Behind them walked the only living thing that shared their pilgrimage, the dog. And by degrees they reached the briny sea. Then, with souls well disciplined they reached the northern region, and beheld, with heaven aspiring hearts, the mighty mountain Himavat . . . Whereupon the lake was lapping, the lilacs were blowing, the chenars were budding, the mountains were glistening, the waterfalls were playing, the spring was green, the snow was white, the sky was blue, the fruit blossoms were clouds: and he was still thirsty. Then the snow was not glistening, the fruit blossoms were not clouds, they were mosquitoes, the Himalayas were hidden by dust, and he was thirstier than ever. Then the lake was blowing, the snow was blowing, the waterfalls were blowing, the fruit blossoms were blowing, the seasons were blowing—blowing away—he was blowing away himself, whirled by a storm of blossoms into the mountains, where now the rain was falling. But this rain, that fell only on the mountains, did not assuage his thirst. Nor was he after all in the mountains. He was standing, among cattle, in a stream. He was resting, with some ponies, knee-deep beside him in the cool marshes. He was lying face downward drinking from a lake that reflected the white-capped ranges, the clouds piled five miles high behind the mighty mountain Himavat, the purple chenars and a village nestling among the mulberries. Yet his thirst still remained unquenched. Perhaps because he was drinking, not water, but lightness, and promise of lightness—how could he be drinking promise of lightness? Perhaps because he was drinking, not water, but certainty of brightness—how could he be drinking certainty of brightness? Certainty of brightness, promise of lightness, of light, light, light, and again, of light, light, light, light, light!

. . . The Consul, an inconceivable anguish of horripilating hangover thunderclapping about his skull, and accompanied by a protective screen of demons gnattering in his ears, became aware that in the horrid event of his being observed by his neighbours it could hardly be supposed he was just sauntering down his garden with some innocent horticultural object in view. Nor even that he was sauntering. The Consul, who had waked a moment or two ago on the porch and remembered everything immediately, was almost running. He was also lurching. In vain he tried to check himself, plunging his hands, with an extraordinary attempt at nonchalance, in which he hoped might appear more than a hint of consular majesty, deeper into the sweat-soaked pockets of his dress trousers. And now, rheumatisms discarded, he really was running . . . Might he not, then, be reasonably suspected of a more dramatic purpose, of having assumed, for instance, the impatient buskin of a William Blackstone leaving the Puritans to dwell among the Indians, or the desperate mien of his friend Wilson when he so magnificently abandoned the University Expedition to disappear, likewise in a pair of dress trousers, into the jungles of darkest Oceania, never to return? Not very reasonably. For one thing, if he continued much further in this present direction toward the bottom of his garden any such visioned escape into the unknown must shortly be arrested by what was, for him, an unscalable wire fence. “Do not be so foolish as to imagine you have no object, however. We warned you, we told you so, but now that in spite of all our pleas you have got yourself into this deplorable—” He recognized the tone of one of his familiars, faint among the other voices as he crashed on through the metamorphoses of dying and reborn hallucinations, like a man who does not know he has been shot from behind. “—condition,” the voice went on severely, “you have to do something about it. Therefore we are leading you toward the accomplishment of this something.” “I’m not going to drink,” the Consul said, halting suddenly. “Or am I? Not mescal anyway.” “Of course not, the bottle’s just there, behind that bush. Pick it up.” “I can’t,” he objected—“That’s right, just take one drink, just the necessary, the therapeutic drink: perhaps two drinks.” “God,” the Consul said. “Ah. Good. God. Christ.” “Then you can say it doesn’t count.” “It doesn’t. It isn’t mescal.” “Of course not, it’s tequila. You might have another.” “Thanks, I will.” The Consul palsiedly readjusted the bottle to his lips. “Bliss. Jesus. Sanctuary . . . Horror,” he added. “—Stop. Put that bottle down, Geoffrey Firmin, what are you doing to yourself?” another voice said in his ear so loudly he turned round. On the path before him a little snake he had thought a twig was rustling off into the bushes and he watched it a moment through his dark glasses, fascinated. It was a real snake all right. Not that he was much bothered by anything so simple as snakes, he reflected with a degree of pride, gazing straight into the eyes of a dog. It was a pariah dog and disturbingly familiar. “Perro,” he repeated, as it still stood there—but had not this incident occurred, was it not now, as it were, occurring an hour or two ago, he thought in a flash. Strange. He dropped the bottle which was of white corrugated glass—Tequila Añejo de Jalisco, it said on the label—out of sight into the undergrowth, looking about him. All seemed normal again. Anyway, both snake and dog had gone. And the voices had ceased . . .

The Consul now felt himself in a position to entertain, for a minute, the illusion that all really was “normal.” Yvonne would probably be asleep: no point in disturbing her yet. And it was fortunate he’d remembered about the almost full tequila bottle: now he had a chance to straighten up a little, which he never could have done on the porch, before greeting her again. There was altogether too much difficulty involved, under the circumstances, in drinking on the porch; it was a good thing a man knew where to have a quiet drink when he wanted it, without being disturbed etc. etc. . . . All these thoughts were passing through his mind—which, so to say, nodding gravely, accepted them with the most complete seriousness—while he gazed back up his garden. Oddly enough, it did not strike him as being nearly so “ruined” as it had earlier appeared. Such chaos as might exist even lent an added charm. He liked the exuberance of the unclipped growth at hand. Whereas further away, the superb plantains flowering so finally and obscenely, the splendid trumpet vines, brave and stubborn pear trees, the papayas planted around the swimming pool and beyond, the low white bungalow itself covered by bougainvillea, its long porch like the bridge of a ship, positively made a little vision of order, a vision, however, which inadvertently blended at this moment, as he turned by accident, into a strangely subaqueous view of the plains and the volcanoes with a huge indigo sun multitudinously blazing south southeast. Or was it north northwest? He noted it all without sorrow, even with a certain ecstasy, lighting a cigarette, an Alas (though he repeated the word “Alas” aloud mechanically) then, the alcohol sweat pouring off his brows like water, he began to walk down the path toward the fence separating his garden from the little new public one beyond that truncated his property.

In this garden, which he hadn’t looked at since the day Hugh arrived, when he’d hidden the bottle, and which seemed carefully and lovingly kept, there existed at the moment certain evidence of work left uncompleted: tools, unusual tools, a murderous machete, an oddly shaped fork, somehow nakedly impaling the mind, with its twisted tines glittering in the sunlight, were leaning against the fence, as also was something else, a sign uprooted or new, whose oblong pallid face stared through the wire at him. ¿Le gusta este jardín? it asked . . .

¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDÍN?

¿QUE ES SUYO?

¡EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!

The Consul stared back at the black words on the sign without moving. You like this garden? Why is it yours? We evict those who destroy! Simple words, simple and terrible words, words which one took to the very bottom of one’s being, words which, perhaps a final judgement on one, were nevertheless unproductive of any emotion whatsoever, unless a kind of colourless, cold, a white agony, an agony chill as that iced mescal drunk in the Hotel Canada on the morning of Yvonne’s departure.

However he was drinking tequila again now—and with no very clear idea how he’d returned so quickly and found the bottle. Ah, the subtle bouquet of pitch and teredos! Careless of being observed this time, he drank long and deeply, then stood—and he had been observed too, by his neighbor Mr. Quincey, who was watering flowers in the shade of their common fence to the left beyond the briars—stood facing his bungalow once more. He felt hemmed in. Gone was the little dishonest vision of order. Over his house, above the spectres of neglect that now refused to disguise themselves, the tragic wings of untenable responsibilities hovered. Behind him, in the other garden, his fate repeated softly: “Why is it yours? . . . Do you like this garden? . . . We evict those who destroy!” Perhaps the sign didn’t mean quite that—for alcohol sometimes affected the Consul’s Spanish adversely (or perhaps the sign itself, inscribed by some Aztec, was wrong)—but it was near enough. Coming to an abrupt decision he dropped the tequila into the undergrowth again and turned back toward the public garden, walking with an attempted “easy” stride.

Not that he had any intention of “verifying” the words on the sign, which certainly seemed to have more question marks than it should have; no, what he wanted, he now saw very clearly, was to talk to someone: that was necessary: but it was more, merely, than that; what he wanted involved something like the grasping, at this moment, of a brilliant opportunity, or more accurately, of an opportunity to be brilliant, an opportunity evinced by that apparition of Mr. Quincey through the briars which, now upon his right, he must circumvent in order to reach him. Yet this opportunity to be brilliant was, in turn, more like something else, an opportunity to be admired; even, and he could at least thank the tequila for such honesty, however brief its duration, to be loved. Loved precisely for what was another question: since he’d put it to himself he might answer: loved for my reckless and irresponsible appearance, or rather for the fact that, beneath that appearance, so obviously burns the fire of genius, which, not so obviously, is not my genius but in an extraordinary manner that of my old and good friend, Abraham Taskerson, the great poet, who once spoke so glowingly of my potentialities as a young man.

And what he wanted then, ah then (he had turned right without looking at the sign and was following the path along the wire fence), what he wanted then, he thought, casting one yearning glance at the plains—and at this moment he could have sworn that a figure, the details of whose dress he did not have time to make out before it departed, but apparently in some kind of mourning, had been standing, head bowed in deepest anguish, near the centre of the public garden—what you want then, Geoffrey Firmin, if only as an antidote against such routine hallucinations, is, why it is, nothing less than to drink; to drink, indeed, all day, just as the clouds once more bid you, and yet not quite; again it is more subtle than this; you do not wish merely to drink, but to drink in a particular place and in a particular town.

Parián! . . . It was a name suggestive of old marble and the gale-swept Cyclades. The Farolito in Parián, how it called to him with its gloomy voices of the night and early dawn. But the Consul (he had inclined right again leaving the wire fence behind) realised he wasn’t yet drunk enough to be very sanguine about his chances of going there; the day offered too many immediate—pitfalls! It was the exact word . . . He had almost fallen into the barranca, an unguarded section of whose hither bank—the ravine curved sharply down here toward the Alcapancingo road to curve again below and follow its direction, bisecting the public garden—added at this juncture a tiny fifth side to his estate. He paused, peeping, tequila-unafraid, over the bank. Ah the frightful cleft, the eternal horror of opposites! Thou mighty gulf, insatiate cormorant, deride me not, though I seem petulant to fall into thy chops. One was, come to that, always stumbling upon the damned thing, this immense intricate donga cutting right through the town, right, indeed, through the country, in places a two-hundred-foot sheer drop into what pretended to be a churlish river during the rainy season, but which, even now, though one couldn’t see the bottom, was probably beginning to resume its normal rôle of general Tartarus and gigantic jakes. It was, perhaps, not so frightening here: one might even climb down, if one wished, by easy stages of course, and taking the occasional swig of tequila on the way, to visit the cloacal Prometheus who doubtless inhabited it. The Consul walked on more slowly. He had come face to face with his house again and simultaneously to the path skirting Mr. Quincey’s garden. On his left beyond their common fence, now at hand, the green lawns of the American, at the moment being sprinkled by innumerable small whizzing hoses, swept down parallel with his own briars. Nor could any English turf have appeared smoother or lovelier. Suddenly overwhelmed by sentiment, as at the same time by a violent attack of hiccups, the Consul stepped behind a gnarled fruit tree rooted on his side but spreading its remnant of shade over the other, and leaned against it, holding his breath. In this curious way he imagined himself hidden from Mr. Quincey, working further up, but he soon forgot all about Quincey in spasmodic admiration of his garden . . . Would it happen at the end, and would this save one, that old Popeye would begin to seem less desirable than a slag-heap in Chester-le-Street, and that mighty Johnsonian prospect, the road to England, would stretch out again in the Western Ocean of his soul? And how peculiar that would be! How strange the landing at Liverpool, the Liver Building seen once more through the misty rain, that murk smelling already of nosebags and Caegwyrle Ale—the familiar deep-draughted cargo steamers, harmoniously masted, still sternly sailing outward bound with the tide, worlds of iron hiding their crews from the weeping black-shawled women on the piers: Liverpool, whence sailed so often during the war under sealed orders those mysterious submarine catchers Q-boats, fake freighters turning into turreted men-of-war at a moment’s notice, obsolete peril of submarines, the snouted voyagers of the sea’s unconscious . . .

“Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”

“Hicket,” said the Consul, taken aback by the premature rediscovery, at such close quarters, of the tall slightly stooping figure, in khaki shirt and grey flannel trousers, sandalled, immaculate, grey-haired, complete, fit, a credit to Soda Springs, and carrying a watering-can, who was regarding him distastefully through horn-rimmed spectacles from the other side of the fence. “Ah, good morning, Quincey.”

“What’s good about it?” The retired walnut grower asked suspiciously, continuing his work of watering his flower beds, which were out of range of the ceaselessly swinging hoses.

The Consul gestured toward his briars, and perhaps unconsciously also in the direction of the tequila bottle. “I saw you from over there . . . I was just out inspecting my jungle, don’t you know.”

“You are doing what ?” Mr. Quincey glanced at him over the top of the watering-can as if to say: I have seen all this going on; I know all about it because I am God, and even when God was much older than you are he was nevertheless up at this time and fighting it, if necessary, while you don’t even know whether you’re up or not yet, and even if you have been out all night you are certainly not fighting it, as I would be, just as I would be ready to fight anything or anybody else too, for that matter, at the drop of a hat!

“And I’m afraid it really is a jungle too,” pursued the Consul; “in fact I expect Rousseau to come riding out of it at any moment on a tiger.”

“What’s that?” Mr. Quincey said, frowning in a manner that might have meant: And God never drinks before breakfast either.

“On a tiger,” the Consul repeated.

The other gazed at him a moment with the cold sardonic eye of the material world. “I expect so,” he said sourly. “Plenty tigers. Plenty elephants too . . . Might I ask you if the next time you inspect your jungle you’d mind being sick on your own side of the fence?”

“Hicket,” answered the Consul simply. “Hicket,” he snarled, laughing, and, trying to take himself by surprise, he thwacked himself hard in the kidneys, a remedy which, strangely, seemed to work. “Sorry I gave that impression, it was merely this damned hiccups!—”

“So I observe,” Mr. Quincey said, and perhaps he too had cast a subtle glance toward the ambush of the tequila bottle.

“And the funny thing is,” interrupted the Consul, “I scarcely touched anything more than Tehuacan water all night . . . By the way; how did you manage to survive the ball?”

Mr. Quincey stared at him evenly, then began to refill his watering-can from a hydrant nearby.

“Just Tehuacan,” the Consul continued. “And a little gaseosa. That ought to take you back to dear old Soda Springs, eh?—tee hee!—yes, I’ve cut liquor right out these days.”

The other resumed his watering, sternly moving on down the fence, and the Consul, not sorry to leave the fruit tree, to which he had noticed clinging the sinister carapace of a seven-year locust, followed him step by step.

“Yes, I’m on the wagon now,” he commented, “in case you didn’t know.”

“The funeral wagon, I’d say, Firmin,” Mr. Quincey muttered testily.

“By the way, I saw one of those little garter snakes just a moment ago,” the Consul broke out.

Mr. Quincey coughed or snorted but said nothing.

“And it made me think . . . Do you know, Quincey, I’ve often wondered whether there isn’t more in the old legend of the Garden of Eden, and so on, than meets the eye. What if Adam wasn’t really banished from the place at all? That is, in the sense we used to understand it—” The walnut grower had looked up and was fixing him with a steady gaze that seemed, however, directed at a point rather below the Consul’s midriff—“What if his punishment really consisted,” the Consul continued with warmth, “in his having to go on living there , alone, of course—suffering, unseen, cut off from God . . . Or perhaps,” he added, in more cheerful vein, “perhaps Adam was the first property owner and God, the first agrarian, a kind of Cárdenas, in fact—tee hee!—kicked him out. Eh? Yes,” the Consul chuckled, aware, moreover, that all this was possibly not so amusing under the existing historical circumstances, “for it’s obvious to everyone these days—don’t you think so, Quincey?—that the original sin was to be an owner of property . . .”

The walnut grower was nodding at him, almost imperceptibly, but not it seemed in any agreement; his realpolitik eye was still concentrated upon that same spot below his midriff and looking down the Consul discovered his open fly. Licentia vatum indeed! “Pardon me. J’adoube,” he said, and making the adjustment continued, laughing, returning to his first theme mysteriously unabashed by his recusancy. “Yes indeed. Yes . . . And of course the real reason for that punishment—his being forced to go on living in the garden, I mean, might well have been that the poor fellow, who knows, secretly loathed the place! Simply hated it, and had done so all along. And that the Old Man found this out —”

“Was it my imagination, or did I see your wife up there a while ago?” patiently said Mr. Quincey.

“—and no wonder! To hell with the place! Just think of all the scorpions and leafcutter ants—to mention only a few of the abominations he must have had to put up with! What?” the Consul exclaimed as the other repeated his question. “In the garden? Yes—that is, no. How do you know? No, she’s asleep as far as I—”

“Been away quite a time, hasn’t she?” the other asked mildly, leaning forward so that he could see, more clearly, the Consul’s bungalow. “Your brother still here?”

“Brother? Oh, you mean Hugh . . . No, he’s in Mexico City.”

“I think you’ll find he’s got back.”

The Consul now glanced up at the house himself. “Hicket,” he said briefly, apprehensively.

“I think he went out with your wife,” the walnut grower added.

“—Hullo-hullo-look-who-comes-hullo-my-little-snake-in-the-grass -my-little-anguish-in-herba—” the Consul at this moment greeted Mr. Quincey’s cat, momentarily forgetting its owner again as the grey, meditative animal, with a tail so long it trailed on the ground, came stalking through the zinnias: he stooped, patting his thighs—“hello-pussy-my-little-Priapusspuss, my-little-Oedipusspusspuss,” and the cat, recognizing a friend and uttering a cry of pleasure, wound through the fence and rubbed against the Consul’s legs, purring. “My little Xicotancatl.” The Consul stood up. He gave two short whistles while below him the cat’s ears twirled. “She thinks I’m a tree with a bird in it,” he added.

“I wouldn’t wonder,” retorted Mr. Quincey, who was refilling his watering-can at the hydrant.

“Animals not fit for food and kept only for pleasure, curiosity, or whim—eh?—as William Blackstone said—you’ve heard of him of course!—” The Consul was somehow on his haunches half talking to the cat, half to the walnut grower, who had paused to light a cigarette. “Or was that another William Blackstone?” He addressed himself now directly to Mr. Quincey, who was paying no attention. “He’s a character I’ve always liked. I think it was William Blackstone. Or so Abraham . . . Anyway, one day he arrived in what is now, I believe—no matter—somewhere in Massachusetts. And lived there quietly among the Indians. After a while the Puritans settled on the other side of the river. They invited him over; they said it was healthier on that side, you see. Ah, these people, these fellows with ideas,” he told the cat, “old William didn’t like them—no he didn’t—so he went back to live among the Indians, so he did. But the Puritans found him out, Quincey, trust them. Then he disappeared altogether—God knows where . . . Now , little cat,” the Consul tapped his chest indicatively, and the cat, its face swelling, body arched, important, stepped back, “the Indians are in here.”

“They sure are,” sighed Mr. Quincey, somewhat in the manner of a quietly exacerbated sergeant-major, “along with all those snakes and pink elephants and them tigers you were talking about.”

The Consul laughed, his laughter having a humourless sound, as though the part of his mind that knew all this essentially a burlesque of a great and generous man once his friend knew also how hollow the satisfaction afforded him by the performance. “Not real Indians . . . And I didn’t mean in the garden; but in here .” He tapped his chest again. “Yes, just the final frontier of consciousness, that’s all. Genius, as I’m so fond of saying,” he added, standing up, adjusting his tie and (he did not think further of the tie) squaring his shoulders as if to go with a decisiveness that, also borrowed on this occasion from the same source as the genius and his interest in cats, left him abruptly as it had been assumed. “—Genius will look after itself.”

Somewhere in the distance a clock was striking; the Consul still stood there motionless. “Oh Yvonne, can I have forgotten you already, on this of all days?” Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one strokes. By his watch it was a quarter to eleven. But the clock hadn’t finished: it struck twice more, two wry, tragic notes: bing-bong : whirring. The emptiness in the air after filled with whispers: alas , alas . Wings, it really meant.

“Where’s your friend these days—I never can remember his name—that French fellow?” Mr. Quincey had asked a moment ago.

“Laruelle?” The Consul’s voice came from far away. He was aware of vertigo; closing his eyes wearily he took hold of the fence to steady himself. Mr. Quincey’s words knocked on his consciousness—or someone actually was knocking on a door—fell away, then knocked again, louder. Old De Quincey; the knocking on the gate in Macbeth. Knock knock: who’s there? Cat. Cat who? Catastrophe. Catastrophe who? Catastrophysicist. What, is it you, my little popo-cat? Just wait an eternity till Jacques and I have finished murdering sleep! Katabasis to cat abysses. Cathartes atratus . . . Of course, he should have known it, these were the final moments of the retiring of the human heart, and of the final entrance of the fiendish, the night insulated—just as the real De Quincey (that mere drug fiend, he thought opening his eyes—he found he was looking straight over towards the tequila bottle) imagined the murder of Duncan and the others insulated, self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion . . . But where had Quincey gone? And my God, who was this advancing behind the morning paper to his rescue across the lawn, where the breath of the hoses had suddenly failed as if by magic, if not Dr. Guzmán?

If not Guzmán, if not, it could not be, but it was, it certainly was no less a figure than that of his companion the night before, Dr. Vigil; and what on earth would he be doing here? As the figure approached closer the Consul felt an increasing uneasiness. Quincey was his patient doubtless. But in that case why wasn’t the doctor in the house? Why all this secretive prowling about the garden? It could only mean one thing: Vigil’s visit had somehow been timed to coincide with his own probable visit to the tequila (though he had fooled them neatly there), with the object, naturally, of spying upon him, of obtaining some information about him, some clue to the nature of which might all too conceivably be found within the pages of that accusing newspaper: “Old Samaritan case to be reopened, Commander Firmin believed in Mexico.” “Firmin found guilty, acquitted, cries in box.” “Firmin innocent, but bears guilt of world on shoulders.” “Body of Firmin found drunk in bunker,” such monstrous headlines as these indeed took instant shape in the Consul’s mind, for it was not merely El Universal the doctor was reading, it was his fate; but the creatures of his more immediate conscience were not to be denied, they seemed silently to accompany that morning paper too, withdrawing to one side (as the doctor came to a standstill, looking about him) with averted heads, listening, murmuring now: “You cannot lie to us. We know what you did last night.” What had he done though? He saw again clearly enough—as Dr. Vigil, recognizing him with a smile, closed his paper and hastened toward him—the doctor’s consulting room in the Avenida de la Revolución, visited for some drunken reason in the early hours of the morning, macabre with its pictures of ancient Spanish surgeons, their goat faces rising queerly from ruffs resembling ectoplasm, roaring with laughter as they performed inquisitorial operations; but since all this was retained as a mere vivid setting completely detached from his own activity, and since it was about all he did remember, he could scarcely take comfort from not seeming to appear within it in any vicious rôle. Not so much comfort, at least, as had just been afforded him by Vigil’s smile, nor half so much as was now afforded him when the doctor, upon reaching the spot lately vacated by the walnut grower, halted, and, suddenly, bowed to him profoundly from the waist; bowed once, twice, thrice, mutely yet tremendously assuring the Consul that after all no crime had been committed during the night so great he was still not worthy of respect.

Then, simultaneously, the two men groaned.

“Qué t—” began the Consul.

“Por favor,” broke in the other hoarsely, placing a well-manicured though shaky finger to his lips, and with a slightly worried look up the garden.

The Consul nodded. “Of course. You’re looking so fit, I see you can’t have been at the ball last night,” he added loudly and loyally, following the other’s gaze, though Mr. Quincey, who after all could not have been so fit, was still nowhere to be seen. He had probably been turning off the hoses at the main hydrant—and how absurd to have suspected a “plan” when it was so patently an informal call and the doctor had just happened to notice Quincey working in the garden from the drive. He lowered his voice. “All the same, might I take this opportunity of asking you what you prescribe for a slight case of katzenjammer?”

The doctor gave another worried look down the garden and began to laugh quietly, though his whole body was shaking with mirth, his white teeth flashed in the sun, even his immaculate blue suit seemed to be laughing. “Señor,” he began, biting off his laughter short on his lips, like a child, with his front teeth. “Señor Firmin, por favor, I am sorry, but I must comport myself here like,” he looked round him again, catching his breath, “like an apostle. You mean, Señor,” he went on more evenly, “that you are feeling fine this morning, quite like the cat’s pyjamas.”

“Well: hardly,” said the Consul, softly as before, casting a suspicious eye for his part in the other direction at some maguey growing beyond the barranca, like a battalion moving up a slope under machine-gun fire. “Perhaps that’s an overstatement. To put it more simply, what would you do for a case of chronic, controlled, all-possessing and inescapable delirium tremens?”

Doctor Vigil started. A half-playful smile hovered at the corner of his lips as he contrived rather unsteadily to roll up his paper into a neat cylindrical tube. “You mean, not cats—” he said, and he made a swift rippling circular crawling gesture in front of his eyes with one hand, “but rather—”

The Consul nodded cheerfully. For his mind was at rest. He had caught a glimpse of those morning headlines, which seemed entirely concerned with the Pope’s illness and the Battle of the Ebro.

“—progresión,” the doctor was repeating the gesture more slowly with his eyes closed, his fingers crawling separately, curved like claws, his head shaking idiotically. “—a ra tos!” he pounced. “Sí,” he said, pursing his lips and clapping his hand to his forehead in a motion of mock horror. “Sí,” he repeated. “Tereebly . . . More alcohol is perhaps best,” he smiled.

“Your doctor tells me that in my case delirium tremens may not prove fatal,” the Consul, triumphantly himself at last, informed Mr. Quincey, who came up just at this moment.

And at the next moment, though not before there had passed between himself and the doctor a barely perceptible exchange of signals, a tiny symbolic mouthward flick of the wrist on the Consul’s side as he glanced up at his bungalow, and upon Vigil’s a slight flapping movement of the arms extended apparently in the act of stretching, which meant (in the obscure language known only to major adepts in the Great Brotherhood of Alcohol), “Come up and have a spot when you’ve finished.” “I shouldn’t, for if I do I shall be ‘flying,’ but on second thoughts perhaps I will,”—it seemed he was back drinking from his bottle of tequila. And, the moment after, that he was drifting slowly and powerfully through the sunlight back toward the bungalow itself. Accompanied by Mr. Quincey’s cat, who was following an insect of some sort along his path, the Consul floated in an amber glow. Beyond the house, where now the problems awaiting him seemed already on the point of energetic solution, the day before him stretched out like an illimitable rolling wonderful desert in which one was going, though in a delightful way, to be lost: lost, but not so completely he would be unable to find the few necessary water-holes, or the scattered tequila oases where witty legionnaires of damnation who couldn’t understand a word he said, would wave him on, replenished, into that glorious Parián wilderness where man never went thirsty, and where now he was drawn on beautifully by the dissolving mirages past the skeletons like frozen wire and the wandering dreaming lions towards ineluctable personal disaster, always in a delightful way of course; the disaster might even be found at the end to contain a certain element of triumph. Not that the Consul now felt gloomy. Quite the contrary. The outlook had rarely seemed so bright. He became conscious, for the first time, of the extraordinary activity which everywhere surrounded him in his garden: a lizard going up a tree, another kind of lizard coming down another tree, a bottle-green hummingbird exploring a flower, another kind of hummingbird, voraciously at another flower; huge butterflies, whose precise stitched markings reminded one of the blouses in the market, flopping about with indolent gymnastic grace (much as Yvonne had described them greeting her in Acapulco Bay yesterday, a storm of torn-up multicolored love-letters, tossing to windward past the saloons on the promenade deck); ants with petals or scarlet blossoms tacking hither and thither along the paths; while from above, below, from the sky, and, it might be, from under the earth, came a continual sound of whistling, gnawing, rattling, even trumpeting. Where was his friend the snake now? Hiding up a pear tree probably. A snake that waited to drop rings on you: whore’s shoes. From the branches of these pear trees hung carafes full of a glutinous yellow substance for trapping insects still changed religiously every month by the local horticultural college. (How gay were the Mexicans! The horticulturists made the occasion, as they made every possible occasion, a sort of dance, bringing their womenfolk with them, flitting from tree to tree, gathering up and replacing the carafes as though the whole thing were a movement in a comic ballet, afterwards lolling about in the shade for hours, as if the Consul himself did not exist.) Then the behaviour of Mr. Quincey’s cat began to fascinate him. The creature had at last caught the insect but instead of devouring it, she was holding its body, still uninjured, delicately between her teeth, while its lovely luminous wings, still beating, for the insect had not stopped flying an instant, protruded from either side of her whiskers, fanning them. The Consul stooped forward to the rescue. But the animal bounded just out of reach. He stooped again, with the same result. In this preposterous fashion, the Consul stooping, the cat dancing just out of reach, the insect still flying furiously in the cat’s mouth, he approached his porch. Finally the cat extended a preparate paw for the kill, opening her mouth, and the insect, whose wings had never ceased to beat, suddenly and marvellously flew out, as might indeed the human soul from the jaws of death, flew up, up, up, soaring over the trees: and at that moment he saw them. They were standing on the porch; Yvonne’s arms were full of bougainvillea, which she was arranging in a cobalt ceramic vase. “—but suppose he’s absolutely adamant. Suppose he simply won’t go . . . careful, Hugh, it’s got spikes on it, and you have to look at everything carefully to be sure there’re no spiders.” “Hi there, Suchiquetal!” the Consul shouted gaily, waving his hand, as the cat with a frigid look over her shoulder that said plainly, “I didn’t want it anyway; I meant to let it go,” galloped away, humiliated, into the bushes. “Hi there, Hugh, you old snake in the grass!”

. . . Why then should he be sitting in the bathroom? Was he asleep? dead? passed out? Was he in the bathroom now or half an hour ago? Was it night? Where were the others? But now he heard some of the others’ voices on the porch. Some of the others? It was just Hugh and Yvonne, of course, for the doctor had gone. Yet for a moment he could have sworn the house had been full of people; why, it was still this morning, or barely afternoon, only 12:15 in fact by his watch. At eleven he’d been talking to Mr. Quincey. “Oh . . . Oh.” The Consul groaned aloud . . . It came to him he was supposed to be getting ready to go to Tomalín. But how had he managed to persuade anyone he was sober enough to go to Tomalín? And why, anyhow, Tomalín?

A procession of thoughts like little elderly animals filed through the Consul’s mind, and in his mind too he was steadily crossing the porch again, as he had done an hour ago, immediately after he’d seen the insect flying away out of the cat’s mouth.

He had crossed the porch—which Concepta had swept—smiling soberly to Yvonne and shaking hands with Hugh on his way to the icebox, and unfastening it, he knew not only that they’d been talking about him, but, obscurely, from that bright fragment of overheard conversation, its round meaning, just as had he at that moment glimpsed the new moon with the old one in its arms, he might have been impressed by its complete shape, though the rest were shadowy, illumined only by earthlight.

But what had happened then? “Oh,” the Consul cried aloud again. “Oh.” The faces of the last hour hovered before him, the figures of Hugh and Yvonne and Doctor Vigil moving quickly and jerkily now like those of an old silent film, their words mute explosions in the brain. Nobody seemed to be doing anything important; yet everything seemed of the utmost hectic importance, for instance Yvonne saying: “We saw an armadillo”:—“What, no Tarsius spectres!” he had replied, then Hugh opening the freezing bottle of Carta Blanca beer for him, prizing off the fizzing cap on the edge of the parapet and decanting the foam into his glass, the contiguity of which to his strychnine bottle had, it must be admitted now, lost most of its significance . . .

In the bathroom the Consul became aware he still had with him half a glass of slightly flat beer; his hand was fairly steady, but numbed holding the glass, he drank cautiously, carefully postponing the problem soon to be raised by its emptiness.

—“Nonsense,” he said to Hugh. And he had added with impressive consular authority that Hugh couldn’t leave immediately anyway, at least not for Mexico City, that there was only one bus to-day, the one Hugh’d come on, which had gone back to the City already, and one train that didn’t leave till 11:45 p.m. . . .

Then: “But wasn’t it Bougainville, doctor,” Yvonne was asking—and it really was astonishing how sinister and urgent and inflamed all these minutiae seemed to him in the bathroom—“Wasn’t it Bougainville who discovered the bougainvillea?” while the doctor bending over her flowers merely looked alert and puzzled, he said nothing save with his eyes which perhaps barely betrayed that he’d stumbled on a “situation.”—“Now I come to think of it, I believe it was Bougainville. Hence the name,” Hugh observed fatuously, seating himself on the parapet—“Sí: you can go to the botica and so not to be misunderstood, say favor de servir una toma de vino quinado o en su defecto una toma de nuez vómica, pero—” Dr. Vigil was chuckling, talking to Hugh it must have been, Yvonne having slipped into her room a moment, while the Consul, eavesdropping, was at the icebox for another bottle of beer—then; “Oh, I was so terrible sick this morning I needed to be holding myself to the street windows,” and to the Consul himself as he returned “—Please forgive my stupid comport last night: oh, I have done a lot of stupid things everywhere these last few days, but”—raising his glass of whiskey—“I will never drink more; I will need two full days of sleeping to recover myself”—and then, as Yvonne returned—magnificently giving the whole show away, raising his glass to the Consul again: “Salud: I hope you are not as sick as I am. You were so perfecta men te borracho last night I think you must have killed yourself with drinking. I think even to send a boy after you this morning to knock your door, and find if drinking have not killed you already,” Dr. Vigil had said.

A strange fellow: in the bathroom the Consul sipped his flat beer. A strange, decent, generous-hearted fellow, if slightly deficient in tact save on his own behalf. Why couldn’t people hold their liquor? He himself had still managed to be quite considerate of Vigil’s position in Quincey’s garden. In the final analysis there was no one you could trust to drink with you to the bottom of the bowl. A lonely thought. But of the doctor’s generosity there was little doubt. Before long indeed, in spite of the necessary “two full days of sleeping,” he had been inviting them all to come with him to Guanajuato: recklessly he proposed leaving for his holiday by car this evening, after a problematic set of tennis this afternoon with—

The Consul took another sip of beer. “Oh,” he shuddered. “Oh.” It had been a mild shock last night to discover that Vigil and Jacques Laruelle were friends, far more than embarrassing to be reminded of it this morning . . . Anyhow, Hugh had turned down the notion of the two-hundred-mile trip to Guanajuato, since Hugh—and how amazingly well, after all, those cowboy clothes seemed to suit his erect and careless bearing!—was now determined to catch that night train; while the Consul had declined on Yvonne’s account.

The Consul saw himself again, hovering over the parapet, gazing down at the swimming pool below, a little turquoise set in the garden. Thou art the grave where buried love doth live. The inverted reflections of banana trees and birds, caravans of clouds, moved in it. Wisps of new-mown turf floated on the surface. Fresh mountain water trickled into the pool, which was almost overflowing, from the cracked broken hose whose length was a series of small spouting fountains.

Then Yvonne and Hugh, below, were swimming in the pool . . .

—“Absolutamente,” the doctor had said, beside the Consul at the parapet, and attentively lighting a cigarette. “I have,” the Consul was telling him, lifting his face towards the volcanoes and feeling his desolation go out to those heights where even now at mid-morning the howling snow would whip the face, and the ground beneath the feet was dead lava, a soulless petrified residue of extinct plasm in which even the wildest and loneliest trees would never take root; “I have another enemy round the back you can’t see. A sunflower. I know it watches me and I know it hates me.” “Exactamente,” Dr. Vigil said, “very posseebly it might be hating you a little less if you would stop from drinking tequila.” “Yes, but I’m only drinking beer this morning,” the Consul said with conviction, “as you can see for yourself.” “Sí, hombre,” Dr. Vigil nodded, who after a few whiskies (from a new bottle) had given up trying to conceal himself from Mr. Quincey’s house and was standing boldly by the parapet with the Consul. “There are,” the Consul added, “a thousand aspects of this infernal beauty I was talking about, each with its peculiar tortures, each jealous as a woman of all stimulations save its own.” “Naturalmente,” Dr. Vigil said. “But I think if you are very serious about your progresión a ratos you may take a longer journey even than this proposed one.” The Consul placed his glass on the parapet while the doctor continued. “Me too unless we contain with ourselves never to drink no more. I think, mi amigo, sickness is not only in body but in that part used to be call: soul.” “Soul?” “Precisamente,” the doctor said, swiftly clasping and unclasping his fingers. “But a mesh? Mesh. The nerves are a mesh, like, how do you say it, an eclectic systemë.” “Ah, very good,” the Consul said, “you mean an electric system.” “But after much tequila the eclectic systemë is perhaps un poco descompuesto, comprenez, as sometimes in the cine: claro?” “A sort of eclampsia, as it were,” the Consul nodded desperately, removing his glasses, and at this point, the Consul remembered, he had been without a drink nearly ten minutes; the effect of the tequila too had almost gone. He had peered out at the garden, and it was as though bits of his eyelids had broken off and were flittering and jittering before him, turning into nervous shapes and shadows, jumping to the guilty chattering in his mind, not quite voices yet, but they were coming back, they were coming back; a picture of his soul as a town appeared once more before him, but this time a town ravaged and stricken in the black path of his excess, and shutting his burning eyes he had thought of the beautiful functioning of the system in those who were truly alive, switches connected, nerves rigid only in real danger, and in nightmareless sleep now calm, not resting, yet poised: a peaceful village. Christ, how it heightened the torture (and meantime there had been every reason to suppose the others imagined he was enjoying himself enormously) to be aware of all this, while at the same time conscious, of the whole horrible disintegrating mechanism, the light now on, now off, now on too glaringly, now too dimly, with the glow of a fitful dying battery—then at last to know the whole town plunged into darkness, where communication is lost, motion mere obstruction, bombs threaten, ideas stampede—

The Consul had now finished his glass of flat beer. He sat gazing at the bathroom wall in an attitude like a grotesque parody of an old attitude in meditation. “I am very much interested in insanes.” That was a strange way to start a conversation with a fellow who’d just stood you a drink. Yet that was precisely how the doctor, in the Bella Vista bar, had started their conversation the previous night. Could it be Vigil considered his practised eye had detected approaching insanity (and this was funny too, recalling his thoughts on the subject earlier, to conceive of it as merely approaching) as some who have watched wind and weather all their lives can prophesy, under a fair sky, the approaching storm, the darkness that will come galloping out of nowhere across the fields of the mind. Not that there could be said to be a very fair sky either in that connection. Yet how interested would the doctor have been in one who felt himself being shattered by the very forces of the universe? What cataplasms have laid on his soul? What did even the hierophants of science know of the fearful potencies of, for them, unvintageable evil? The Consul wouldn’t have needed a practised eye to detect on this wall, or any other, a Mene-Tekel-Peres for the world, compared to which mere insanity was a drop in the bucket. Yet who would ever have believed that some obscure man, sitting at the centre of the world in a bathroom, say, thinking solitary miserable thoughts, was authoring their doom, that, even while he was thinking, it was as if behind the scenes certain strings were pulled, and whole continents burst into flame, and calamity moved nearer—just as now, at this moment perhaps, with a sudden jolt and grind, calamity had moved nearer, and, without the Consul’s knowing it, outside the sky had darkened. Or perhaps it was not a man at all, but a child, a little child, innocent as that other Geoffrey had been, who sat as up in an organ loft somewhere playing, pulling out all the stops at random, and kingdoms divided and fell, and abominations dropped from the sky—a child innocent as that infant sleeping in the coffin which had slanted past them down the Calle Tierra del Fuego . . .

The Consul lifted his glass to his lips, tasted its emptiness again, then set it on the floor, still wet from the feet of the swimmers. The uncontrollable mystery on the bathroom floor. He remembered that the next time he had returned to the porch with a bottle of Carta Blanca, though for some reason this now seemed a terribly long time ago, in the past—it was as if something he could not put his finger on had mysteriously supervened to separate drastically that returning figure from himself sitting in the bathroom (the figure on the porch, for all its damnation, seemed younger, to have more freedom of movement, choice, to have, if only because it held a full glass of beer once more, a better chance of a future)—Yvonne, youthful and pretty-looking in her white satin bathing suit, had been wandering on tiptoe round the doctor, who was saying:

“Señora Firmin, I am really disappoint though you cannot come me with.”

The Consul and she had exchanged a look of understanding, it almost amounted to, then Yvonne was swimming again, below, and the doctor was saying to the Consul:

“Guanajuato is sited in a beautiful circus of steepy hills.

“Guanajuato,” the doctor was saying, “you will not believe me, how she can lie there, like the old golden jewel on the breast of our grandmother.

“Guanajuato,” Dr. Vigil said, “the streets. How can you resist the names of the streets? Street of Kisses. Street of Singing Frogs. The Street of the Little Head. Is not that revolting?”

“Repellent,” the Consul said. “Isn’t Guanajuato the place they bury everybody standing up?”—ah, and this was where he had remembered about the bullthrowing and feeling a return of energy, had called down to Hugh, who was sitting thoughtfully by the edge of the pool in the Consul’s swimming trunks. “Tomalín’s quite near Parián, where your pal was going,” he said. “We might even go on there.” And then to the doctor. “Perhaps you might come too . . . I left my favourite pipe in Parián. Which I might get back, with luck. In the Farolito.” And the doctor had said: “Wheee, es un infierno,” while Yvonne, lifting up a corner of her bathing cap to hear better, said meekly, “Not a bullfight?” And the Consul: “No, a bullthrowing. If you’re not too tired?”

But the doctor could not of course come to Tomalín with them, though this was never discussed, since just then the conversation was violently interrupted by a sudden terrific detonation, that shook the house and sent birds skimming panic-stricken all over the garden. Target practise in the Sierra Madre. The Consul had been half aware of it in his sleep earlier. Puffs of smoke were drifting high over the rocks below Popo at the end of the valley. Three black vultures came tearing through the trees low over the roof with soft hoarse cries like the cries of love. Driven at unaccustomed speed by their fear they seemed almost to capsize, keeping close together but balancing at different angles to avoid collision. Then they sought another tree to wait in and the echoes of gunfire swept back over the house, soaring higher and higher and growing fainter while somewhere a clock was striking nineteen. Twelve o’clock, and the Consul said to the doctor: “Ah, that the dream of dark magician in his visioned cave, even while his hand—that’s the bit I like—shakes in its last decay, were the true end of this so lovely world. Jesus. Do you know, compañero, I sometimes have the feeling that it’s actually sinking, like Atlantis, beneath my feet. Down, down to the frightful ‘poulps.’ Meropis of Theopompus . . . And the ignivome mountains.” And the doctor who was nodding gloomily said: “Sí, that is tequila. Hombre, un poco de cerveza, un poco de vino, but never no more tequila. Never no more mescal.” And then the doctor was whispering: “But hombre, now that your esposa has come back.” (It seemed that Dr. Vigil had said this several times, only with a different look on his face: “But hombre, now that your esposa has come back.”) And then he was going: “I did not need to be inquisitive to be knowing you might have wished my advice. No hombre, as I say last night, I am not so interested in moneys.—Con permiso, the plaster he no good.” A little shower of plaster had, indeed, rained down on the doctor’s head. Then: “Hasta la vista” “Adiós” “Muchas gracias” “Thank you so much” “Sorry we couldn’t come” “Have a good time,” from the swimming pool. “Hasta la vista” again, then silence.

And now the Consul was in the bathroom getting ready to go to Tomalín. “Oh . . .” he said “Oh . . .” But, you see, nothing so dire has happened after all. First to wash. Sweating and trembling again, he took off his coat and shirt. He had turned on the water in the basin. Yet for some obscure reason he was standing under the shower, waiting in an agony for the shock of cold water that never came. And he was still wearing his trousers.

The Consul sat helplessly in the bathroom, watching the insects which lay at different angles from one another on the wall, like ships out in the roadstead. A caterpillar started to wriggle toward him, peering this way and that, with interrogatory antennae. A large cricket, with polished fuselage, clung to the curtain, swaying it slightly and cleaning its face like a cat, its eyes on stalks appearing to revolve in its head. He turned, expecting the caterpillar to be much nearer, but it too had turned, just slightly shifting its moorings. Now a scorpion was moving slowly across towards him. Suddenly the Consul rose, trembling in every limb. But it wasn’t the scorpion he cared about. It was that, all at once, the thin shadows of isolated nails, the stains of murdered mosquitoes, the very scars and cracks of the wall, had begun to swarm, so that, wherever he looked, another insect was born, wriggling instantly toward his heart. It was as if, and this was what was most appalling, the whole insect world had somehow moved nearer and now was closing, rushing in upon him. For a moment the bottle of tequila at the bottom of the garden gleamed on his soul, then the Consul stumbled into his bedroom.

Here there was no longer that terrible visible swarming, yet—lying now on the bed—it still seemed to persist in his mind, much as the vision of the dead man earlier had persisted, a kind of seething, from which, as from the persistent rolling of drums heard by some great dying monarch, occasionally a half-recognizable voice dissociated itself:

—Stop it, for God’s sake, you fool. Watch your step. We can’t help you any more.

—I would like the privilege of helping you, of your friendship. I would work you with. I do not care a damn for moneys anyway.

—What, is this you, Geoffrey? Don’t you remember me? Your old friend, Abe. What have you done, my boy?

—Ha ha, you’re for it now. Straightened out—in a coffin! Yeah.

—My son, my son!

—My lover. Oh come to me again as once in May.