Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [144]
... It was as if, almost, he were standing upon that black open station platform, where he had gone--had he gone?--that day after drinking all night to meet Lee Maitland returning from Virginia at 7.40 in the morning, gone, light-headed, light-footed, and in that state of being where Baudelaire's angel indeed wakes, desiring to meet trains perhaps, but to meet no trains that stop, for in the angel's mind are no trains that stop, and from such trains no one descends, not even another angel, nor even a fair-haired one, like Lee Maitland.--Was the train late? Why was he pacing the platform? Was it the second or third train from Suspension Bridge--Suspensión!--" Tlax--" the Consul repeated. "I choose--"
He was in a room, and suddenly in this room, matter was disjunct: a doorknob was standing a little way out from the door. A curtain floated in by itself, unfastened, unattached to anything. The idea struck him it had come in to strangle him. An orderly little clock behind the bar called him to his senses, its ticking very loud; Tlax: tlax: tlax: tlax... Half past five. Was that all? "Hell," he finished absurdly. "Because--" He produced a twenty-peso note and laid it on the table.
"I like it," he called to them, through the open window, from outside. Cervantes stood behind the bar, with scared eyes, holding the cockerel. "I love hell. I can't wait to get back there. In fact I'm running. I'm almost back there already."
He was running too, in spite of his limp, calling back to them crazily, and the queer thing was, he wasn't quite serious, running toward the forest, which was growing darker and darker, tumultuous above--a rush of air swept out of it, and the weeping pepper tree roared.
He stopped after a while: all was calm. No one had come after him. Was that good? Yes, it was good, he thought, his heart pounding. And since it was so good he would take the path to Parián, to the Farolito.
Before him the volcanoes, precipitous, seemed to have drawn nearer. They towered up over the jungle, into the lowering sky--massive interests moving up in the background.
11
Sunset. Eddies of green and orange birds scattered aloft with ever wider circlings like rings on water. Two little pigs disappeared into the dust at a gallop. A woman passed swiftly, balancing on her head, with the grace of a Rebecca, a small light bottle...
Then, the Salón Ofelia at last behind them, there was no more dust. And their path became straight, leading on through the roar of Water past the bathing place, where, reckless, a few late bathers lingered, toward the forest.
Straight ahead, in the north-east, lay the volcanoes, the towering dark clouds behind them steadily mounting the heavens.
--The storm, that had already dispatched its outriders, must have been travelling in a circle: the real onset was yet to come. Meantime the wind had dropped and it was lighter again, though the sun had gone down at their back slightly to their left, in the south-west, where a red blaze fanned out into the sky over their heads.
The Consul had not been in the Todos Contentos y Yo También. And now, through the warm twilight, Yvonne was walking before Hugh, purposely too fast for talking. None the less his voice (as earlier that day the Consul's own) pursued her.
"You know perfectly well I won't just run away and abandon him," she said.
"Christ Jesus, this never would have happened if I hadn't been here!"
"Something else would probably have happened."
The jungle closed over them and the volcanoes were blotted out. Yet it was still not dark. From the stream racing along beside them a radiance was cast. Big yellow flowers, resembling chrysanthemums, shining like stars through the gloom, grew on either side of the water. Wild bougainvillea, brick-red in the half-light, occasionally a bush with white handbells, tongue downwards, started out at them, every little while a notice nailed to a tree, a whittled, weather-beaten arrow pointing, with the words hardly visible: a la Cascada--
Farther on worn-out ploughshares and the rusted and twisted chassis of abandoned American cars bridged the stream which they kept always to their left.