Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [149]
"Well," he was saying, "this is somewhat different from the Cervecería Quauhnahuac... Indeed!... Yes, I guess I'll always remember this morning. The sky was so blue, wasn't it?"
"And the woolly dog and the foals that came with us and the river with those swift birds overhead--"
"How far to the Farolito now?"
"About a mile and a half. We can cut nearly a mile if we take the forest path."
"In the dark?"
"We can't wait very long if you're going to make the last bus back to Quauhnahuac. It's after six now. I can't drink this beer, can you?"
"No. It tastes like gun-metal--hell--Christ," Hugh said, "let's--"
"Have a different drink," Yvonne proposed, half ironically.
"Couldn't we phone?"
"Mescal," Yvonne said brightly.
The air was so full of electricity it trembled.
"Comment?"
"Mescal, por favor," Yvonne repeated, shaking her head solemnly, sardonically. "I've always wanted to find out what Geoffrey sees in it."
"¿Como no? let's have two mescals."
But Hugh had still not returned when the two drinks were brought by a different waiter questioning the gloom, who, balancing the tray on one palm, switched on another light.
The drinks Yvonne had had at dinner and during the day, relatively few though they'd been, lay like swine on her soul: some moments passed before she reached out her hand and drank.
Sickly, sullen, and ether-tasting, the mescal produced at first no warmth in her stomach, only, like the beer, a coldness, a chill. But it worked. From the porch outside a guitar, slightly out of tune; struck up La Paloma, a Mexican voice was singing, and the mescal was still working. It had in the end the quality of a good hard drink. Where was Hugh? Had he found the Consul here, after all? No: she knew he was not here. She gazed round the El Popo, a soulless draughty death that ticked and groaned, as Geoff himself once said--a bad ghost of an American road-house; but it no longer appeared so awful. She selected a lemon from the table and squeezed a few drops into her glass and all this took her an inordinately long time to do.
All at once she became conscious she was laughing unnaturally to herself, something within her was smouldering, was on fire: and once more, too, in her brain a picture shaped of a woman ceaselessly beating her fists on the ground...
But no, it was not herself that was on fire. It was the house of her spirit. It was her dream. It was the farm, it was Orion, the Pleiades, it was their house by the sea. But where was the fire? It was the Consul who had been the first to notice it. What were these crazy thoughts, thoughts without form or logic? She stretched out her hand for the other mescal, Hugh's mescal, and the fire went out, was overwhelmed by a sudden wave through her whole being of desperate love and tenderness for the Consul.
--very dark and clear with an onshore wind, and the sound of surf you couldn't see, deep in the spring night the summer stars were overhead, presage of summer, and the stars bright; clear and dark, and the moon had not risen; a beautiful strong clean onshore wind, and then the waning moon rising over the water, and later, inside the house, the roar of unseen surf beating in the night--
"How do you like the mescal?"
Yvonne jumped up. She had been almost crouching over Hugh's drink; Hugh, swaying, stood over her, carrying under his arm a long battered key-shaped canvas case.
"What in the world have you got there?" Yvonne's voice was blurred and remote.
Hugh put the case on the parapet. Then he laid on the table an electric torch. It was a boy scout contraption like a ship's ventilator with a metal ring to slip your belt through. "I met the fellow on the porch Geoff was so bloody rude to in the Salón Ofelia and I bought this from him. But he wanted to sell his guitar and get a new one so I bought that too. Only ocho pesos cincuenta--"
"What do you want a guitar for? Are you going to play the Internationale or something on it, on board your ship?" Yvonne said.
"How's the mescal?" Hugh said again.
"Like ten yards of barbed-wire fence. It nearly took the top of my head off. Here, this is yours, Hugh, what's left of it."