Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [90]
"--With your astronomical mind," he repeated, but no, he had not said it: "doesn't all that revolving and plunging up there somehow suggest to you the voyaging of unseen planets, of unknown moons hurtling backwards?" He had said nothing.
"Please Geoffrey--" Yvonne laid her hand on his arm. "Please, please believe me, I didn't want to be drawn into this. Let's make some excuse and get away as quickly as possible... I don't mind how many drinks you have after," she added.
"I wasn't aware I'd said anything about drinks now. Or after. It's you that have put the thought into my head. Or Jacques, whom I can hear breaking--or should we say, crushing?--the ice down below."
"Haven't you got any tenderness or love left for me at all?" Yvonne asked suddenly, almost piteously, turning round on him, and he thought: Yes, I do love you, I have all the love in the world left for you, only that love seems so far away from me and so strange too, for it is as though I could almost hear it, a droning or a weeping, but far, far away, and a sad lost sound, it might be either approaching or receding, I can't tell which.
"Don't you think of anything except of how many drinks you're going to have?"
"Yes," said the Consul (but wasn't it Jacques who'd just asked him this?), "yes, I do--oh my God, Yvonne!"
"Please, Geoffrey--"
Yet he could not face her. The clubs of the flying machines seen out of the corner of his eye, now seemed as if belabouring him all over. "Listen," he said, "are you asking me to extricate us from all this, or are you starting to exhort me again about drinking?"
"Oh, I'm not exhorting you, really I'm not. I'll never exhort you again. I'll do anything you ask."
"Then--" he had begun in anger.
But a look of tenderness came over Yvonne's face and the Consul thought once more of the postcard in his pocket. It ought to have been a good omen. It could be the talisman of their immediate salvation now. Perhaps it would have been a good omen if only it had arrived yesterday or at the house this morning. Unfortunately one could not now conceive of it as having arrived at any other moment. And how could he know whether it was a good omen or not without another drink?
"But I'm back," she was apparently saying. "Can't you see it? We're here together again, it's us. Can't you see that?" Her lips were trembling, she was almost crying.
Then she was close to him, in his arms, but he was gazing over her head.
"Yes, I can see," he said, only he couldn't see, only hear, the droning, the weeping, and feel, feel the unreality."I do love you. Only--" "I can never forgive you deeply enough": was that what was in his mind to add?
--And yet, he was thinking all over again, and all over again as for the first time, how he had suffered, suffered, suffered without her; indeed such desolation, such a desperate sense of abandonment, bereavement, as during this last year without Yvonne, he had never known in his life, unless it was when his mother died. But this present emotion he had never experienced with his mother: this urgent desire to hurt, to provoke, at a time when forgiveness alone could save the day, this, rather, had commenced with his stepmother, so that she would have to cry: "I can't eat, Geoffrey, the food sticks in my throat!" It was hard to forgive, hard, hard to forgive. Harder still, not to say how hard it was, I hate you. Even now, of all times. Even though here was God's moment, the chance to agree, to produce the card, to change everything; or there was but a moment left... Too late. The Consul had controlled his tongue. But he felt his mind divide and rise, like the two halves of a counterpoised drawbridge, ticking, to permit passage of these noisome thoughts. "Only my heart--" he said.
"Your heart, darling?" she asked anxiously.
"Nothing--"
"Oh my poor sweetheart, you must be so weary!"
"Momentito," he said, disengaging himself.
He strolled back into Jacques's room, leaving Yvonne on the porch. Laruelle's voice floated up from downstairs. Was it here he had been betrayed? This very room, perhaps, had been filled with her cries of love. Books (among which he did not see his Elizabethan plays) were strewn all over the floor and on the side of the studio couch nearest the wall, were stacked, as by some half-repenting poltergeist, almost to the ceiling. What if Jacques, approaching his design with Tarquin's ravishing strides, had disturbed this potential avalanche! Grisly Orozco charcoal drawings, of an unexampled horrendousness, snarled down from the walls. In one, executed by a hand of indisputable genius, harpies grappled on a smashed bedstead among broken bottles of tequila, gnashing their teeth. No wonder; the Consul, peering closer, sought in vain for a sound bottle. He sought in vain around Jacques's room too. There were two ruddy Riveras. Expressionless Amazons with feet like legs of mutton testified to the oneness of the toilers with the earth. Over the chevron-shaped windows, which looked down the Calle Tierra del Fuego, hung a terrifying picture he hadn't seen before, and took at first to be a tapestry. Called Los Borrachones--why not Los Borrachos?--it resembled something between a primitive and a prohibitionist poster, remotely under the influence of Michelangelo. In fact, he now saw, it really amounted to a prohibitionist poster, though of a century or so back, half a century, God knows what period. Down, headlong into hades, selfish and florid-faced, into a tumult of fire-spangled fiends, Medusae, and belching monstrosities, with swallow-dives or awkwardly, with dread backward leaps, shrieking among falling bottles and emblems of broken hopes, plunged the drunkards; up, up, flying palely, selflessly into the light towards heaven, soaring sublimely in pairs, male sheltering female, shielded themselves by angels with abnegating wings, shot the sober. Not all were in pairs however, the Consul noted. A few lone females on the upgrade were sheltered by angels only. It seemed to him these females were casting half-jealous glances downward after their plummeting husbands, some of whose faces betrayed the most unmistakable relief. The Consul laughed, a trifle shakily. It was ridiculous, but still--had anyone ever given a good reason why good and evil should not be thus simply delimited? Elsewhere in Jacques's room cuneiform stone idols squatted like bulbous infants: on one side of the room there was even a line of them chained together. One part of the Consul continued to laugh, in spite of himself, and all this evidence of lost wild talents, at the thought of Yvonne confronted in the aftermath of her passion by a whole row of fettered babies.