Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [40]
But the door was still a door and it was shut: and now ajar. Through it, on the porch he saw the whisky bottle, slightly smaller and emptier of hope than the Burke's Irish, standing forlornly. Yvonne had not opposed a snifter: he had been unjust to her. Yet was that any reason why he should be unjust also to the bottle? Nothing in the world was more terrible than an empty bottle! Unless it was an empty glass. But he could wait: yes, sometimes he knew when to leave it alone. He wandered back to the bed thinking or saying:
"Yes: I can see the reviews now. Mr Firmin's sensational new data on Atlantis! The most extraordinary thing of its kind since Donnelly! Interrupted by his untimely death... Marvellous. And the chapters on the alchemists! Which beat the Bishop of Tasmania to a frazzle. Only that's not quite the way they'll put it. Pretty good, eh? I might even work in something about Coxcox and Noah. I've got a publisher interested too; in Chicago--interested but not concerned, if you understand me, for it's really a mistake to imagine such a book could ever become popular. But it's amazing when you come to think of it how the human spirit seems to blossom in the shadow of the abattoir! How--to say nothing of all the poetry--not far enough below the stockyards to escape altogether the reek of the porterhouse of tomorrow, people can be living in cellars the life of the old alchemists of Prague! Yes: living among the cohabitations of Faust himself, among the litharge and agate and hyacinth and pearls. A life which is amorphous, plastic and crystalline. What am I talking about? Copula Maritalis? Or from alcohol to alkahest. Can you tell me?... Or perhaps I might get myself another job, first of course being sure to insert an advertisement in the Universal : will accompany corpse to any place in the east!"
Yvonne was sitting up half reading her magazine, her nightgown slightly pulled aside showing where her warm tan faded into the white skin of her breast, her arms outside the covers and one hand turned downward from the wrist hanging over the edge of the bed listlessly: as he approached she turned this hand palm upward in an involuntary movement, of irritation perhaps, but it was like an unconscious gesture of appeal: it was more: it seemed to epitomize, suddenly, all the old supplication, the whole queer secret dumb show of incommunicable tendernesses and loyalties and eternal hopes of their marriage. The Consul felt his tearducts quicken. But he had also felt a sudden peculiar sense of embarrassment, a sense, almost, of indecency that he, a stranger, should be in her room. This room! He went to the door and looked out. The whisky bottle was still there.
But he made no motion towards it, none at all, save to put on his dark glasses. He was conscious of new aches here and there, of, for the first time, the impact of the Calle Nicaragua. Vague images of grief and tragedy flickered in his mind. Somewhere a butterfly was flying out to sea: lost. La Fontaine's duck had loved the white hen, yet after escaping together from the dreadful farmyard through the forest to the lake it was the duck that swam: the hen, following, drowned. In November 1895, in convict dress, from two o'clock in the afternoon till half past, handcuffed, recognized, Oscar Wilde stood on the centre platform at Clapham Junction...
When the Consul returned to the bed and sat down on it Yvonne's arms were under the covers while her face was turned to the wall. After a while he said with emotion, his voice grown hoarse again:
"Do you remember how the night before you left we actually made a date like a couple of strangers to meet for dinner in Mexico City?"
Yvonne gazed at the wall:
"You didn't keep it."
"That was because I couldn't remember the name of the restaurant at the last moment. All I knew was that it was in the Via Dolorosa somewhere. It was the one we'd discovered together the last time we were in the city. I went into all the restaurants in the Via Dolorosa looking for you and not finding you I had a drink in each one."
"Poor Geoffrey."
"I must have phoned back the Hotel Canada from each restaurant. From the cantina of each restaurant. God knows how many times, for I thought you might have returned there. And each time they said the same thing, that you'd left to meet me, but they didn't know where. And finally they became pretty damned annoyed. I can't imagine why we stayed at the Canada instead of the Regis--do you remember how they kept mistaking me there, with my beard, for that wrestler?... Anyhow, there I was wandering around from place to place, wrestling, and thinking all the while I could prevent you from going the next morning, if I could only find you!"