Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [174]
Save me, thought the Consul vaguely, as the boy suddenly went out for a change, suélteme, help: but maybe the scorpion, not wanting to be saved, had stung itself to death. He strolled across the room. After fruitlessly trying to make friends with the white rabbit, he approached the open window on his right. It was almost a sheer drop to the bottom of the ravine. What a dark, melancholy place! In Parián did Kubla Khan... And the crag was still there too--just as in Shelley or Calderón or both--the crag that couldn't make up its mind to crumble absolutely, it clung so, cleft, to life. The sheer height was terrifying, he thought, leaning outwards, looking sideways at the split rock and attempting to recall the passage in The Cenci that described the huge stack clinging to the mass of earth, as if resting on life, not afraid to fall, but darkening, just the same, where it would go if it went. It was a tremendous, an awful way down to the bottom. But it struck him he was not afraid to fall either. He traced mentally the barranca's circuitous abysmal path back through the country, through shattered mines, to his own garden, then saw himself standing again this morning with Yvonne outside the printer's shop, gazing at the picture of that other rock, La Despedida, the glacial rock crumbling among the wedding invitations in the shop window, the spinning flywheel behind. How long ago, how strange, how sad, remote as the memory of first love, even of his mother's death, it seemed; like some poor sorrow, this time without effort, Yvonne left his mind again.
Popocatepetl towered through the window, its immense flanks partly hidden by rolling thunderheads; its peak blocking the sky, it appeared almost right overhead, the barranca, the Farolito, directly beneath it. Under the volcano! It was not for nothing the ancients had placed Tartarus under Mt Aetna, nor within it, the monster Typhoeus, with his hundred heads and--relatively--fearful eyes and voices.
Turning, the Consul took his drink over to the open door. A mercurochrome agony down the west. He stared out at Parián. There, beyond a grass plot, was the inevitable square with its little public garden. To the left, at the edge of the barranca, a soldier slept under a tree. Half facing him, to the right, on an incline, stood what seemed at first sight a ruined monastery or waterworks. This was the grey turreted barracks of the Military Police he had mentioned to Hugh as the reputed Unión Militar headquarters. The building, which also included the prison, glowered at him with one eye, over an archway set in the forehead of its low facade: a clock pointing to six. On either side of the archway the barred windows in the Comisario de Policía and the Policía de Seguridad looked down on a group of soldiers talking, their bugles slung over their shoulders with bright green lariats. Other soldiers, puttees flapping, stumbled at sentry duty. Under the archway, in the entrance to the courtyard, a corporal was working at a table, on which stood an unlighted oil lamp. He was inscribing something in copperplate handwriting, the Consul knew, for his rather unsteady course hither--not so unsteady however as in the square at Quauhnahuac earlier, but still disgraceful--had brought him almost on top of him. Through the archway, grouped round the courtyard beyond, the Consul could make out dungeons with wooden bars like pigpens. In one of them a man was gesticulating. Elsewhere, to the left, were scattered huts of dark thatch, merging into the jungle which on all sides surrounded the town, glowing now in the unnatural livid light of approaching storm.
A Few Fleas having returned, the Consul went to the bar for his change. The boy, not hearing apparently, slopped some mescal into his glass from the beautiful gourd. Handing it back he upset the toothpicks.