Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [62]
"Brother? Oh. you mean Hugh... No, he's in Mexico City."
"I think you'll find he's got back."
The Consul now glanced up at the house himself. "Hicket," he said briefly, apprehensively.
"I think he went out with your wife," the walnut grower added.
--Hullo--hullo--look--who-comes-hullo-my-little-snake-in-the-grass-my-little-anguish-in-herba--" the Consul at this moment greeted Mr Quincey's cat, momentarily forgetting its owner again as the grey, meditative animal, with a tail so long it trailed on the ground, came stalking through the zinnias: he stooped, patting his thighs--"hello-pussy-my-little-Priapusspuss, my-little-Oedipusspusspuss," and the cat, recognizing a friend and uttering a cry of pleasure, wound through the fence and rubbed against the Consul's legs, purring. "My little Xicoténcatl." The Consul stood up. He gave two short whistles while below him the cat's ears twirled. "She thinks I'm a tree with a bird in it," he added.
"I wouldn't wonder," retorted Mr Quincey, who was refilling his watering can at the hydrant.
"Animals not fit for food and kept only for pleasure, curiosity, or whim--eh?--as William Blackstone said--you've heard of him of course!--" The Consul was somehow on his haunches half talking to the cat, half to the walnut grower, who had paused to light a cigarette. "Or was that another William Blackstone?" He addressed himself now directly to Mr Quincey, who was paying no attention. "He's a character I've always liked. I think it was William Blackstone. Or so Abraham... Anyway, one day he arrived in what is now, I believe---no matter--somewhere in Massachusetts. And lived there quietly among the Indians. After a while the Puritans settled on the other side of the river. They invited him over; they said it was healthier on that side, you see. Ah, these people, these fellows with ideas," he told the cat, "old William didn't like them--no he didn't--so he went back to live among the Indians, so he did. But the Puritans found him out, Quincey, trust them. Then he disappeared altogether--God knows where... Now , little cat," the Consul tapped his chest indicatively, and the cat, its face swelling, body arched, important, stepped back, "the Indians are in here."
"They sure are," sighed Mr Quincey, somewhat in the manner of a quietly exacerbated sergeant-major, "along with all those snakes and pink elephants and them tigers you were talking about."
The Consul laughed, his laughter having a humourless sound, as though the part of his mind that knew all this essentially a burlesque of a great and generous man once his friend knew also how hollow the satisfaction afforded him by the performance. "Not real Indians... And I didn't mean in the garden; but in here " He tapped his chest again. "Yes, just the final frontier of consciousness, that's all. Genius, as I'm so fond of saying," he added, standing up, adjusting his tie and (he did not think further of the tie) squaring his shoulders as if to go with a decisiveness that, also borrowed on this occasion from the same source as the genius and his interest in cats, left him abruptly as it had been assumed, "--genius will look after itself."
Somewhere in the distance a clock was striking; the Consul still stood there motionless. "Oh, Yvonne, can I have forgotten you already, on this of all days?" Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one strokes. By his watch it was a quarter to eleven. But the clock hadn't finished: it struck twice more, two wry, tragic notes: bing-bong : whirring. The emptiness in the air after filled with whispers: alas, alas . Wings, it really meant.
"Where's your friend these days--I never can remember his name--that French fellow?" Mr Quincey had asked a moment ago.
" Laruelle?" The Consul's voice came from far away. He was aware of vertigo; closing his eyes wearily he took hold of the fence to steady himself. Mr Quincey's words knocked on his consciousness--or someone actually was knocking on a door--fell away, then knocked again, louder. Old De Quincey; the knocking on the gate in Macbeth. Knock, knock, knock: who's there? Cat. Cat who? Catastrophe. Catastrophe who? Catastro-physicist. What, is it you, my little popocat? Just wait an eternity till Jacques and I have finished murdering sleep? Katabasis to cat abysses. Cat hartes atratus... Of course, he should have know it, these were the final moments of the retiring of the human heart, and of the final entrance of the fiendish, the night insulated--just as the real De Quincey (that mere drug fiend, he thought opening his eyes--he found he was looking straight over towards the tequila bottle) imagined the murder of Duncan and the others insulated, self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion... But where had Quincey gone? And my God, who was this advancing behind the morning paper to his rescue across the lawn, where the breath of the hoses had suddenly failed as if by magic, if not Dr. Guzm