Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [12]
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 some day 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 side-street 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 mean bitch; 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 illuminated, 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 frieze carved into the wall, serious, moustachioed men, warriors waiting for the show to begin, for a glimpse of the murderer's bloodstained hands.