Under The Volcano Part 3

"Even, I wouldn't say, if that town seems to be going about its business again, though in a somewhat stricken fashion, I admit, and its trams running more or less on schedule." The Consul strapped his watch firmly on his wrist. "Eh?"

"--Look at the red bird on the tree-twigs, Geoffrey! I never saw a cardinal as big as that before."

"No." The Consul, all un.o.bserved, secured the whisky bottle, uncorked it, smelt its contents, and returned it to the tray gravely, pursing his lips: "You wouldn't have. Because it isn't a cardinal."

"Of course that's a cardinal. Look at its red breast. It's like a bit of flame!" Yvonne, it was clear to him, dreaded the approaching scene as much as he, and now felt under some compulsion to go on talking about anything until the perfect inappropriate moment arrived, that moment too when, unseen by her, the awful bell would actually touch the doomed child with giant protruding tongue and h.e.l.lish Wesleyan breath. "There, on the hibiscus!"

The Consul closed one eye. "He's a coppery-tailed trogon I believe. And he has no red breast. He's a solitary fellow who probably lives way off in the Canyon of the Wolves over there, away off from those other fellows with ideas, so that he can have peace to meditate about not being a cardinal."

"I'm sure it's a cardinal and lives right here in this garden!"

"Have it your own way. Trogon ambiguus ambiguuus is the exact name, I think, the ambiguous bird! Two ambiguities ought to make an affirmative and this is it, the coppery-tailed trogon, not the cardinal." The Consul reached out towards the tray for his empty strychnine gla.s.s, but forgetting midway what he proposed to put in it, or whether it wasn't one of the bottles he wanted first, if only to smell, and not the gla.s.s, he dropped his hand and leaned still farther forward, turning the movement into one of concern for the volcanoes. He said: "Old Popeye ought to be coming out again pretty soon."

"He seems to be completely obliterated in spinach at the moment--" Yvonne's voice quivered.

The Consul struck a match against their old jest for the cigarette he had somehow failed to place between his lips: after a little, finding himself with a dead match, he put it in his pocket.

For a time they confronted each other like two mute unspeaking forts.

The water still trickling into the pool--G.o.d, how deadeningly slowly--filled the silence between them... There was something else: the Consul imagined he still heard the music of the ball, which must have long since ceased, so that this silence was pervaded as with a stale thudding of drums. Parian: that meant drums too. Parian. It was doubtless the almost tactile absence of the music however, that made it so peculiar the trees should be apparently shaking to it, an illusion investing not only the garden but the plains beyond, the whole scene before his eyes, with horror, the horror of an intolerable unreality. This must be not unlike, he told himself, what some insane person suffers at those moments when, sitting benignly in the asylum grounds, madness suddenly ceases to be a refuge and becomes incarnate in the shattering sky and all his surroundings in the presence of which reason, already struck dumb, can only bow the head. Does the madman find solace at such moments, as his thoughts like cannonb.a.l.l.s crash through his brain, in the exquisite beauty of the madhouse garden or of the neighbouring hills beyond the terrible chimney? Hardly, the Consul felt. As for this particular beauty he knew it dead as his marriage and as wilfully slaughtered. The sun shining brilliantly now on all the world before him, its rays picking out the timberline of Popocatepetl as its summit like a gigantic surfacing whale shouldered out of the clouds again, all this could not lift his spirit. The sunlight could not share his burden of conscience, of sourceless sorrow. It did not know him. Down to his left beyond the plantains the gardener at the Argentinean amba.s.sador's weekend residence was slashing his way through some tall gra.s.ses, clearing the ground for a badminton court, yet something about this innocent enough occupation contained a horrible threat against him. The broad leaves of the plantains themselves dropping gently seemed menacingly savage as the stretched wings of pelicans, shaking before they fold. The movements of some more little red birds in the garden, like animated rosebuds, appeared unbearably jittery and thievish. It was as though the creatures were attached by sensitive wires to his nerves. When the telephone rang his heart almost stopped beating.

As a matter of fact the telephone was ringing clearly and the Consul left the porch for the dining-room where, afraid of the furious thing, he started to speak into the receiver, then, sweating, into the mouthpiece, talking rapidly--for it was a trunk-call--not knowing what he was saying, hearing Tom's muted voice quite plainly but turning his questions into his own answers, apprehensive lest at any moment boiling oil pour into his eardrums or his mouth: "All right. Good-bye... Oh, say, Tom, what was the origin of that silver rumour that appeared in the papers yesterday denied by Washington? I wonder where it came from... What started it? Yes. All right. Good-bye. Yes, I have, terrible. Oh they did! Too bad. But after all they own it. Or don't they? Good-bye. They probably will. Yes, that's all right, that's all right. Good-bye; good-bye!.".. Christ. What does he want to ring me up at this hour of the morning for. What time is it in America? Erikson 43?

Christ... He hung up the receiver the wrong way and returned to the porch: no Yvonne; after a moment he heard her in the bathroom...

The Consul was guiltily climbing the Calle Nicaragua.

It was as if he were toiling up some endless staircase between houses. Or perhaps even old Popeye itself. Never had it seemed such a long way to the top of this hill. The road with its tossing broken stones stretched on for ever into the distance like a life of agony. He thought: 900 pesos = 100 bottles of whisky = 900 ditto tequila. Argal: one should drink neither tequila nor whisky but mescal. It was hot as a furnace too out on the street and the Consul sweated profusely. Away! Away! He was not going very far away, nor to the top of the hill. There was a lane branching to the left before you reached Jacques's house, leafy, no more than a cart-track at first, then a switchback, and some where along that lane to the right, not five minutes' walk, at a dusty corner, waited a cool nameless cantina with horses probably tethered outside, and a huge white tom cat sleeping below the counter of whom a whiskerando would say: "He ah work all night mistair and sleep all day!" And this cantina would be open.

This was where he was going (the lane was plainly in sight now, a dog guarding it) to have in peace a couple of necessary drinks unspecified in his mind, and be back again before Yvonne had finished her bath. It was just possible too of course that he might meet-- But suddenly the Calle Nicaragua rose up to meet him.

The Consul lay face downward on the deserted street.

--Hugh, is that you old chap lending the old boy a hand? Thank you so much. For it is perhaps indeed your turn these days to lend a hand. Not that I haven't always been delighted to help you! I was even delighted in Paris that time you arrived from Aden in a fix over your carte d'ident.i.te and the pa.s.sport you so often seem to prefer travelling without and whose number I remember to this day is 21312. It perhaps gave me all the more pleasure in that it served a while to take my mind from my own tangled affairs and moreover proved to my satisfaction, though some of my colleagues were even then beginning to doubt it, that I was still not so divorced from life as to be incapable of discharging such duties with dispatch. Why do I say this?--Is it in part that you should see that I also recognize how close Yvonne and I had already been brought to disaster before your meeting! Are you listening, Hugh--do I make myself clear? Clear that I forgive you, as somehow I have never wholly been able to forgive Yvonne, and that I can still love you as a brother and respect you as a man. Clear, that I would help you, ungrudgingly, again. In fact ever since Father went up into the White Alps alone and failed to return, though they happened to be the Himalayas, and more often than I care to think these volcanoes remind me of them, just as this valley does of the Valley of the Indus, and as those old turbaned trees in Taxco do of Srinigar, and just as Xochimilco--are you listening, Hugh?--of all places when I first came here, reminded me of those houseboats on the Shalimar you cannot remember, and your mother, my step-mother died, all those dreadful things seeming to happen at once as though the in-laws of catastrophe had suddenly arrived from nowhere, or, perhaps, Damchok, and moved in on us bag and baggage--there has been all too little opportunity to act, so to say, as a brother to you. Mind you I have perhaps acted as a father: but you were only an infant then, and seasick, upon the P. and O., the old erratic Cocanada. But after that and once back in England there were too many guardians, too many surrogates in Harrogate, too many establishments and schools, not to mention the war, the struggle to win which, for as you say rightly it is not yet over, I continue in a bottle and you with the ideas I hope may prove less calamitous to you than did our father's to him, or for that matter mine to myself. However all this may be--still there, Hugh, lending a hand?--I ought to point out in no uncertain terms that I never dreamed for a moment such a thing as did happen would or could happen. That I had forfeited Yvonne's trust did not necessarily mean she had forfeited mine, of which one had a rather different conception. And that I trusted you goes without saying. Far less could I have dreamed you would attempt morally to justify yourself on the grounds that I was absorbed in a debauch: there are certain reasons too, to be revealed only at the day of reckoning, why you should not have stood in judgement upon me. Yet I am afraid--are you listening, Hugh?--that long before that day what you did impulsively and have tried to forget in the cruel abstraction of youth will begin to strike you in a new and darker light. I am sadly afraid that you may indeed, precisely because you are a good and simple person at bottom and genuinely respect more than most the principles and decencies that might have prevented it, fall heir, as you grow older and your conscience less robust, to a suffering on account of it more abominable than any you have caused me. How may I help you? How ward it off? How shall the murdered man convince his a.s.sa.s.sin he will not haunt him? Ah, the past is filled up quicker than we know and G.o.d has little patience with remorse! Yet does this help, what I am trying to tell you, that I realize to what degree I brought all this upon myself? Help, that I am admitting moreover that to have cast Yvonne upon you in that fashion was a reckless action, almost, I was going to say, a clownish one, inviting in return the inevitable bladder on the brain, the mouthful and heartful of sawdust. I sincerely hope so... Meantime, however, old fellow, my mind, staggering under the influence of the last half-hour's strychnine, of the several therapeutic drinks before that, of the numerous distinctly untherapeutic drinks with Dr. Vigil before that, you must meet Dr. Vigil, I say nothing of his friend Jacques Laruelle to whom for various reasons I have hitherto avoided introducing you--please remind me to get back my Elizabethan plays from him--of the two days' and one night's continuous drinking before that, of the seven hundred and seventy-five and a half--but why go on? My mind, I repeat, must somehow, drugged though it is, like Don Quixote avoiding a town invested with his abhorrence because of his excesses there, take a clear cut around--did I say Dr. Vigil?--"

"I say I say what's the matter there?" The English "King's Parade" voice, scarcely above him, called out from behind the steering wheel, the Consul saw now, of an extremely long low car drawn up beside him, murmurous: an M. G. Magna, or some such.

"Nothing." The Consul sprang to his feet instantly sober as a judge. "Absolutely all right."

"Can't be all right, you were lying right down in the road there, what?" The English face, now turned up toward him, was rubicund, merry, kindly, but worried, above the English striped tie, mnemonic of a fountain in a great court.

The Consul brushed the dust from his clothes; he sought for wounds in vain; there was not a scratch. He saw the fountain distinctly. Might a soul bathe there and be clean or slake its drought?

"All right, apparently," he said, "thanks very much."

"But d.a.m.n it all I say you were lying right down in the road there, might have run over you, there must be something wrong, what? No?" The Englishman switched his engine off, "I say, haven't I seen you before or something."

"Trinity." The Consul found his own voice becoming involuntarily a little more "English." "Unless--"

"Cams."

"But you're wearing a Trinity tie--" the Consul remarked with a polite note of triumph.

"Trinity?... Yes. It's my cousin's, as a matter of fact." The Englishman peered down his chin at the tie, his red merry face become a shade redder. "We're going to Guatemala... Wonderful country this. Pity about all this oil business, isn't it? Bad show.--Are you sure there's no bones broken or anything, old man?"

"No. There are no bones broken," the Consul said. But he was trembling.

The Englishman leaned forward fumbling as for the engine switch again. "Sure you're all right? We're staying at the Bella Vista Hotel, not leaving until this afternoon. I could take you along there for a little shuteye... Deuced nice pub I must say but deuced awful row going on all night. I suppose you were at the ball--is that it? Going the wrong way though, aren't you? I always keep a bottle of something in the car for an emergency... No. Not Scotch. Irish. Burke's Irish. Have a nip?

But perhaps you'd--"

" Ah..." The Consul was taking a long draught. "Thanks a million."

"Go ahead... Go ahead..."

"Thanks." The Consul handed back the bottle. "A million."

"Well, cheerio." The Englishman restarted his engine. "Cheerio man. Don't go lying down in roads. Bless my soul you'll get run over or run in or something, d.a.m.n it all. Dreadful road too. Splendid weather, isn't it?" The Englishman drove away up the hill, waving his hand.

"If you're ever in any kind of a jam yourself," the Consul cried after him recklessly, "I'm--wait, here's my card--"

"Bungho!"

--It was not Dr. Vigil's card the Consul still held in his hand: but it was certainly not his own. Compliments of the Venezuelan Government. What was this? The Venezuelan Government will appreciate... Wherever could this have sprung from? The Venezuelan Government will appreciate an acknowledgement to the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores. Caracas, Venezuela. Well, now, Caracas--well, why not?

Erect as Jim Taskerson, he thought, married now too, poor devil--restored, the Consul glided down the Calle Nicaragua.

Within the house there was the sound of bathwater running out: he made a lightning toilet. Intercepting Concepta (though not before he had added a tactful strychnine to her burden) with the breakfast tray, the Consul, innocently as a man who has committed a murder while dummy at bridge, entered Yvonne's room. It was bright and tidy. A gaily coloured Oaxaquenan serape covered the low bed where Yvonne lay half asleep with her head resting on one hand.

"How!"

"How!"

A magazine she'd been reading dropped to the floor. The Consul, inclined slightly forward over the orange juice and ranchero eggs, advanced boldly through a diversity of powerless emotions.

"Are you comfortable there?"

"Fine, thanks." Yvonne accepted the tray smiling. The magazine was the amateur astronomy one she subscribed to and from the cover the huge domes of an observatory, haloed in gold and standing out in black silhouette like roman helmets, regarded the Consul waggishly. ""The Mayas'," he read aloud, "'were far advanced in observational astronomy. But they did not suspect a Copernican system.'" He threw the magazine back on the bed and sat easily in his chair, crossing his legs, the tips of his fingers meeting in a strange calm, his strychnine on the floor beside him. "Why should they?... What I like though are the 'vague' years of the old Mayans. And their 'pseudo years,' mustn't overlook them! And their delicious names for the months. Pop. Uo. Zip. Zotz. Tzec. Xul. Yaxkin."

"Mac," Yvonne was laughing. "Isn't there one called Mac?"

"There's Yax and Zac. And Uayeb: I like that one most of all, the month that only lasts five days."

"In receipt of yours dated Zip the first I--"

"But where does it all get you in the end?" The Consul sipped his strychnine that had yet to prove its adequacy as a chaser to the Burke's Irish (now perhaps in the garage at the Bella Vista). "The knowledge, I mean. One of the first penances I ever imposed on myself was to learn the philosophical section of War and Peace by heart. That was of course before I could dodge about in the rigging of the Cabbala like a St Jago's monkey. But then the other day I realized that the only thing I remembered about the whole book was that Napoleon's leg twitched--"

"Aren't you going to eat anything yourself? You must be starved."

"I partook."

Yvonne who was herself breakfasting heartily asked: "How's the market?"

"Tom's a bit fed up because they've confiscated some property of his in Tlaxcala, or Puebla, he thought he'd got away with. They haven't my number yet, I'm not sure where I really do stand in that regard, now I've resigned the service--"

"So you--"

"By the by I must apologize for still being in these duds--dusty too--bad show, I might have put on a blazer at least for your benefit!" The Consul smiled inwardly at his accent, now become for undivulgeable reasons almost uncontrolledly "English."

"So you really have resigned!"

"Oh absolutely! I'm thinking of becoming a Mexican subject, of going to live among the Indians, like William Blackstone. But for one's habit of making money, don't you know, all very mysterious to you, I suppose, outside looking in--" The Consul stared round mildly at the pictures on the wall, mostly water-colours by his mother depicting scenes in Kashmir: a small grey stone enclosure encompa.s.sing several birch trees and a taller poplar was Lalla Rookh's tomb, a picture of wild torrential scenery, vaguely Scottish, the gorge, the ravine at Gugganvir; the Shalimar looked more like the Cam than ever: a distant view of Nanga Parbat from Sind valley could have been painted on the porch here, Nanga Parbat might well have pa.s.sed for old Popo..."--outside looking in," he repeated, "the result of so much worry, speculation, foresight, alimony, seigniorage--"

"But--" Yvonne had laid aside her breakfast tray and taken a cigarette from her own case beside the bed and lit it before the Consul could help her.

"One might have already done so!"

Yvonne lay back in bed smoking... In the end the Consul scarcely heard what she was saying--calmly, sensibly, courageously--for his awareness of an extraordinary thing that was happening in his mind. He saw in a flash, as if these were ships on the horizon, under a black lateral abstract sky, the occasion for desperate celebration (it didn't matter he might be the only one to celebrate it) receding, while at the same time, coming closer, what could only be, what was--Good G.o.d!--his salvation...

" Now? " he found he had said gently. "But we can't very well go away now can we, what with Hugh and you and me and one thing and another, don't you think? It's a little unfeasible, isn't it?" (For his salvation might not have seemed so large with menace had not the Burke's Irish whiskey chosen suddenly to tighten, if almost imperceptibly, a screw. It was the soaring of this moment, conceived of as continuous, that felt itself threatened.) "Isn't it?" he repeated.

"I'm sure Hugh'd understand--"

"But that's not quite the point!"

"Geoffrey, this house has become somehow evil--"

"--I mean it's rather a dirty trick--"

Oh Jesus... The Consul slowly a.s.sumed an expression intended to be slightly bantering and at the same time a.s.sured, indicative of a final consular sanity. For this was it. Goethe's church bell was looking him straight between the eyes; fortunately, he was prepared for it. "I remember a fellow I helped out in New York once," he was saying with apparent irrelevance, "in some way, an out of work actor he was. 'Why Mr Firmin,' he said, 'it isn't naturel here.' That's exactly how he p.r.o.nounced it: naturel. "Man wasn't intended for it,' he complained. 'All the streets are the same as this Tenth or Eleventh Street in Philadelphia too...'" The Consul could feel his English accent leaving him and that of a Bleecker Street mummer taking its place. "'But in Newcastle, Delaware, now that's another thing again! Old cobbled roads... And Charleston: old Southern stuff... But oh my G.o.d this city--the noise! the chaos! If I could only get out! If only I knew where you could get to!'" The Consul concluded with pa.s.sion, with anguish, his voice quivering--though as it happened he had never met any such person, and the whole story had been told him by Tom, he shook violently with the emotion of the poor actor.

"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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sume it, a.s.sume 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 d.a.m.ned 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 rect.i.tude 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! 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: G.o.d 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s. 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! 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 c.o.xc.o.x 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 embarra.s.sment, 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 gla.s.ses. 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 hoa.r.s.e 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. G.o.d 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 d.a.m.ned 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 Marias 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 any-one!'" the Consul heard himself ask; tears of sorrow came to his eyes, he removed his dark gla.s.ses 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 thousandth time on the heavens to permit pa.s.sage 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 uncla.s.sifiable 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, pa.s.sionately 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, la.s.soes 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 s...o...b..acks 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 G.o.d, 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 gla.s.s 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.

He just managed to reach his gla.s.s left on the tray and held it now in his hands, weighing it, but--for he was trembling again, not slightly, but violently, like a man with Parkinson's disease or palsy--unable to bring it to his lips. Then without drinking he set it on the parapet. After a while, his whole body quaking, he rose deliberately and poured, somehow, into the other unused tumbler Concepta had not removed, about a half quartern of whisky. Nacio 1820 y siguiendo tan campante. Siguiendo. Born 1896 and still going flat. I love you, he murmured, gripping the bottle with both hands as he replaced it on the tray. He now brought the tumbler filled with whisky back to his chair and sat with it in his hands, thinking. Presently without having drunk from this gla.s.s either he set it on the parapet next to his strychnine. He sat watching both the gla.s.ses. Behind him in the room he heard Yvonne crying.

"--Have you forgotten the letters Geoffrey Firmin the letters she wrote till her heart broke why do you sit there trembling why do you not go back to her now she will understand after all it hasn't always been that way toward the end perhaps but you could laugh at this you could laugh at it why do you think she is weeping it is not for that alone you have done this to her my boy the letters you not only have never answered you didn't you did you didn't you did then where is your reply but have never really read where are they now they are lost Geoffrey Firmin lost or left somewhere even we do not know where--"

The Consul reached forward and absentmindedly managed a sip of whisky; the voice might have been either of his familiars or-- Hullo, good morning.

The instant the Consul saw the thing he knew it an hallucination and he sat, quite calmly now, waiting for the object shaped like a dead man and which seemed to be lying flat on its back by his swimming-pool, with a large sombrero over its face, to go away. So the "other" had come again. And now gone, he thought: but no, not quite, for there was still something there, in some way connected with it, or here, at his elbow, or behind his back, in front of him now; no, that too, whatever it was, was going: perhaps it had only been the coppery-tailed trogon stirring in the bushes, his "ambiguous bird" that was now departing quickly on creaking wings, like a pigeon once it was in flight, heading for its solitary home in the Canyon of the Wolves, away from the people with ideas.

"d.a.m.n it, I feel pretty well," he thought suddenly, finishing his half quartern. He stretched out for the whisky bottle, failed to reach it, rose again and poured himself another finger. "My hand is much steadier already." He finished this whisky and taking the gla.s.s and the bottle of Johnny Walker, which was fuller than he'd imagined, crossed the porch to its farthest corner and placed them in a cupboard. There were two old golf b.a.l.l.s in the cupboard.

"Play with me I can still carry the eighth green in three. I am tapering off," he said. "What am I talking about? Even I know I am being fatuous."

"I shall sober up." He returned and poured some more strychnine into the other gla.s.s, filling it, then moved the strychnine bottle from the tray into a more prominent position on the parapet. "After all I have been out all night: what could one expect?"

"I am too sober. I have lost my familiars, my guardian angels. I am straightening out," he added, sitting down again opposite the strychnine bottle with his gla.s.s. "In a sense what happened was a sign of my fidelity, my loyalty; any other man would have spent this last year in a very different manner. At least I have no disease," he cried in his heart, the cry seeming to end on a somewhat doubtful note, however. "And perhaps it's fortunate I've had some whisky since alcohol is an aphrodisiac too. One must never forget either that alcohol is a food. How can a man be expected to perform his marital duties without food? Marital? At all events I am progressing, slowly but surely. Instead of immediately rushing out to the Bella Vista and getting drunk as I did the last time all this happened and we had that disastrous quarrel about Jacques and I smashed the electric-light bulb, I have stayed here. True, I had the car before and it was easier. But here I am. I am not escaping. And what's more I intend to have a h.e.l.l of a sight better time staying." The Consul sipped his strychnine, then put his gla.s.s on the floor.

"The will of man is unconquerable. Even G.o.d cannot conquer it."

He lay back in his chair. Ixtaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, that image of the perfect marriage, lay now clear and beautiful on the horizon under an almost pure morning sky. Far above him a few white clouds were racing windily after a pale gibbous moon. Drink all morning, they said to him, drink all day. This is life!

Enormously high too, he noted some vultures waiting, more graceful than eagles as they hovered there like burnt papers floating from a fire which suddenly are seen to be blowing swiftly upward, rocking.

The shadow of an immense weariness stole over him... The Consul fell asleep with a crash.

4.