Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [48]
Yvonne flung back her hair impatiently and stood up. "If they'd stayed out of it the war would have been over long ago!"
"Well, there ain't no brigade no mo," Hugh said absently, for it was not a ship he was steering now, but the world, out of the Western Ocean of its misery. "If the paths of glory lead but to the grave--I once made such an excursion into poetry--then Spain's the grave where England's glory led."
"Fiddlesticks!"
Hugh suddenly laughed, not loud, probably at nothing at all: he straightened himself with a swift movement and jumped on the parapet.
"Hugh!"
"My God! Horses," Hugh said, glancing and stretching himself to his full mental height of six feet two (he was five feet eleven).
"Where?"
He was pointing. "Over there."
"Of course," Yvonne said slowly, "I'd forgotten--they belong to the Casino de la Selva: they put them out there to pasture or something. If we go up the hill a ways we'll come to the place--"
... On a gentle slope to their left now, colts with glossy coats were rolling in the grass. They turned off the Calle Nicaragua along a narrow shady lane leading down one side of the paddock. The stables were part of what appeared to be a model dairy farm. It stretched away behind the stables on level ground where tall English-looking trees lined either side of a grassy wheel-rutted avenue. In the distance a few rather large cows, which, however, like Texas longhorns, bore a disturbing resemblance to stags (you've got your cattle again, I see, Yvonne said) were lying under the trees. A row of shining milkpails stood outside the stables in the sun. A sweet smell of milk and vanilla and wild flowers hung about the quiet place. And the sun was over all.
"Isn't it an adorable farm?" Yvonne said. "I believe it's some government experiment. I'd love to have a farm like that."
"--perhaps you'd like to hire a couple of those greater kudus over there instead?"
Their horses proved two pesos an hour apiece. "Muy correcto," the stable boy's dark eyes flashed good-humouredly at Hugh's boots as he turned swiftly to adjust Yvonne's deep leather stirrups. Hugh didn't know why, but this lad reminded him of how, in Mexico City, if you stand at a certain place on the Paseo de la Reforma in the early morning, suddenly everyone in sight will seem to be running, laughing, to work, in the sunlight, past the statue of Pasteur... "Muy incorrecto," Yvonne surveyed her slacks: she swung, swung twice into the saddle. "We've never ridden together before, have we?" She leaned forward to pat her mare's neck as they swayed forward.
They ambled up the lane, accompanied by two foals, which had followed their mothers out of the paddock, and an affectionate scrubbed woolly white dog belonging to the farm. After a while the lane branched off into a main road. They seemed to be in Alcapancingo itself, a sort of straggling suburb. The watchtower, nearer, taller, bloomed above a wood, through which they just made out the high prison walls. On the other side, to their left, Geoffrey's house came in sight, almost a bird's-eye view, the bungalow crouching, very tiny, before the trees, the long garden below descending steeply, parallel with which on different levels obliquely climbing the hill, all the other gardens of the contiguous residences, each with its cobalt oblong of swimming-pool, also descended steeply towards the barranca, the land sweeping away at the top of the Calle Nicaragua back up to the pre-eminence of Cortez Palace. Could that white dot down there be Geoffrey himself? Possibly to avoid coming to a place where, by the entrance to the public garden, they must be almost directly opposite the house, they trotted into another lane that inclined to their right. Hugh was pleased to see that Yvonne rode cowboy-fashion, jammed to the saddle, and not, as Juan Cerillo put it, "as in gardens." The prison was now behind them and he imagined themselves jogging into enormous focus for the inquisitive binoculars up there on the watchtower; "Guapa," one policeman would say. "Ah, muy hermosa," another might call, delighted with Yvonne and smacking his lips. The world was always within the binoculars of the police. Meantime the foals, which perhaps were not fully aware that a road was a means of getting somewhere and not, like a field, something to roll on or eat, kept straying into the undergrowth on either hand. Then the mares whinnied after them anxiously and they scrambled back again. Presently the mares grew tired of whinnying, so in a way he had learned Hugh whistled instead. He had pledged himself to guard the foals but actually the dog was guarding all of them. Evidently trained to detect snakes, he would run ahead then double back to make sure all were safe before loping on once more. Hugh watched him a moment. It was certainly hard to reconcile this dog with the pariahs one saw in town, those dreadful creatures that seemed to shadow his brother everywhere.