Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [88]
Why are you so voluble? Hugh wondered: "How delightful, for the post-office," he said politely. They were all watching the cartero's approach. Hugh happened not to have observed any of these unique postmen before. He could not have been five feet in height, and from a distance appeared like an unclassifiable but somehow pleasing animal advancing on all fours. He was wearing a colourless dungaree suit and a battered official cap and Hugh now saw he had a tiny goatee beard. Upon his small wizened face as he lunged down the street towards them in his inhuman yet endearing fashion there was the friendliest expression imaginable. Seeing them he stopped, unshouldered the bag and began to unbuckle it.
"There is a letter, a letter, a letter,1 he was saying when they came up with him, bowing to Yvonne as if he'd last greeted her yesterday, "a message por el señor, for your horse," he informed the Consul, withdrawing two packages and smiling roguishly as he undid them. "What?--nothing for Señor Caligula."
"Ah." The cartero flicked through another bundle, glancing at them sideways and keeping his elbows close to his sides in order not to drop the bag. "No." He put down the bag now altogether, and began to search feverishly; soon letters were spread all over the road. "It must be. Here. No. This is. Then this one. Ei ei ei ei ei ei."
"Don't bother, my dear fellow," the Consul said." Please."
But the cartero tried again: "Badrona, Dios dado--" Hugh too was waiting expectantly, not so much any word from the Globe, which would come if at all by cable, but half in hope, a hope which the postman's own appearance rendered delightfully plausible, of another minuscule Oaxaquenian envelope, covered with bright stamps of archers shooting at the sun, from Juan Cerillo. He listened: somewhere, behind a wall, someone was playing a guitar--badly, he was let down; and a dog barked sharply.
"--Feeshbank, Figueroa, Gómez--no, Quincey, Sandovah, no."
At last the good little man gathered up his letters and bowing apologetically, disappointedly, lunged off down the street again. They were all looking after him, and just as Hugh was wondering whether the postman's behaviour might not have been part of some enormous inexplicable private joke, if really he'd been laughing at them the whole time, though in the kindliest way, he halted, fumbled once more at one of the packages, turned, and trotting back with little yelps of triumph, handed the Consul what looked like a postal card.
Yvonne, a little ahead again by now, nodded at him over her shoulder, smiling, as to say: "Good, you've got a letter after all," and with her buoyant dancing steps walked on slowly beside M. Laruelle, up the dusty hill. The Consul turned the card over twice, then handed it to Hugh.
"Strange--" he said.
--It was from Yvonne herself and apparently written at least a year ago. Hugh suddenly realized it must have been posted soon after she'd left the Consul and most probably in ignorance he proposed to remain in Quauhnahuac. Yet curiously it was the card that had wandered far afield: originally addressed to Wells Fargo in Mexico City, it had been forwarded by some error abroad, gone badly astray in fact, for it was date-stamped from Paris, Gibraltar, and even Algeciras, in Fascist Spain.
"No, read it," the Consul smiled.
Yvonne's scrawl ran: Darling, why did I leave? Why did you let me? Expect to arrive in the U.S. tomorrow, California two days later. Hope to find a word from you there waiting. Love Y.
Hugh turned the card over. There was a picture of the leonine Signal Peak on El Paso with Carlsbad Cavern Highway leading over a white fenced bridge between desert and desert. The road turned a little corner in the distance and vanished.
7
On the side of the drunken madly revolving world hurtling at 1.20 p.m. towards Hercules's Butterfly the house seemed a bad idea, the Consul thought--
There were two towers, Jacques's zacualis, one at each end and joined by a catwalk over the roof, which was the glassed-in gable of the studio below. These towers were as if camouflaged (almost like the Samaritan, in fact): blue, grey, purple, vermilion, had once been slashed on in zebra stripes. But time and weather had combined to render the effect from a short distance of a uniform dull mauve. Their tops, reached from the catwalk by twin wooden ladders, and from inside by two spiral staircases, made two flimsy crenellated miradors, each scarcely larger than a bartizan, tiny roofless variants of the observation posts which everywhere commanded the valley in Quauhnahuac.