Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [149]
The subdued roar of the falls filled the room like a ship's engine... Eternity... The Consul, cooler, leaned on the bar, staring into his second glass of the colourless ether-smelling liquid. To drink or not to drink.--But without mescal, he imagined, he had forgotten eternity, forgotten their world's voyage, that the earth was a ship, lashed by the Horn's tail, doomed never to make her Valparaiso. Or that it was like a golf ball, launched at Hercules's Butterfly, wildly hooked by a giant out of an asylum window in hell. Or that it was a bus, making its erratic journey to Tomalín and nothing. Or that it was like--whatever it would be shortly, after the next mescal.
Still, there had not yet been a "next" mescal. The Consul stood, his hand as if part of the glass, listening, remembering... Suddenly he heard, above the roar, the clear sweet voices of the young Mexicans outside: the voice of Yvonne too, dear, intolerable--and different, after the first mescal--shortly to be lost.
Why lost?... The voices were as if confused now with the blinding torrent of sunlight which poured across the open doorway, turning the scarlet flowers along the path into flaming swords. Even almost bad poetry is better than life, the muddle of voices might have been saying, as, now, he drank half his drink.
The Consul was aware of another roaring, though it came from inside his head: clipperty-one: the American Express, swaying, bears the corpse through the green meadows. What is man but a little soul holding up a corpse? The soul! Ah, and did she not too have her savage and traitorous Tlaxcalans, her Cortes and her noches tristes, and, sitting within her innermost citadel in chains, drinking chocolate, her pale Moctezuma?
The roaring rose, died away, rose again; guitar chords mingled with the shouting of many voices, calling, chanting, like native women in Kashmir, pleading, above the noise of the maelstrom: "Borrrrraaacho," they wailed. And the dark room with its flashing doorway rocked under his feet.
"--what do you think, Yvonne, if sometime we climb that baby, Popo I mean--"
"Good heavens why! Haven't you had enough exercise for one--"
"--might be a good idea to harden your muscles first, try a few small peaks."
They were joking. But the Consul was not joking. His second mescal had become serious. He left it still unfinished on the counter, Señor Cervantes was beckoning from a far corner.
A shabby little man with a black shade over one eye, wearing a black coat, but a beautiful sombrero with long gay tassels down the back, he seemed, however savage at heart, in almost as highly nervous a state as himself. What magnetism drew these quaking ruined creatures into his orbit? Cervantes led the way behind the bar, ascended two steps, and pulled a curtain aside. Poor lonely fellow, he wanted to show him round his house again. The Consul made the steps with difficulty. One small room occupied by a huge brass bedstead. Rusty rifles in a rack on the wall. In one corner, before a tiny porcelain Virgin, burned a little lamp. Really a sacramental candle, it diffused a ruby shimmer through its glass into the room, and cast a broad yellow flickering cone on the ceiling: the wick was burning low. "Mistair," Cervantes tremulously pointed to it. "Señor. My grandfather tell me never to let her go out." Mescal tears came to the Consul's eyes, and he remembered sometime during last night's debauch going with Dr. Vigil to a church in Quauhnahuac he didn't know, with sombre tapestries, and strange votive pictures, a compassionate Virgin floating in the gloom, to whom he prayed, with muddily beating heart, he might have Yvonne again. Dark figures, tragic and isolated, stood about the church, or were kneeling--only the bereaved and lonely went there. "She is the Virgin for those who have nobody with," the doctor told him, inclining his head towards the image. "And for mariners on the sea." Then he knelt in the