Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [69]
Here there was no longer that terrible visible swarming, yet--lying now on the bed--it still seemed to persist in his mind, much as the vision of the dead man earlier had persisted, a kind of seething, from which, as from the persistent rolling of drums heard by some great dying monarch, occasionally a half-recognizable voice dissociated itself:
--Stop it, for God's sake, you fool. Watch your step. We can't help you any more.
--I would like the privilege of helping you, of your friendship. I would work you with. I do not care a damn for moneys anyway.
--What, is this you, Geoffrey? Don't you remember me? Your old friend, Abe. What have you done, my boy?
--Ha ha, you're for it now. Straightened out--in a coffin! Yeah.
--My son, my son!
--My lover. Oh come to me again as once in May.
6
--Nel mezzo del bloody cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai in... Hugh flung himself down on the porch daybed.
A strong warm gusty wind howled over the garden. Refreshed by his swim and a lunch of turkey sandwiches, the cigar Geoff had given him earlier partially shielded by the parapet, he lay watching the clouds speeding across the Mexican skies. How fast they went, how far too fast! In the middle of our life, in the middle of the bloody road of our life...
Twenty-nine clouds. At twenty-nine a man was in his thirtieth year. And he was twenty-nine. And now at last, though the feeling had perhaps been growing on him all morning, he knew what it felt like, the intolerable impact of this knowledge that might have come at twenty-two, but had not, that ought at least to have come at twenty-five, but still somehow had not, this knowledge, hitherto associated only with people tottering on the brink of the grave and A. E. Housman, that one could not be young for ever--that indeed, in the twinkling of an eye, one was not young any longer. For in less than four years, passing so swiftly today's cigarette seemed smoked yesterday, one would be thirty-three, in seven more, forty; in forty-seven, eighty. Sixty-seven years seemed a comfortingly long time but then he would be a hundred. I am not a prodigy any longer. I have no excuse any longer to behave in this irresponsible fashion. I am not such a dashing fellow after all. I am not young. On the other hand: I am a prodigy. I am young. I am a dashing fellow. Am I not? You are a liar, said the trees tossing in the garden. You are a traitor, rattled the plantain leaves. And a coward too, put in some fitful sounds of music that might have meant that in the zócalo the fair was beginning. And they are losing the Battle of the Ebro. Because of you, said the wind. A traitor even to your journalist friends you like to run down and who are really courageous men, admit it-- Ahhh! Hugh, as if to rid himself of these thoughts, turned the radio dial back and forth, trying to get San Antonio ("I am none of these things really." "I have done nothing to warrant all this guilt." "I am no worse than anybody else..."); but it was no good. All his resolutions of this morning were to no avail. It seemed useless to struggle any further with these thoughts, better to let them have their way. At least they would take his mind from Yvonne for a time, if they only led back to her in the end. Even Juan Cerillo failed him now, as did, at this moment, San Antonio: two Mexican voices on different wavelengths were breaking in. For everything you have done up to now has been dishonest, the first might have been saying. What about the way you treated poor old Bolowski, the music publisher, remember his shabby little shop in Old Compton Street, off the Tottenham Court Road? Even what you persuade yourself is the best thing about you, your passion for helping the Jews, has some basis in a dishonourable action of your own. Small wonder, since he so charitably forgave you, that you forgave him his skulduggery, to the point of being prepared to lead the whole Jewish race out of Babylon itself... No: I am much afraid there is little enough in your past, which will come to your aid against the future. Not even the seagull? said Hugh...