Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [114]
"The diplomatic thing, doubtless."
The Consul went to see to Yvonne; the other passengers, shielding their faces against the dust, climbed on board the bus which had continued to the detour where, stalled, it waited still as death, as a hearse. Hugh ran to the Indian. His breathing sounded fainter, and yet more laboured. An uncontrollable desire to see his face again seized Hugh and he stooped over him. Simultaneously the Indian's right hand raised itself in a blind groping gesture, the hat was partially pushed away, a voice muttered or groaned one word: "Compañero."
--"The hell they won't," Hugh was saying, why he scarcely knew, a moment later to the Consul. But he'd detained the camion, whose engine had started once more, a little longer, and he watched the three smiling vigilantes approach, tramping through the dust, with their holsters slapping their thighs.
"Come on, Hugh, they won't let you on the bus with him, and you'll only get hauled into jail and entangled in red tape for Christ knows how long," the Consul was saying. "They're not the pukka police anyhow, only those birds I told you about... Hugh--"
"Momentito--" Hugh was almost immediately expostulating with one of the vigilantes--the other two had gone over to the Indian--while the driver, wearily, patiently, honked. Then the policeman pushed Hugh towards the bus: Hugh pushed back. The policeman dropped his hand and began to fumble with his holster: it was a manoeuvre, not to be taken seriously. With his other hand he gave Hugh a further shove, so that, to maintain balance, Hugh was forced to ascend the rear step of the bus which, at that instant suddenly, violently, moved away with them. Hugh would have jumped down only the Consul, exerting his strength, held him pinned to a stanchion.
"Never mind, old boy, it would have been worse than the windmills."--"What windmills?"
Dust obliterated the scene...
The bus thundered on, reeling, cannonading, drunk. Hugh sat staring at the quaking, shaking floor.
--Something like a tree stump with a tourniquet on it, a severed leg in an army boot that someone picked up, tried to unlace, and then put down, in a sickening smell of petrol and blood, half reverently on the road; a face that gasped for a cigarette, turned grey, and was cancelled; headless things, that sat, with protruding windpipes, fallen scalps, bolt upright in motor cars; children piled up, many hundreds; screaming burning things; like the creatures, perhaps, in Geoff's dreams; among the stupid props of war's senseless Titus Andronicus, the horrors that could not even make a good story, but which had been, in a flash, evoked by Yvonne when they got out, Hugh moderately case-hardened, could have acquitted himself, have done something, have not done nothing...
Keep the patient absolutely quiet in a darkened room. Brandy may sometimes be given to the dying.
Hugh guiltily caught the eye of an old woman. Her face was completely expressionless... Ah, how sensible were these old women, who at least knew their own mind, who had made a silent communal decision to have nothing to do with the whole affair. No hesitation, no fluster, no fuss. With what solidarity, sensing danger, they had clutched their baskets of poultry to them, when they stopped, or peered round to identify their property, then had sat, as now, motionless. Perhaps they remembered the days of revolution in the valley, the blackened buildings, the communications cut off, those crucified and gored in the bull-ring, the pariah dogs barbecued in the market place. There was no callousness in their faces, no cruelty. Death they knew, better than the law, and their memories were long. They sat ranked now, motionless, frozen, discussing nothing, without a word, turned to stone. It was natural to have left the matter to the men. And yet, in these old women it was as if, through the various tragedies of Mexican history, pity, the impulse to approach, and terror, the impulse to escape (as one had learned at college), having replaced it, had finally been reconciled by prudence, the conviction it is better to stay where you are.