Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [22]
" Don't you love these early mornings?" The Consul's voice, but not his hand, was perfectly steady as now he put the timetable down. "Have, as our friend next door suggests," he inclined his head towards the partition, "a--" the name on the trembling, offered, and rejected cigarette package struck her: Alas! "--"
The Consul was saying with gravity: "Ah, Hornos.--But why come via Cape Horn? It has a bad habit of wagging its tail, sailors tell me. Or does it mean ovens?"
"--Calle Nicaragua, cincuenta dos." Yvonne pressed a tostón on a dark god by this time in possession of her bags who bowed and disappeared obscurely.
"What if I didn't live there any longer." The Consul, sitting down again, was shaking so violently he had to hold the bottle of whisky he was pouring himself a drink from with both hands. "Have a drink?"
Or should she? She should: even though she hated drinking in the morning she undoubtedly should: it was what she had made up her mind to do if necessary, not to have one drink alone but a great many drinks with the Consul. But instead she could feel the smile leaving her face that was struggling to keep back the tears she had forbidden herself on any account, thinking and knowing Geoffrey knew she was thinking: "I was prepared for this, I was prepared for it." "You have one and I'll cheer," she found herself saying. (As a matter of fact she had been prepared for almost anything. After all, what could one expect? She had told herself all the way down on the ship, a ship because she would have time on board to persuade herself her journey was neither thoughtless nor precipitate, and on the plane when she knew it was both, that she should have warned him, that it was abominably unfair to take him by surprise.) "Geoffrey," she went on, wondering if she seemed pathetic sitting there, all her carefully thought-out speeches, her plans and tact so obviously vanishing in the gloom, or merely repellent--she felt slightly repellent--because she wouldn't have a drink. "What have you done? I wrote you and wrote you. I wrote till my heart broke. What have you done with your--"
"--life," came from beyond the glass partition. "What a life! Christ, it's a shame! Where I come from they don't run. We're going through busting this way--"
"--No. I thought of course you'd returned to England, when you didn't answer. What have you done? Oh Geoff--have you resigned from the service?"
"--went down to Fort Sale. Took your shoeshot. And took your Brownings.--Jump, jump, jump, jump, jump--see, get it--"
"I ran into Louis in Santa Barbara. He said you were still here."
"--and like hell you can, you can't do it, and that's what you do in Alabama! "
"Well, actually I've only been away once." The Consul took a long shuddering drink, then sat down again beside her. "To Oaxaca.--Remember Oaxaca?"
"--Oaxaca?--"
"--Oaxaca.--"
--The word was like a breaking heart, a sudden peal of stifled bells in a gale, the last syllables of one dying of thirst in the desert. Did she remember Oaxaca! The roses and the great tree, was that, the dust and the buses to Etla and Nochitlán? and: "damas acompañadas de un caballero, gratis." Or at night their cries of love, rising into the ancient fragrant Mayan air, heard only by ghosts? In Oaxaca they had found each other once. She was watching the Consul who seemed less on the defensive than in process while straightening out the leaflets on the bar of changing mentally from the part played for Fernando to the part he would play for her, watching him almost with amazement: "Surely this cannot be us," she cried in her heart suddenly. "This cannot be us--say that it is not, somebody, this cannot be us here!"--Divorce. What did the word really mean? She'd looked it up in the dictionary, on the ship: to sunder, to sever. And divorced meant: sundered, severed. Oaxaca meant divorce. They had not been divorced there but that was where the Consul had gone when she left, as if into the heart of the sundering, of the severance. Yet they had loved one another! But it was as though their love were wandering over some desolate cactus plain, far from here, lost, stumbling and falling, attacked by wild beasts, calling for help--dying, to sigh at last, with a kind of weary peace: Oaxaca--