Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [47]
Yvonne gave him an odd look, then said:
"Hugh, you're not thinking of going back to Spain now are you, by any chance?"
Hugh shook his head, laughing: he meticulously dropped his ravaged cigarette down the ravine. "¿Cui bono? To stand in for the noble army of pimps and experts, who've already gone home to practise the little sneers with which they propose to discredit the whole thing--the first moment it becomes fashionable not to be a Communist fence. No, muchas gracias. And I'm completely through with newspaper work, it isn't a pose." Hugh put his thumbs under his belt. "So--since they got the Internationals out five weeks ago, on the twenty-eighth of September to be precise--two days before Chamberlain went to Godesberg and neatly crimped the Ebro offensive--and with half the last bunch of volunteers still rotting in goal in Perpignan, how do you suppose one could get in anyway, at this late date?"
"Then what did Geoffrey mean by saying that you 'wanted action' and all that?... And what's this mysterious other purpose you came down here for?"
"It's really rather tedious," Hugh answered. "As a matter of fact I'm going back to sea for a while. If all goes well I'll be sailing from Vera Cruz in about a week. As quartermaster, you knew I had an A.B.'s ticket didn't you? Well, I might have got a ship in Galveston but it's not so easy as it used to be. Anyway it'll be more amusing to sail from Vera Cruz. Havana, perhaps Nassau and then, you know, down to the West Indies and São Paulo. I've always wanted to take a look at Trinidad--might be some real fun coming out of Trinidad one day. Geoff helped me with a couple of introductions but no more than that, I didn't want to make him responsible. No, I'm merely fed to the teeth with myself, that's all. Try persuading the world not to cut its throat for half a decade or more, like me, under one name or another, and it'll begin to dawn on you that even your behaviour's part of its plan. I ask you, what do we know?"
And Hugh thought: the S.S. Noemijolea , 6,000 tons, leaving Vera Cruz on the night of 13-14 (?) November 1938, with antimony and coffee, bound for Freetown, British West Africa, will proceed thither, oddly enough, from Tzucox on the Yucatan coast, and also in a north-easterly direction: in spite of which she will still emerge through the passages named Windward and Crooked into the Atlantic Ocean: where after many days out of sight of land she will make eventually the mountainous landfall of Madeira: whence, avoiding Port Lyautey and carefully keeping her destination in Sierra Leone some 1,800 miles to the south-east, she will pass, with luck, through the straits of Gibraltar. Whence again, negotiating, it is profoundly to be hoped, Franco's blockade, she will proceed with the utmost caution into the Mediterranean Sea, leaving first Cape de Gata, then Cape de Palos, then Cape de la Nao, well aft: thence, the Pityusae Isles sighted, she will roll through the Gulf of Valencia and so northwards past Carlos de la Rápita, and the mouth of the Ebro until the rocky Garraf coast looms abaft the beam where finally, still rolling, at Vallcara, twenty miles south of Barcelona, she will discharge her cargo of T.N.T. for the hard-pressed Loyalist armies and probably be blown to smithereens--
Yvonne was staring down the barranca, her hair hanging over her face: "I know Geoff sounds pretty foul sometimes," she was saying, "but there's one point where I do agree with him, these romantic notions about the International Brigade--"
But Hugh was standing at the wheel: Potato Firmin or Columbus in reverse: below him the foredeck of the Noemijolea lay over in the blue trough and spray slowly exploded through the lee scuppers into the eyes of the seaman chipping a winch: on the forecastle head the look-out echoed one bell, struck by Hugh a moment before, and the seaman gathered up his tools: Hugh's heart was lifting with the ship, he was aware that the officer on duty had changed from white to blue for winter but at the same time of exhilaration, the limitless purification of the sea--