On the side of the drunken madly revolving world hurtling at 1:20 p.m. toward Hercules’ Butterfly the house seemed a bad idea, the Consul thought—

There were two towers, Jacques’ zacualis, one at each end and joined by a catwalk over the roof, which was the glassed-in gable of the studio below. These towers were as if camouflaged (almost like the Samaritan , in fact): blue, grey, purple, vermilion, had once been slashed on in zebra stripes. But time and weather had combined to render the effect from a short distance of a uniform dull mauve. Their tops, reached from the catwalk by twin wooden ladders, and from inside by two spiral staircases, made two flimsy crenellated miradors, each scarcely larger than a bartizan, tiny roofless variants of the observation posts which everywhere commanded the valley in Quauhnahuac.

On the battlements of the mirador to their left, as the Consul and Hugh confronted the house, with the Calle Nicaragua stretching downhill to their right, now appeared to them two bilious-looking angels. The angels, carved out of pink stone, knelt facing one another in profile against the sky across the intervening crenels, while behind, upon corresponding merlons at the far side, sat solemnly two nameless objects like marzipan cannonballs, evidently constructed from the same material.

The other mirador was unadorned save by its crenellations and it often struck the Consul that this contrast was somehow obscurely appropriate to Jacques, as indeed was that between the angels and the cannonballs. It was perhaps also significant he should use his bedroom for working whereas the studio itself on the main floor had been turned into a dining room often no better than a camping ground for his cook and her relatives.

Coming closer it could be seen that on the left and somewhat larger tower, below that bedroom’s two windows—which, as if degenerate machicolations, were built askew, like the separated halves of a chevron—a panel of rough stone, covered with large letters painted in gold leaf, had been slightly set into the wall to give a semblance of bas-relief. These gold letters though very thick were merged together most confusingly. The Consul had noticed visitors to the town staring up at them for half an hour at a time. Sometimes M. Laruelle would come out to explain they really spelt something, that they formed that phrase of Frey Luis de León’s the Consul did not at this moment allow himself to recall. Nor did he ask himself why he should have come to be almost more familiar with this extraordinary house than his own as, preceding M. Laruelle now, who was prodding him cheerfully from behind, he followed Hugh and Yvonne into it, into the studio, empty for once, and up the spiral staircase of its left-hand tower. “Haven’t we overshot the drinks?” he asked, his mood of detachment expiring now he remembered that only a few weeks before he’d sworn never to enter this place again.

“Don’t you ever think of anything else?” it seemed Jacques had said.

The Consul made no reply but stepped out into the familiar disorderly room with the askew windows, the degenerate machicolations, now seen from inside, and followed the others obliquely through it to a balcony at the back, into a view of sun-filled valleys and volcanoes, and cloud shadows wheeling across the plain.

M. Laruelle, however, was already nervously going downstairs. “Not for me!” protested the others. Fools! The Consul took two or three steps after him, a movement apparently without meaning, but it almost constituted a threat: his gaze shifted vaguely up the spiral staircase which continued from the room to the mirador above, then he rejoined Hugh and Yvonne on the balcony.

“Get up on the roof, you people, or stay on the porch, just make yourselves at home,” came from downstairs. “There’s a pair of binoculars on the table there—er—Hugues . . . I won’t be a minute.”

“Any objection if I go on the roof?” Hugh asked them.

“Don’t forget the binoculars!”

Yvonne and the Consul were alone on the flying balcony. From where they stood the house seemed situated halfway up a cliff rising steeply from the valley stretched out below them. Leaning round they saw the town itself, built as on top of this cliff, overhanging them. The clubs of flying machines waved silently over the roofs, their motions like gesticulations of pain. But the cries and music of the fair reached them at this moment clearly. Far away the Consul made out a green corner, the golf course, with little figures working their way round the side of the cliff, crawling . . . Golfing scorpions. The Consul remembered the card in his pocket, and apparently he had made a movement toward Yvonne, desiring to tell her about it, to say something tender to her concerning it, to turn her towards him, to kiss her. Then he realised that without another drink shame for this morning would prevent his looking in her eyes. “What do you think, Yvonne,” he said, “with your astronomical mind—” Could it be he, talking to her like this, on an occasion like this! Surely not, it was a dream. He was pointing up at the town. “—With your astronomical mind,” he repeated, but no, he had not said it: “doesn’t all that revolving and plunging up there somehow suggest to you the voyaging of unseen planets, of unknown moons hurling backwards?” He had said nothing.

“Please Geoffrey—” Yvonne laid her hand on his arm. “Please, please believe me, I didn’t want to be drawn into this. Let’s make some excuse and get away as quickly as possible . . . I don’t mind how many drinks you have after ,” she added.

“I wasn’t aware I’d said anything about drinks now or after. It’s you that have put the thought into my head. Or Jacques, whom I can hear breaking—or should we say, crushing?—the ice down below.”

“Haven’t you got any tenderness or love left for me at all?” Yvonne asked suddenly, almost piteously, turning round on him, and he thought: Yes, I do love you, I have all the love in the world left for you, only that love seems so far away from me and so strange too, for it is as though I could almost hear it, a droning or a weeping, but far, far away, and a sad lost sound, it might be either approaching or receding, I can’t tell which. “Don’t you think of anything except of how many drinks you’re going to have?”

“Yes,” said the Consul (but wasn’t it Jacques who’d just asked him this?), “yes, I do—oh my God, Yvonne!”

“Please, Geoffrey—”

Yet he could not face her. The clubs of the flying machines seen out of the corner of his eye, now seemed as if belabouring him all over. “Listen,” he said, “are you asking me to extricate us from all this, or are you starting to exhort me again about drinking.”

“Oh, I’m not exhorting you, really I’m not. I’ll never exhort you again. I’ll do anything you ask.”

“Then—” he had begun in anger.

But a look of tenderness came over Yvonne’s face and the Consul thought once more of the postcard in his pocket. It ought to have been a good omen. It could be the talisman of their immediate salvation now. Perhaps it would have been a good omen if only it had arrived yesterday or at the house this morning. Unfortunately one could not now conceive of it as having arrived at any other moment. And how could he know whether it was a good omen or not without another drink?

“But I’m back,” she was apparently saying. “Can’t you see it? We’re here together again, it’s us . Can’t you see that?” Her lips were trembling, she was almost crying.

Then she was close to him, in his arms, but he was gazing over her head.

“Yes, I can see,” he said, only he couldn’t see, only hear, the droning, the weeping, and feel, feel the unreality. “I do love you. Only—” “I can never forgive you deeply enough”: was that what was in his mind to add?

—And yet, he was thinking all over again, and all over again as for the first time, how he had suffered, suffered, suffered without her; indeed such desolation, such a desperate sense of abandonment, bereavement, as during this last year without Yvonne, he had never known in his life, unless it was when his mother died. But this present emotion he had never experienced with his mother: this urgent desire to hurt, to provoke, at a time when forgiveness alone could save the day, this, rather, had commenced with his stepmother, so that she would have to cry:—“I can’t eat, Geoffrey, the food sticks in my throat!” It was hard to forgive, hard, hard to forgive. Harder still, not to say how hard it was, I hate you . Even now, of all times. Even though here was God’s moment, the chance to agree, to produce the card, to change everything; or there was but a moment left . . . Too late. The Consul had controlled his tongue. But he felt his mind divide and rise, like the two halves of a counterpoised drawbridge, ticking, to permit passage of these noisome thoughts. “Only my heart—” he said.

“Your heart, darling?” she asked anxiously.

“Nothing—”

“Oh my poor sweetheart, you must be so weary!”

“Momentito,” he said, disengaging himself.

He strolled back into Jacques’ room, leaving Yvonne on the porch. Laruelle’s voice floated up from downstairs. Was it here he had been betrayed? This very room, perhaps, had been filled with her cries of love. Books (among which he did not see his Elizabethan plays) were strewn all over the floor and on the side of the studio couch nearest the wall, were stacked, as by some half-repenting poltergeist, almost to the ceiling. What if Jacques, approaching his design with Tarquin’s ravishing strides, had disturbed this potential avalanche! Grisly Orozco charcoal drawings, of an unexampled horrendousness, snarled down from the walls. In one, executed by a hand of indisputable genius, harpies grappled on a smashed bedstead among broken bottles of tequila, gnashing their teeth. No wonder; the Consul, peering closer, sought in vain for a sound bottle. He sought in vain around Jacques’ room too. There were two ruddy Riveras. Expressionless Amazons with feet like legs of mutton testified to the oneness of the toilers with the earth. Over the chevron-shaped windows, which looked down the Calle Tierra del Fuego, hung a terrifying picture he hadn’t seen before, and took at first to be a tapestry. Called “Los Borrachones”—why not Los Borrachos?—it resembled something between a primitive and a prohibitionist poster, remotely under the influence of Michelangelo. In fact, he now saw, it really amounted to a prohibitionist poster, though of a century or so back, half a century, God knows what period. Down, headlong into hades, selfish and florid-faced, into a tumult of fire-spangled fiends, Medusae, and belching monstrosities, with swallow dives or awkwardly, with dread backward leaps, shrieking among falling bottles and emblems of broken hopes, plunged the drunkards; up, up, flying palely, selflessly into the light toward heaven, soaring sublimely in pairs, male sheltering female, shielded themselves by angels with abnegating wings, shot the sober. Not all were in pairs however, the Consul noted. A few lone females on the upgrade were sheltered by angels only. It seemed to him these females were casting half-jealous glances downward after their plummeting husbands, some of whose faces betrayed the most unmistakable relief. The Consul laughed, a trifle shakily. It was ridiculous, but still—had anyone ever given a good reason why good and evil should not be thus simply delimited? Elsewhere in Jacques’ room cuneiform stone idols squatted like bulbous infants: on one side of the room there was even a line of them chained together. One part of the Consul continued to laugh, in spite of himself, and all this evidence of lost wild talents, at the thought of Yvonne confronted in the aftermath of her passion by a whole row of fettered babies.

“How are you getting on up there, Hugh?” he called up the staircase.

“I think I’ve got Parián in pretty good focus.”

Yvonne was reading on the balcony, and the Consul gazed back at Los Borrachones. Suddenly he felt something never felt before with such shocking certainty. It was that he was in hell himself. At the same time he became possessed of a curious calm. The inner ferment within him, the squalls and eddies of nervousness, were held again in check. He could hear Jacques moving downstairs and soon he would have another drink. That would help, but it was not the thought which calmed him. Parián—the Farolito! he said to himself. The Lighthouse, the lighthouse that invites the storm, and lights it! After all, sometime during the day, when they were at the bullthrowing perhaps, he might break away from the others and go there, if only for five minutes, if only for one drink. That prospect filled him with an almost healing love and at this moment, for it was part of the calm, the greatest longing he had ever known. The Farolito! It was a strange place, a place really of the late night and early dawn, which as a rule, like that one other terrible cantina in Oaxaca, did not open till four o’clock in the morning. But to-day being the holiday for the dead it would not close. At first it had appeared to him tiny. Only after he had grown to know it well had he discovered how far back it ran, that it was really composed of numerous little rooms, each smaller and darker than the last, opening one into another, the last and darkest of all being no larger than a cell. These rooms struck him as spots where diabolical plots must be hatched, atrocious murders planned; here, as when Saturn was in Capricorn, life reached bottom. But here also great wheeling thoughts hovered in the brain; while the potter and the field-laborer alike, early-risen, paused a moment in the paling doorway, dreaming . . . He saw it all now, the enormous drop on one side of the cantina into the barranca that suggested Kubla Khan: the proprietor, Ramón Diosdado, known as the Elephant, who was reputed to have murdered his wife to cure her neurasthenia, the beggars, hacked by war and covered with sores, one of whom one night after four drinks from the Consul had taken him for the Christ, and falling down on his knees before him, had pinned swiftly under his coat-lapel two medallions, joined to a tiny worked bleeding heart like a pincushion, portraying the Virgin of Guadalupe. “I ah give you the Saint!” He saw all this, feeling the atmosphere of the cantina enclosing him already with its certainty of sorrow and evil, and with its certainty of something else too, that escaped him. But he knew: it was peace. He saw the dawn again, watched with lonely anguish from that open door, in the violet-shaded light, a slow bomb bursting over the Sierra Madre— Sonnenaufgang! —the oxen harnessed to their carts with wooden disc wheels patiently waiting outside for their drivers, in the sharp cool pure air of heaven. The Consul’s longing was so great his soul was locked with the essence of the place as he stood and he was gripped by thoughts like those of the mariner who, sighting the faint beacon of Start Point after a long voyage, knows that soon he will embrace his wife.

Then they returned to Yvonne abruptly. Had he really forgotten her, he wondered. He looked round the room again. Ah, in how many rooms, upon how many studio couches, among how many books, had they found their own love, their marriage, their life together, a life which, in spite of its many disasters, its total calamity indeed—and in spite too of any slight element of falsehood in its inception on her side, her marriage partly into the past, into her Anglo-Scottish ancestry, into the visioned empty ghost-whistling castles in Sutherland, into an emanation of gaunt lowland uncles chumbling shortbread at six o’clock in the morning—had not been without triumph. Yet for how brief a time. Far too soon it had begun to seem too much of a triumph, it had been too good, too horribly unimaginable to lose, impossible finally to bear: it was as if it had become itself its own foreboding that it could not last, a foreboding that was like a presence too, turning his steps towards the taverns again. And how could one begin all over again, as though the Café Chagrin, the Farolito, had never been? Or without them? Could one be faithful to Yvonne and the Farolito both?—Christ, oh pharos of the world, how, and with what blind faith, could one find one’s way back, fight one’s way back, now, through the tumultuous horrors of five thousand shattering awakenings, each more frightful than the last, from a place where even love could not penetrate, and save in the thickest flames there was no courage? On the wall the drunks eternally plunged. But one of the little Mayan idols seemed to be weeping . . .

“Ei ei ei ei,” M. Laruelle was saying, not unlike the little postman, coming, stamping up the stairs; cocktails, despicable repast. Unperceived the Consul did an odd thing; he took the postcard he’d just received from Yvonne and slipped it under Jacques’ pillow. She emerged from the balcony. “Hullo, Yvonne, where is Hugh—sorry I’ve been so long. Let’s go on the roof, shall we?” Jacques continued.

Actually all the Consul’s reflections had not occupied seven minutes. Still, Laruelle seemed to have been away longer. He saw, following them, following the drinks up the spiral staircase, that in addition to the cocktail shaker and glasses there were canapés and stuffed olives on the tray. Perhaps despite all his seductive aplomb, Jacques had really gone downstairs frightened by the whole business and completely beside himself. While these elaborate preparations were merely the excuse for his flight. Perhaps also it was quite true, the poor fellow had really loved Yvonne—“Oh, God,” the Consul said, reaching the mirador, to which Hugh had almost simultaneously ascended, climbing, as they approached, the last rungs of the wooden ladder from the catwalk, “God, that the dream of dark magician in his visioned cave, even while his hand shakes in its last decay—that’s the bit I like—were the true end of this so lousy world . . . You shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble, Jacques.”

He took the binoculars from Hugh, and now, his drink upon a vacant merlon between the marzipan objects, he gazed steadily over the country. But oddly he had not touched this drink. And the calm mysteriously persisted. It was as if they were standing on a lofty golf-tee somewhere. What a beautiful hole this would make, from here to a green out into those trees on the other side of the barranca, that natural hazard which some hundred and fifty yards away could be carried by a good full spoon shot, soaring . . . Plock. The Golgotha Hole. High up, an eagle drove downwind in one. It had shown lack of imagination to build the local course back up there, remote from the barranca. Golf = gouffre = gulf. Prometheus would retrieve lost balls. And on that other side what strange fairways could be contrived, crossed by lone railway lines, humming with telegraph poles, glistening with crazy lies on embankments, over the hills and far away, like youth, like life itself, the course plotted all over these plains, extending far beyond Tomalín, through the jungle, to the Farolito, the nineteenth hole . . . The Case is Altered.

“No, Hugh,” he said, adjusting the lenses but without turning round, “Jacques means the film he made out of Alastor before he went to Hollywood, which he shot in a bathtub, what he could of it, and apparently stuck the rest together with sequences of ruins cut out of old travelogues, and a jungle hoiked out of In dunkelste Afrika , and a swan out of the end of some old Corinne Griffith—Sarah Bernhardt, she was in it too, I understand, while all the time the poet was standing on the shore, and the orchestra was supposed to be doing its best with the Sacre du Printemps. I think I forgot the fog.”

Their laughter somewhat cleared the air.

“But beforehand you do have certain wisions , as a German director friend of mine used to say, of what your film should be like,” Jacques was telling them, behind him, over by the angels. “But afterwards, that is another story . . . As for the fog, that is after all the cheapest commodity in any studio.”

“Didn’t you make any films in Hollywood?” Hugh asked, who a moment ago had almost drifted into a political argument with M. Laruelle.

“Yes . . . But I refuse to see them.”

But what on earth was he, the Consul, the Consul wondered, continuing to look for out there on those plains, in that tumulose landscape, through Jacques’ binoculars? Was it for some figment of himself, who had once enjoyed such a simple healthy stupid good thing as golf, as blind holes, for example, driving up into a high wilderness of sand dunes, yes, once with Jacques himself? To climb, and then to see, from an eminence, the ocean with the smoke on the horizon, then, far below, resting near the pin on the green, his new Silver King, twinkling. Ozone!—The Consul could no longer play golf: his few efforts of recent years had proved disastrous . . . I should have become a sort of Donne of the fairways at least. Poet of the unreplaced turf.—Who holds the flag while I hole out in three? Who hunts my Zodiac Zone along the shore? And who, upon that last and final green, though I hole out in four, accepts my ten and three score . . . Though I have more. The Consul dropped the glasses at last and turned round. And still he had not touched his drink.

“Alastor, Alastor,” Hugh strolled over to him saying. “Who is, was, why, and/or wrote Alastor, anyway?”

“Percy Bysshe Shelley.” The Consul leaned against the mirador beside Hugh. “Another fellow with ideas . . . The story I like about Shelley is the one where he just let himself sink to the bottom of the sea—taking several books with him of course—and just stayed there, rather than admit he couldn’t swim.”

“Geoffrey, don’t you think Hugh ought to see something of the fiesta,” suddenly Yvonne was saying from the other side, “since it’s his last day? Especially if there’s native dancing?”

So it was Yvonne who was “extricating them from all this,” just when the Consul was proposing to stay. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “Won’t we get native dancing and things in Tomalín? Would you like to, Hugh?”

“Sure. Of course. Anything you say.” Hugh got down awkwardly from the parapet. “There’s still about an hour before the bus leaves, isn’t there?”

“I’m sure Jacques will forgive us if we rush off,” Yvonne was saying almost desperately.

“Let me see you downstairs safely then.” Jacques controlled his voice. “It’s too early for the fête to be very much but you ought to see Rivera’s murals, Hugues, if you haven’t already.”

“Aren’t you coming, Geoffrey?” Yvonne turned on the staircase. “Please come,” her eyes said.

“Well, fiestas aren’t my strong suit. You run along and I’ll meet you at the terminal in time for the bus. I have to talk to Jacques here anyway.”

But they had all gone downstairs and the Consul was alone on the mirador. And yet not alone. For Yvonne had left a drink on the merlon by the angels, poor Jacques’ was in one of the crenels, Hugh’s was on the side parapet. And the cocktail shaker was not empty. Moreover the Consul had not touched his own drink. And still, now, he did not drink. The Consul felt with his right hand his left bicep under his coat. Strength—of a kind—but how to give oneself courage? That fine droll courage of Shelley’s; no, that was pride. And pride bade one go on, either go on and kill oneself, or “straighten out,” as so often before, by oneself, with the aid of thirty bottles of beer and staring at the ceiling. But this time it was very different. What if courage here implied admission of total defeat, admission that one couldn’t swim, admission indeed (though just for a second the thought was not too bad) into a sanitorium? No, to whatever end, it wasn’t merely a matter of being “got away.” No angels nor Yvonne nor Hugh could help him here. As for the demons, they were inside him as well as outside; quiet at the moment—taking their siesta perhaps—he was nonetheless surrounded by them and occupied; they were in possession. The Consul looked at the sun. But he had lost the sun: it was not his sun. Like the truth, it was well-nigh impossible to face; he did not want to go anywhere near it, least of all, sit in its light, facing it. “Yet I shall face it.” How? When he not only lied to himself, but himself believed the lie and lied back again to those lying factions, among whom was not even their own honour. There was not even a consistent basis to his self-deceptions. How should there be then to his attempts at honesty? “Horror,” he said. “Yet I will not give in.” But who was I, how find that I, where had “I” gone? “Whatever I do, it shall be deliberately.” And deliberately, it was true, the Consul still refrained from touching his drink. “The will of man is unconquerable.” Eat? I should eat. So the Consul ate half a canapé. And when M. Laruelle returned the Consul was still gazing drinklessly—where was he gazing? He didn’t know himself. “Do you remember when we went to Cholula,” he said, “how much dust there was?”

The two men faced each other in silence. “I don’t want to speak to you at all really,” the Consul added after a moment. “For that matter I wouldn’t mind if this was the last time I ever saw you . . . Did you hear me?”

“Have you gone mad?” M. Laruelle exclaimed at last. “Am I to understand that your wife has come back to you, something I have seen you praying and howling for under the table—really under the table . . . And that you treat her indifferently as this, and still continue only to care where the next drink’s coming from?”

To this unanswerable and staggering injustice the Consul had no word; he reached for his cocktail, he held it, smelt it: but somewhere, where it would do little good, a hawser did not give way: he did not drink; he almost smiled pleasantly at M. Laruelle. You might as well start now as later, refusing the drinks. You might as well start now; as later. Later.

The phone rang out and M. Laruelle ran down the staircase. The Consul sat with his face buried in his hands a while, then, leaving his drink still untouched, leaving, yes, all the drinks untouched, he descended to Jacques’ room.

M. Laruelle hung up the phone: “Well,” he said, “I didn’t know you two were acquainted.” He took off his coat and began to undo his tie. “That was my doctor, asking about you . He wants to know if you are not dead already.”

“Oh . . . Oh, that was Vigil, was it?”

“Arturo Díaz Vigil. Médico. Cirujano . . . Et cetera!”

“Ah,” the Consul said guardedly, running his finger round the inside of his collar. “Yes. I met him for the first time last night. As a matter of fact he was along at my house this morning.”

M. Laruelle discarded his shirt thoughtfully, saying: “We’re getting in a set before he goes on his holiday.”

The Consul, sitting down, imagined that weird gusty game of tennis under the hard Mexican sunlight, the tennis balls tossed in a sea of error—hard going for Vigil, but what would he care (and who was Vigil?—the good fellow seemed by now unreal to him as some figure one would forbear to greet for fear he was not your acquaintance of the morning, so much as the living double of the actor seen on the screen that afternoon) while the other prepared to enter a shower which, with that queer architectural disregard for decorum exhibited by a people who value decorum above all else, was built in a little recess splendidly visible from both the balcony and the head of the staircase.

“He wants to know if you have changed your mind, if you and Yvonne will ride with him to Guanajuato after all . . . Why don’t you?”

“How did he know I was here?” The Consul sat up, shaking a little again, though amazed for an instant at his mastery of the situation, that here it turned out there actually was someone named Vigil, who had invited one to come to Guanajuato.

“How? How else . . . I told him. It’s a pity you didn’t meet him long ago. That man might really be of some help to you.”

“You might find . . . You can be of some help to him to-day.” The Consul closed his eyes, hearing the doctor’s voice again distinctly: “But now that your esposa has come back. But now that your esposa has come back . . . I would work you with.” “What?” He opened his eyes . . . But the abominable impact on his whole being at this moment of the fact that that hideously elongated cucumiform bundle of blue nerves and gills below the steaming unselfconscious stomach had sought its pleasure in his wife’s body brought him trembling to his feet. How loathsome, how incredibly loathsome was reality. He began to walk around the room, his knees giving way every step with a jerk. Books, too many books. The Consul still didn’t see his Elizabethan plays. Yet there was everything else, from Les joyeuses bourgeoises de Windsor to Agrippa d’Aubigné and Collin d’Harleville, from Shelley to Touchard—Lafosse and Tristan l’Hermite. Beaucoup de bruit pour rien! Might a soul bathe there or quench its draught? It might. Yet in none of these books would one find one’s own suffering. Nor could they show you how to look at an ox-eye daisy. “But what could have made you tell Vigil I was here, if you didn’t know he knew me?” he asked, almost with a sob.

M. Laruelle, overpowered by steam, explanatory fingers in his ears, hadn’t heard: “What did you find to talk about, you two? Vigil and yourself?”

“Alcohol. Insanity. Medullary compression of the gibbus. Our agreements were more or less bilateral.” The Consul, shaking frankly now, normally, peered out through the open doors of the balcony at the volcanoes over which once more hovered puffs of smoke, accompanied by the rattle of musketry; and once he cast a passionate glance up at the mirador, where his untouched drinks lay. “Mass reflexes, but only the erections of guns, disseminating death,” he said, noticing too that the sounds of the fair were getting louder.

“What was that?”

“How were you proposing to entertain the others supposing they had stayed,” the Consul almost shrieked soundlessly, for he had himself dreadful memories of showers that slithered all over him like soap slipping from quivering fingers, “by taking a shower?”

And the observation plane was coming back, oh Jesus, yes, here, here, out of nowhere, she came whizzing, straight at the balcony, at the Consul, looking for him perhaps, zooming . . . Aaaaaaaah! Berumph.

M. Laruelle shook his head; he hadn’t heard a sound, a word. Now he came out of the shower and into another little recess screened by a curtain which he used as a dressing room:

“Lovely day, isn’t it? . . . I think we shall have thunder.”

“No.”

The Consul on a sudden went to the telephone, also in a kind of recess (the house seemed fuller of such recesses to-day than usual) found the telephone book, and now, shaking all over, opened it; not Vigil, no, not Vigil, his nerves gibbered, but Guzmán. A.B.C.G. He was sweating now, terribly; it was suddenly as hot in this little niche as in a telephone booth in New York during a heat wave; his hands trembled frantically; 666, Cafeasperina; Guzmán. Erikson 34. He had the number, had forgotten it: the name Zuzugoitea, Zuzugoitea, then Sanabria, came starting out of the book at him: Erikson 35. Zuzugoitea. He’d already forgotten the number, forgotten the number, 34, 35, 666: he was turning back the leaves, a large drop of sweat splashed on the book—this time he thought he saw Vigil’s name. But he’d already taken the receiver off the hook, the receiver off the hook, off the hook, he held it the wrong way up, speaking, splashing into the earhole, the mouth-hole, he could not hear—could they hear? see?—the earhole as before: “Qué quieres? Who do you want . . . God!” he shouted, hanging up. He would need a drink to do this. He ran for the staircase but halfway up, shuddering, in a frenzy, started down again; I brought the tray down. No, the drinks are still up there. He came on the mirador and drank down all the drinks in sight. He heard music. Suddenly about three hundred head of cattle, dead, frozen stiff in the postures of the living, sprang on the slope before the house, were gone. The Consul finished the contents of the cocktail shaker and came downstairs quietly, picked up a paper-backed book lying on the table, sat down and opened it with a long sigh. It was Jean Cocteau’s La Machine Infernale . “Oui, mon enfant, mon petit enfant,” he read, “les choses qui paraissent abominable aux humains, si tu savais, de l’endroit où j’habite, elles ont peu d’importance.” “We might have a drink in the square,” he said, closing the book, then opening it again: sortes Shakespeareanae. “The gods exist, they are the devil,” Baudelaire informed him.

He had forgotten Guzmán. Los Borrachones fell eternally into the flames. M. Laruelle, who hadn’t noticed a thing, appeared again, resplendent in white flannels, took his tennis racquet from the top of a bookcase; the Consul found his stick and his dark glasses, and they went down the iron spiral staircase together.

“Absolutamente necesario.” Outside the Consul paused, turning . . .

No se puede vivir sin amar , were the words on the house. In the street there was now not a breath of wind and they walked a while without speaking, listening to the babel of the fiesta which grew still louder as they approached the town. Street of the Land of Fire. 666.

—M. Laruelle, possibly because he was walking on the higher part of the banked street, now seemed even taller than he was, and beside him, below, the Consul felt a moment uncomfortably dwarfed, childish. Years before in their boyhood this position had been reversed; then the Consul was the taller. But whereas the Consul had stopped growing when seventeen at five foot eight or nine, M. Laruelle kept on through the years under different skies until now he had grown out of the Consul’s reach. Out of reach? Jacques was a boy of whom the Consul could still remember certain things with affection: the way he pronounced “vocabulary” to rhyme with “foolery,” or “bible” with “runcible.” Runcible spoon. And he’d grown into a man who could shave and put on his socks by himself. But out of his reach, hardly. Up there, across the years, at his height of six foot three or four, it did not seem too outlandish to suggest that his influence still reached him strongly. If not, why the English-looking tweed coat similar to the Consul’s own, those expensive expressive English tennis shoes of the kind you could walk in, the English white trousers of twenty-one inches breadth, the English shirt worn English-fashion open at the neck, the extraordinary scarf that suggested M. Laruelle had once won a half-blue at the Sorbonne or something? There was even, in spite of his slight stoutness, an English, almost an ex-consular sort of litheness about his movements. Why should Jacques be playing tennis at all? Have you forgotten it, Jacques, how I myself taught you, that summer long ago, behind the Taskersons’, or at the new public courts in Leasowe? On just such afternoons as this. So brief their friendship and yet, the Consul thought, how enormous, how all-permeating, permeating Jacques’ whole life, that influence had been, an influence that showed even in his choice of books, his work—why had Jacques come to Quauhnahuac in the first place? Was it not much as though he, the Consul, from afar, had willed it, for obscure purposes of his own? The man he’d met here eighteen months ago seemed, though hurt in his art and destiny, the most completely unequivocal and sincere Frenchman he’d ever known. Nor was the seriousness of M. Laruelle’s face, seen now against the sky between houses, compatible with cynical weakness. Was it not almost as though the Consul had tricked him into dishonour and misery, willed, even, his betrayal of him?

“Geoffrey,” M. Laruelle said suddenly, quietly, “has she really come back?”

“It looks like it, doesn’t it?” They both paused, to light their pipes, and the Consul noticed Jacques was wearing a ring he had not seen, a scarab, of simple design, cut into a chalcedony: whether Jacques would remove it to play tennis he didn’t know, but the hand that wore it was trembling, while the Consul’s was now steady.

“But I mean really come back,” M. Laruelle continued in French as they went forward up the Calle Tierra del Fuego. “She hasn’t merely come down on a visit, or to see you out of curiosity, or on the basis that you’ll just be friends, and so on, if you don’t mind my asking.”

“As a matter of fact I rather do.”

“Get this straight, Geoffrey, I’m thinking of Yvonne, not you.”

“Get it a little straighter still. You’re thinking of yourself.”

“But to- day —I can see how that’s—I suppose you were tight at the ball. I didn’t go. But if so why aren’t you back home thanking God and trying to rest and sober up instead of making everyone wretched by taking them to Tomalín? Yvonne looks tired out.”

The words drew faint weary furrows across the Consul’s mind constantly filling with harmless deliriums. Nevertheless his French was fluent and rapid:

“How do you mean you suppose I was tight when Vigil told you so on the phone? And weren’t you suggesting just now I take Yvonne to Guanajuato with him? Perhaps you imagined if you could insinuate yourself into our company on that proposed trip she would miraculously cease to be tired, even though it’s fifty times further than to Tomalín.”

“When I suggested you go it hadn’t quite entered my head she’d only arrived this morning.”

“Well—I forget whose idea Tomalín was,” the Consul said. Can it be I discussing Yvonne with Jacques, discussing us like this? Though after all they had done it before. “But I haven’t explained just how Hugh fits into the picture, have—”

“— Eggs! ” had the jovial proprietor of the abarrotes called down from the pavement above them to their right?

“Mesca li to!” had somebody else whizzed past carrying a length of plank, some barfly of his acquaintance; or was that this morning?

—“And on second thoughts I don’t think I’ll trouble.”

Soon the town loomed up before them. They had reached the foot of Cortez Palace. Near them children (encouraged by a man also in dark glasses who seemed familiar, and to whom the Consul motioned) were swinging round and round a telegraph pole on an improvised whirligig, a little parody of the Great Carrousel up the hill in the square. Higher, on a terrace of the Palace (because it was also the ayuntamiento) a soldier stood at ease with a rifle: on a still higher terrace dawdled the tourists: vandals in sandals looking at the murals.

The Consul and M. Laruelle had a good view of the Rivera frescoes from where they were. “You get an impression from here those tourists can’t up there,” M. Laruelle said, “they’re too close.” He was pointing with his tennis racquet. “The slow darkening of the murals as you look from right to left. It seems somehow to symbolise the gradual imposition of the Spaniards’ conquering will upon the Indians. Do you see what I mean?”

“If you stood at a greater distance still it might seem to symbolise for you the gradual imposition of the Americans’ conquering friendship from left to right upon the Mexicans,” the Consul said with a smile, removing his dark glasses, “upon those who have to look at the frescoes and remember who paid for them.”

The part of the murals he was gazing at portrayed, he knew, the Tlahuicans who had died for this valley in which he lived. The artist had represented them in their battle dress, wearing the masks and skins of wolves and tigers. As he looked it was as though these figures were gathering silently together. Now they had become one figure, one immense, malevolent creature staring back at him. Suddenly this creature appeared to start forward, then make a violent motion. It might have been, indeed unmistakably it was, telling him to go away.

“See, there’s Yvonne and Hugues waving at you.” M. Laruelle waved back his tennis racquet. “Do you know I think they make rather a formidable couple,” he added, with a half pained, half malicious smile.

There they were too, he saw, the formidable couple, up by the frescoes: Hugh with his foot on the rail of the Palace balcony, looking over their heads at the volcanoes perhaps; Yvonne with her back to them now. She was leaning against the rail facing the murals, then she turned sideways toward Hugh to say something. They did not wave again.

M. Laruelle and the Consul decided against the cliff path. They floated along the base of the Palace then, opposite the Banco de Crédito y Ejidal, turned left up the steep narrow road climbing to the square. Toiling, they edged into the Palace wall to let a man on horseback pass, a fine-featured Indian of the poorer class, dressed in soiled white loose clothes. The man was singing gaily to himself. But he nodded to them courteously as if to thank them. He seemed about to speak, reining in his little horse—on either side of which chinked two saddle-bags, and upon whose rump was branded the number seven—to a slow walk beside them, as they ascended the hill. Jingle jingle little surcingle. But the man, riding slightly in front, did not speak and at the top he suddenly waved his hand and galloped away, singing.

The Consul felt a pang. Ah, to have a horse, and gallop away, singing, away to someone you loved perhaps, into the heart of all the simplicity and peace in the world; was not that like the opportunity afforded man by life itself? Of course not. Still, just for a moment, it had seemed that it was.

“What is it Goethe says about the horse?” he said. “ ‘Weary of liberty he suffered himself to be saddled and bridled, and was ridden to death for his pains.’ ”

In the plaza the tumult was terrific. Once again they could scarcely hear one another speak. A boy dashed up to them selling papers. Sangriento Combate en Mora de Ebro. Los Aviones de los Rebeldes Bombardean Barcelona. Es inevitable la muerte del Papa. The Consul started; this time, an instant, he had thought the headlines referred to himself. But of course it was only the poor Pope whose death was inevitable. As if everyone else’s death were not inevitable too! In the middle of the square a man was climbing a slippery flagpole in a complicated manner necessitating ropes and spikes. The huge carrousel, set near the bandstand, was thronged by peculiar long-nosed wooden horses mounted on whorled pipes, dipping majestically as they revolved with a slow piston-like circulation. Boys on roller skates, holding to the stays of the umbrella structure, were being whirled around yelling with joy, while the uncovered machine driving it hammered away like a steam pump: then they were whizzing. Barcelona and Valencia mingled with the crashes and cries against which the Consul’s nerves were wooled. Jacques was pointing to the pictures on the panels running entirely around the inner wheel that was set horizontally and attached to the top of the central revolving pillar. A mermaid reclined in the sea combing her hair and singing to the sailors of a five-funnelled battleship. A daub which apparently represented Medea sacrificing her children turned out to be of performing monkeys. Five jovial-looking a Scottish glen at them, then went tearing out of sight. While a fine Pancho Villa with handlebar moustaches galloped for dear life after them all. But stranger than these was a panel showing lovers, a man and a woman reclining by a river. Though childish and crude it had about it a somnambulistic quality and something too of truth, of the pathos of love. The lovers were depicted as awkwardly askance. Yet one felt that really they were wrapped in each other’s arms by this river at dusk among gold stars. Yvonne, he thought, with sudden tenderness, where are you, my darling? Darling . . . For a moment he had thought her by his side. Then he remembered she was lost; then that no, this feeling belonged to yesterday, to the months of lonely torment behind him. She was not lost at all, she was here all the time, here now, or as good as here. The Consul wanted to raise his head, and shout for joy, like the horseman: she is here! Wake up, she has come back again! Sweetheart, darling, I love you! A desire to find her immediately and take her home (where in the garden still lay the white bottle of Tequila Añejo de Jalisco, unfinished) to put a stop to this senseless trip, to be, above all, alone with her, seized him, and a desire too, to lead immediately again a normal happy life with her, a life, for instance, in which such innocent happiness as all these good people around him were enjoying, was possible. But had they ever led a normal happy life? Had such a thing as a normal happy life ever been possible for them? It had . . . Yet what about that belated postcard, now under Laruelle’s pillow? It proved the lonely torment unnecessary, proved, even, he must have wanted it. Would anything really have been changed had he received the card at the right time? He doubted it. After all, her other letters—Christ, again, where were they?—had not changed anything. If he had read them properly, perhaps. But he had not read them properly. And soon he would forget about what had been done with the card. Nevertheless the desire remained—like an echo of Yvonne’s own—to find her, to find her now, to reverse their doom, it was a desire amounting almost to a resolution . . . Raise your head, Geoffrey Firmin, breathe your prayer of thankfulness, act before it is too late. But the weight of a great hand seemed to be pressing his head down. The desire passed. At the same time, as though a cloud had come over the sun, the aspect of the fair had completely altered for him. The merry grinding of the roller skates, the cheerful if ironic music, the cries of the little children on their goose-necked steeds, the procession of queer pictures—all this had suddenly become transcendentally awful and tragic, distant, transmuted, as it were some final impression on the senses of what the earth was like, carried over into an obscure region of death, a gathering thunder of immedicable sorrow; the Consul needed a drink . . .

—“Tequila,” he said. “Una?” the boy said sharply, and M. Laruelle called for gaseosa.

“Sí, señores.” The boy swept the table. “Una tequila y una gaseosa.” He brought immediately a bottle of El Nilo for M. Laruelle together with salt, chile, and a saucer of sliced lemons.

The café, which was in the centre of a little railed-in garden at the edge of the square among trees, was called the Paris. And in fact it was reminiscent of Paris. A simple fountain dripped near. The boy brought them camarones, red shrimps in a saucer, and had to be told again to get the tequila.

At last it arrived.

“Ah—” the Consul said, though it was the chalcedony ring that had been shaking.

“Do you really like it?” M. Laruelle asked him, and the Consul, sucking a lemon, felt the fire of the tequila run down his spine like lightning striking a tree which thereupon, miraculously, blossoms.

“What are you shaking for?” the Consul asked him.

M. Laruelle stared at him, he gave a nervous glance over his shoulder, he made as if absurdly to twang his tennis racquet on his toe, but remembering the press, stood it up against his chair awkwardly.

“What are you afraid of—” the Consul was mocking him.

“I admit, I feel confused . . .” M. Laruelle cast a more protracted glance over his shoulder. “Here, give me some of your poison.” He leaned forward and took a sip of the Consul’s tequila and remained bent over the thimble-shaped glass of terrors, a moment since brimming.

“Like it?”

“—like Oxygènée, and petrol . . . If I ever start to drink that stuff, Geoffrey, you’ll know I’m done for.”

“It’s mescal with me . . . Tequila, no, that is healthful . . . and delightful. Just like beer. Good for you. But if I ever start to drink mescal again, I’m afraid, yes, that would be the end,” the Consul said dreamily.

“Name of a name of God,” shuddered M. Laruelle.

“You’re not afraid of Hugh, are you?” The Consul, mocking, pursued—while it struck him that all the desolation of the months following Yvonne’s departure were now mirrored in the other’s eyes. “Not jealous of him, by any chance, are you?”

“Why should—”

“But you are thinking, aren’t you, that in all this time I have never once told you the truth about my life,” the Consul said, “isn’t that right?”

“No . . . For perhaps once or twice, Geoffrey, without knowing it, you have told the truth. No, I truly want to help. But, as usual, you don’t give me a chance.”

“I have never told you the truth. I know it, it is worse than terrible. But as Shelley says, the cold world shall not know. And the tequila hasn’t cured your trembling.”

“No, I am afraid,” M. Laruelle said.

“But I thought you were never afraid . . . Un otro tequila,” the Consul told the boy, who came running, repeating sharply, “—uno?”

M. Laruelle glanced round after the boy as if it had been in his mind to say “dos”: “I’m afraid of you,” he said, “Old Bean.”

The Consul heard, after half the second tequila, every now and then, familiar well-meaning phrases. “It’s hard to say this. As man to man. I don’t care who she is. Even if the miracle has occurred. Unless you cut it out altogether.”

The Consul however was looking past M. Laruelle at the flying boats which were at a little distance: the machine itself was feminine, graceful as a ballet dancer, its iron skirts of gondolas whirling higher and higher. Finally it whizzed round with a tense whipping and whining, then its skirts drooped chastely again when for a time there was stillness, only the breeze stirring them. And how beautiful, beautiful, beautiful—

“For God’s sake. Go home to bed . . . Or stay here. I’ll find the others. And tell them you’re not going . . .”

“But I am going,” the Consul said, commencing to take one of the shrimps apart. “Not camarones,” he added. “Cabrones. That’s what the Mexicans call them.” Placing his thumbs at the base of both ears he waggled his fingers. “Cabrón. You too, perhaps . . . Venus is a horned star.”

“What about the damage you’ve done, to her life . . . After all your howling . . . If you’ve got her back!—If you’ve got this chance—”

“You are interfering with my great battle,” the Consul said, gazing past M. Laruelle at an advertisement at the foot of the fountain: Peter Lorre en Las Manos de Orlac: á las 6:30 P. M. “I have to have a drink or two now, myself—so long as it isn’t mescal of course—else I shall become confused, like yourself.”

“—the truth is, I suppose, that sometimes, when you’ve calculated the amount exactly, you do see more clearly,” M. Laruelle was admitting a minute later.

“Against death.” The Consul sank back easily in his chair. “My battle for the survival of the human consciousness.”

“But certainly not the things so important to us despised sober people, on which the balance of any human situation depends. It’s precisely your inability to see them, Geoffrey, that turns them into the instruments of the disaster you have created yourself. Your Ben Jonson, for instance, or perhaps it was Christopher Marlowe, your Faust man, saw the Carthaginians fighting on his big toe-nail. That’s like the kind of clear seeing you indulge in. Everything seems perfectly clear, because indeed it is perfectly clear, in terms of the toe-nail.”

“Have a devilled scorpion,” invited the Consul, pushing over the camarones with extended arm. “A bedevilled cabrón.”

“I admit the efficacy of your tequila—but do you realise that while you’re battling against death, or whatever you imagine you’re doing, while what is mystical in you is being released, or whatever it is you imagine is being released, while you’re enjoying all this, do you realise what extraordinary allowances are being made for you by the world which has to cope with you, yes, are even now being made by me ?”

The Consul was gazing upward dreamily at the Ferris wheel near them, huge, but resembling an enormously magnified child’s structure of girders and angle brackets, nuts and bolts, in Meccano; to-night it would be lit up, its steel twigs caught in the emerald pathos of the trees; the wheel of the law, rolling ; and it bore thinking of too that the carnival was not going in earnest now. What a hullabaloo there would be later! His eye fell on another little carrousel, a dazzle-painted wobbling child’s toy, and he saw himself as a child making up his mind to go on it, hesitating, missing the next opportunity, and the next, missing all the opportunities finally, until it was too late. What opportunities, precisely, did he mean? A voice on the radio somewhere began to sing a song: Samaritana mía, alma pía, bebe en tu boca linda, then went dead. It had sounded like Samaritana.

“And you forget what you exclude from this, shall we say, feeling of omniscience. And at night, I imagine, or between drink and drink, which is a sort of night, what you have excluded, as if it resented that exclusion, returns—”

“I’ll say it returns,” the Consul said, listening at this point. “There are other minor deliriums too, meteora , which you can pick out of the air before your eyes, like gnats. And this is what people seem to think is the end . . . But d.t.’s are only the beginning, the music round the portal of the Qliphoth, the overture, conducted by the God of Flies . . . Why do people see rats? These are the sort of questions that ought to concern the world, Jacques. Consider the word remorse. Remord. Mordeo, mordere. La Mordida! Agenbite too . . . And why rongeur? Why all this biting, all those rodents, in the etymology?”

“Facilis est descensus Averno . . . It’s too easy.”

“You deny the greatness of my battle? Even if I win. And I shall certainly win, if I want to,” the Consul added, aware of a man near them standing on a step-ladder nailing a board to a tree.

“Je crois que le vautour est doux à Prometheus et que les Ixion se plaisent en Enfers.”

—¡Box!

“To say nothing of what you lose, lose, lose, are losing, man. You fool, you stupid fool . . . You’ve even been insulated from the responsibility of genuine suffering . . . Even the suffering you do endure is largely unnecessary. Actually spurious. It lacks the very basis you require of it for its tragic nature. You deceive yourself. For instance that you’re drowning your sorrows . . . Because of Yvonne and me. But Yvonne knows. And so do I. And so do you. That Yvonne wouldn’t have been aware. If you hadn’t been so drunk all the time. To know what she was doing. Or care. And what’s more. The same thing is bound to happen again you fool it will happen again if you don’t pull yourself together. I can see the writing on the wall. Hullo.”

M. Laruelle wasn’t there at all; he had been talking to himself. The Consul stood up and finished his tequila. But the writing was there, all right, if not on the wall. The man had nailed his board to the tree:

¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDÍN?

The Consul realised, leaving the Paris, he was in a state of drunkenness, so to speak, rare with him. His steps teetered to the left, he could not make them incline to the right. He knew in which direction he was going, toward the Bus Terminal, or rather the little dark cantina adjacent to it kept by the widow Gregorio, who herself was half English and had lived in Manchester, and to whom he owed fifty centavos he’d suddenly made up his mind to pay back. But simply he could not steer a straight course there . . . Oh we all walk the wibberley wobberley —

Dies Faustus . . . The Consul looked at his watch. Just for one moment, one horrible moment in the Paris, he had thought it night, that it was one of those days the hours slid by like corks bobbing astern, and the morning was carried away by the wings of the angel of night, all in a trice, but to-day quite the reverse seemed to be happening: it was still only five to two. It was already the longest day in his entire experience, a lifetime; he had not only not missed the bus, he would have plenty of time for more drinks. If only he were not drunk! The Consul strongly disapproved of this drunkenness.

Children accompanied him, gleefully aware of his plight. Money, money, money, they gibbered. O.K. mistair! Where har you go? Their cries grew discouraged, fainter, utterly disappointed as they clung to his trouser leg. He would have liked to give them something. Yet he did not wish to draw more attention to himself. He had caught sight of Hugh and Yvonne, trying their hands at a shooting gallery. Hugh was shooting, Yvonne watched; phut , pssst , pfffing ; and Hugh brought down a procession of wooden ducks.

The Consul stumbled on without being seen, passing a booth where you could have your photograph taken with your sweetheart against a terrifying thunderous background, lurid and green, with a charging bull, and Popocatepetl in eruption, past, his face averted, the shabby little closed British Consulate, where the lion and the unicorn on the faded blue shield regarded him mournfully. This was shameful. But we are still at your service, in spite of all, they seemed to say. Dieu et mon droit. The children had given him up. However he had lost his bearings. He was reaching the edge of the fair. Mysterious tents were shut up here, or lying collapsed, enfolded on themselves. They appeared almost human, the former kind awake, expectant; the latter with the wrinkled crumpled aspect of men asleep, but longing even in unconsciousness to stretch their limbs. Further on at the final frontiers of the fair, it was the day of the dead indeed. Here the tent booths and galleries seemed not so much asleep as lifeless, beyond hope of revival. Yet there were faint signs of life after all, he saw.

At a point outside the plaza’s periphery, half on the pavement, there was another, utterly desolated, “safe” roundabout. The little chairs circulated beneath a frilled canvas pyramid that twirled slowly for half a minute, then stopped, when it looked just like the hat of the bored Mexican who tended it. Here it was, this little Popocatepetl, nestling far away from the swooping flying machines, far from the Great Wheel, existing—for whom did it exist, the Consul wondered. Belonging neither to the children nor the adults it stood, untenanted, as one might imagine the whirligig of adolescence as resting deserted, if youth suspected it of offering an excitement so apparently harmless, choosing rather what in the proper square swooned in agonising ellipses beneath some gigantic canopy.

The Consul walked on a little further, still unsteadily; he thought he had his bearings again, then stopped:

¡BRAVA ATRACCIÓN!

10 c MÁQUINA INFERNAL

he read, half struck by some coincidence in this. Wild attraction. The huge looping-the-loop machine, empty, but going full blast over his head in this dead section of the fair, suggested some huge evil spirit, screaming in its lonely hell, its limbs writhing, smiting the air like flails of paddlewheels. Obscured by a tree, he hadn’t seen it before. The machine stopped also . . .

“—Mistair. Money money money.” “Mistair! Where har you go?”

The wretched children had spotted him again; and his penalty for avoiding them was to be drawn inexorably, though with as much dignity as possible, into boarding the monster. And now, his ten centavos paid to a Chinese hunchback in a retiform visored tennis cap, he was alone, irrevocably and ridiculously alone, in a little confession box. After a while, with violent bewildering convulsions, the thing started to go. The confession boxes, perched at the end of menacing steel cranks, zoomed upwards and heavily fell. The Consul’s own cage hurled up again with a powerful thrusting, hung for a moment upside down at the top, while the other cage, which, significantly, was empty, was at the bottom, then, before this situation had been grasped, crashed down, paused a moment at the other extremity, only to be lifted upwards again cruelly to the highest point where for an interminable, intolerable period of suspension, it remained motionless.—The Consul, like that poor fool who was bringing light to the world, was hung upside down over it, with only a scrap of woven wire between himself and death. There, above him, poised the world, with its people stretching out down to him, about to fall off the road onto his head, or into the sky. 999. The people hadn’t been there before. Doubtless, following the children, they had assembled to watch him. Obliquely he was aware that he was without physical fear of death, as he would have been without fear at this moment of anything else that might sober him up; perhaps this had been his main idea. But he did not like it. This was not amusing. It was doubtless another example of Jacques’—Jacques?—unnecessary suffering. And it was scarcely a dignified position for an ex-representative of His Majesty’s government to find himself in, though it was symbolic, of what he could not conceive, but it was undoubtedly symbolic. Jesus. All at once, terribly, the confession boxes had begun to go in reverse: Oh, the Consul said, oh; for the sensation of falling was now as if terribly behind him, unlike anything, beyond experience; certainly this recessive unwinding was not like looping-the-loop in a plane, where the movement was quickly over, the only strange feeling one of increased weight; as a sailor he disapproved of that feeling too, but this—ah, my God! Everything was falling out of his pockets, was being wrested from him, torn away, a fresh article at each whirling, sickening, plunging, retreating, unspeakable circuit, his notecase, pipe, keys, his dark glasses he had taken off, his small change he did not have time to imagine being pounced on by the children after all, he was being emptied out, returned empty, his stick, his passport—had that been his passport? He didn’t know if he’d brought it with him. Then he remembered he had brought it. Or hadn’t brought it. It could be difficult even for a Consul to be without a passport in Mexico. Ex-consul. What did it matter? Let it go! There was a kind of fierce delight in this final acceptance. Let everything go! Everything particularly that provided means of ingress or egress, went bond for, gave meaning or character, or purpose or identity to that frightful bloody nightmare he was forced to carry around with him everywhere upon his back, that went by the name of Geoffrey Firmin, late of His Majesty’s Navy, later still of His Majesty’s Consular Service, later still of—Suddenly it struck him that the Chinaman was asleep, that the children, the people had gone, that this would go on forever; no one could stop the machine . . . It was over.

And yet not over. On terra firma the world continued to spin madly round; houses, whirligigs, hotels, cathedrals, cantinas, volcanoes: it was difficult to stand up at all. He was conscious of people laughing at him but, what was more surprising, of his possessions being restored to him, one by one. The child who had his notecase withdrew it from him playfully before returning it. No: she still had something in her other hand, a crumpled paper. The Consul thanked her for it firmly. Some telegram of Hugh’s. His stick, his glasses, his pipe, unbroken; yet not his favorite pipe; and no passport. Well, definitely he could not have brought it. Putting his other things back in his pockets he turned a corner, very unsteadily, and slumped down on a bench. He replaced his dark glasses, set his pipe in his mouth, crossed his legs, and, as the world gradually slowed down, assumed the bored expression of an English tourist sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens.

Children, he thought, how charming they were at heart. The very same kids who had beseiged him for money, had now brought him back even the smallest of his small change and then, touched by his embarrassment, had scurried away without waiting for a reward. Now he wished he had given them something. The little girl had gone also. Perhaps this was her exercise book open on the bench. He wished he had not been so brusque with her, that she would come back, so that he could give her the book. Yvonne and he should have had children, would have had children, could have had children, should have . . .

In the exercise book he made out with difficulty:

Escruch is an old man. He lives in London. He lives alone in a large house. Scrooge is a rich man but he never gives to the poor. He is a miser. No one loves Scrooge and Scrooge loves no one. He has no friends. He is alone in the world. The man (el hombre): the house (la casa): the poor (los pobres): he lives (el vive): he gives (el da): he has no friends (el no tiene amigos): he loves (el ama): old (viejo): large (grande): no one (nadie): rich (rico): Who is Scrooge? Where does he live? Is Scrooge rich or poor? Has he friends? How does he live? Alone. World. On.

At last the earth had stopped spinning with the motion of the Infernal Machine. The last house was still, the last tree rooted again. It was seven minutes past two by his watch. And he was cold stone sober. How horrible was the feeling. The Consul closed the exercise book: bloody old Scrooge; how queer to meet him here!

—Gay-looking soldiers, grimy as sweeps, strolled up and down the avenues with a jaunty unmilitary gait. Their officers, smartly uniformed, sat on benches, leaning forward over their swagger canes as if petrified by remote strategical thoughts. An Indian carrier with a towering load of chairs loped along the Avenida Guerrero. A madman passed, wearing, in the manner of a lifebelt, an old bicycle tire. With a nervous movement he continually shifted the injured tread round his neck. He muttered to the Consul, but waiting neither for reply nor reward, took off the tire and flung it far ahead of him toward a booth, then followed unsteadily, stuffing something in his mouth from a tin bait jar. Picking up the tire he flung it far ahead again, repeating this process, to the irreducible logic of which he appeared eternally committed, until out of sight.

The Consul felt a clutch at his heart and half rose. He had caught sight of Hugh and Yvonne again at a booth; she was buying a tortilla from an old woman. While the woman plastered the tortilla for her with cheese and tomato sauce, a touchingly dilapidated little policeman, doubtless one on strike, with cap askew, in soiled baggy trousers, leggings, and a coat several sizes too large for him, tore off a piece of lettuce and with a consummately courteous smile, handed it to her. They were having a splendid time, it was obvious. They ate their tortillas, grinning at each other as the sauce dripped from their fingers; now Hugh had brought out his handkerchief; he was wiping a smear from Yvonne’s cheek, while they roared with laughter, in which the policeman joined. What had happened to their plot now, their plot to get him away? Never mind. The clutch at his heart had become a cold iron grip of persecution which had been stayed only by a certain relief; for how, had Jacques communicated his little anxieties to them, would they now be here, laughing? Still, one never knew; and a policeman was a policeman, even if on strike, and friendly, and the Consul was more afraid of the police than death. He placed a small stone upon the child’s exercise book, leaving it on the bench, and dodged behind a stall to avoid them. He got a glimpse through the boards of the man still halfway up the slippery pole, neither near enough to the top nor the bottom to be certain of reaching either in comfort, avoided a huge turtle dying in two parallel streams of blood on the pavement outside a sea-food restaurant, and entered El Bosque with a steady gait, as once before, similarly obsessed, at a run: there was no sign of the bus yet; he had twenty minutes, probably more.

The Terminal Cantina El Bosque, however, seemed so dark that even with his glasses off he had to stop dead . . . Mi ritrovai per una bosca oscura—or selva? No matter. The Cantina was well named, “The Boskage.” This darkness, though, was associated in his mind with velvet curtains, and there they were, behind the shadowy bar, velvet or velveteen curtains, too dirty and full of dust to be black, partially screening the entrance to the back room, which one could never be sure was private. For some reason the fiesta had not overflowed in here; the place—a Mexican relative of the English “Jug and Bottle,” chiefly dedicated to those who drank “off” the premises, in which there was only one spindly iron table and two stools at the bar, and which, facing east, became progressively darker as the sun, to those who noticed such things, climbed higher into the sky—was deserted, as usual at this hour. The Consul groped his way forward. “Señora Gregorio,” he called softly, yet with an agonized impatient quaver in his voice. It had been difficult to find his voice at all; he now needed another drink badly. The word echoed through the back of the house; Gregorio; there was no answer. He sat down, while gradually the shapes about him became more clearly defined, shapes of barrels behind the bar, of bottles. Ah, the poor turtle!—The thought struck at a painful tangent.—There were big green barrels of jerez, habanero, catalán, parras, zarzamora, málaga, durazno, membrillo, raw alcohol at a peso a litre, tequila, mescal, rumpope. As he read these names and, as if it were a dreary dawn outside, the cantina grew lighter to his eyes, he heard voices in his ears again, a single voice above the muted roar of the fair: “Geoffrey Firmin, this is what it is like to die, just this and no more, an awakening from a dream in a dark place, in which, as you see, are present the means of escape from yet another nightmare. But the choice is up to you. You are not invited to use those means of escape; it is left up to your judgment; to obtain them it is necessary only to—” “Señora Gregorio,” he repeated, and the echo came back: “Orio.”

In one corner of the bar someone had apparently once begun a small mural, aping the Great Mural in the Palace, two or three figures only, peeling and inchoate Tlahuicans.—There was the sound of slow, dragging footsteps from behind; the widow appeared, a little old woman wearing an unusually long and shabby rustling black dress. Her hair that he recalled as grey seemed to have been recently hennaed, or dyed red, and though it hung untidily in front, it was twisted up at the back into a Psyche knot. Her face, which was beaded with perspiration, evinced the most extraordinary waxen pallor; she looked careworn, wasted with suffering, yet at the sight of the Consul her tired eyes gleamed, kindling her whole expression to one of wry amusement in which there appeared also both a determination and a certain weary expectancy. “Mescal posseebly,” she said, in a queer, chanting half-bantering tone, “Mescal imposseebly.” But she made no move to draw the Consul a drink, perhaps because of his debt, an objection he immediately disposed of by laying a tostón on the counter. She smiled almost slyly as she edged toward the mescal barrel.

“No, tequila, por favor,” he said.

“Un obsequio”—she handed him the tequila. “Where do you laugh now?”

“I still laugh in the Calle Nicaragua, cincuenta dos,” the Consul replied, smiling. “You mean ‘live,’ Señora Gregorio, not ‘laugh,’ con permiso.”

“Remember,” Señora Gregorio corrected him gently, slowly, “remember my English. Well, so it is,” she sighed, drawing a small glass of málaga for herself from the barrel chalked with that name. “Here’s to your love. What’s my names?” She pushed toward him a saucer filled with salt that was speckled with orange-colored pepper.

“Lo mismo.” The Consul drank the tequila down. “Geoffrey Firmin.”

Señora Gregorio brought him a second tequila; for a time they regarded one another without speaking. “So it is,” she repeated at last, sighing once more; and there was pity in her voice for the Consul. “So it is. You must take it as it come. It can’t be helped.”

“No, it can’t be helped.”

“If you har your wife you would lose all things in that love,” Señora Gregorio said, and the Consul, understanding that somehow this conversation was being taken up where it had been left off weeks before, probably at the point where Yvonne had abandoned him for the seventh time that evening, found himself not caring to change the basis of shared misery on which their relationship rested—for Gregorio had really abandoned her before he died—by informing her his wife had come back, was indeed, perhaps, not fifty feet away. “Both minds is occupied in one thing, so you can’t lose it,” she continued sadly.

“Sí” said the Consul.

“So it is. If your mind is occupied with all things, then you never lose your mind. Your minds, your life—your everything in it. Once when I was a girl I never used to think I live like I laugh now. I always used to dream about kernice dreams. Nice clothes, nice hairts—‘Everything is good for me just now’ it was one time, theatres, but everything—now, I don’t think of but nothing but trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble; and trouble comes . . . So it is.”

“Sí, Señora Gregorio.”

“Of course I was a kernice girl from home,” she was saying. “This—” she glanced contemptuously round the dark little bar, “was never in my mind. Life changes, you know, you can never drink of it.”

“Not ‘drink of it,’ Señora Gregorio, you mean ‘think of it.’ ”

“Never drink of it. Oh, well,” she said, pouring out a litre of raw alcohol for a poor noseless peon who had entered silently and was standing in a corner, “a kernice life among kernice people, and now what?”

Señora Gregorio shuffled off into the back room, leaving the Consul alone. He sat with his second large tequila untouched for some minutes. He imagined himself drinking it yet had not the will to stretch out his hand to take it, as if it were something once long and tediously desired but which, an overflowing cup suddenly within reach, had lost all meaning. The cantina’s emptiness, and a strange ticking like that of some beetle, within that emptiness, began to get on his nerves; he looked at his watch: only seventeen minutes past two. This was where the tick was coming from. Again he imagined himself taking the drink: again his will failed him. Once the swing door opened, someone glanced round quickly to satisfy himself, went out: was that Hugh, Jacques? Whoever it was had seemed to possess the features of both, alternately. Somebody else entered and, though the next instant the Consul felt this was not the case, went right through into the back room, peering round furtively. A starving pariah dog with the appearance of having lately been skinned had squeezed itself in after the last man; it looked up at the Consul with beady, gentle eyes. Then, thrusting down its poor wrecked dinghy of a chest, from which raw withered breasts drooped, it began to bow and scrape before him. Ah, the ingress of the animal kingdom! Earlier it had been the insects; now these were closing in upon him again, these animals, these people without ideas: “Dispense usted, por Dios,” he whispered to the dog, then wanting to say something kind, added, stooping, a phrase read or heard in youth or childhood: “For God sees how timid and beautiful you really are, and the thoughts of hope that go with you like little white birds—”

The Consul stood up and suddenly declaimed to the dog:

“Yet this day, pichicho, shalt thou be with me in—” But the dog hopped away in terror on three legs and slunk under the door.

The Consul finished his tequila in one gulp; he went to the counter. “Señora Gregorio,” he called; he waited, casting his eyes about the cantina, which seemed to have grown very much lighter. And the echo came back: “Orio.”—Why, the mad pictures of the wolves! He had forgotten they were here. The materialised pictures, six or seven of considerable length, completed, in the defection of the muralist, the decoration of El Bosque. They were precisely the same in every detail. All showed the same sleigh being pursued by the same pack of wolves. The wolves hunted the occupants of the sleigh the entire length of the bar and at intervals right round the room, though neither sleigh nor wolves budged an inch in the process. To what red tartar, oh mysterious beast? Incongruously, the Consul was reminded of Rostov’s wolf hunt in War and Peace —ah, that incomparable party afterwards at the old uncle’s, the sense of youth, the gaiety, the love! At the same time he remembered having been told that wolves never hunted in packs at all. Yes, indeed, how many patterns of life were based on kindred misconceptions, how many wolves do we feel on our heels, while our real enemies go in sheepskin by? “Señora Gregorio,” he said again, and saw that the widow was returning, dragging her feet, though it was perhaps too late, there would not be time for another tequila.

He held out his hand, then dropped it—Good God, what had come over him? For an instant he’d thought he was looking at his own mother. Now he found himself struggling with his tears, that he wanted to embrace Señora Gregorio, to cry like a child, to hide his face on her bosom. “Adiós,” he said, and seeing a tequila on the counter just the same, he drank it rapidly.

Señora Gregorio took his hand and held it. “Life changes, you know,” she said, gazing at him intently. “You can never drink of it. I think I see you with your esposa again soon. I see you laughing together in some kernice place where you laugh.” She smiled. “Far away. In some kernice place where all those troubles you har now will har—” The Consul started: what was Señora Gregorio saying? “Adiós,” she added in Spanish, “I have no house only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours.”

“Thank you.”

“Sank you.”

“Not sank you, Señora Gregorio, thank you.”

“Sank you.”

The coast looked clear: yet when the Consul pushed out cautiously through the jalousie doors he almost fell over Dr. Vigil. Fresh and impeccable in his tennis clothes, he was hurrying by, accompanied by Mr. Quincey and the local cinema manager, Señor Bustamente. The Consul drew back, fearful now of Vigil, of Quincey, of being seen coming out of the cantina, but they appeared not to notice him as they glided past the Tomalín camión, which had just arrived, their elbows working like jockeys, chattering unceasingly. He suspected their conversation to be entirely about him; what could be done with him, they were asking, how many drinks had he put away at the Gran Baile last night? Yes, there they were, even going towards the Bella Vista itself, to get a few more “opinions” about him. They flitted here and there, vanished . . .

Es inevitable la muerte del Papa.