Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [94]
The two men faced each other in silence. "I don't want to speak to you at all really," the Consul added after a moment. "For that matter I wouldn't mind if this was the last time I ever saw you... Did you hear me?"
"Have you gone mad?" M. Laruelle exclaimed at last. "Am I to understand that your wife has come back to you, something I have seen you praying and howling for under the table--really under the table... And that you treat her indifferently as this, and still continue only to care where the next drink's coming from?"
To this unanswerable and staggering injustice the Consul had no word; he reached for his cocktail, he held it, smelt it: but somewhere, where it would do little good, a hawser did not give way: he did not drink; he almost smiled pleasantly at M. Laruelle. You might as well start now as later, refusing the drinks. You might as well start now; as later. Later.
The phone rang out and M. Laruelle ran down the staircase. The Consul sat with his face buried in his hands a while, then, leaving his drink still untouched, leaving, yes, all the drinks untouched, he descended to Jacques's room.
M. Laruelle hung up the phone: "Well," he said, "I didn't know you two were acquainted." He took off his coat and began to undo his tie. "That was my doctor, asking about you. He wants to know if you are not dead already."
"Oh... Oh, that was Vigil, was it?"
"Arturo Diaz Vigil. Médico. Cirujano... Et cetera!"
"Ah," the Consul said guardedly, running his ringer round the inside of his collar. "Yes. I met him for the first time last night. As a matter of fact he was along at my house this morning."
M. Laruelle discarded his shirt thoughtfully, saying: "We're getting in a set before he goes on his holiday."
The Consul, sitting down, imagined that weird gusty game of tennis under the hard Mexican sunlight, the tennis balls tossed in a sea of error--hard going for Vigil, but what would he care (and who was Vigil?--the good fellow seemed by now unreal to him as some figure one would forbear to greet for fear he was not your acquaintance of the morning, so much as the living double of the actor seen on the screen that afternoon) while the other prepared to enter a shower which, with that queer architectural disregard for decorum exhibited by a people who value decorum above all else, was built in a little recess splendidly visible from both the balcony and the head of the staircase.
"He wants to know if you have changed your mind, if you and Yvonne will ride with him to Guanajuato after all... Why don't you?"
"How did he know I was here?" The Consul sat up, shaking a little again, though amazed for an instant at his mastery of the situation, that here it turned out there actually was someone named Vigil, who had invited one to come to Guanajuato.
"How? How else... I told him. It's a pity you didn't meet him long ago. That man might really be of some help to you."
"You might find... You can be of some help to him today." The Consul closed his eyes, hearing the doctor's voice again distinctly: "But now that your esposa has come back. But now that your esposa has come back... I would work you with." "What?" He opened his eyes... But the abominable impact on his whole being at this moment of the fact that that hideously elongated cucumiform bundle of blue nerves and gills below the steaming un-selfconscious stomach had sought its pleasure in his wife's body brought him trembling to his feet. How loathsome, how incredibly loathsome was reality. He began to walk around the room, his knees giving way every step with a jerk. Books, too many books. The Consul still didn't see his Elizabethan plays. Yet there was everything else, from Les Joyeuses Bourgeoises de Windsor to Agrippa d'Aubigné and Collin d'Harleville, from Shelley to Touchard-Lafosse and Tristan l'Hermite. Beaucoup de bruit pour rien! Might a soul bathe there or quench its draught? It might. Yet in none of these books would one find one's own suffering. Nor could they show you how to look at an ox-eye daisy. "But what could have made you tell Vigil I was here, if you didn't know he knew me?" he asked, almost with a sob.