Free Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry Page B

meeting any acquaintance was she,
Yvonne had almost taken the arm of another man wearing dark glasses, a ragged
young Mexican leaning against the hotel wall to whom the Consul, slapping his
stick over his wrist and with something enigmatic in his voice observed:
"Buenas tardes, señor." Yvonne started forward quickly. "Yes,
let's walk."
    The Consul took her arm with
courtliness (the ragged Mexican with the dark glasses had been joined, she
noticed, by another man with a shade over one eye and bare feet who had been
leaning against the wall farther down, to whom the Consul also remarked
"Buenas tardes," but there were no more guests coming out of the
hotel, only the two men who'd politely called "Buenas" after them
standing there nudging each other as if to say: "He said 'Buenas tardes',
what a card he is!") and they set off obliquely through the square. The
fiesta wouldn't start till much later and the streets that remembered so many
other Days of the Dead were fairly deserted. The bright banners, the paper
streamers, flashed: the great wheel brooded under the trees, brilliant,
motionless. Even so the town around and below them was already full of sharp
remote noises like explosions of rich colour. ¡Box! said an advertisement.
ARENA TOMALÍN. Frente al Jardín Xicoténcatl. Domingo 8 de Noviembre de 1938. 4
Emocionantes Peleas.
    Yvonne tried to keep herself from asking:
    "Did you smack the car up
again?"
    "As a matter of fact I've lost
it."
    "Lost it!"
    "It's a pity because--but look
here, dash it all, aren't you terribly tired, Yvonne?"
    "Not in the least! I should
think you're the one to be--"
    --¡ Box! Preliminar a 4 Rounds, El
TURCO (Gonzalo Calderón de Par. de 52 kilos) vs EL OSO (de Par. de 53 kilos).
    "I had a million hours of sleep
on the boat! And I'd far rather walk, only--"
    "Nothing. Just a touch of
rheumatiz.--Or is it the sprue? I'm glad to get some circulation going in the
old legs."
    --¡Box! Evento Especial a 5 rounds,
en los que el vencedor pasará al grupo de Semi-Finales, TOMA AGUERO (El
Invencible Indio de Quauhnahuac de 57 kilos, que acaba de llegar de la Capital
de la República). ARENA TOMALÍN. Frente al Jardín Xicoténcatl.
    " It's a pity about the car
because we might have gone to the boxing," said the Consul, who was
walking almost exaggeratedly erect.
    "I hate boxing."
    "--But that's not till next
Sunday anyhow... I heard they had some kind of a bullthrowing on today over at
Tomalín.--Do you remember--"
    "No!"
    The Consul, with no more recognition
than she, held up one finger in dubious greeting to an individual resembling a
carpenter, running past them wagging his head and carrying a sawed length of
grained board under his arm and who threw, almost chanted, a laughing word at
him that sounded like: "¡Mescalito!"
    The sunlight blazed down on them,
blazed on the eternal ambulance whose headlights were momentarily transformed
into a blinding magnifying glass, glazed on the volcanoes--she could not look
at them now. Born in Hawaii, she'd had volcanoes in her life before, however.
Seated on a park bench under a tree in the square, his feet barely touching the
ground, the little public scribe was already crashing away on a giant
typewriter.
    "I am taking the only way out,
semicolon," the Consul offered cheerfully and soberly in passing.
"Good-bye, full stop. Change of paragraph, change of chapter, change of
worlds--"
    The whole scene about her--the names
on the shops surrounding the square: La China Poblana, hand-embroidered
dresses, the advertisements: Baños de la Libertad, Los mejores de la Capital y
los únicos en donde nunca falta el agua, Estufas especiales para Damas y
Caballeros: and Sr Panadero: Sí quiere hacer buen pan exija las harinas
"Princesa Donaji"--striking Yvonne as so strangely familiar all over
again and yet so sharply strange after the year's absence, the