Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [156]
Closing his eyes again, standing there, glass in hand, he thought for a minute with a freezing detached almost amused calm of the dreadful night inevitably awaiting him whether he drank much more or not, his room shaking with daemonic orchestras, the snatches of fearful tumultuous sleep, interrupted by voices which were really dogs barking, or by his own name being continually repeated by imaginary parties arriving, the vicious shouting, the strumming, the slamming, the pounding, the battling with insolent archfiends, the avalanche breaking down the door, the proddings from under the bed, and always, outside, the cries, the wailing, the terrible music, the dark: spinets: he returned to the bar.
Diosdado, the Elephant, had just entered from the back. The Consul watched him discard his black coat, hang it in the closet, then feel in the breast pocket of his spotless white shirt for a pipe protruding from it. He took this out and began to fill it from a package of Country Club el Bueno Tono tobacco. The Consul remembered now about his pipe: here it was, no doubt about that.
"Sí, sí, mistair," he replied, listening with bent head to the Consul's query. "Claro. No--my ah peeper no Inglés. Monterey peeper. You were--ah--borracho one day then. ¿No señor?
"¿Como no?" said the Consul.
"Twice a day."
"You was dronk three times a day," Diosdado said, and his look, the insult, the implied extent of his downfall, penetrated the Consul. "Then you'll be going back to America now," he added, rummaging behind the bar.
"I--no--por qué?"
Diosdado suddenly slapped a fat package of envelopes fastened with elastic on the bar counter. "¿--es suyo?" he asked directly.
Where are the letters Geoffrey Firmin the letters the letters she wrote till her heart broke? Here were the letters, here and nowhere else: these were the letters and this the Consul knew immediately without examining the envelopes. When he spoke he could not recognize his own voice:
"Sí, señor, muchas gracias," he said.
"De nada, señor." The Godgiven turned away.
La rame inutile fatigua vainement une mer immobile... The Consul could not move for a full minute. He could not even make a move toward a drink. Then he began to trace sideways in spilled liquor a little map on the bar. Diosdado came back and watched with interest. "España," the Consul said, then his Spanish failing him, "You are Spanish, señor?"
"Sí, sí, señor, si," said Diosdado, watching, but in a new tone. "Español. España."
"These letters you gave me--see?--are from my wife, my esposa. ¿Claro? This is where we met. In Spain. You recognize it, your old home, you know Andalusia? That, up there, that's the Guadalquivir. Beyond there, the Sierra Morena. Down there's Almeria. Those," he traced with his finger, "lying between, are the Sierra Nevada mountains. And there's Granada. That is the place. The very place we met." The Consul smiled.
"Granada," said Diosdado, sharply, in a different, harder pronunciation to the Consul's. He gave him a searching, an important, suspicious look, then left him again. Now he was speaking to a group at the other end of the bar. Faces were turned in the Consul's direction.
The Consul carried another drink with Yvonne's letters into an inner room, one of the boxes in the Chinese puzzle. He hadn't remembered before they were framed in dull glass, like cashiers' offices in a bank. In this room he was not really surprised to find the old Tarascan woman of the Bella Vista this morning. Her tequila, surrounded by dominoes, was set before her on the round table. Her chicken pecked among them. The Consul wondered if they were her own; or was it just necessary for her to have dominoes wherever she happened to be? Her stick with the claw handle hung, as though alive, on the edge of the table. The Consul moved to her, drank half his mescal, took off his glasses, then slipped the elastic from the package.
--"Do you remember tomorrow?" he read. No, he thought; the words sank like stones in his mind.--It was a fact that he was losing touch with his situation... He was dissociated from himself, and at the same time he saw this plainly, the shock of receiving the letters having in a sense waked him, if only, so to say, from one somnambulism into another; he was drunk, he was sober, he had a hangover; all at once; it was after six in the evening, yet whether it was being in the Farolito, or the presence of the old woman in this glass-framed room where an electric light was burning, he seemed back in the early morning again: it was almost as if he were yet another kind of drunkard, in different circumstances, in another country, to whom something quite different was happening: he was like a man who gets up half stupefied with liquor at dawn, chattering, "Jesus this is the kind of fellow I am, Ugh! Ugh!" to see his wife off by an early bus, though it is too late, and there is the note on the breakfast table. "Forgive me for being hysterical yesterday, such an outburst was certainly not excused on any grounds of your having hurt me, don't forget to bring in the milk," beneath which he finds written, almost as an afterthought: "Darling, we can't go on like this, it's too awful, I'm leaving--" and who, instead of perceiving the whole significance of this, remembers incongruously he told the barman at too great length last night how somebody's house burned down--and why has he told him where he lives, now the police will be able to find out--and why is the barman's name Sherlock? an unforgettable name!--and having a glass of port and water and three aspirin, which make him sick, reflects that he has five hours before the pubs open when he must return to that same bar and apologize... But where did I put my cigarette? and why is my glass of port under the bathtub? and was that an explosion I heard, somewhere in the house?