Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [158]
The Consul stood up--Yvonne had certainly been reading something--bowed to the old woman, and went out into the bar he'd imagined filling up behind him, but which was still fairly deserted. Who indeed was to stand between? He posted himself at the door again, as sometimes before in the deceptive violet dawn: who indeed could prevent? Once more he stared at the square. The same ragged platoon of soldiers still seemed to be crossing it, as in some disrupted movie repeating itself. The corporal still toiled at his copperplate handwriting under the archway, only his lamp was alight. It was getting dark. The police were nowhere to be seen. Though by the barranca the same soldier was still asleep under a tree; or wasn't it a soldier, but something else? He looked away. Black clouds were boiling up again, there was a distant breaking of thunder. He breathed the oppressive air in which there was a slight hint of coolness. Who indeed, even now, was to stand between? he thought desperately,
Who indeed even now could prevent? He wanted Yvonne at this moment, to take her in his arms, wanted more than ever to be forgiven, and to forgive: but where should he go? Where would he find her now? A whole unlikely family of indeterminate class were strolling past the door: the grandfather in front, correcting his watch, peering at the dim barracks clock that still said six, the mother laughing and drawing her rebozo over her head, mocking the probable storm (up in the mountains two drunken gods standing far apart were still engaged in an endlessly indecisive and wildly swinging game of bumblepuppy with a Burmese gong), the father by himself smiling proudly, contemplatively, clicking his fingers, flicking a speck of dust now from his fine brown shiny boots. Two pretty little children with limpid black eyes were walking between them hand in hand. Suddenly the elder child freed her sister's hand, and turned a succession of cartwheels on the lush grass plot. All of them were laughing. The Consul hated to look at them... They'd gone anyway, thank God. Miserably he wanted Yvonne and did not want her. "¿Quiere María?" a voice spoke softly behind him.
At first he saw only the shapely legs of the girl who was leading him, now by the constricted power of aching flesh alone, of pathetic trembling yet brutal lust, through the little glass-paned rooms, that grew smaller and smaller, darker and darker, until by the mingitorio, the "Señores," out of whose evil-smelling gloom broke a sinister chuckle, there was merely a lightless annex no larger than a cupboard in which two men whose faces he couldn't see either were sitting, drinking or plotting.
Then it struck him that some reckless murderous power was drawing him on, forcing him, while he yet remained passionately aware of the all too possible consequences and somehow as innocently unconscious, to do without precaution or conscience what he would never be able to undo or gainsay, leading him irresistibly out into the garden--lightning-filled at this moment, it reminded him queerly of his own house, and also of El Popo, where earlier he had thought of going, only this was grimmer, the obverse of it--leading him through the open door into the darkening room, one of many giving on the patio.
So this was it, the final stupid unprophylactic rejection. He could prevent it even now. He would not prevent it. Yet perhaps his familiars, or one of his voices, might have some good advice: he looked about him, listening; erectis whoribus. No voices came! Suddenly he laughed: it had been clever of him to trick his voices. They didn't know he was here. The room itself, in which gleamed a single blue electric bulb, was not sordid: at first sight it was a student's room. In fact it closely resembled his old room at college, only this was more spacious. There were the same great doors and a bookcase in a familiar place, with a book open on top of the shelves. In one corner, incongruously, stood a gigantic sabre. Kashmir! He imagined he'd seen the word, then it had gone. Probably he had seen it, for the book, of all things, was a Spanish history of British India. The bed was disorderly and covered with footmarks, even what appeared bloodstains, though this bed too seemed akin to a student's cot. He noticed by it an almost empty bottle of mescal. But the floor was red flagstone and somehow its cold strong logic cancelled the horror; he finished the bottle. The girl who had been shutting the double doors while addressing him in some strange language, possibly Zapotecan, came toward him and he saw she was young and pretty. Lightning silhouetted against the window a face, for a moment curiously like Yvonne's. "Quiere Mar