They advanced slowly, past the Baños de la Libertad, the Casa Brandes (La Primera en el Ramo de Electricidad), a hooded hooting intruder through the narrow tilted streets. At the market they stopped for a group of Indian women with baskets of live fowl. The women’s strong faces were the colour of dark ceramic ware. There was a massiveness in their movements as they settled themselves. Two or three had cigarette stubs behind their ears, another chewed an old pipe. Their good-humoured faces of old idols were wrinkled with sun but they did not smile.
— ‘Look! O.K.,’ the driver of the bus invited Hugh and Yvonne, who were changing places, producing, from beneath his shirt where they’d been nestling, little secret ambassadors of peace, of love, two beautiful white tame pigeons. ‘My — ah —my aerial pigeons.’
They had to scratch the heads of the birds who, arching their backs proudly, shone as with fresh white paint. (Could he have known, as Hugh, from merely smelling the latest headlines had known, how much nearer even in these moments the Government were to losing the Ebro, that it would now be a matter of days before Modesto withdrew altogether?) The driver replaced the pigeons under his white open shirt: ‘To keep them warm. Sure, Mike. Yes, sir,’ he told them.’ Vâmonos!’
Someone laughed as the bus lurched off!; the faces of the other passengers slowly cracked into mirth, the camión was welding the old women into a community. The clock over the market arch, like the one in Rupert Brooke, said ten to three; but it was twenty to. They rambled and bounced into the main highway, the Avenida de la Revolución, past offices whose windows proclaimed, while the Consul nodded his head deprecatingly, Dr Arturo Díaz Vigil, Médico Cirujano y Partero, past the cinema itself. — The old women didn’t look as though they knew about the Battle of the Ebro either. Two of them were holding an anxious conversation, in spite of the clatter and squeak of the patient floorboards, about the price of fish. Used to tourists, they took no notice of them. Hugh conveyed to the Consul:
‘How are the rajah shakes?’
Inhumaciones: the Consul, laughingly pinching one ear, was pointing for answer at the undertakers’ jolting by, where a parrot, head cocked, looked down from its perch suspended in the entrance, above which a sign inquired:
Quo Vadis?
Where they were going immediately was down, at a snail’s pace, by a secluded square with great old trees, their delicate leaves like new spring green. In the garden under the trees were doves and a small black goat. ¿Le gusta este jardin, que es suyo? ¡Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan! Do you like this garden, the notice said, that is yours? See to it that your children do not destroy it!
… There were no children, however, in the garden; just a man sitting alone on a stone bench. This man was apparently the devil himself, with a huge dark red face and horns, fangs, and his tongue hanging out over his chin, and an expression of mingled evil, lechery, and terror. The devil lifted his mask to spit, rose, and shambled through the garden with a dancing, loping step towards a church almost hidden by the trees. There was a sound of clashing machetes. A native dance was going on beyond some awnings by the church, on the steps of which two Americans, Yvonne and he had seen earlier, were watching on tiptoe, craning their necks. ‘Seriously,’ Hugh repeated to the Consul, who seemed calmly to have accepted the devil, while Hugh exchanged a look of regret with Yvonne, for they had seen no dancing in the zócalo, and it was now too late to get out.
‘Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus.’
They were crossing a bridge at the bottom of the hill, over the ravine. It appeared overtly horrendous here. In the bus one looked straight down, as from the maintruck of a sailing ship, through dense foliage and wide leaves that did not at all conceal the treachery of the drop; its steep banks were thick with refuse, which even hung on the bushes. Turning, Hugh saw a dead dog right at the bottom, nuzzling the refuse; white bones showed through the carcass. But above was the blue sky and Yvonne looked happy when Popocatepetl sprang into view, dominating the landscape for a while as they climbed the hill beyond. Then it dropped out of sight around a corner. It was a long circuitous hill. Half-way up, outside a gaudily decorated tavern, a man in a blue suit and strange headgear, swaying gently and eating half a melon, awaited the bus. From the interior of this tavern, which was called El Amor de los Amores, came a sound of singing. Hugh caught sight of what appeared to be armed policemen drinking at the bar. The camión slithered, banking with wheels locked to a stop alongside the sidewalk.
The driver dashed into the tavern, leaving the tilted camión, which meanwhile the man with the melon had boarded, throbbing away to itself. The driver emerged; he hurled himself back on to the vehicle, jamming it almost simultaneously into gear. Then, with an amused glance over his shoulder at the man, and a look to his trusting pigeons, he urged his bus up the hill:
‘Sure, Mike. Sure. O.K. boy.’
The Consul was pointing back at the El Amor de los Amores:
’Viva Franco… That’s one of your Fascist joints, Hugh.’
‘So?’
“That hophead‘s the brother of the proprietor, I believe. I can tell you this much… He’s not an aerial pigeon.’
‘A what?… Oh.’
‘You may not think it, but he’s a Spaniard.’
The seats ran lengthwise and Hugh looked at the man in the blue suit opposite, who had been talking thickly to himself, who now, drunk, drugged, or both, seemed sunk in stupor. There was no conductor on the bus. Perhaps there would be one later, evidently fares were to be paid the driver on getting off, so none bothered him. Certainly his features, high, prominent nose and firm chin, were of strongly Spanish cast. His hands — in one he still clutched the gnawed half-melon — were huge, capable and rapacious. Hands of the conquistador, Hugh thought suddenly. But his general aspect suggested less the conquistador than, it was Hugh’s perhaps too neat idea, the confusion that tends eventually to overtake conquistadores. His blue suit was of quite expensive cut, the open coat, it appeared, shaped at the waist. Hugh had noticed his broad-cuffed trousers draped well over expensive shoes. The shoes however — which had been shined that morning but were soiled with saloon sawdust — were full of holes. He wore no tie. His handsome purple shirt, open at the neck, revealed a gold crucifix. The shirt was torn and in places hung out over his trousers. And for some reason he wore two hats, a kind of cheap Homburg fitting neatly over the broad crown of his sombrero.
‘How do you mean Spaniard?’ Hugh said.
‘They came over after the Moroccan war,’ the Consul said. ‘A pelado,’ he added, smiling.
The smile referred to an argument about this word he’d had with Hugh, who’d seen it defined somewhere as a shoeless illiterate. According to the Consul, this was only one meaning: pelados were indeed ‘peeled ones’, the stripped, but also those who did not have to be rich to prey on the really poor. For instance those half-breed petty politicians who will, in order to get into office just for one year, in which year they hope to put by enough to forswear work the rest of their lives, do literally anything whatsoever, from shining shoes, to acting as one who was not an ‘aerial pigeon’. Hugh understood this word finally to be pretty ambiguous. A Spaniard, say, could interpret it as Indian, the Indian he despised, used, made drunk. The Indian, however, might mean Spaniard by it. Either might mean by it anyone who made a show of himself. It was perhaps one of those words that had actually been distilled out of conquest, suggesting, as it did, on the one hand thief, on the other exploiter. Interchangeable ever were the terms of abuse with which the aggressor discredits those about to be ravaged !
The hill behind them, the bus was stopping opposite the foot of an avenue, with fountains, leading to a hotel: the Casino de la Selva. Hugh made out tennis courts, and white figures moving, the Consul’s eyes pointed — there were Dr Vigil and M. Lamelle. M. Lamelle, if it was he, tossed a ball high into the blue, smacked it down, but Vigil walked right past it, crossing to the other side.
Here the American highway really began; and they
enjoyed a brief stretch of good road. The camión reached the railway station, sleepy, signals up, points locked in somnolence. It was closed like a book. Unusual pullmans snored along a siding. On the embankment Pearce oiltanks were pillowed. Their burnished silver lightning alone was awake, playing hide-and-seek among the trees. And on that lonely platform tonight he himself would stand, with his pilgrim’s bundle.
‘How are you?’ (meaning how much more!) Hugh smiled, leaning over to Yvonne.
‘This is such fun –’
Like a child Hugh wanted everyone to be happy on a trip. Even had they been going to the cemetery he would have wanted them to be happy. But Hugh felt more as if, fortified by a pint of bitter, he were going to play in some important ‘away’ match for a school fifteen in which he’d been included at the last minute: when the dread, hard as nails and boots, of the foreign twenty-five line, of the whiter, taller goalposts, expressed itself in a strange exaltation, an urgent desire to chatter. The noonday languor had passed him by: yet the naked realities of the situation, like the spokes of a wheel, were blurred in motion towards unreal high events. This trip now seemed to him the best of all possible ideas. Even the Consul seemed still in a good mood. But communication between them all soon became again virtually impossible; the American highway rolled away into the distance.
They left it abruptly, rough stone walls shut out the view. Now they were rattling between leafy hedges full of wild flowers with deep royal bluebells. Possibly, another kind of convolvulus. Green and white clothing hung on the cornstalks outside the low grass-roofed houses. Here the bright blue flowers climbed right up into the trees that were already snowy with blooms.
To their right, beyond a wall that suddenly became much higher, now lay their grove of the morning. And here, announced by its smell of beer, was the Cervecería Quauhnahuac itself. Yvonne and Hugh, around the Consul, exchanged a look of encouragement and friendship. The massive gate was still open. How swiftly they clattered past! Yet not before Hugh had seen again the blackened and leaf-covered tables and, in the distance, the fountain choked with leaves. The little girl with the armadillo had gone, but the visored man resembling a gamekeeper was standing alone in the courtyard, his hands behind his back, watching them. Along the wall the cypresses stirred gently together, enduring their dust.
Beyond the level-crossing the Tomalín road became smoother for a time. A cool breeze blew gratefully through the windows into the hot camión. Over the plains to their right wound now the interminable narrow-gauge railway, where — though there were twenty-one other paths they might have taken! — they had ridden home abreast. And there were the telegraph poles refusing, for ever, that final curve to the left, and striding straight ahead… In the square too they’d talked of nothing but the Consul. What a relief, and what a joyful relief for Yvonne, when he’d turned up at the Terminal after all! — But the road was rapidly growing much worse again, it was now well-nigh impossible to think, let alone talk —
They jogged on into ever rougher and rougher country. Popocatepetl came in view, an apparition already circling away, that beckoned them forward. The ravine appeared once more on the scene, patiently creeping after them in the distance. The camión crashed down a pothole with a deafening jolt that threw Hugh’s soul between his teeth. And then crashed into, and over, a second series of deeper potholes:
‘This is like driving over the moon,’ he tried to say to Yvonne.
She couldn’t hear… He noticed new fine lines about her mouth, a weariness that had not been there in Paris. Poor Yvonne ! May she be happy. May everything come, somehow, right. May we all be happy. God bless us. Hugh now wondered if he should produce, from his inside pocket, a very small pinch bottle of habanero he had acquired, against emergency, in the square, and frankly offer the Consul a drink. But he obviously didn’t need it yet. A faint calm smile played about the Consul’s lips which from time to time moved slightly, as if, in spite of the racket, the swaying and jolting, and their continually being sent sprawling against one another, he were solving a chess problem, or reciting something to himself.
Then they were hissing along a good stretch of oiled road through fiat wooded country with neither volcano nor ravine in sight. Yvonne had turned sideways and her clear profile sailed along reflected in the window. The more even sounds of the bus wove into Hugh’s brain an idiotic syllogism: I am losing the Battle of the Ebro, I am also losing Yvonne, therefore Yvonne is…
The camión was now somewhat fuller. In addition to the pelado and the old women there were men dressed in their Sunday best, white trousers and purple shirts, and one or two younger women in mourning, probably going to the cemeteries. The poultry were a sad sight. All alike had submitted to their fate; hens, cocks, and turkeys, whether in their baskets, or still loose. With only an occasional flutter to show they were alive they crouched passively under the long seats, their emphatic spindly claws bound with cord. Two pullets lay, frightened and quivering, between the hand brake and the clutch, their wings linked with the levers. Poor things, they had signed their Munich agreement too. One of the turkeys even looked remarkably like Neville Chamberlain. su salud estará a salvo no escupiendo en el interior de este vehículo: these words, over the windscreen, ran the entire breadth of the bus. Hugh concentrated upon different objects in the camión; the driver’s small mirror with the legend running round it — Cooperación de la Cruz Roja, the three picture postcards of the Virgin Mary pinned beside it, the two slim vases of marguerites over the dashboard, the gangrened fire extinguisher, the dungaree jacket and whiskbroom under the seat where the pelado was sitting — he watched him as they hit another bad stretch of road.
Swaying from side to side with his eyes shut, the man was trying to tuck in his shirt. Now he was methodically buttoning his coat on the wrong buttons. But it struck Hugh all this was merely preparatory, a sort of grotesque toilet. For, still without opening his eyes, he had now somehow found room to lie full length on the seat. It was extraordinary, too, how, stretched out, a corpse, he yet preserved the appearance of knowing everything that was going on. Despite his stupor, he was a man on guard. The half-melon jumped from his hand, the chawed fragment full of seeds like raisins rolled on the seat; those closed eyes saw it. His crucifix was slipping off; he was conscious of it. The Homburg fell from his sombrero, slid to the floor, he knew all about it, though he made no effort to pick the hat up. He was guarding himself against theft, while at the same time gathering strength for more debauchery. In order to get into another cantina not his brother’s he might have to walk straight. Such prescience was worthy of admiration.
Nothing but pines, fircones, stones, black earth. Yet that earth looked parched, those stones, unmistakably, volcanic. Everywhere, quite as Prescott informed one, were attestations to Popocatepetl’s presence and antiquity. And here the damned thing was again! Why were there volcanic eruptions? People pretended not to know. Because, they might suggest tentatively, under the rocks beneath the surface of the earth, steam, its pressure constantly rising, was generated; because the rocks and the water, decomposing, formed gases, which combined with the molten material from below; because the watery rocks near the surface were unable to restrain the growing complex of pressures, and the whole mass exploded; the lava flooded out, the gases escaped, and there was your eruption. — But not your explanation. No, the whole thing was a complete mystery still. In movies of eruptions people were always seen standing in the midst of the encroaching flood, delighted by it. Walls fell over, churches collapsed, whole families moved away their possessions in a panic, but there were always these people, jumping about between the streams of molten lava, smoking cigarettes…
Christ! He hadn’t realized how fast they were going, in spite of the road and their being in a 1918 Chevrolet, and it seemed to him that because of this a quite different atmosphere now pervaded the little bus; the men were smiling, the old women gossiping knowingly and chuckling, two boys, newcomers hanging on by their eyebrows at the back, were whistli
ng cheerfully — the bright shirts, the brighter serpentine confetti of tickets, red, yellow, green, blue, dangling from a loop on the ceiling, all contributed to a sense of gaiety, a feeling, almost, of the fiesta itself again, that hadn’t been there before.
But the boys were dropping off, one by one, and the gaiety, short-lived as a burst of sunlight, departed. Brutal-looking candelabra cactus swung past, a ruined church, full of pumpkins, windows bearded with grass. Burned, perhaps, in the revolution, its exterior was blackened with fire, and it had an air of being damned.
— The time has come for you to join your comrades, to aid the workers, he told Christ, who agreed. It had been His idea all the while, only until Hugh had rescued Him those hypocrites had kept him shut up inside the burning church where He couldn’t breathe. Hugh made a speech. Stalin gave him a medal and listened sympathetically while he explained what was on his mind. ‘True… I wasn’t in time to save the Ebro, but I did strike my blow –’ He went off, the star of Lenin on his lapel; in his pocket a certificate; Hero of the Soviet Republic, and the True Church, pride and love in his heart —
Hugh looked out of the window. Well, after all. Silly bastard. But the queer thing was, that love was real. Christ, why can’t we be simple, Christ Jesus why may we not be simple, why may we not all be brothers?
Buses with odd names on them, a procession out of a side-road, were bobbing past in the opposite direction: buses to Tetecala, to Jujuta, to Xuitepec: buses to Xochitepec, to Xoxitepec —
Popocatepelt loomed, pyramidal, to their right, one side beautifully curved as a woman’s breast, the other precipitous, jagged, ferocious. Cloud drifts were massing again, high-piled, behind it. Ixtaccihuatl appeared…
Under the Volcano Page 29