Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [113]
"No, I am afraid," M. Laruelle said.
"But I thought you were never afraid... Un otro tequila," the Consul told the boy, who came running, repeating sharply, "--uno?"
M. Laruelle glanced round after the boy as if it had been in his mind to say "dos": "I'm afraid of you," he said, "Old Bean."
The Consul heard, after half the second tequila, every now and then, familiar well-meaning phrases. "It's hard to say this. As man to man, I don't care who she is. Even if the miracle has occurred. Unless you cut it out altogether."
The Consul however was looking past M. Laruelle at the flying-boats which were at a little distance: the machine itself was feminine, graceful as a ballet dancer, its iron skirts of gondolas whirling higher and higher. Finally it whizzed round with a tense whipping and whining, then its skirts drooped chastely again when for a time there was stillness, only the breeze stirring them. And how beautiful, beautiful, beautiful--
"For God's sake. Go home to bed... Or stay here. I'll find the others. And tell them you're not going..."
"But I am going," the Consul said, commencing to take one of the shrimps apart. "Not camarones," he added. "Cabrones. That's what the Mexicans call them." Placing his thumbs at the base of both ears he waggled his fingers. "Cabrón. You too, perhaps... Venus is a horned star."
"What about the damage you've done, to her life... After all your howling... If you've got her back!--If you've got this chance--"
"You are interfering with my great battle," the Consul said, gazing past M. Laruelle at an advertisement at the foot of the fountain: Peter Lorre en Las Manos de Orlac, a las 6.30 p.m. "I have to have a drink or two now, myself--so long as it isn't mescal of course--else I shall become confused, like yourself."
"--the truth is, I suppose, that sometimes, when you've calculated the amount exactly, you do see more clearly," M. Laruelle was admitting a minute later.
"Against death." The Consul sank back easily in his chair. "My battle for the survival of the human consciousness."
"But certainly not the things so important to us despised sober people, on which the balance of any human situation depends. It's precisely your inability to see them, Geoffrey, that turns them into the instruments of the disaster you have created yourself. Your Ben Jonson, for instance, or perhaps it was Christopher Marlowe, your Faust man, saw the Carthaginians fighting on his big toe-nail. That's like the kind of clear seeing you indulge in. Everything seems perfectly clear, because indeed it is perfectly clear, in terms of the toe-nail."
"Have a devilled scorpion," invited the Consul, pushing over the camarones with extended arm. "A bedevilled cabrón."
"I admit the efficacy of your tequila--but do you realize that while you're battling against death, or whatever you imagine you're doing, while what is mystical in you is being released, or whatever it is you imagine is being released, while you're enjoying all this, do you realize what extraordinary allowances are being made for you by the world which has to cope with you, yes, are even now being made by me?"
The Consul was gazing upward dreamily at the Ferris wheel near them, huge, but resembling an enormously magnified child's structure of girders and angle brackets, nuts and bolts, in Meccano; tonight it would be lit up, its steel twigs caught in the emerald pathos of the trees; the wheel of the law rolling; and it bore thinking of too that the carnival was not going in earnest now. What a hullabaloo there would be later! His eye fell on another little carrousel, a dazzle-painted wobbling child's toy, and he saw himself as a child making up his mind to go on it, hesitating, missing the next opportunity, and the next, missing all the opportunities finally, until it was too late. What opportunities, precisely, did he mean? A voice on the radio somewhere began to sing a song: Samaritana mía, alma pía, bebe en tu boca linda, then went dead. It had sounded like Samaritana.
"And you forget what you exclude from this, shall we say, feeling