Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

  Yvonne turned, smiling, though her eyes were troubled and perplexed: ‘What about the war?’ she said.

  ‘That was the point. I fell out of an ambulance with three dozen beer bottles and six journalists on top of me and that’s when I decided it might be healthier to go to California.’ Hugh glanced suspiciously at a billy goat which had been following them on their right along the grass margin between the road and a wire fence, and which now stood there motionless, regarding them with patriarchal contempt. ‘No, they’re the lowest form of animal life, except possibly – look out! – my God, I knew it –’ The goat had charged and Hugh felt the sudden intoxicating terrified incidence and warmth of Yvonne’s body as the animal missed them, skidded, slithered round the abrupt leftward bend the road took at this point over a low stone bridge, and disappeared beyond up a hill, furiously trailing its tether. ‘Goats,’ he said, twisting Yvonne firmly out of his arms. ‘Even when there are no wars think of the damage they do,’ he went on, through something nervous, mutually dependent still, about their mirth. ‘I mean journalists, not goats. There’s no punishment on earth fit for them. Only the Malebolge… And here is the Malebolge.’

  The Malebolge was the barranca, the ravine which wound through the country, narrow here – but its momentousness successfully prescinded their minds from the goat. The little stone bridge on which they stood crossed it. Trees, their tops below them, grew down into the gulch, their foliage partly obscuring the terrific drop. From the bottom came a faint chuckling of water.

  ‘This ought to be about the place, if Alcapancingo’s over there,’ Hugh said, ‘where Bernal Díaz and his Tlaxcalans got across to beat up Quauhnahuac. Superb name for a dance-band: Bernal Díaz and his Tlaxcalans… Or didn’t you get around to Prescott at the University of Hawaii? ‘

  ‘Mm hm,’ Yvonne said, meaning yes or no to the meaningless question, and peering down the ravine with a shudder.

  ‘I understand it made even old Díaz’s head swim.’

  ‘I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘You can’t see them, but it’s chock full of defunct newspapermen, still spying through keyholes and persuading themselves they’re acting in the best interests of democracy. But I’d forgotten you didn’t read the papers. Eh?’ Hugh laughed. ‘Journalism equals intellectual male prostitution of speech and writing, Yvonne. That’s one point on which I’m in complete agreement with Spengler. Hullo.’ Hugh looked up suddenly at a sound, unpleasantly familiar, as of a thousand carpets being simultaneously beaten in the distance: the uproar, seeming to emanate from the direction of the volcanoes, which had almost imperceptibly come into view on the horizon, was followed presently by the prolonged twang-piiing of its echo.

  ‘Target practice,’ Yvonne said. ‘They’re at it again.’

  Parachutes of smoke were drifting over the mountains; they watched a minute in silence. Hugh sighed and started to roll a cigarette.

  ‘I had an English friend fighting in Spain, and if he’s dead I expect he’s still there.’ Hugh licked the fold of paper, sealed it and lit it, the cigarette drawing hot and fast. ‘As a matter of fact he was reported dead twice but he turned up again the last two times. He was there in thirty-six. While they were waiting for Franco to attack he lay with his machine-gun in the library at University City reading De Quincey, whom he hadn’t read before. I may be exaggerating about the machine-gun though: I don’t think they had one between them. He was a Communist and approximately the best man I’ve ever met. He had a taste for Vin Rosé d’Anjou. He also had a dog named Harpo, back in London. You probably wouldn’t have expected a Communist to have a dog named Harpo — or would you? ‘

  ‘Or would you?’

  Hugh put one foot up on the parapet and regarded his cigarette that seemed bent, like humanity, on consuming itself as quickly as possible.

  ‘I had another friend who went to China, but didn’t know what to make of that, or they didn’t of him, so he went to Spain too as a volunteer. He was killed by a stray shell before seeing any action at all. Both these fellows had perfectly good lives at home. They hadn’t robbed the bank.’ He was lamely silent.

  ‘Of course we left Spain about a year before it started, but Geoffrey used to say there was far too much sentiment about this whole business of going to die for the Loyalists. In fact, he said he thought it would be much better if the Fascists just won and got it over with –’

  ‘He has a new line now. He says when the Fascists win there’ll only be a sort of “freezing” of culture in Spain — by the way, is that the moon up there? — well, freezing anyway. Which will presumably thaw at some future date when it will be discovered, if you please, simply to have been in a state of suspended animation. I dare say it’s true as far as that goes. Incidentally, did you know I was in Spain?’

  ‘No,’ Yvonne said, startled.

  ‘Oh yes. I fell out of an ambulance there with only two dozen beer bottles and five journalists on top of me, all heading for Paris. That wasn’t so very long after I last saw you. The thing was, just as the Madrid show was really getting under way, as it turned out, it seemed all up, so the Globe told me to beat it… And like a heel I went, though they sent me back again afterwards for a time. I didn’t go to China until after Brihuega.’

  Yvonne gave him an odd look, then said:

  ‘Hugh, you’re not thinking of going back to Spain now are you, by any chance?’

  Hugh shook his head, laughing: he meticulously dropped his ravaged cigarette down the ravine. ‘¿Cut bono? To stand in for the noble army of pimps and experts, who’ve already gone home to practise the little sneers with which they propose to discredit the whole thing — the first moment it becomes fashionable not to be a Communist fence. No, muchas gracias. And I’m completely through with newspaper work, it isn’t a pose.’ Hugh put his thumbs under his belt. ‘So — since they got the Internationals out five weeks ago, on the twenty-eighth of September to be precise — two days before Chamberlain went to Godesberg and neatly crimped the Ebro offensive — and with half the last bunch of volunteers still rotting in goal in Perpignan, how do you suppose one could get in anyway, at this late date?’

  ‘Then what did Geoffrey mean by saying that you “wanted action” and all that?… And what’s this mysterious other purpose you came down here for?’

  ‘It’s really rather tedious,’ Hugh answered. ‘As a matter of fact I’m going back to sea for a while. If all goes well I’ll be sailing from Vera Cruz in about a week. As quartermaster, you knew I had an A.B.‘S ticket didn’t you? Well, I might have got a ship in Galveston but it’s not so easy as it used to be. Anyway it’ll be more amusing to sail from Vera Cruz. Havana, perhaps Nassau and then, you know, down to the West Indies and São Paulo. I’ve always wanted to take a look at Trinidad — might be some real fun coming out of Trinidad one day. Geoff helped me with a couple of introductions but no more than that, I didn’t want to make him responsible. No, I’m merely fed to the teeth with myself, that’s all. Try persuading the world not to cut its throat for half a decade or more, like me, under one name or another, and it’ll begin to dawn on you that even your behaviour’s part of its plan. I ask you, what do we know?’

  And Hugh thought: the s.s. Noemijolea, 6,000 tons, leaving Vera Cruz on the night of 13-14 (?) November 1938, with antimony and coffee, bound for Freetown, British West Africa, will proceed thither, oddly enough, from Tzucox on the Yucatan coast, and also in a north-easterly direction: in spite of which she will still emerge through the passages named Windward and Crooked into the Atlantic Ocean: where after many days out of sight of land she will make eventually the mountainous landfall of Madeira: whence, avoiding Port Lyautey and carefully keeping her destination in Sierra Leone some 1,800 miles to the south-east, she will pass, with luck, through the straits of Gibraltar. Whence again, negotiating, it is profoundly to be hoped, Franco’s blockade, she will proceed with the utmost caution into the Mediterranean Sea, leaving first Cape de Gata, then Cape de Palos, then Cape de la Nao, well
aft: thence, the Pityusae Isles sighted, she will roll through the Gulf of Valencia and so northwards past Carlos de la Rápita, and the mouth of the Ebro until the rocky Garraf coast looms abaft the beam where finally, still rolling, at Vallcara, twenty miles south of Barcelona, she will discharge her cargo of T.N.T. for the hard-pressed Loyalist armies and probably be blown to smithereens —

  Yvonne was staring down the barranca, her hair hanging over her face: ‘I know Geoff sounds pretty foul sometimes,’ she was saying, ‘but there’s one point where I do agree with him, these romantic notions about the International Brigade –’

  But Hugh was standing at the wheel: Potato Firmin or Columbus in reverse: below him the foredeck of the Noemijolea lay over in the blue trough and spray slowly exploded through the lee scuppers into the eyes of the seaman chipping a winch: on the forecastle head the look-out echoed one bell, struck by Hugh a moment before, and the seaman gathered up his tools: Hugh’s heart was lifting with the ship, he was aware that the officer on duty had changed from white to blue for winter but at the same time of exhilaration, the limitless purification of the sea —

  Yvonne flung back her hair impatiently and stood up. ‘If they’d stayed out of it the war would have been over long ago!’

  ‘Well, there ain’t no brigade no mo’,’ Hugh said absently, for it was not a ship he was steering now, but the world, out of the Western Ocean of its misery. ‘If the paths of glory lead but to the grave — I once made such an excursion into poetry — then Spain’s the grave where England’s glory led.’

  ‘Fiddlesticks!’

  Hugh suddenly laughed, not loud, probably at nothing at all: he straightened himself with a swift movement and jumped on the parapet.

  ‘Hugh!’

  ‘My God! Horses,’ Hugh said, glancing and stretching himself to his full mental height of six feet two (he was five feet eleven).

  ‘Where?’

  He was pointing. ‘Over there.’

  ‘Of course,’ Yvonne said slowly, ‘I’d forgotten — they belong to the Casino de la Selva: they put them out there to pasture or something. If we go up the hill a ways we’ll come to the place –’

  … On a gentle slope to their left now, colts with glossy coats were rolling in the grass. They turned off the Calle Nicaragua along a narrow shady lane leading down one side of the paddock. The stables were part of what appeared to be a model dairy farm. It stretched away behind the stables on level ground where tall English-looking trees lined either side of a grassy wheel-rutted avenue. In the distance a few rather large cows, which, however, like Texas longhorns, bore a disturbing resemblance to stags (you’ve got your cattle again, I see, Yvonne said) were lying under the trees. A row of shining milkpails stood outside the stables in the sun. A sweet smell of milk and vanilla and wild flowers hung about the quiet place. And the sun was over all.

  ‘Isn’t it an adorable farm?’ Yvonne said. ‘I believe it’s some government experiment. I’d love to have a farm like that.’

  ‘ – perhaps you’d like to hire a couple of those greater kudus over there instead?’

  Their horses proved two pesos an hour apiece. ‘Muy correcto’ the stable boy’s dark eyes flashed good-humouredly at Hugh’s boots as he turned swiftly to adjust Yvonne’s deep leather stirrups. Hugh didn’t know why, but this lad reminded him of how, in Mexico City, if you stand at a certain place on the Paseo de la Reforma in the early morning, suddenly everyone in sight will seem to be running, laughing, to work, in the sunlight, past the statue of Pasteur… ‘Muy incorrecto,’ Yvonne surveyed her slacks: she swung, swung twice into the saddle. ‘We’ve never ridden together before, have we?’ She leaned forward to pat her mare’s neck as they swayed forward.

  They ambled up the lane, accompanied by two foals, which had followed their mothers out of the paddock, and an affectionate scrubbed woolly white dog belonging to the farm. After a while the lane branched off into a main road. They seemed to be in Alcapancingo itself, a sort of straggling suburb. The watchtower, nearer, taller, bloomed above a wood, through which they just made out the high prison walls. On the other side, to their left, Geoffrey’s house came in sight, almost a bird’s-eye view, the bungalow crouching, very tiny, before the trees, the long garden below descending steeply, parallel with which on different levels obliquely climbing the hill, all the other gardens of the contiguous residences, each with its cobalt oblong of swimming-pool, also descended steeply towards the barranca, the land sweeping away at the top of the Calle Nicaragua back up to the pre-eminence of Cortez Palace. Could that white dot down there be Geoffrey himself? Possibly to avoid coming to a place where, by the entrance to the public garden, they must be almost directly opposite the house, they trotted into another lane that inclined to their right. Hugh was pleased to see that Yvonne rode cowboy-fashion, jammed to the saddle, and not, as Juan Cerillo put it, ‘as in gardens’. The prison was now behind them and he imagined themselves jogging into enormous focus for the inquisitive binoculars up there on the watchtower; ‘Guapa,’ one policeman would say. ‘Ah, muy hermosa,’ another might call, delighted with Yvonne and smacking his lips. The world was always within the binoculars of the police. Meantime the foals, which perhaps were not fully aware that a road was a means of getting somewhere and not, like a field, something to roll on or eat, kept straying into the undergrowth on either hand. Then the mares whinnied after them anxiously and they scrambled back again. Presently the mares grew tired of whinnying, so in a way he had learned Hugh whistled instead. He had pledged himself to guard the foals but actually the dog was guarding all of them. Evidently trained to detect snakes, he would run ahead then double back to make sure all were safe before loping on once more. Hugh watched him a moment. It was certainly hard to reconcile this dog with the pariahs one saw in town, those dreadful creatures that seemed to shadow his brother everywhere.

  ‘You do sound astonishingly like a horse,’ Yvonne said suddenly. ‘Wherever did you learn that?’

  ‘Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wheeee-u,’ Hugh whistled again. ‘In Texas.’ Why had he said Texas? He had learned the trick in Spain, from Juan Cerillo. Hugh took off his jacket and laid it across the horse’s withers in front of the saddle. Turning round as the foals came obediently plunging out of the bushes he added:

  ‘It’s the whéee-u that does it. The dying fall of the whinny.’

  They passed the goat, two fierce cornucopias over a hedge. There could be no mistaking it. Laughing they tried to decide if it had turned off the Calle Nicaragua at the other lane or at its juncture with the Alcapancingo road. The goat was cropping at the edge of a field and lifted towards them, now, a Machiavellian eye, but did not move farther, watching them. I may have missed that time. I am still on the warpath however,

  The new lane, peaceful, quite shady, deep-rutted, and despite the dry spell full of pools, beautifully reflecting the sky, wandered on between clumps of trees and broken hedges screening indeterminate fields, and now it was as though they were a company, a caravan, carrying, for their greater security, a little world of love with them as they rode along. Earlier it had promised to be too hot: but just enough sun warmed them, a soft breeze caressed their faces, the countryside on either hand smiled upon them with deceptive innocence, a drowsy hum rose up from the morning, the mares nodded, there were the foals, here was the dog, and it is all a bloody lie, he thought: we have fallen inevitably into it, it is as if, upon this one day in the year, the dead come to life, or so one was reliably informed on the bus, this day of visions and miracles, by some contrariety we have been allowed for one hour a glimpse of what never was at all, of what never can be since brotherhood was betrayed, the image of our happiness, of that it would be better to think could not have been. Another thought struck Hugh. And yet I do not expect, ever in my life, to be happier than I am now. No peace I shall ever find but will be poisoned as these moments are poisoned —

  (‘Firmin, you are a poor sort of good man.’ The voice might have come from an imaginary member of their car
avan, and Hugh pictured Juan Cerillo distinctly now, tall, and riding a horse much too small for him, without stirrups, so that his feet nearly touched the ground, his wide ribboned hat on the back of his head, and a typewriter in a box slung around his neck resting on the pommel; in one free hand he held a bag of money, and a boy was running along beside him in the dust. Juan Cerillo! He had been one of the fairly rare overt human symbols in Spain of the generous help Mexico had actually given; he had returned home before Brihuega. Trained as a chemist, he worked for a Credit Bank in Oaxaca with the Ejido, delivering money on horseback to finance the collective effort of remote Zapotecan villages; frequently beset by bandits murderously yelling Viva el Cristo Rey, shot at by enemies of Cárdenas in reverberating church towers, his daily job was equally an adventure in a human cause, which Hugh had been invited to share. For Juan had written, express, his letter in a bravely stamped envelope of thumbnail size — the stamps showed archers shooting at the sun — written that he was well, back at work, less than a hundred miles away, and now as each glimpse of the mysterious mountains seemed to mourn this opportunity lost to Geoff and the Noemijolea, Hugh seemed to hear his good friend rebuking him. It was the same plangent voice that had said once, in Spain, of his horse left in Cuicadán: ‘My poor horse, she will be biting, biting all the time.’ But now it spoke of the Mexico of Juan’s childhood, of the year Hugh was born. Juarez had lived and died. Yet was it a country with free speech, and the guarantee of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? A country of brilliantly muralled schools, and where even each little cold mountain village had its stone open-air stage, and the land was owned by its people free to express their native genius? A country of model farms: of hope? — It was a country of slavery, where human beings were sold like cattle, and its native peoples, the Yaquis, the Papagos, the Tomasachics, exterminated through deportation, or reduced to worse than peonage, their lands in thrall or the hands of foreigners. And in Oaxaca lay the terrible Valle Nacional where Juan himself, a bona-fide slave aged seven, had seen an older brother beaten to death, and another, bought for forty-five pesos, starved to death in seven months, because it was cheaper this should happen, and the slave-holder buy another slave, than simply have one slave better fed merely worked to death in a year. All this spelt Porfirio Díaz: rurales everywhere, jefes políticos, and murder, the extirpation of liberal political institutions, the army an engine of massacre, an instrument of exile. Juan knew this, having suffered it; and more. For later in the revolution, his mother was murdered. And later still Juan himself killed his father, who had fought with Huerta, but turned traitor. Ah, guilt and sorrow had dogged Juan’s footsteps too, for he was not a Catholic who could rise refreshed from the cold bath of confession. Yet the banality stood: that the past was irrevocably past. And conscience had been given man to regret it only in so far as that might change the future. For man, every man, Juan seemed to be telling him, even as Mexico, must ceaselessly struggle upward. What was life but a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn? Revolution rages too in the tierra caliente of each human soul. No peace but that must pay full toll to hell —)