Under The Volcano Part 8

"I seem to have learned that no bird ever flew with one--"

"Or that Thomas Burnet, author of the Telluris Theoria Sacra, entered Christs in--Cascaras Caracoles! Virgen Santisima! Ave Maria! Fuego, fuego! Ay, que me matan!

With a shattering and fearful tumult a plane slammed down upon them, skimmed the frightened trees, zooming, narrowly missed a mirador, and was gone the next moment, headed in the direction of the volcanoes, from which rolled again the monotonous sound of artillery.

"Acabo se," sighed the Consul.

Hugh suddenly noticed that a tall man (who must have stepped out of the side-road Yvonne had seemed anxious they should take) with sloping shoulders and handsome, rather swarthy features, though he was obviously a European, doubtless in some state of exile, was confronting them, and it was as though die whole of this man, by some curious fiction, reached up to the crown of his perpendicularly raised Panama hat, for the gap below seemed to Hugh still occupied by something, a sort of halo or spiritual property of his body, or the essence of some guilty secret perhaps that he kept under the hat but which was now momentarily exposed, fluttering and embarra.s.sed. He was confronting them, though smiling, it appeared, at Yvonne alone, his blue, bold protuberant eyes expressing an incredulous dismay, his black eyebrows frozen in a comedian's arch: he hesitated: then this man, who wore his coat open and trousers very high over a stomach they had probably been designed to conceal but merely succeeded in giving the character of an independent tumescence of the lower part of his body, came forward with eyes flas.h.i.+ng and mouth under its small black moustache curved in a smile at once false and engaging, yet somehow protective--and somehow, also, increasingly grave--came forward as it were impelled by clockwork, hand out, automatically ingratiating: " Why Yvonne, what a delightful surprise. Why goodness me, I thought; oh, hullo, old bean--"

"Hugh, this is Jacques Laruelle," the Consul was saying. "You've probably heard me speak about him at one time or another. Jacques, my young brother Hugh: ditto... ,"/ vient d'arriver... or vice versa. How goes it, Jacques? You look as though you needed a drink rather badly."

A minute later M. Laruelle, whose name struck only a very distant chord for Hugh, had taken Yvonne's arm and was walking in the middle of the road with her up the hill. Probably there was no significance in this. But the Consul's introduction had been brusque to say the least. Hugh himself felt half hurt and, whatever the cause, a slight appalling sense of tension as the Consul and he slowly fell behind again. Meantime M. Laruelle was saying: "Why do we not all drop into my "madhouse"; that would be good fun, don't you think Geoffrey--ah--ah--Hughes?"

"No," softly remarked the Consul, behind, to Hugh, who on the other hand now felt almost disposed to laugh once more.

For the Consul was also saying something cloacal very quietly to himself over and over again. They were following Yvonne and her friend through the dust which now, chased by a lonely gust of wind, was moving along with them up the road, sizzling in petulant ground-swirls to blow away like rain. When the wind died away the water rus.h.i.+ng headlong down the gutters here was like a sudden force in the opposite direction. M. Laruelle was saying attentively, ahead of them, to Yvonne: "Yes... Yes... But your bus won't leave till two-thirty. You have over an hour."

--"But that does sound like an unusual b.l.o.o.d.y miracle," Hugh said." You mean after all these years--"

"Yeah. It was a great coincidence our meeting here," the Consul told Hugh in a changed even tone. "But I really think you two ought to get together, you have something in common. Seriously you might enjoy his house, it's always mildly amusing." "Good," said Hugh.

"Why, here comes the cartero," Yvonne called out ahead, half turning round and disengaging her arm from M. Laruelle's. She was pointing to the corner on the left at the top of the hill where the Calle Nicaragua met the Calle Tierra del Fuego." He's simply amazing," she was saying volubly. "The funny thing is that all the postmen in Quauhnahuac look exactly alike. Apparently they're all from the same family and have been postmen for positively generations. I think this one's grandfather was a cartero at the time of Maximilian. Isn't it delightful to think of the post-office collecting all these grotesque little creatures like so many carrier pigeons to dispatch at their will?"

Why are you so voluble? Hugh wondered: "How delightful, for the post-office," he said politely. They were all watching the cartero's approach. Hugh happened not to have observed any of these unique postmen before. He could not have been five feet in height, and from a distance appeared like an uncla.s.sifiable but somehow pleasing animal advancing on all fours. He was wearing a colourless dungaree suit and a battered official cap and Hugh now saw he had a tiny goatee beard. Upon his small wizened face as he lunged down the street towards them in his inhuman yet endearing fas.h.i.+on there was the friendliest expression imaginable. Seeing them he stopped, unshouldered the bag and began to unbuckle it.

"There is a letter, a letter, a letter,1 he was saying when they came up with him, bowing to Yvonne as if he'd last greeted her yesterday, "a message por el senor, for your horse," he informed the Consul, withdrawing two packages and smiling roguishly as he undid them. "What?--nothing for Senor Caligula."

"Ah." The cartero flicked through another bundle, glancing at them sideways and keeping his elbows close to his sides in order not to drop the bag. "No." He put down the bag now altogether, and began to search feverishly; soon letters were spread all over the road. "It must be. Here. No. This is. Then this one. Ei ei ei ei ei ei."

"Don't bother, my dear fellow," the Consul said." Please."

But the cartero tried again: "Badrona, Dios dado--" Hugh too was waiting expectantly, not so much any word from the Globe, which would come if at all by cable, but half in hope, a hope which the postman's own appearance rendered delightfully plausible, of another minuscule Oaxaquenian envelope, covered with bright stamps of archers shooting at the sun, from Juan Cerillo. He listened: somewhere, behind a wall, someone was playing a guitar--badly, he was let down; and a dog barked sharply.

"--Feeshbank, Figueroa, Gomez--no, Quincey, Sandovah, no."

At last the good little man gathered up his letters and bowing apologetically, disappointedly, lunged off down the street again. They were all looking after him, and just as Hugh was wondering whether the postman's behaviour might not have been part of some enormous inexplicable private joke, if really he'd been laughing at them the whole time, though in the kindliest way, he halted, fumbled once more at one of the packages, turned, and trotting back with little yelps of triumph, handed the Consul what looked like a postal card.

Yvonne, a little ahead again by now, nodded at him over her shoulder, smiling, as to say: "Good, you've got a letter after all," and with her buoyant dancing steps walked on slowly beside M. Laruelle, up the dusty hill. The Consul turned the card over twice, then handed it to Hugh.

"Strange--" he said.

--It was from Yvonne herself and apparently written at least a year ago. Hugh suddenly realized it must have been posted soon after she'd left the Consul and most probably in ignorance he proposed to remain in Quauhnahuac. Yet curiously it was the card that had wandered far afield: originally addressed to Wells Fargo in Mexico City, it had been forwarded by some error abroad, gone badly astray in fact, for it was date-stamped from Paris, Gibraltar, and even Algeciras, in Fascist Spain.

"No, read it," the Consul smiled.

Yvonne's scrawl ran: Darling, why did I leave? Why did you let me? Expect to arrive in the U.S. tomorrow, California two days later. Hope to find a word from you there waiting. Love Y.

Hugh turned the card over. There was a picture of the leonine Signal Peak on El Paso with Carlsbad Cavern Highway leading over a white fenced bridge between desert and desert. The road turned a little corner in the distance and vanished.

7.

On the side of the drunken madly revolving world hurtling at 1.20 p.m. towards Hercules's b.u.t.terfly the house seemed a bad idea, the Consul thought-- There were two towers, Jacques's zacualis, one at each end and joined by a catwalk over the roof, which was the gla.s.sed-in gable of the studio below. These towers were as if camouflaged (almost like the Samaritan, in fact): blue, grey, purple, vermilion, had once been slashed on in zebra stripes. But time and weather had combined to render the effect from a short distance of a uniform dull mauve. Their tops, reached from the catwalk by twin wooden ladders, and from inside by two spiral staircases, made two flimsy crenellated miradors, each scarcely larger than a bartizan, tiny roofless variants of the observation posts which everywhere commanded the valley in Quauhnahuac.

On the battlements of the mirador to their left, as the Consul and Hugh confronted the house, with the Calle Nicaragua stretching downhill to their right, now appeared to them two bilious-looking angels. The angels, carved out of pink stone, knelt facing one another in profile against the sky across the intervening crenels, while behind, upon corresponding merlons at the far side, sat solemnly two nameless objects like marzipan cannonb.a.l.l.s, evidently constructed from the same material.

The other mirador was unadorned save by its crenellations and it often struck the Consul that this contrast was somehow obscurely appropriate to Jacques, as indeed was that between the angels and the cannonb.a.l.l.s. It was perhaps also significant he should use his bedroom for working whereas the studio itself on the main floor had been turned into a dining-room often no better than a camping-ground for his cook and her relatives.

Coming closer it could be seen that on the left and somewhat larger tower, below that bedroom's two windows--which, as if degenerate machicolations, were built askew, like the separated halves of a chevron--a panel of rough stone, covered with large letters painted in gold leaf, had been slightly set into the wall to give a semblance of bas-relief. These gold letters though very thick were merged together most confusingly. The Consul had noticed visitors to the town staring up at them for half an hour at a time. Sometimes M. Laruelle would come out to explain they really spelt something, that they formed that phrase of Frey Luis de Leon's the Consul did not at this moment allow himself to recall. Nor did he ask himself why he should have come to be almost more familiar with this extraordinary house than his own as, preceding M. Laruelle now, who was prodding him cheerfully from behind, he followed Hugh and Yvonne into it, into the studio, empty for once, and up the spiral staircase of its left-hand tower. "Haven't we overshot the drinks?" he asked, his mood of detachment expiring now he remembered that only a few weeks before he'd sworn never to enter this place again. "Don't you ever think of anything else?" it seemed Jacques had said.

The Consul made no reply but stepped out into the familiar disorderly room with the askew windows, the degenerate machicolations, now seen from inside, and followed the others obliquely through it to a balcony at the back, into a view of sun-filled valleys and volcanoes, and cloud shadows wheeling across the plain.

M. Laruelle, however, was already nervously going downstairs. "Not for me!" protested the others. Fools! The Consul took two or three steps after him, a movement apparently without meaning, but it almost const.i.tuted a threat: his gaze s.h.i.+fted vaguely up the spiral staircase which continued from the room to the mirador above, then he rejoined Hugh and Yvonne on the balcony.

"Get up on the roof, you people, or stay on the porch, just make yourselves at home," came from downstairs. "There's a pair of binoculars on the table there--er--Hugh's... I won't be a minute."

"Any objection if I go on the roof?" Hugh asked them.

"Don't forget the binoculars!"

Yvonne and the Consul were alone on the flying balcony.

From where they stood the house seemed situated half-way up a cliff rising steeply from the valley stretched out below them. Leaning round they saw the town itself, built as on top of this cliff, overhanging them. The clubs of flying machines waved silently over the roofs, their motions like gesticulations of pain. But the cries and music of the fair reached them at this moment clearly. Far away the Consul made out a green corner, the golf course, with little figures working their way round the side of the cliff, crawling... Golfing scorpions. The Consul remembered the card in his pocket, and apparently he had made a movement towards Yvonne, desiring to tell her about it, to say something tender to her concerning it, to turn her towards him, to kiss her. Then he realized that without another drink shame for this morning would prevent his looking in her eyes. "What do you think, Yvonne," he said, "with your astronomical mind--" Could it be he, talking to her like this, on an occasion like this! Surely not, it was a dream. He was pointing up at the town.

"--With your astronomical mind," he repeated, but no, he had not said it: "doesn't all that revolving and plunging up there somehow suggest to you the voyaging of unseen planets, of unknown moons hurtling backwards?" He had said nothing.

"Please Geoffrey--" Yvonne laid her hand on his arm. "Please, please believe me, I didn't want to be drawn into this. Let's make some excuse and get away as quickly as possible... I don't mind how many drinks you have after," she added.

"I wasn't aware I'd said anything about drinks now. Or after. It's you that have put the thought into my head. Or Jacques, whom I can hear breaking--or should we say, crus.h.i.+ng?--the ice down below."

"Haven't you got any tenderness or love left for me at all?" Yvonne asked suddenly, almost piteously, turning round on him, and he thought: Yes, I do love you, I have all the love in the world left for you, only that love seems so far away from me and so strange too, for it is as though I could almost hear it, a droning or a weeping, but far, far away, and a sad lost sound, it might be either approaching or receding, I can't tell which.

"Don't you think of anything except of how many drinks you're going to have?"

"Yes," said the Consul (but wasn't it Jacques who'd just asked him this?), "yes, I do--oh my G.o.d, Yvonne!"

"Please, Geoffrey--"

Yet he could not face her. The clubs of the flying machines seen out of the corner of his eye, now seemed as if belabouring him all over. "Listen," he said, "are you asking me to extricate us from all this, or are you starting to exhort me again about drinking?"

"Oh, I'm not exhorting you, really I'm not. I'll never exhort you again. I'll do anything you ask."

"Then--" he had begun in anger.

But a look of tenderness came over Yvonne's face and the Consul thought once more of the postcard in his pocket. It ought to have been a good omen. It could be the talisman of their immediate salvation now. Perhaps it would have been a good omen if only it had arrived yesterday or at the house this morning. Unfortunately one could not now conceive of it as having arrived at any other moment. And how could he know whether it was a good omen or not without another drink?

"But I'm back," she was apparently saying. "Can't you see it? We're here together again, it's us. Can't you see that?" Her lips were trembling, she was almost crying.

Then she was close to him, in his arms, but he was gazing over her head.

"Yes, I can see," he said, only he couldn't see, only hear, the droning, the weeping, and feel, feel the unreality."I do love you. Only--" "I can never forgive you deeply enough": was that what was in his mind to add?

--And yet, he was thinking all over again, and all over again as for the first time, how he had suffered, suffered, suffered without her; indeed such desolation, such a desperate sense of abandonment, bereavement, as during this last year without Yvonne, he had never known in his life, unless it was when his mother died. But this present emotion he had never experienced with his mother: this urgent desire to hurt, to provoke, at a time when forgiveness alone could save the day, this, rather, had commenced with his stepmother, so that she would have to cry: "I can't eat, Geoffrey, the food sticks in my throat!" It was hard to forgive, hard, hard to forgive. Harder still, not to say how hard it was, I hate you. Even now, of all times. Even though here was G.o.d's moment, the chance to agree, to produce the card, to change everything; or there was but a moment left... Too late. The Consul had controlled his tongue. But he felt his mind divide and rise, like the two halves of a counterpoised drawbridge, ticking, to permit pa.s.sage of these noisome thoughts. "Only my heart--" he said.

"Your heart, darling?" she asked anxiously.

"Nothing--"

"Oh my poor sweetheart, you must be so weary!"

"Moment.i.to," he said, disengaging himself.

He strolled back into Jacques's room, leaving Yvonne on the porch. Laruelle's voice floated up from downstairs. Was it here he had been betrayed? This very room, perhaps, had been filled with her cries of love. Books (among which he did not see his Elizabethan plays) were strewn all over the floor and on the side of the studio couch nearest the wall, were stacked, as by some half-repenting poltergeist, almost to the ceiling. What if Jacques, approaching his design with Tarquin's ravis.h.i.+ng strides, had disturbed this potential avalanche! Grisly Orozco charcoal drawings, of an unexampled horrendousness, snarled down from the walls. In one, executed by a hand of indisputable genius, harpies grappled on a smashed bedstead among broken bottles of tequila, gnas.h.i.+ng their teeth. No wonder; the Consul, peering closer, sought in vain for a sound bottle. He sought in vain around Jacques's room too. There were two ruddy Riveras. Expressionless Amazons with feet like legs of mutton testified to the oneness of the toilers with the earth. Over the chevron-shaped windows, which looked down the Calle Tierra del Fuego, hung a terrifying picture he hadn't seen before, and took at first to be a tapestry. Called Los Borrachones--why not Los Borrachos?--it resembled something between a primitive and a prohibitionist poster, remotely under the influence of Michelangelo. In fact, he now saw, it really amounted to a prohibitionist poster, though of a century or so back, half a century, G.o.d knows what period. Down, headlong into hades, selfish and florid-faced, into a tumult of fire-spangled fiends, Medusae, and belching monstrosities, with swallow-dives or awkwardly, with dread backward leaps, shrieking among falling bottles and emblems of broken hopes, plunged the drunkards; up, up, flying palely, selflessly into the light towards heaven, soaring sublimely in pairs, male sheltering female, s.h.i.+elded themselves by angels with abnegating wings, shot the sober. Not all were in pairs however, the Consul noted. A few lone females on the upgrade were sheltered by angels only. It seemed to him these females were casting half-jealous glances downward after their plummeting husbands, some of whose faces betrayed the most unmistakable relief. The Consul laughed, a trifle shakily. It was ridiculous, but still--had anyone ever given a good reason why good and evil should not be thus simply delimited? Elsewhere in Jacques's room cuneiform stone idols squatted like bulbous infants: on one side of the room there was even a line of them chained together. One part of the Consul continued to laugh, in spite of himself, and all this evidence of lost wild talents, at the thought of Yvonne confronted in the aftermath of her pa.s.sion by a whole row of fettered babies.

"How are you getting on up there, Hugh?" he called up the staircase.

"I think I've got Parian in pretty good focus."

Yvonne was reading on the balcony, and the Consul gazed back at Los Borrachones. Suddenly he felt something never felt before with such shocking certainty. It was that he was in h.e.l.l himself. At the same time he became possessed of a curious calm. The inner ferment within him, the squalls and eddies of nervousness, were held again in check. He could hear Jacques moving downstairs and soon he would have another drink. That would help, but it was not the thought which calmed him. Parian--the Farolito! he said to himself. The Lighthouse, the lighthouse that invites the storm, and lights it! After all, some time during the day, when they were at the bullthrowing perhaps, he might break away from the others and go there, if only for five minutes, if only for one drink. That prospect filled him with an almost healing love and at this moment, for it was part of the calm, the greatest longing he had ever known. The Farolito!

It was a strange place, a place really of the late night and early dawn, which as a rule, like that one other terrible cantina in Oaxaca, did not open till four o'clock in the morning. But today being the holiday for the dead it would not close. At first it had appeared to him tiny. Only after he had grown to know it well had he discovered how far back it ran, that it was really composed of numerous little rooms, each smaller and darker than the last, opening one into another, the last and darkest of all being no larger than a cell. These rooms struck him as spots where diabolical plots must be hatched, atrocious murders planned; here, as when Saturn was in Capricorn, life reached bottom. But here also great wheeling thoughts hovered in the brain; while the potter and the field-labourer alike, early risen, paused a moment in the paling doorway, dreaming... He saw it all now, the enormous drop on one side of the cantina into the barranca that suggested Kubla Khan: the proprietor, Ramon Diosdado, known as the Elephant, who was reputed to have murdered his wife to cure her neurasthenia, the beggars, hacked by war and covered with sores, one of whom one night after four drinks from the Consul had taken him for the Christ, and falling down on his knees before him, had pinned swiftly under his coat-lapel two medallions, joined to a tiny worked bleeding heart like a pin-cus.h.i.+on, portraying the Virgin of Guadalupe. "I ah give you the Saint!" He saw all this, feeling the atmosphere of the cantina enclosing him already with its certainty of sorrow and evil, and with its certainty of something else too, that escaped him. But he knew: it was peace. He saw the dawn again, watched with lonely anguish from that open door, in the violet-shaded light, a slow bomb bursting over the Sierra Madre--Sonnenauf-gang!--the oxen harnessed to their carts with wooden disc wheels patiently waiting outside for their drivers, in the sharp cool pure air of heaven. The Consul's longing was so great his soul was locked with the essence of the place as he stood and he was gripped by thoughts like those of the mariner who, sighting the faint beacon of Start Point after a long voyage, knows that soon he will embrace his wife.

Then they returned to Yvonne abruptly. Had he really forgotten her, he wondered. He looked round the room again. Ah, in how many rooms, upon how many studio couches, among how many books, had they found their own love, their marriage, their life together, a life which, in spite of its many disasters, its total calamity indeed--and in spite too of any slight element of falsehood in its inception on her side, her marriage partly into the past, into her Anglo-Scottish ancestry, into the visioned empty ghost-whistling castles in Sutherland, into an emanation of gaunt lowland uncles chumbling shortbread at six o'clock in the morning--had not been without triumph. Yet for how brief a time. Far too soon it had begun to seem too much of a triumph, it had been too good, too horribly unimaginable to lose, impossible finally to bear: it was as if it had become itself its own foreboding that it could not last, a foreboding that was like a presence too, turning his steps towards the taverns again. And how could one begin all over again, as though the Cafe Chagrin, the Farolito, had never been? Or without them? Could one be faithful to Yvonne and the Farolito both?--Christ, oh pharos of the world, how, and with what blind faith, could one find one's way back, fight one's way back, now, through the tumultuous horrors of five thousand shattering awakenings, each more frightful than the last, from a place where even love could not penetrate, and save in the thickest flames there was no courage? On the wall the drunks eternally plunged. But one of the little Mayan idols seemed to be weeping...

"Ei ei ei ei," M. Laruelle was saying, not unlike the little postman, coming, stamping up the stairs; c.o.c.ktails, despicable repast. Unperceived the Consul did an odd thing; he took the postcard he'd just received from Yvonne and slipped it under Jacques's pillow. She emerged from the balcony. "Hullo, Yvonne, where is Hugh?--sorry I've been so long. Let's get on the roof, shall we?" Jacques continued.

Actually all the Consul's reflections had not occupied seven minutes. Still, Laruelle seemed to have been away longer. He saw, following them, following the drinks up the spiral staircase, that in addition to the c.o.c.ktail shaker and gla.s.ses there were canapes and stuffed olives on the tray. Perhaps despite all his seductive aplomb, Jacques had really gone downstairs frightened by the whole business and completely beside himself. While these elaborate preparations were merely the excuse for his flight. Perhaps also it was quite true, the poor fellow had really loved Yvonne--"Oh, G.o.d," the Consul said, reaching the mirador, to which Hugh had almost simultaneously ascended, climbing, as they approached, the last rungs of the wooden ladder from the catwalk, "G.o.d, that the dream of dark magician in his visioned cave, even while his hand shakes in its last decay--that's the bit I like--were the true end of this so lousy world... You shouldn't have gone to all this trouble, Jacques."

He took the binoculars from Hugh, and now, his drink upon a vacant merlon between the marzipan objects, he gazed steadily over the country. But oddly he had not touched this drink. And the calm mysteriously persisted. It was as if they were standing on a lofty golf-tee somewhere. What a beautiful hole this would make, from here to a green out into those trees on the other side of the barranca, that natural hazard which some hundred and fifty yards away could be carried by a good full spoon shot, soaring... Plock. The Golgotha Hole. High up, an eagle drove downwind in one. It had shown lack of imagination to build the local course back up there, remote from the barranca. Golf = gouffre = gulf. Prometheus would retrieve lost b.a.l.l.s. And on that other side what strange fairways could be contrived, crossed by lone railway lines, humming with telegraph poles, glistening with crazy lies on embankments, over the hills and far away, like youth, like life itself, the course plotted all over these plains, extending far beyond Tomalin, through the jungle, to the Farolito, the nineteenth hole... The Case is Altered.

"No, Hugh," he said, adjusting the lenses but without turning round, "Jacques means the film he made out of Alastor before he went to Hollywood, which he shot in a bathtub, what he could of it, and apparently struck the rest together with sequences of ruins cut out of old travelogues, and a jungle hoiked out of In dunkelste Africa, and a swan out of the end of some old Corinne Griffith--Sarah Bernhardt, she was in it too, I understand, while all the time the poet was standing on the sh.o.r.e, and the orchestra was supposed to be doing its best with the Sacre du Printemps. I think I forgot the fog." Their laughter somewhat cleared the air.

"But beforehand you do have certain wisions, as a German director friend of mine used to say, of what your film should be like," Jacques was telling them, behind him, over by the angels. "But afterwards, that is another story... As for the fog, that is after all the cheapest commodity in any studio."

"Didn't you make any films in Hollywood?" Hugh asked, who a moment ago had almost drifted into a political argument with M. Laruelle.

"Yes... But I refuse to see them."

But what on earth was he, the Consul, the Consul wondered, continuing to look out for there on those plains, in that tumulose landscape, through Jacques's binoculars? Was it for some figment of himself, who had once enjoyed such a simple healthy stupid good thing as golf, as blind holes, for example, driving up into a high wilderness of sand-dunes, yes, once with Jacques himself? To climb, and then to see, from an eminence, the ocean with the smoke on the horizon, then, far below, resting near the pin on the green, his new Silver King, twinkling. Ozone!--The Consul could no longer play golf: his few efforts of recent years had proved disastrous... I should have become a sort of Donne of the fairways at least. Poet of the unreplaced turf.--Who holds the flag while I hole out in three? Who hunts my Zodiac Zone along the sh.o.r.e? And who, upon that last and final green, though I hole out in four, accepts my ten and three score... Though I have more. The Consul dropped the gla.s.ses at last and turned round. And still he had not touched his drink.

"Alastor, Alastor," Hugh strolled over to him saying. "Who is, was, why, and/or wrote Alastor, anyway?"

"Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley." The Consul leaned against the mirador beside Hugh. "Another fellow with ideas... The story I like about Sh.e.l.ley is the one where he just let himself sink to the bottom of the sea--taking several books with him of course--and just stayed there, rather than admit he couldn't swim."

"Geoffrey don't you think Hugh ought to see something of the fiesta," suddenly Yvonne was saying from the other side, "since it's his last day? Especially if there's native dancing?"

So it was Yvonne who was "extricating them from all this," just when the Consul was proposing to stay. "I wouldn't know," he said. "Won't we get native dancing and things in Tomalin? Would you like to, Hugh?"

"Sure. Of course. Anything you say." Hugh got down awkwardly from the parapet. "There's still about an hour before the bus leaves, isn't there?"

"I'm sure Jacques will forgive us if we rush off," Yvonne was saying almost desperately.

"Let me see you downstairs safely then." Jacques controlled his voice. "It's too early for the fete to be very much but you ought to see Rivera's murals, Hughes, if you haven't already."

"Aren't you coming, Geoffrey?" Yvonne turned on the staircase. "Please come," her eyes said.

"Well, fiestas aren't my strong suit. You run along and I'll meet you at the terminal in time for the bus. I have to talk to Jacques here anyway."

But they had all gone downstairs and the Consul was alone on the mirador. And yet not alone. For Yvonne had left a drink on the merlon by the angels, poor Jacques's was in one of the crenels, Hugh's was on the side parapet. And the c.o.c.ktail shaker was not empty. Moreover the Consul had not touched his own drink. And still, now, he did not drink. The Consul felt with his right hand his left bicep under his coat. Strength--of a kind--but how to give oneself courage? That fine droll courage of Sh.e.l.ley's; no, that was pride. And pride bade one go on, either go on and kill oneself, or "straighten out," as so often before, by oneself, with the aid of thirty bottles of beer and staring at the ceiling. But this time it was different. What if courage here implied admission of total defeat, admission that one couldn't swim, admission indeed (though just for a second the thought was not too bad) into a sanatorium? No, to whatever end, it wasn't merely a matter of being "got away." No angels nor Yvonne nor Hugh could help him here. As for the demons, they were inside him as well as outside; quiet at the moment--taking their siesta perhaps--he was none the less surrounded by them and occupied; they were in possession. The Consul looked at the sun. But he had lost the sun: it was not his sun. Like the truth, it was well-nigh impossible to face; he did not want to go anywhere near it, least of all, sit in its light, facing it. "Yet I shall face it." How? When he not only lied to himself, but himself believed the lie and lied back again to those lying factions, among whom was not even their own honour. There was not even a consistent basis to his self-deceptions. How should there be then to his attempts at honesty? "Horror," he said. "Yet I will not give in." But who was I, how find that I, where had I gone? "Whatever I do, it shall be deliberately." And deliberately, it was true, the Consul still refrained from touching his drink. "The will of man is unconquerable." Eat? I should eat. So the Consul ate half a canape. And when M. Laruelle returned the Consul was still gazing drinklessly--where was he gazing? He didn't know himself. "Do you remember when we went to Cholula," he said," how much dust there was?"

The two men faced each other in silence. "I don't want to speak to you at all really," the Consul added after a moment. "For that matter I wouldn't mind if this was the last time I ever saw you... Did you hear me?"

"Have you gone mad?" M. Laruelle exclaimed at last. "Am I to understand that your wife has come back to you, something I have seen you praying and howling for under the table--really under the table... And that you treat her indifferently as this, and still continue only to care where the next drink's coming from?"

To this unanswerable and staggering injustice the Consul had no word; he reached for his c.o.c.ktail, he held it, smelt it: but somewhere, where it would do little good, a hawser did not give way: he did not drink; he almost smiled pleasantly at M. Laruelle. You might as well start now as later, refusing the drinks. You might as well start now; as later. Later.

The phone rang out and M. Laruelle ran down the staircase. The Consul sat with his face buried in his hands a while, then, leaving his drink still untouched, leaving, yes, all the drinks untouched, he descended to Jacques's room.

M. Laruelle hung up the phone: "Well," he said, "I didn't know you two were acquainted." He took off his coat and began to undo his tie. "That was my doctor, asking about you. He wants to know if you are not dead already."

"Oh... Oh, that was Vigil, was it?"

"Arturo Diaz Vigil. Medico. Cirujano... Et cetera!"

"Ah," the Consul said guardedly, running his ringer round the inside of his collar. "Yes. I met him for the first time last night. As a matter of fact he was along at my house this morning."

M. Laruelle discarded his s.h.i.+rt thoughtfully, saying: "We're getting in a set before he goes on his holiday."

The Consul, sitting down, imagined that weird gusty game of tennis under the hard Mexican sunlight, the tennis b.a.l.l.s tossed in a sea of error--hard going for Vigil, but what would he care (and who was Vigil?--the good fellow seemed by now unreal to him as some figure one would forbear to greet for fear he was not your acquaintance of the morning, so much as the living double of the actor seen on the screen that afternoon) while the other prepared to enter a shower which, with that queer architectural disregard for decorum exhibited by a people who value decorum above all else, was built in a little recess splendidly visible from both the balcony and the head of the staircase.

"He wants to know if you have changed your mind, if you and Yvonne will ride with him to Guanajuato after all... Why don't you?"

"How did he know I was here?" The Consul sat up, shaking a little again, though amazed for an instant at his mastery of the situation, that here it turned out there actually was someone named Vigil, who had invited one to come to Guanajuato.

"How? How else... I told him. It's a pity you didn't meet him long ago. That man might really be of some help to you."

"You might find... You can be of some help to him today." The Consul closed his eyes, hearing the doctor's voice again distinctly: "But now that your esposa has come back. But now that your esposa has come back... I would work you with." "What?" He opened his eyes... But the abominable impact on his whole being at this moment of the fact that that hideously elongated cuc.u.miform bundle of blue nerves and gills below the steaming un-selfconscious stomach had sought its pleasure in his wife's body brought him trembling to his feet. How loathsome, how incredibly loathsome was reality. He began to walk around the room, his knees giving way every step with a jerk. Books, too many books. The Consul still didn't see his Elizabethan plays. Yet there was everything else, from Les Joyeuses Bourgeoises de Windsor to Agrippa d'Aubigne and Collin d'Harleville, from Sh.e.l.ley to Touchard-Lafosse and Tristan l'Hermite. Beaucoup de bruit pour rien! Might a soul bathe there or quench its draught? It might. Yet in none of these books would one find one's own suffering. Nor could they show you how to look at an ox-eye daisy. "But what could have made you tell Vigil I was here, if you didn't know he knew me?" he asked, almost with a sob.

M. Laruelle, overpowered by steam, explanatory fingers in his ears, hadn't heard: "What did you find to talk about, you two? Vigil and yourself?"