Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [118]
In one corner of the bar someone had apparently once begun a small mural, aping the Great Mural in the Palace, two or three figures only, peeling and inchoate Tlahuicans.--There was the sound of slow, dragging footsteps from behind; the widow appeared, a little old woman wearing an unusually long and shabby rustling black dress. Her hair that he recalled as grey seemed to have been recently hennaed, or dyed red, and though it hung untidily in front, it was twisted up at the back into a Psyche knot. Her face, which was beaded with perspiration, evinced the most extraordinary waxen pallor; she looked careworn, wasted with suffering, yet at the sight of the Consul her tired eyes gleamed, kindling her whole expression to one of wry amusement in which there appeared also both a determination and a certain weary expectancy. "Mescal posseebly," she said, in a queer, chanting half-bantering tone, "Mescal imposseebly." But she made no move to draw the Consul a drink, perhaps because of his debt, an objection he immediately disposed of by laying a tostón on the counter. She smiled almost slyly as she edged towards the mescal barrel. "No, tequila, por favor," he said.
"Un obsequio"--she handed him the tequila. "Where do you laugh now?"
"I still laugh in the Calle Nicaragua, cincuenta dos," the Consul replied, smiling. "You mean 'live,' Señora Gregorio, not 'laugh,'con permiso."
"Remember," Señora Gregorio corrected him gently, slowly, "remember my English. Well, so it is," she sighed, drawing a small glass of málaga for herself from the barrel chalked with that name. "Here's to your love. What's my names?" She pushed towards him a saucer filled with salt that was speckled with orange-coloured pepper.
"Lo mismo! The Consul drank the tequila down. "Geoffrey Firmin."
Señora Gregorio brought him a second tequila; for a time they regarded one another without speaking. "So it is," she repeated at last, sighing once more; and there was pity in her voice for the Consul. "So it is. You must take it as it come. It can't be helped."
"No, it can't be helped."
"If you har your wife you would lose all things in that love," Señora Gregorio said, and the Consul, understanding that somehow this conversation was being taken up where it had been left off weeks before, probably at the point where Yvonne had abandoned him for the seventh time that evening, found himself not caring to change the basis of shared misery on which their relationship rested--for Gregorio had really abandoned her before he died--by informing her his wife had come back, was indeed, perhaps, not fifty feet away. "Both minds is occupied in one thing, so you can't lose it," she continued sadly.
"Sí--," said the Consul.
"So it is. If your mind is occupied with all things, then you never lose your mind. Your minds, your life--your everything in it. Once when I was a girl I never used to think I live like I laugh now. I always used to dream about kernice dreams. Nice clothes, nice hairts--"Everything is good for me just now' it was one time, theatres, but everything--now, I don't think of but nothing but trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble; and trouble comes... So it is."
"Sí--, Señora Gregorio."
"Of course I was a kernice girl from home," she was saying. "This--" she glanced contemptuously round the dark little bar, "was never in my mind. Life changes, you know, you can never drink of