Under The Volcano Part 10

"If you har your wife you would lose all things in that love," Senora Gregorio said, and the Consul, understanding that somehow this conversation was being taken up where it had been left off weeks before, probably at the point where Yvonne had abandoned him for the seventh time that evening, found himself not caring to change the basis of shared misery on which their relations.h.i.+p rested--for Gregorio had really abandoned her before he died--by informing her his wife had come back, was indeed, perhaps, not fifty feet away. "Both minds is occupied in one thing, so you can't lose it," she continued sadly.

"Si--," said the Consul.

"So it is. If your mind is occupied with all things, then you never lose your mind. Your minds, your life--your everything in it. Once when I was a girl I never used to think I live like I laugh now. I always used to dream about kernice dreams. Nice clothes, nice hairts--"Everything is good for me just now' it was one time, theatres, but everything--now, I don't think of but nothing but trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble; and trouble comes... So it is."

"Si--, Senora Gregorio."

"Of course I was a kernice girl from home," she was saying. "This--" she glanced contemptuously round the dark little bar, "was never in my mind. Life changes, you know, you can never drink of it." "Not 'drink of it,' Senora Gregorio, you mean 'think of it.'" "Never drink of it. Oh, well," she said, pouring out a litre of raw alcohol for a poor noseless peon who had entered silently and was standing in a corner, "a kernice life among kernice people and now what?"

Senora Gregorio shuffled off into the back room, leaving the Consul alone. He sat with his second large tequila untouched for some minutes. He imagined himself drinking it yet had not the will to stretch out his hand to take it, as if it were something once long and tediously desired but which, an overflowing cup suddenly within reach, had lost all meaning. The cantina's emptiness, and a strange ticking like that of some beetle, within that emptiness, began to get on his nerves; he looked at his watch: only seventeen minutes past two. This was where the tick was coming from. Again he imagined himself taking the drink: again his will failed him. Once the swing door opened, someone glanced round quickly to satisfy himself, went out: was that Hugh, Jacques? Whoever it was had seemed to possess the features of both, alternately. Somebody else entered and, though the next instant the Consul felt this was not the case, went right through into the back room, peering round furtively. A starving pariah dog with the appearance of having lately been skinned had squeezed itself in after the last man; it looked up at the Consul with beady, gentle eyes. Then, thrusting down its poor wrecked dinghy of a chest, from which raw withered b.r.e.a.s.t.s drooped, it began to bow and sc.r.a.pe before him. Ah, the ingress of the animal kingdom! Earlier it had been the insects; now these were closing in upon him again, these animals, these people without ideas: "Dispense usted, por Dios," he whispered to the dog, then wanting to say something kind, added, stooping, a phrase read or heard in youth or childhood: "For G.o.d sees how timid and beautiful you really are, and the thoughts of hope that go with you like little white birds--" The Consul stood up and suddenly declaimed to the dog: "Yet this day, pichicho, shalt thou be with me in--" But the dog hopped away in terror on three legs and slunk under the door.

The Consul finished his tequila in one gulp; he went to the counter. "Senora Gregorio," he called; he waited, casting his eyes about the cantina, which seemed to have grown very much lighter. And the echo came back: "Orio."--Why, the mad pictures of the wolves! He had forgotten they were here. The materialized pictures, six or seven of considerable length, completed, in the defection of the muralist, the decoration of El Bosque. They were precisely the same in every detail. All showed the same sleigh being pursued by the same pack of wolves. The wolves hunted the occupants of the sleigh the entire length of the bar and at intervals right round the room, though neither sleigh nor wolves budged an inch in the process. To what red tartar, oh mysterious beast? Incongruously, the Consul was reminded of Rostov's wolf hunt in War and Peace--ah, that incomparable party afterwards at the old uncle's, the sense of youth, the gaiety, the love! At the same time he remembered having been told that wolves never hunted in packs at all. Yes, indeed, how many patterns of life were based on kindred misconceptions, how many wolves do we feel on our heels, while our real enemies go in sheepskin by? "Senora Gregorio," he said again, and saw that the widow was returning, dragging her feet, though it was perhaps too late, there would not be time for another tequila.

He held out his hand, then dropped it--Good G.o.d, what had come over him? For an instant he'd thought he was looking at his own mother. Now he found himself struggling with his tears, that he wanted to embrace Senora Gregorio, to cry like a child, to hide his face on her bosom. " Adios," he said, and seeing a tequila on the counter just the same, he drank it rapidly.

Senora Gregorio took his hand and held it. "Life changes, you know," she said, gazing at him intently. "You can never drink of it. I think I see you with your esposa again soon. I see you laughing together in some kernice place where you laugh." She smiled. "Far away. In some kernice place where all those troubles you har now will har--" The Consul started: what was Senora Gregorio saying? "Adios," she added in Spanish, "I have no house only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours."

"Thank you."

"Sank you."

"Not sank you, Senora Gregorio, thank you."

"Sank you."

The coast looked clear: yet when the Consul pushed out cautiously through the jalousie doors he almost fell over Dr. Vigil. Fresh and impeccable in his tennis clothes, he was hurrying by, accompanied by Mr Quincey and the local cinema manager, Senor Bustamente. The Consul drew back, fearful now of Vigil, of Quincey, of being seen coming out of the cantina, but they appeared not to notice him as they glided past the Tomalin camion, which had just arrived, their elbows working like jockeys, chattering unceasingly. He suspected their conversation to be entirely about him; what could be done with him, they were asking, how many drinks had he put away at the Gran Baile last night? Yes, there they were, even going towards the Bella Vista itself, to get a few more "opinions" about him. They flitted here and there, vanished...

Es inevitable la muerte del Papa.

8.

DOWNHILL...

"Let in the clutch, step on the gas," the driver threw a smile over his shoulder. "Sure, Mike," he went on Irish-American for them.

The bus, a 1918 Chevrolet, jerked forward with a noise like startled poultry. It wasn't full, save for the Consul, who spread himself, in a good mood, drunk-sober-uninhibited; Yvonne sat neutral but smiling: they'd started anyhow. No wind; yet a gust lifted the awnings along the street. Soon they were rolling in a heavy sea of chaotic stone. They pa.s.sed tall hexagonal stands pasted with advertis.e.m.e.nts for Yvonne's cinema: Las Manos de Orlac. Elsewhere posters for the same film showed a murderer's hands laced with blood.

They advanced slowly, past the Banos de la Libertad, the Casa Brandes (La Primera en el Ramo de Electricidad), a hooded hooting intruder through the narrow tilted streets. At the market they stopped for a group of Indian women with baskets of live fowl. The women's strong faces were the colour of dark ceramic ware. There was a ma.s.siveness in their movements as they settled themselves. Two or three had cigarette stubs behind their ears, another chewed an old pipe. Their good-humoured faces of old idols were wrinkled with sun but they did not smile.

--"Look! O.K." the driver of the bus invited Hugh and Yvonne, who were changing places, producing, from beneath his s.h.i.+rt where they'd been nestling, little secret amba.s.sadors of peace, of love, two beautiful white tame pigeons. "My--ah--my aerial pigeons."

They had to scratch the heads of the birds who, arching their backs proudly, shone as with fresh white paint. (Could he have known, as Hugh, from merely smelling the latest headlines had known, how much nearer even in these moments the Government were to losing the Ebro, that it would now be a matter of days before Modesto withdrew altogether?) The driver replaced the pigeons under his white open s.h.i.+rt: "To keep them warm. Sure, Mike. Yes, sir," he told them."Vamonos!"

Someone laughed as the bus lurched off; the faces of the other pa.s.sengers slowly cracked into mirth, the camion was welding the old women into a community. The clock over the market arch, like the one in Rupert Brooke, said ten to three; but it was twenty to. They rambled and bounced into the main highway, the Avenida de la Revolucion, past offices whose windows proclaimed, while the Consul nodded his head deprecatingly, Dr. Arturo Diaz Vigil, Medico Cirujano y Partero, past the cinema itself.--The old women didn't look as though they knew about the Battle of the Ebro either. Two of them were holding an anxious conversation, in spite of the clatter and squeak of the patient floorboards, about the price of fish. Used to tourists, they took no notice of them. Hugh conveyed to the Consul: "How are the rajah shakes?"

Inhumaciones: the Consul, laughingly pinching one ear, was pointing for answer at the undertakers' jolting by, where a parrot, head c.o.c.ked, looked down from its perch suspended in the entrance, above which a sign inquired: Quo Vadis?

Where they were going immediately was down, at a snail's pace, by a secluded square with great old trees, their delicate leaves like new spring green. In the garden under the trees were doves and a small black goat. Le gusta este jardin, que es suyo? Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan! Do you like this garden, the notice said, that is yours? See to it that your children do not destroy it!

... There were no children, however, in the garden; just a man sitting alone on a stone bench. This man was apparently the devil himself, with a huge dark red face and horns, fangs, and his tongue hanging out over his chin, and an expression of mingled evil, lechery, and terror. The devil lifted his mask to spit, rose, and shambled through the garden with a dancing, loping step towards a church almost hidden by the trees. There was a sound of clas.h.i.+ng machetes. A native dance was going on beyond some awnings by the church, on the steps of which two Americans, Yvonne and he had seen earlier, were watching on tiptoe, craning their necks.

"Seriously," Hugh repeated to the Consul, who seemed calmly to have accepted the devil, while Hugh exchanged a look of regret with Yvonne, for they had seen no dancing in the zocalo, and it was now too late to get out.

"Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus!"

They were crossing a bridge at the bottom of the hill, over the ravine. It appeared overtly horrendous here. In the bus one looked straight down, as from the maintruck of a sailing s.h.i.+p, through dense foliage and wide leaves that did not at all conceal the treachery of the drop; its steep banks were thick with refuse, which even hung on the bushes. Turning, Hugh saw a dead dog right at the bottom, nuzzling the refuse; white bones showed through the carca.s.s. But above was the blue sky and Yvonne looked happy when Popocatepetl sprang into view, dominating the landscape for a while as they climbed the hill beyond. Then it dropped out of sight around a corner. It was a long circuitous hill. Half-way up, outside a gaudily decorated tavern, a man in a blue suit and strange headgear, swaying gently and eating half a melon, awaited the bus. From the interior of this tavern, which was called El Amor de los Amores, came a sound of singing. Hugh caught sight of what appeared to be armed policemen drinking at the bar. The camion slithered, banking with wheels locked to a stop alongside the sidewalk.

The driver dashed into the tavern, leaving the tilted camion; which meanwhile the man with the melon had boarded, throbbing away to itself. The driver emerged; he hurled himself back on to the vehicle, jamming it almost simultaneously into gear. Then, with an amused glance over his shoulder at the man, and a look to his trusting pigeons, he urged his bus up the hill: "Sure, Mike. Sure. O.K. boy."

The Consul was pointing back at the El Amor de los Amores: "Viva Franco... That's one of your Fascist joints, Hugh."

"So?"

"That hophead's the brother of the proprietor, I believe. I can tell you this much... He's not an aerial pigeon." "A what?...Oh."

"You may not think it, but he's a Spaniard."

The seats ran lengthwise and Hugh looked at the man in the blue suit opposite, who had been talking thickly to himself, who now, drunk, drugged, or both, seemed sunk in stupor. There was no conductor on the bus. Perhaps there would be one later, evidently fares were to be paid the driver on getting off, so none bothered him. Certainly his features, high, prominent nose and firm chin, were of strongly Spanish cast. His hands--in one he still clutched the gnawed half-melon--were huge, capable and rapacious. Hands of the conquistador, Hugh thought suddenly. But his general aspect suggested less the conquistador than, it was Hugh's perhaps too neat idea, the confusion that tends eventually to overtake conquistadores. His blue suit was of quite expensive cut, the open coat, it appeared, shaped at the waist. Hugh had noticed his broad-cuffed trousers draped well over expensive shoes. The shoes however--which had been s.h.i.+ned that morning but were soiled with saloon sawdust--were full of holes. He wore no tie. His handsome purple s.h.i.+rt, open at the neck, revealed a gold crucifix. The s.h.i.+rt was torn and in places hung out over his trousers. And for some reason he wore two hats, a kind of cheap Homburg fitting neatly over the broad crown of his sombrero.

"How do you mean Spaniard?" Hugh said.

"They came over after the Moroccan war," the Consul said. "A pelado," he added, smiling.

The smile referred to an argument about this word he'd had with Hugh, who'd seen it defined somewhere as a shoeless illiterate. According to the Consul, this was only one meaning: pelados were indeed "peeled ones," the stripped, but also those who did not have to be rich to prey on the really poor. For instance those half-breed petty politicians who will, in order to get into office just for one year, in which year they hope to put by enough to forswear work the rest of their lives, do literally anything whatsoever, from s.h.i.+ning shoes, to acting as one who was not an "aerial pigeon." Hugh understood this word finally to be pretty ambiguous. A Spaniard, say, could interpret it as Indian, the Indian he despised, used, made drunk. The Indian, however, might mean Spaniard by it. Either might mean by it anyone who made a show of himself. It was perhaps one of those words that had actually been distilled out of conquest, suggesting, as it did, on the one hand thief, on the other exploiter. Interchangeable ever were the terms of abuse with which the aggressor discredits those about to be ravaged!

The hill behind them, the bus was stopping opposite the foot of an avenue, with fountains, leading to a hotel: the Casino de la Selva. Hugh made out tennis courts, and white figures moving, the Consul's eyes pointed--there were Dr. Vigil and M. Laruelle. M. Laruelle, if it was he, tossed a ball high into the blue, smacked it down, but Vigil walked right past it, crossing to the other side.

Here the American highway really began; and they enjoyed a brief stretch of good road. The camion reached the railway station, sleepy, signals up, points locked in somnolence. It was closed like a book. Unusual pullmans snored along a siding. On the embankment Pearce oiltanks were pillowed. Their burnished silver lightning alone was awake, playing hide-and-seek among the trees. And on that lonely platform tonight he himself would stand, with his pilgrim's bundle.

QUAUHNAHUAC.

"How are you?" (meaning how much more!) Hugh smiled, leaning over to Yvonne.

"This is such fun--"

Like a child Hugh wanted everyone to be happy on a trip. Even had they been going to the cemetery he would have wanted them to be happy. But Hugh felt more as if, fortified by a pint of bitter, he were going to play in some important "away" match for a school fifteen in which he'd been included at the last minute: when the dread, hard as nails and boots, of the foreign twenty-five line, of the whiter, taller goalposts, expressed itself in a strange exaltation, an urgent desire to chatter. The noonday languor had pa.s.sed him by: yet the naked realities of the situation, like the spokes of a wheel, were blurred in motion towards unreal high events. This trip now seemed to him the best of all possible ideas. Even the Consul seemed still in a good mood. But communication between them all soon became again virtually impossible; the American highway rolled away into the distance.

They left it abruptly, rough stone walls shut out the view. Now they were rattling between leafy hedges full of wild flowers with deep royal bluebells. Possibly, another kind of convolvulus. Green and white clothing hung on the cornstalks outside the low gra.s.s-roofed houses. Here the bright blue flowers climbed right up into the trees that were already snowy with blooms.

To their right, beyond a wall that suddenly became much higher, now lay their grove of the morning. And here, announced by its smell of beer, was the Cerveceria Quauhnahuac itself. Yvonne and Hugh, around the Consul, exchanged a look of encouragement and friends.h.i.+p. The ma.s.sive gate was still open. How swiftly they clattered past! Yet not before Hugh had seen again the blackened and leaf-covered tables and, in the distance, the fountain choked with leaves. The little girl with the armadillo had gone, but the visored man resembling a gamekeeper was standing alone in the courtyard, his hands behind his back, watching them. Along the wall the cypresses stirred gently together, enduring their dust.

Beyond the level-crossing the Tomalin road became smoother for a time. A cool breeze blew gratefully through the windows into the hot camion. Over the plains to their right wound now the interminable narrow-gauge railway, where--though there were twenty-one other paths they might have taken!--they had ridden home abreast. And there were the telegraph poles refusing, for ever, that final curve to the left, and striding straight ahead... In the square too they'd talked of nothing but the Consul. What a relief, and what a joyful relief for Yvonne, when he'd turned up at the Terminal after all!--But the road was rapidly growing much worse again, it was now well-nigh impossible to think, let alone talk-- They jogged on into ever rougher and rougher country. Popocatepetl came in view, an apparition already circling away, that beckoned them forward. The ravine appeared once more on the scene, patiently creeping after them in the distance. The camion crashed down a pothole with a deafening jolt that threw Hugh's soul between his teeth. And then crashed into, and over, a second series of deeper potholes: "This is like driving over the moon," he tried to say to Yvonne.

She couldn't hear... He noticed new fine lines about her mouth, a weariness that had not been there in Paris. Poor Yvonne! May she be happy. May everything come, somehow, right. May we all be happy. G.o.d bless us. Hugh now wondered if he should produce, from his inside pocket, a very small pinch bottle of habanero he had acquired, against emergency, in the square, and frankly offer the Consul a drink. But he obviously didn't need it yet. A faint calm smile played about the Consul's lips which from time to time moved slightly, as if, in spite of the racket, the swaying and jolting, and their continually being sent sprawling against one another, he were solving a chess problem, or reciting something to himself.

Then they were hissing along a good stretch of oiled road through flat wooded country with neither volcano nor ravine in sight. Yvonne had turned sideways and her clear profile sailed along reflected in the window. The more even sounds of the bus wove into Hugh's brain an idiotic syllogism: I am losing the Battle of the Ebro, I am also losing Yvonne, therefore Yvonne is...

The camion was now somewhat fuller. In addition to the pelado and the old women there were men dressed in their Sunday best, white trousers and purple s.h.i.+rts, and one or two younger women in mourning, probably going to the cemeteries. The poultry were a sad sight. All alike had submitted to their fate; hens, c.o.c.ks, and turkeys, whether in their baskets, or still loose. With only an occasional flutter to show they were alive they crouched pa.s.sively under the long seats, their emphatic spindly claws bound with cord. Two pullets lay, frightened and quivering, between the hand brake and the clutch, their wings linked with the levers. Poor things, they had signed then--Munich agreement too. One of the turkeys even looked remarkably like Neville Chamberlain. Su salud estara a salvo no escupiendo en el interior de este vehiculo: these words, over the windscreen, ran the entire breadth of the bus. Hugh concentrated upon different objects in the camion; the driver's small mirror with the legend running round it--Cooperacion de la Cruz Roja, the three picture postcards of the Virgin Mary pinned beside it, the two slim vases of marguerites over the dashboard, the gangrened fire extinguisher, the dungaree jacket and whiskbroom under the seat where the pelado was sitting--he watched him as they hit another bad stretch of road.

Swaying from side to side with his eyes shut, the man was trying to tuck in his s.h.i.+rt. Now he was methodically b.u.t.toning his coat on the wrong b.u.t.tons. But it struck Hugh all this was merely preparatory, a sort of grotesque toilet. For, still without opening his eyes, he had now somehow found room to lie full length on the seat. It was extraordinary, too, how, stretched out, a corpse, he yet preserved the appearance of knowing everything that was going on. Despite his stupor, he was a man on guard. The half-melon jumped from his hand, the chawed fragment full of seeds like raisins rolled on the seat; those closed eyes saw it. His crucifix was slipping off; he was conscious of it. The Homburg fell from his sombrero, slid to the floor, he knew all about it, though he made no effort to pick the hat up. He was guarding himself against theft, while at the same time gathering, strength for more debauchery. In order to get into another cantina not his brother's he might have to walk straight. Such prescience was worthy of admiration.

Nothing but pines, fircones, stones, black earth. Yet that earth looked parched, those stones, unmistakably, volcanic. Everywhere, quite as Prescott informed one, were attestations to Popocatepetl's presence and antiquity. And here the d.a.m.ned thing was again! Why were there volcanic eruptions? People pretended not to know. Because, they might suggest tentatively, under the rocks beneath the surface of the earth, steam, its pressure constantly rising, was generated; because the rocks and the water, decomposing, formed gases, which combined with the molten material from below; because the watery rocks near the surface were unable to restrain the growing complex of pressures, and the whole ma.s.s exploded; the lava flooded out, the gases escaped, and there was your eruption.--But not your explanation. No, the whole thing was a complete mystery still. In movies of eruptions people were always seen standing in the midst of the encroaching flood, delighted by it. Walls fell over, churches collapsed, whole families moved away their possessions in a panic, but there were always these people, jumping about between the streams of molten lava, smoking cigarettes...

Christ! He hadn't realized how fast they were going, in spite of the road and their being in a 1918 Chevrolet, and it seemed to him that because of this a quite different atmosphere now pervaded the little bus; the men were smiling, the old women gossiping knowingly and chuckling, two boys, newcomers hanging on by their eyebrows at the back, were whistling cheerfully--the bright s.h.i.+rts, the brighter serpentine confetti of tickets, red, yellow, green, blue, dangling from a loop on the ceiling, all contributed to a sense of gaiety, a feeling, almost, of the fiesta itself again, that hadn't been there before.

But the boys were dropping off, one by one, and the gaiety, short-lived as a burst of sunlight, departed. Brutal-looking candelabra cactus swung past, a ruined church, full of pumpkins, windows bearded with gra.s.s. Burned, perhaps, in the revolution, its exterior was blackened with fire, and it had an air of being d.a.m.ned.

--The time has come for you to join your comrades, to aid the workers, he told Christ, who agreed. It had been His idea all the while, only until Hugh had rescued Him those hypocrites had kept him shut up inside the burning church where He couldn't breathe. Hugh made a speech. Stalin gave him a medal and listened sympathetically while he explained what was on his mind. "True... I wasn't in time to save the Ebro, but I did strike my blow--" He went off, the star of Lenin on his lapel; in his pocket a certificate; Hero of the Soviet Republic, and the True Church, pride and love in his heart-- Hugh looked out of the window. Well, after all. Silly b.a.s.t.a.r.d. But the queer thing was, that love was real. Christ, why can't we be simple, Christ Jesus why may we not be simple, why may we not all be brothers?

Buses with odd names on them, a procession out of a side-road, were bobbing past in the opposite direction: buses to Tetecala, to Jujuta, to Xuitepec: buses to Xochitepec, to Xoxitepec-- Popocatepetl loomed, pyramidal, to their right, one side beautifully curved as a woman's breast, the other precipitous, jagged, ferocious. Cloud drifts were ma.s.sing again, high-piled, behind it. Ixtaccihuatl appeared...

--Xiutepecanocht.i.tlantehuantepec, Quintanarooroo, Tlacolula, Moctezuma, Juarez, Puebla, Tlampam--bong! suddenly snarled the bus. They thundered on, pa.s.sing little pigs trotting along the road, an Indian screening sand, a bald boy, with ear-rings, sleepily scratching his stomach and swinging madly on a hammock. Advertis.e.m.e.nts on ruined walls swam by. Atchis! Instante! Resfriados, Dolores, Cafeasperina. Rechace Imitaciones. Las Manos de Orlac. Con Peter Lorre.

When there was a bad patch the bus rattled and sideslipped ominously, once it altogether ran off the road, but its determination outweighed these waverings, one was pleased at last to have transferred one's responsibilities to it, lulled into a state from which it would be pain to waken.

Hedges, with low steep banks, in which grew dusty trees, were hemming them in on either side. Without decreasing pace they were running into a narrow, sunken section of road, winding, and so reminiscent of England one expected at any point to see a sign: Public Footpath to Lostwithiel.

Desviacion! Hombres Trabajando!

With a yelping of tyres and brakes they made the detour leftward too quickly. But Hugh had seen a man, whom they'd narrowly missed, apparently lying fast asleep under the hedge on the right side of the road.

Neither Geoffrey nor Yvonne, staring sleepily out of the opposite window, had seen him. Nor did anyone else, were they aware of it, seem to think it peculiar a man should choose to sleep, however perilous his position, in the sun on the main road.

Hugh leaned forward to call out, hesitated, then tapped the driver on the shoulder; almost at the same moment the bus leaped to a standstill.

Guiding the whining vehicle swiftly, steering an erratic course with one hand, the driver, craning out of his seat to watch the corners behind and before, reversed out of the detour back into the narrow highway.

The friendly harsh smell of exhaust gases was tempered with the hot tar smell from the repairs, ahead of them now, where the road was broader with a wide gra.s.s margin between it and the hedge, though n.o.body was working there, everyone knocked off for the day possibly hours before, and there was nothing to be seen, just the soft, indigo carpet sparkling and sweating away to itself.

There appeared now, standing alone in a sort of rubbish heap where this gra.s.s margin stopped, opposite the detour, a stone wayside cross. Beneath it lay a milk bottle, a funnel, a sock, and part of an old suitcase.

And now, farther back still, in the road, Hugh saw the man again. His face covered by a wide hat, he was lying peacefully on his back with his arms stretched out towards this wayside cross, in whose shadow, twenty feet away, he might have found a gra.s.sy bed. Nearby stood a horse meekly cropping the hedge.

As the bus jerked to another stop the pelado, who was still lying down, almost slid from the seat to the floor. Managing to recover himself though, he not only reached his feet and an equilibrium he contrived remarkably to maintain but had, with one strong counter-movement, arrived half-way to the exit, crucifix fallen safely in place around his neck, hats in one hand, what remained of the melon in the other. With a look that might have withered at its inception any thought of stealing them, he placed the hats carefully on a vacant seat near the door, then, with exaggerated care, let himself down to the road. His eyes were still only half open, and they preserved a dead glaze. Yet there could be no doubt he had already taken in the whole situation. Throwing away the melon he started over towards the man, stepping tentatively, as over imaginary obstacles. But his course was straight, he held himself erect.

Hugh, Yvonne, the Consul, and two of the male pa.s.sengers got out and followed him. None of the old women moved.

It was stiflingly hot in the sunken deserted road. Yvonne gave a nervous cry and turned on her heel; Hugh caught her arm.

"Don't mind me. It's just that I can't stand the sight of blood, d.a.m.n it."

She was climbing back into the camion as Hugh came up with the Consul and the two pa.s.sengers.

The pelado was swaying gently over the rec.u.mbent man who was dressed in the usual loose white garments of the Indian.

There was not, however, much blood in sight, save on one side of his hat.

But the man was certainly not sleeping peacefully. His chest heaved like a spent swimmer's, his stomach contracted and dilated rapidly, one fist clenched and unclenched in the dust...

Hugh and the Consul stood helplessly, each, he thought, waiting for the other to remove the Indian's hat, to expose the wound each felt must be there, checked from such action by a common reluctance, perhaps an obscure courtesy. For each knew the other was also thinking it would be better still should one of the pa.s.sengers, even the pelado, examine the man.

As n.o.body made any move at all Hugh grew impatient. He s.h.i.+fted from foot to foot. He looked at the Consul expectantly: he'd been in this country long enough to know what should be done, moreover he was the one among them most nearly representing authority. Yet the Consul seemed lost in reflection. Suddenly Hugh stepped forward impulsively and bent over the Indian--one of the pa.s.sengers plucked his sleeve.

"Har you throw your cigarette?"

"Throw it away." The Consul woke up. "Forest fires."

"So--, they have prohibidated it."

Hugh stamped his cigarette out and was about to bend over the man once more when the pa.s.senger again plucked his sleeve: "No, no," he said, tapping his nose, "they har prohibidated that, tambien."

"You can't touch him--it's the law," said the Consul sharply, who looked now as though he would like to get as far from this scene as possible, if necessary even by means of the Indian's horse. "For his protection. Actually it's a sensible law. Otherwise you might become an accessory after the fact."

The Indian's breathing sounded like the sea dragging itself down a stone beach.

A single bird flew, high.

"But the man may be dy--" Hugh muttered to Geoffrey.

"G.o.d, I feel terrible," the Consul replied, though it was a fact he was about to take some action, when the pelado antic.i.p.ated him: he went down on one knee and, quick as lightning, whipped off the Indian's hat.

They all peered over, seeing the cruel wound on the side of his head, where the blood had almost coagulated, the flushed moustachioed face turned aside, and before they stood back Hugh caught a glimpse of a sum of money, four or five silver pesos and a handful of centavos, that had been placed neatly under the loose collar to the man's blouse, which partly concealed it. The pelado replaced the hat and, straightening himself, made a hopeless gesture with hands now blotched with half-dried blood.

How long had he been here, lying in the road?

Hugh gazed after the pelado on his way back to the camion, and then, once more, at the Indian, whose life, as they talked, seemed gasping away from them all. "Diantre! Donde buscamos un medico?" he asked stupidly.

This time from the camion, the pelado made again that gesture of hopelessness, which was also like a gesture of sympathy: what could they do, he appeared trying to convey to them through the window, how could they have known, when they got out, that they could do nothing?

"Move his hat farther down though so that he can get some air," the Consul said, in a voice that betrayed a trembling tongue; Hugh did this and, so swiftly he did not have time to see the money again, also placed the Consul's handkerchief over the wound, leaving it held in place by the balanced sombrero.

The driver now came for a look, tall, in his white s.h.i.+rt sleeves, and soiled whipcord breeches like bellows,, inside high-laced, dirty boots. With his bare tousled head, laughing dissipated intelligent face, shambling yet athletic gait, there was something lonely and likeable about this man whom Hugh had seen twice before walking by himself in the town.

Instinctively you trusted him. Yet here, his indifference seemed remarkable; still, he had the responsibility of the bus, and what could he do, with his pigeons?

From somewhere above the clouds a lone plane let down a single sheaf of sound.

--"Pobrecito."

--"Chingar!"

Hugh was aware that gradually these remarks had been taken up as a kind of refrain around him--for their presence, together with the camion having stopped at all, had ratified approach at least to the extent that another male pa.s.senger, and two peasants. .h.i.therto unnoticed, and who knew nothing, had joined the group about the stricken man whom n.o.body touched again--a quiet rustling of futility, a rustling of whispers, in which the dust, the heat, the bus itself with its load of immobile old women and doomed poultry, might have been conspiring, while only these two words, the one of compa.s.sion, the other of obscene contempt, were audible above the Indian's breathing.