Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [160]
--drawing the blanket he had secretly brought down from the hotel room over his head, creeping out past the manager's nephew--the escape!--past the hotel desk, not daring to look for mail--"it is this silence that frightens me"--(can it be there? Is this me? Alas, self-pitying miserable wretch, you old rascal) past
--the escape!--the Indian night-watchman sleeping on the floor in the doorway, and like an Indian himself now, clutching the few pesos he had left, out into the cold walled cobbled city, past
--the escape through the secret passage!--the open sewers in the mean streets, the few lone dim street lamps, into the night, into the miracle that the coffins of houses, the landmarks were still there, the escape down the poor broken sidewalks, groaning, groaning--and how alike are the groans of love, to those of the dying, how alike, those of love, to those of the dying!--and the houses so still, so cold, before dawn, till he saw, rounding the corner safe, the one lamp of El Infierno glowing, that was so like the Farolito, then, surprised once more he could ever have reached it, standing inside the place with his back to the wall, and his blanket still over his head, talking to the beggars, the early workers, the dirty prostitutes, the pimps, the debris and detritus of the streets and the bottom of the earth, but who were yet so much higher than he, drinking just as he had done here in the Farolito, and telling lies, lying--the escape, still the escape!--until the lilac-shaded dawn that should have brought death, and he should have died now too; what have I done?
The Consul's eyes focused a calendar behind the bed. He had reached his crisis at last, a crisis without possession, almost without pleasure finally, and what he saw might have been, no, he was sure it was, a picture of Canada. Under a brilliant full moon a stag stood by a river down which a man and a woman were paddling a birch-bark canoe. This calendar was set to the future, for next month, December: where would he be then? In the dim blue light he even made out the names of the Saints for each December day, printed by the numerals: Santa Natalia, Santa Bibiana, S. Francisco Xavier, Santa Sabos, S. Nicolás de Bari, S. Ambrosio: thunder blew the door open, the face of M. Laruelle faded in the door.
In the mingitorio a stench like mercapatan clapped yellow hands on his face and now, from the urinal walls, uninvited, he heard his voices again, hissing and shrieking and yammering at him: "Now you've done it, now you've really done it, Geoffrey Firmin! Even we can help you no longer... Just the same you might as well make the most of it now, the night's still young..."
"You like María, you like?" A man's voice--that of the chuckler, he recognized--came from the gloom and the Consul, his knees trembling, gazed round him; all he saw at first were slashed advertisements on the slimy feebly lit walls: Clínica Dr. Vigil, Enfermedades Secretas de Ambos Sexos, Vias Urinarias, Trastornos Sexuales, Debilidad Sexual, Derrame? Nocturnos, Emisiones Prematuras, Espermatorrea Impotencia, 666. His versatile companion of this morning and last night might have been informing him ironically all was not yet lost--unfortunately by now he would be well on his way to Guanajuato. He distinguished an incredibly filthy man sitting hunched in the corner on a lavatory seat, so short his trousered feet didn't reach the littered, befouled floor. "You like María?" this man croaked again. "I send. Me amigo." He farted. "Me fliend Englisman all tine, all tine." "¿Qué hora?" asked the Consul, shivering, noticing, in the runnel, a dead scorpion; a sparkle of phosphorescence and it had gone, or had never been there. "What's the time?" "Sick," answered the man. "No, it er ah half past sick by the cock." "You mean half past six by the clock." "Sí señor. Half past sick by the cock."
666.--The pricked peetroot, pickled betroot; the Consul, arranging his dress, laughed grimly at the pimp's reply--or was he some sort of stool pigeon, in the strictest sense of that term? And who was it had said earlier, half past tree by the cock? How had the man known he was English, he wondered, taking his laughter back through the glass-paned rooms, out through the filling bar to the door again--perhaps he worked for the Uni