Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [25]
"I am taking the only way out, semicolon," the Consul offered cheerfully and soberly in passing. "Good-bye, full stop. Change of paragraph, change of chapter, change of worlds--"
The whole scene about her--the names on the shops surrounding the square: La China Poblana, hand-embroidered dresses, the advertisements: Baños de la Libertad, Los mejores de la Capital y los únicos en donde nunca falta el agua, Estufas especiales para Damas y Caballeros: and Sr Panadero: Sí quiere hacer buen pan exija las harinas "Princesa Donaji"--striking Yvonne as so strangely familiar all over again and yet so sharply strange after the year's absence, the severance of thought and body, mode of being, became almost intolerable for a moment. "You might have made use of him to answer some of my letters," she said.
"Look, do you remember what María used to call it?" The Consul, with his stick, was indicating through the trees the little American grocery store, catercorner to Cortez Palace. "Peegly Weegly."
"I won't," Yvonne thought, hurrying on and biting her lips. "I won't cry."
The Consul had taken her arm. "I'm sorry, I never thought."
They emerged on the street again: when they had crossed it she was grateful for the excuse suggested by the printer's shop window for readjustment. They stood, as once, looking in. The shop, adjacent to the Palace, but divided from it by the breadth of a steep narrow street desperate as a winze, was opening early. From the mirror within the window an ocean creature so drenched and coppered by sun and winnowed by sea-wind and spray looked back at her she seemed, even while making the fugitive motions of Yvonne's vanity, somewhere beyond human grief charioting the surf. But the sun turned grief to poison and a glowing body only mocked the sick heart, Yvonne knew, if the sun-darkened creature of waves and sea margins and windows did not! In the window itself, on either side of this abstracted gaze of her mirrored face, the same brave wedding invitations she remembered were ranged, the same touched-up prints of extravagantly floriferous brides, but this time there was something she hadn't seen before, which the Consul now pointed out with a murmur of "Strange," peering closer: a photographic enlargement, purporting to show the disintegration of a glacial deposit in the Sierra Madre, of a great rock split by forest fires. This curious, and curiously sad picture--to which the nature of the other exhibits lent an added ironic poignance--set behind and above the already spinning flywheel of the presses, was called: La Despedida.
They moved on past the front of Cortez Palace, then down its blind side began to descend the cliff that traversed it width-ways. Their path made the short cut to the Calle Tierra del Fuego which curved below to meet them but the cliff was little better than a rubbish heap with smouldering debris and they had to pick their way carefully. Yvonne breathed more freely though, now they were leaving the centre of the town behind. La Despedida, she thought. The Parting. After the damp and detritus had done their work both severed halves of that blasted rock would crumble to earth. It was inevitable, so it said on the picture... Was it really? Wasn't there some way of saving the poor rock whose immutability so short a time ago no one would have dreamed of doubting! Ah, who would have thought of it then as other than a single integrated rock? But granted it had been split, was there no way before total disintegration should set in of at least saving the severed halves? There was no way. The violence of the fire which split the rock apart had also incited the destruction of each separate rock, cancelling the power that might have held them unities. Oh, but why--by some fanciful geologic thaumaturgy, couldn't the pieces be welded together again? She longed to heal the cleft rock. She was one of the rocks and she yearned to save the other, that both might be saved. By a superlapidary effort she moved herself nearer it, poured out her pleas, her passionate tears, told all her forgiveness: the other rock stood unmoved. "That's all very well," it said, "but it happens to be your fault, and as for myself, I propose to disintegrate as I please!"