Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [132]
The roaring rose, died away, rose again; guitar chords mingled with the shouting of many voices, calling, chanting, like native women in Kashmir, pleading, above the noise of the maelstrom: "Borrrrraaacho," they wailed. And the dark room with its flashing doorway rocked under his feet.
"--what do you think, Yvonne, if sometime we climb that baby, Popo I mean--"
"Good heavens why! Haven't you had enough exercise for one--"
"--might be a good idea to harden your muscles first, try a few small peaks."
They were joking. But the Consul was not joking. His second mescal had become serious. He left it still unfinished on the counter, Señor Cervantes was beckoning from a far corner.
A shabby little man with a black shade over one eye, wearing a black coat, but a beautiful sombrero with long gay tassels down the back, he seemed, however savage at heart, in almost as highly nervous a state as himself. What magnetism drew these quaking ruined creatures into his orbit? Cervantes led the way behind the bar, ascended two steps, and pulled a curtain aside. Poor lonely fellow, he wanted to show him round his house again. The Consul made the steps with difficulty. One small room occupied by a huge brass bedstead. Rusty rifles in a rack on the wall. In one corner, before a tiny porcelain Virgin, burned a little lamp. Really a sacramental candle, it diffused a ruby shimmer through its glass into the room, and cast a broad yellow flickering cone on the ceiling: the wick was burning low. "Mistair," Cervantes tremulously pointed to it. "Señor. My grandfather tell me never to let her go out." Mescal tears came to the Consul's eyes, and he remembered sometime during last night's debauch going with Dr. Vigil to a church in Quauhnahuac he didn't know, with sombre tapestries, and strange votive pictures, a compassionate Virgin floating in the gloom, to whom he prayed, with muddily beating heart, he might have Yvonne again. Dark figures, tragic and isolated, stood about the church, or were kneeling--only the bereaved and lonely went there. "She is the Virgin for those who have nobody with," the doctor told him, inclining his head towards the image. "And for mariners on the sea." Then he knelt in the dirt and placing his pistol--for Dr. Vigil always went armed to Red Cross Balls--on the floor beside him, said sadly, "Nobody come here, only those who have nobody them with." Now the Consul made this Virgin the other who had answered his prayer and as they stood in silence before her, prayed again. "Nothing is altered and in spite of God's mercy I am still alone. Though my suffering seems senseless I am still in agony. There is no explanation of my life." Indeed there was not, nor was this what he'd meant to convey. "Please let Yvonne have her dream--dream?--of a new life with me--please let me believe that all that is not an abominable self-deception," he tried... "Please let me make her happy, deliver me from this dreadful tyranny of self. I have sunk low. Let me sink lower still, that I may know the truth. Teach me to love again, to love life." That wouldn't do either... "Where is love? Let me truly suffer. Give me back my purity, the knowledge of the Mysteries, that I have betrayed and lost.--Let me be truly lonely, that I may honestly pray. Let us be happy again somewhere, if it's only together, if it's only out of this terrible world. Destroy the world!" he cried in his heart. The Virgin's eyes were turned down in benediction, but perhaps she hadn't heard.--The Consul had scarcely noticed that Cervantes had picked up one of the rifles. "I love hunting." After replacing it he opened the bottom drawer of a wardrobe which was squeezed in another corner. The drawer was chock full of books, including the History of Tlaxcala, in ten volumes. He shut it immediately. "I am an insignificant man, and I do not read these books to prove my insignificance," he said proudly. "Sí hombre," he went on, as they descended to the bar again, "as I told you, I obey my grandfather. He tell me to marry my wife. So I call my wife my mother." He produced a photograph of a child lying in a coffin and laid it on the counter. "I drank all day."