Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [73]
But what had happened then? "Oh," the Consul cried aloud again. "Oh." The faces of the last hour hovered before him, the figures of Hugh and Yvonne and Dr. Vigil moving quickly and jerkily now like those of an old silent film, their words mute explosions in the brain. Nobody seemed to be doing anything important; yet everything seemed of the utmost hectic importance, for instance Yvonne saying: "We saw an armadillo"--"What, no Tarsius spectres!" he had replied, then Hugh opening the freezing bottle of Carta Blanca beer for him, prizing off the fizzing cap on the edge of the parapet and decanting the foam into his glass, the contiguity of which to his strychnine bottle had, it must be admitted now, lost most of its significance...
In the bathroom the Consul became aware he still had with him half a glass of slightly flat beer; his hand was fairly steady, but numbed holding the glass, he drank cautiously, carefully postponing the problem soon to be raised by its emptiness.
--"Nonsense," he said to Hugh. And he had added with impressive consular authority that Hugh couldn't leave immediately anyway, at least not for Mexico City, that there was only one bus today, the one Hugh'd come on, which had gone back to the City already, and one train that didn't leave till 11.45 p.m....
Then: "But wasn't it Bougainville, doctor?" Yvonne was asking--and it really was astonishing how sinister and urgent and inflamed all these minutiae seemed to him in the bathroom--"Wasn't it Bougainville who discovered the bougainvillea?" while the doctor bending over her flowers merely looked alert and puzzled, he said nothing save with his eyes which perhaps barely betrayed that he'd stumbled on a "situation."--"Now I come to think of it, I believe it was Bougainville. Hence the name," Hugh observed fatuously, seating himself on the parapet--"Sí: you can go to the botica and so as not to be misunderstood, say favor de servir una toma de vino quinado o en su defecto una toma de nuez vómica, pero--" Dr. Vigil was chuckling, talking to Hugh it must have been, Yvonne having slipped into her room a moment, while the Consul, eavesdropping, was at the icebox for another bottle of beer--then; "Oh, I was so terrible sick this morning I needed to be holding myself to the street windows, and to the Consul himself as he returned. "--Please forgive my stupid comport last night: oh, I have done a lot of stupid things everywhere these last few days, but"--raising his glass of whisky--"I will never drink more; I will need two full days of sleeping to recover myself"--and then, as Yvonne returned--magnificently giving the whole show away, raising his glass to the Consul again: "Salud: I hope you are not as sick as I am. You were so perfectamente borracho last night I think you must have killed yourself with drinking. I think even to send a boy after you this morning to knock your door, and find if drinking have not killed you already," Dr. Vigil had said.
A strange fellow: in the bathroom the Consul sipped his flat beer. A strange, decent, generous-hearted fellow, if slightly deficient in tact save on his own behalf. Why couldn't people hold their liquor? He himself had still managed to be quite considerate of Vigil's position in Quincey's garden. In the final analysis there was no one you could trust to drink with you to the bottom of the bowl. A lonely thought. But of the doctor's generosity there was little doubt. Before long indeed, in spite of the necessary "two full days of sleeping," he had been inviting them all to come with him to Guanajuato: recklessly he proposed leaving for his holiday by car this evening, after a problematic