Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [3]
"Bueno. I will see you this night then, in the place where you know. Remember, I still do not believe you are leaving tomorrow." He held out his hand which M. Laruelle grasped firmly, loving him. "Try and come tonight, if not, please understand I am always interested in your health."
"Hasta la vista."
"Hasta la vista."
--Alone, standing beside the highway down which he had driven four years before on the last mile of that long, insane, beautiful journey from Los Angeles, M. Laruelle also found it hard to believe he was really going. Then the thought of tomorrow seemed well-nigh overwhelming. He had paused, undecided which way to walk home, as the little overloaded bus--Tomalín Zócalo--jounced past him downhill towards the barranca before climbing into Quauhnahuac. He was loth to take the same direction tonight. He crossed the street, making for the station. Although he would not be travelling by train the sense of departure, of its imminence, came heavily about him again as, childishly avoiding the locked points, he picked his path over the narrow-gauge lines. Light from the setting sun glanced off the oil tanks on the grass embankment beyond. The platform slept. The tracks were vacant, the signals up. There was little to suggest that any train ever arrived at this station, let alone left it:
QUAUHNAHUAC
Yet a little less than a year ago the place had been the scene of a parting he would never forget. He had not liked the Consul's half-brother at their first encounter when he'd come with Yvonne and the Consul himself to M. Laruelle's house in the Calle Nicaragua, any more, he felt now, than Hugh had liked him. Hugh's odd appearance--though such was the overwhelming effect of meeting Yvonne again, he did not obtain even the impression of oddity so strongly that he was able later in Parián immediately to recognize him--had merely seemed to caricature the Consul's amiable half-bitter description of him. So this was the child M. Laruelle vaguely remembered hearing about years before! In half an hour he'd dismissed him as an irresponsible bore, a professional indoor Marxman, vain and self-conscious really, but affecting a romantic extroverted air. While Hugh, who for various reasons had certainly not been "prepared" by the Consul to meet M. Laruelle, doubtless saw him as an even more precious type of bore, the elderly aesthete, a confirmedly promiscuous bachelor, with a rather unctuous possessive manner towards women. But three sleepless nights later an eternity had been lived through: grief and bewilderment at an unassimilable catastrophe had drawn them together. In the hours which followed his response to Hugh's telephone call from Parián M. Laruelle learned much about Hugh: his hopes, his fears, his self-deceptions, his despairs. When Hugh left, it was as if he had lost a son.
Careless of his tennis clothes, M. Laruelle climbed the embankment. Yet he was right, he told himself, as reaching the top he paused for breath, right, after the Consul had been "discovered" (though meantime the grotesquely pathetic situation had developed where there was not, on probably the first occasion when one had been so urgently needed, a British Consul in Quauhnahuac to appeal to), right in insisting Hugh should waive all conventional scruples and take every advantage of the curious reluctance of the "police" to hold him--their anxiety, it all but appeared, to be rid of him just when it seemed highly logical they should detain him as a witness, at least in one aspect of what now at a distance one could almost refer to as the "case"--and at the earliest possible moment join that ship providentially awaiting him at Vera Cruz. M. Laruelle looked back at the station; Hugh left a gap. In a sense he had decamped with the last of his illusions. For Hugh, at twenty-nine, still dreamed, even then, of changing the world (there was no other way of saying this) through his actions--just as Laruelle, at forty-two, had still then not quite given up hope