Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [123]
--"Thank you." Hugh had passed her the pinch bottle of habanero also absently. She took a sip and gave it to the Consul who sat holding the bottle gloomily in his hands without drinking. And had he not, too, met her at the Bus Terminal?
Yvonne glanced around the grandstand: there was not, so far as she could see, in this whole gathering one other woman save a gnarled old Mexican selling pulque. No, she was wrong. An American couple had just climbed up the scaffolding farther down, a woman in a dove-grey suit, and a man with hornrimmed spectacles, a slight stoop, and hair worn long at the back, who looked like an orchestra conductor; it was the couple Hugh and she had seen before in the zócalo, at a corner Novedades buying huaraches and strange rattles and masks, and then later, from the bus, on the church steps, watching the natives dancing. How happy they seemed in one another; lovers they were, or on their honeymoon. Their future would stretch out before them pure and untrammelled as a blue and peaceful lake, and thinking of this Yvonne's heart felt suddenly light as that of a boy on his summer holidays, who rises in the morning and disappears into the sun.
Instantly Hugh's shack began to take form in her mind. But it was not a shack--it was a home! It stood, on wide-girthed strong legs of pine, between the forest of pine and high, high waving alders and tall slim birches, and the sea. There was the narrow path that wound down through the forest from the store, with salmonberries and thimbleberries and wild blackberry bushes that on bright winter nights of frost reflected a million moons; behind the house was a dogwood tree that bloomed twice in the year with white stars. Daffodils and snowdrops grew in the little garden. There was a wide porch where they sat on spring mornings, and a pier going right out into the water. They would build this pier themselves when the tide was out, sinking the posts one by one down the steep slanting beach. Post by post they'd build it until one day they could dive from the end into the sea. The sea was blue and cold and they would swim every day, and every day climb back up a ladder on to their pier, and run straight along it into their house. She saw the house plainly now; it was small and made of silvery weathered shingles, it had a red door, and casement windows, open to the sun. She saw the curtains she had made herself, the Consul's desk, his favourite old chair, the bed, covered with brilliant Indian blankets, the yellow light of the lamps against the strange blue of long June evenings, the crab-apple tree that half supported the open sunny platform where the Consul would work in summer, the wind in the dark trees above and the surf beating along the shore on stormy autumn nights; and then the mill-wheel reflections of sunlight on water, as Hugh described those on the Cervecería Quauhnahuac, only sliding down the front of their house, sliding, sliding, over the windows, the walls, the reflections that, above and behind the house, turned the pine boughs into green chenille: and at night they stood on their pier and watched the constellations, Scorpio and Triangulum, Bootes and the Great Bear, and then the millwheel reflections would be of moonlight on water ceaselessly sliding down the wooden walls of silver overlapping shingles, the moonlight that on the water also embroidered their waving windows--
And it was possible. It was possible! It was all there, waiting for them. If only she were alone with Geoffrey so she could tell him of it! Hugh, his cowboy hat on the back of his head, his feet in their high-heeled boots on the seat in front, seemed now an interloper, a stranger, part of the scene below. He was watching the rigging of the bull with intense interest, but becoming conscious of her gaze, his eyelids drooped nervously and he sought and found his cigarette package, corroborating its emptiness more with his fingers than his eyes.
Down in the arena a bottle was passed among the men on horseback who handed it to the others working on the bull. Two of the horsemen galloped about the ring aimlessly. The spectators bought lemonade, fruit, potato chips, pulque. The Consul himself made as if to buy some pulque but changed his mind, fingering the habanero bottle.