Free Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

volume till this minute.Though the Consul had several times asked him for it later he had missed it that same day when he must have left it behind in the cinema. M. Laruelle listened to the water booming down the gutters beneath the one jalousie door of the Cervecería XX which opened into a side-street in the far left-hand corner. A sudden thunderclap shook the whole building and the sound echoed away like coal sliding down a chute.
    â€˜You know,
señor
he said suddenly, ‘that this isn’t my book.’
    â€˜I know,’ Sr Bustamente replied, but softly, almost in a whisper: ‘I think your
amigo
, it was his.’ He gave a little confused cough, an
appoggiatura
. ‘Your
amigo
, the
bicho
–’ Sensitive apparently to M. Laruelle’s smile he interrupted himself quietly. ‘I did not mean bitch; I mean
bicho
, the one with the blue eyes.’ Then, as if there were any longer doubt of whom he spoke, he pinched his chin and drew downward from it an imaginary beard. ‘Your
amigo
— ah — Señor Firmin.
El Cónsul
. The
Americano
.’
    â€˜No. He wasn’t American.’ M. Laruelle tried to raise his voice a little. It was hard, for everyone in the
cantina
had stopped talking and M. Laruelle noticed that a curious hush had also fallen in the theatre. The light had now completely failed and he stared over Sr Bustamente’s shoulder past the curtain into a graveyard darkness, stabbed by flashes of torchlight like heat lightning, but the vendors had lowered their voices, the children had stopped laughing and crying while the diminished audience sat slackly and bored yet patient before the dark screen, suddenly illuminated, swept, by silent grotesque shadows of giants and spears and birds, then dark again, the men along the right-hand balcony, who hadn’t bothered to move or come downstairs, a solid frieze carved into the wall, serious, moustachioed men, warriors waiting for the show to begin, for a glimpse of the murderer’s bloodstained hands.
    â€˜No?’ Sr Bustamente said softly. He took a sip of his
gaseosa
, looking too into the dark theatre and then, preoccupied again, around the
cantina
. ‘But was it true, then, he was a Consul? For I remember him many time sitting here drinking : and often, the poor guy, he have no socks.’
    M. Laruelle laughed shortly. ‘Yes, he was the British Consul here.’ They spoke subduedly in Spanish, and Sr Bustamente despairing for another ten minutes of the lights, was persuaded to a glass of beer while M. Laruelle himself took a soft drink.
    But he had not succeeded in explaining the Consul to the gracious Mexican. The lights had dimly come on again both in the theatre and the
cantina
, though the show had not recommenced, and M. Laruelle sat alone at a vacated corner table of the Cervecería XX with another
anís
before him. His stomach would suffer for it: it was only during the last year he had been drinking so heavily. He sat rigidly, the book of Elizabethan plays closed on the table, staring at his tennis racket propped against the back of the seat opposite he was keeping for Dr Vigil. He felt rather like someone lying in a bath after all the water has run out, witless, almost dead. Had he only gone home he might have finished his packing by now. But he had not been able to even make the decision to say good-bye to Sr Bustamente. It was still raining, out of season, over Mexico, the dark waters rising outside to engulf his own
zacuali
in the Calle Nicaragua, his useless tower against the coming of the second flood. Night of the Culmination of the Pleiades! I What, after all, was a Consul that one was mindful of him? Sr Bustamente, who was older than he looked, had remembered the days of Porfirio Díaz, the days when, in America, every small town along the Mexican border harboured a ‘Consul’. Indeed Mexican Consuls were to be found even in villages hundreds of miles from that