Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [49]
"You do sound astonishingly like a horse," Yvonne said suddenly. "Wherever did you learn that?"
"Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wheeee-u," Hugh whistled again. "In Texas." Why had he said Texas? He had learned the trick in Spain, from Juan Cerillo. Hugh took off his jacket and laid it across the horse's withers in front of the saddle. Turning round as the foals came obediently plunging out of the bushes he added:
"It's the wheee-u that does it. The dying fall of the whinny." They passed the goat, two fierce cornucopias over a hedge. There could be no mistaking it. Laughing they tried to decide if it had turned off the Calle Nicaragua at the other lane or at its juncture with the Alcapancingo road. The goat was cropping at the edge of a field and lifted towards them, now, a Machiavellian eye, but did not move farther, watching them. I may have missed that time. I am still on the warpath however. The new lane, peaceful, quite shady, deep-rutted, and despite the dry spell full of pools, beautifully reflecting the sky, wandered on between clumps of trees and broken hedges screening indeterminate fields, and now it was as though they were a company, a caravan, carrying, for their greater security, a little world of love with them as they rode along. Earlier it had promised to be too hot: but just enough sun warmed them, a soft breeze caressed their faces, the countryside on either hand smiled upon them with deceptive innocence, a drowsy hum rose up from the morning, the mares nodded, there were the foals, here was the dog, and it is all a bloody lie, he thought: we have fallen inevitably into it, it is as if, upon this one day in the year, the dead come to life, or so one was reliably informed on the bus, this day of visions and miracles, by some contrariety we have been allowed for one hour a glimpse of what never was at all, of what never can be since brotherhood was betrayed, the image of our happiness, of that it would be better to think could not have been. Another thought struck Hugh. And yet I do not expect, ever in my life, to be happier than I am now. No peace I shall ever find but will be poisoned as these moments are poisoned--
"Firmin, you are a poor sort of good man." The voice might have come from an imaginary member of their caravan, and Hugh pictured Juan Cerillo distinctly now, tall, and riding a horse much too small for him, without stirrups, so that his feet nearly touched the ground, his wide ribboned hat on the back of his head, and a typewriter in a box slung around his neck resting on the pommel; in one free hand he held a bag of money, and a boy was running along beside him in the dust. Juan Cerillo! He had been one of the fairly rare overt human symbols in Spain of the generous help Mexico had actually given; he had returned home before Brihuega. Trained as a chemist, he worked for a Credit Bank in Oaxaca with the Ejido, delivering money on horseback to finance the collective effort of remote Zapotecan villages; frequently beset by bandits murderously yelling Viva el Cristo Rey, shot at by enemies of Cárdenas in reverberating church towers, his daily job was equally an adventure in a human cause, which Hugh had been invited to share. For Juan had written, express, his letter in a bravely stamped envelope of thumbnail size--the stamps showed archers shooting at the sun--written that he was well, back at work, less than a hundred miles away, and now as each glimpse of the mysterious mountains seemed to mourn this opportunity lost to Geoff and the Noemijolea , Hugh seemed to hear his good friend rebuking him. It was the same plangent voice that had said once, in Spain, of his horse left in Cuscatlán:
"My poor horse, she will be biting, biting all the time." But now it spoke of the Mexico of Juan's childhood, of the year Hugh was born. Juarez had lived and died. Yet was it a country with free speech, and the guarantee of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? A country of brilliantly muralled schools, and where even each little cold mountain village had its stone open-air stage, and the land was owned by its people free to express their native genius? A country of model farms; of hope?--It was a country of slavery, where human beings were sold like cattle, and its native peoples, the Yaquis, the Papagos, the Tomasachics, exterminated through deportation, or reduced to worse than peonage, their lands in thrall or the hands of foreigners. And in Oaxaca lay the terrible Valle Nacional where Juan himself, a bona-fide slave aged seven, had seen an older brother beaten to death, and another, bought for forty-five pesos, starved to death in seven months, because it was cheaper this should happen, and the slave-holder buy another slave, than simply have one slave better fed merely worked to death in a year. All this spelt Porfirio Diaz: rurales everywhere, jefes pol