Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [67]
The Consul had now finished his glass of flat beer. He sat gazing at the bathroom wall in an attitude like a grotesque parody of an old attitude in meditation. "I am very much interested in insanes." That was a strange way to start a conversation with a fellow who'd just stood you a drink. Yet that was precisely how the doctor, in the Bella Vista bar, had started their conversation the previous night. Could it be Vigil considered his practised eye had detected approaching insanity (and this was funny too, recalling his thoughts on the subject earlier, to conceive of it as merely approaching) as some who have watched wind and weather all their lives can prophesy, under a fair sky, the approaching storm, the darkness that will come galloping out of nowhere across the fields of the mind? Not that there could be said to be a very fair sky either in that connexion. Yet how interested would the doctor have been in one who felt himself being shattered by the very forces of the universe? What cataplasms have laid on his soul? What did even the hierophants of science know of the fearful potencies of, for them, unvintageable evil? The Consul wouldn't have needed a practised eye to detect on this wall, or any other, a Mene-Tekel-Peres for the world, compared to which mere insanity was a drop in the bucket. Yet who would ever have believed that some obscure man, sitting at the centre of the world in a bathroom, say, thinking solitary miserable thoughts, was authoring their doom, that, even while he was thinking, it was as if behind the scenes certain strings were being pulled, and whole continents burst into flame, and calamity moved nearer--just as now, at this moment perhaps, with a sudden jolt and grind, calamity had moved nearer, and, without the Consul's knowing it, outside the sky had darkened. Or perhaps it was not a man at all, but a child, a little child, innocent as that other Geoffrey had been, who sat as up in an organ loft somewhere playing, pulling out all the stops at random, and kingdoms divided and fell, and abominations dropped from the sky--a child innocent as that infant sleeping in the coffin which had slanted past them down the Calle Tierra del Fuego...
The Consul lifted his glass to his lips, tasted its emptiness again, then set it on the floor, still wet from the feet of the swimmers. The uncontrollable mystery on the bathroom floor. He remembered that the next time he had returned to the porch with a bottle of Carta Blanca, though for some reason this now seemed a terribly long time ago, in the past--it was as if something he could not put his finger on had mysteriously supervened to separate drastically that returning figure from himself sitting in the bathroom (the figure on the porch, for all its damnation, seemed younger, to have more freedom of movement, choice, to have, if only because it held a full glass of beer once more, a better chance of a future)--Yvonne, youthful and pretty-looking in her white satin bathing-suit, had been wandering on tiptoe round the doctor, who was saying:
"Señora Firmin, I am really disappoint though you cannot come me with."
The Consul and she had exchanged a look of understanding, it almost amounted to, then Yvonne was swimming again, below, and the doctor was saying to the Consul:
"Guanajuato is sited in a beautiful circus of steepy hills."
"Guanajuato," the doctor was saying, "you will not believe me, how she can lie there, like the old golden jewel on the breast of our grandmother."
"Guanajuato," Dr. Vigil said, "the streets. How can you resist the names of the streets? Street of Kisses. Street of Singing Frogs. The Street of the Little Head. Is not that revolting?"
"Repellent," the Consul said. "Isn't Guanajuato the place they bury everybody standing up?"--ah, and this was where he had remembered about the bullthrowing and, feeling a return of energy, had called down to Hugh, who was sitting thoughtfully by the edge of the pool in the Consul's swimming-trunks. "Tomalín's quite near Parián, where your pal was going," he said. "We might even go on there." And then to the doctor, "Perhaps you might come too... I left my favourite pipe in Pari