Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [155]
Popocatepetl towered through the window, its immense flanks partly hidden by rolling thunderheads; its peak blocking the sky, it appeared almost right overhead, the barranca, the Farolito, directly beneath it. Under the volcano! It was not for nothing the ancients had placed Tartarus under Mt Aetna, nor within it, the monster Typhoeus, with his hundred heads and--relatively--fearful eyes and voices.
Turning, the Consul took his drink over to the open door. A mercurochrome agony down the west. He stared out at Parián. There, beyond a grass plot, was the inevitable square with its little public garden. To the left, at the edge of the barranca, a soldier slept under a tree. Half facing him, to the right, on an incline, stood what seemed at first sight a ruined monastery or waterworks. This was the grey turreted barracks of the Military Police he had mentioned to Hugh as the reputed Unión Militar headquarters. The building, which also included the prison, glowered at him with one eye, over an archway set in the forehead of its low facade: a clock pointing to six. On either side of the archway the barred windows in the Comisario de Policía and the Policía de Seguridad looked down on a group of soldiers talking, their bugles slung over their shoulders with bright green lariats. Other soldiers, puttees flapping, stumbled at sentry duty. Under the archway, in the entrance to the courtyard, a corporal was working at a table, on which stood an unlighted oil lamp. He was inscribing something in copperplate handwriting, the Consul knew, for his rather unsteady course hither--not so unsteady however as in the square at Quauhnahuac earlier, but still disgraceful--had brought him almost on top of him. Through the archway, grouped round the courtyard beyond, the Consul could make out dungeons with wooden bars like pigpens. In one of them a man was gesticulating. Elsewhere, to the left, were scattered huts of dark thatch, merging into the jungle which on all sides surrounded the town, glowing now in the unnatural livid light of approaching storm.
A Few Fleas having returned, the Consul went to the bar for his change. The boy, not hearing apparently, slopped some mescal into his glass from the beautiful gourd. Handing it back he upset the toothpicks. The Consul said nothing further about the change for the moment. However he made a mental note to order for his next drink something costing more than the fifty centavos he had already laid down. In this way he saw himself gradually recovering his money. He argued absurdly with himself that it was necessary to remain for this alone. He knew there was another reason yet couldn't place his finger on it. Every time the thought of Yvonne recurred to him he was aware of this. It seemed indeed then as though he must stay here for her sake, not because she would follow him here--no, she had gone, he'd let her go finally now, Hugh might come, though never she, not this time, obviously she would return home and his mind could not travel beyond that point--but for something else. He saw his change lying on the counter, the price of the mescal not deducted from it. He pocketed it all and came to the door again. Now the situation was reversed; the boy would have to keep an eye on him. It lugubriously diverted him to imagine, for A Few Fleas' benefit, though half aware the preoccupied boy was not watching him at all, he had assumed the blue expression peculiar to a certain type of drunkard, tepid with two drinks grudgingly on credit, gazing out of an empty saloon, an expression that pretends he hopes help, any kind of help, may be on its way, friends, any kind of friends coming to rescue him. For him life is always just around the corner, in the form of another drink at a new bar. Yet he really wants none of these things. Abandoned by his friends, as they by him, he knows that nothing but the crushing look of a creditor lives round that corner. Neither has he fortified himself sufficiently to borrow more money, nor obtain more credit; nor does he like the liquor next door anyway. Why am I here, says the silence, what have I done, echoes the emptiness, why have I ruined myself in this wilful manner, chuckles the money in the till, why have I been brought so low, wheedles the thoroughfare, to which the only answer was--The square gave him no answer. The little town, that had seemed empty, was filling up as evening wore on. Occasionally a moustachioed officer swaggered past, with a heavy gait, slapping his swagger stick on his leggings. People were returning from the cemeteries, though perhaps the procession would not pass for some time. A ragged platoon of soldiers were marching across the square. Bugles blared. The police too--those who were not on strike, or had been pretending to be on duty at the graves, or the deputies, it was not easy to get the distinction between the police and the military clear in one's mind either--had arrived in force. Con German friends, doubtless. The corporal was still writing at his table; it oddly reassured him. Two or three drinkers pushed their way past him into the Farolito, tasselled sombreros on the backs of their heads, holsters slapping their thighs. Two beggars had arrived and were taking up their posts outside the bar, under the tempestuous sky. One, legless, was dragging himself through the dust like a poor seal. But the other beggar, who boasted one leg, stood up stiffly, proudly, against the cantina wall as if waiting to be shot. Then this beggar with one leg leaned forward: he dropped a coin into the legless man's outstretched hand. There were tears in the first beggar's eyes. The Consul now observed that on his extreme right some unusual animals resembling geese, but large as camels, and skinless men, without heads, upon stilts, whose animated entrails jerked along the ground, were issuing out of the forest path the way he had come. He shut his eyes from this and when he opened them someone who looked like a policeman was leading a horse up the path, that was all. He laughed, despite the policeman, then stopped. For he saw that the face of the reclining beggar was slowly changing to Se