Under The Volcano Part 15

"And lagoons?"

"So--... many lagoons."

"And are there not many web-footed fowl in these lagoons?"

"Si, senor. Muy fuerte... In Tlaxcala."

"Well then," said the Consul, turning round on the others, "what's wrong with my plan? What's wrong with all you people? Aren't you going to Vera Cruz after all, Hugh?"

Suddenly a man started to play the guitar in the doorway angrily, and once again Cervantes came forward: "Black Flowers is the name of that song." Cervantes was about to beckon the man to come in. "It say: I suffer, because your lips say only lies and they have death in a kiss."

"Tell him to go away," the Consul said. "Hugh--cuantos trenes hay el dia para Vera Cruz?" The guitar player changed his tune: "This is a farmer's song," said Cervantes, "for oxen."

"Oxen, we've had enough oxen for one day. Tell him to go far away, por favor," said the Consul. "My G.o.d, what's wrong with you people? Yvonne, Hugh... It's a perfectly good idea, a most practical idea. Don't you see it'll kill two birds with one stone--a stone, Cervantes!... Tlaxcala is on the way to Vera Cruz, Hugh, the true cross... This is the last time we'll be seeing you, old fellow. For all I know... We could have a celebration. Come on now, you can't lie to me, I'm watching you... Change at San Martin Texmelucan in both ways..."

Thunder, single, exploded in mid-air just outside the door and Cervantes came hurrying forward with the coffee: he struck matches for their cigarettes: "La supersticion dice," he smiled, striking a fresh one for the Consul, "que cuando tres amigos prenden su cigarro con la misma cerilla, el ultimo muere antes que los otros dos."

"You have that superst.i.tion in Mexico?" Hugh asked.

"Si, senor," Cervantes nodded, "the fantasy is that when three friends take fire with the same match, the last die before the other two. But in war it is impossible because many soldiers have only one match."

"Feurstick," said Hugh, s.h.i.+elding yet another light for the Consul. "The Norwegians have a better name for matches."

--It was growing darker, the guitar player, it seemed, was sitting in the corner, wearing dark gla.s.ses, they had missed this bus back, if they'd meant to take it, the bus that was going to take them home to Tlaxcala, but it seemed to the Consul that, over the coffee, he had, all at once, begun to talk soberly, brilliantly, and fluently again, that he was, indeed, in top form, a fact he was sure was making Yvonne, opposite him, happy once more. Feurstick, Hugh's Norwegian word, was still in his head. And the Consul was taking about the Indo-Aryans, the Iranians and the sacred fire, Agni, called down from heaven, with his firesticks, by the priest. He was talking of soma, Amrita, the nectar of immortality, praised in one whole book of the Rig Veda--bhang, which was, perhaps, much the same thing as mescal itself, and, changing the subject here, delicately, he was talking of Norwegian architecture, or rather how much architecture, in Kashmir, was almost, so to speak, Norwegian, the Hamadan mosque for instance, wooden, with its tall tapering spires, and ornaments pendulous from the eaves. He was talking of the Borda gardens in Quauhnahuac, opposite Bustamente's cinema, and how much they, for some reason, always reminded him of the terrace of the Nishat Bagh. The Consul was talking about the Vedic G.o.ds, who were not properly anthropomorphized, whereas Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl... Or were they not? In any event the Consul, once more, was talking about the sacred fire, the sacrificial fire, of the stone soma press, the sacrifices of cakes and oxen and horses, the priest chanting from the Veda, how the drinking rites, simple at first, became more and more complicated as time went on, the ritual having to be carried out with meticulous care, since one slip--tee hee!--would render the sacrifice invalid. Soma, bhang, mescal, ah yes, mescal, he was back upon that subject again, and now from it, had departed almost as cunningly as before. He was talking of the immolation of wives, and the fact that, at the time he was referring to, in Taxila, at the mouth of the Khyber Pa.s.s, the widow of a childless man might contract a Levirate marriage with her brother-in-law. The Consul found himself claiming to see an obscure relation, apart from any purely verbal one, between Taxila and Tlaxcala itself: for when that great pupil of Aristotle's--Yvonne--Alexander, arrived in Taxila, had he not Cortez-like already been in communication with Ambhi, Taxila's king, who likewise had seen in an alliance with a foreign conqueror, an excellent chance of undoing a rival, in this case not Moctezuma but the Paurave monarch, who ruled the country between the Jhelma and the Chenab? Tlaxcala... The Consul was talking, like Sir Thomas Browne, of Archimedes, Moses, Achilles, Methuselah, Charles V, and Pontius Pilate. The Consul was talking furthermore of Jesus Christ, or rather of Yus Asaf who, according to the Kashmiri legend, was Christ--Christ, who had, after being taken down from the cross, wandered to Kashmir in search of the lost tribes of Israel, and died there, in Srinagar-- But there was a slight mistake. The Consul was not talking. Apparently not. The Consul had not uttered a single word. It was all an illusion, a whirling cerebral chaos, out of which, at last, at long last, at this very instant, emerged, rounded and complete, order: "The act of a madman or a drunkard, old bean," he said, "or of a man labouring under violent excitement seems less free and more inevitable to the one who knows the mental condition of the man who performed the action, and more free and less inevitable to the one who does not know it."

It was like a piece on a piano, it was like that little bit in seven flats, on the black keys--it was what, more or less, he now remembered, he'd gone to the excusado in the first place in order to remember, to bring off pat--it was perhaps also like Hugh's quotation from Matthew Arnold on Marcus Aurelius, like that little piece one had learned, so laboriously, years ago, only to forget whenever one particularly wanted to play it, until one day one got drunk in such a way that one's fingers themselves recalled the combination and, miraculously, perfectly, unlocked the wealth of melody; only here Tolstoy had supplied no melody.

"What?" Hugh said.

"Not at all. I always come back to the point, and take a thing up where it has been left off. How else should I have maintained myself so long as Consul? When we have absolutely no understanding of the causes of an action--I am referring, in case your mind has wandered to the subject of your own conversation, to the events of the afternoon--the causes, whether vicious or virtuous or what not, we ascribe, according to Tolstoy, a greater element of free will to it. According to Tolstoy then, we should have had less reluctance in interfering than we did..."

"All cases without exception in which our conception of free will and necessity varies depend on three considerations," the Consul said. "You can't get away from it."

"Moreover, according to Tolstoy," he went on, "before we pa.s.s judgement on the thief--if thief he were--we would have to ask ourselves: what were his connexions with other thieves, ties of family, his place in time, if we know even that, his relation to the external world, and to the consequences leading to the act... Cervantes!"

"Of course we're taking time to find out all this while the poor fellow just goes on dying in the road," Hugh was saying. "How did we get on to this? No one had an opportunity to interfere till after the deed was done. None of us saw him steal the money, to the best of my knowledge. Which crime are you talking about anyway, Geoff? If other crime there were... And the fact that we did nothing to stop the thief is surely beside the point that we did nothing really to save the man's life."

"Precisely," said the Consul, "I was talking about interference in general, I think. Why should we have done anything to save his life? Hadn't he a right to die, if he wanted to?... Cervantes--mescal--no, parras, por favor... Why should anybody interfere with anybody? Why should anybody have interfered with the Tlaxcalans, for example, who were perfectly happy by their own stricken in years trees, among the web-footed fowl in the first lagoon--"

"What web-footed fowl in what lagoon? "

"Or more specifically perhaps, Hugh, I was talking of nothing at all... Since supposing we settled anything--ah, ignoratio elenchi, Hugh, that's what. Or the fallacy of supposing a point proved or disproved by argument which proves or disproves something not at issue. Like these wars. For it seems to me that almost everywhere in the world these days there has long since ceased to be anything fundamental to man at issue at all... Ah, you people with ideas!

"Ah, ignoratio elenchi!... All this, for instance, about going to fight for Spain?...and poor little defenceless China! Can't you see there's a sort of determinism about the fate of nations? They all seem to get what they deserve in the long run."

"Well...."

A gust of wind moaned round the house with an eerie sound like a northerner prowling among the tennis nets in England, jingling the rings.

"Not exactly original."

"Not long ago it was poor little defenceless Ethiopia. Before that, poor little defenceless Flanders. To say nothing of course of the poor little defenceless Belgian Congo. And tomorrow it will be poor little defenceless Latvia. Or Finland. Or Piddiedeedee. Or even Russia. Read history. Go back a thousand years. What is the use of interfering with its worthless stupid course? Like a barranca, a ravine, choked up with refuse, that winds through the ages, and peters out in a--What in G.o.d's name has all the heroic resistance put up by poor little defenceless peoples all rendered defenceless in the first place for some well-calculated and criminal reason--"

"h.e.l.l, I told you that--"

"--to do with the survival of the human spirit? Nothing whatsoever. Less than nothing. Countries, civilizations, empires, great hordes perish for no reason at all, and their soul and meaning with them, that one old man perhaps you never heard of, and who never heard of them, sitting boiling in Timbuktu, proving the existence of the mathematical correlative of ignoratio elenchi with obsolete instruments, may survive!"

"For Christ's sake," said Hugh.

"Just go back to Tolstoy's day--Yvonne, where are you going?"

"Out."

"Then it was poor little defenceless Montenegro. Poor little defenceless Serbia. Or back a little farther still, Hugh, to your Sh.e.l.ley's, when it was poor little defenceless Greece--Cervantes!"

"--As it will be again, of course. Or to Boswell's--poor little defenceless Corsica! Shades of Paoli and Monboddo. Applesquires and fairies strong for freedom. As always. And Rousseau--not douanier--knew he was talking nonsense--"

" I should like to know what the b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l it is you imagine you're talking!"

"Why can't people mind their own d.a.m.ned business!"

"Or say what they mean? "

"It was something else, I grant you. The dishonest ma.s.s rationalization of motive," justification of the common pathological itch. Of the motives for interference; merely a pa.s.sion for fatality half the time. Curiosity. Experience--very natural... But nothing constructive at bottom, only acceptance really, a piddling contemptible acceptance of the state of affairs that flatters one into feeling thus n.o.ble or useful!"

"But my G.o.d it's against such a state of affairs that people like the Loyalists--"

"But with calamity at the end of it! There must be calamity because otherwise the people who did the interfering would have to come back and cope with their responsibilities for a change--"

"Just let a real war come along and then see how bloodthirsty chaps like you are!"

"Which would never do. Why all you people who talk about going to Spain and fighting for freedom--Cervantes!--should learn by heart what Tolstoy said about that kind of thing in War and Peace, that conversation with the volunteers in the train--"

"But anyhow that was in--"

"Where the first volunteer, I mean, turned out to be a bragging degenerate obviously convinced after he'd been drinking that he was doing something heroic--what are you laughing at, Hugh?"

"It's funny."

"And the second was a man who had tried everything and been a failure in all of them. And the third--" Yvonne abruptly returned and the Consul, who had been shouting, slightly lowered his voice, "an artillery man, was the only one who struck him at first favourably. Yet what did he turn out to be? A cadet who'd failed in his examinations. All of them, you see, misfits, all good for nothing, cowards, baboons, meek wolves, parasites, every man jack of them, people afraid to face their own responsibilities, fight their own fight, ready to go anywhere, as Tolstoy well perceived--"

"Quitters?" Hugh said. "Didn't Karamazov or whoever he was believe that the action of those volunteers was nevertheless an expression of the whole soul of the Russian people?--Mind you, I appreciate that a diplomatic corps which merely remains in San Sebastian hoping Franco will win quickly instead of returning to Madrid to tell the British Government the truth of what's really going on in Spain can't possibly consist of quitters!"

"Isn't your desire to fight for Spain, for fiddlededee, for Timbuktu, for China, for hypocrisy, for b.u.g.g.e.r all, for any hokery pokery that a few moose-headed idiot sons choose to call freedom--of course there is nothing of the sort, really--"

"If--"

"If you've really read War and Peace, as you claim you have, why haven't you the sense to profit by it, I repeat?"

"At any rate," said Hugh, "I profited by it to the extent of being able to distinguish it from Anna Karenina"

"Well, Anna Karenina then ..." the Consul paused.

"Cervantes!"--and Cervantes appeared, with his fighting c.o.c.k, evidently fast asleep, under his arm. "Muy fuerte" he said, "muy terreebly," pa.s.sing through the room, un bruto!--"But as I implied, you b.l.o.o.d.y people, mark my words, you don't mind your own business any better at home, let alone in foreign countries. Geoffrey darling, why don't you stop drinking, it isn't too late--that sort of thing. Why isn't it? Did I say so?" What was he saying? The Consul listened to himself almost in surprise at this sudden cruelty, this vulgarity. And in a moment it was going to get worse. "I thought it was all so splendidly and legally settled that it was. It's only you that insists it isn't."

"Oh Geoffrey--"

--Was the Consul saying this? Must he say it?--It seemed he must. "For all you know it's only the knowledge that it most certainly is too late that keeps me alive at all... You're all the same, all of you, Yvonne, Jacques, you, Hugh, trying to interfere with other people's lives, interfering, interfering--why should anyone have interfered with young Cervantes here, for example, given him an interest in c.o.c.k fighting?--and that's precisely what's bringing about disaster in the world, to stretch a point, yes, quite a point, all because you haven't got the wisdom and the simplicity and the courage, yes, the courage, to take any of the, to take--"

"See here, Geoffrey--"

"What have you ever done for humanity, Hugh, with all your oratio obliqua about the capitalist system, except talk, and thrive on it, until your soul stinks?"

"Shut up, Geoff, for the love of Mike!"

"For that matter, both your souls stink! Cervantes!"

"Geoffrey, please sit down," Yvonne seemed to have said wearily, "you're making such a scene."

"No, I'm not, Yvonne. I'm talking very calmly. As when I ask you, what have you ever done for anyone but yourself?" Must the Consul say this? He was saying, had said it: "Where are the children I might have wanted? You may suppose I might have wanted them. Drowned. To the accompaniment of the rattling of a thousand douche bags. Mind you, you don't pretend to love 'humanity,' not a bit of it! You don't even need an illusion, though you do have some illusions unfortunately, to help you deny the only natural and good function you have. Though on second thoughts it might be better if women had no functions at all!"

"Don't be a b.l.o.o.d.y swine, Geoffrey." Hugh rose.

"Stay where you b.l.o.o.d.y are," ordered the Consul. "Of course I see the romantic predicament you two are in. But even if Hugh makes the most of it again it won't be long, it won't be long, before he realizes he's only one of the hundred or so other ninney-hammers with gills like codfish and veins like racehorses--prime as goats all of them, hot as monkeys, salt as wolves in pride! No, one will be enough."

A gla.s.s, fortunately empty, fell to the floor and was smashed.

"As if he plucked up kisses by the roots and then laid his leg over her thigh and sighed. What an uncommon time you two must have had, paddling palms and playing bubbies and t.i.tties all day under cover of saving me... Jesus. Poor little defenceless me--I hadn't thought of that. But, you see, it's perfectly logical, what it comes down to: I've got my own piddling little fight for freedom on my hands. Mummy, let me go back to the beautiful brothel! Back to where those triskeles are strumming, the infinite trismus..."

"True, I've been tempted to talk peace. I've been beguiled by your offers of a sober and non-alcoholic Paradise. At least I suppose that's what you've been working around towards all day. But now I've made up my melodramatic little mind, what's left of it, just enough to make up. Cervantes! That far from wanting it, thank you very much, on the contrary, I choose--Tlax--" Where was he?" Tlax--Tlax--"

... It was as if, almost, he were standing upon that black open station platform, where he had gone--had he gone?--that day after drinking all night to meet Lee Maitland returning from Virginia at 7.40 in the morning, gone, light-headed, light-footed, and in that state of being where Baudelaire's angel indeed wakes, desiring to meet trains perhaps, but to meet no trains that stop, for in the angel's mind are no trains that stop, and from such trains no one descends, not even another angel, nor even a fair-haired one, like Lee Maitland.--Was the train late? Why was he pacing the platform? Was it the second or third train from Suspension Bridge--Suspension!--" Tlax--" the Consul repeated. "I choose--"

He was in a room, and suddenly in this room, matter was disjunct: a doork.n.o.b was standing a little way out from the door. A curtain floated in by itself, unfastened, unattached to anything. The idea struck him it had come in to strangle him. An orderly little clock behind the bar called him to his senses, its ticking very loud; Tlax: tlax: tlax: tlax... Half past five. Was that all? "h.e.l.l," he finished absurdly. "Because--" He produced a twenty-peso note and laid it on the table.

"I like it," he called to them, through the open window, from outside. Cervantes stood behind the bar, with scared eyes, holding the c.o.c.kerel. "I love h.e.l.l. I can't wait to get back there. In fact I'm running. I'm almost back there already."

He was running too, in spite of his limp, calling back to them crazily, and the queer thing was, he wasn't quite serious, running toward the forest, which was growing darker and darker, tumultuous above--a rush of air swept out of it, and the weeping pepper tree roared.

He stopped after a while: all was calm. No one had come after him. Was that good? Yes, it was good, he thought, his heart pounding. And since it was so good he would take the path to Parian, to the Farolito.

Before him the volcanoes, precipitous, seemed to have drawn nearer. They towered up over the jungle, into the lowering sky--ma.s.sive interests moving up in the background.

11.

Sunset. Eddies of green and orange birds scattered aloft with ever wider circlings like rings on water. Two little pigs disappeared into the dust at a gallop. A woman pa.s.sed swiftly, balancing on her head, with the grace of a Rebecca, a small light bottle...

Then, the Salon Ofelia at last behind them, there was no more dust. And their path became straight, leading on through the roar of Water past the bathing place, where, reckless, a few late bathers lingered, toward the forest.

Straight ahead, in the north-east, lay the volcanoes, the towering dark clouds behind them steadily mounting the heavens.

--The storm, that had already dispatched its outriders, must have been travelling in a circle: the real onset was yet to come. Meantime the wind had dropped and it was lighter again, though the sun had gone down at their back slightly to their left, in the south-west, where a red blaze fanned out into the sky over their heads.

The Consul had not been in the Todos Contentos y Yo Tambien. And now, through the warm twilight, Yvonne was walking before Hugh, purposely too fast for talking. None the less his voice (as earlier that day the Consul's own) pursued her.

"You know perfectly well I won't just run away and abandon him," she said.

"Christ Jesus, this never would have happened if I hadn't been here!"

"Something else would probably have happened."

The jungle closed over them and the volcanoes were blotted out. Yet it was still not dark. From the stream racing along beside them a radiance was cast. Big yellow flowers, resembling chrysanthemums, s.h.i.+ning like stars through the gloom, grew on either side of the water. Wild bougainvillea, brick-red in the half-light, occasionally a bush with white handbells, tongue downwards, started out at them, every little while a notice nailed to a tree, a whittled, weather-beaten arrow pointing, with the words hardly visible: a la Cascada-- Farther on worn-out ploughshares and the rusted and twisted cha.s.sis of abandoned American cars bridged the stream which they kept always to their left.

The sound of the falls behind was now lost in that of the cascade ahead. The air was full of spray and moisture. But for the tumult one might almost have heard things growing as the torrent rushed through the wet heavy foliage that sprang up everywhere around them from the alluvial soil.

All at once, above them, they saw the sky again. The clouds, no longer red, had become a peculiar luminous blue-white, drifts and depths of them, as though illumined by moon rather than sunlight, between which roared still the deep fathomless cobalt of afternoon.

Birds were sailing up there, ascending higher and higher. Infernal bird of Prometheus!

They were vultures, that on earth so jealously contend with one another, defiling themselves with blood and filth, but who were yet capable of rising, like this, above the storms, to heights shared only by the condor, above the summit of the Andes-- Down the south-west stood the moon itself, preparing to follow the sun below the horizon. On their left, through the trees beyond the stream appeared low hills, like those at the foot of the Calle Nicaragua; they were purple and sad. At their foot, so near Yvonne made out a faint rustling, cattle moved on the sloping fields among gold cornstalks and striped mysterious tents.

Before them, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl continued to dominate the north-east, the Sleeping Woman now perhaps the more beautiful of the two, with jagged angles of blood-red snow on its summit, fading as they watched, whipped with darker rock shadows, the summit itself seeming suspended in mid-air, floating among the curdling ever mounting black clouds.

Chimborazo, Popocatepetl--so ran the poem the Consul liked--had stolen his heart away! But in the tragic Indian legend Popocatepetl himself was strangely the dreamer: the fires of his warrior's love, never extinct in the poet's heart, burned eternally for Ixtaccihuatl, whom he had no sooner found than lost, and whom he guarded in her endless sleep...

They had reached the limit of the clearing, where the path divided in two. Yvonne hesitated. Pointing to the left, as it were straight on, another aged arrow on a tree repeated: a la Cascada. But a similar arrow on another tree pointed away from the stream down a path to their right: a Parian.

Yvonne knew where she was now, but the two alternatives, the two paths, stretched out before her on either side like the arms--the oddly dislocated thought struck her--of a man being crucified.

If they chose the path to their right they would reach Parian much sooner. On the other hand, the main path would bring them to the same place finally, and, what was more to the point, past, she felt sure, at least two other cantinas.

They chose the main path: the striped tents, the cornstalks dropped out of sight, and the jungle returned, its damp earthy leguminous smell rising about them with the night.

This path, she was thinking, after emerging on a sort of main highway near a restaurant-cantina named the Rum-Popo or the El Popo, took, upon resumption (if it could be called the same path), a short cut at right angles through the forest to Parian, across to the Farolito itself, as it might be the shadowy crossbar from which the man's arms were hanging.

The noise of the approaching falls was now like the awakening voices downwind of five thousand bobolinks in an Ohio savannah. Toward it the torrent raced furiously, fed from above, where, down the left bank, transformed abruptly into a great wall of vegetation, water was spouting into the stream through thickets festooned with convolvuli on a higher level than the topmost trees of the jungle. And it was as though one's spirit too were being swept on by the swift current with the uprooted trees and smashed bushes in a debacle towards that final drop.

They came to the little cantina El Petate. It stood, at a short distance from the clamorous falls, its lighted windows friendly against the twilight, and was at present occupied, she saw as her heart leaped and sank, leaped again, and sank, only by the barman and two Mexicans' shepherds or quince farmers, deep in conversation, and leaning against the bar.--Their mouths opened and shut soundlessly, their brown hands traced patterns in the air, courteously.

The El Petate, which from where she stood resembled a sort of complicated postage stamp, surcharged on its outside walls with its inevitable advertis.e.m.e.nts for Moctezuma, Criollo, Cafeaspirina, Mentholatum--no se rasque las picaduras de los insectos!--was about all remaining, the Consul and she'd once been told, of the formerly prosperous village of Anocht.i.tlan, which had burned, but which at one time extended to the westward, on the other side of the stream.

In the smas.h.i.+ng din she waited outside. Since leaving the Salon Ofelia and up to this point, Yvonne had felt herself possessed of the most complete detachment. But now, as Hugh joined the scene within the cantina--he was asking the two Mexicans questions, describing Geoffrey's beard to the barman, he was describing Geoffrey's beard to the Mexicans, he was asking the barman questions, who, with two fingers had a.s.sumed, jocosely, a beard--she became conscious she was laughing unnaturally to herself; at the same time she felt, crazily, as if something within her were smouldering, had taken fire, as if her whole being at any moment were going to explode.