Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [27]
The Consul took her arm with courtliness (the ragged Mexican with the dark glasses had been joined, she noticed, by another man with a shade over one eye and bare feet who had been leaning against the wall farther down, to whom the Consul also remarked "Buenas tardes," but there were no more guests coming out of the hotel, only the two men who'd politely called "Buenas" after them standing there nudging each other as if to say: "He said 'Buenas tardes', what a card he is!") and they set off obliquely through the square. The fiesta wouldn't start till much later and the streets that remembered so many other Days of the Dead were fairly deserted. The bright banners, the paper streamers, flashed: the great wheel brooded under the trees, brilliant, motionless. Even so the town around and below them was already full of sharp remote noises like explosions of rich colour. ¡Box! said an advertisement. ARENA TOMALÍN. Frente al Jardín Xicoténcatl. Domingo 8 de Noviembre de 1938. 4 Emocionantes Peleas.
Yvonne tried to keep herself from asking:
"Did you smack the car up again?"
"As a matter of fact I've lost it."
"Lost it!"
"It's a pity because--but look here, dash it all, aren't you terribly tired, Yvonne?"
"Not in the least! I should think you're the one to be--"
--¡ Box! Preliminar a 4 Rounds, El TURCO (Gonzalo Calderón de Par. de 52 kilos) vs EL OSO (de Par. de 53 kilos).
"I had a million hours of sleep on the boat! And I'd far rather walk, only--"
"Nothing. Just a touch of rheumatiz.--Or is it the sprue? I'm glad to get some circulation going in the old legs."
--¡Box! Evento Especial a 5 rounds, en los que el vencedor pasará al grupo de Semi-Finales, TOMA AGUERO (El Invencible Indio de Quauhnahuac de 57 kilos, que acaba de llegar de la Capital de la República). ARENA TOMALÍN. Frente al Jardín Xicoténcatl.
" It's a pity about the car because we might have gone to the boxing," said the Consul, who was walking almost exaggeratedly erect.
"I hate boxing."
"--But that's not till next Sunday anyhow... I heard they had some kind of a bullthrowing on today over at Tomalín.--Do you remember--"
"No!"
The Consul, with no more recognition than she, held up one finger in dubious greeting to an individual resembling a carpenter, running past them wagging his head and carrying a sawed length of grained board under his arm and who threw, almost chanted, a laughing word at him that sounded like: "¡Mescalito!"
The sunlight blazed down on them, blazed on the eternal ambulance whose headlights were momentarily transformed into a blinding magnifying glass, glazed on the volcanoes--she could not look at them now. Born in Hawaii, she'd had volcanoes in her life before, however. Seated on a park bench under a tree in the square, his feet barely touching the ground, the little public scribe was already crashing away on a giant typewriter.
"I am taking the only way out, semicolon," the Consul offered cheerfully and soberly in passing. "Good-bye, full stop. Change of paragraph, change of chapter, change of worlds--"
The whole scene about her--the names on the shops surrounding the square: La China Poblana, hand-embroidered dresses, the advertisements: Baños de la Libertad, Los mejores de la Capital y los únicos en donde nunca falta el agua, Estufas especiales para Damas y Caballeros: and Sr Panadero: Sí quiere hacer buen pan exija las harinas "Princesa Donaji"--striking Yvonne as so strangely familiar all over again and yet so sharply strange after the year's absence, the severance of thought and body, mode of being, became almost intolerable for a moment. "You might have made use of him to answer some of my letters," she said.
"Look, do you remember what María used to call it?" The Consul, with his stick, was indicating through the trees the little American grocery