— Xiutepecanochtitlantehuantepec, Quintanarooroo, Tlacolula, Moctezuma, Juarez, Puebla, Tlampam — bong! suddenly snarled the bus. They thundered on, passing little pigs trotting along the road, an Indian screening sand, a bald boy, with ear-rings, sleepily scratching his stomach and swinging madly on a hammock. Advertisements on ruined walls swam by. ¡Atchis!¡ Instante! Resfriados, Dolores, Cafeasperina. Rechace Imitaciones. Las Manos de Orlac. Con Peter horre.
When there was a bad patch the bus rattled and sideslipped ominously, once it altogether ran off the road, but its determination outweighed these waverings, one was pleased at last to have transferred one’s responsibilities to it, lulled into a state from which it would be pain to waken.
Hedges, with low steep banks, in which grew dusty trees, were hemming them in on either side. Without decreasing pace they were running into a narrow, sunken section of road, winding, and so reminiscent of England one expected at any point to see a sign: Public Footpath to Lostwithiel.
¡Desviaciónl¡ Hombres Trabajando!
With a yelping of tyres and brakes they made the detour leftward too quickly. But Hugh had seen a man, whom they’d narrowly missed, apparently lying fast asleep under the hedge on the right side of the road.
Neither Geoffrey nor Yvonne, staring sleepily out of the opposite window, had seen him. Nor did anyone else, were they aware of it, seem to think it peculiar a man should choose to sleep, however perilous his position, in the sun on the main road.
Hugh leaned forward to call out, hesitated, then tapped the driver on the shoulder; almost at the same moment the bus leaped to a standstill.
Guiding the whining vehicle swiftly, steering an erratic course with one hand, the driver, craning out of his seat to watch the corners behind and before, reversed out of the detour back into the narrow highway.
The friendly harsh smell of exhaust gases was tempered with the hot tar smell from the repairs, ahead of them now, where the road was broader with a wide grass margin between it and the hedge, though nobody was working there, everyone knocked off for the day possibly hours before, and there was nothing to be seen, just the soft, indigo carpet sparkling and sweating away to itself.
There appeared now, standing alone in a sort of rubbish heap where this grass margin stopped, opposite the detour, a stone wayside cross. Beneath it lay a milk bottle, a funnel, a sock, and part of an old suitcase.
And now, farther back still, in the road, Hugh saw the man again. His face covered by a wide hat, he was lying peacefully on his back with his arms stretched out towards this wayside cross, in whose shadow, twenty feet away, he might have found a grassy bed. Nearby stood a horse meekly cropping the hedge.
As the bus jerked to another stop the pelado, who was still lying down, almost slid from the seat to the floor. Managing to recover himself though, he not only reached his feet and an equilibrium he contrived remarkably to maintain but had, with one strong counter-movement, arrived half-way to the exit, crucifix fallen safely in place around his neck, hats in one hand, what remained of the melon in the other. With a look that might have withered at its inception any thought of stealing them, he placed the hats carefully on a vacant seat near the door, then, with exaggerated care, let himself down to the road. His eyes were still only half open, and they preserved a dead glaze. Yet there could be no doubt he had already taken in the whole situation. Throwing away the melon he started over towards the man, stepping tentatively, as over imaginary obstacles. But his course was straight, he held himself erect.
Hugh, Yvonne, the Consul, and two of the male passengers got out and followed him. None of the old women moved.
It was stiflingly hot in the sunken deserted road. Yvonne gave a nervous cry and turned on her heel; Hugh caught her arm.
‘Don’t mind me. It’s just that I can’t stand the sight of blood, damn it.’
She was climbing back into the camión as Hugh came up with the Consul and the two passengers.
The pelado was swaying gently over the recumbent man who was dressed in the usual loose white garments of the Indian.
There was not, however, much blood in sight, save on one side of his hat.
But the man was certainly not sleeping peacefully. His chest heaved like a spent swimmer’s, his stomach contracted and dilated rapidly, one fist clenched and unclenched in the dust…
Hugh and the Consul stood helplessly, each, he thought, waiting for the other to remove the Indian’s hat, to expose the wound each felt must be there, checked from such action by a common reluctance, perhaps an obscure courtesy. For each knew the other was also thinking it would be better still should one of the passengers, even the pelado, examine the man.
As nobody made any move at all Hugh grew impatient. He shifted from foot to foot. He looked at the Consul expectantly: he’d been in this country long enough to know what should be done, moreover he was the one among them most nearly representing authority. Yet the Consul seemed lost in reflection. Suddenly Hugh stepped forward impulsively and bent over the Indian — one of the passengers plucked his sleeve.
‘Har you throw your cigarette?’
‘Throw it away.’ The Consul woke up. ‘Forest fires.’
‘Si, they have prohibidated it.’
Hugh stamped his cigarette out and was about to bend over the man once more when the passenger again plucked his sleeve:
‘No, no,’ he said, tapping his nose, ‘they har prohibidated that, también.’
‘You can’t touch him — it’s the law,’ said the Consul sharply, who looked now as though he would like to get as far from this scene as possible, if necessary even by means of the Indian’s horse. ‘For his protection. Actually it’s a sensible law. Otherwise you might become an accessory after the fact.’
The Indian’s breathing sounded like the sea dragging itself down a stone beach.
A single bird flew, high.
‘But the man may be dy –’ Hugh muttered to Geoffrey.
‘God, I feel terrible,’ the Consul replied, though it was a fact he was about to take some action, when the pelado anticipated him: he went down on one knee and, quick as lightning, whipped off the Indian’s hat.
They all peered over, seeing the cruel wound on the side of his head, where the blood had almost coagulated, the flushed moustachioed face turned aside, and before they stood back Hugh caught a glimpse of a sum of money, four or five silver pesos and a handful of centavos, that had been placed neatly under the loose collar to the man’s blouse, which partly concealed it. The pelado replaced the hat and, straightening himself, made a hopeless gesture with hands now blotched with half-dried blood.
How long had he been here, lying in the road?
Hugh gazed after the pelado on his way back to the camión, and then, once more, at the Indian, whose life, as they talked, seemed gasping away from them all. ‘Diantre! ¿Dónde buscamos un médico?’ he asked stupidly.
This time from the camión, die pelado made again that gesture of hopelessness, which was also like a gesture of sympathy: what could they do, he appeared trying to convey to them through the window, how could they have known, when they got out, that they could do nothing?
‘Move his hat farther down though so that he can get some air,’ the Consul said, in a voice that betrayed a trembling tongue; Hugh did this and, so swiftly he did not have time to see the money again, also placed the Consul’s handkerchief over the wound, leaving it held in place by the balanced sombrero.
The driver now came for a look, tall, in his white shirt sleeves, and soiled whipcord breeches like bellows, inside high-laced, dirty boots. With his bare tousled head, laughing dissipated intelligent face, shambling yet athletic gait, there was something lonely and likeable about this man whom Hugh had seen twice before walking by himself in the town.
Instinctively you trusted him. Yet here, his indifference seemed remarkable; still, he had the responsibility of the bus, and what could he do, with his pigeons?
From somewhere above the clouds a lone plane l
et down a single sheaf of sound.
— ‘Pobrecito.’
— ‘Chingar.’
Hugh was aware that gradually these remarks had been taken up as a kind of refrain around him — for their presence, together with the camión having stopped at all, had ratified approach at least to the extent that another male passenger, and two peasants hitherto unnoticed, and who knew nothing, had joined the group about the stricken man whom nobody touched again — a quiet rustling of futility, a rustling of whispers, in which the dust, the heat, the bus itself with its load of immobile old women and doomed poultry, might have been conspiring, while only these two words, the one of compassion, the other of obscene contempt, were audible above the Indian’s breathing.
The driver, having returned to his camión, evidently satisfied all was as it should be save he had stopped on the wrong side of the road, now began to blow his horn, yet far from this producing the desired effect, the rustling punctuated by a heckling accompaniment of indifferent blasts, turned into a general argument.
Was it robbery, attempted murder, or both? The Indian had probably ridden from market, where he’d sold his wares, with much more man that four or five pesos hidden by the hat, with mucho dinero, so that a good way to avoid suspicion of theft was to leave a little of the money, as had been done. Perhaps it wasn’t robbery at all, he had only been thrown from his horse? Posseebly. Imposseebly.
Sí, hombre, but hadn’t the police been called? But clearly somebody was already going for help. Chingar. One of them now should go for help, for the police. An ambulance — the Cruz Roja — where was the nearest phone?
But it was absurd to suppose the police were not on their way. How could the chingados be on their way when half of them were on strike? No it was only a quarter of them that were on strike. They would be on their way, all right though. A taxi? No, hombre, there was a strike there too. — But was there’ any truth, someone chimed in, in the rumour that the Servicio de Ambulancia had been suspended? It was not a red, but a green cross anyhow, and their business began only when they were informed. Get Dr Figueroa. Un hombre noble. But there was no phone. Oh, there was a phone once, in Tomalín, but it had decomposed. No, Dr Figueroa had a nice new phone. Pedro, the son of Pepe, whose mother-in-law was Josefina, who also knew, it was said, Vincente González, had carried it through the streets himself.
Hugh (who had wildly thought of Vigil playing tennis, of Guzmán, wildly of the habanero in his pocket) and the Consul also had their personal argument. For the fact remained, whoever had placed the Indian by the roadside — though in that case why not on the grass, by the cross? — who had slipped the money for safety in his collar — but perhaps it slipped there of its own accord — who had providently tied his horse to the tree in the hedge it was now cropping — yet was it necessarily his horse? —probably was, whoever he was, wherever he was — or they were, who acted with such wisdom and compassion — even now getting help.
There was no limit to their ingenuity. Though the most potent and final obstacle to doing anything about the Indian was this discovery that it wasn’t one’s own business, but someone else’s. And looking round him, Hugh saw that this too was just what everyone else was arguing. It is not my business, but, as it were, yours, they all said, as they shook their heads, and no, not yours either, but someone else’s, their objections becoming more and more involved, more and more theoretical, till at last the discussion began to take a political turn.
This turn, as it happened, made no sense to Hugh, who was thinking that had Joshua appeared at this moment to make the sun stand still, a more absolute dislocation of time could not have been created.
Yet it was not that time stood still. Rather was it time was moving at different speeds, the speed at which the man seemed dying contrasting oddly with the speed at which everybody was finding it impossible to make up their minds.
However the driver had given up blowing his horn, he was about to tinker with the engine, and leaving the unconscious man the Consul and Hugh walked over to the horse, which, with its cord reins, empty bucket saddle, and jangling heavy iron sheaths for stirrups, was calmly chewing the convolvulus in the hedge, looking innocent as only one of its species can when under mortal suspicion. Its eyes, that had shut blandly at their approach, now opened, wicked and plausible. There was a sore on its hipbone and on the beast’s rump a branded number seven.
‘Why — good God — this must be the horse Yvonne and I saw this morning!’
‘You did, eh? Well.’ The Consul made to feel, though did not touch, the horse’s surcingle. ‘That’s funny… So did I. That is, I think I saw it.’ He glanced over at the Indian in the road as though trying to tear something out of his memory. ‘Did you notice if it had any saddlebags on when you saw it? It had when I think I saw it.’
‘It must be the same fellow.’
‘I don’t suppose if the horse kicked the man to death it would have sufficient intelligence to kick its saddlebags off too, and hide them somewhere, do you –’
But the bus, with a terrific hooting, was going off without them.
It came at them a little, then stopped, in a wider part of the road, to let through two querulous expensive cars that had been held up behind. Hugh shouted at them to halt, the Consul half waved to someone who perhaps half recognized him, while the cars, that both bore upon their rear number-plates the sign ‘Diplomático’, surged on past, bouncing on their springs, and brushing the hedges, to disappear ahead in a cloud of dust. From the second car’s rear seat a Scotch terrier barked at them merrily.
‘The diplomatic thing, doubtless.’
The Consul went to see to Yvonne; the other passengers, shielding their faces against the dust, climbed on board the bus which had continued to the detour where, stalled, it waited still as death, as a hearse. Hugh ran to the Indian. His breathing sounded fainter, and yet more laboured. An uncontrollable desire to see his face again seized Hugh and he stooped over him. Simultaneously the Indian’s right hand raised itself in a blind groping gesture, the hat was partially pushed away, a voice muttered or groaned one word:
‘Compañero.’
— ‘The hell they won’t,’ Hugh was saying, why he scarcely knew, a moment later to the Consul. But he’d detained the camión, whose engine had started once more, a little longer, and he watched the three smiling vigilantes approach, tramping through the dust, with their holsters slapping their thighs.
‘Come on, Hugh, they won’t let you on the bus with him, and you’ll only get hauled into jail and entangled in red tape for Christ knows how long,’ the Consul was saying. ‘They’re not the pukka police anyhow, only those birds I told you about… Hugh –’
‘Momentito —’ Hugh was almost immediately expostulating with one of the vigilantes — the other two had gone over to the Indian — while the driver, wearily, patiently, honked. Then the policeman pushed Hugh towards the bus: Hugh pushed back. The policeman dropped his hand and began to fumble with his holster: it was a manoeuvre, not to be taken seriously. With his other hand he gave Hugh a further shove, so that, to maintain balance, Hugh was forced to ascend the rear step of the bus which, at that instant suddenly, violently, moved away with them. Hugh would have jumped down only the Consul, exerting his strength, held him pinned to a stanchion.
‘Never mind, old boy, it would have been worse than the windmills.’ –’ What windmills?’
Dust obliterated the scene…
The bus thundered on, reeling, cannonading, drunk. Hugh sat staring at the quaking, shaking floor.
— Something like a tree stump with a tourniquet on it, a severed leg in an army boot that someone picked up, tried to unlace, and then put down, in a sickening smell of petrol and blood, half reverently on the road; a face that gasped for a cigarette, turned grey, and was cancelled; headless things, that sat, with protruding windpipes, fallen scalps, bolt upright in motorcars; children piled up, many hundreds; screaming burning things; like the creatures, perhaps, in Geoff’s dreams: among
The stupid props of war’s senseless Titus Andronicus, the horrors that could not even make a good story, but which had been, in a flash, evoked by Yvonne when they got out, Hugh moderately case-hardened, could have acquitted himself, have done something, have not done nothing…
Keep the patient absolutely quiet in a darkened room. Brandy may sometimes be given to the dying.
Hugh guiltily caught the eye of an old woman. Her face was completely expressionless… Ah, how sensible were these old women, who at least knew their own mind, who had made a silent communal decision to have nothing to do with the whole affair. No hesitation, no fluster, no fuss. With what solidarity, sensing danger, they had clutched their baskets of poultry to them, when they stopped, or peered round to identify their property, then had sat, as now, motionless. Perhaps they remembered the days of revolution in the valley, the blackened buildings, the communications cut off, those crucified and gored in the bull-ring, the pariah dogs barbecued in the market place. There was no callousness in their faces, no cruelty. Death they knew, better than the law, and their memories were long. They sat ranked now, motionless, frozen, discussing nothing, without a word, turned to stone. It was natural to have left the matter to the men. And yet, in these old women it was as if, through the various tragedies of Mexican history, pity, the impulse to approach, and terror, the impulse to escape (as one had learned at college), having replaced it, had finally been reconciled by prudence, the conviction it is better to stay where you are.
And what of the other passengers, the younger women in mourning – there were no women in mourning; they’d all got out, apparently, and walked; since death, by the roadside, must not be allowed to interfere with one’s plans for resurrection, in the cemetery. And the men in the purple shirts, who’d had a good look at what was going on, yet hadn’t stirred from the bus? Mystery. No one could be more courageous than a Mexican. But this was not clearly a situation demanding courage. Frijoles for all : Tierra, Libertad, Justicia y Ley. Did all that mean anything? ¿Quién sabe? They weren’t sure of anything save that it was foolish to get mixed up with the police, especially if they weren’t proper police; and this went equally for the man who’d plucked Hugh’s sleeve, and the two other passengers who’d joined in the argument around the Indian, now all dropping off the bus going full speed, in their graceful, devil-may-care fashion.
Under the Volcano Page 30