Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [92]
"Ei ei ei ei," M. Laruelle was saying, not unlike the little postman, coming, stamping up the stairs; cocktails, despicable repast. Unperceived the Consul did an odd thing; he took the postcard he'd just received from Yvonne and slipped it under Jacques's pillow. She emerged from the balcony. "Hullo, Yvonne, where is Hugh?--sorry I've been so long. Let's get on the roof, shall we?" Jacques continued.
Actually all the Consul's reflections had not occupied seven minutes. Still, Laruelle seemed to have been away longer. He saw, following them, following the drinks up the spiral staircase, that in addition to the cocktail shaker and glasses there were canapés and stuffed olives on the tray. Perhaps despite all his seductive aplomb, Jacques had really gone downstairs frightened by the whole business and completely beside himself. While these elaborate preparations were merely the excuse for his flight. Perhaps also it was quite true, the poor fellow had really loved Yvonne--"Oh, God," the Consul said, reaching the mirador, to which Hugh had almost simultaneously ascended, climbing, as they approached, the last rungs of the wooden ladder from the catwalk, "God, that the dream of dark magician in his visioned cave, even while his hand shakes in its last decay--that's the bit I like--were the true end of this so lousy world... You shouldn't have gone to all this trouble, Jacques."
He took the binoculars from Hugh, and now, his drink upon a vacant merlon between the marzipan objects, he gazed steadily over the country. But oddly he had not touched this drink. And the calm mysteriously persisted. It was as if they were standing on a lofty golf-tee somewhere. What a beautiful hole this would make, from here to a green out into those trees on the other side of the barranca, that natural hazard which some hundred and fifty yards away could be carried by a good full spoon shot, soaring... Plock. The Golgotha Hole. High up, an eagle drove downwind in one. It had shown lack of imagination to build the local course back up there, remote from the barranca. Golf = gouffre = gulf. Prometheus would retrieve lost balls. And on that other side what strange fairways could be contrived, crossed by lone railway lines, humming with telegraph poles, glistening with crazy lies on embankments, over the hills and far away, like youth, like life itself, the course plotted all over these plains, extending far beyond Tomalín, through the jungle, to the Farolito, the nineteenth hole... The Case is Altered.
"No, Hugh," he said, adjusting the lenses but without turning round, "Jacques means the film he made out of Alastor before he went to Hollywood, which he shot in a bathtub, what he could of it, and apparently struck the rest together with sequences of ruins cut out of old travelogues, and a jungle hoiked out of In dunkelste Africa, and a swan out of the end of some old Corinne Griffith--Sarah Bernhardt, she was in it too, I understand, while all the time the poet was standing on the shore, and the orchestra was supposed to be doing its best with the Sacre du Printemps. I think I forgot the fog." Their laughter somewhat cleared the air.
"But beforehand you do have certain wisions, as a German director friend of mine used to say, of what your film should be like," Jacques was telling them, behind him, over by the angels. "But afterwards, that is another story... As for the fog, that is after all the cheapest commodity in any studio."
"Didn't you make any films in Hollywood?" Hugh asked, who a moment ago had almost drifted into a political argument with M. Laruelle.