Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [121]
--But Yvonne Constable had not become a star for the second time. Yvonne Constable had not even been on her way to becoming a star. She had acquired an agent who managed to execute some excellent publicity--excellent in spite of the fact that publicity of any kind, she persuaded herself, was one of her greatest secret fears--on the strength of her earlier rough-riding successes; she received promises, and that was all. In the end she walked alone down Virgil Avenue or Mariposa beneath the dusty dead shallow-planted palms of the dark and accursed City of the Angels without even the consolation that her tragedy was no less valid for being so stale. For her ambitions as an actress had always been somewhat spurious: they suffered in some sense from the dislocations of the functions--she saw this--of womanhood itself. She saw it, and at the same time, now it was all quite hopeless (and now that she had, after everything, outgrown Hollywood), saw that she might under other conditions have become a really first-rate, even a great artist. For that matter what was she if not that now (if greatly directed) as she walked or drove furiously through her anguish and all the red lights, seeing, as might the Consul, the sign in the Town House window "Informal Dancing in the Zebra Room" turn "Infernal"--or "Notice to Destroy Weeds" become "Notice to Newlyweds." While on the hoarding--"Man's public inquiry of the hour"--the great pendulum on the giant blue clock swung ceaselessly. Too late! And it was this, it was all this that had perhaps helped to make meeting Jacques Laruelle in Quauhnahuac such a shattering and ominous thing in her life. It was not merely that they had the Consul in common, so that through Jacques she had been mysteriously able to reach, in a sense to avail herself of, what she had never known, the Consul's innocence; it was only to him that she'd been able to talk of Hollywood (not always honestly, yet with the enthusiasm with which close relatives may speak of a hated parent and with what relief!) on the mutual grounds of contempt and half-admitted failure. Moreover they discovered that they were both there in the same year, in 1932, had been once, in fact, at the same party, outdoor-barbecue-swimming-pool-and-bar; and to Jacques she had shown also, what she had kept hidden from the Consul, the old photographs of Yvonne the Terrible dressed in fringed leather shirts and riding-breeches and high-heeled boots, and wearing a ten-gallon hat, so that in his amazed and bewildered recognition of her this horrible morning, she had wondered was there not just an instant's faltering--for surely Hugh and Yvonne were in some grotesque fashion transposed!... And once too in his studio, where the Consul was so obviously not going to arrive,
M. Laruelle had shown her some stills of his old French films, one of which it turned out--good heavens!--she'd seen in New York soon after going east again. And in New York she'd stood once more (still in Jacques's studio) on that freezing winter night in Times Square--she was staying at the Astor--watching the illuminated news aloft travelling around the Times Building, news of disaster, of suicide, of banks failing, of approaching war, of nothing at all, which, as she gazed upward with the crowd, broke off abruptly, snapped off into darkness, into the end of the world, she had felt, when there was no more news. Or was it--Golgotha? A bereaved and dispossessed orphan, a failure, yet rich, yet beautiful, walking, but not back to her hotel, in the rich fur trappings of alimony, afraid to enter the bars alone whose warmth she longed for then, Yvonne had felt far more desolate than a streetwalker; walking--and being followed, always followed--through the numb brilliant jittering city--the best for less, she kept seeing, or Dead End, or Romeo and Juliet, and then again, the best for less--that awful darkness had persisted in her mind, blackening still further her false wealthy loneliness, her guilty divorced dead helplessness. The electric arrows thrust at her heart--yet they were cheating: she knew, increasingly frightened by it, that darkness to be still there, in them, of them. The cripples jerked themselves slowly past. Men muttered by in whose faces all hope seemed to have died. Hoodlums with wide purple trousers waited where the icy gale streamed into open parlours. And everywhere, that darkness, the darkness of a world without meaning, a world without aim--the best for less--but where everyone save herself, it seemed to her, however hypocritically, however churlish, lonely, crippled, hopeless, was capable, if only in a mechanical crane, a cigarette butt plucked from the street, if only in a bar, if only in accosting Yvonne herself, of finding some faith...le Destin de Yvonne Griffaton... And there she was--and she was still being followed--standing outside the little cinema in Fourteenth Street which showed revivals and foreign films. And there, upon the stills, who could it be, that solitary figure, but herself, walking down the same dark streets, even wearing the same fur coat, only the signs above her and around her said: Dubonnet, Amer Picon, Les 10 Frattelinis, Moulin Rouge. And "Yvonne, Yvonne!" a voice was saying at her entrance, and a shadowy horse, gigantic, filling the whole screen, seemed leaping out of it at her: it was a statue that the figure had passed, and the voice, an imaginary voice, which pursued Yvonne Griffaton down the dark streets, and Yvonne herself too, as if she had walked straight out of that world outside into this dark world on the screen, without taking breath. It was one of those pictures that, even though you have arrived in the middle, grip you with the instant conviction that it is the best film you have ever seen in your life; so extraordinarily complete is its realism, that what the story is all about, who the protagonist may be, seems of small account beside the explosion of the particular moment, beside the immediate threat, the identification with the one hunted, the one haunted, in this case Yvonne Griffaton--or Yvonne Constable! But if Yvonne Griffaton was being followed, was being hunted--the film apparently concerned the downfall of a Frenchwoman of rich family and aristocratic birth--she in turn was also the hunter, was searching, was groping for something, Yvonne couldn't understand what at first, in this shadowy world. Strange figures froze to the walls, or into alleyways, at her approach: they were the figures of her past evidently, her lovers, her one true love who had committed suicide, her father--and as if seeking sanctuary from them, she had entered a church. Yvonne Griffaton was praying, but the shadow of one follower fell on the chancel steps: it was her first lover and at the next moment she was laughing hysterically, she was at the Folies Berg