Under The Volcano Part 9

"Alcohol. Insanity. Medullary compression of the gibbus. Our agreements were more or less bilateral." The Consul, shaking frankly now, normally, peered out through the open doors of the balcony at the volcanoes over which once more hovered puffs of smoke, accompanied by the rattle of musketry; and once he cast a pa.s.sionate glance up at the mirador, where his untouched drinks lay. "Ma.s.s reflexes, but only the erections of guns, disseminating death," he said, noticing too that the sounds of the fair were getting louder.

"What was that?"

"How were you proposing to entertain the others supposing they had stayed," the Consul almost shrieked soundlessly, for he had himself dreadful memories of showers that slithered all over him like soap slipping from quivering fingers, "by taking a shower?"

And the observation plane was coming back, or Jesus, yes, here, here, out of nowhere, she came whizzing, straight at the balcony, at the Consul, looking for him perhaps, zooming... Aaaaaaaah! Berumph.

M. Laruelle shook his head; he hadn't heard a sound, a word. Now he came out of the shower and into another little recess screened by a curtain which he used as a dressing-room: "Lovely day, isn't it?... I think we shall have thunder."

"No."

The Consul on a sudden went to the telephone, also in a kind of recess (the house seemed fuller of such recesses today than usual), found the telephone book, and now, shaking all over, opened it; not Vigil, no, not Vigil, his nerves gibbered, but Guzman. A.B.C.G. He was sweating now, terribly; it was suddenly as hot in this little niche as in a telephone booth in New York during a heat wave; his hands trembled frantically; 666, Cafeasperina; Guzman. Erikson 34. He had the number, had forgotten it: the name Zuzugoitea, Zuzugoitea, then Sanabria, came starting out of the book at him: Erikson 35. Zuzugoitea. He'd already forgotten the number, forgotten the number, 34, 35, 666: he was turning back the leaves, a large drop of sweat splashed on the book--this time he thought he saw Vigil's name. But he'd already taken the receiver off the hook, the receiver off the hook, off the hook, he held it the wrong way up, speaking, splashing into the earhole, the mouth-hole, he could not hear--could they hear? see?--the earhole as before: "Que quieres? Who do you want... G.o.d!" he shouted, hanging up. He would need a drink to do this. He ran for the staircase but half-way up, shuddering, in a frenzy, started down again; I brought the tray down. No, the drinks are still up there. He came on the mirador and drank down all the drinks in sight. He heard music. Suddenly about three hundred head of cattle, dead, frozen stiff in the postures of the living, sprang on the slope before the house, were gone. The Consul finished the contents of the c.o.c.ktail shaker and came downstairs quietly, picked up a paper-backed book lying on the table, sat down and opened it with a long sigh. It was Jean Cocteau's La Machine infernale. "Out, mon enfant, mon pet.i.t enfant," he read, "les choses qui paraissent abominable aux humains, si tu savais, de 'endroit ou j'habite, elles ont peu d'importance." "We might have a drink in the square," he said, closing the book, then opening it again: sortes Shakespeareanae. "The G.o.ds exist, they are the devil," Baudelaire informed him.

He had forgotten Guzman. Los Borrachones fell eternally into the flames. M. Laruelle, who hadn't noticed a thing, appeared again, resplendent in white flannels, took his tennis racket from the top of a bookcase; the Consul found his stick and his dark gla.s.ses, and they went down the iron spiral staircase together.

"Absolutamente necesario!" Outside the Consul paused, turning...

No se puede vivir sin amar, were the words on the house. In the street there was now not a breath of wind and they walked a while without speaking, listening to the babel of the fiesta which grew still louder as they approached the town. Street of the Land of Fire. 666.

--M. Laruelle, possibly because he was walking on the higher part of the banked street, now seemed even taller than he was, and beside him, below, the Consul felt a moment uncomfortably dwarfed, childish. Years before in their boyhood this position had been reversed; then the Consul was the taller. But whereas the Consul had stopped growing when seventeen at five foot eight or nine, M. Laruelle kept on through the years under different skies until now he had grown out of the Consul's reach. Out of reach? Jacques was a boy of whom the Consul could still remember certain things with affection: the way he p.r.o.nounced "vocabulary" to rhyme with "foolery," or "bible" with "runcible." Runcible spoon. And he'd grown into a man who could shave and put on his socks by himself. But out of his reach, hardly. Up there, across the years, at his height of six foot three or four, it did not seem too outlandish to suggest that his influence still reached him strongly. If not, why the English-looking tweed coat similar to the Consul's own, those expensive, expressive English tennis shoes of the kind you could walk in, the English white trousers of twenty-one inches breadth, the English shirt worn English-fashion open at the neck, the extraordinary scarf that suggested M. Laruelle had once won a half-blue at the Sorbonne or something? There was even, in spite of his slight stoutness, an English, almost an ex-consular sort of litheness about his movements. Why should Jacques be playing tennis at all? Have you forgotten it, Jacques, how I myself taught you, that summer long ago, behind the Taskersons', or at the new public courts in Leasowe? On just such afternoons as this. So brief their friendship and yet, the Consul thought, how enormous, how all-permeating, permeating Jacques's whole life, that influence had been, an influence that showed even in his choice of books, his work--why had Jacques come to Quauhnahuac in the first place? Was it not much as though he, the Consul, from afar, had willed it, for obscure purposes of his own? The man he'd met here eighteen months ago seemed, though hurt in his art and destiny, the most completely unequivocal and sincere Frenchman he'd ever known. Nor was the seriousness of M. Laruelle's face, seen now against the sky between houses, compatible with cynical weakness. Was it not almost as though the Consul had tricked him into dishonour and misery, willed, even, his betrayal of him?

"Geoffrey," M. Laruelle said suddenly, quietly, "has she really come back?"

"It looks like it, doesn't it?" They both paused, to light their pipes, and the Consul noticed Jacques was wearing a ring he had not seen, a scarab, of simple design, cut into a chalcedony: whether Jacques would remove it to play tennis he didn't know, but the hand that wore it was trembling, while the Consul's was now steady.

"But I mean really come back," M. Laruelle continued in French as they went forward up the Calle Tierra del Fuego. "She hasn't merely come down on a visit, or to see you out of curiosity, or on the basis that you'll just be friends, and so on, if you don't mind my asking."

"As a matter of fact I rather do."

"Get this straight, Geoffrey, I'm thinking of Yvonne, not you."

"Get it a little straighter still. You're thinking of yourself."

"But today--I can see how that's--I suppose you were tight at the ball. I didn't go. But if so why aren't you back home thanking G.o.d and trying to rest and sober up instead of making everyone wretched by taking them to Tomalin? Yvonne looks tired out."

The words drew faint weary furrows across the Consul's mind constantly filling with harmless deliriums. Nevertheless his French was fluent and rapid: "How do you mean you suppose I was tight when Vigil told you so on the phone? And weren't you suggesting just now I take Yvonne to Guanajuato with him? Perhaps you imagined if you could insinuate yourself into our company on that proposed trip she would miraculously cease to be tired, even though it's fifty times farther than to Tomalin."

"When I suggested you go it hadn't quite entered my head she'd only arrived this morning."

"Well--I forget whose idea Tomalin was," the Consul said. Can it be I discussing Yvonne with Jacques, discussing us like this? Though after all they had done it before. "But I haven't explained just how Hugh fits into the picture, have--"

"--Eggs!" had the jovial proprietor of the abarrotes called down from the pavement above them to their right.

"Mezcalito!" had somebody else whizzed past carrying a length of plank, some barfly of his acquaintance; or was that this morning?

--"And on second thoughts I don't think I'll trouble."

Soon the town loomed up before them. They had reached the foot of Cortes Palace. Near them children (encouraged by a man also in dark gla.s.ses who seemed familiar, and to whom the Consul motioned) were swinging round and round a telegraph pole on an improvised whirligig, a little parody of the Great Carrousel up the hill in the square. Higher, on a terrace of the Palace (because it was also the ayuntamiento), a soldier stood at case with a rifle; on a still higher terrace dawdled the tourists: vandals in sandals looking at the murals.

The Consul and M. Laruelle had a good view of the Rivera frescoes from where they were. "You get an impression from here those tourists can't up here," M. Laruelle said, "they're too close." He was pointing with his tennis racket. "The slow darkening of the murals as you look from right to left. It seems somehow to symbolize the gradual imposition of the Spaniards" conquering will upon the Indians. Do you see what I mean?"

"If you stood at a greater distance still it might seem to symbolize for you the gradual imposition of the Americans' conquering friendship from left to right upon the Mexicans," the Consul said with a smile, removing his dark gla.s.ses, "upon those who have to look at the frescoes and remember who paid for them."

The part of the murals he was gazing at portrayed, he knew, the Tlahuicans who had died for this valley in which he lived. The artist had represented them in their battle dress, wearing the masks and skins of wolves and tigers. As he looked it was as though these figures were gathering silently together. Now they had become one figure, one immense, malevolent creature staring back at him. Suddenly this creature appeared to start forward, then make a violent motion. It might have been, indeed unmistakably it was, telling him to go away.

"See, there's Yvonne and Hugh's waving at you." M. Laruelle waved back his tennis racket. "Do you know I think they make rather a formidable couple," he added, with a half pained, half malicious smile.

There they were too, he saw, the formidable couple, up by the frescoes: Hugh with his foot on the rail of the Palace balcony, looking over their heads at the volcanoes perhaps: Yvonne with her back to them now. She was leaning against the rail facing the murals, then she turned sideways towards Hugh to say something. They did not wave again.

M. Laruelle and the Consul decided against the cliff path. They floated along the base of the Palace then, opposite the Banco de Credito y Ejidal, turned left up the steep narrow road climbing to the square. Toiling, they edged into the Palace wall to let a man on horseback pa.s.s, a fine-featured Indian of the poorer cla.s.s, dressed in soiled white loose clothes. The man was singing gaily to himself. But he nodded to them courteously as if to thank them. He seemed about to speak, reining in his little horse--on either side of which c.h.i.n.ked two saddle-bags, and upon whose rump was branded the number seven--to a slow walk beside them, as they ascended the hill. Jingle jingle little surcingle. But the man, riding slightly in front, did not speak and at the top he suddenly waved his hand and galloped away, singing.

The Consul felt a pang. Ah, to have a horse, and gallop away, singing, away to someone you loved perhaps, into the heart of all the simplicity and peace in the world; was not that like the opportunity afforded man by life itself? Of course not. Still, just for a moment, it had seemed that it was.

"What is it Goethe says about the horse?" he said. "'Weary of liberty he suffered himself to be saddled and bridled, and was ridden to death for his pains.'"

In the plaza the tumult was terrific. Once again they could scarcely hear one another speak. A boy dashed up to them selling papers. Sangriento Combate en Mora de Ebro. Los Aviones de los Rebeldes Bombardean Barcelona. Es inevitable la muerte del Papa. The Consul started; this time, an instant, he had thought the headlines referred to himself. But of course it was only the poor Pope whose death was inevitable. As if everyone else's death were not inevitable too! In the middle of the square a man was climbing a slippery flagpole in a complicated manner necessitating ropes and spikes. The huge carrousel, set near the bandstand, was thronged by peculiar long-nosed wooden horses mounted on whorled pipes, dipping majestically as they revolved with a slow piston-like circulation. Boys on roller skates, holding to the stays of the umbrella structure, were being whirled around yelling with joy, while the uncovered machine driving it hammered away like a steam pump: then they were whizzing. "Barcelona" and "Valencia" mingled with the crashes and cries against which the Consul's nerves were wooled. Jacques was pointing to the pictures on the panels running entirely around the inner wheel that was set horizontally and attached to the top of the central revolving pillar. A mermaid reclined in the sea combing her hair and singing to the sailors of a five-funnelled battleship. A daub which apparently represented Medea sacrificing her children turned out to be of performing monkeys. Five jovial-looking stags peered, in all their monarchical unlikelihood, out of a Scottish glen at them, then went tearing out of sight. While a fine Pancho Villa with handlebar moustaches galloped for dear life after them all. But stranger than these was a panel showing lovers, a man and a woman reclining by a river. Though childish and crude it had about it a somnambulistic quality and something too of truth, of the pathos of love. The lovers were depicted as awkwardly askance. Yet one felt that really they were wrapped in each other's arms by this river at dusk among gold stars. Yvonne, he thought, with sudden tenderness, where are you, my darling? Darling... For a moment he had thought her by his side. Then he remembered she was lost; then that no, this feeling belonged to yesterday, to the months of lonely torment behind him. She was not lost at all, she was here all the time, here now, or as good as here. The Consul wanted to raise his head, and shout for joy, like the horseman: she is here! Wake up, she has come back again! Sweetheart, darling, I love you! A desire to find her immediately and take her home (where in the garden still lay the white bottle of Tequila Anejo de Jalisco, unfinished), to put a stop to this senseless trip, to be, above all, alone with her, seized him, and a desire, too, to lead immediately again a normal happy life with her, a life, for instance, in which such innocent happiness as all these good people around him were enjoying, was possible. But had they ever led a normal happy life? Had such a thing as a normal happy life ever been possible for them? It had... Yet what about that belated postcard, now under Laruelle's pillow? It proved the lonely torment unnecessary, proved, even, he must have wanted it. Would anything really have been changed had he received the card at the right time? He doubted it. After all, her other letters--Christ, again, where were they?--had not changed anything. If he had not read them properly, perhaps. But he had not read them properly. And soon he would forget about what had been done with the card. Nevertheless the desire remained--like an echo of Yvonne's own--to find her, to find her now, to reverse their doom, it was a desire amounting almost to a resolution... Raise your head, Geoffrey Firmin, breathe your prayer of thankfulness, act before it is too late. But the weight of a great hand seemed to be pressing his head down. The desire pa.s.sed. At the same time, as though a cloud had come over the sun, the aspect of the fair had completely altered for him. The merry grinding of the roller skates, the cheerful if ironic music, the cries of the little children on their goose-necked steeds, the procession of queer pictures--all this had suddenly become transcendentally awful and tragic, distant, trans.m.u.ted, as it were some final impression on the senses of what the earth was like, carried over into an obscure region of death, a gathering thunder of immedicable sorrow; the Consul needed a drink...

--"Tequila," he said.

"Una?" the boy said sharply, and M. Laruelle called for gaseosa.

"Si, senores." The boy swept the table. "Una tequila y una gaseosa." He brought immediately a bottle of El Nilo for M. Laruelle together with salt, chile, and a saucer of sliced lemons.

The cafe, which was in the centre of a little railed-in garden at the edge of the square among trees, was called the Paris. And in feet it was reminiscent of Paris. A simple fountain dripped near. The boy brought them camarones, red shrimps in a saucer, and had to be told again to get the tequila.

At last it arrived.

"Ah--" the Consul said, though it was the chalcedony ring that had been shaking.

"Do you really like it?" M. Laruelle asked him, and the Consul, sucking a lemon, felt the fire of the tequila run down his spine like lightning striking a tree which thereupon, miraculously, blossoms.

"What are you shaking for?" the Consul asked him.

M. Laruelle stared at him, he gave a nervous glance over his shoulder, he made as if absurdly to tw.a.n.g his tennis racket on his toe, but remembering the press, stood it up against his chair awkwardly.

"What are you afraid of--" the Consul was mocking him.

"I admit, I feel confused..." M. Laruelle cast a more protracted glance over his shoulder. "Here, give me some of your poison." He leaned forward and took a sip of the Consul's tequila and remained bent over the thimble-shaped gla.s.s of terrors, a moment since br.i.m.m.i.n.g.

"Like it?"

"--like Oxygenee, and petrol... If I ever start to drink that stuff, Geoffrey, you'll know I'm done for."

"It's mescal with me... Tequila, no, that is healthful... and delightful. Just like beer. Good for you. But if I ever start to drink mescal again, I'm afraid, yes, that would be the end," the Consul said dreamily.

"Name of a name of G.o.d," shuddered M. Laruelle.

"You're not afraid of Hugh, are you?" The Consul, mocking, pursued--while it struck him that all the desolation of the months following Yvonne's departure were now mirrored in the other's eyes. "Not jealous of him, by any chance, are you?"

"Why should--"

"But you are thinking, aren't you, that in all this time I have never once told you the truth about my life," the Consul said, "isn't that right?"

"No... For perhaps once or twice, Geoffrey, without knowing it, you have told the truth. No, I truly want to help. But, as usual, you don't give me a chance."

"I have never told you the truth. I know it, it is worse than terrible. But as Sh.e.l.ley says, the cold world shall not know. And the tequila hasn't cured your trembling."

"No, I am afraid," M. Laruelle said.

"But I thought you were never afraid... Un otro tequila," the Consul told the boy, who came running, repeating sharply, "--uno?"

M. Laruelle glanced round after the boy as if it had been in his mind to say "dos": "I'm afraid of you," he said, "Old Bean."

The Consul heard, after half the second tequila, every now and then, familiar well-meaning phrases. "It's hard to say this. As man to man, I don't care who she is. Even if the miracle has occurred. Unless you cut it out altogether."

The Consul however was looking past M. Laruelle at the flying-boats which were at a little distance: the machine itself was feminine, graceful as a ballet dancer, its iron skirts of gondolas whirling higher and higher. Finally it whizzed round with a tense whipping and whining, then its skirts drooped chastely again when for a time there was stillness, only the breeze stirring them. And how beautiful, beautiful, beautiful-- "For G.o.d's sake. Go home to bed... Or stay here. I'll find the others. And tell them you're not going..."

"But I am going," the Consul said, commencing to take one of the shrimps apart. "Not camarones," he added. "Cabrones. That's what the Mexicans call them." Placing his thumbs at the base of both ears he waggled his fingers. "Cabron. You too, perhaps... Venus is a horned star."

"What about the damage you've done, to her life... After all your howling... If you've got her back!--If you've got this chance--"

"You are interfering with my great battle," the Consul said, gazing past M. Laruelle at an advertis.e.m.e.nt at the foot of the fountain: Peter Lorre en Las Manos de Orlac, a las 6.30 p.m. "I have to have a drink or two now, myself--so long as it isn't mescal of course--else I shall become confused, like yourself."

"--the truth is, I suppose, that sometimes, when you've calculated the amount exactly, you do see more clearly," M. Laruelle was admitting a minute later.

"Against death." The Consul sank back easily in his chair. "My battle for the survival of the human consciousness."

"But certainly not the things so important to us despised sober people, on which the balance of any human situation depends. It's precisely your inability to see them, Geoffrey, that turns them into the instruments of the disaster you have created yourself. Your Ben Jonson, for instance, or perhaps it was Christopher Marlowe, your Faust man, saw the Carthaginians fighting on his big toe-nail. That's like the kind of clear seeing you indulge in. Everything seems perfectly clear, because indeed it is perfectly clear, in terms of the toe-nail."

"Have a devilled scorpion," invited the Consul, pushing over the camarones with extended arm. "A bedevilled cabron."

"I admit the efficacy of your tequila--but do you realize that while you're battling against death, or whatever you imagine you're doing, while what is mystical in you is being released, or whatever it is you imagine is being released, while you're enjoying all this, do you realize what extraordinary allowances are being made for you by the world which has to cope with you, yes, are even now being made by me?"

The Consul was gazing upward dreamily at the Ferris wheel near them, huge, but resembling an enormously magnified child's structure of girders and angle brackets, nuts and bolts, in Meccano; tonight it would be lit up, its steel twigs caught in the emerald pathos of the trees; the wheel of the law rolling; and it bore thinking of too that the carnival was not going in earnest now. What a hullabaloo there would be later! His eye fell on another little carrousel, a dazzle-painted wobbling child's toy, and he saw himself as a child making up his mind to go on it, hesitating, missing the next opportunity, and the next, missing all the opportunities finally, until it was too late. What opportunities, precisely, did he mean? A voice on the radio somewhere began to sing a song: Samaritana mia, alma pia, bebe en tu boca linda, then went dead. It had sounded like Samaritana.

"And you forget what you exclude from this, shall we say, feeling of omniscience. And at night, I imagine, or between drink and drink, which is a sort of night, what you have excluded, as if it resented that exclusion, returns--"

"I'll say it returns," the Consul said, listening at this point. "There are other minor deliriums too, meteora, which you can pick out of the air before your eyes, like gnats. And this is what people seem to think is the end... But d.t.'s are only the beginning, the music round the portal of the Qliphoth, the overture, conducted by the G.o.d of Flies... Why do people see rats? These are the sort of questions that ought to concern the world, Jacques. Consider the word remorse. Remors. Mordeo, mordere. La Mordida! Agenbite too... And why rongeur? Why all this biting, all those rodents, in the etymology?"

"Facilis est descensus Averno... It's too easy."

"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.

"]e crois que le vautour est doux a Promethee 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.

LE GUSTA ESTE JARDiN?.

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-- Dies 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, pa.s.sing 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 Popocatepetl, 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 ATRACCIN!.

10 C. MaQUINA 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 h.e.l.l, 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 sc.r.a.p 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 a.s.sembled 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 another 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 G.o.d! 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 gla.s.ses 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 pa.s.sport--had that been his pa.s.sport? 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 pa.s.sport in Mexico. Ex-consul. What did it matter? Let it go! 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 ident.i.ty to that frightful b.l.o.o.d.y 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 gla.s.ses, his pipe, unbroken; yet not his favourite pipe; and no pa.s.sport. 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 gla.s.ses, set his pipe in his mouth, crossed his legs, and, as the world gradually slowed down, a.s.sumed 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 embarra.s.sment, 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: Scrunch 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 (el vive): he gives (el da): he has no friends (el no tiene amigos): he loves (el amo): 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: b.l.o.o.d.y 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 pa.s.sed, 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 El 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 gla.s.ses 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 a.s.sociated 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. "Senora 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, catalan, parras, zarzamora, malaga, durazno, membrillo, raw alcohol at a peso a litre, tequila, mescal, rompope. 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--" "Senora Gregorio," he repeated, and the echo came back:."Orio."

In one corner of the bar someone had apparently once begun a small mural, aping the Great Mural in the Palace, two or three figures only, peeling and inchoate Tlahuicans.--There was the sound of slow, dragging footsteps from behind; the widow appeared, a little old woman wearing an unusually long and shabby rustling black dress. Her hair that he recalled as grey seemed to have been recently hennaed, or dyed red, and though it hung untidily in front, it was twisted up at the back into a Psyche knot. Her face, which was beaded with perspiration, evinced the most extraordinary waxen pallor; she looked careworn, wasted with suffering, yet at the sight of the Consul her tired eyes gleamed, kindling her whole expression to one of wry amus.e.m.e.nt in which there appeared also both a determination and a certain weary expectancy. "Mescal posseebly," she said, in a queer, chanting half-bantering tone, "Mescal imposseebly." But she made no move to draw the Consul a drink, perhaps because of his debt, an objection he immediately disposed of by laying a toston on the counter. She smiled almost slyly as she edged towards the mescal barrel. "No, tequila, por favor," he said.

"Un obsequio"--she handed him the tequila. "Where do you laugh now?"

"I still laugh in the Calle Nicaragua, cincuenta dos," the Consul replied, smiling. "You mean 'live,' Senora Gregorio, not 'laugh,'con permiso."

"Remember," Senora Gregorio corrected him gently, slowly, "remember my English. Well, so it is," she sighed, drawing a small gla.s.s of malaga for herself from the barrel chalked with that name. "Here's to your love. What's my names?" She pushed towards him a saucer filled with salt that was speckled with orange-coloured pepper.

"Lo mismo! The Consul drank the tequila down. "Geoffrey Firmin."

Senora Gregorio brought him a second tequila; for a time they regarded one another without speaking. "So it is," she repeated at last, sighing once more; and there was pity in her voice for the Consul. "So it is. You must take it as it come. It can't be helped."

"No, it can't be helped."