Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [38]
"Geoffrey this place is a wreck!"
"Mariana and the moated grange isn't in it." The Consul was winding his wrist-watch. .".. But look here, suppose for the sake of argument you abandoned a besieged town to the enemy and then somehow or other not very long afterwards you go back to it--there's something about my analogy I don't like, but never mind, suppose you do it--then you can't very well expect to invite your soul into quite the same green graces, with quite the same dear old welcome here and there, can you, eh?"
"But I didn't abandon--"
"Even, I wouldn't say, if that town seems to be going about its business again, though in a somewhat stricken fashion, I admit, and its trams running more or less on schedule." The Consul strapped his watch firmly on his wrist. "Eh?"
"--Look at the red bird on the tree-twigs, Geoffrey! I never saw a cardinal as big as that before."
"No." The Consul, all unobserved, secured the whisky bottle, uncorked it, smelt its contents, and returned it to the tray gravely, pursing his lips: "You wouldn't have. Because it isn't a cardinal."
"Of course that's a cardinal. Look at its red breast. It's like a bit of flame!" Yvonne, it was clear to him, dreaded the approaching scene as much as he, and now felt under some compulsion to go on talking about anything until the perfect inappropriate moment arrived, that moment too when, unseen by her, the awful bell would actually touch the doomed child with giant protruding tongue and hellish Wesleyan breath. "There, on the hibiscus!"
The Consul closed one eye. "He's a coppery-tailed trogon I believe. And he has no red breast. He's a solitary fellow who probably lives way off in the Canyon of the Wolves over there, away off from those other fellows with ideas, so that he can have peace to meditate about not being a cardinal."
"I'm sure it's a cardinal and lives right here in this garden!"
"Have it your own way. Trogon ambiguus ambiguuus is the exact name, I think, the ambiguous bird! Two ambiguities ought to make an affirmative and this is it, the coppery-tailed trogon, not the cardinal." The Consul reached out towards the tray for his empty strychnine glass, but forgetting midway what he proposed to put in it, or whether it wasn't one of the bottles he wanted first, if only to smell, and not the glass, he dropped his hand and leaned still farther forward, turning the movement into one of concern for the volcanoes. He said:
"Old Popeye ought to be coming out again pretty soon."
"He seems to be completely obliterated in spinach at the moment--" Yvonne's voice quivered.
The Consul struck a match against their old jest for the cigarette he had somehow failed to place between his lips: after a little, finding himself with a dead match, he put it in his pocket.
For a time they confronted each other like two mute unspeaking forts.
The water still trickling into the pool--God, how deadeningly slowly--filled the silence between them... There was something else: the Consul imagined he still heard the music of the ball, which must have long since ceased, so that this silence was pervaded as with a stale thudding of drums. Parián: that meant drums too. Parián. It was doubtless the almost tactile absence of the music however, that made it so peculiar the trees should be apparently shaking to it, an illusion investing not only the garden but the plains beyond, the whole scene before his eyes, with horror, the horror of an intolerable unreality. This must be not unlike, he told himself, what some insane person suffers at those moments when, sitting benignly in the asylum grounds, madness suddenly ceases to be a refuge and becomes incarnate in the shattering sky and all his surroundings in the presence of which reason, already struck dumb, can only bow the head. Does the madman find solace at such moments, as his thoughts like cannonballs crash through his brain, in the exquisite beauty of the madhouse garden or of the neighbouring hills beyond the terrible chimney? Hardly, the Consul felt. As for this particular beauty he knew it dead