Is Scrooge rich or poor? Has he friends? How does he live? Alone. World. On.

At last the earth had stopped spinning with the motion of the Infernal Machine. The last house was still, the last tree rooted again. It was seven minutes past two by his watch. And he was cold stone sober. How horrible was the feeling. The Consul closed the exercise book: bloody old Scrooge; how queer to meet him here!

— Gay looking soldiers, grimy as sweeps, strolled up and down the avenues with a jaunty unmilitary gait. Their officers, smartly uniformed, sat on benches, leaning forward over their swagger canes as if petrified by remote strategical thoughts. An Indian carrier with a towering load of chairs loped along the Avenida Guerrero. A madman passed, wearing, in the manner of a lifebelt, an old bicycle tyre. With a nervous movement he continually shifted the injured tread round his neck. He muttered to the Consul, but waiting neither for reply nor reward, took off the tyre and flung it far ahead of him towards a booth, then followed unsteadily, stuffing something in his mouth from a tin bait jar. Picking up the tyre he flung it far ahead again, repeating this process, to the irreducible logic of which he appeared eternally committed, until out of sight.

The Consul felt a clutch at his heart and half rose. He had caught sight of Hugh and Yvonne again at a booth; she was buying tortilla from an old woman. While the woman plastered the tortilla for her with cheese and tomato sauce, a touchingly dilapidated little policeman, doubtless one on strike, with cap askew, in soiled baggy trousers, leggings, and a coat several sizes too large for him, tore off a piece of lettuce and, with a consummately courteous smile, handed it to her. They were having a splendid time, it was obvious. They ate their tortillas, grinning at each other as the sauce dripped from their fingers; now Hugh had brought out his handkerchief; he was wiping a smear from Yvonne's cheek, while they roared with laughter, in which the policeman joined. What had happened to their plot now, their plot to get him away? Never mind. The clutch at his heart had become a cold iron grip of persecution which had been stayed only by a certain relief; for how, had Jacques communicated his little anxieties to them, would they now be here, laughing? Still, one never knew; and a policeman was a policeman, even if on strike, and friendly, and the Consul was more afraid of the police than death. He placed a small stone upon the child's exercise book, leaving it on the bench, and dodged behind a stall to avoid them. He got a glimpse through the boards of the man still half-way up the slippery pole, neither near enough to the top nor the bottom to be certain of reaching either in comfort, avoided a huge turtle dying in two parallel streams of blood on the pavement outside a sea-food restaurant, and entered E1 Bosque with a steady gait, as once before, similarly obsessed, at a run: there was no sign of the bus yet; he had twenty minutes, probably more.

The Terminal Cantina El Bosque, however, seemed so dark that even with his glasses off he had to stop dead…
Mi ritrovai in una bosca oscura
— or
selva}
No matter. The
Cantina
was well named, ‘The Boskage'. This darkness, though, was associated in his mind with velvet curtains, and there they were, behind the shadowy bar, velvet or velveteen curtains, too dirty and full of dust to be black, partially screening the entrance to the back room, which one could never be sure was private. For some reason the
fiesta
had not overflowed in here; the place — a
Mexican relative of the English ‘Jug and Bottle', chiefly dedicated to those who drank ‘off' the premises, in which there was only one spindly iron table and two stools at the bar, and which, facing east, became progressively darker as the sun, to those who noticed such things, climbed higher into the sky — was deserted, as usual at this hour. The Consul groped his way forward. ‘Señora Gregorio,' he called softly, yet with an agonized impatient quaver in his voice. It had been difficult to find his voice at all; he now needed another drink badly. The word echoed through the back of the house; Gregorio; there was no answer. He sat down, while gradually the shapes about him became more clearly defined, shapes of barrels behind the bar, of bottles. Ah, the poor turtle! — The thought struck at a painful tangent. —There were big green barrels of jerez, habanero, Catalán, parras, zarzamora, málaga, durazno, membrillo, raw alcohol at a peso a litre, tequila, mescal, rumpope. As he read these names and, as if it were a dreary dawn outside, the
cantina
grew lighter to his eyes, he heard voices in his ears again, a single voice above the muted roar of the fair: ‘Geoffrey Firmin, this is what it is like to die, just this and no more, an awakening from a dream in a dark place, in which, as you see, are present the means of escape from yet another nightmare. But the choice is up to you. You are not invited to use those means of escape; it is left up to your judgement; to obtain them it is necessary only to –' ‘Señora Gregorio,' he repeated, and the echo came back: ‘Orio.'