Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [19]
Lift up your eyes unto the hills, I seem to hear a voice saying. Sometimes, when I see the little red mail plane fly in from Acapulco at seven in the morning over the strange hills, or more probably hear, lying trembling, shaking, and dying in bed (when I am in bed at that time)--just a tiny roar and gone--as I reach out babbling for the glass of mescal, the drink that I can never believe even in raising to my lips is real, that I have had the marvellous foresight to put within easy reach the night before, I think that you will be on it, on that plane every morning as it goes by, and will have come to save me. Then the morning goes by and you have not come. But oh, I pray for this now, that you will come. On second thoughts I do not see why from Acapulco. But for God's sake, Yvonne, hear me, my defences are down, at the moment they are down--and there goes the plane, I heard it in the distance then, just for an instant, beyond Tomalín--come back, come back. I will stop drinking, anything. I am dying without you. For Christ Jesus" sake Yvonne come back to me, hear me, it is a cry, come back to me, Yvonne, if only for a day...
M. Laruelle began very slowly to fold up the letter again, smoothing the creases carefully between finger and thumb, then almost without thinking he had crumpled it up. He sat holding the crumpled paper in one fist on the table staring, deeply abstracted, around him. In the last five minutes the scene within the cantina had wholly changed. Outside the storm seemed over but the Cervecería XX meantime had filled with peasants, evidently refugees from it. They were not sitting at the tables, which were empty--for while the show had still not recommenced most of the audience had filed back into the theatre, now fairly quiet as in immediate anticipation of it--but crowded by the bar. And there was a beauty and a sort of piety about this scene. In the cantina both the candles and the dim electric lights still burned. A peasant held two little girls by the hand while the floor was covered with baskets, mostly empty and leaning against each other, and now the barman was giving the younger of the two children an orange: someone went out, the little girl sat on the orange, the jalousie door swung and swung and swung. M. Laruelle looked at his watch--Vigil would not come for half an hour yet--and again at the crumpled pages in his hand. The fresh coolness of rain-washed air came through the jalousie into the cantina and he could hear the rain dripping off the roofs and the water still rushing down the gutters in the street and from the distance once more the sounds of the fair. He was about to replace the crumpled letter in the book when, half absently, yet on a sudden definite impulse, he held it into the candle flame. The flare lit up the whole cantina with a burst of brilliance in which the figures at the bar--that he now saw included besides the little children and the peasants who were quince or cactus farmers in loose white clothes and wide hats, several women in mourning from the cemeteries and dark-faced men in dark suits with open collars and their ties undone--appeared, for an instant, frozen, a mural: they had all stopped talking and were gazing round at him curiously^ all save the barman who seemed momentarily about to object, then lost interest as M. Laruelle set the writhing mass in an ashtray, where beautifully conforming it folded upon itself, a burning castle, collapsed, subsided to a ticking hive through which sparks like tiny red worms crawled and flew, while above a few grey wisps of ashes floated in the thin smoke, a dead husk now, faintly crepitant... Suddenly from outside, a bell spoke out, then ceased abruptly: dolente... dolore! Over the town, in the dark tempestuous night, backwards revolved the luminous wheel.
2
... "A corpse will be transported by express!"
The tireless resilient voice that had just lobbed this singular remark over the Bella Vista bar window-sill into the square was, though its owner remained unseen, unmistakable and achingly familiar as the spacious flower-boxed balconied hotel itself, and as unreal, Yvonne thought.