Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [20]
"But why, Fernando, why should a corpse be transported by express, do you suppose?"
The Mexican taxi-driver, familiar too, who'd just picked up her bags--there'd been no taxi at the tiny Quauhnahuac airfield though, only the bumptious station wagon that insisted on taking her to the Bella Vista--put them down again on the pavement as to assure her: I know why you're here, but no one's recognized you except me, and I won't give you away. "Sí señora," he chuckled. "Señora--El Cónsul." Sighing, he inclined his head with a certain admiration towards the bar window. "¡Qué hombre!"
"--on the other hand, damn it, Fernando, why shouldn't it? Why shouldn't a corpse be transported by express?"
" Absolutamente necesario"
" --Just a bunch of Alladamnbama farmers! "
The last was yet another voice. So the bar, open all night for the occasion, was evidently full. Ashamed, numb with nostalgia and anxiety, reluctant to enter the crowded bar, though equally reluctant to have the taxi-driver go in for her, Yvonne, her consciousness so lashed by wind and air and voyage she still seemed to be travelling, still sailing into Acapulco harbour yesterday evening through a hurricane of immense and gorgeous butterflies swooping seaward to greet the Pennsylvania--at first it was as though fountains of multicoloured stationery were being swept out of the saloon lounge--glanced defensively round the square, really tranquil in the midst of this commotion, of the butterflies still zigzagging overhead or past the heavy open ports, endlessly vanishing astern, their square, motionless and brilliant in the seven o'clock morning sunlight, silent yet somehow poised, expectant, with one eye half open already, the merry-go-rounds, the Ferris wheel, lightly dreaming, looking forward to the fiesta later--the ranged rugged taxis too that were looking forward to something else, a taxi strike that afternoon, she'd been confidentially informed. The zócalo was just the same in spite of its air of slumbering Harlequin. The old bandstand stood empty, the equestrian statue of the turbulent Huerta rode under the nutant trees wild-eyed evermore, gazing over the valley beyond which, as if nothing had happened and it was November 1936 and not November 1938, rose, eternally, her volcanoes, her beautiful, beautiful volcanoes. Ah, how familiar it all was: Quauhnahuac, her town of cold mountain water swiftly running. Where the eagle stops! Or did it really mean, as Louis said, near the wood? The trees, the massive shining depths of these ancient fresno trees, how had she ever lived without them? She drew a deep breath, the air had yet a hint about it of dawn, the dawn this morning at Acapulco--green and deep purple high above and gold scrolled back to reveal a river of lapis where the horn of Venus burned so fiercely she could imagine her dim shadow cast from its light on the airfield, the vultures floating lazily up there above the brick-red horizon into whose peaceful foreboding the little plane of the Compañía Mexicana de Aviación had ascended, like a minute red demon, winged emissary of Lucifer, the windsock below streaming out its steadfast farewell.
She took in the zócalo with a long final look--the untenanted ambulance that might not have moved since she'd last been here, outside the Servicio de Ambulancia within Cortez Palace, the huge paper poster strung between two trees which said Hotel Bella Vista Gran Baile Noviembre 1938 a Beneficio de la Cruz Roja. Los Mejores Artistas del radio en acción. No falte Vd., beneath which some of the guests were returning home, pallid and exhausted as the music that struck up at this moment and reminded her the ball was still proceeding--then entered the bar silently, blinking, myopic in the swift leathery perfumed alcoholic dusk, the sea that morning going in with her, rough and pure, the long dawn rollers advancing, rising, and crashing down to glide, sinking, in colourless ellipses over the sand, while early pelicans hunting turned and dived, dived and turned and dived again into the spume, moving with the precision of planets, the spent breakers racing back to their calm; flotsam was scattered all along the beach: she had heard, from the small boats tossing in the Spanish Main, the boys, like young Tritons, already beginning to blow on their mournful conch shells...