Free Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry Page A

border. Consuls were expected to look after the interests of trade between countries — were they not? But towns in Arizona that did not do ten dollars’ worth of trade a year with Mexico had Consuls maintained by Díaz. Of course, they were not Consuls but spies. Sr Bustamente knew because before the revolution his own father, a liberal and a member of the Ponciano Arriaga, had been held for three months in prison at Douglas, Arizona (in spite of which Sr Bustamente himself was going to vote for Almazán), on the orders of a Díaz-maintained Consul. Was it not then reasonable to suppose, he had hinted, without offence, and perhaps not altogether seriously, Señor Firmin was such a Consul, not, it was true, a MexicanConsul, nor of quite the same breed as those others, but an English Consul who could scarcely claim to have the interests of British trade at heart in a place where there were ño British interests and no Englishmen, the less so when it was considered that England had severed diplomatic relations with Mexico?
    Actually Sr Bustamente seemed half convinced that M. Laruelle had been taken in, that Señor Firmin had really been a sort of spy, or, as he put it, spider. But nowhere in the world were there people more human or readily moved to sympathy than the Mexicans, vote as they might for Almazán. Sr Bustamente was prepared to be sorry for the Consul even as a spider, sorry in his heart for the poor lonely dispossessed trembling soul that had sat drinking here night after night, abandoned by his wife (though she came back, M. Laruelle almost cried aloud, that was the extraordinary thing, she came back!) and possibly, remembering the socks, even by his country, and wandering hat-less and
desconsolado
and beside himself around the town pursued by other spiders who, without his ever being quite certain of it, a man in dark glasses he took to be a loafer here, a man lounging on the other side of the road he thought was a peon there, a bald boy with ear-rings swinging madly on a creaking hammock there, guarded every street and alley entrance, which, even a Mexican would no longer believe (because it was not true, M. Laruelle said) but which was still quite possible, as Sr Bustamente’s father would have assured him, let him start something and find out, just as his father would have assured him that he, M. Laruelle, could not cross the border in a cattle truck, say, without ‘their’ knowing it in Mexico City before he arrived and having already decided what ‘they’ were going to do about it. Certainly Sr Bustamente did not know the Consul well, though it was his habit to keep his eyes open, but the whole town knew him by sight, and the impression he gave, or gave that last year anyway, apart from being always
muy borracho
of course, was of a man living in continual terror of his life. Once he had run into the
cantina
El Bosque, kept by the old woman Gregorio, now a widow, shouting something like ‘
Sanctuario!
’ that people were after him, and the widow, more terrified than he, had hidden him in the back room for halfthe afternoon. It was not the widow who’d told him that but Señor Gregorio himself before he died, whose brother was his, Sr Bustamente’s, gardener, because Señora Gregorio was half English or American herself and had had some difficult explanations to make both to Señor Gregorio and his brother Bernardino. And yet, if the Consul were a ‘spider’, he was one no longer and could be forgiven. After all, he was
simpático
himself. Had he not seen him once in this very bar give all his money to a beggar taken by the police?
    â€“ But the Consul also was not a coward, M. Laruelle had interrupted, perhaps irrelevantly, at least not the kind to be craven about his life. On the contrary he was an extremely brave man, no less than a hero in fact, who had won, for conspicuous gallantry in the service of his country during the last