Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [26]
"--in Tortu," the Consul was saying, though Yvonne was not following, and now they had come out in the Calle Tierra del Fuego itself, a rough narrow dusty street that, deserted, looked quite unfamiliar. The Consul was beginning to shake again.
"Geoffrey, I'm so thirsty, why don't we stop and have a drink?"
"Geoffrey, let's be reckless this once and get tight together before breakfast!"
Yvonne said neither of these things.
--The Street of the Land of Fire! To their left, raised high above road level, were uneven sidewalks with rough steps hewn in them. The whole little thoroughfare, slightly humpbacked in the centre where the open sewers had been filled in, was banked sharply down to the right as though it had once sideslipped in an earthquake. On this side one-storied houses with tiled roofs and oblong barred windows stood flush with the street but seemingly below it. On the other, above them, they were passing small shops, sleepy, though mostly opening or, like the "Molino para Nixtamal, Morelense," open: harness shops, a milk shop under its sign Lechería (brothel, someone insisted it meant, and she hadn't seen the joke), dark interiors with strings of tiny sausages, chorizos, hanging over the counters where you could also buy goat cheese or sweet quince wine or cacao, into one of which the Consul was now, with a "momentito" disappearing. "Just go on and I'll catch you up. I won't be a jiffy."
Yvonne walked on past the place a short distance, then retraced her steps. She had not entered any of these shops since their first week in Mexico and the danger of being recognized in the abarrotes was slight. Nevertheless, repenting her tardy impulse to follow the Consul in, she waited outside, restless as a little yacht turning at anchor. The opportunity to join him ebbed. A mood of martyrdom stole upon her. She wanted the Consul to see her, when he emerged, waiting there, abandoned and affronted. But glancing back the way they had come she forgot Geoffrey an instant.--It was unbelievable. She was in Quauhnahuac again! There was Cortez Palace and there, high on the cliff, a man standing gazing over the valley who from his air of martial intentness might have been Cortez himself. The man moved, spoiling the illusion. Now he looked less like Cortez than the poor young man in the dark glasses who'd been leaning against the wall of the Bella Vista.
" You-are-a-man-who-like-much-Vine! " now issued powerfully from the abarrotes into the peaceful street, followed by a roar of incredibly good-humoured but ruffianly male laughter. "You are—diablo!" There was a pause in which she heard the Consul saying something. "Eggs!" the good-humoured voice exploded again. "You--two diablos! You tree diablos." The voice crackled with glee. "Eggs!" Then: "Who is the beautiful layee?--Ah, you are--ah five diablos, you ah—Eggs!" ludicrously followed the Consul, who appeared at this moment, calmly smiling, on the pavement above Yvonne.
"In Tortu," he was saying as, steadier again, he fell into step beside her, "the ideal University, where no application whatsoever, so I have heard on good authority, nothing, not even athletics, is allowed to interfere with the business of--look out!... drinking."
It came sailing out of nowhere, the child's funeral, the tiny lace-covered coffin followed by the band: two saxophones, bass guitar, a fiddle, playing of all things "La Cucaracha" the women behind, very solemn, while several paces back a few hangers-on were joking, straggling along in the dust almost at a run.
They stood to one side while the little cortege slanted by swiftly in the direction of the town, then walked on in silence not looking at one another. The banking of the street now became less acute and the sidewalks and the shops dropped away. To the left there was only a low blank wall with vacant lots behind it, whereas to the right the houses had turned into low open shanties filled with black carbon. Yvonne's heart, that had been struggling with an insufferable pang, suddenly missed a beat. Though one might not think it they were approaching the residential district, their own terrain.