Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [150]
Hugh sat down: "I had a tequila outside with the guitar hombre...
"Well," he added, "I'm definitely not going to try and get to Mexico City tonight, and that once decided there're various things we might do about Geoff."
"I'd rather like to get tight," Yvonne said.
"Como tu quieras. It might be a good idea."
"Why did you say it would be a good idea to get tight?" Yvonne was asking over the new mescals; then, "What did you get a guitar for?" she repeated.
"To sing with. To give people the lie with maybe."
"What are you so strange for, Hugh? To give what people what lie?"
Hugh tilted back his chair until it touched the parapet behind him, then sat like that, smoking, nursing his mescal in his lap.
"The kind of lie Sir Walter Raleigh meditates, when he addresses his soul. "The truth shall be thy warrant. Go, since I needs must die. And give the world the lie. Say to the court it glows, and shines like rotten wood. Say to the church it shows, what's good and doth no good. If Church and Court reply, then give them both the lie."That sort of thing, only slightly different."
"You're dramatizing yourself, Hugh. Salud y pesetas."
"Salud y pesetas."
"Salud y pesetas."
He stood, smoking, drink in hand, leaning against the dark monastic archway and looking down at her:
"But on the contrary," he was saying, "we do want to do good, to help, to be brothers in distress. We will even condescend to be crucified, on certain terms. And are, for that matter, regularly, every twenty years or so. But to an Englishman it's such terribly bad form to be a bona-fide martyr. We may respect with one part of our minds the integrity, say, of men like Gandhi, or Nehru. We may even recognize that their selflessness, by example, might save us. But in our hearts we cry "Throw the bloody little man in the river." Or "Set Barabbas free!" "O'Dwyer for ever!" Jesus!--It's even pretty bad form for Spain to be a martyr too; in a very different way of course... And if Russia should prove--"
Hugh was saying all this while Yvonne was scanning a document he'd just skimmed on to the table for her. It was an old soiled and creased menu of the house simply, that seemed to have been picked up from the floor, or spent a long period in someone's pocket, and this she read, with alcoholic deliberation, several times:
"EL POPO"
SERVICIO A LA CARTE
Sopa de ajo ….. $0.30
Enchiladas de salsa verde ….. $0.30
Chiles rellenos ….. $0.30
Rajas a la "Popo" ….. $0.30
Machitos en salsa verde ….. $0.30
Menudo estilo sonora ….. $0.30
Pierna de ternera al horno ….. $0.30
Cabrito al horno ….. $0.30
Asado de pollo ….. $0.30
Chuletas de cerdo ….. $0.30
Filete con papas o al gusto ….. $0.30
Sándwiches ….. $0.30
Frijoles refritos ….. $0.30
Chocolate a la española ….. $0.30
Chocolate a la francesa ….. $0.30
Café solo o con leche ….. $0.30
This much was typed in blue and underneath it--she made out with the same deliberation--was a design like a small wheel round the inside of which was written "Lotería Nacional Para La Beneficencia Pública," making another circular frame, within which appeared a sort of trade or hallmark representing a happy mother caressing her child.
The whole left side of the menu was taken up by a full-length lithographic portrait of a smiling young woman surmounted by the announcement that Hotel Restaurant El Popo se observa la más estricta moralidad, siendo esta disposición de su propietario una garantía para el pasajero, que llegue en compañía: Yvonne studied this woman: she was buxom and dowdy, with a quasi-American coiffure, and she was wearing a long, confetti-coloured print dress: with one hand she was beckoning roguishly, while with the other she held up a block of ten lottery tickets, on each of which a cowgirl was riding a bucking horse and (as if these ten minute figures were Yvonne's own reduplicated and half-forgotten selves waving good-bye to herself) waving her hand.
"Well," she said.
"No, I meant on the other side," Hugh said.
Yvonne turned the menu over and then sat staring blankly.
The back of the menu was almost covered by the Consul's handwriting at its most chaotic. At the top on the left was written: