• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 8848 0

younger of the two children an orange: someone went out, the little girl sat on the orange, the jalousie door swung and swung and swung. M. Laruelle looked at his watch--Vigil would not come for half an hour yet--and again at the crumpled pages in his hand. The fresh coolness of rain-washed air came through the jalousie into the cantina and he could hear the rain dripping off the roofs and the water still rushing down the gutters in the street and from the distance once more the sounds of the fair. He was about to replace the crumpled letter in the book when, half absently, yet on a sudden definite impulse, he held it into the candle flame. The flare lit up the whole cantina with a burst of brilliance in which the figures at the bar--that he now saw included besides the little children and the peasants who were quince or cactus farmers in loose white clothes and wide hats, several women in mourning from the cemeteries and dark-faced men in dark suits with open collars and their ties undone--appeared, for an instant, frozen, a mural: they had all stopped talking and were gazing round at him curiously^ all save the barman who seemed momentarily about to object, then lost interest as M. Laruelle set the writhing mass in an ashtray, where beautifully conforming it folded upon itself, a burning castle, collapsed, subsided to a ticking hive through which sparks like tiny red worms crawled and flew, while above a few grey wisps of ashes floated in the thin smoke, a dead husk now, faintly crepitant... Suddenly from outside, a bell spoke out, then ceased abruptly: dolente... dolore! Over the town, in the dark tempestuous night, backwards revolved the luminous wheel.

2

... "A corpse will be transported by express!"

The tireless resilient voice that had just lobbed this singular remark over the Bella Vista bar window-sill into the square was, though its owner remained unseen, unmistakable and achingly familiar as the spacious flower-boxed balconied hotel itself, and as unreal, Yvonne thought.

"But why, Fernando, why should a corpse be transported by express, do you suppose?"

The Mexican taxi-driver, familiar too, who'd just picked up her bags--there'd been no taxi at the tiny Quauhnahuac airfield though, only the bumptious station wagon that insisted on taking her to the Bella Vista--put them down again on the pavement as to assure her: I know why you're here, but no one's recognized you except me, and I won't give you away. "Sí señora," he chuckled. "Señora--El Cónsul." Sighing, he inclined his head with a certain admiration towards the bar window. "¡Qué hombre!"

"--on the other hand, damn it, Fernando, why shouldn't it? Why shouldn't a corpse be transported by express?"

" Absolutamente necesario"

" --Just a bunch of Alladamnbama farmers! "

The last was yet another voice. So the bar, open all night for the occasion, was evidently full. Ashamed, numb with nostalgia and anxiety, reluctant to enter the crowded bar, though equally reluctant to have the taxi-driver go in for her, Yvonne, her consciousness so lashed by wind and air and voyage she still seemed to be travelling, still sailing into Acapulco harbour yesterday evening through a hurricane of immense and gorgeous butterflies swooping seaward to greet the Pennsylvania--at first it was as though fountains of multicoloured stationery were being swept out of the saloon lounge--glanced defensively round the square, really tranquil in the midst of this commotion, of the butterflies still zigzagging overhead or past the heavy open ports, endlessly vanishing astern, their square, motionless and brilliant in the seven o'clock morning sunlight, silent yet somehow poised, expectant, with one eye half open already, the merry-go-rounds, the Ferris wheel, lightly dreaming, looking forward to the fiesta later--the ranged rugged taxis too that were looking forward to something else, a taxi strike that afternoon, she'd been confidentially informed. The zócalo was just the same in spite of its air of slumbering Harlequin. The old bandstand stood empty, the equestrian statue of the