Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [23]
-'The strange thing about this little corpse, Yvonne," the Consul was saying, "is that it must be accompanied by a person holding its hand: no, sorry. Apparently not its hand, just a first-class ticket." He held up, smiling, his own right hand which shook as with a movement of wiping chalk from an imaginary blackboard. "It's really the shakes that make this kind of life insupportable. But they will stop: I was only drinking enough so they would. Just the necessary, the therapeutic drink." Yvonne looked back at him. "--but the shakes are the worst of course," he was going on. "You get to like the other after a while, and I'm really doing very well, I'm much better than I was six months ago, very much better than I was, say, in Oaxaca"--noticing a curious familiar glare in his eyes that always frightened her, a glare turned inward now like one of those sombrely brilliant cluster-lamps down the hatches of the Pennsylvania on the work of unloading, only this was a work of spoliation: and she felt a sudden dread lest this glare, as of old, should swing outward, turn upon her.
"God knows I've seen you like this before," her thoughts were saying, her love was saying, through the gloom of the bar, "too many times for it to be a surprise anyhow. You are denying me again. But this time there is a profound difference. This is like an ultimate denial--oh Geoffrey, why can't you turn back? Must you go on and on for ever into this stupid darkness, seeking it, even now, where I cannot reach you, ever on into the darkness of the sundering, of the severance!--Oh Geoffrey, why do you do it!"
"But look here, hang it all, it is not altogether darkness," the Consul seemed to be saying in reply to her, gently, as he produced a half-filled pipe and with the utmost difficulty lit it, and as her eyes followed his as they roved around the bar, not meeting those of the barman, who had gravely, busily effaced himself into the background, "you misunderstand me if you think it is altogether darkness I see, and if you insist on thinking so, how can I tell you why I do it? But if you look at that sunlight there, ah, then perhaps you'll get the answer, see, look at the way it falls through the window: what beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the early morning? Your volcanoes outside? Your stars--Ras Algethi? Antares raging south south-east? Forgive me, no. Not so much the beauty of this one necessarily, which, a regression on my part, is not perhaps properly a cantina, but think of all the other terrible ones where people go mad that will soon be taking down their shutters, for not even the gates of heaven, opening wide to receive me, could fill me with such celestial complicated and hopeless joy as the iron screen that rolls up with a crash, as the unpadlocked jostling jalousies which admit those whose souls tremble with the drinks they carry unsteadily to their lips. All mystery, all hope, all disappointment, yes, all disaster, is here, beyond those swinging doors. And, by the way, do you see that old woman from Tarasco sitting in the corner, you didn't before, but do you now?" his eyes asked her, gazing round him with the bemused unfocused brightness of a lover's, his love asked her, "how, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old woman from Tarasco who plays dominoes at seven o'clock in the morning?"
It was true, it was almost uncanny, there was someone else in the room she hadn't noticed until the Consul, without a word, had glanced behind them: now Yvonne's eyes came to rest on the old woman, who was sitting in the shadow at the bar's one table. On the edge of the table her stick, made of steel with some animal's claw for a handle, hung like something alive. She had a little chicken on a cord which she kept under her dress over her heart. The chicken peeped out with pert, jerky, sidelong glances. She set the little chicken on a table near her where it pecked among the dominoes, uttering tiny cries. Then she replaced it, drawing her dress tenderly over it. But Yvonne looked away. The old woman with her chicken and the dominoes chilled her heart. It was like an evil omen.