Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [45]
But he made no motion towards it, none at all, save to put on his dark glasses. He was conscious of new aches here and there, of, for the first time, the impact of the Calle Nicaragua. Vague images of grief and tragedy flickered in his mind. Somewhere a butterfly was flying out to sea: lost. La Fontaine's duck had loved the white hen, yet after escaping together from the dreadful farmyard through the forest to the lake it was the duck that swam: the hen, following, drowned. In November 1895, in convict dress, from two o'clock in the afternoon till half past, handcuffed, recognized, Oscar Wilde stood on the centre platform at Clapham Junction...
When the Consul returned to the bed and sat down on it Yvonne's arms were under the covers while her face was turned to the wall. After a while he said with emotion, his voice grown hoarse again:
"Do you remember how the night before you left we actually made a date like a couple of strangers to meet for dinner in Mexico City?"
Yvonne gazed at the wall:
"You didn't keep it."
"That was because I couldn't remember the name of the restaurant at the last moment. All I knew was that it was in the Via Dolorosa somewhere. It was the one we'd discovered together the last time we were in the city. I went into all the restaurants in the Via Dolorosa looking for you and not finding you I had a drink in each one."
"Poor Geoffrey."
"I must have phoned back the Hotel Canada from each restaurant. From the cantina of each restaurant. God knows how many times, for I thought you might have returned there. And each time they said the same thing, that you'd left to meet me, but they didn't know where. And finally they became pretty damned annoyed. I can't imagine why we stayed at the Canada instead of the Regis--do you remember how they kept mistaking me there, with my beard, for that wrestler?... Anyhow, there I was wandering around from place to place, wrestling, and thinking all the while I could prevent you from going the next morning, if I could only find you!"
"Yes."
(If you could only find her! Ah, how cold it was that night, and bitter, with a howling wind and wild steam blowing from the pavement gratings where the ragged children were making to sleep early under their poor newspapers. Yet none was more homeless than you, as it grew later and colder and darker, and still you had not found her! And a sorrowful voice seemed to be wailing down the street at you with the wind calling its name: Via Dolorosa, Via Dolorosa! And then somehow it was early the next morning directly after she had left the Canada--you brought one of her suitcases down yourself though you didn't see her off--and you were sitting in the hotel bar drinking mescal with ice in it that chilled your stomach, you kept swallowing the lemon pips, when suddenly a man with the look of an executioner came from the street dragging two little fawns shrieking with fright into the kitchen. And later you heard them screaming, being slaughtered probably. And you thought: better not remember what you thought. And later still, after Oaxaca, when you had returned here to Quauhnahuac, through the anguish of that return--circling down from the Tres Marías in the Plymouth, seeing the town below through the mist, and then the town itself, the landmarks, your soul dragged past them as at the tail of a runaway horse--when you returned here--)
"The cats had died," he said, "when I got back--Pedro insisted it was typhoid. Or rather, poor old Oedipuss died the very day you left apparently, he'd already been thrown down the barranca while little Pathos was lying in the garden under the plantains when I arrived looking even sicker than when we first picked her out of the gutter; dying, though no one could