Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [13]
"No?" Sr Bustamente said softly. He took a sip of his gaseosa, looking too into the dark theatre and then, preoccupied again, around the cantina. "But was it true, then, he was a Consul? For I remember him many time sitting here drinking: and often, the poor guy, he have no socks."
M. Laruelle laughed shortly. "Yes, he was the British Consul here." They spoke subduedly in Spanish, and Sr Bustamente despairing for another ten minutes of the lights, was persuaded to a glass of beer while M. Laruelle himself took a soft drink.
But he had not succeeded in explaining the Consul to the gracious Mexican. The lights had dimly come on again both in the theatre and the cantina, though the show had not recommenced, and M. Laruelle sat alone at a vacated corner table of the Cervecería XX with another anís before him. His stomach would suffer for it: it was only during the last year he had been drinking so heavily. He sat rigidly, the book of Elizabethan plays closed on the table, staring at his tennis racket propped against the back of the seat opposite he was keeping for Dr. Vigil. He felt rather like someone lying in a bath after all the water has run out, witless, almost dead. Had he only gone home he might have finished his packing by now. But he had not been able to even make the decision to say good-bye to Sr Bustamente. It was still raining, out of season, over Mexico, the dark waters rising outside to engulf his own zacuali in the Calle Nicaragua, his useless tower against the coming of the second flood. Night of the Culmination of the Pleiades! What, after all, was a Consul that one was mindful of him? Sr Bustamente, who was older than he looked, had remembered the days of Porfirio Diaz, the days when, in America, every small town along the Mexican border harboured a "Consul." Indeed Mexican Consuls were to be found even in villages hundreds of miles from that border. Consuls were expected to look after the interests of trade between countries--were they not? But towns in Arizona that did not do ten dollars" worth of trade a year with Mexico had Consuls maintained by Diaz. Of course, they were not Consuls but spies. Sr Bustamente knew because before the revolution his own father, a liberal and a member of the Ponciano Arriaga, had been held for three months in prison at Douglas, Arizona (in spite of which Sr Bustamente himself was going to vote for Almazan), on the orders of a Diaz-maintained Consul. Was it not then reasonable to suppose, he had hinted, without offence, and perhaps not altogether seriously, Señor Firmin was such a Consul, not, it was true, a Mexican Consul, nor of quite the same breed as those others, but an English Consul who could scarcely claim to have the interests of British trade at heart in a place where there were no British interests and no Englishmen, the less so when it was considered that England had severed diplomatic relations with Mexico?
Actually Sr Bustamente seemed half convinced that M. Laruelle had been taken in, that Señor Firmin had really been a sort of spy, or, as he put it, spider. But nowhere in the world were there people more human or readily moved to sympathy than the Mexicans, vote as they might for Almazan. Sr Bustamente was prepared to be sorry for the Consul even as a spider, sorry in his heart for the poor lonely dispossessed trembling soul that had sat drinking here night after night, abandoned by his wife (though she came back, M. Laruelle almost cried aloud, that was the extraordinary thing, she came back!) and possibly, remembering the socks, even by his country, and wandering hatless and desconsolado and beside himself around the town pursued by other spiders who, without his ever being quite certain of it, a man in dark glasses he took to be a loafer here, a man lounging on the other side of the road he thought was a peon there, a bald boy with ear-rings swinging madly on a creaking hammock there, guarded every street and alley entrance, which even a Mexican would no longer believe (because it was not true, M. Laruelle said) but which was still quite possible, as Sr Bustamente's father would have assured him, let him start something and find out, just as his father would have assured him that he, M. Laruelle, could not cross the border in a cattle truck, say, without "their" knowing it in Mexico City before he arrived and having already decided what "they" were going to do about it. Certainly Sr Bustamente did not know the Consul well, though it was his habit to keep his eyes open, but the whole town knew him by sight, and the impression he gave, or gave that last year anyway, apart from being always muy borracho of course, was of a man living in continual terror of his life. Once he had run into the cantina El Bosque, kept by the old woman Gregorio, now a widow, shouting something like "