Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [31]
Yvonne disengaged her arm to lift a tentacle from a trumpet vine growing across the path:
"Oh Geoffrey! Where're my camellias?--"
"God knows." The lawn was divided by a dry runnel parallel with the house bridged by a spurious plank. Between floribundia and rose a spider wove an intricate web. With pebbly cries a covey of tyrant flycatchers swept over the house in quick dark flight. They crossed the plank and they were on the "stoop."
An old woman with a face of a highly intellectual black gnome the Consul always thought (mistress to some gnarled guardian of the mine beneath the garden once, perhaps), and carrying the inevitable mop, the trapeador or American husband, over her shoulder, shuffled out of the "front" door, scraping her feet--the shuffling and the scraping however seemingly unidentified, controlled by separate mechanisms. "Here's Concepta," the Consul said. Yvonne: "Concepta. Concepta, Señora Firmin." The gnome smiled a childlike smile that momentarily transformed its face into an innocent girl's. Concepta wiped her hands on her apron: she was shaking hands with Yvonne as the Consul hesitated, seeing now, studying with sober interest (though at this point all at once he felt more pleasantly "tight" than at any time since just before that blank period last night) Yvonne's luggage on the stoop before him, three bags and a hatbox so bespangled with labels they might have burst forth into a kind of bloom, to be saying too, here is your history: Hotel Hilo Honolulu, Villa Carmona Granada, Hotel Theba Algeciras, Hotel Peninsula Gibraltar, Hotel Nazareth Galilee, Hotel Manchester Paris, Cosmo Hotel London, the S.S. Ile de France, Regis Hotel Canada, Hotel Mexico D.F.--and now the new labels, the newest blossoms: Hotel Astor New York, the Town House Los Angeles, S.S. Pennsylvania, Hotel Mirador Acapulco, the Compañía Mexicana de Aviación. "¿El otro señor?" he was saying to Concepta who shook her head with delighted emphasis. "Hasn't returned yet. A right, Yvonne, I dare say you want your old room. Anyhow Hugh's in the back one with the machine."
"The machine?"
"The mowing machine."
"--por qué no, agua caliente," Concepta's soft musical humorous voice rose and fell as she shuffled and scraped off with two of the bags.
"So there's hot water for you, which is a miracle!"
On the other side of the house the view was suddenly spacious and windy as the sea.
Beyond the barranca the plains rolled up to the very foot of the volcanoes into a barrier of murk above which rose the pure cone of old Popo, and spreading to the left of it like a University City in the snow the jagged peaks of Ixtaccihuatl, and for a moment they stood on the porch without speaking, not holding hands, but with their hands just meeting, as though not quite sure they weren't dreaming this, each of them separately on their far bereaved cots, their hands but blown fragments of their memories, half afraid to commingle, yet touching over the howling sea at night.
Immediately below them the small chuckling swimming-pool was still filling from a leaky hose connected with a hydrant, though it was almost full; they had painted it themselves once, blue on the sides and the bottom; the paint had scarcely faded and mirroring the sky, aping it, the water appeared a deep turquoise. Hugh had trimmed about the pool's edges but the garden sloped off beyond into an indescribable confusion of briars from which the Consul averted his eyes: the pleasant evanescent feeling of tightness was wearing off...
He glanced absently round the porch which also embraced briefly the left side of the house, the house Yvonne hadn't yet entered at all, and now as in answer to his prayer Concepta was approaching them down its length. Concepta's gaze was fixed steadfastly on the tray she was carrying and she glanced neither to right nor left, neither at the drooping plants, dusty and gone to seed on the low parapet, nor at the stained hammock, nor the bad melodrama of the broken chair, nor the disembowelled day-bed, nor the uncomfortable stuffed Quixote's tilting their straw mounts on the house wall, shuffling slowly nearer them through the dust and dead leaves she hadn't yet swept from the ruddy tiled floor.