Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [66]
A strange fellow: in the bathroom the Consul sipped his flat beer. A strange, decent, generous-hearted fellow, if slightly deficient in tact save on his own behalf. Why couldn't people hold their liquor? He himself had still managed to be quite considerate of Vigil's position in Quincey's garden. In the final analysis there was no one you could trust to drink with you to the bottom of the bowl. A lonely thought. But of the doctor's generosity there was little doubt. Before long indeed, in spite of the necessary "two full days of sleeping," he had been inviting them all to come with him to Guanajuato: recklessly he proposed leaving for his holiday by car this evening, after a problematic set of tennis this afternoon with--
The Consul took another sip of beer. "Oh," he shuddered. "Oh." It had been a mild shock last night to discover that Vigil and Jacques Laruelle were friends, far more than embarrassing to be reminded of it this morning... Anyhow, Hugh had turned down the notion of the two-hundred-mile trip to Guanajuato, since Hugh--and how amazingly well, after all, those cowboy clothes seemed to suit his erect and careless bearing!--was now determined to catch that night train; while the Consul had declined on Yvonne's account.
The Consul saw himself again, hovering over the parapet, gazing down at the swimming-pool below, a little turquoise set in the garden. Thou art the grave where buried love doth live. The inverted reflections of banana trees and birds, caravans of clouds, moved in it. Wisps of new-mown turf floated on the surface. Fresh mountain water trickled into the pool, which was almost overflowing, from the cracked broken hose whose length was a series of small spouting fountains.
Then Yvonne and Hugh, below, were swimming in the--"Absolutamente," the doctor had said, beside the Consul at the parapet, and attentively lighting a cigarette. "I have," the Consul was telling him, lifting his face towards the volcanoes and feeling his desolation go out to those heights where even now at mid-morning the howling snow would whip the face, and the ground beneath the feet was dead lava, a soulless petrified residue of extinct plasm in which even the wildest and loneliest trees would never take root; "I have another enemy round the back you can't see. A sunflower. I know it watches me and I know it hates me." "Exactamente!" Dr. Vigil said, "very posseebly it might be hating you a little less if you would stop from drinking tequila." "Yes, but I'm only drinking beer this morning," the Consul said with conviction, "as you can see for yourself." "Sí, hombre," Dr. Vigil nodded, who after a few whiskies (from a new bottle) had given up trying to conceal himself from Mr Quincey's house and was standing boldly by the parapet with the Consul. "There are," the Consul added, "a thousand aspects of this infernal beauty I was talking about, each with its peculiar tortures, each jealous as a woman of all stimulations save its own." "Naturalmente," Dr. Vigil said. "But I think if you are very serious about your progresión a ratos you may take a longer journey even than this proposed one." The Consul placed his glass on the parapet while the doctor continued. "Me too unless we contain with ourselves never to drink no more. I think, mi amigo sickness is not only in body but in that part used to be call: soul." "Soul?" "Precisamente," the doctor said, swiftly clasping and unclasping his fingers. "But a mesh? Mesh. The nerves are a mesh, like, how do you say it, an eclectic systemë." "Ah, very good," the Consul said, "you mean an electric system." "But after much tequila the eclectic systemë is perhaps un poco descompuesto, comprenez, as sometimes in the cine: claro?" "A sort of eclampsia, as it were," the Consul nodded desperately, removing his glasses, and at this point, the Consul remembered, he had been without a drink nearly ten minutes; the effect of the tequila too had almost gone. He had peered out at the garden, and it was as though bits of his eyelids had broken off and were flittering and jittering before him, turning into nervous shapes and shadows, jumping to the guilty chattering in his mind, not quite voices yet, but they were coming back, they were coming back; a picture of his soul as a town appeared once more before him, but this time a town ravaged and stricken in the black path of his excess and shutting his burning eyes he had thought of the beautiful functioning of the system in those who were truly alive, switches connected, nerves rigid only in real danger, and in nightmareless sleep now calm, not resting, yet poised: a peaceful village. Christ, how it heightened the torture (and meantime there had been every reason to suppose the others imagined he was enjoying himself enormously) to be aware of all this, while at the same time conscious of the whole horrible disintegrating mechanism, the light now on, now off, now on too glaringly, now too dimly, with the glow of a fitful dying battery--then at last to know the whole town plunged into darkness, where communication is lost, motion mere obstruction, bombs threaten, ideas stampede--