Under the Volcano (7 page)

M. Laruelle passed up the hill: he stood, tired, in the town below the square. He had not, however, climbed the Calle Nicaragua. In order to avoid his own house he had taken a cut to the left just beyond the school, a steep broken circuitous path that wound round behind the
zócalo
. People stared at him curiously as he sauntered down the Avenida de la Revolución, still encumbered with his tennis racket. This street, pursued far enough, would lead back to the American highway again and the Casino de la Selva; M. Laruelle smiled: at this rate he could go on travelling in an eccentric orbit round his house for ever. Behind him now, the fair, which he'd given scarcely a glance, whirled on. The town, colourful even at night, was brilliantly lit, but only in patches, like a harbour. Windy shadows swept the pavements. And occasional trees in the shadow seemed as if drenched in coal dust, their branches bowed beneath a weight of soot. The little bus clanged by him again, going the other way now, braking hard on the steep hill, and without a tail light. The last bus to Tomalín. He passed Dr Vigil' s windows on the far side:
Dr Arturo Díaz Vigil, Médico Cirujano y Partero, Facultad de México, de la Escuela Médico Militar, Enfermedades de Niños, Indisposiciones nerviosas
— and how politely all this differed from the notices one encountered in the
mingitorios
! —
Consultas de 12 a 2 y 4 a 7
. slight overstatement, he thought. Newsboys ran past selling copies of
Quauhnahuac Nuevo
, the pro-Almazán, pro-Axis sheet put out, they said, by the tiresome Unión Militar.
Un avión de combate Francés derribado por un caza Alemán. Los trabajadores de Australia abogan por la paz. ¿Quiere V d
? — a placard asked him in a shop window —
vestirse con elegancia y ala última moda de Europa y los Estados Unidos
? M. Laruelle walked on down the hill. Outside the barracks two soldiers, wearing French army helmets and grey faded purple uniforms laced and interlaced with green lariats, paced on sentry duty. He crossed the street. Approaching the cinema he became conscious all was not as it should be, that there was a strange unnatural excitement in the air, a kind of fever. It had grown on the instant much cooler. And the cinema was dark, as though no picture were playing tonight. On the other hand a large group of people, not a
queue, but evidently some of the patrons from the
cine
itself, who had come prematurely flooding out, were standing on the pavement and under the arcature listening to a loudspeaker mounted on a van blaring the Washington Post March. Suddenly there was a crash of thunder and the street lights twitched off. So the lights of the
cine
had gone already. Rain, M. Laruelle thought. But his desire to get wet had deserted him. He put his tennis racket under his coat and ran. A troughing wind all at once engulfed the street, scattering old newspapers and blowing the naphtha flares on the tortilla stands flat: there was a savage scribble of lightning over the hotel opposite the cinema, followed by another peal of thunder. The wind was moaning, everywhere people were running, mostly laughing, for shelter. M. Laruelle could hear the thunderclaps crashing on the mountains behind him. He just reached the theatre in time. The rain was falling in torrents.

He stood, out of breath, under the shelter of the theatre entrance which was, however, more like the entrance to some gloomy bazaar or market. Peasants were crowding in with baskets. At the box office, momentarily At the box office, momentarily vacated, the
, the door left half open, a frantic hen sought admission. Everywhere people were flashing torches or striking matches. The van with the loudspeaker slithered away into the rain and thunder.
Las Manos de Orlac
, said a poster:
6 y 8.30. Las Manos de Orlac, con Peter Lorre
.

The street lights came on again, though the theatre still remained dark. M. Laruelle fumbled for a cigarette. The hands of Orlac… How, in a flash, that had brought back the old days of the cinema, he thought, indeed his own delayed student days, the days of the
Student of Prague
, and Wiene and Werner Kraũss and Karl Grüne, the Ufa days when a defeated Germany was winning the respect of the cultured world by the pictures she was making. Only then it had been Conrad Veidt in
Orlac
. Strangely, that particular film had been scarcely better than the present version, a feeble Hollywood product he'd seen some years before in Mexico City or perhaps — M. Laruelle looked around him — perhaps at this very theatre. It was not impossible. But so far as he remembered not even Peter Lorre
had been able to salvage it and he didn't want to see it again… Yet what a complicated endless tale it seemed to tell, of tyranny and sanctuary, that poster looming above him now, showing the murderer Orlac! An artist with a murderer's hands; that was the ticket, the hieroglyphic of the times. For really it was Germany itself that, in the gruesome degradation of a bad cartoon, stood over him. — Or was it, by some uncomfortable stretch of the imagination, M. Laruelle himself?

The manager of the
cine
was standing before him, cupping, with that same lightning-swift, fumbling-thwarting courtesy exhibited by Dr Vigil, by all Latin Americans, a match for his cigarette: his hair, innocent of raindrops, which seemed almost lacquered, and a heavy perfume emanating from him, betrayed his daily visit to the
peluquería;
he was impeccably dressed in striped trousers and a black coat, inflexibly
muy correcto
, like most Mexicans of his type, despite earthquake and thunderstorm. He threw the match away now with a gesture that was not wasted, for it amounted to a salute. ‘Come and have a drink,' he said.

‘The rainy season dies hard,' M. Laruelle smiled as they elbowed their way through into a little
cantina
which abutted on the cinema without sharing its frontal shelter. The
cantina
, known as the Cervecería XX, and which was also Vigil's ‘place where you know', was lit by candles stuck in bottles on the bar and on the few tables along the walls. The tables were all full.

‘
Chingar
,' the manager said, under his breath, preoccupied, alert, and gazing about him: they took their places standing at the end of the short bar where there was room for two. ‘I am very sorry the function must be suspended. But the wires have decomposed.
Chingado
. Every blessed week something goes wrong with the lights. Last week it was much worse, really terrible. You know we had a troupe from Panama City here trying out a show for Mexico.'

‘Do you mind my –'

‘No,
hombre
,' laughed the other — M. Laruelle had asked Sr Bustamente, who'd now succeeded in attracting the barman's attention, hadn't he seen the
Orlac
picture here before and if so had he revived it as a hit. ‘¿—
uno —
?'

M. Laruelle hesitated:
Tequila
,' then corrected himself:'
No, anís
—
anís, por favor, señor
.'

‘
Y una —ah— gaseosa
,' Sr Bustamente told the barman. ‘
No, señor
,' he was fingering appraisingly, still preoccupied, the stuff of M. Laruelle's scarcely wet tweed jacket. ‘
Compañero
, we have not revived it. It has only returned. The other day I show my latest news here too: believe it, the first newsreels from the Spanish war, that have come back again.'

‘I see you get some modern pictures still though,' M. Laruelle (he had just declined a seat in the
autoridades
box for the second showing, if any) glanced somewhat ironically at a garish three-sheet of a German film star, though the features seemed carefully Spanish, hanging behind the bar:
La simpatiquísima y encantadora María Landrock, notable artista alemana que pronto habremos de ver en sensacional Film
.

‘ –
un momentito, señor. Con permiso…
'

Sr Bustamente went out, not through the door by which they had entered, but through a side entrance behind the bar immediately on their right, from which a curtain had been drawn back, into the cinema itself. M. Laruelle had a good view of the interior. From it, exactly indeed as though the show were in progress, came a beautiful uproar of bawling children and hawkers selling fried potatoes and frijoles. It was difficult to believe so many had left their seats. Dark shapes of pariah dogs prowled in and out of the stalls. The lights were not entirely dead : they glimmered, a dim reddish orange, flickering. On the screen, over which clambered an endless procession of torchlit shadows, hung, magically projected upside down, a faint apology for the ‘suspended function'; in the
autoridades
box three cigarettes were lit on one match. At the rear where reflected light caught the lettering
SALIDA
of the exit he just made out the anxious figure of Sr Bustamente taking to his office. Outside it thundered and rained. M. Laruelle sipped his water-clouded
anís
which was first greenly chilling then rather nauseating. Actually it was not at all like absinthe. But his tiredness had left him and he began to feel hungry. It was already seven o'clock. Though Vigil and he would probably dine later at the Gambrinus or Charley's Place. He selected, from a saucer, a
quarter lemon and sucked it reflectively, reading a calendar which, next to the enigmatic María Landrock, behind the bar portrayed the meeting of Cortez and Moctezuma in Tenochtitlán:
El último Emperador Azteca
, it said below,
Moctezuma y Hernán Cortés representativo de la raza hispaña, quedan frente a frente: dos razas y dos civilizaciones que habían llegado a un alto grado de perfección se mezclan para integrar el núcleo de nuestra nacionalidad actual
. But Sr Bustamente was coming back, carrying, in one uplifted hand above a press of people by the curtain, a book…

M. Laruelle, conscious of shock, was turning the book over and over in his hands. Then he laid it on the bar counter and took a sip of
anís. ‘Bueno, muchas gracias, señor
,' he said.

‘
De nada
,' Sr Bustamente answered in a lowered tone; he waved aside with a sweeping somehow inclusive gesture, a sombre pillar advancing bearing a tray of chocolate skulls. ‘Don't know how long, maybe two, maybe three years
aquí
.'

M. Laruelle glanced in the flyleaf again, then shut the book on the counter. Above them the rain slammed on the cinema roof. It was eighteen months since the Consul had lent him the thumbed maroon volume of Elizabethan plays. At that time Geoffrey and Yvonne had been separated for perhaps five months. Six more must elapse before she would return. In the Consul's garden they drifted gloomily up and down among the roses and the plumbago and the waxplants ‘like dilapidated
préservatifs
', the Consul had remarked with a diabolical look at him, a look at the same time almost official, that seemed now to have said :' I know, Jacques, you may never return the book, but suppose I lend it you precisely for that reason, that some day you may be sorry you did not. Oh, I shall forgive you then, but will you be able to forgive yourself? Not merely for not having returned it, but because the book will by then have become an emblem of what even now it is impossible to return.' M. Laruelle had taken the book. He wanted it because for sometime he had been carrying at the back of his mind the notion of making in France a modern film version of the Faustus story with some such character as Trotsky for its protagonist: as a matter of fact he had not opened the volume till this minute.
Though the Consul had several times asked him for it later he had missed it that same day when he must have left it behind in the cinema. M. Laruelle listened to the water booming down the gutters beneath the one jalousie door of the Cervecería XX which opened into a side-street in the far left-hand corner. A sudden thunderclap shook the whole building and the sound echoed away like coal sliding down a chute.

‘You know,
señor
he said suddenly, ‘that this isn't my book.'

‘I know,' Sr Bustamente replied, but softly, almost in a whisper: ‘I think your
amigo
, it was his.' He gave a little confused cough, an
appoggiatura
. ‘Your
amigo
, the
bicho
–' Sensitive apparently to M. Laruelle's smile he interrupted himself quietly. ‘I did not mean bitch; I mean
bicho
, the one with the blue eyes.' Then, as if there were any longer doubt of whom he spoke, he pinched his chin and drew downward from it an imaginary beard. ‘Your
amigo
— ah — Señor Firmin.
El Cónsul
. The
Americano
.'

‘No. He wasn't American.' M. Laruelle tried to raise his voice a little. It was hard, for everyone in the
cantina
had stopped talking and M. Laruelle noticed that a curious hush had also fallen in the theatre. The light had now completely failed and he stared over Sr Bustamente's shoulder past the curtain into a graveyard darkness, stabbed by flashes of torchlight like heat lightning, but the vendors had lowered their voices, the children had stopped laughing and crying while the diminished audience sat slackly and bored yet patient before the dark screen, suddenly illuminated, swept, by silent grotesque shadows of giants and spears and birds, then dark again, the men along the right-hand balcony, who hadn't bothered to move or come downstairs, a solid frieze carved into the wall, serious, moustachioed men, warriors waiting for the show to begin, for a glimpse of the murderer's bloodstained hands.

‘No?' Sr Bustamente said softly. He took a sip of his
gaseosa
, looking too into the dark theatre and then, preoccupied again, around the
cantina
. ‘But was it true, then, he was a Consul? For I remember him many time sitting here drinking : and often, the poor guy, he have no socks.'

M. Laruelle laughed shortly. ‘Yes, he was the British Consul here.' They spoke subduedly in Spanish, and Sr Bustamente despairing for another ten minutes of the lights, was persuaded to a glass of beer while M. Laruelle himself took a soft drink.