Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [29]
Yvonne walked on past the place a short distance, then retraced her steps. She had not entered any of these shops since their first week in Mexico and the danger of being recognized in the abarrotes was slight. Nevertheless, repenting her tardy impulse to follow the Consul in, she waited outside, restless as a little yacht turning at anchor. The opportunity to join him ebbed. A mood of martyrdom stole upon her. She wanted the Consul to see her, when he emerged, waiting there, abandoned and affronted. But glancing back the way they had come she forgot Geoffrey an instant.--It was unbelievable. She was in Quauhnahuac again! There was Cortez Palace and there, high on the cliff, a man standing gazing over the valley who from his air of martial intentness might have been Cortez himself. The man moved, spoiling the illusion. Now he looked less like Cortez than the poor young man in the dark glasses who'd been leaning against the wall of the Bella Vista.
" You-are-a-man-who-like-much-Vine! " now issued powerfully from the abarrotes into the peaceful street, followed by a roar of incredibly good-humoured but ruffianly male laughter. "You are—diablo!" There was a pause in which she heard the Consul saying something. "Eggs!" the good-humoured voice exploded again. "You--two diablos! You tree diablos." The voice crackled with glee. "Eggs!" Then: "Who is the beautiful layee?--Ah, you are--ah five diablos, you ah—Eggs!" ludicrously followed the Consul, who appeared at this moment, calmly smiling, on the pavement above Yvonne.
"In Tortu," he was saying as, steadier again, he fell into step beside her, "the ideal University, where no application whatsoever, so I have heard on good authority, nothing, not even athletics, is allowed to interfere with the business of--look out!... drinking."
It came sailing out of nowhere, the child's funeral, the tiny lace-covered coffin followed by the band: two saxophones, bass guitar, a fiddle, playing of all things "La Cucaracha" the women behind, very solemn, while several paces back a few hangers-on were joking, straggling along in the dust almost at a run.
They stood to one side while the little cortege slanted by swiftly in the direction of the town, then walked on in silence not looking at one another. The banking of the street now became less acute and the sidewalks and the shops dropped away. To the left there was only a low blank wall with vacant lots behind it, whereas to the right the houses had turned into low open shanties filled with black carbon. Yvonne's heart, that had been struggling with an insufferable pang, suddenly missed a beat. Though one might not think it they were approaching the residential district, their own terrain.
"Do look where you're going, Geoffrey!" But it was Yvonne who had stumbled rounding the right-angled corner into the Calle Nicaragua. The Consul regarded her without expression as she stared up into the sun at the bizarre house opposite them near the head of their street, with two towers and a connecting catwalk over the ridgepole, at which someone else, a peon with his back turned, was also gazing curiously.
"Yes, it's still there, it hasn't budged an inch," he said, and now they had passed the house to their left with its inscription on the wall she didn't want to see and were walking down the Calle Nicaragua.
"Yet the street looks different somehow." Yvonne relapsed into silence again. Actually she was making a tremendous effort to control