Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [109]
He had forgotten Guzmán. Los Borrachones fell eternally into the flames. M. Laruelle, who hadn't noticed a thing, appeared again, resplendent in white flannels, took his tennis racket from the top of a bookcase; the Consul found his stick and his dark glasses, and they went down the iron spiral staircase together.
"Absolutamente necesario!" Outside the Consul paused, turning...
No se puede vivir sin amar, were the words on the house. In the street there was now not a breath of wind and they walked a while without speaking, listening to the babel of the fiesta which grew still louder as they approached the town. Street of the Land of Fire. 666.
--M. Laruelle, possibly because he was walking on the higher part of the banked street, now seemed even taller than he was, and beside him, below, the Consul felt a moment uncomfortably dwarfed, childish. Years before in their boyhood this position had been reversed; then the Consul was the taller. But whereas the Consul had stopped growing when seventeen at five foot eight or nine, M. Laruelle kept on through the years under different skies until now he had grown out of the Consul's reach. Out of reach? Jacques was a boy of whom the Consul could still remember certain things with affection: the way he pronounced "vocabulary" to rhyme with "foolery," or "bible" with "runcible." Runcible spoon. And he'd grown into a man who could shave and put on his socks by himself. But out of his reach, hardly. Up there, across the years, at his height of six foot three or four, it did not seem too outlandish to suggest that his influence still reached him strongly. If not, why the English-looking tweed coat similar to the Consul's own, those expensive, expressive English tennis shoes of the kind you could walk in, the English white trousers of twenty-one inches breadth, the English shirt worn English-fashion open at the neck, the extraordinary scarf that suggested M. Laruelle had once won a half-blue at the Sorbonne or something? There was even, in spite of his slight stoutness, an English, almost an ex-consular sort of litheness about his movements. Why should Jacques be playing tennis at all? Have you forgotten it, Jacques, how I myself taught you, that summer long ago, behind the Taskersons', or at the new public courts in Leasowe? On just such afternoons as this. So brief their friendship and yet, the Consul thought, how enormous, how all-permeating, permeating Jacques's whole life, that influence had been, an influence that showed even in his choice of books, his work--why had Jacques come to Quauhnahuac in the first place? Was it not much as though he, the Consul, from afar, had willed it, for obscure purposes of his own? The man he'd met here eighteen months ago seemed, though hurt in his art and destiny, the most completely unequivocal and sincere Frenchman he'd ever known. Nor was the seriousness of M. Laruelle's face, seen now against the sky between houses, compatible with cynical weakness. Was it not almost as though the Consul had tricked him into dishonour and misery, willed, even, his betrayal of him?
"Geoffrey," M. Laruelle said suddenly, quietly, "has she really come back?"
"It looks like it, doesn't it?" They both paused, to light their pipes, and the Consul noticed Jacques was wearing a ring he had not seen, a scarab, of simple design, cut into a chalcedony: whether Jacques would remove it to play tennis he didn't know, but the hand that wore it was trembling, while the Consul's was now steady.
"But I mean really come back," M. Laruelle continued in French as they went forward up the Calle Tierra del Fuego. "She hasn't merely come down on a visit, or to see you out of curiosity, or on the basis that you'll just be friends, and so on, if you