Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [164]
"And I--" began the Consul.
"Am perfectamente borracho," finished the first policeman, and everyone roared again save the Jefe de Jardineros.
"Y yo--" repeated the Consul, but what was he saying? And who were these people, really? Chief of what Rostrums, Chief of what Municipality, above all, Chief of what Gardens? Surely this silent man in tweeds, sinister too, though apparently the only one unarmed in the group, wasn't the one responsible for all those little public gardens. Albeit the Consul was prompted by a shadowy prescience he already had concerning the claimants to these titular pretensions. They were associated in his mind with the Inspector General of the State and also as he had told Hugh with the Unión Militar. Doubtless he'd seen them here before in one of the rooms or at the bar, but certainly never at such close quarters as this. However so many questions he was unable to answer were being showered upon him by so many different people this significance was almost forgotten. He gathered, though, that the respected Chief of Gardens, to whom at this moment he sent a mute appeal for help, might be even "higher" than the Inspector-General himself. The appeal was answered by a blacker look than ever: at the same time the Consul knew where he'd seen him before; the Chief of Gardens might have been the image of himself when, lean, bronzed, serious, beardless, and at the crossroads of his career, he had assumed the Vice-Consulship in Granada. Innumerable tequilas and mescals were being brought and the Consul drank everything in sight without regard for ownership, "It's not enough to say they were at the El Amor de los Amores together," he heard himself repeating--it must have been in answer to some insistent demand for the story of this afternoon, though why it should be made at all he didn't know--"What matters is how the thing happened. Was the peon--perhaps he wasn't quite a peon--drunk? Or did he fail from his horse? Perhaps the thief just recognized a boon companion who owed him a drink or two--"
Thunder growled outside the Farolito. He sat down. It was an order. Everything was growing very chaotic. The bar was now nearly full. Some of the drinkers had come from the graveyards, Indians in loose-fitting clothes. There were dilapidated soldiers with among them here and there a more smartly dressed officer. He distinguished in the glass rooms bugles and green lariats moving. Several dancers had entered dressed in long black cloaks streaked with luminous paint to represent skeletons. The Chief of Municipality was standing behind him now. The Chief of Rostrums was standing too, talking on his right with the Jefe de Jardineros, whose name, the Consul had discovered, was Fructuoso Sanabria. "Hullo, qué tal?" asked the Consul. Someone was sitting next him with his back half turned who also seemed familiar. He looked like a poet, some friend of his college days. Fair hair fell over his fine forehead. The Consul offered him a drink which this young man not only refused, in Spanish, but rose to refuse, making a gesture with his hand of pushing the Consul away, then moving, with angry half-averted face, to the far end of the bar. The Consul was hurt. Again he sent a mute appeal for help to the Chief of Gardens: he was answered by an implacable, an almost final look. For the first time the Consul scented the tangibility of his danger. He knew Sanabria and the first policemen were discussing him with the utmost hostility, deciding what to do with him. Then he saw they were trying to catch the Chief of Municipality's attention. They were breasting their way, just the two of them, behind the bar again to a telephone he hadn't noticed, and the curious thing about this telephone was that it seemed to be working properly. The Chief of Rostrums did the talking: Sanabria stood by grimly, apparently giving instructions. They were taking their time, and realizing the call would be about him, whatever its nature, the Consul, with a slow burning pain of apprehension, felt again how lonely he was, that all around him in spite of the crowd, the uproar, slightly muted at a gesture from Sanabria, stretched a solitude like the wilderness of grey heaving Atlantic conjured to his eyes a little while since with Mar