Free Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

sitting there, all her carefully
thought-out speeches, her plans and tact so obviously vanishing in the gloom,
or merely repellent--she felt slightly repellent--because she wouldn't have a
drink. "What have you done? I wrote you and wrote you. I wrote till my
heart broke. What have you done with your--"
    "--life," came from beyond
the glass partition. "What a life! Christ, it's a shame! Where I come from
they don't run. We're going through busting this way--"
    "--No. I thought of course you'd
returned to England, when you didn't answer. What have you done? Oh Geoff--have
you resigned from the service?"
    "--went down to Fort Sale. Took
your shoeshot. And took your Brownings.--Jump, jump, jump, jump, jump--see, get
it--"
    "I ran into Louis in Santa
Barbara. He said you were still here."
    "--and like hell you can, you
can't do it, and that's what you do in Alabama! "
    "Well, actually I've only been
away once." The Consul took a long shuddering drink, then sat down again
beside her. "To Oaxaca.--Remember Oaxaca?"
    "--Oaxaca?--"
    "--Oaxaca.--"
    --The word was like a breaking heart,
a sudden peal of stifled bells in a gale, the last syllables of one dying of
thirst in the desert. Did she remember Oaxaca! The roses and the great tree,
was that, the dust and the buses to Etla and Nochitlán? and: "damas
acompañadas de un caballero, gratis." Or at night their cries of love,
rising into the ancient fragrant Mayan air, heard only by ghosts? In Oaxaca
they had found each other once. She was watching the Consul who seemed less on
the defensive than in process while straightening out the leaflets on the bar
of changing mentally from the part played for Fernando to the part he would
play for her, watching him almost with amazement: "Surely this cannot be
us," she cried in her heart suddenly. "This cannot be us--say that it
is not, somebody, this cannot be us here!"--Divorce. What did the word
really mean? She'd looked it up in the dictionary, on the ship: to sunder, to
sever. And divorced meant: sundered, severed. Oaxaca meant divorce. They had
not been divorced there but that was where the Consul had gone when she left,
as if into the heart of the sundering, of the severance. Yet they had loved one
another! But it was as though their love were wandering over some desolate
cactus plain, far from here, lost, stumbling and falling, attacked by wild
beasts, calling for help--dying, to sigh at last, with a kind of weary peace:
Oaxaca--
    -'The strange thing about this little
corpse, Yvonne," the Consul was saying, "is that it must be
accompanied by a person holding its hand: no, sorry. Apparently not its hand,
just a first-class ticket." He held up, smiling, his own right hand which
shook as with a movement of wiping chalk from an imaginary blackboard.
"It's really the shakes that make this kind of life insupportable. But
they will stop: I was only drinking enough so they would. Just the necessary,
the therapeutic drink." Yvonne looked back at him. "--but the shakes
are the worst of course," he was going on. "You get to like the other
after a while, and I'm really doing very well, I'm much better than I was six
months ago, very much better than I was, say, in Oaxaca"--noticing a
curious familiar glare in his eyes that always frightened her, a glare turned
inward now like one of those sombrely brilliant cluster-lamps down the hatches
of the Pennsylvania on the work of unloading, only this was a work of
spoliation: and she felt a sudden dread lest this glare, as of old, should
swing outward, turn upon her.
    "God knows I've seen you like
this before," her thoughts were saying, her love was saying, through the
gloom of the bar, "too many times for it to be a surprise anyhow. You are
denying me again. But this time there is a profound difference. This is like an
ultimate denial--oh Geoffrey, why can't you turn back? Must you go on and on
for ever into this stupid darkness, seeking it,