Free Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry Page A

even now, where I cannot reach
you, ever on into the darkness of the sundering, of the severance!--Oh
Geoffrey, why do you do it!"
    "But look here, hang it all, it
is not altogether darkness," the Consul seemed to be saying in reply to her,
gently, as he produced a half-filled pipe and with the utmost difficulty lit
it, and as her eyes followed his as they roved around the bar, not meeting
those of the barman, who had gravely, busily effaced himself into the
background, "you misunderstand me if you think it is altogether darkness I
see, and if you insist on thinking so, how can I tell you why I do it? But if
you look at that sunlight there, ah, then perhaps you'll get the answer, see,
look at the way it falls through the window: what beauty can compare to that of
a cantina in the early morning? Your volcanoes outside? Your stars--Ras
Algethi? Antares raging south south-east? Forgive me, no. Not so much the
beauty of this one necessarily, which, a regression on my part, is not perhaps
properly a cantina, but think of all the other terrible ones where people go
mad that will soon be taking down their shutters, for not even the gates of
heaven, opening wide to receive me, could fill me with such celestial
complicated and hopeless joy as the iron screen that rolls up with a crash, as
the unpadlocked jostling jalousies which admit those whose souls tremble with
the drinks they carry unsteadily to their lips. All mystery, all hope, all
disappointment, yes, all disaster, is here, beyond those swinging doors. And,
by the way, do you see that old woman from Tarasco sitting in the corner, you
didn't before, but do you now?" his eyes asked her, gazing round him with
the bemused unfocused brightness of a lover's, his love asked her, "how,
unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old woman
from Tarasco who plays dominoes at seven o'clock in the morning?"
    It was true, it was almost uncanny,
there was someone else in the room she hadn't noticed until the Consul, without
a word, had glanced behind them: now Yvonne's eyes came to rest on the old
woman, who was sitting in the shadow at the bar's one table. On the edge of the
table her stick, made of steel with some animal's claw for a handle, hung like
something alive. She had a little chicken on a cord which she kept under her
dress over her heart. The chicken peeped out with pert, jerky, sidelong
glances. She set the little chicken on a table near her where it pecked among
the dominoes, uttering tiny cries. Then she replaced it, drawing her dress
tenderly over it. But Yvonne looked away. The old woman with her chicken and
the dominoes chilled her heart. It was like an evil omen.
    --"Talking of corpses"--the
Consul poured himself another whisky and was signing a chit book with a
somewhat steadier hand while Yvonne sauntered towards the
door--"personally I'd like to be buried next to William Blackstone--"
He pushed the book back for Fernando, to whom mercifully he had not attempted
to introduce her. "The man who went to live among the Indians. You know
who he was, of course?" The Consul stood half turned towards her,
doubtfully regarding this new drink he had not picked up.
    "--Christ, if you want it,
Alabama, go ahead and take it... I don't want it. But if you wish it, you go and
take it."
    "Absolutamente necesario--"
    The Consul left half of it.
    Outside, in the sunlight, in the
backwash of tabid music from the still-continuing ball, Yvonne waited again,
casting nervous glances over her shoulder at the main entrance of the hotel
from which belated revellers like half-dazed wasps out of a hidden nest issued
every few moments while, on the instant, correct, abrupt, army and navy,
consular, the Consul, with scarce a tremor now, found a pair of dark glasses
and put them on.
    "Well," he said, "the
taxis seem to have all disappeared. Shall we walk?"
    "Why what's happened to the
car?" So confused by apprehension of