Under the Volcano

I-5

“The rainy season dies hard,” M. Laruelle smiled as they elbowed their way through into a little cantina which abutted on the cinema without sharing its frontal shelter. The cantina, known as the Cervecería XX, and which was also Vigil’s “place where you know,” was lit by candles stuck in bottles on the bar and on the few tables along the walls. The tables were all full.

“Chingar,” the manager said, under his breath, preoccupied, alert, and gazing about him: they took their places standing at the end of the short bar where there was room for two. “I am very sorry the function must be suspended. But the wires have decomposed. Chingado. Every blessed week something goes wrong with the lights. Last week it was much worse, really terrible. You know we had a troupe from Panama City here trying out a show for Mexico.”

“Do you mind my—”

“No, hombre,” laughed the other—M. Laruelle had asked Sr. Bustamente, who’d now succeeded in attracting the barman’s attention, hadn’t he seen the Orlac picture here before and if so had he revived it as a hit. “—uno—?”

M. Laruelle hesitated: “Tequila,” then corrected himself: “No, anís—anís, por favor, señor.”

“Y una—ah—gaseosa,” Sr. Bustamente told the barman. “No, señor,” he was fingering, appraisingly, still preoccupied, the stuff of M. Laruelle’s scarcely wet tweed jacket. “Compañero, we have not revived it. It has only returned. The other day I show my latest news here too: believe it, the first newsreels from the Spanish war, that have come back again.”

“I see you get some modern pictures still though,” M. Laruelle (he had just declined a seat in the autoridades box for the second showing, if any) glanced somewhat ironically at a garish threesheet of a German film star, though the features seemed carefully Spanish, hanging behind the bar: La simpatiquísima y encantadora María Landrock, notable artista alemana que pronto habremos de ver en sensacional Film.

“—un momentito, señor. Con permiso . . .”

Sr. Bustamente went out, not through the door by which they had entered, but through a side entrance behind the bar immediately on their right, from which a curtain had been drawn back, into the cinema itself. M. Laruelle had a good view of the interior. From it, exactly indeed as though the show were in progress, came a beautiful uproar of bawling children and hawkers selling fried potatoes and frijoles. It was difficult to believe so many had left their seats. Dark shapes of pariah dogs prowled in and out of the stalls. The lights were not entirely dead: they glimmered, a dim reddish orange, flickering. On the screen, over which clambered an endless procession of torchlit shadows, hung, magically projected upside down, a faint apology for the “suspended function”; in the autoridades box three cigarettes were lit on one match. At the rear where reflected light caught the lettering salida of the exit he just made out the anxious figure of Sr. Bustamente taking to his office. Outside it thundered and rained. M. Laruelle sipped his water-clouded anís which was first greenly chilling then rather nauseating. Actually it was not at all like absinthe. But his tiredness had left him and he began to feel hungry. It was already seven o’clock.

Though Vigil and he would probably dine later at the Gambrinus or Charley’s Place. He selected, from a saucer, a quarter lemon and sucked it reflectively, reading a calendar which, next to the enigmatic Maria Landrock, behind the bar portrayed the meeting of Cortez and Moctezuma in Tenochtitlán: El último Emperador Azteca, it said below, Moctezuma y Hernán Cortés representativo de la raza hispana, quedan frente a frente: dos razas y dos civilizaciones que habían llegado a un alto grado de perfección se mezclan para integrar el núcleo de nuestra nacionalidad actual. But Sr. Bustamente was coming back, carrying, in one uplifted hand above a press of people by the curtain, a book . . .

M. Laruelle, conscious of shock, was turning the book over and over in his hands. Then he laid it on the bar counter and took a sip of anís. “Bueno, muchas gracias, señor,” he said.

“De nada,” Sr. Bustamente answered in a lowered tone; he waved aside with a sweeping somehow inclusive gesture, a sombre pillar advancing bearing a tray of chocolate skulls. “Don’t know how long, maybe two, maybe three years aquí.”

M. Laruelle glanced in the flyleaf again, then shut the book on the counter. Above them the rain slammed on the cinema roof. It was eighteen months since the Consul had lent him the thumbed maroon volume of Elizabethan plays. At that time Geoffrey and Yvonne had been separated for perhaps five months. Six more must elapse before she would return. In the Consul’s garden they drifted gloomily up and down among the roses and the plumbago and the waxplants “like dilapidated préservatifs,” the Consul had remarked with a diabolical look at him, a look at the same time almost official, that seemed now to have said: “I know, Jacques, you may never return the book, but suppose I lend it you precisely for that reason, that someday you may be sorry you did not. Oh, I shall forgive you then, but will you be able to forgive yourself? Not merely for not having returned it, but because the book will by then have become an emblem of what even now it is impossible to return.” M. Laruelle had taken the book. He wanted it because for some time he had been carrying at the back of his mind the notion of making in France a modern film version of the Faustus story with some such character as Trotsky for its protagonist: as a matter of fact he had not opened the volume till this minute. Though the Consul had several times asked him for it later he had missed it that same day when he must have left it behind in the cinema. M. Laruelle listened to the water booming down the gutters beneath the one jalousie door of the Cervecería XX which opened into a sidestreet in the far left-hand corner. A sudden thunderclap shook the whole building and the sound echoed away like coal sliding down a chute.

“You know, señor,” he said suddenly, “that this isn’t my book.”

“I know,” Sr. Bustamente replied, but softly, almost in a whisper: “I think your amigo, it was his.” He gave a little confused cough, an appoggiatura. “Your amigo, the bicho—” Sensitive apparently to M. Laruelle’s smile he interrupted himself quietly. “I did not meant b***h; I mean bicho, the one with the blue eyes.” Then, as if there were any longer doubt of whom he spoke he pinched his chin and drew downward from it an imaginary beard. “Your amigo—ah—Señor Firmin. El Consul. The Americano.”

“No. He wasn’t American.” M. Laruelle tried to raise his voice a little. It was hard, for everyone in the cantina had stopped talking and M. Laruelle noticed that a curious hush had also fallen in the theatre. The light had now completely failed and he stared over Sr. Bustamente’s shoulder past the curtain into a graveyard darkness, stabbed by flashes of torchlight like heat lightning, but the vendors had lowered their voices, the children had stopped laughing and crying while the diminished audience sat slackly and bored yet patient before the dark screen, suddenly illumined, swept, by silent grotesque shadows of giants and spears and birds, then dark again, the men along the right-hand balcony, who hadn’t bothered to move or come downstairs, a solid dark frieze carved into the wall, serious, moustachioed men, warriors waiting for the show to begin, for a glimpse of the murderer’s bloodstained hands.

“No?” Sr. Bustamente said softly. He took a sip of his gaseosa, looking too into the dark theatre and then, preoccupied again, around the cantina. “But was it true, then, he was a Consul? For I remember him many times sitting here drinking: and often, the poor guy, he have no socks.”

M. Laruelle laughed shortly. “Yes, he was the British Consul here.” They spoke subduedly in Spanish, and Sr. Bustamente despairing for another ten minutes of the lights, was persuaded to a glass of beer while M. Laruelle himself took a soft drink.

But he had not succeeded in explaining the Consul to the gracious Mexican. The lights had dimly come on again both in the theatre and the cantina, though the show had not recommenced, and M. Laruelle sat alone at a vacated corner table of the Cervecería XX with another anís before him. His stomach would suffer for it: it was only during the last year he had been drinking so heavily. He sat rigidly, the book of Elizabethan plays closed on the table, staring at his tennis racquet propped against the back of the seat opposite he was keeping for Dr. Vigil. He felt rather like someone lying in a bath after all the water has run out, witless, almost dead. Had he only gone home he might have finished his packing by now. But he had not been able even to make the decision to say good-bye to Sr. Bustamente. It was still raining, out of season, over Mexico, the dark waters rising outside to engulf his own zacuali in the Calle Nicaragua, his useless tower against the coming of the second flood. Night of the Culmination of the Pleiades! What, after all, was a Consul that one was mindful of him? Sr. Bustamente, who was older than he looked, had remembered the days of Porfirio Díaz, the days when, in America, every small town along the Mexican border harboured a “Consul.” Indeed Mexican Consuls were to be found even in villages hundreds of miles from that border. Consuls were expected to look after the interests of trade between countries—were they not? But towns in Arizona that did not do ten dollars’ worth of trade a year with Mexico had Consuls maintained by Díaz. Of course, they were not Consuls but spies. Sr. Bustamente knew because before the revolution his own father, a liberal and a member of the Ponciano Arriaga, had been held for three months in prison at Douglas, Arizona (in spite of which Sr. Bustamente himself was going to vote for Almazán), on the orders of a Díaz-maintained Consul. Was it not then reasonable to suppose, he had hinted, without offence, and perhaps not altogether seriously, Señor Firmin was such a Consul, not, it was true, a Mexican Consul, nor of quite the same breed as those others, but an English Consul who could scarcely claim to have the interests of British trade at heart in a place where there were no British interests and no Englishmen, the less so when it was considered that England had severed diplomatic relations with Mexico?

Actually Sr. Bustamente seemed half convinced that M. Laruelle had been taken in, that Señor Firmin had really been a sort of spy, or, as he put it, spider. But nowhere in the world were there people more human or readily moved to sympathy than the Mexicans, vote as they might for Almazán. Sr. Bustamente was prepared to be sorry for the Consul even as a spider, sorry in his heart for the poor lonely dispossessed trembling soul that had sat drinking here night after night, abandoned by his wife (though she came back, M. Laruelle almost cried aloud, that was the extraordinary thing, she came back!) and possibly, remembering the socks, even by his country, and wandering hatless and desconsolado and beside himself around the town pursued by other spiders who, without his ever being quite certain of it, a man in dark glasses he took to be a loafer here, a man lounging on the other side of the road he thought was a peon there, a bald boy with earrings swinging madly on a creaking hammock there, guarded every street and alley entrance, which even a Mexican would no longer believe (because it was not true, M. Laruelle said) but which was still quite possible, as Sr. Bustamente’s father would have assured him, let him start something and find out, just as his father would have assured him that he, M. Laruelle, could not cross the border in a cattletruck, say, without “their” knowing it in Mexico City before he arrived and having already decided what “they” were going to do about it. Certainly Sr. Bustamente did not know the Consul well, though it was his habit to keep his eyes open, but the whole town knew him by sight, and the impression he gave, or gave that last year anyway, apart from being always muy borracho of course, was of a man living in continual terror of his life. Once he had run into the cantina El Bosque, kept by the old woman Gregorio, now a widow, shouting something like “Sanctuario!” that people were after him, and the widow, more terrified than he, had hidden him in the back room for half the afternoon. It was not the widow who’d told him that but Señor Gregorio himself before he died, whose brother was his, Sr. Bustamente’s, gardener, because Señora Gregorio was half English or American herself and had had some difficult explanations to make both to Señor Gregorio and his brother Bernardino. And yet, if the Consul were a “spider,” he was one no longer and could be forgiven. After all, he was simpático himself. Had he not seen him once in this very bar give all his money to a beggar taken by the police?