Under the Volcano (41 page)

It was as though she had never left Geoffrey, never gone to America, never suffered the anguish of the last year, as though even, Yvonne felt a moment, they were in Mexico again for the first time; there was that same warm poignant happy sense, indefinable, illogically, of sorrow that would be overcome, of hope — for had not Geoffrey met her at the Bus Terminal? — above all of hope, of the future —

A smiling, bearded giant, a white serape decorated with cobalt dragons flung over his shoulder, proclaimed it. He was stalking importantly around the arena, where the boxing would be on Sunday, propelling through the dust — the ‘Rocket' it might have been, the first locomotive.

It was a marvellous peanut wagon. She could see its little donkey engine toiling away minutely inside, furiously grinding the peanuts. How delicious, how good, to feel oneself, in spite of all the strain and stress of the day, the journey, the bus, and now the crowded rickety grandstand, part of the brilliantly coloured serape of existence, part of the sun, the smells, the laughter!

From time to time the peanut wagon's siren jerked, its fluted smokestack belched, its polished whistle shrieked. Apparently the giant didn't want to sell any peanuts. Simply, he couldn't resist showing off this engine to everyone: see, this is my possession, my joy, my faith, perhaps even (he would like it to be imagined) my invention! And everyone loved him.

He was pushing the wagon, all of a final triumphant belch and squeal, from the arena just as the bull shot out of a gate on the opposite side.

A merry bull at heart too — obviously.
¿Por qué no
? It knew it wasn't going to be killed, merely to play, to participate in the gaiety. But the bull's merriment was controlled as yet; after its explosive entrance it began to cruise round the edge of the ring slowly, thoughtfully, though raising much dust. It was prepared to enjoy the game as much as anyone, at its own expense if need be, only its dignity must receive proper recognition first.

Nevertheless some people sitting on the rude fence that enclosed the ring scarcely bothered to draw their legs up at its approach, while others lying prone on the ground just outside, with their heads as if thrust through luxurious stocks, did not withdraw an inch.

On the other hand some responsive
borrachos
straying into the ring prematurely essayed to ride the bull. This was not playing the game : the bull must be caught in a special way, fair play was in order, and they were escorted off, tottering, weak-kneed, protesting, yet always gay…

The crowd, in general more pleased with the bull even than with the peanut vendor, started to cheer. Newcomers gracefully swung up on to fences, to appear standing there, marvellously balanced, on the top railings. Muscular hawkers lifted aloft, in one sinewy stretch of the forearm, heavy trays brimmed with multi-coloured fruits. A boy stood high upon the crotch of a tree, shading his eyes as he gazed over the jungle at the volcanoes. He was looking for an airplane in the wrong direction; she made it out herself, a droning hyphen in abyssal blue. Thunder was in the air though, at her back somewhere, a tingle of electricity.

The bull repeated his tour of the ring at a slightly increased though still steadily measured gait, deviating only once when a smart little dog snapping at his heels made him forget where he was going.

Yvonne straightened her back, pulled down her hat, and began to powder her nose, peering into the traitorous mirror of the bright enamel compact. It reminded her that only five minutes ago she had been crying and imaged too, nearer, looking over her shoulder, Popocatepetl.

The volcanoes! How sentimental one could become about
them! It was ‘volcano' now; however she moved the mirror she couldn't get poor Ixta in, who, quite eclipsed, fell away sharply into invisibility, while Popocatepetl seemed even more beautiful for being reflected, its summit brilliant against pitch-massed cloud banks. Yvonne ran one finger down her cheek, drew down an eyelid. It was stupid to have cried, in front of the little man at the door of Las Novedades too, who'd told them it ‘was half past three by the cock', then that it was ‘imposseebly' to phone because Dr Figueroa had gone to Xiutepec…

‘ – Forward to the bloody arena then,' the Consul had said savagely, and she had cried. Which was almost as stupid as to have turned back this afternoon, not at the sight, but at the mere suspicion of blood. That was her weakness though, and she remembered the dog that was dying on the street in Honolulu, rivulets of blood streaked the deserted pavement, and she had wanted to help, but fainted instead, just for a minute, and then was so dismayed to find herself lying there alone on the kerb —what if anyone had seen her?— she hurried away without a word, only to be haunted by the memory of the wretched abandoned creature so that once — but what was the good thinking of that? Besides, hadn't everything possible been done? It wasn't as if they'd come to the bullthrowing without first making sure there was no phone. And even had there been one! So far as she could make out, the poor Indian was obviously being taken care of when they left, so now she seriously thought of it, she couldn't understand why — She gave her hat a final pat before the mirror, then blinked. Her eyes were tired and playing tricks. For a second she'd had the awful sensation that, not Popocatepetl, but the old woman with the dominoes that morning, was looking over her shoulder. She closed the compact with a snap, and turned to the others smiling.

Both the Consul and Hugh were staring gloomily at the arena.

From the grandstand around her came a few groans, a few belches, a few half-hearted
olés
, as now the bull, with two shuffling broom-like sweeps of the head along the ground, drove away the dog again and resumed his circuit of the ring. But no gaiety, no applause. Some of the rail sitters actually nodded with slumber. Someone else was tearing a
sombrero
to pieces while
another spectator was trying unsuccessfully to skim, like a boomerang, a straw hat at a friend. Mexico was not laughing away her tragic history; Mexico was bored. The bull was bored. Everyone was bored, perhaps had been all the time. All that had happened was that Yvonne's drink in the bus had taken effect and was now wearing off. As amid boredom the bull circled the arena and, boredom, he now finally sat down in a corner of it.

‘Just like Ferdinand –' Yvonne began, still almost hopefully.

‘Nandi,' the Consul (and ah, had he not taken her hand in the bus?) muttered, peering sideways with one eye through cigarette smoke at the ring, ‘the bull, I christen him Nandi, vehicle of Siva, from whose hair the River Ganges flows, and who has also been identified with the Vedic storm-god Vindra — known to the ancient Mexicans as Huracán.'

‘For Jesus' sake, papa,' Hugh said, ‘thank you.'

Yvonne sighed; it was a tiresome and odious spectacle, really. The only people happy were the drunks. Gripping tequila or mescal bottles they tottered into the ring, approached the recumbent Nandi, and sliding and tripping over each other were chased out again by several
charros
, who now attempted to drag the miserable bull to its feet.

But the bull would not be dragged. At last a small boy no one had seen before appeared to nip its tail with his teeth, and as the boy ran away, the animal clambered up convulsively. Instantly it was lassoed by a cowboy mounted on a malicious-looking horse. The bull soon kicked itself free: it had been roped only around one foot, and walked from the scene shaking its head, then catching sight of the dog once more, wheeled, and pursued it a short distance…

There was suddenly more activity in the arena. Presently everyone there, whether on horseback, pompously, or on foot —running or standing still, or swaying with an old serape or rug or even a rag held out — was trying to attract the bull.

The poor old creature seemed now indeed like someone being drawn, lured, into events of which he has no real comprehension, by people with whom he wishes to be friendly, even to play, who entice him by encouraging that wish and by whom, because they really despise and desire to humiliate him, he is finally entangled.

… Yvonne's farther made his way towards her, through the seats, hovering, responding eagerly as a child to anyone who held out a friendly hand, her father, whose laughter in memory still sounded so warmly rich and generous, and whom the small sepia photograph she still carried with her depicted as a young captain in the uniform of the Spanish-American war, with earnest candid eyes beneath a high fine brow, a full-lipped sensitive mouth beneath the dark silky moustache, and a cleft chin — her father, with his fatal craze for invention, who had once so confidently set out for Hawaii to make his fortune by raising pineapples. In this he had not succeeded. Missing army life, and abetted by his friends, he wasted time tinkering over elaborate projects. Yvonne had heard that he'd tried to make synthetic hemp from the pineapple tops and even attempted to harness the volcano behind their estate to run the hemp machine. He sat on the
lanai
sipping okoolihao and singing plaintive Hawaiian songs, while the pineapples rotted in the fields, and the native help gathered round to sing with him, or slept through the cutting season, while the plantation ran into weeds and ruin, and the whole place hopelessly into debt. That was the picture; Yvonne remembered little of the period save her mother's death. Yvonne was then six. The World War, together with the final foreclosure, was approaching, and with it the figure of her Uncle Macintyre, her mother's brother, a wealthy Scotchman with financial interests in South America, who had long prophesied his brother-in-law's failure, and yet to whose large influence it was undoubtedly due that, all at once and to everyone's surprise, Captain Constable became American consul to Iquique.

— Consul to Iquique!… Or Quauhnahuac! How many times in the misery of the last year had Yvonne not tried to free herself of her love for Geoffrey by rationalizing it away, by analysing it away, by telling herself — Christ, after she'd waited, and written at first hopefully, with all her heart, then urgently, frantically, at last despairingly, waited and watched every day for the letter — ah, that daily crucifixion of the post!

She looked at the Consul, whose face for a moment seemed to have assumed that brooding expression of her father's she
remembered so well during those long war years in Chile. Chile! It was as if that republic of stupendous coastline yet narrow girth, where all thoughts bring up at Cape Horn, or in the nitrate country, had had a certain attenuating influence on his mind. For what, precisely, was her father brooding about all that time, more spiritually isolated in the land of Bernardo O'Higgins than was once Robinson Crusoe, only a few hundred miles from the same shores? Was it of the outcome of the war itself, or of obscure trade agreements he perhaps initiated, or the lot of American sailors stranded in the Tropic of Capricorn? No, it was upon a single notion that had not, however, reached its fruition till after the Armistice. Her father had invented a new kind of pipe, insanely complicated, that one took to pieces for purposes of cleanliness. The pipes came into something like seventeen pieces, came, and thus remained, since apparently none save her father knew how to put them together again. It was a fact that the Captain did not smoke a pipe himself. Nevertheless, as usual, he had been led on and encouraged… When his factory in Hilo burned down within six weeks of its completion he had returned to Ohio where he was born and for a time worked in a wire-fence company.

And there, it had happened. The bull was hopelessly entangled. Now one, two, three, four more lassoes, each launched with a new marked lack of friendliness, caught him. The spectators stamped on the wooden scaffolding, clapping rhythmically, with-out enthusiasm. — Yes, it struck her now that this whole business of the bull was like a life; the important birth, the fair chance, the tentative, then assured, then half-despairing circulations of the ring, an obstacle negotiated — a feat improperly recognized — boredom, resignation, collapse: then another, more convulsive birth, a new start; the circumspect endeavours to obtain one's bearings in a world now frankly hostile, the apparent but deceptive encouragement of one's judges, half of whom were asleep, the swervings into the beginnings of disaster because of that same negligible obstacle one had surely taken before at a stride, the final enmeshment in the toils of enemies one was never quite certain weren't friends more clumsy than actively ill-disposed, followed by disaster, capitulation, disintegration —

— The failure of a wire-fence company, the failure, rather less emphatic and final, of one's father's mind, what were these things in the face of God or destiny? Captain Constable's be-setting illusion was that he'd been cashiered from the army; and everything started up to this imagined disgrace. He set out on his way back yet once more to Hawaii, the dementia that arrested him in Los Angeles however, where he discovered he was penniless, being strictly alcoholic in character.

Yvonne glanced again at the Consul who was sitting meditative with pursed lips apparently intent on the arena. How little he knew of this period of her life, of that terror, the terror, terror that still could wake her in the night from that recurrent night-mare of things collapsing; the terror that was like that she had been supposed to portray in the white-slave-traffic film, the hand clutching her shoulder through the dark doorway; or the real terror she'd felt when she actually had been caught in a ravine with two hundred stampeding horses; no, like Captain Constable himself, Geoffrey had been almost bored, perhaps ashamed, by all this: that she had, starting when she was only thirteen, supported her father for five years as an actress in ‘serials' and ‘westerns'; Geoffrey might have nightmares, like her father in this too, be the only person in the world who ever had such nightmares, but that
she
should have them… Nor did Geoffrey know much more of the false real excitement, or the false flat bright enchantment of the studios, or the childish adult pride, as harsh as it was pathetic, and justifiable, in having, somehow, at that age, earned a living.