Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [100]
"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 unclassifiable 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 fashion 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 señor, for your horse," he informed the Consul, withdrawing two packages and smiling roguishly as he undid them. "What?--nothing for Señor 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, Gómez--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: