de México, de la Escuela Médico Militar, Enfermedades de Niños, Indisposiciones nerviosas ~ and how politely all this differed from the notices one encountered in the mingitorios!--Consultas de 12 a 2 y 4 a 7. A slight overstatement, he thought. Newsboys ran past selling copies of Quauhnahuac Nuevo, the pro-Almazan, pro-Axis sheet put out, they said, by the tiresome Unión Militar. Un avión de combate Francis derribado por un caza Alemán. Los trabajadores de Australia abogan por la paz. ¿Quiere Vd.?--a placard asked him in a shop window--vestirse con elegancia y a la última moda de Europa y los Estados Unidos? M. Laruelle walked on down the hill. Outside the barracks two soldiers, wearing French army helmets and grey faded purple uniforms laced and interlaced with green lariats, paced on sentry duty. He crossed the street. Approaching the cinema he became conscious all was not as it should be, that there was a strange unnatural excitement in the air, a kind of fever. It had grown on the instant much cooler. And the cinema was dark, as though no picture were playing tonight. On the other hand a large group of people, not a queue, but evidently some of the patrons from the cine itself, who had come prematurely flooding out, were standing on the pavement and under the arcature listening to a loudspeaker mounted on a van blaring the Washington Post March. Suddenly there was a crash of thunder and the street lights twitched off. So the lights of the cine had gone already. Rain, M. Laruelle thought. But his desire to get wet had deserted him. He put his tennis racket under his coat and ran. A troughing wind all at once engulfed the street, scattering old newspapers and blowing the naphtha flares on the tortilla stands flat: there was a savage scribble of lightning over the hotel opposite the cinema, followed by another peal of thunder. The wind was moaning, everywhere people were running, mostly laughing, for shelter. M. Laruelle could hear the thunderclaps crashing on the mountains behind him. He just reached the theatre in time. The rain was falling in torrents.
He stood, out of breath, under the shelter of the theatre entrance which was, however, more like the entrance to some gloomy bazaar or market. Peasants were crowding in with baskets. At the box office, momentarily vacated, the door left half open, a frantic hen sought admission. Everywhere people were flashing torches or striking matches. The van with the loudspeaker slithered away into the rain and thunder. Las Manos de Orlac, said a poster: 6 y 8.30. Las Manos de Orlac, con Peter Lorre.
The street lights came on again, though the theatre still remained dark. M. Laruelle fumbled for a cigarette. The hands of Orlac... How, in a flash, that had brought back the old days of the cinema, he thought, indeed his own delayed student days, the days of the Student of Prague, and Wiene and Werner Krauss and Karl Grüne, the Ufa days when a defeated Germany was winning the respect of the cultured world by the pictures she was making. Only then it had been Conrad Veidt in Orlac. Strangely, that particular film had been scarcely better than the present version, a feeble Hollywood product he'd seen some years before in Mexico City or perhaps--M. Laruelle looked around him--perhaps at this very theatre. It was not impossible. But so far as he remembered not even Peter Lorre had been able to salvage it and he didn't want to see it again... Yet what a complicated endless tale it seemed to tell, of tyranny and sanctuary, that poster looming above him now, showing the murderer Orlac! An artist with a murderer's hands; that was the ticket, the hieroglyphic of the times. For really it was Germany itself that, in the gruesome degradation of a bad cartoon, stood over him.--Or was it, by some uncomfortable stretch of the imagination, M. Laruelle himself?
The manager of the cine was standing before him, cupping, with that same lightning-swift, fumbling-thwarting courtesy exhibited by Dr. Vigil, by all Latin Americans, a match for his cigarette: his hair, innocent of raindrops, which seemed