Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [53]
Yvonne was staring down the barranca, her hair hanging over her face: "I know Geoff sounds pretty foul sometimes," she was saying, "but there's one point where I do agree with him, these romantic notions about the International Brigade--"
But Hugh was standing at the wheel: Potato Firmin or Columbus in reverse: below him the foredeck of the Noemijolea lay over in the blue trough and spray slowly exploded through the lee scuppers into the eyes of the seaman chipping a winch: on the forecastle head the look-out echoed one bell, struck by Hugh a moment before, and the seaman gathered up his tools: Hugh's heart was lifting with the ship, he was aware that the officer on duty had changed from white to blue for winter but at the same time of exhilaration, the limitless purification of the sea--
Yvonne flung back her hair impatiently and stood up. "If they'd stayed out of it the war would have been over long ago!"
"Well, there ain't no brigade no mo," Hugh said absently, for it was not a ship he was steering now, but the world, out of the Western Ocean of its misery. "If the paths of glory lead but to the grave--I once made such an excursion into poetry--then Spain's the grave where England's glory led."
"Fiddlesticks!"
Hugh suddenly laughed, not loud, probably at nothing at all: he straightened himself with a swift movement and jumped on the parapet.
"Hugh!"
"My God! Horses," Hugh said, glancing and stretching himself to his full mental height of six feet two (he was five feet eleven).
"Where?"
He was pointing. "Over there."
"Of course," Yvonne said slowly, "I'd forgotten--they belong to the Casino de la Selva: they put them out there to pasture or something. If we go up the hill a ways we'll come to the place--"
... On a gentle slope to their left now, colts with glossy coats were rolling in the grass. They turned off the Calle Nicaragua along a narrow shady lane leading down one side of the paddock. The stables were part of what appeared to be a model dairy farm. It stretched away behind the stables on level ground where tall English-looking trees lined either side of a grassy wheel-rutted avenue. In the distance a few rather large cows, which, however, like Texas longhorns, bore a disturbing resemblance to stags (you've got your cattle again, I see, Yvonne said) were lying under the trees. A row of shining milkpails stood outside the stables in the sun. A sweet smell of milk and vanilla and wild flowers hung about the quiet place. And the sun was over all.
"Isn't it an adorable farm?" Yvonne said. "I believe it's some government experiment. I'd love to have a farm like that."
"--perhaps you'd like to hire a couple of those greater kudus over there instead?"
Their horses proved two pesos an hour apiece. "Muy correcto," the stable boy's dark eyes flashed good-humouredly at Hugh's boots as he turned swiftly to adjust Yvonne's deep leather stirrups. Hugh didn't know why, but this lad reminded him of how, in Mexico City, if you stand at a certain place on the Paseo de la Reforma in the early morning, suddenly everyone in sight will seem to be running, laughing, to work, in the sunlight, past the statue of Pasteur... "Muy incorrecto," Yvonne surveyed her slacks: she swung, swung twice into the saddle. "We've never ridden together before, have we?" She leaned forward to pat her mare's neck as they swayed forward.
They ambled up the lane, accompanied by two foals, which had followed their mothers out