“ A corpse will be transported by express!”

The tireless resilient voice that had just lobbed this singular remark over the Bella Vista bar windowsill into the square was, though its owner remained unseen, unmistakable and achingly familiar as the spacious flower-boxed balconied hotel itself, and as unreal, Yvonne thought.

“But why, Fernando, why should a corpse be transported by express, do you suppose?”

The Mexican taxidriver, familiar too, who’d just picked up her bags—there’d been no taxi at the tiny Quauhnahuac air field though, only the bumptious station wagon that insisted on taking her to the Bella Vista—put them down again on the pavement as to assure her: I know why you’re here, but no one’s recognized you except me, and I won’t give you away. “Sí, señora,” he chuckled. “Señora—El Cónsul.” Sighing, he inclined his head with a certain admiration toward the bar window. “Qué hombre!”

“—on the other hand, damn it, Fernando, why shouldn’t it? Why shouldn’t a corpse be transported by express?”

“Absolutamente necesario.”

“— just a bunch of Alladamnbama farmers! ”

The last was yet another voice. So the bar, open all night for the occasion, was evidently full. Ashamed, numb with nostalgia and anxiety, reluctant to enter the crowded bar, though equally reluctant to have the taxidriver go in for her, Yvonne, her consciousness so lashed by wind and air and voyage she still seemed to be travelling, still sailing into Acapulco harbour yesterday evening through a hurricane of immense and gorgeous butterflies swooping seaward to greet the Pennsylvania —at first it was as though fountains of multi-coloured stationery were being swept out of the saloon lounge—glanced defensively round the square, really tranquil in the midst of this commotion, of the butterflies still zigzagging overhead or past the heavy open ports, endlessly vanishing astern, their square, motionless and brilliant in the seven o’clock morning sunlight, silent yet somehow poised, expectant, with one eye half open already, the merry-go-rounds, the Ferris wheel, lightly dreaming, looking forward to the fiesta later—the ranged rugged taxis too that were looking forward to something else, a taxi strike that afternoon, she’d been confidentially informed. The zócalo was just the same in spite of its air of slumbering Harlequin. The old bandstand stood empty, the equestrian statue of the turbulent Huerta rode under the nutant trees wild-eyed ever more, gazing over the valley beyond which, as if nothing had happened and it was November 1936 and not November 1938, rose, eternally, her volcanoes, her beautiful beautiful volcanoes. Ah, how familiar it all was: Quauhnahuac, her town of cold mountain water swiftly running. Where the eagle stops! Or did it really mean, as Louis said, near the wood? The trees, the massive shining depths of these ancient fresno trees, how had she ever lived without them? She drew a deep breath, the air had yet a hint about it of dawn, the dawn this morning at Acapulco—green and deep purple high above and gold scrolled back to reveal a river of lapis where the horn of Venus burned so fiercely she could imagine her dim shadow cast from its light on the air field, the vultures floating lazily up there above the brick-red horizon into whose peaceful foreboding the little plane of the Compañía Mexicana de Aviación had ascended, like a minute red demon, winged emissary of Lucifer, the windsock below streaming out its steadfast farewell.

She took in the zócalo with a long final look—the untenanted ambulance that might not have moved since she’d last been here, outside the Servicio de Ambulancia within Cortez Palace, the huge paper poster strung between two trees which said Hotel Bella Vista Gran Baile Noviembre 1938 a Beneficio de la Cruz Roja. Los Mejores Artistas del radio en acción. No falte Vd. , beneath which some of the guests were returning home, pallid and exhausted as the music that struck up at this moment and reminded her the ball was still proceeding—then entered the bar silently, blinking, myopic in the swift leathery perfumed alcoholic dusk, the sea that morning going in with her, rough and pure, the long dawn rollers advancing, rising, and crashing down to glide, sinking, in colourless ellipses over the sand, while early pelicans hunting turned and dived, dived and turned and dived again into the spume, moving with the precision of planets, the spent breakers racing back to their calm; flotsam was scattered all along the beach: she had heard, from the small boats tossing in the Spanish Main, the boys, like young Tritons, already beginning to blow on their mournful conch shells . . .

The bar was empty, however.

Or rather it contained one figure. Still in his dress clothes, which weren’t particularly dishevelled, the Consul, a lock of fair hair falling over his eyes and one hand clasped in his short pointed beard, was sitting sideways with one foot on the rail of an adjacent stool at the small right-angled counter, half leaning over it and talking apparently to himself, for the barman, a sleek dark lad of about eighteen, stood at a little distance against a glass partition that divided the room (from yet another bar, she remembered now, giving on a sidestreet) and didn’t have the air of listening. Yvonne stood there silently by the door, unable to make a move, watching, the roar of the plane still with her, the buffeting of wind and air as they left the sea behind, the roads below still climbing and dropping, the little towns still steadily passing with their humped churches, Quauhnahuac with all its cobalt swimming pools rising again obliquely to meet her. But the exhilaration of her flight, of mountain piled on mountain, the terrific onslaught of sunlight while the earth turned yet in shadow, a river flashing, a gorge winding darkly beneath, the volcanoes abruptly wheeling into view from the glowing east, the exhilaration and the longing had left her. Yvonne felt her spirit that had flown to meet this man’s as if already sticking to the leather. She saw she was mistaken about the barman: he was listening after all. That is, while he mightn’t understand what Geoffrey (who was, she noticed, wearing no socks) was talking about, he was waiting, his towelled hands overhauling the glasses ever more slowly, for an opening to say or do something. He set the glass he was drying down. Then he picked up the Consul’s cigarette, which was consuming itself in an ashtray at the counter edge, inhaled it deeply, closing his eyes with an expression of playful ecstasy, opened them and pointed, scarcely exhaling now the slow billowing smoke from his nostrils and mouth, at an advertisement for Cafeaspirina , a woman wearing a scarlet brassière lying on a scrolled divan, behind the upper row of tequila añejo bottles. “Absolutamente necesario,” he said, and Yvonne realized it was the woman, not the Cafeaspirina , he meant (the Consul’s phrase doubtless) was absolutely necessary. But he hadn’t attracted the Consul’s attention, so he closed his eyes again with the same expression, opened them, replaced the Consul’s cigarette, and, still exuding smoke, pointed once more to the advertisement—next it she noticed one for the local cinema, simply, Las Manos de Orlac, con Peter Lorre —and repeated: “Absolutamente necesario.”

“A corpse, whether adult or child,” the Consul had resumed, after briefly pausing to laugh at this pantomime, and to agree, with a kind of agony, “Sí, Fernando, absolutamente necesario,”—and it is a ritual, she thought, a ritual between them, as there were once rituals between us, only Geoffrey has gotten a little bored with it at last—resumed his study of a blue and red Mexican National Railways timetable. Then he looked up abruptly and saw her, peering shortsightedly about him before recognizing her, standing there, a little blurred probably because the sunlight was behind her, with one hand thrust through the handle of her scarlet bag resting on her hip, standing there as she knew he must see her, half jaunty, a little diffident.

Still holding the timetable the Consul built himself to his feet as she came forward. “— Good God.”

Yvonne hesitated but he made no move towards her; she slipped quietly onto a stool beside him; they did not kiss.

“Surprise party. I’ve come back . . . My plane got in an hour ago.”

“—when Alabama comes through we ask nobody any questions,” came suddenly from the bar on the other side of the glass partition: “We come through with heels flying!”

“—From Acapulco, Hornos . . . I came by boat, Geoff, from San Pedro—Panama Pacific. The Pennsylvania . Geoff—”

“—bull-headed Dutchmen! 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. They don’t miss it. They shoot first and ask questions later. You’re goddam right. And that’s a nice thing to say. I take a bunch of goddamned farmers, then ask them no questions. Righto!—smoke a cool cigarette—”

“Don’t you love these early mornings.” The Consul’s voice, but not his hand, was perfectly steady as now he put the timetable down. “Have, as our friend next door suggests,” he inclined his head toward the partition, “a—” the name on the trembling, offered, and rejected cigarette package struck her: Alas! “—”

The Consul was saying with gravity: “Ah, Hornos.—But why come via Cape Horn? It has a bad habit of wagging its tail, sailors tell me. Or does it mean ovens?”

“—Calle Nicaragua, cincuenta dos.” Yvonne pressed a tostón on a dark god by this time in possession of her bags who bowed and disappeared obscurely.

“What if I didn’t live there any longer.” The Consul, sitting down again, was shaking so violently he had to hold the bottle of whiskey he was pouring himself a drink from with both hands. “Have a drink?”

“—”

Or should she? She should: even though she hated drinking in the morning she undoubtedly should: it was what she had made up her mind to do if necessary, not to have one drink alone but a great many drinks with the Consul. But instead she could feel the smile leaving her face that was struggling to keep back the tears she had forbidden herself on any account, thinking and knowing Geoffrey knew she was thinking: “I was prepared for this, I was prepared for it.” “You have one and I’ll cheer,” she found herself saying. (As a matter of fact she had been prepared for almost anything. After all, what could one expect? She had told herself all the way down on the ship, a ship because she would have time on board to persuade herself her journey was neither thoughtless nor precipitate, and on the plane when she knew it was both, that she should have warned him, that it was abominably unfair to take him by surprise.) “Geoffrey,” she went on, wondering if she seemed pathetic sitting there, all her carefully thought-out speeches, her plans and tact so obviously vanishing in the gloom, or merely repellent—she felt slightly repellent—because she wouldn’t have a drink. “What have you done? I wrote you and wrote you. I wrote till my heart broke What have you done with your—”

“—life,” came from beyond the glass partition. “What a life! Christ it’s a shame! Where I come from they don’t run. We’re going through busting this way—”

“—No. I thought of course you’d returned to England, when you didn’t answer. What have you done? Oh Geoff—have you resigned from the service?”

“—went down to Fort Sale. Took your shoeshot. And took your Brownings.—Jump, jump, jump, jump, jump—see, get it?—”

“I ran into Louis in Santa Barbara. He said you were still here.”

“—and like hell you can, you can’t do it, and that’s what you do in Alabama!”

“Well, actually I’ve only been away once.” The Consul took a long shuddering drink, then sat down again beside her. “To Oaxaca.—Remember Oaxaca?”

“—Oaxaca?—”

“—Oaxaca.—”

—The word was like a breaking heart, a sudden peal of stifled bells in a gale, the last syllables of one dying of thirst in the desert. Did she remember Oaxaca! The roses and the great tree, was that, the dust and the buses to Etla and Nochitlán? and: “ damas acompañadas de un caballero, gratis! ” Or at night their cries of love, rising into the ancient fragrant Mayan air, heard only by ghosts? In Oaxaca they had found each other once. She was watching the Consul who seemed less on the defensive than in process while straightening out the leaflets on the bar of changing mentally from the part played for Fernando to the part he would play for her, watching him almost with amazement: “Surely this cannot be us,” she cried in her heart suddenly. “This cannot be us—say that it is not, somebody, this cannot be us here!”—Divorce. What did the word really mean? She’d looked it up in the dictionary, on the ship: to sunder, to sever. And divorced meant: sundered, severed. Oaxaca meant divorce. They had not been divorced there but that was where the Consul had gone when she left, as if into the heart of the sundering, of the severance. Yet they had loved one another! But it was as though their love were wandering over some desolate cactus plain, far from here, lost, stumbling and falling, attacked by wild beasts, calling for help—dying, to sigh at last, with a kind of weary peace: Oaxaca—

—“The strange thing about this little corpse, Yvonne,” the Consul was saying, “is that it must be accompanied by a person holding its hand: no, sorry. Apparently not its hand, just a first-class ticket.” He held up, smiling, his own right hand which shook as with a movement of wiping chalk from an imaginary blackboard. “It’s really the shakes that make this kind of life insupportable. But they will stop: I was only drinking enough so they would. Just the necessary, the therapeutic drink.” Yvonne looked back at him. “—but the shakes are the worst of course,” he was going on. “You get to like the other after a while, and I’m really doing very well, I’m much better than I was six months ago, very much better than I was, say, in Oaxaca”—noticing a curious familiar glare in his eyes that always frightened her, a glare turned inward now like one of those sombrely brilliant cluster-lamps down the hatches of the Pennsylvania on the work of unloading, only this was a work of spoliation: and she felt a sudden dread lest this glare, as of old, should swing outward, turn upon her.

“God knows I’ve seen you like this before,” her thoughts were saying, her love was saying, through the gloom of the bar, “too many times for it to be a surprise anyhow. You are denying me again. But this time there is a profound difference. This is like an ultimate denial—oh Geoffrey, why can’t you turn back? Must you go on and on forever into this stupid darkness, seeking it, even now, where I cannot reach you, ever on into the darkness of the sundering, of the severance!—Oh Geoffrey, why do you do it!”

“But look here, hang it all, it is not altogether darkness,” the Consul seemed to be saying in reply to her, gently, as he produced a half-filled pipe and with the utmost difficulty lit it, and as her eyes followed his as they roved around the bar, not meeting those of the barman, who had gravely, busily effaced himself into the background, “you misunderstand me if you think it is altogether darkness I see, and if you insist on thinking so, how can I tell you why I do it? But if you look at that sunlight there, ah, then perhaps you’ll get the answer, see, look at the way it falls through the window: what beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the early morning? Your volcanoes outside? Your stars—Ras Algethi? Antares raging south southeast? Forgive me, no. Not so much the beauty of this one necessarily, which, a regression on my part, is not perhaps properly a cantina, but think of all the other terrible ones where people go mad that will soon be taking down their shutters, for not even the gates of heaven, opening wide to receive me, could fill me with such celestial complicated and hopeless joy as the iron screen that rolls up with a crash, as the unpadlocked jostling jalousies which admit those whose souls tremble with the drinks they carry unsteadily to their lips. All mystery, all hope, all disappointment, yes, all disaster, is here, beyond those swinging doors. And, by the way, do you see that old woman from Tarasco sitting in the corner, you didn’t before, but do you now?” his eyes asked her, gazing round him with the bemused unfocussed brightness of a lover’s, his love asked her, “how, unless you drink as I do, can you hope to understand the beauty of an old woman from Tarasco who plays dominoes at seven o’clock in the morning?”

It was true, it was almost uncanny, there was someone else in the room she hadn’t noticed until the Consul, without a word, had glanced behind them: now Yvonne’s eyes came to rest on the old woman, who was sitting in the shadow at the bar’s one table. On the edge of the table her stick, made of steel with some animal’s claw for a handle, hung like something alive. She had a little chicken on a cord which she kept under her dress over her heart. The chicken peeped out with pert, jerky, sidelong glances. She set the little chicken on a table near her where it pecked among the dominoes, uttering tiny cries. Then she replaced it, drawing her dress tenderly over it. But Yvonne looked away. The old woman with her chicken and the dominoes chilled her heart. It was like an evil omen.

—“Talking of corpses,”—the Consul poured himself another whiskey and was signing a chit book with a somewhat steadier hand while Yvonne sauntered toward the door—“personally I’d like to be buried next to William Blackstone—” He pushed the book back for Fernando, to whom mercifully he had not attempted to introduce her. “The man who went to live among the Indians. You know who he was, of course?” The Consul stood half turned toward her, doubtfully regarding this new drink he had not picked up.

“—Christ, if you want it, Alabama, go ahead and take it . . . I don’t want it. But if you wish it, you go and take it.”

“Absolutamente necesario—”

The Consul left half of it.

Outside, in the sunlight, in the backwash of tabid music from the still-continuing ball, Yvonne waited again, casting nervous glances over her shoulder at the main entrance of the hotel from which belated revellers like half-dazed wasps out of a hidden nest issued every few moments while, on the instant, correct, abrupt, army and navy, consular, the Consul, with scarce a tremor now, found a pair of dark glasses and put them on.

“Well,” he said, “the taxis seem to have all disappeared. Shall we walk?”

“Why what’s happened to the car?” So confused by apprehension of meeting any acquaintance was she, Yvonne had almost taken the arm of another man wearing dark glasses, a ragged young Mexican leaning against the hotel wall to whom the Consul, slapping his stick over his wrist and with something enigmatic in his voice observed: “Buenas tardes, señor.” Yvonne started forward quickly. “Yes, let’s walk.”

The Consul took her arm with courtliness (the ragged Mexican with the dark glasses had been joined, she noticed, by another man with a shade over one eye and bare feet who had been leaning against the wall further down, to whom the Consul also remarked “Buenas tardes,” but there were no more guests coming out of the hotel, only the two men who’d politely called “Buenas” after them standing there nudging each other as if to say: “He said ‘Buenas tardes,’ what a card he is!”) and they set off obliquely through the square. The fiesta wouldn’t start till much later and the streets that remembered so many other Days of the Dead were fairly deserted. The bright banners, the paper streamers, flashed: the great wheel brooded under the trees, brilliant, motionless. Even so the town around and below them was already full of sharp remote noises like explosions of rich colour. ¡Box! said an advertisement. arena tomalín. Frente al Jardín Xicotancatl. Domingo 8 de Noviembre de 1938. 4 Emocionantes Peleas.

Yvonne tried to keep herself from asking:

“Did you smack the car up again?”

“As a matter of fact I’ve lost it.”

“ Lost it!”

“It’s a pity because—but look here, dash it all, aren’t you terribly tired, Yvonne?”

“Not in the least! I should think you’re the one to be—”

—¡Box! Preliminar a 4 Rounds. el turco ( Gonzalo Calderón de Par. de 52 kilos ) vs. el oso ( de Par. de 53 kilos ).

“I had a million hours of sleep on the boat! And I’d far rather walk, only—”

“Nothing. Just a touch of rheumatiz.—Or is it the sprue? I’m glad to get some circulation going in the old legs.”

—¡Box! Evento Especial a 5 Rounds, en los que el vencedor pasará al grupo de Semi-Finales. tomás aguero ( el Invencible Indio de Quauhnahuac de 57 kilos, que acaba de llegar de la Capital de la República ). arena tomalín. Frente al Jardín Xicotancatl.

“It’s a pity about the car because we might have gone to the boxing,” said the Consul, who was walking almost exaggeratedly erect.

“I hate boxing.”

“—But that’s not till next Sunday anyhow . . . I heard they had some kind of a bullthrowing on to-day over at Tomalín.—Do you remember—”

“No!”

The Consul, with no more recognition than she, held up one finger in dubious greeting to an individual resembling a carpenter, running past them wagging his head and carrying a sawed length of grained board under his arm and who threw, almost chanted, a laughing word at him that sounded like: “Mesca li to!”

The sunlight blazed down on them, blazed on the eternal ambulance whose headlights were momentarily transformed into a blinding magnifying glass, glazed on the volcanoes—she could not look at them now. Born in Hawaii, she’d had volcanoes in her life before, however. Seated on a park bench under a tree in the square, his feet barely touching the ground, the little public scribe was already crashing away on a giant typewriter.

“I am taking the only way out, semicolon,” the Consul offered cheerfully and soberly in passing. “Good-bye, full stop. Change of paragraph, change of chapter, change of worlds—”

The whole scene about her—the names on the shops surrounding the square: La China Poblana, hand-embroidered, dresses , the advertisements: Baños de la Libertad , Los mejores de la Capital y los únicos en donde nunca falta el agua , Estufas especiales para Damas y Caballeros : and Sr. Panadero: Sí quiere hacer buen pan exija las harinas “Princesa Donaji” —striking Yvonne as so strangely familiar all over again and yet so sharply strange after the year’s absence, the severance of thought and body, mode of being, became almost intolerable for a moment. “You might have made use of him to answer some of my letters,” she said.

“Look, do you remember what Maria used to call it?” The Consul, with his stick, was indicating through the trees the little American grocery store, catercorner to Cortez Palace. “Peegly Weegly.”

“I won’t,” Yvonne thought, hurrying on and biting her lips. “I won’t cry.”

The Consul had taken her arm. “I’m sorry, I never thought.”

They emerged on the street again. When they had crossed it she was grateful for the excuse suggested by the printer’s shop window for readjustment. They stood, as once, looking in. The shop, adjacent to the Palace, but divided from it by the breadth of a steep narrow street desperate as a winze, was opening early. From the mirror within the window an ocean creature so drenched and coppered by sun and winnowed by sea-wind and spray looked back at her she seemed, even while making the fugitive motions of Yvonne’s vanity, somewhere beyond human grief charioting the surf. But the sun turned grief to poison and a glowing body only mocked the sick heart, Yvonne knew, if that sun-darkened creature of waves and sea margins and windrows did not! In the window itself, on either side of this abstracted gaze of her mirrored face, the same brave wedding invitations she remembered were ranged, the same touched-up prints of extravagantly floriferous brides, but this time there was something she hadn’t seen before, which the Consul now pointed out with a murmur of “Strange,” peering closer: a photographic enlargement, purporting to show the disintegration of a glacial deposit in the Sierra Madre, of a great rock split by forest fires. This curious, and curiously sad picture—to which the nature of the other exhibits lent an added ironic poignance—set behind and above the already spinning flywheel of the presses, was called: La Despedida.

They moved on past the front of Cortez Palace, then down its blind side began to descend the cliff that traversed it widthways. Their path made the short cut to the Calle Tierra del Fuego which curved below to meet them but the cliff was little better than a rubbish heap with smouldering debris and they had to pick their way carefully. Yvonne breathed more freely though, now they were leaving the centre of the town behind. La Despedida , she thought. The Parting! After the damp and detritus had done their work both severed halves of that blasted rock would crumble to earth. It was inevitable, so it said on the picture . . . Was it really? Wasn’t there some way of saving the poor rock whose immutability so short a time ago no one would have dreamed of doubting! Ah, who would have thought of it then as other than a single integrated rock? But granted it had been split, was there no way before total disintegration should set in of at least saving the severed halves? There was no way. The violence of the fire which split the rock apart had also incited the destruction of each separate rock, cancelling the power that might have held them unities. Oh, but why—by some fanciful geologic thaumaturgy, couldn’t the pieces be welded together again! She longed to heal the cleft rock. She was one of the rocks and she yearned to save the other, that both might be saved. By a super-lapidary effort she moved herself nearer it, poured out her pleas, her passionate tears, told all her forgiveness: the other rock stood unmoved. “That’s all very well,” it said, “but it happens to be your fault, and as for myself, I propose to disintegrate as I please!”

“—in Tortu,” the Consul was saying, though Yvonne was not following, and now they had come out in the Calle Tierra del Fuego itself, a rough narrow dusty street that, deserted, looked quite unfamiliar. The Consul was beginning to shake again.

“Geoffrey, I’m so thirsty, why don’t we stop and have a drink?”

“Geoffrey, let’s be reckless this once and get tight together before breakfast!”

Yvonne said neither of these things.

—The Street of the Land of Fire! To their left, raised high above road level, were uneven sidewalks with rough steps hewn in them. The whole little thoroughfare, slightly humpbacked in the centre where the open sewers had been filled in, was banked sharply down to the right as though it had once sideslipped in an earthquake. On this side one-storied houses with tiled roofs and oblong barred windows stood flush with the street but seemingly below it. On the other, above them, they were passing small shops, sleepy, though mostly opening or, like the “Molino para Nixtamal, Morelense,” open: harness shops, a milk shop under its sign Lechería (brothel, someone insisted it meant, and she hadn’t seen the joke), dark interiors with strings of tiny sausages, chorizos, hanging over the counters where you could also buy goat cheese or sweet quince wine or cacao, into one of which the Consul was now, with a “momentito,” disappearing. “Just go on and I’ll catch you up. I won’t be a jiffy.”

Yvonne walked on past the place a short distance, then retraced her steps. She had not entered any of these shops since their first week in Mexico and the danger of being recognized in the abarrotes was slight. Nevertheless, repenting her tardy impulse to follow the Consul in, she waited outside, restless as a little yacht turning at anchor. The opportunity to join him ebbed. A mood of martyrdom stole upon her. She wanted the Consul to see her, when he emerged, waiting there, abandoned and affronted. But glancing back the way they had come she forgot Geoffrey an instant.—It was unbelievable. She was in Quauhnahuac again! There was Cortez Palace and there, high on the cliff, a man standing gazing over the valley who from his air of martial intentness might have been Cortez himself. The man moved, spoiling the illusion. Now he looked less like Cortez than the poor young man in the dark glasses who’d been leaning against the wall of the Bella Vista.

“ You-are-a-man-who-like-much- Vine!” now issued powerfully from the abarrotes into the peaceful street, followed by a roar of incredibly good-humoured but ruffianly male laughter. “You are— diablo !” There was a pause in which she heard the Consul saying something. “ Eggs! ” the good-humoured voice exploded again. “You— two diablos! You tree diablos.” The voice cackled with glee. “ Eggs! ” Then: “Who is the beauful layee ?—Ah, you are—ah five diablos, you ah— Eggs! ” ludicrously followed the Consul who appeared at this moment, calmly smiling, on the pavement above Yvonne.

“In Tortu,” he was saying, as, steadier again, he fell into step beside her, “the ideal University, where no application whatsoever, so I have heard on good authority, nothing, not even athletics, is allowed to interfere with the business of—look out! . . . drinking.”

It came sailing out of nowhere, the child’s funeral, the tiny lace-covered coffin followed by the band: two saxophones, bass guitar, a fiddle, playing of all things “La Cucaracha,” the women behind, very solemn, while several paces back a few hangers-on were joking, straggling along in the dust almost at a run.

They stood to one side while the little cortège slanted by swiftly in the direction of the town, then walked on in silence not looking at one another. The banking of the street now became less acute and the sidewalks and the shops dropped away. To the left there was only a low blank wall with vacant lots behind it, whereas to the right the houses had turned into low open shanties filled with black carbon. Yvonne’s heart, that had been struggling with an insufferable pang, suddenly missed a beat. Though one might not think it they were approaching the residential district, their own terrain.

“Do look where you’re going, Geoffrey!” But it was Yvonne who had stumbled rounding the right-angled corner into the Calle Nicaragua. The Consul regarded her without expression as she stared up into the sun at the bizarre house opposite them near the head of their street, with two towers and a connecting catwalk over the ridgepole, at which someone else, a peon with his back turned, was also gazing curiously.

“Yes, it’s still there, it hasn’t budged an inch,” he said, and now they had passed the house to their left with its inscription on the wall she didn’t want to see and were walking down the Calle Nicaragua.

“Yet the street looks different somehow.” Yvonne relapsed into silence again. Actually she was making a tremendous effort to control herself. What she could not have explained was that recently in her picture of Quauhnahuac this house hadn’t been here at all! On the occasions imagination had led her with Geoffrey down the Calle Nicaragua lately, never once, poor phantoms, had they been confronted with Jacques’ zacuali. It had vanished some time before, leaving not a trace, it was as if the house had never existed, just as in the mind of a murderer, it may happen, some prominent landmark in the vicinity of his crime becomes obliterated, so that on returning to the neighborhood, once so familiar, he scarcely knows where to turn. But the Calle Nicaragua didn’t really look different. Here it was, still cluttered up with large grey loose stones, full of the same lunar potholes, and in that well-known state of frozen eruption that resembled repair but which in fact only testified facetiously to the continued deadlock between the Municipality and the property owners here over its maintenance. Calle Nicaragua!—the name, despite everything, sang plangently within her: only that ridiculous shock at Jacques’ house could account for her feeling, with one part of her mind, calm as she did about it.

The road, broad, sidewalkless, ran with increasing steepness downhill, mostly between high walls overhung by trees, though at the moment there were more little carbon shanties to their right, down to a leftward curve some three hundred yards away where roughly the same distance again above their own house it was lost from sight. Trees blocked the view beyond of low rolling hills. Nearly all the large residences were on their left, built far back from the road toward the barranca in order to face the volcanoes across the valley. She saw the mountains again in the distance through a gap between two estates, a small field bounded by a barbed wire fence and overflowing with tall spiny grasses tossed wildly together as by a big wind that had abruptly ceased. There they were, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, remote ambassadors of Mauna Loa, Mokuaweoweo: dark clouds now obscured their base. The grass, she thought, wasn’t as green as it should be at the end of the rains: there must have been a dry spell, though the gutters on either side of the road were brimful of rushing mountain water and—

“And he’s still there too. He hasn’t budged an inch either.” The Consul without turning was nodding back in the direction of M. Laruelle’s house.

“Who—who hasn’t—” Yvonne faltered. She glanced behind her: there was only the peon who had stopped looking at the house and was going into an alleyway.

“Jacques.”

“Jacques!”

“That’s right. In fact we’ve had terrific times together. We’ve been slap through everything from Bishop Berkeley to the four o’clock mirabilis jalapa .”

“You do what ?”

“The Diplomatic Service.” The Consul had paused and was lighting his pipe. “Sometimes I really think there’s something to be said for it.”

“—”

He stooped to float a match down the brimming gutter and somehow they were moving, even hurrying on: she heard bemusedly the swift angry click and crunch of her heels on the road and the Consul’s seemingly effortless voice at her shoulder.

“For instance had you ever been British attaché to the White Russian Embassy in Zagreb in 1922, and I’ve always thought a woman like you would have done very well as attaché to the White Russian Embassy in Zagreb in 1922, though God knows how it managed to survive that long, you might have acquired a certain, I don’t say technique exactly, but a mien, a mask, a way, at any rate, of throwing a look into your face at a moment’s notice of sublime dishonest detachment.”

“—”

“Although I can very well see how it strikes you—how the picture of our implied indifference, Jacques’ and mine that is, I mean, strikes you, as being even more indecent than that, say, Jacques shouldn’t have left when you did or that we shouldn’t have dropped the friendship.”

“—”

“But had you, Yvonne, ever been on the bridge of a British Q-ship, and I’ve always thought a woman like you would have been very good on the bridge of a British Q-ship—peering at the Tottenham Court Road through a telescope, only figuratively speaking of course, day in and day out, counting the waves, you might have learnt—”

“Please look where you’re going!”

“Though had you of course ever been Consul to Cuckoldshaven, that town cursed by the lost love of Maximilian and Carlotta, then, why then—”

— ¡box! arena tomalín. el balón vs. el redondillo .

“But I don’t think I finished about the little corpse. What is really so astonishing about him is that he has to be checked, actually checked, to the U. S. Border of Exit. While the charges for him are equivalent to two adult passengers—”

“—”

“However since you don’t seem to want to listen to me, here’s something else perhaps I ought to tell you.”

“—”

“Something else, I repeat, very important, that perhaps I ought to tell you.”

“Yes. What is it?”

“About Hugh.”

Yvonne said at last:

“You’ve heard from Hugh. How is he?”

“He’s staying with me.”

— ¡box! arena tomalín. frente al jardín xicotancatl. Domingo 8 de Noviembre de 1938. 4 Emocionantes Peleas. el balón vs. el redondillo .

Las Manos de Orlac. Con Peter Lorre.

“ What! ” Yvonne stopped dead.

“It seems he’s been in America this time on a cattle ranch,” the Consul was saying rather gravely as somehow, anyhow, they moved on, but this time more slowly. “Why, heaven knows. It couldn’t be he was learning to ride, but still, he turned up about a week ago in a distinctly unpukka outfit, looking like Hoot S. Hart in the Riders to the Purple Sage. Apparently he’d teleported himself, or been deported, from America by cattletruck. I don’t pretend to know how the press get by in these matters. Or maybe it was a bet . . . Anyhow he got as far as Chihuahua with the cattle, and some gun-running gun-toting pal by the name of—Weber?—I forget, anyway, I didn’t meet him, flew him the rest of the way.” The Consul knocked out his pipe on his heel, smiling. “It seems everyone comes flying to see me these days.”

“But—but Hugh —I don’t understand—”

“He’d lost his clothes en route but it wasn’t carelessness, if you can believe it, only that they wanted to make him pay higher duty at the border than they were worth, so quite naturally he left them behind. He hadn’t lost his passport however, which was unusual perhaps because he’s still somehow with—though I haven’t the foggiest in what capacity—the London Globe . . . Of course you knew he’s become quite famous lately. For the second time, in case you weren’t aware of the first.”

“Did he know about our divorce?” Yvonne managed to ask.

The Consul shook his head. They walked on slowly, the Consul looking at the ground.

“Did you tell him?”

The Consul was silent, walking more and more slowly. “What did I say,” he said at length.

“Nothing, Geoff.”

“Well, he knows now that we’re separated, of course.” The Consul decapitated a dusty coquelicot poppy growing by the side of the gutter with his stick. “But he expected us both to be here. I gather he had some idea we might let—but I avoided telling him the divorce had gone through. That is, I think I did. I meant to avoid it. So far as I know, honestly, I hadn’t got around to telling him when he left.”

“Then he’s not staying with you any longer.”

The Consul burst out in a laugh that became a cough. “Oh yes he is! He most certainly is . . . In fact, I nearly passed out altogether under the stress of his salvage operations. Which is to say he’s been trying to ‘straighten me out.’ Can’t you see it? Can’t you recognize his fine Italian hand? And he almost literally succeeded right off with some malevolent strychnine compound he produced. But,” just for one moment the Consul seemed to have difficulty placing one foot before another, “to be more concrete, actually he did have a better reason for staying than to play Theodore Watts Dunton. To my Swinburne.” The Consul decapitated another poppy. “Mute Swinburne. He’d got wind of some story while vacationing on the ranch and came after it here like a red rag after a bull. Didn’t I tell you that? . . . Which—didn’t I say so before?—is why he’s gone off to Mexico City.”

After a while Yvonne said weakly, scarcely hearing herself speak: “Well, we may have a little time together, mayn’t we?”

“Quién sabe?”

“But you mean he’s in the City now,” she covered hastily.

“Oh, he’s throwing up the job—he might be home now. At any rate he’ll be back to-day, I think. He says he wants ‘action.’ Poor old chap, he’s wearing a very popular front indeed these days.” Whether the Consul was being sincere or not he added, sympathetically enough, it sounded, “And God alone knows what will be the end of that romantic little urge in him.”

“And how will he feel,” Yvonne asked bravely all at once, “when he sees you again?”

“Yes, well, not much difference, not enough time to show, but I’d just been about to say,” the Consul went on with a slight hoarseness, “that the terrific times, Laruelle’s and mine, I mean, ceased on the advent of Hugh.” He was poking at the dust with his stick, making little patterns for a minute as he went along, like a blind man. “They were mostly mine because Jacques has a weak stomach and is usually sick after three drinks and after four he would start to play the Good Samaritan, and after five Theodore Watts Dunton too . . . So that I appreciated, so to speak, a change of technique. At least to the extent that I find I shall be grateful now, on Hugh’s behalf, if you’d say nothing to him—”

“Oh—”

The Consul cleared his throat. “Not that I have been drinking much of course in his absence, and not that I’m not absolutely cold stone sober now, as you can readily see.”

“Oh yes indeed,” Yvonne smiled, full of thoughts that had already swept her a thousand miles in frantic retreat from all this. Yet she was walking on slowly beside him. And deliberately as a climber on a high unguarded place looks up at the pine trees above on the precipice and comforts himself by saying: “Never mind about the drop below me, how very much worse if I were on top of one of those pines up there!” she forced herself out of the moment: she stopped thinking: or she thought about the street again, remembering her last poignant glimpse of it—and how even more desperate things had seemed then!—at the beginning of that fateful journey to Mexico City, glancing back from the now lost Plymouth as they turned the corner, crashing, crunching down on its springs into the potholes, stopping dead, then crawling, leaping forward again, keeping in, it didn’t matter on which side, to the walls. They were higher than she recalled and covered with bougainvillea; massive smouldering banks of bloom. Over them she could see the crests of trees, their boughs heavy and motionless, and occasionally a watchtower, the eternal mirador of Parián state, set among them, the houses invisible here below the walls and from on top too, she’d once taken the trouble to find out, as if shrunken down inside their patios, the miradors cut off, floating above like lonely rooftrees of the soul. Nor could you distinguish the houses much better through the wrought-iron lacework of the high gates, vaguely reminiscent of New Orleans, locked in these walls on which were furtively pencilled lovers’ trysts, and which so often concealed less Mexico than a Spaniard’s dream of home. The gutter on the right ran underground a while and another of those low shanties built on the street frowned at her with its dark open sinister bunkers—where Maria used to fetch their carbon. Then the water tumbled out into the sunlight and on the other side, through a gap in the walls, Popocatepetl emerged alone. Without her knowing it they had passed the corner and the entrance to their house was in sight.

The street was now absolutely deserted and save for the gushing murmurous gutters that now became like two fierce little streams racing each other, silent: it reminded her, confusedly, of how in her heart’s eye, before she’d met Louis, and when she’d half imagined the Consul back in England, she’d tried to keep Quauhnahuac itself, as a sort of safe footway where his phantom could endlessly pace, accompanied only by her own consoling unwanted shadow, above the rising waters of possible catastrophe.

Then since the other day Quauhnahuac had seemed, though emptied still, different—purged, swept clean of the past, with Geoffrey here alone, but now in the flesh, redeemable, wanting her help.

And here Geoffrey indeed was, not only not alone, not only not wanting her help, but living in the midst of her blame, a blame by which, to all appearances, he was curiously sustained—

Yvonne gripped her bag tightly, suddenly light-headed and barely conscious of the landmarks the Consul, who seemed recovered in spirits, was silently indicating with his stick: the country lane to the right, and the little church that had been turned into a school with the tombstones and the horizontal bar in the playground, the dark entrance in the ditch—the high walls on both sides had temporarily disappeared altogether—to the abandoned iron mine running under the garden.

To and fro from school . . .

Popocatepetl

It was your shining day . . .

The Consul hummed. Yvonne felt her heart melting. A sense of a shared, a mountain peace seemed to fall between them; it was false, it was a lie, but for a moment it was almost as though they were returning home from marketing in days past. She took his arm, laughing, they fell into step. And now here were the walls again, and their drive sloping down into the street where no one had allayed the dust, already paddled by early bare feet, and now here was their gate, off its hinges and lying just beyond the entrance, as for that matter it always had lain, defiantly, half hidden under the bank of bougainvillea.

“There now, Yvonne. Come along, darling . . . We’re almost home!”

“Yes.”

“Strange—” the Consul said.

A hideous pariah dog followed them in.