Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [100]
"--the truth is, I suppose, that sometimes, when you've calculated the amount exactly, you do see more clearly," M. Laruelle was admitting a minute later.
"Against death." The Consul sank back easily in his chair. "My battle for the survival of the human consciousness."
"But certainly not the things so important to us despised sober people, on which the balance of any human situation depends. It's precisely your inability to see them, Geoffrey, that turns them into the instruments of the disaster you have created yourself. Your Ben Jonson, for instance, or perhaps it was Christopher Marlowe, your Faust man, saw the Carthaginians fighting on his big toe-nail. That's like the kind of clear seeing you indulge in. Everything seems perfectly clear, because indeed it is perfectly clear, in terms of the toe-nail."
"Have a devilled scorpion," invited the Consul, pushing over the camarones with extended arm. "A bedevilled cabrón."
"I admit the efficacy of your tequila--but do you realize that while you're battling against death, or whatever you imagine you're doing, while what is mystical in you is being released, or whatever it is you imagine is being released, while you're enjoying all this, do you realize what extraordinary allowances are being made for you by the world which has to cope with you, yes, are even now being made by me?"
The Consul was gazing upward dreamily at the Ferris wheel near them, huge, but resembling an enormously magnified child's structure of girders and angle brackets, nuts and bolts, in Meccano; tonight it would be lit up, its steel twigs caught in the emerald pathos of the trees; the wheel of the law rolling; and it bore thinking of too that the carnival was not going in earnest now. What a hullabaloo there would be later! His eye fell on another little carrousel, a dazzle-painted wobbling child's toy, and he saw himself as a child making up his mind to go on it, hesitating, missing the next opportunity, and the next, missing all the opportunities finally, until it was too late. What opportunities, precisely, did he mean? A voice on the radio somewhere began to sing a song: Samaritana mía, alma pía, bebe en tu boca linda, then went dead. It had sounded like Samaritana.
"And you forget what you exclude from this, shall we say, feeling of omniscience. And at night, I imagine, or between drink and drink, which is a sort of night, what you have excluded, as if it resented that exclusion, returns--"
"I'll say it returns," the Consul said, listening at this point. "There are other minor deliriums too, meteora, which you can pick out of the air before your eyes, like gnats. And this is what people seem to think is the end... But d.t.'s are only the beginning, the music round the portal of the Qliphoth, the overture, conducted by the God of Flies... Why do people see rats? These are the sort of questions that ought to concern the world, Jacques. Consider the word remorse. Remors. Mordeo, mordere. La Mordida! Agenbite too... And why rongeur? Why all this biting, all those rodents, in the etymology?"
"Facilis est descensus Averno... It's too easy."
"You deny the greatness of my battle? Even if I win. And I shall certainly win, if I want to," the Consul added, aware of a man near them standing on a step-ladder nailing a board to a tree.
"]e crois que le vautour est doux a Prométhée et que les Ixion se plaisent en Enfers."
--¡Box!
"To say nothing of what you lose, lose, lose, are losing, man. You fool, you stupid fool... You've even been insulated from the responsibility of genuine suffering... Even the suffering you do endure is largely unnecessary. Actually spurious. It lacks the very basis you require of it for its tragic nature. You deceive yourself. For instance that you're drowning your sorrows... Because of Yvonne and me. But Yvonne knows. And so do I. And so do you. That Yvonne wouldn't have been aware. If you hadn't been so drunk all the time. To know what she was doing. Or care. And what's more. The same thing is bound to happen again you fool it will happen again if you don't pull yourself together. I can see the writing on the wall. Hullo."