Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [171]
The Chief of Rostrums was looking down at him. Sanabria stood by silent, grimly rubbing his cheek. "Norteamericano, eh," said the Chief. "Ingles. You Jew." He narrowed his eyes. "What the hell you think you do around here? You pelado, eh? It's no good for your health. I shoot de twenty people." It was half a threat, half confidential. "We have found out--on the telephone--is it right?--that you are a criminal. You want to be a policeman? I make you policeman in Mexico."
The Consul rose slowly to his feet, swaying. He caught sight of the horse, tethered near him. Only now he saw it more vividly and as a whole, electrified: the corded mouth, the shaved wooden pommel behind which tape was hanging, the saddlebags, the mats under the belt, the sore and the glossy shine on the hipbone, the number seven branded on the rump, the stud behind the saddlebuckle glittering like a topaz in the light from the cantina. He staggered towards it.
"I blow you wide open from your knees up, you Jew chingao," warned the Chief of Rostrums, grasping him by the collar, and the Chief of Gardens, standing by, nodded gravely. The Consul, shaking himself free, tore frantically at the horse's bridle. The Chief of Rostrums stepped aside, hand on his holster. He drew his pistol. With his free hand he waved away some tentative onlookers. "I blow you wide open from your knees up, you cabrón," he said, "you pelado."
"No, I wouldn't do that," said the Consul quietly, turning round. "That's a Colt--17, isn't it? It throws a lot of steel shavings."
The Chief of Rostrums pushed the Consul back out of the light, took two steps forward, and fired. Lightning flashed like an inchworm going down the sky and the Consul, reeling, saw above him for a moment the shape of Popocatepetl, plumed with emerald snow and drenched with brilliance. The Chief fired twice more, the shots spaced, deliberate. Thunderclaps crashed on the mountains and then at hand. Released, the horse reared; tossing its head, it wheeled round and plunged neighing into the forest.
At first the Consul felt a queer relief. Now he realized he had been shot. He fell on one knee, then, with a groan, flat on his face in the grass. "Christ," he remarked, puzzled, "this is a dingy way to die."
A bell spoke out:
Dolente... dolore!
It was raining softly. Shapes hovered by him, holding his hand, perhaps still trying to pick his pockets, or to help, or merely curious. He could feel life slivering out of him like liver, ebbing into the tenderness of the grass. He was alone. Where was everybody? Or had there been no one? Then a face shone out of the gloom, a mask of compassion. It was the old fiddler, stooping over him. "Compañero--" he began. Then he had vanished.
Presently the word pelado began to fill his whole consciousness. That had been Hugh's word for the thief: now someone had flung the insult at him. And it was as if, for a moment, he had become the pelado, the thief--yes, the pilferer of meaningless muddled ideas out of which his rejection of life had grown, who had worn his two or three little bowler hats, his disguises, over these abstractions: now the realest of them all was close. But someone had called him compañero too, which was better, much better. It made him happy. These thoughts drifting through his mind were accompanied by music he could hear only when he listened carefully. Mozart was it? The Siciliana. Finale of the D minor quartet by Moses. No, it was something funereal, of Gluck's perhaps, from Alcestis. Yet there was a Bach-like quality to it. Bach? A clavichord, heard from far away, in England in the seventeenth century. England. The chords of a guitar too, half lost, mingled with the distant clamour of a waterfall and what sounded like the cries of love.
He was in Kashmir, he knew, lying in the meadows near running water among violets and trefoil, the Himalayas beyond, which made it all the more remarkable he should suddenly be setting out with Hugh and Yvonne to climb Popocatepetl. Already they had drawn ahead. "Can you pick bougainvillea?" he heard Hugh say, and, "Be careful," Yvonne replied, "It's got spikes on it and you have to look at everything to be sure there're no spiders." "We shoota de espiders in Mexico," another voice muttered. And with this Hugh and Yvonne had gone. He suspected they had not only climbed Popocatepetl but were by now far beyond it. Painfully he trudged the slope of the foothills toward Amecameca alone. With ventilated snow goggles, with alpenstock, with mittens and a wool cap pulled over his ears, with pockets full of dried prunes and raisins and nuts, with a jar of rice protruding from one coat pocket, and the Hotel Fausto's information from the other, he was utterly weighed down. He could go no farther. Exhausted, helpless, he sank to the ground. No one would help him even if they could. Now he was the one dying by the wayside where no good Samaritan would halt. Though it was perplexing there should be this sound of laughter in his ears, of voices: ah, he was being rescued at last. He was in an ambulance shrieking through the jungle itself, racing uphill past the timberline toward the peak--and this was certainly one way to get there!--while those were friendly voices around him, Jacques's and Vigil's, they would make allowances, would set Hugh and Yvonne's minds at rest about him. "No se puede vivir sin amar," they would say, which would explain everything, and he repeated this aloud. How could he have thought so evil of the world when succour was at hand all the time? And now he had reached the summit. Ah, Yvonne, sweetheart, forgive me! Strong hands lifted him. Opening his eyes, he looked down, expecting to see, below him, the magnificent jungle, the heights, Pico de Orizabe, Malinche, Cofre de Perote, like those peaks of his life conquered one after another before this greatest ascent of all had been successfully, if unconventionally, completed. But there was nothing there: no peaks, no life, no climb. Nor was this summit a summit exactly: it had no substance, no firm base. It was crumbling too, whatever it was, collapsing, while he was falling, falling into the volcano, he must have climbed it after all, though now there was this noise of foisting lava in his ears, horribly, it was in eruption, yet no, it wasn't the volcano, the world itself was bursting, bursting into black spouts of villages catapulted into space, with himself falling through it all, through the inconceivable pandemonium of a million tanks, through the blazing of ten million burning bodies, falling, into a forest, falling--