Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [110]
"As a matter of fact I rather do."
"Get this straight, Geoffrey, I'm thinking of Yvonne, not you."
"Get it a little straighter still. You're thinking of yourself."
"But today--I can see how that's--I suppose you were tight at the ball. I didn't go. But if so why aren't you back home thanking God and trying to rest and sober up instead of making everyone wretched by taking them to Tomalín? Yvonne looks tired out."
The words drew faint weary furrows across the Consul's mind constantly filling with harmless deliriums. Nevertheless his French was fluent and rapid:
"How do you mean you suppose I was tight when Vigil told you so on the phone? And weren't you suggesting just now I take Yvonne to Guanajuato with him? Perhaps you imagined if you could insinuate yourself into our company on that proposed trip she would miraculously cease to be tired, even though it's fifty times farther than to Tomalín."
"When I suggested you go it hadn't quite entered my head she'd only arrived this morning."
"Well--I forget whose idea Tomalín was," the Consul said. Can it be I discussing Yvonne with Jacques, discussing us like this? Though after all they had done it before. "But I haven't explained just how Hugh fits into the picture, have--"
"--Eggs!" had the jovial proprietor of the abarrotes called down from the pavement above them to their right.
"Mezcalito!" had somebody else whizzed past carrying a length of plank, some barfly of his acquaintance; or was that this morning?
--"And on second thoughts I don't think I'll trouble."
Soon the town loomed up before them. They had reached the foot of Cortés Palace. Near them children (encouraged by a man also in dark glasses who seemed familiar, and to whom the Consul motioned) were swinging round and round a telegraph pole on an improvised whirligig, a little parody of the Great Carrousel up the hill in the square. Higher, on a terrace of the Palace (because it was also the ayuntamiento), a soldier stood at case with a rifle; on a still higher terrace dawdled the tourists: vandals in sandals looking at the murals.
The Consul and M. Laruelle had a good view of the Rivera frescoes from where they were. "You get an impression from here those tourists can't up here," M. Laruelle said, "they're too close." He was pointing with his tennis racket. "The slow darkening of the murals as you look from right to left. It seems somehow to symbolize the gradual imposition of the Spaniards" conquering will upon the Indians. Do you see what I mean?"
"If you stood at a greater distance still it might seem to symbolize for you the gradual imposition of the Americans' conquering friendship from left to right upon the Mexicans," the Consul said with a smile, removing his dark glasses, "upon those who have to look at the frescoes and remember who paid for them."
The part of the murals he was gazing at portrayed, he knew, the Tlahuicans who had died for this valley in which he lived. The artist had represented them in their battle dress, wearing the masks and skins of wolves and tigers. As he looked it was as though these figures were gathering silently together. Now they had become one figure, one immense, malevolent creature staring back at him. Suddenly this creature appeared to start forward, then make a violent motion. It might have been, indeed unmistakably it was, telling him to go away.
"See, there's Yvonne and Hugh's waving at you." M. Laruelle waved back his tennis racket. "Do you know I think they make rather a formidable couple," he added, with a half pained, half malicious smile.
There they were too, he saw, the formidable couple, up by the frescoes: Hugh with his foot on the rail of the Palace balcony, looking over their heads at the volcanoes perhaps: Yvonne with her back to them now. She was leaning against the rail facing the murals, then she turned sideways towards Hugh to say something. They did not wave again.
M. Laruelle and the Consul decided against the cliff path. They floated along the base of the Palace then, opposite the Banco de Crédito y Ejidal, turned