Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [52]
"Of course we left Spain about a year before it started, but Geoffrey used to say there was far too much sentiment about this whole business of going to die for the Loyalists. In fact, he said he thought it would be much better if the Fascists just won and got it over with--"
"He has a new line now. He says when the Fascists win there'll only be a sort of 'freezing' of culture in Spain--by the way, is that the moon up there?--well, freezing anyway. Which will presumably thaw at some future date when it will be discovered, if you please, simply to have been in a state of suspended animation. I dare say it's true as far as that goes. Incidentally, did you know I was in Spain?"
"No," Yvonne said, startled.
"Oh yes. I fell out of an ambulance there with only two dozen beer bottles and five journalists on top of me, all heading for Paris. That wasn't so very long after I last saw you. The thing was, just as the Madrid show was really getting under way, as it turned out, it seemed all up, so the Globe told me to beat it... And like a heel I went, though they sent me back again afterwards for a time. I didn't go to China until after Brihuega."
Yvonne gave him an odd look, then said:
"Hugh, you're not thinking of going back to Spain now are you, by any chance?"
Hugh shook his head, laughing: he meticulously dropped his ravaged cigarette down the ravine. "¿Cui bono? To stand in for the noble army of pimps and experts, who've already gone home to practise the little sneers with which they propose to discredit the whole thing--the first moment it becomes fashionable not to be a Communist fence. No, muchas gracias. And I'm completely through with newspaper work, it isn't a pose." Hugh put his thumbs under his belt. "So--since they got the Internationals out five weeks ago, on the twenty-eighth of September to be precise--two days before Chamberlain went to Godesberg and neatly crimped the Ebro offensive--and with half the last bunch of volunteers still rotting in goal in Perpignan, how do you suppose one could get in anyway, at this late date?"
"Then what did Geoffrey mean by saying that you 'wanted action' and all that?... And what's this mysterious other purpose you came down here for?"
"It's really rather tedious," Hugh answered. "As a matter of fact I'm going back to sea for a while. If all goes well I'll be sailing from Vera Cruz in about a week. As quartermaster, you knew I had an A.B.'s ticket didn't you? Well, I might have got a ship in Galveston but it's not so easy as it used to be. Anyway it'll be more amusing to sail from Vera Cruz. Havana, perhaps Nassau and then, you know, down to the West Indies and São Paulo. I've always wanted to take a look at Trinidad--might be some real fun coming out of Trinidad one day. Geoff helped me with a couple of introductions but no more than that, I didn't want to make him responsible. No, I'm merely fed to the teeth with myself, that's all. Try persuading the world not to cut its throat for half a decade or more, like me, under one name or another, and it'll begin to dawn on you that even your behaviour's part of its plan. I ask you, what do we know?"
And Hugh thought: the S.S. Noemijolea , 6,000 tons, leaving Vera Cruz on the night of 13-14 (?) November 1938, with antimony and coffee, bound for Freetown, British West Africa, will proceed thither, oddly enough, from Tzucox on the Yucatan coast, and also in a north-easterly direction: in spite of which she will still emerge through the passages named Windward and Crooked into the Atlantic Ocean: where after many days out of sight of land she will make eventually the mountainous landfall of Madeira: whence, avoiding Port Lyautey and carefully keeping her destination in Sierra Leone some 1,800 miles to the south-east, she will pass, with luck, through the straits