Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [105]
"No, it can't be helped."
"If you har your wife you would lose all things in that love," Señora Gregorio said, and the Consul, understanding that somehow this conversation was being taken up where it had been left off weeks before, probably at the point where Yvonne had abandoned him for the seventh time that evening, found himself not caring to change the basis of shared misery on which their relationship rested--for Gregorio had really abandoned her before he died--by informing her his wife had come back, was indeed, perhaps, not fifty feet away. "Both minds is occupied in one thing, so you can't lose it," she continued sadly.
"Sí--," said the Consul.
"So it is. If your mind is occupied with all things, then you never lose your mind. Your minds, your life--your everything in it. Once when I was a girl I never used to think I live like I laugh now. I always used to dream about kernice dreams. Nice clothes, nice hairts--"Everything is good for me just now' it was one time, theatres, but everything--now, I don't think of but nothing but trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble; and trouble comes... So it is."
"Sí--, Señora Gregorio."
"Of course I was a kernice girl from home," she was saying. "This--" she glanced contemptuously round the dark little bar, "was never in my mind. Life changes, you know, you can never drink of it." "Not 'drink of it,' Señora Gregorio, you mean 'think of it.'" "Never drink of it. Oh, well," she said, pouring out a litre of raw alcohol for a poor noseless peon who had entered silently and was standing in a corner, "a kernice life among kernice people and now what?"
Señora Gregorio shuffled off into the back room, leaving the Consul alone. He sat with his second large tequila untouched for some minutes. He imagined himself drinking it yet had not the will to stretch out his hand to take it, as if it were something once long and tediously desired but which, an overflowing cup suddenly within reach, had lost all meaning. The cantina's emptiness, and a strange ticking like that of some beetle, within that emptiness, began to get on his nerves; he looked at his watch: only seventeen minutes past two. This was where the tick was coming from. Again he imagined himself taking the drink: again his will failed him. Once the swing door opened, someone glanced round quickly to satisfy himself, went out: was that Hugh, Jacques? Whoever it was had seemed to possess the features of both, alternately. Somebody else entered and, though the next instant the Consul felt this was not the case, went right through into the back room, peering round furtively. A starving pariah dog with the appearance of having lately been skinned had squeezed itself in after the last man; it looked up at the Consul with beady, gentle eyes. Then, thrusting down its poor wrecked dinghy of a chest, from which raw withered breasts drooped, it began to bow and scrape before him. Ah, the ingress of the animal kingdom! Earlier it had been the insects; now these were closing in upon him again, these animals, these people without ideas: "Dispense usted, por Dios," he whispered to the dog, then wanting to say something kind, added, stooping, a phrase read or heard in youth or childhood: "For God sees how timid and beautiful you really are, and the thoughts of hope that go with you like little white birds--" The Consul stood up and suddenly declaimed to the dog: "Yet this day, pichicho, shalt thou be with me in--" But the dog hopped away in terror on three legs and slunk under the door.
The Consul finished his tequila in one gulp; he went to the counter. "Señora Gregorio," he called; he waited, casting his eyes about the cantina, which seemed to have grown very much lighter. And the echo came back: "Orio."--Why, the mad pictures of the wolves! He had forgotten they were here. The materialized pictures, six or seven of considerable length, completed, in the defection of the muralist, the decoration of El Bosque. They were precisely the same in every detail. All showed the same sleigh being pursued by the same pack of wolves. The wolves hunted the occupants of the sleigh the entire length of the bar and at intervals right round the room, though neither sleigh nor wolves budged an inch in the process. To what red tartar, oh mysterious beast? Incongruously, the Consul was reminded of Rostov's wolf hunt in War and Peace--ah, that incomparable party afterwards at the old uncle's, the sense of youth, the gaiety, the love! At the same time he remembered having been told that wolves never hunted in packs at all. Yes, indeed, how many patterns of life were based on kindred misconceptions, how many wolves do we feel on our heels, while our real enemies go in sheepskin by? "Se