“ Mescal ,” said the Consul.

The main barroom of the Farolito was deserted. From a mirror behind the bar, that also reflected the door open to the square, his face silently glared at him, with stern, familiar foreboding.

Yet the place was not silent. It was filled by that ticking: the ticking of his watch, his heart, his conscience, a clock somewhere. There was a remote sound too, from far below, of rushing water, of subterranean collapse; and moreover he could still hear them, the bitter wounding accusations he had flung at his own misery, the voices as in argument, his own louder than the rest, mingling now with those other voices that seemed to be wailing from a distance distressfully: “Borracho, Borrachón, Borraaaacho!”

But one of these voices was like Yvonne’s, pleading. He still felt her look, their look in the Salón Ofélia, behind him. Deliberately he shut out all thought of Yvonne. He drank two swift mescals: the voices ceased.

Sucking a lemon he took stock of his surroundings. The mescal, while it assuaged, slowed his mind; each object demanded some moments to impinge upon him. In one corner of the room sat a white rabbit eating an ear of Indian corn. It nibbled at the purple and black stops with an air of detachment, as though playing a musical instrument. Behind the bar hung, by a clamped swivel, a beautiful Oaxaqueñan gourd of mescal de olla, from which his drink had been measured. Ranged on either side stood bottles of Tenampa, Berreteaga, Tequila Añejo, Anís doble de Mallorca, a violet decanter of Henry Mallet’s “delicioso licor,” a flask of peppermint cordial, a tall voluted bottle of Anís del Mono, on the label of which a devil brandished a pitchfork. On the wide counter before him were saucers of toothpicks, chiles, lemons, a tumblerful of straws, crossed long spoons in a glass tankard. At one end large bulbous jars of many-colored aguardiente were set, raw alcohol with different flavours, in which citrus fruit rinds floated. An advertisement tacked by the mirror for last night’s ball in Quauhnahuac caught his eye: Hotel Bella Vista Gran Baile a Beneficio de la Cruz Roja. Los Mejores Artistas del radio en acción. No falte Vd. A scorpion clung to the advertisement. The Consul noted all these things carefully. Drawing long sighs of icy relief, he even counted the toothpicks. He was safe here; this was the place he loved—sanctuary, the paradise of his despair.

The “barman”—the son of the Elephant—known as A Few Fleas, a small dark sickly-looking child, was glancing nearsightedly through horn-rimmed spectacles at a cartoon serial El Hijo del Diablo in a boys’ magazine, Ti-to . As he read, muttering to himself, he ate chocolates. Returning another replenished glass of mescal to the Consul he slopped some on the bar. He went on reading without wiping it up, however, muttering, cramming himself with chocolate skulls bought for the Day of the Dead, chocolate skeletons, chocolate, yes, funeral wagons. The Consul pointed out the scorpion on the wall and the boy brushed it off with a vexed gesture: it was dead. A Few Fleas turned back to his story, muttering aloud thickly, “De pronto, Dalia vuelve en Sigrita llamando la atención de un guardia que pasea. ¡Suélteme! ¡Suélteme!”

Save me, thought the Consul vaguely, as the boy suddenly went out for change, suélteme, help: but maybe the scorpion, not wanting to be saved, had stung itself to death. He strolled across the room. After fruitlessly trying to make friends with the white rabbit, he approached the open window on his right. It was almost a sheer drop to the bottom of the ravine. What a dark, melancholy place! In Parián did Kubla Khan . . . And the crag was still there too—just as in Shelley or Calderon or both—the crag that couldn’t make up its mind to crumble absolutely, it clung so, cleft, to life. The sheer height was terrifying, he thought, leaning outwards, looking sideways at the split rock and attempting to recall the passage in The Cenci that described the huge stack clinging to the mass of earth, as if resting on life, not afraid to fall, but darkening, just the same, where it would go if it went. It was a tremendous, an awful way down to the bottom. But it struck him he was not afraid to fall either. He traced mentally the barranca’s circuitous abysmal path back through the country, through shattered mines, to his own garden, then saw himself standing again this morning with Yvonne outside the printer’s shop, gazing at the picture of that other rock, La Despedida, the glacial rock crumbling among the wedding invitations in the shop window, the spinning flywheel behind. How long ago, how strange, how sad, remote as the memory of first love, even of his mother’s death, it seemed; like some poor sorrow, this time without effort, Yvonne left his mind again.

Popocatepetl towered through the window, its immense flanks partly hidden by rolling thunderheads; its peak blocking the sky, it appeared almost right overhead, the barranca, the Farolito, directly beneath it. Under the volcano! It was not for nothing the ancients had placed Tartarus under Mt. Aetna, nor within it, the monster Typhoeus, with his hundred heads and—relatively—fearful eyes and voices.

Turning, the Consul took his drink over to the open door. A mercurochrome agony down the west. He stared out at Parián. There, beyond a grass plot, was the inevitable square with its little public garden. To the left, at the edge of the barranca, a soldier slept under a tree. Half facing him, to the right, on an incline, stood what seemed at first sight a ruined monastery or waterworks. This was the grey turreted barracks of the Military Police he had mentioned to Hugh as the reputed Union Militar headquarters. The building, which also included the prison, glowered at him with one eye, over an archway set in the forehead of its low façade: a clock pointing to six. On either side of the archway the barred windows in the Comisario de Policía and the Policía de Seguridad looked down on a group of soldiers talking, their bugles slung over their shoulders with bright green lariats. Other soldiers, puttees flapping, stumbled at sentry duty. Under the archway, in the entrance to the courtyard, a corporal was working at a table, on which stood an unlighted oil lamp. He was inscribing something in copperplate handwriting, the Consul knew, for his rather unsteady course hither—not so unsteady however as in the square at Quauhnahuac earlier, but still disgraceful—had brought him almost on top of him. Through the archway, grouped round the courtyard beyond, the Consul could make out dungeons with wooden bars like pigpens. In one of them a man was gesticulating. Elsewhere, to the left, were scattered huts of dark thatch, merging into the jungle which on all sides surrounded the town, glowing now in the unnatural livid light of approaching storm.

A Few Fleas having returned, the Consul went to the bar for his change. The boy, not hearing apparently, slopped some mescal into his glass from the beautiful gourd. Handing it back he upset the toothpicks. The Consul said nothing further about the change for the moment. However he made a mental note to order for his next drink something costing more than the fifty centavos he had already laid down. In this way he saw himself gradually recovering his money. He argued absurdly with himself that it was necessary to remain for this alone. He knew there was another reason yet couldn’t place his finger on it. Every time the thought of Yvonne recurred to him he was aware of this. It seemed indeed then as though he must stay here for her sake, not because she would follow him here—no, she had gone, he’d let her go finally now, Hugh might come, though never she, not this time, obviously she would return home and his mind could not travel beyond that point—but for something else. He saw his change lying on the counter, the price of the mescal not deducted from it. He pocketed it all and came to the door again. Now the situation was reversed; the boy would have to keep an eye on him . It lugubriously diverted him to imagine, for A Few Fleas’ benefit, though half aware the preoccupied boy was not watching him at all, he had assumed the blue expression peculiar to a certain type of drunkard, tepid with two drinks grudgingly on credit, gazing out of an empty saloon, an expression that pretends he hopes help, any kind of help, may be on its way, friends, any kind of friends coming to rescue him. For him life is always just around the corner, in the form of another drink at a new bar. Yet he really wants none of these things. Abandoned by his friends, as they by him, he knows that nothing but the crushing look of a creditor lives round that corner. Neither has he fortified himself sufficiently to borrow more money, nor obtain more credit; nor does he like the liquor next door anyway. Why am I here, says the silence, what have I done, echoes the emptiness, why have I ruined myself in this wilful manner, chuckles the money in the till, why have I been brought so low, wheedles the thoroughfare, to which the only answer was—The square gave him no answer. The little town, that had seemed empty, was filling up as evening wore on. Occasionally a moustachioed officer swaggered past, with a heavy gait, slapping his swagger stick on his leggings. People were returning from the cemeteries, though perhaps the procession would not pass for some time. A ragged platoon of soldiers were marching across the square. Bugles blared. The police too—those who were not on strike, or had been pretending to be on duty at the graves, or the deputies, it was not easy to get the distinction between the police and the military clear in one’s mind either—had arrived in force. Con German friends, doubtless. The corporal was still writing at his table; it oddly reassured him. Two or three drinkers pushed their way past him into the Farolito, tasselled sombreros on the backs of their heads, holsters slapping their thighs. Two beggars had arrived and were taking up their posts outside the bar, under the tempestuous sky. One, legless, was dragging himself through the dust like a poor seal. But the other beggar, who boasted one leg, stood up stiffly, proudly, against the cantina wall as if waiting to be shot. Then this beggar with one leg leaned forward: he dropped a coin into the legless man’s outstretched hand. There were tears in the first beggar’s eyes. The Consul now observed that on his extreme right some unusual animals resembling geese, but large as camels, and skinless men, without heads, upon stilts, whose animated entrails jerked along the ground, were issuing out of the forest path the way he had come. He shut his eyes from this and when he opened them someone who looked like a policeman was leading a horse up the path, that was all. He laughed, despite the policeman, then stopped. For he saw that the face of the reclining beggar was slowly changing to Señora Gregorio’s, and now in turn to his mother’s face, upon which appeared an expression of infinite pity and supplication.

Closing his eyes again, standing there, glass in hand, he thought for a minute with a freezing detached almost amused calm of the dreadful night inevitably awaiting him whether he drank much more or not, his room shaking with daemonic orchestras, the snatches of fearful tumultuous sleep, interrupted by voices which were really dogs barking, or by his own name being continually repeated by imaginary parties arriving, the vicious shouting, the strumming, the slamming, the pounding, the battling with insolent archfiends, the avalanche breaking down the door, the proddings from under the bed, and always, outside, the cries, the wailing, the terrible music, the dark’s spinets: he returned to the bar.

Diosdado, the Elephant, had just entered from the back. The Consul watched him discard his black coat, hang it in the closet, then feel in the breast pocket of his spotless white shirt for a pipe protruding from it. He took this out and began to fill it from a package of Country Club el Bueno Tono tobacco. The Consul remembered now about his pipe: here it was, no doubt about that.

“Sí, sí, mistair,” he replied, listening with bent head to the Consul’s query. “Claro. No—my ah peeper no Inglese. Monterey peeper. You were—ah—borracho one day then. No señor?”

“¿Cómo no?” said the Consul.

“Twice a day.” “You was dronk three times a day,” Diosdado said, and his look, the insult, the implied extent of his downfall, penetrated the Consul. “Then you’ll be going back to America now,” he added, rummaging behind the bar.

“I—no—por qué?”

Diosdado suddenly slapped a fat package of envelopes fastened with elastic on the bar counter. “—es suyo?” he asked directly.

Where are the letters Geoffrey Firmin the letters the letters she wrote till her heart broke? Here were the letters, here and nowhere else: these were the letters and this the Consul knew immediately without examining the envelopes. When he spoke he could not recognize his own voice:

“Sí, señor, muchas gracias,” he said.

“De nada, señor.” The Godgiven turned away.

La rame inutile fatigua vainement une mer immobile . . . The Consul could not move for a full minute. He could not even make a move toward a drink. Then he began to trace sideways in spilled liquor a little map on the bar. Diosdado came back and watched with interest. “España,” the Consul said, then his Spanish failing him, “You are Spanish, señor?”

“Sí, sí, señor, sí,” said Diosdado, watching, but in a new tone. “Español. España.”

“These letters you gave me—see?—are from my wife, my esposa. Claro? This is where we met. In Spain. You recognize it, your old home, you know Andalusia? That, up there, that’s the Guadalquivir. Beyond there, the Sierra Morena. Down there’s Almería. Those,” he traced with his finger, “lying between, are the Sierra Nevada mountains. And there’s Granada. That is the place. The very place we met.” The Consul smiled.

“Granada,” said Diosdado, sharply, in a different, harder pronunciation to the Consul’s. He gave him a searching, an important, suspicious look, then left him again. Now he was speaking to a group at the other end of the bar. Faces were turned in the Consul’s direction.

The Consul carried another drink with Yvonne’s letters into an inner room, one of the boxes in the Chinese puzzle. He hadn’t remembered before they were framed in dull glass, like cashiers’ offices in a bank. In this room he was not really surprised to find the old Tarascan woman of the Bella Vista this morning. Her tequila, surrounded by dominoes, was set before her on the round table. Her chicken pecked among them. The Consul wondered if they were her own; or was it just necessary for her to have dominoes wherever she happened to be? Her stick with the claw handle hung, as though alive, on the edge of the table. The Consul moved to her, drank half his mescal, took off his glasses, then slipped the elastic from the package.

—“Do you remember to-morrow?” he read. No, he thought; the words sank like stones in his mind.—It was a fact that he was losing touch with his situation . . . He was dissociated from himself, and at the same time he saw this plainly, the shock of receiving the letters having in a sense waked him, if only, so to say, from one somnambulism into another; he was drunk, he was sober, he had a hangover; all at once; it was after six in the evening, yet whether it was being in the Farolito, or the presence of the old woman in this glass-framed room where an electric light was burning, he seemed back in the early morning again: it was almost as if he were yet another kind of drunkard, in different circumstances, in another country, to whom something quite different was happening: he was like a man who gets up half stupefied with liquor at dawn, chattering “Jesus this is the kind of fellow I am. Ugh! Ugh!” to see his wife off by an early bus, though it is too late, and there is the note on the breakfast table: “Forgive me for being hysterical yesterday, such an outburst was certainly not excused on any grounds of your having hurt me, don’t forget to bring in the milk,” beneath which he finds written, almost as an afterthought: “Darling, we can’t go on like this, it’s too awful, I’m leaving—” and who, instead of perceiving the whole significance of this, remembers incongruously he told the barman at too great length last night how somebody’s house burned down—and why has he told him where he lives, now the police will be able to find out—and why is the barman’s name Sherlock? an unforgettable name!—and having a glass of port and water and three aspirin, which make him sick, reflects that he has five hours before the pubs open when he must return to that same bar and apologise . . . But where did I put my cigarette? and why is my glass of port under the bathtub? and was that an explosion I heard, somewhere in the house?

And encountering his accusing eyes in another mirror within the little room, the Consul had the queer passing feeling he’d risen in bed to do this, that he had sprung up and must gibber “Coriolanus is dead!” or “muddle muddle muddle” or “I think it was, Oh! Oh!” or something really senseless like “buckets, buckets, millions of buckets in the soup!” and that he would now (though he was sitting quite calmly in the Farolito) relapse once more upon the pillows to watch, shaking in impotent terror at himself, the beards and eyes form in the curtains, or fill the space between the wardrobe and the ceiling, and hear, from the street, the soft padding of the eternal ghostly policeman outside—

“Do you remember to-morrow? It is our wedding anniversary . . . I have not had one word from you since I left. God, it is this silence that frightens me.”

The Consul drank some more mescal.

“It is this silence that frightens me—this silence—”

The Consul read this sentence over and over again, the same sentence, the same letter, all of the letters vain as those arriving on shipboard in port for one lost at sea, because he found some difficulty in focussing, the words kept blurring and dissembling, his own name starting out at him: but the mescal had brought him in touch with his situation again to the extent that he did not now need to comprehend any meaning in the words beyond their abject confirmation of his own lostness, his own fruitless selfish ruin, now perhaps finally self-imposed, his brain, before this cruelly disregarded evidence of what heartbreak he had caused her , at an agonized standstill.

“It is this silence that frightens me. I have pictured all sorts of tragic things befalling you, it is as though you were away at war and I were waiting, waiting for news of you, for the letter, the telegram . . . but no war could have this power to so chill and terrify my heart. I send you all my love and my whole heart and all my thoughts and prayers.”—The Consul was aware, drinking, that the woman with the dominoes was trying to attract his attention, opening her mouth and pointing into it: now she was subtly moving round the table nearer him.—“Surely you must have thought a great deal of us , of what we built together, of how mindlessly we destroyed the structure and the beauty but yet could not destroy the memory of that beauty. It has been this which has haunted me day and night. Turning I see us in a hundred places with a hundred smiles. I come into a street, and you are there. I creep at night to bed and you are waiting for me. What is there in life besides the person whom one adores and the life one can build with that person? For the first time I understand the meaning of suicide . . . God, how pointless and empty the world is! Days filled with cheap and tarnished moments succeed each other, restless and haunted nights follow in bitter routine: the sun shines without brightness, and the moon rises without light. My heart has the taste of ashes, and my throat is tight and weary with weeping. What is a lost soul? It is one that has turned from its true path and is groping in the darkness of remembered ways—”

The old woman was plucking at his sleeve and the Consul—had Yvonne been reading the letters of Heloise and Abelard?—reached out to press an electric bell, the urbane yet violent presence of which in these odd little niches never failed to give him a shock. A moment later A Few Fleas entered with a bottle of tequila in one hand and of mescal Xicotancatl in the other but he took the bottles away after pouring their drinks. The Consul nodded to the old woman, motioned to her tequila, drank most of his mescal, and resumed reading. He could not remember whether he had paid or not.—“Oh Geoffrey, how bitterly I regret it now. Why did we postpone it? Is it too late? I want your children, soon, at once, I want them. I want your life filling and stirring me. I want your happiness beneath my heart and your sorrows in my eyes and your peace in the fingers of my hand—” The Consul paused, what was she saying? He rubbed his eyes, then fumbled for his cigarettes: Alas; the tragic word droned round the room like a bullet that had passed through him. He read on, smoking;—“You are walking on the edge of an abyss where I may not follow. I wake to a darkness in which I must follow myself endlessly, hating the I who so eternally pursues and confronts me. If we could rise from our misery, seek each other once more, and find again the solace of each other’s lips and eyes. Who is to stand between? Who can prevent?”

The Consul stood up—Yvonne had certainly been reading something —bowed to the old woman, and went out into the bar he’d imagined filling up behind him, but which was still fairly deserted. Who indeed was to stand between? He posted himself at the door again, as sometimes before in the deceptive violet dawn: who indeed could prevent? Once more he stared at the square. The same ragged platoon of soldiers still seemed to be crossing it, as in some disrupted movie repeating itself. The corporal still toiled at his copperplate handwriting under the archway, only his lamp was alight. It was getting dark. The police were nowhere to be seen. Though by the barranca the same soldier was still asleep under a tree; or wasn’t it a soldier, but something else? He looked away. Black clouds were boiling up again, there was a distant breaking of thunder. He breathed the oppressive air in which there was a slight hint of coolness. Who indeed, even now, was to stand between? he thought desperately. Who indeed even now could prevent? He wanted Yvonne at this moment, to take her in his arms, wanted more than ever before to be forgiven, and to forgive: but where should he go? Where would he find her now? A whole unlikely family of indeterminate class were strolling past the door: the grandfather in front, correcting his watch, peering at the dim barracks clock that still said six, the mother laughing and drawing her rebozo over her head, mocking the probable storm (up in the mountains two drunken gods standing far apart were still engaged in an endlessly indecisive and wildly swinging game of bumblepuppy with a Burmese gong), the father by himself smiling proudly, contemplatively, clicking his fingers, flicking a speck of dust now from his fine brown shiny boots. Two pretty little children with limpid black eyes were walking between them hand in hand. Suddenly the elder child freed her sister’s hand, and turned a succession of cartwheels on the lush grass plot. All of them were laughing. The Consul hated to look at them . . . They’d gone anyway, thank God. Miserably he wanted Yvonne and did not want her. “Quiere María?” a voice spoke softly behind him.

At first he saw only the shapely legs of the girl who was leading him, now by the constricted power of aching flesh alone, of pathetic trembling yet brutal lust, through the little glass-paned rooms, that grew smaller and smaller, darker and darker, until by the mingitorio, the “Señores,” out of whose evil-smelling gloom broke a sinister chuckle, there was merely a lightless annex no larger than a cupboard in which two men whose faces he couldn’t see either were sitting, drinking or plotting.

Then it struck him that some reckless murderous power was drawing him on, forcing him, while he yet remained passionately aware of the all too possible consequences and somehow as innocently unconscious, to do without precaution or conscience what he would never be able to undo or gainsay, leading him irresistibly out into the garden—lightning-filled at this moment, it reminded him queerly of his own house, and also of El Popo, where earlier he had thought of going, only this was grimmer, the obverse of it—leading him through the open door into the darkening room, one of many giving on the patio.

So this was it, the final stupid unprophylactic rejection. He could prevent it even now. He would not prevent it. Yet perhaps his familiars, or one of his voices, might have some good advice: he looked about him, listening; erectis whoribus . No voices came. Suddenly he laughed: it had been clever of him to trick his voices. They didn’t know he was here. The room itself, in which gleamed a single blue electric bulb, was not sordid: at first sight it was a student’s room. In fact it closely resembled his old room at college, only this was more spacious. There were the same great doors and a bookcase in a familiar place, with a book open on top of the shelves. In one corner, incongruously, stood a gigantic sabre. Kashmir! He imagined he’d seen the word, then it had gone. Probably he had seen it, for the book, of all things, was a Spanish history of British India. The bed was disorderly and covered with footmarks, even what appeared bloodstains, though this bed too seemed akin to a student’s cot. He noticed by it an almost empty bottle of mescal. But the floor was red flagstone and somehow its cold strong logic cancelled the horror: he finished the bottle. The girl who had been shutting the double doors while addressing him in some strange language, possibly Zapotecan, came toward him and he saw she was young and pretty. Lightning silhouetted against the window a face, for a moment curiously like Yvonne’s. “Quiere María,” she volunteered again, and flinging her arms round his neck, drew him down to the bed. Her body was Yvonne’s too, her legs, her breasts, her pounding passionate heart, electricity crackled under his fingers running over her, though the sentimental illusion was going, it was sinking into a sea, as though it had not been there, it had become the sea, a desolate horizon with one huge black sailing ship, hull down, sweeping into the sunset; or her body was nothing, an abstraction merely, a calamity, a fiendish apparatus for calamitous sickening sensation; it was disaster, it was the horror of waking up in the morning in Oaxaca, his body fully clothed, at half past three every morning after Yvonne had gone; Oaxaca, and the nightly escape from the sleeping Hotel Francia, where Yvonne and he had once been happy, from the cheap room giving on the balcony high up, to El Infierno, that other Farolito, of trying to find the bottle in the dark, and failing, the vulture sitting in the washbasin; his steps, noiseless, dead silence outside his hotel room, too soon for the terrible sounds of squealing and slaughter in the kitchen below—of going down the carpeted stairs to the huge dark well of the deserted dining room once the patio, sinking into the soft disaster of the carpet, his feet sinking into heartbreak when he reached the stairs, still not sure he wasn’t on the landing—and the stab of panic and self-disgust when he thought of the cold shower bath back on the left, used only once before, but that was enough—and the silent final trembling approach, respectable, his steps sinking into calamity (and it was this calamity he now, with María, penetrated, the only thing alive in him now this burning boiling crucified evil organ—God is it possible to suffer more than this, out of this suffering something must be born, and what would be born was his own death) for ah, how alike are the groans of love to those of the dying, how alike, those of love, to those of the dying—and his steps sinking, into his tremor, the sickening cold tremor, and into the dark well of the dining room, with round the corner one dim light hovering above the desk, and the clock—too early—and the letters unwritten, powerless to write, and the calendar saying eternally, powerlessly, their wedding anniversary, and the manager’s nephew asleep on the couch, waiting up to meet the early train from Mexico City; the darkness that murmured and was palpable, the cold aching loneliness in the high sounding dining room, stiff with the dead white grey folded napkins, the weight of suffering and conscience greater (it seemed) than that borne by any man who had survived—the thirst that was not thirst, but itself heartbreak, and lust, was death, death, and death again and death the waiting in the cold hotel dining room, half whispering to himself, waiting, since El Infierno, that other Farolito, did not open till four in the morning and one could scarcely wait outside—(and this calamity he was now penetrating, it was calamity, the calamity of his own life, the very essence of it he now penetrated, was penetrating, penetrated)—waiting for the Infierno whose one lamp of hope would soon be glowing beyond the dark open sewers, and on the table, in the hotel dining room, difficult to distinguish, a carafe of water,—trembling, trembling, carrying the carafe of water to his lips, but not far enough, it was too heavy, like his burden of sorrow—“ you cannot drink of it ”—he could only moisten his lips, and then—it must have been Jesus who sent me this, it was only He who was following me after all—the bottle of red French wine from Salina Cruz still standing there on the table set for breakfast, marked with someone else’s room number, uncorked with difficulty and (watching to see the nephew wasn’t watching) holding it with both hands, and letting the blessed ichor trickle down his throat, just a little, for after all one was an Englishman, and still sporting, and then subsiding on the couch too—his heart a cold ache warm to one side—into a cold shivering shell of palpitating loneliness—yet feeling the wine slightly more, as if one’s chest were being filled with boiling ice now, or there were a bar of red hot iron across one’s chest, but cold in its effect, for the conscience that rages underneath anew and is bursting one’s heart burns so fiercely with the fires of hell a bar of red hot iron is as a mere chill to it—and the clock ticking forward, with his heart beating now like a snow-muffled drum, ticking, shaking, time shaking and ticking toward El Infierno, then—the escape!—drawing the blanket he had secretly brought down from the hotel room over his head, creeping out past the manager’s nephew—the escape!—past the hotel desk, not daring to look for mail—“it is this silence that frightens me”—(can it be there? Is this me? Alas, self-pitying miserable wretch, you old rascal) past—the escape!—the Indian night watchman sleeping on the floor in the doorway, and like an Indian himself now, clutching the few pesos he had left, out into the cold walled cobbled city, past—the escape through the secret passage!—the open sewers in the mean streets, the few lone dim streetlamps, into the night, into the miracle that the coffins of houses, the landmarks were still there, the escape down the poor broken sidewalks, groaning, groaning—and how alike are the groans of love, to those of the dying, how alike, those of love, to those of the dying!—and the houses so still, so cold, before dawn, till he saw, rounding the corner, safe, the one lamp of El Infierno glowing, that was so like the Farolito, then, surprised once more he could ever have reached it, standing inside the place with his back to the wall, and his blanket still over his head, talking to the beggars, the early workers, the dirty prostitutes, the pimps, the debris and detritus of the streets and the bottom of the earth, but who were yet so much higher than he, drinking just as he had drunk here in the Farolito, and telling lies, lying—the escape, still the escape!—until the lilac-shaded dawn that should have brought death, and he should have died now too; what have I done?

The Consul’s eyes focussed a calendar behind the bed. He had reached his crisis at last, a crisis without possession, almost without pleasure finally, and what he saw might have been, no, he was sure it was, a picture of Canada. Under a brilliant full moon a stag stood by a river down which a man and a woman were paddling a birch bark canoe. This calendar was set to the future, for next month, December: where would he be then? In the dim blue light he even made out the names of the Saints for each December day, printed by the numerals: Santa Natalia, Santa Bibiana, S. Francisco Xavier, Santa Sabas, S. Nicolas de Beri, S. Ambrosio: thunder blew the door open, the face of M. Laruelle faded in the door.

In the mingitorio a stench like mercaptan clapped yellow hands on his face and now, from the urinal walls, uninvited, he heard his voices again, hissing and shrieking and yammering at him: “Now you’ve done it, now you’ve really done it, Geoffrey Firmin! Even we can help you no longer . . . Just the same you might as well make the most of it now, the night’s still young . . .”

“You like María, you like?” A man’s voice—that of the chuckler, he recognised—came from the gloom and the Consul, his knees trembling, gazed round him: all he saw at first were slashed advertisements on the slimy feebly lit walls: Clínica Dr. Vigil , Enfermedades Secretas de Ambos Sexos , Vías Urinarias , Trastornos Sexuales , Debilidad Sexual , Derrames Nocturnos , Emisiones Prematuras , Espermatorrea , Impotencia . 666. His versatile companion of this morning and last night might have been informing him ironically all was not yet lost—unfortunately by now he would be well on his way to Guanajuato. He distinguished an incredibly filthy man sitting hunched in the corner on a lavatory seat, so short his trousered feet didn’t reach the littered, befouled floor. “You like María?” this man croaked again. “I send. Me amigo.” He pharted. “Me fliend Englisman all tine, all tine.” “Qué hora?” asked the Consul, shivering, noticing, in the runnel, a dead scorpion; a sparkle of phosphorescence and it had gone, or had never been there. “What’s the time?” “Sick,” answered the man. “No, it er ah half past sick by the cock.” “You mean half past six by the clock.” “Sí señor. Half past sick by the cock.”

666.—The pricked peetroot, pickled betroot; the Consul, arranging his dress, laughed grimly at the pimp’s reply—or was he some sort of stool pigeon, in the strictest sense of that term? And who was it had said earlier, half past tree by the cock? How had the man known he was English, he wondered, taking his laughter back through the glass-paned rooms, out through the filling bar to the door again—perhaps he worked for the Unión Militar, squatting at stool all day in the Seguridad jakes eavesdropping on the prisoners’ conversation, while pimping was just a sideline. He might have found out from him about María, whether she was—but he didn’t want to know. He’d been right about the time though. The clock on the Comisaría de Policía, annular, imperfectly luminous, said, as if it had just moved forward with a jerk, a little after six-thirty, and the Consul corrected his watch, which was slow. It was now quite dark. Yet the same ragged platoon still seemed to be marching across the square. The corporal was no longer writing, however. Outside the prison stood a single motionless sentinel. The archway behind him was suddenly swept by wild light. Beyond, by the cells, the shadow of a policeman’s lantern was swinging against the wall. The evening was filled by odd noises, like those of sleep. The roll of a drum somewhere was a revolution, a cry down the street someone being murdered, brakes grinding far away a soul in pain. The plucked chords of a guitar hung over his head. A bell clanged frantically in the distance. Lightning twitched. Half past sick by the cock . . . In British Columbia, in Canada, on cold Pineaus Lake, where his island had long since become a wilderness of laurel and Indian Pipe, of wild strawberry and Oregon holly, he remembered the strange Indian belief prevailing that a cock would crow over a drowned body. How dread the validation that silver February evening long ago when, as acting Lithuanian Consul to Vernon, he had accompanied the search party in the boat, and the bored rooster had roused himself to crow shrilly seven times! The dynamite charges had apparently disturbed nothing, they were sombrely rowing for shore through the cloudy twilight, when suddenly, protruding from the water, they had seen what looked at first like a glove—the hand of the drowned Lithuanian. British Columbia, the genteel Siberia, that was neither genteel nor a Siberia, but an undiscovered, perhaps an undiscoverable Paradise, that might have been a solution, to return there, to build, if not on his island, somewhere there, a new life with Yvonne. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Or why hadn’t she? Or had that been what she was getting at this afternoon, and which had half communicated itself to his mind? My little grey home in the west. Now it seemed to him he had often thought of it before, in this precise spot where he was standing. But now too at least this much was clear. He couldn’t go back to Yvonne if he wanted to. The hope of any new life together, even were it miraculously offered again, could scarcely survive in the arid air of an estranged postponement to which it must now, on top of everything else, be submitted for brutal hygienic reasons alone. True, those reasons were without quite secure basis as yet, but for another purpose that eluded him they had to remain unassailable. All solutions now came up against their great Chinese wall, forgiveness among them. He laughed once more, feeling a strange release, almost a sense of attainment. His mind was clear. Physically he seemed better too. It was as if, out of an ultimate contamination he had derived strength. He felt free to devour what remained of his life in peace. At the same time a certain gruesome gaiety was creeping into this mood, and, in an extraordinary way, a certain light-headed mischievousness. He was aware of a desire at once for complete glutted oblivion and for an innocent youthful fling. “Alas,” a voice seemed to be saying also in his ear, “my poor little child, you do not feel any of these things really, only lost, only homeless.”

He started. In front of him tied to a small tree he hadn’t noticed, though it was right opposite the cantina on the other side of the path, stood a horse cropping the lush grass. Something familiar about the beast made him walk over. Yes—exactly as he thought. He could mistake by now neither the number seven branded on the rump nor the leather saddle charactered in that fashion. It was the Indian’s horse, the horse of the man he’d first seen to-day riding it singing into the sunlit world, then abandoned, left dying by the roadside. He patted the animal which twitched its ears and went on cropping imperturbably—perhaps not so imperturbably; at a rumble of thunder the horse, whose saddlebags he noticed had been mysteriously restored, whinneyed uneasily, shaking all over. When just as mysteriously those saddlebags no longer chinked. Unbidden, an explanation of this afternoon’s events came to the Consul. Hadn’t it turned out to be a policeman into which all those abominations he’d observed a little while since had melted, a policeman leading a horse in this direction? Why should not that horse be this horse? It had been those vigilante hombres who’d turned up on the road this afternoon, and here, in Parián, as he’d told Hugh, was their headquarters. How Hugh would relish this, could he be here! The police—ah, the fearful police—or rather not the real police, he corrected himself, but those Unión Militar fellows were at the bottom, in an insanely complicated manner but still at the bottom, of the whole business. He felt suddenly sure of this. As if out of some correspondence between the subnormal world itself and the abnormally suspicious delirious one within him the truth had sprung—sprung like a shadow however, which—

“Qué hacéis aquí?”

“Nada,” he said, and smiled at the man resembling a Mexican sergeant of police who had snatched the bridle from his hands. “Nothing. Veo que la tierra anda; estoy esperando que pase mi casa por aquí para meterme en ella,” he brilliantly managed. The brasswork on the amazed policeman’s uniform buckles caught the light from the doorway of the Farolito, then, as he turned, the leather on his sam-browne caught it, so that it was glossy as a plantain leaf, and lastly his boots, which shone like dull silver. The Consul laughed: just to glance at him was to feel that mankind was on the point of being saved immediately. He repeated the good Mexican joke, not quite right, in English, patting the policeman, whose jaw had dropped in bewilderment and who was eyeing him blankly, on the arm. “I learn that the world goes round so I am waiting here for my house to pass by.” He held out his hand. “Amigo,” he said.

The policeman grunted, brushing the Consul’s hand off. Then, giving him quick suspicious glances over his shoulder, he fastened the horse more securely to the tree. In those swift glances there was something serious indeed, the Consul was aware, something that bade him escape at his peril. Slightly hurt, he now remembered, too, the look Diosdado had given him. But the Consul felt neither serious nor like escaping. Nor did his feelings change as he found himself impelled by the policeman from behind toward the cantina, beyond which, by lightning, the east briefly appeared, in onrush, a towering thunderhead. Preceding him through the door, it actually struck the Consul that the sergeant was trying to be polite. He stood aside quite nimbly, bidding, with a gesture, the other go first. “Mi amigo,” he repeated. The policeman shoved him in and they made for one end of the bar which was empty.

“Americano, eh?” this policeman said now, firmly. “Wait, aquí. Comprende, señor?” He went behind the bar to speak with Diosdado.

The Consul unsuccessfully tried to intrude, on his conduct’s behalf, a cordial note of explanation for the Elephant, who appeared grim as if he’d just murdered another of his wives to cure her neurasthenia. Meantime, A Few Fleas, temporarily otiose, and with surprising charity, slid him a mescal along the counter. People were looking at him again. Then the policeman confronted him from the other side of the bar. “They say there ees trouble about you no pay,” he said, “you no pay for—ah—Mehican whisky. You no pay for Mehican girl. You no have money, hey?”

“Zicker,” said the Consul, whose Spanish, in spite of a temporary insurgence, he knew virtually gone. “Sí. Yes. Mucho dinero,” he added, placing a peso on the counter for A Few Fleas. He saw that the policeman was a heavy-necked handsome man with a black gritty moustache, flashing teeth, and a rather consciously swashbuckling manner. He was joined at this moment by a tall slim man in well-cut American tweeds with a hard sombre face and long beautiful hands. Glancing periodically at the Consul he spoke in undertones with Diosdado and the policeman. This man, who looked pure-bred Castilian, seemed familiar and the Consul wondered where he had seen him before. The policeman, disengaging himself from him, leaned over with his elbows on the bar, talking to the Consul. “You no have money, hey, and now you steal my horse.” He winked at the Godgiven. “What for you ah run away with Mehican caballo? for to no pay Mehican money—hey?”

The Consul stared at him. “No. Decidedly not. Of course I wasn’t going to steal your horse. I was merely looking at it, admiring it.”

“What for you want to look at Mehican caballo? For why?” The policeman laughed suddenly, with real merriment, slapping his thighs—obviously he was a good fellow and the Consul, feeling the ice was broken, laughed too. But the policeman obviously enough was also quite drunk, so it was difficult to gauge the quality of this laughter. While the faces of both Diosdado and the man in tweeds remained black and stern. “You make a the map of the Spain,” the policeman persisted, controlling his laughter finally. “You know ah Spain?”

“Comment non,” the Consul said. So Diosdado had told him about the map, yet surely that was an innocently sad enough thing to have done. “Oui. Es muy asombrosa.” No, this wasn’t Pernambuco: definitely he ought not to speak Portuguese. “Jawohl. Correcto, señor,” he finished. “Yes, I know Spain.”

“You make a the map of the Spain? You Bolsheviki prick? You member of the Brigade Internationale and stir up trouble?”

“No,” answered the Consul firmly, decently, but now somewhat agitated. “Absolutamente no.”

“Ab-so-lut-a-mente hey?” The policeman, with another wink at Diosdado, imitated the Consul’s manner. He came round to the correct side of the bar again, bringing the sombre man with him who didn’t say a word or drink but merely stood there, looking stern, as did the Elephant, opposite them now, angrily drying glasses. “All,” he drawled, and “right!” the policeman added with tremendous emphasis, slapping the Consul on the back. “All right. Come on my friend—” he invited him. “Drink. Drink a all you ah want to have. We have been looking for you,” he went on in a loud, half-bantering, drunken tone. “You have murdered a man and escaped through seven states. We want to found out about you. We have founded out—it is right?—you desert your ship at Vera Cruz? You say you have money. How much money a you have got?”

The Consul took out a crumpled note and replaced it in his pocket. “Fifty pesos, hey. Perhaps that not enough money. What are you for? Inglés? Español? Americano? Aleman? Russish? You come a from the you-are-essy-essy? What for are you do?”

“I no spikker the English—hey, what’s your names?” someone else asked him loudly at his elbow, and the Consul turned to see another policeman dressed much like the first, only shorter, heavy-jowled, with little cruel eyes in an ashen pulpy clean-shaven face. Though he carried sidearms both his trigger finger and his right thumb were missing. As he spoke he made an obscene rolling movement of his hips and winked at the first policeman and at Diosdado though avoiding the eyes of the man in tweeds. “Progresión al culo,” he added, for no reason the Consul knew of, still rolling his hips.

“He is the Chief of Municipality,” the first policeman explained heartily to the Consul. “This man want to know ah your name. Cómo se llama?”

“Yes, what’s your names,” shouted the second policeman, who had taken a drink from the bar, but not looking at the Consul and still rolling his hips.

“Trotsky,” gibed someone from the far end of the counter, and the Consul, beard-conscious, flushed.

“Blackstone,” he answered gravely, and indeed, he asked himself, accepting another mescal, had he not and with a vengeance come to live among the Indians? The only trouble was one was very much afraid these particular Indians might turn out to be people with ideas too. “William Blackstone.”

“Why ah are you?” shouted the fat policeman, whose own name was something like Zuzugoitea, “What ah are you for?” And he repeated the catechism of the first policeman, whom he seemed to imitate in everything. “Inglés? Aleman?”

The Consul shook his head. “No. Just William Blackstone.”

“You are Juden?” the first policeman demanded.

“No. Just Blackstone,” the Consul repeated, shaking his head. “William Blackstone. Jews are seldom very borracho.”

“You are—ah—a borracho, hey,” the first policeman said, and everyone laughed—several others, his henchmen evidently, had joined them though the Consul couldn’t distinguish them clearly—save the inflexible indifferent man in tweeds. “He is the Chief of Gardens,” the first policeman explained, continuing; “That man is Jefe de Jardineros.” And there was a certain awe in his tone. “I am chief too, I am Chief of Rostrums,” he added, but almost reflectively, as if he meant “I am only Chief of Rostrums.”

“And I—” began the Consul.

“Am perfecta men te borracho,” finished the first policeman, and everyone roared again save the Jefe de Jardineros.

“Y yo—” repeated the Consul, but what was he saying? And who were these people, really? Chief of what Rostrums, Chief of what Municipality, above all, Chief of what Gardens? Surely this silent man in tweeds, sinister too, though apparently the only one unarmed in the group, wasn’t the one responsible for all those little public gardens. Albeit the Consul was prompted by a shadowy prescience he already had concerning the claimants to these titular pretensions. They were associated in his mind with the Inspector General of the State and also as he had told Hugh with the Unión Militar. Doubtless he’d seen them here before in one of the rooms or at the bar, but certainly never at such close quarters as this. However so many questions he was unable to answer were being showered upon him by so many different people this significance was almost forgotten. He gathered, though, that the respected Chief of Gardens, to whom at this moment he sent a mute appeal for help, might be even “higher” than the Inspector General himself. The appeal was answered by a blacker look than ever: at the same time the Consul knew where he’d seen him before; the Chief of Gardens might have been the image of himself when, lean, bronzed, serious, beardless, and at the crossroads of his career, he had assumed the Vice Consulship in Granada. Innumerable tequilas and mescals were being brought and the Consul drank everything in sight without regard for ownership. “It’s not enough to say they were at the El Amor de los Amores together,” he heard himself repeating—it must have been in answer to some insistent demand for the story of his afternoon, though why it should be made at all he didn’t know—“What matters is how the thing happened. Was the peon—perhaps he wasn’t quite a peon—drunk? Or did he fall from his horse? Perhaps the thief just recognized a boon companion who owed him a drink or two—”

Thunder growled outside the Farolito. He sat down. It was an order. Everything was growing very chaotic. The bar was now nearly full. Some of the drinkers had come from the graveyards, Indians in loose-fitting clothes. There were dilapidated soldiers with among them here and there a more smartly dressed officer. He distinguished in the glass rooms bugles and green lariats moving. Several dancers had entered dressed in long black cloaks streaked with luminous paint to represent skeletons. The Chief of Municipality was standing behind him now. The Chief of Rostrums was standing too, talking on his right with the Jefe de Jardineros, whose name, the Consul had discovered, was Fructuoso Sanabria. “Hullo, qué tal?” asked the Consul. Someone was sitting next him with his back half turned who also seemed familiar. He looked like a poet, some friend of his college days. Fair hair fell over his fine forehead. The Consul offered him a drink which this young man not only refused, in Spanish, but rose to refuse, making a gesture with his hand of pushing the Consul away, then moving, with angry half-averted face, to the far end of the bar. The Consul was hurt. Again he sent a mute appeal for help to the Chief of Gardens: he was answered by an implacable, an almost final look. For the first time the Consul scented the tangibility of his danger. He knew Sanabria and the first policemen were discussing him with the utmost hostility, deciding what to do with him. Then he saw they were trying to catch the Chief of Municipality’s attention. They were breasting their way, just the two of them, behind the bar again to a telephone he hadn’t noticed, and the curious thing about this telephone was that it seemed to be working properly. The Chief of Rostrums did the talking: Sanabria stood by grimly, apparently giving instructions. They were taking their time, and realising the call would be about him, whatever its nature, the Consul, with a slow burning pain of apprehension, felt again how lonely he was, that all around him in spite of the crowd, the uproar, slightly muted at a gesture from Sanabria, stretched a solitude like the wilderness of grey heaving Atlantic conjured to his eyes a little while since with María, only this time no sail was in sight. The mood of mischievousness and release had vanished completely. He knew he’d half hoped all along Yvonne would come to rescue him, knew, now, it was too late, she would not come. Ah, if Yvonne, if only as a daughter, who would understand and comfort him, could only be at his side now! Even if but to lead him by the hand, drunkenly homeward through the stone fields, the forests—not interfering of course with his occasional pulls at the bottle, and ah, those burning draughts in loneliness, he would miss them, wherever he was going, they were perhaps the happiest things his life had known!—as he had seen the Indian children lead their fathers home on Sundays. Instantly, consciously, he forgot Yvonne again. It ran in his head he could perhaps leave the Farolito at this moment by himself, unnoticed and without difficulty, for the Chief of Municipality was still deep in conversation, while the backs of the two other policemen at the telephone were turned, yet he made no move. Instead, leaning his elbows on the bar, he buried his face in his hands.

He saw again in his mind’s eye that extraordinary picture on Laruelle’s wall, Los Borrachones, only now it took on a somewhat different aspect. Mightn’t it have another meaning, that picture, unintentional as its humour, beyond the symbolically obvious? He saw those people like spirits appearing to grow more free, more separate, their distinctive noble faces more distinctive, more noble, the higher they ascended into the light; those florid people resembling huddled fiends, becoming more like each other, more joined together, more as one fiend, the further down they hurled into the darkness. Perhaps all this wasn’t so ludicrous. When he had striven upwards, as at the beginning with Yvonne, had not the “features” of life seemed to grow more clear, more animated, friends and enemies more identifiable, special problems, scenes, and with them the sense of his own reality, more separate from himself? And had it not turned out that the further down he sank, the more those features had tended to dissemble, to cloy and clutter, to become finally little better than ghastly caricatures of his dissimulating inner and outer self, or of his struggle, if struggle there were still? Yes, but had he desired it, willed it, the very material world, illusory though that was, might have been a confederate, pointing the wise way. Here would have been no devolving through failing unreal voices and forms of dissolution that became more and more like one voice to a death more dead than death itself, but an infinite widening, an infinite evolving and extension of boundaries, in which the spirit was an entity, perfect and whole: ah, who knows why man, however beset his chance by lies, has been offered love? Yet it had to be faced, down, down he had gone, down till—it was not the bottom even now, he realized. It was not the end quite yet. It was as if his fall had been broken by a narrow ledge, a ledge from which he could neither climb up nor down, on which he lay bloody and half stunned, while far below him the abyss yawned, waiting. And on it as he lay he was surrounded in delirium by these phantoms of himself, the policemen, Fructuoso Sanabria, that other man who looked like a poet, the luminous skeletons, even the rabbit in the corner and the ash and sputum on the filthy floor—did not each correspond, in a way he couldn’t understand yet obscurely recognized, to some faction of his being? And he saw dimly too how Yvonne’s arrival, the snake in the garden, his quarrel with Laruelle and later with Hugh and Yvonne, the infernal machine, the encounter with Señora Gregorio, the finding of the letters, and much beside, how all the events of the day indeed had been as indifferent tufts of grass he had half-heartedly clutched at or stones loosed on his downward flight, which were still showering on him from above. The Consul produced his blue package of cigarettes with the wings on them: Alas! He raised his head again; no, he was where he was, there was nowhere to fly to. And it was as if a black dog had settled on his back, pressing him to his seat.

The Chief of Gardens and the Chief of Rostrums were still waiting by the telephone, perhaps for the right number. Probably they would be calling the Inspector General: but what if they’d forgotten him, the Consul—what if they weren’t phoning about him at all? He remembered his dark glasses he had removed to read Yvonne’s letters and, some fatuous notion of disguise crossing his mind, put them on. Behind him the Chief of Municipality was still engrossed; now once more, he could go. With the aid of his dark glasses, what could be simpler? He could go—only he needed another drink; one for the road. Moreover he realised he was wedged in by a solid mass of people and that, to make matters worse, a man sitting at the bar next him wearing a dirty sombrero on the back of his head and a cartridge belt hanging low down his trousers had clutched him by the arm affectionately; it was the pimp, the stool pigeon, of the mingitorio. Hunched in almost precisely the same posture as before, he had apparently been talking to him for the last five minutes.

“My friend for my,” he was babbling. “All dees men nothing for you, or for me. All dees men—nothing for you, or for me! All dees men, son of a bitch . . . Sure, you Englisman!” He clutched the Consul’s arm more firmly. “All my! Mexican men: all tine Englishman, my friend, Mexican! I don’t care son of a bitch American: no good for you, or for me, my Mexican all tine, all tine, all tine—eh?—”

The Consul withdrew his arm but was immediately clutched on his left by a man of uncertain nationality, crosseyed with drink, who resembled a sailor. “You limey,” he stated flatly, swivelled round his stool. “I’m from the county of Pope,” yelled this unknown man, very slowly, putting his arm now through the Consul’s. “What do you think? Mozart was the man what writ the Bible. You’re here to the off down there. Man here, on the earth, shall be equal. And let there be tranquillity. Tranquillity means peace. Peace on earth, of all men—”

The Consul freed himself: the pimp clutched him again. Almost for succour, he gazed about him. The Chief of Municipality was still engaged. In the bar the Chief of Rostrums was telephoning once more; Sanabria stood at his elbow directing. Squeezed against the pimp’s chair another man the Consul took for American, who was continually squinting over his shoulder as though expecting somebody, was saying to no one in especial: “Winchester! Hell, that’s something else. Don’t tell me. Righto! The Black Swan is in Winchester. They captured me on the German side of the camp and at the same side of the place where they captured me is a girls’ school. A girl teacher. She gave it to me. And you can take it. And you can have it.”

“Ah,” said the pimp, still clutching the Consul. He was speaking across him, half to the sailor. “My friend—was a matter for you? My looking for you all tine. My England man, all tine, all tine, sure, sure. Excu. This man telling me my friend for you all tine. You like he?—This man very much money. This man—right or wrong, sure; Mexican is my friend or Inglés. American goddamn son of a bitch for you or for me, or for any tine .”

The Consul was drinking with these macabre people inextricably. When he gazed round on this occasion he met, cognizant of him, the Chief of Municipality’s hard little cruel eyes. He gave up trying to understand what the illiterate sailor, who seemed an even obscurer fellow than the stool pigeon, was talking about. He consulted his watch: still only a quarter to seven. Time was circumfluent again too, mescal-drugged. Feeling the eyes of Señor Zuzugoitea still boring into his neck he produced once more, importantly, defensively, Yvonne’s letters. With his dark glasses on they appeared for some reason clearer.

“And the off of man here what there will be let the lord be with us all the time,” bellowed the sailor, “there’s my religion spoke in those few words. Mozart was the man that writ the Bible. Mozart wrote the old testimony. Stay by that and you’ll be all right. Mozart was a lawyer.”

—“Without you I am cast out, severed. I am an outcast from myself, a shadow”—

“Weber’s my name. They captured me in Flanders. You would doubt me more or less. But if they captured me now!—When Alabama came through, we came through with heels flying. We ask nobody no questions because down there we don’t run. Christ, if you want ’em go ahead and take ’em. But if you want Alabama, that bunch.” The Consul looked up; the man, Weber, was singing. “ I’m just a country b-hoy. I don’t know a damn thing.” He saluted his reflection in the mirror. “Soldat de la Légion Etrangère.”

—“There I met some people I must tell you about, for perhaps the thought of these people held before us like a prayer for absolution may strengthen us once more to nourish the flame which can never go out, but burns now so fearfully low.”

—“Yes sir. Mozart was a lawyer. And don’t dispute me no more. Here to the off of God. I would dispute my incomprehensible stuff!”

“—de la Légion Etrangère. Vous n’avez pas de nation. La France est votre mère. Thirty miles out of Tangier, banging in pretty well. Captain Dupont’s orderly . . . He was a son of a bitch from Texas. Never will tell his name. It was Fort Adamant.”

“— Mar Cantábrico! —”

—“You are one born to walk in the light. Plunging your head out of the white sky you flounder in an alien element. You think you are lost, but it is not so, for the spirits of light will help you and bear you up in spite of yourself and beyond all opposition you may offer. Do I sound mad? I sometimes think I am. Seize the immense potential strength you fight, which is within your body and ever so much more strongly within your soul, restore to me the sanity that left when you forgot me, when you sent me away, when you turned your footsteps towards a different path, a stranger route which you have trod apart . . .”

“He turreted out this underground place here. Fifth squadron of the French Foreign Legion. They give ’em the spreadeagle. Soldat de la Légion Etrangère.” Weber saluted himself in the mirror again and clicked his heels. “The sun parches the lips and they crack. Oh Christ, it’s a shame: the horses all go away kicking in the dust. I wouldn’t have it. They plugged ’em too.”

—“I am perhaps God’s loneliest mortal. I do not have the companionship in drink you find, however unsatisfactory. My wretchedness is locked up within me. You used to cry to me to help you. The plea I send to you is far more desperate. Help me, yes, save me, from all that is enveloping, threatening, trembling, and ready to pour over my head.”

“—man what wrote the Bible. You got to study deep down to know that Mozart writ the Bible. But I’ll tell you, you can’t think with me. I’ve got an awful mind,” the sailor was telling the Consul. “And I hope you the same. I hope you will have good. Only to hell on me,” he added, and suddenly despairing, this sailor rose and reeled out.

“American no good for me no. American no good for Mexican. These donkey, these man,” the pimp said contemplatively, staring after him, and then at the legionnaire, who was examining a pistol that lay in his palm like a bright jewel. “All my, Mexican man. All tine England man, my friend Mexican.” He summoned A Few Fleas and, ordering more drinks, indicated the Consul would pay. “I don’t care son of a bitch American no good for you, or for me. My Mexican, all tine, all tine, all tine , eh?” he declared.

“Quiere usted la salvación de Méjico?” suddenly asked a radio from somewhere behind the bar. “Quiere usted que Cristo sea nuestro Rey?” and the Consul saw that the Chief of Rostrums had stopped phoning but was still standing in the same place with the Chief of Gardens.

“No.”

—“Geoffrey, why don’t you answer me? I can only believe that my letters have not reached you. I have put aside all my pride to beg your forgiveness, to offer you mine. I cannot, I will not believe that you have ceased to love me, have forgotten me. Or can it be that you have some misguided idea that I am better off without you, that you are sacrificing yourself that I may find happiness with someone else? Darling, sweetheart, don’t you realise that is impossible? We can give each other so much more than most people can, we can marry again, we can build forward . . .”

—“You are my friend for all tine. Me pay for you and for me and for this man. This man is friend for me and for this man,” and the pimp slapped the Consul, at this moment taking a long drink, calamitously on the back. “Want he?”

—“And if you no longer love me and do not wish me to come back to you, will you not write and tell me so? It is the silence that is killing me, the suspense that reaches out of that silence and possesses my strength and my spirit. Write and tell me that your life is the one you want, that you are gay, or are wretched, or are content or restless. If you have lost the feel of me write of the weather, or the people we know, the streets you walk in, the altitude.—Where are you, Geoffrey? I do not even know where you are. Oh, it is all too cruel. Where did we go, I wonder? In what far place do we still walk, hand in hand?”—

The voice of the stool pigeon now became clear, rising above the clamour—the Babel, he thought, the confusion of tongues, remembering again as he distinguished the sailor’s remote, returning voice, the trip to Cholula: “You telling me or am I telling you? Japan no good for U. S., for America . . . No bueno. Mehican, diez y ocho. All tine Mehican gone in war for U. S. A. Sure, sure, yes . . . Give me cigarette for me. Give me match for my. My Mehican war gone for England all tine—”

—“Where are you, Geoffrey? If I only knew where you were, if I only knew that you wanted me, you know I would have long since been with you. For my life is irrevocably and forever bound to yours. Never think that by releasing me you will be free. You would only condemn us to an ultimate hell on earth. You would only free something else to destroy us both. I am frightened, Geoffrey. Why do you not tell me what has happened? What do you need? And my God, what do you wait for? What release can be compared to the release of love? My thighs ache to embrace you. The emptiness of my body is the famished need of you. My tongue is dry in my mouth for the want of our speech. If you let anything happen to yourself you will be harming my flesh and mind. I am in your hands now. Save—”

“Mexican works, England works, Mexican works, sure, French works. Why speak English? Mine Mexican. Mexican United States he sees negros—de comprende—Detroit, Houston, Dallas . . .”

“Quiere usted la salvación de Méjico? Quiere usted que Cristo sea nuestro Rey?”

“No.”

The Consul looked up, pocketing his letters. Someone near him was playing a fiddle loudly. A patriarchal toothless old Mexican with a thin wiry beard, encouraged ironically from behind by the Chief of Municipality, was sawing away almost in his ear at the Star Spangled Banner. But he was also saying something to him privately. “Americano? This bad place for you. Deese hombres, malos. Cacos. Bad people here. Brutos. No bueno for anyone. Comprendo. I am a potter,” he pursued urgently, his face close to the Consul’s. “I take you to my home. I ah wait outside.” The old man, still playing wildly though rather out of tune, had gone, way was being made for him through the crowd, but his place, somehow between the Consul and the pimp, had been taken by an old woman who, though respectably enough dressed with a fine rebozo thrown over her shoulders, was behaving in a distressing fashion, plunging her hand restlessly into the Consul’s pocket, which he as restlessly removed, thinking she wanted to rob him. Then he realised she too wanted to help. “No good for you,” she whispered. “Bad place. Muy malo. These man no friend of Mexican people.” She nodded toward the bar, in which the Chief of Rostrums and Sanabria still stood. “They no policía. They diablos. Murderers. He kill ten old men. He kill twenty viejos.” She peered behind her nervously, to see if the Chief of Municipality was watching her, then took from her shawl a clockwork skeleton. She set this on the counter before A Few Fleas, who was watching intently, munching a marzipan coffin. “Vámonos,” she muttered to the Consul, as the skeleton, set in motion, jigged on the bar, to collapse flaccidly. But the Consul only raised his glass. “Gracias, buena amiga,” he said, without expression. Then the old woman had gone. Meantime the conversation about him had grown even more foolish and intemperate. The pimp was pawing at the Consul from the other side, where the sailor had been. Diosdado was serving ochas, raw alcohol in steaming herb tea: there was the pungent smell too, from the glass rooms, of marijuana. “All deese men and women telling me these men my friend for you. Ah me gusta gusta gusta . . . You like me like? I pay for dis man all tine ,” the pimp rebuked the legionnaire, who was on the point of offering the Consul a drink. “My friend of England man! My for Mexican all! American no good for me no. American no good for Mexican. These donkey, these man. These donkey. No savee nada. Me pay for all you drinkee. You no American. You England. O.K. Life for your pipe?”

“No gracias,” the Consul said lighting it himself and looking meaningly at Diosdado, from whose shirt pocket his other pipe was protruding again, “I happen to be American, and I’m getting rather bored by your insults.”

“Quiere usted la salvación de Méjico? Quiere usted que Cristo sea nuestro Rey?”

“No.”

“These donkey. Goddamn son of a bitch for my.”

“One, two, tree, four, five, twelve, sixee, seven—it’s a long, longy, longy, longy—way to Tipperaire.”

“Noch ein habanero—”

“—Bolshevisten—”

“Buenas tardes, señores,” the Consul greeted the Chief of Gardens and the Chief of Rostrums returning from the phone.

They were standing beside him. Soon, preposterous things were being said between them again without adequate reason: answers, it seemed to him, given by him to questions that while they had perhaps not been asked, nevertheless hung in the air. And as for some answers others gave, when he turned round, no one was there. Lingeringly, the bar was emptying for la comida; yet a handful of mysterious strangers had already entered to take the others’ places. No thought of escape now touched the Consul’s mind. Both his will, and time, which hadn’t advanced five minutes since he was last conscious of it, were paralysed. The Consul saw someone he recognised: the driver of the bus that afternoon. He had arrived at that stage of drunkenness where it becomes necessary to shake hands with everyone. The Consul too found himself shaking hands with the driver. “Dónde están vuestras palomas?” he asked him. Suddenly, at a nod from Sanabria, the chief of Rostrums plunged his hands into the Consul’s pockets. “Time you pay for—ah—Mehican whiky,” he said loudly, taking out the Consul’s notecase with a wink at Diosdado. The Chief of Municipality made his obscene circular movement of the hips. “Progresión al culo—” he began. The Chief of Rostrums had abstracted the package of Yvonne’s letters: he glanced sideways at this without removing the elastic the Consul had replaced. “Chingao, cabrón.” His eyes consulted Sanabria who, silent, stern, nodded again. The Chief brought out another paper, and a card he didn’t know he possessed, from the Consul’s jacket pocket. The three policemen put their heads together over the bar, reading the paper. Now the Consul, baffled, was reading this paper himself:

Daily . . . Londres Presse. Collect antisemitic campaign mexpress propetition . . . textile manufacture’s unquote . . . German behind . . . interiorwards. What was this? . . . news . . . jews . . . country belief . . . power ends conscience . . . unquote stop Firmin.

“No. Blackstone,” the Consul said.

“Cómo se llama? Your name is Firmin. It say there: Firmin. It say you are Juden.”

“I don’t give a damn what it says anywhere. My name’s Blackstone, and I’m not a journalist. True, vero, I’m a writer, an escritor, only on economic matters,” the Consul wound up.

“Where your papers? What for you have no papers?” The Chief of Rostrums asked, pocketing Hugh’s cable. “Where your passaporte? What need for you to make disguise?”

The Consul removed his dark glasses. Mutely to him, between sardonic thumb and forefinger, the Chief of Gardens held out the card: Federación Anarquista Ibérica , it said. Sr. Hugo Firmin.

“No comprendo,” the Consul took the card and turned it over. “Blackstone’s my name. I am a writer, not an anarchist.”

“Wrider? You antichrista. Sí, you antichrista prik.” The Chief of Rostrums snatched back the card and pocketed it. “And Juden,” he added. He slipped the elastic from Yvonne’s letters and, moistening his thumb, ran through them, glancing sideways once more at the envelopes. “Chingar. What for you tell lies?” he said almost sorrowfully. “Cabrón. What for you lie? It say here too: your name is Firmin.” It struck the Consul that the legionnaire Weber, who was still in the bar, though at a distance, was staring at him with a remote speculation, but he looked away again. The Chief of Municipality regarded the Consul’s watch, which he held in the palm of one mutilated hand, while he scratched himself between the thighs with the other, fiercely. “Here, oiga.” The Chief of Rostrums withdrew a ten-peso note from the Consul’s case, crackled it and threw it on the counter. “Chingao.” Winking at Diosdado he replaced the case in his own pocket with the Consul’s other things. Then Sanabria spoke for the first time to him.

“I am afraid you must come to prison,” he said simply in English. He went back to the phone.

The Chief of Municipality rolled his hips and gripped the Consul’s arm. The Consul shouted at Diosdado in Spanish, shaking himself loose. He managed to reach his hand over the bar but Diosdado struck it away. A Few Fleas began to yap. A sudden noise from the corner startled everyone: Yvonne and Hugh perhaps, at last. He turned round quickly, still free of the Chief: it was only the uncontrollable face on the barroom floor, the rabbit, having a nervous convulsion; trembling all over, wrinkling its nose and scuffing disapprovingly. The Consul caught sight of the old woman with the rebozo: loyally, she hadn’t gone. She was shaking her head at him, frowning sadly, and he now realised she was the same old woman who’d had the dominoes.

“What for you lie?” the Chief of Rostrums repeated in a glowering voice. “You say your name is Black. No es Black.” He shoved him backwards toward the door. “You say you are a wrider.” He shoved him again. “You no are a wrider.” He pushed the Consul more violently, but the Consul stood his ground. “You are no a de wrider, you are de espider, and we shoota de espiders in Méjico.” Some military policemen watched with concern. The newcomers were breaking up. Two pariah dogs ran around in the bar. A woman clutched her baby to her, terrified. “You no wrider.” The Chief caught him by the throat. “You Al Capón. You a Jew chingao.” The Consul shook himself free again. “You are a spider.”

Abruptly the radio, which, as Sanabria finished with the phone again, Diosdado had turned full blast, shouted in Spanish the Consul translated to himself in a flash, shouted like orders yelled in a gale of wind, the only orders that will save the ship: “Incalculable are the benefits civilization has brought us, incommensurable the productive power of all classes of riches originated by the inventions and discoveries of science. Inconceivable the marvellous creations of the human sex in order to make men more happy, more free, and more perfect. Without parallel the crystalline and fecund fountains of the new life which still remains closed to the thirsty lips of the people who follow in their griping and bestial tasks.”

Suddenly the Consul thought he saw an enormous rooster flapping before him, clawing and crowing. He raised his hands and it merded on his face. He struck the returning Jefe de Jardineros straight between the eyes. “Give me those letters back!” he heard himself shouting at the Chief of Rostrums, but the radio drowned his voice, and now a peal of thunder drowned the radio. “You poxboxes. You coxcoxes. You killed that Indian. You tried to kill him and make it look like an accident,” he roared. “You’re all in it. Then more of you came up and took his horse. Give me my papers back.”

“Papers. Cabrón. You har no papers.” Straightening himself the Consul saw in the Chief of Rostrums’ expression a hint of M. Laruelle and he struck at it. Then he saw himself the Chief of Gardens again and struck that figure; then in the Chief of Municipality the policeman Hugh had refrained from striking this afternoon and he struck this figure too. The clock outside quickly chimed seven times. The cock flapped before his eyes, blinding him. The Chief of Rostrums took him by the coat. Someone else seized him from behind. In spite of his struggles he was being dragged towards the door. The fair man who had turned up again helped shove him towards it; and Diosdado, who had vaulted ponderously over the bar; and A Few Fleas, who kicked him viciously on the shins. The Consul snatched a machete lying on a table near the entrance and brandished it wildly. “Give me back those letters!” he cried. Where was that bloody cock? He would chop off its head. He stumbled backwards out into the road. People taking tables laden with gaseosas in from the storm stopped to watch. The beggars turned their heads dully. The sentinel outside the barracks stood motionless. The Consul didn’t know what he was saying: “Only the poor, only through God, only the people you wipe your feet on, the poor in spirit, old men carrying their fathers and philosophers weeping in the dust, America perhaps, Don Quixote—” he was still brandishing the sword, it was that sabre really, he thought, in Maria’s room—“if you’d only stop interfering, stop walking in your sleep, stop sleeping with my wife, only the beggars and the accursed.” The machete fell with a rattle. The Consul felt himself stumbling backwards until he fell over a tussock of grass. “You stole that horse,” he repeated.

The Chief of Rostrums was looking down at him. Sanabria stood by silent, grimly rubbing his cheek. “Norteamericano, eh,” said the Chief. “Inglés. You Jew.” He narrowed his eyes. “What the hell you think you do around here? You pelado, eh? It’s no good for your health. I shoot de twenty people.” It was half a threat, half confidential. “We have found out—on the telephone—is it right?—that you are a criminal. You want to be a policeman? I make you policeman in Mexico.”

The Consul rose slowly to his feet, swaying. He caught sight of the horse, tethered near him. Only now he saw it more vividly and as a whole, electrified: the corded mouth, the shaved wooden pommel behind which tape was hanging, the saddlebags, the mats under the belt, the sore and the glossy shine on the hipbone, the number seven branded on the rump, the stud behind the saddlebuckle glittering like a topaz in the light from the cantina. He staggered towards it.

“I blow you wide open from your knees up, you Jew chingao,” warned the Chief of Rostrums, grasping him by the collar, and the Chief of Gardens, standing by, nodded gravely. The Consul, shaking himself free, tore frantically at the horse’s bridle. The Chief of Rostrums stepped aside, hand on his holster. He drew his pistol. With his free hand he waved away some tentative onlookers. “I blow you wide open from your knees up, you cabrón,” he said, “you pelado.”

“No, I wouldn’t do that,” said the Consul quietly, turning round. “That’s a Colt ’17, isn’t it? It throws a lot of steel shavings.”

The Chief of Rostrums pushed the Consul back out of the light, took two steps forward and fired. Lightning flashed like an inchworm going down the sky and the Consul, reeling, saw above him for a moment the shape of Popocatepetl, plumed with emerald snow and drenched with brilliance. The Chief fired twice more, the shots spaced, deliberate. Thunderclaps crashed on the mountains and then at hand. Released, the horse reared; tossing its head, it wheeled round and plunged neighing into the forest.

At first the Consul felt a queer relief. Now he realised he had been shot. He fell on one knee, then, with a groan, flat on his face in the grass. “Christ,” he remarked, puzzled, “this is a dingy way to die.”

A bell spoke out:

Dolente . . . dolore!

It was raining softly. Shapes hovered by him, holding his hand, perhaps still trying to pick his pockets, or to help, or merely curious. He could feel his life slivering out of him like liver, ebbing into the tenderness of the grass. He was alone. Where was everybody? Or had there been no one. Then a face shone out of the gloom, a mask of compassion. It was the old fiddler, stooping over him. “Compañero—” he began. Then he had vanished.

Presently the word “pelado” began to fill his whole consciousness. That had been Hugh’s word for the thief: now someone had flung the insult at him. And it was as if, for a moment, he had become the pelado, the thief—yes, the pilferer of meaningless muddled ideas out of which his rejection of life had grown, who had worn his two or three little bowler hats, his disguises, over these abstractions: now the realest of them all was close. But someone had called him “compañero” too, which was better, much better. It made him happy. These thoughts drifting through his mind were accompanied by music he could hear only when he listened carefully. Mozart was it? The Siciliana. Finale of the D minor quartet by Moses. No, it was something funereal, of Gluck’s perhaps, from Alcestis. Yet there was a Bach-like quality to it. Bach? A clavichord, heard from far away, in England in the seventeenth century. England. The chords of a guitar too, half lost, mingled with the distant clamour of a waterfall and what sounded like the cries of love.

He was in Kashmir, he knew, lying in the meadows near running water among violets and trefoil, the Himalayas beyond, which made it all the more remarkable he should suddenly be setting out with Hugh and Yvonne to climb Popocatepetl. Already they had drawn ahead. “Can you pick bougainvillea?” he heard Hugh say, and, “Be careful,” Yvonne replied, “it’s got spikes on it and you have to look at everything to be sure there’re no spiders.” “We shoota de espiders in Mexico,” another voice muttered. And with this Hugh and Yvonne had gone. He suspected they had not only climbed Popocatepetl but were by now far beyond it. Painfully he trudged the slope of the foothills toward Amecameca alone. With ventilated snow goggles, with alpenstock, with mittens and a wool cap pulled over his ears, with pockets full of dried prunes and raisins and nuts, with a jar of rice protruding from one coat pocket, and the Hotel Fausto’s information from the other, he was utterly weighed down. He could go no farther. Exhausted, helpless, he sank to the ground. No one would help him even if they could. Now he was the one dying by the wayside where no good Samaritan would halt. Though it was perplexing there should be this sound of laughter in his ears, of voices: ah, he was being rescued at last. He was in an ambulance shrieking through the jungle itself, racing uphill past the timberline toward the peak—and this was certainly one way to get there!—while those were friendly voices around him, Jacques’ and Vigil’s, they would make allowances, would set Hugh and Yvonne’s minds at rest about him. “No se puede vivir sin amar,” they would say, which would explain everything, and he repeated this aloud. How could he have thought so evil of the world when succour was at hand all the time? And now he had reached the summit. Ah, Yvonne, sweetheart, forgive me! Strong hands lifted him. Opening his eyes, he looked down, expecting to see, below him, the magnificent jungle, the heights, Pico de Orizabe, Malinche, Cofre de Perote, like those peaks of his life conquered one after another before this greatest ascent of all had been successfully, if unconventionally, completed. But there was nothing there: no peaks, no life, no climb. Nor was this summit a summit exactly: it had no substance, no firm base. It was crumbling too, whatever it was, collapsing, while he was falling, falling into the volcano, he must have climbed it after all, though now there was this noise of foisting lava in his ears, horribly, it was in eruption, yet no, it wasn’t the volcano, the world itself was bursting, bursting into black spouts of villages catapulted into space, with himself falling through it all, through the inconceivable pandemonium of a million tanks, through the blazing of ten million burning bodies, falling, into a forest, falling—

Suddenly he screamed, and it was as though this scream were being tossed from one tree to another, as its echoes returned, then, as though the trees themselves were crowding nearer, huddled together, closing over him, pitying . . .

Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.