Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [7]
But it was the Consul's voice, not Maximilian's, M. Laruelle could almost have heard in the Palace; and he remembered as he walked on, thankful he had finally struck the Calle Nicaragua even at its farthest end, the day he'd stumbled upon the Consul and Yvonne embracing there; it was not very long after their arrival in Mexico and how different the Palace had seemed to him then! M. Laruelle slackened his pace. The wind had dropped. He opened his English tweed coat (bought however from High Life, pronounced Eetchleef, Mexico City) and loosened his blue polka-dotted scarf. The evening was unusually oppressive. And how silent. Not a sound, not a cry reached his ears now. Nothing but the clumsy suction of his footsteps... Not a soul in sight. M. Laruelle felt slightly chafed too, his trousers bound him. He was getting too fat, had already got too fat in Mexico, which suggested another odd reason some people might have for taking up arms, that would never find its way into the newspapers. Absurdly, he swung his tennis racket in the air, through the motions of a serve, a return: but it was too heavy, he had forgotten about the press. He passed the model farm on his right, the buildings, the fields, the hills shadowy now in the swiftly gathering gloom. The Ferris wheel came into view again, just the top, silently burning high on the hill, almost directly in front of him, then the trees rose up over it. The road, which was terrible and full of pot-holes, went steeply downhill here; he was approaching the little bridge over the barranca, the deep ravine. Half-way across the bridge he stopped; he lit a new cigarette from the one he'd been smoking, and leaned over the parapet, looking down. It was too dark to see the bottom, but: here was finality indeed, and cleavage! Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner. Dormitory for vultures and city Moloch! When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country, though the coincidence could hardly have impressed anyone then! It was on this bridge the Consul had once suggested to him he make a film about Atlantis. Yes, leaning over just like this, drunk but collected, coherent, a little mad, a little impatient--it was one of those occasions when the Consul had drunk himself sober--he had spoken to him about the spirit of the abyss, the god of storm, "huracán," that "testified so suggestively to intercourse between opposite sides of the Atlantic." Whatever he had meant.
Though it was not the first occasion the Consul and he had stood looking into an abyss. For there had always been, ages ago--and how could one now forget it?--the "Hell Bunker': and that other encounter there which seemed to bear some obscure relation to the later one in Maximilian's Palace... Had his discovery of the Consul here in Quauhnahuac really been so extraordinary, the discovery