Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [25]
"--life," came from beyond the glass partition. "What a life! Christ, it's a shame! Where I come from they don't run. We're going through busting this way--"
"--No. I thought of course you'd returned to England, when you didn't answer. What have you done? Oh Geoff--have you resigned from the service?"
"--went down to Fort Sale. Took your shoeshot. And took your Brownings.--Jump, jump, jump, jump, jump--see, get it--"
"I ran into Louis in Santa Barbara. He said you were still here."
"--and like hell you can, you can't do it, and that's what you do in Alabama! "
"Well, actually I've only been away once." The Consul took a long shuddering drink, then sat down again beside her. "To Oaxaca.--Remember Oaxaca?"
"--Oaxaca?--"
"--Oaxaca.--"
--The word was like a breaking heart, a sudden peal of stifled bells in a gale, the last syllables of one dying of thirst in the desert. Did she remember Oaxaca! The roses and the great tree, was that, the dust and the buses to Etla and Nochitlán? and: "damas acompañadas de un caballero, gratis." Or at night their cries of love, rising into the ancient fragrant Mayan air, heard only by ghosts? In Oaxaca they had found each other once. She was watching the Consul who seemed less on the defensive than in process while straightening out the leaflets on the bar of changing mentally from the part played for Fernando to the part he would play for her, watching him almost with amazement: "Surely this cannot be us," she cried in her heart suddenly. "This cannot be us--say that it is not, somebody, this cannot be us here!"--Divorce. What did the word really mean? She'd looked it up in the dictionary, on the ship: to sunder, to sever. And divorced meant: sundered, severed. Oaxaca meant divorce. They had not been divorced there but that was where the Consul had gone when she left, as if into the heart of the sundering, of the severance. Yet they had loved one another! But it was as though their love were wandering over some desolate cactus plain, far from here, lost, stumbling and falling, attacked by wild beasts, calling for help--dying, to sigh at last, with a kind of weary peace: Oaxaca--
-'The strange thing about this little corpse, Yvonne," the Consul was saying, "is that it must be accompanied by a person holding its hand: no, sorry. Apparently not its hand, just a first-class ticket." He held up, smiling, his own right hand which shook as with a movement of wiping chalk from an imaginary blackboard. "It's really the shakes that make this kind of life insupportable. But they will stop: I was only drinking enough so they would. Just the necessary, the therapeutic drink." Yvonne looked back at him. "--but the shakes are the worst of course," he was going on. "You get to like the other after a while, and I'm really doing very well, I'm much better than I was six months ago, very much better than I was, say, in Oaxaca"--noticing a curious familiar glare in his eyes that always frightened her, a glare turned inward now like one of those sombrely brilliant cluster-lamps down the hatches of the Pennsylvania on the work of unloading, only this was a work of spoliation: and she felt a sudden dread lest this glare, as of old, should swing outward, turn upon her.
"God knows I've seen you like this before," her thoughts were saying, her love was saying, through the gloom of the bar, "too many times for it to be a surprise anyhow. You are denying me again. But this time there is a profound difference. This is like an ultimate denial--oh Geoffrey,