Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [89]
On the battlements of the mirador to their left, as the Consul and Hugh confronted the house, with the Calle Nicaragua stretching downhill to their right, now appeared to them two bilious-looking angels. The angels, carved out of pink stone, knelt facing one another in profile against the sky across the intervening crenels, while behind, upon corresponding merlons at the far side, sat solemnly two nameless objects like marzipan cannonballs, evidently constructed from the same material.
The other mirador was unadorned save by its crenellations and it often struck the Consul that this contrast was somehow obscurely appropriate to Jacques, as indeed was that between the angels and the cannonballs. It was perhaps also significant he should use his bedroom for working whereas the studio itself on the main floor had been turned into a dining-room often no better than a camping-ground for his cook and her relatives.
Coming closer it could be seen that on the left and somewhat larger tower, below that bedroom's two windows--which, as if degenerate machicolations, were built askew, like the separated halves of a chevron--a panel of rough stone, covered with large letters painted in gold leaf, had been slightly set into the wall to give a semblance of bas-relief. These gold letters though very thick were merged together most confusingly. The Consul had noticed visitors to the town staring up at them for half an hour at a time. Sometimes M. Laruelle would come out to explain they really spelt something, that they formed that phrase of Frey Luis de Leon's the Consul did not at this moment allow himself to recall. Nor did he ask himself why he should have come to be almost more familiar with this extraordinary house than his own as, preceding M. Laruelle now, who was prodding him cheerfully from behind, he followed Hugh and Yvonne into it, into the studio, empty for once, and up the spiral staircase of its left-hand tower. "Haven't we overshot the drinks?" he asked, his mood of detachment expiring now he remembered that only a few weeks before he'd sworn never to enter this place again. "Don't you ever think of anything else?" it seemed Jacques had said.
The Consul made no reply but stepped out into the familiar disorderly room with the askew windows, the degenerate machicolations, now seen from inside, and followed the others obliquely through it to a balcony at the back, into a view of sun-filled valleys and volcanoes, and cloud shadows wheeling across the plain.
M. Laruelle, however, was already nervously going downstairs. "Not for me!" protested the others. Fools! The Consul took two or three steps after him, a movement apparently without meaning, but it almost constituted a threat: his gaze shifted vaguely up the spiral staircase which continued from the room to the mirador above, then he rejoined Hugh and Yvonne on the balcony.
"Get up on the roof, you people, or stay on the porch, just make yourselves at home," came from downstairs. "There's a pair of binoculars on the table there--er--Hugh's... I won't be a minute."
"Any objection if I go on the roof?" Hugh asked them.
"Don't forget the binoculars!"
Yvonne and the Consul were alone on the flying balcony.
From where they stood the house seemed situated half-way up a cliff rising steeply from the valley stretched out below them. Leaning round they saw the town itself, built as on top of this cliff, overhanging them. The clubs of flying machines waved silently over the roofs, their motions like gesticulations of pain. But the cries and music of the fair reached them at this moment clearly. Far away the Consul made out a green corner, the golf course, with little figures working their way round the side of the cliff, crawling... Golfing scorpions. The Consul remembered the card in his pocket, and apparently he had made a movement towards Yvonne, desiring to tell her about it, to say something tender to her concerning it, to turn her towards him, to kiss her. Then he realized that without another drink shame for this morning would prevent his looking in her eyes. "What do you think, Yvonne," he said, "with your astronomical mind--" Could it be he, talking to her like this, on an occasion like this! Surely not, it was a dream. He was pointing up at the town.