Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [33]
"What?" She was sitting on the parapet gazing over the valley with every semblance of interested enjoyment. It was dead calm in the garden itself. But the wind must have suddenly changed; Ixta had vanished while Popocatepetl was almost wholly obscured by black horizontal columns of cloud, like smoke drawn across the mountain by several trains running parallel. "Will you say that again?" The Consul took her hand.
They were embracing, or so it all but seemed, passionately: somewhere, out of the heavens, a swan, transfixed, plummeted to earth. Outside the cantina El Puerto del Sol in Independencia the doomed men would be already crowding into the warmth of the sun, waiting for the shutters to roll up with a crash of trumpets...
"No, I'll stick to the old medicine, thanks." The Consul had almost fallen backwards on to his broken green rocking-chair. He sat soberly facing Yvonne. This was the moment then, yearned for under beds, sleeping in the corners of bars, at the edge of dark woods, lanes, bazaars, prisons, the moment when--but the moment, stillborn, was gone: and behind him the ursa horribilis of the night had moved nearer. What had he done? Slept somewhere, that much was certain. Tak: Tok: help: help: the swimming-pool ticked like a clock. He had slept: what else? His hand searching in his dress trousers pockets felt the hard edge of a clue. The card he brought to light said:
Arturo Diaz Vigil
Medico Cirujano y Partero
Enfermedades de Niños
Indisposiciones Nerviosas
Consultas de 12 a 2 y de 4 a 7
Av. Revolución Numero 8.
"--Have you really come back? Or have you just come to see me?" the Consul was asking Yvonne gently as he replaced the card.
"Here I am, aren't I?" Yvonne said merrily, even with a slight note of challenge.
"Strange," the Consul commented, half trying to rise for the drink Yvonne had ratified in spite of himself and the quick voice that protested: "You bloody fool Geoffrey Firmin, I'll kick your face in if you do, if you have a drink I'll cry, O idiot!" "Yet it's awfully courageous of you. What if--I'm in a frightfully jolly mess, you know."
"But you look amazingly well I thought. You've no idea how well you look." (The Consul had absurdly flexed his biceps, feeling them: "Still strong as a horse, so to speak, strong as a horse!") "How do I look?" She seemed to have said. Yvonne averted her face a little, keeping it in profile.
"Didn't I say?" The Consul watched her. "Beautiful... Brown." Had he said that? "Brown as a berry. You've been swimming," he added. "You look as though you've had plenty of sun... There's been plenty of sun here too of course," he went on. "As usual.., Too much of it. In spite of the rain... Do you know, I don't like it."
"Oh yes you do, really," she had apparently replied. "We could get out in the sun, you know."
"Well--"
The Consul sat on the broken green rocker facing Yvonne. Perhaps it was just the soul, he thought, slowly emerging out of the strychnine into a form of detachment, to dispute with Lucretius, that grew older, while the body could renew itself many times unless it had acquired an unalterable habit of age. And perhaps the soul thrived on its sufferings, and upon the sufferings he had inflicted on his wife her soul had not only thrived but flourished. Ah, and not only upon the sufferings he had inflicted. What of those for which the adulterous ghost named Cliff he imagined always as just a morning coat and a pair of striped pyjamas open at the front, had been responsible? And the child, strangely named Geoffrey too, she had had by the ghost, two years before her first ticket to Reno, and which would now be six, had it not died at the age of as many months as many years ago, of meningitis, in 1932, three years before they themselves had met, and been married in Granada, in Spain? There Yvonne was at all events, bronzed and youthful and ageless: she had been at fifteen, she'd told him (that is, about the time she must have been acting in those Western pictures M. Laruelle, who had not seen them, adroitly assured one had influenced Eisenstein or somebody), a girl of whom people said, "She is not pretty but she is going to be beautiful": at twenty they still said so, and at twenty-seven when she'd married him it was still true, according to the category through which one perceived such things of course: it was equally true of her now, at thirty, that she gave the impression of someone who is still going to be, perhaps just about to be, beautiful: the same tilted nose, the small ears, the warm brown eyes, clouded now and hurt-looking, the same wide, full-lipped mouth, warm too and generous, the slightly weak chin. Yvonne's was the same fresh bright face that could collapse, as Hugh would say, like a heap of ashes, and be grey. Yet she was changed. Ah yes indeed! Much as the demoted skipper's lost command, seen through the barroom window lying out in harbour, is changed. She was no longer his: someone had doubtless approved her smart slate-blue travelling suit: it had not been he.