Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [21]
(Several mescalitos later and dawn in the Farolito)... Time is a fake healer anyhow. How can anyone presume to tell me about you? You cannot know the sadness of my life. Endlessly haunted waking and sleeping by the thought that you may need my help, which I cannot give, as I need yours, which you cannot, seeing you in visions and in every shadow, I have been compelled to write this," which I shall never send, to ask you what we can do. Is not that extraordinary? And yet--do we not owe it ourselves, to that self we created, apart from us, to try again? Alas, what has happened to the love and understanding we once had! What is going to happen to it--what is going to happen to our hearts? Love is the only thing which gives meaning to our poor ways on earth: not precisely a discovery, I am afraid. You will think I am mad, but this is how I drink too, as if I were taking an eternal sacrament. Oh Yvonne, we cannot allow what we created to sink down to oblivion in this dingy fashion--
Lift up your eyes unto the hills, I seem to hear a voice saying. Sometimes, when I see the little red mail plane fly in from Acapulco at seven in the morning over the strange hills, or more probably hear, lying trembling, shaking, and dying in bed (when I am in bed at that time)--just a tiny roar and gone--as I reach out babbling for the glass of mescal, the drink that I can never believe even in raising to my lips is real, that I have had the marvellous foresight to put within easy reach the night before, I think that you will be on it, on that plane every morning as it goes by, and will have come to save me. Then the morning goes by and you have not come. But oh, I pray for this now, that you will come. On second thoughts I do not see why from Acapulco. But for God's sake, Yvonne, hear me, my defences are down, at the moment they are down--and there goes the plane, I heard it in the distance then, just for an instant, beyond Tomalín--come back, come back. I will stop drinking, anything. I am dying without you. For Christ Jesus" sake Yvonne come back to me, hear me, it is a cry, come back to me, Yvonne, if only for a day...
M. Laruelle began very slowly to fold up the letter again, smoothing the creases carefully between finger and thumb, then almost without thinking he had crumpled it up. He sat holding the crumpled paper in one fist on the table staring, deeply abstracted, around him. In the last five minutes the scene within the cantina had wholly changed. Outside the storm seemed over but the Cervecería XX meantime had filled with peasants, evidently refugees from it. They were not sitting at the tables, which were empty--for while the show had still not recommenced most of the audience had filed back into the theatre, now fairly quiet as in immediate anticipation of it--but crowded by the bar. And there was a beauty and a sort of piety about this scene. In the cantina both the candles and the dim electric lights still burned. A peasant held two little girls by the hand while the floor was covered with baskets, mostly empty and leaning against each other, and now the barman was giving the