Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry Read Free Book Online Page B

a
folded sheet of paper that had fluttered out of it. He picked the paper up
between two fingers and unfolded it, turning it over. Hotel Bella Vista, he
read. There were really two sheets of uncommonly thin hotel note-paper that had
been pressed flat in the book, long but narrow and crammed on both sides with meaningless
writing in pencil. At first glance it did not appear a letter. But there was no
mistaking, even in the uncertain light, the hand, half crabbed, half generous,
and wholly drunken, of the Consul himself, the Greek e's, flying buttresses of
d's, the t's like lonely wayside crosses save where they crucified the entire
word, the words themselves slanting steeply downhill, though the individual
characters seemed as if resisting the descent, braced, climbing the other way.
M. Laruelle felt a qualm. For he saw now that it was indeed a letter of sorts,
though one that the writer undoubtedly had little intention, possibly no
capability for the further tactile effort, of posting:
    ... Night: and once again, the
nightly grapple with death, the room shaking with daemonic orchestras, the
snatches of fearful sleep, the voices outside the window, my name being
continually repeated with scorn by imaginary parties arriving, the dark's
spinnets. As if there were not enough real noises in these nights the colour of
grey hair. Not like the rending tumult of American cities, the noise of the
unbandaging of great giants in agony. But the howling pariah dogs, the cocks
that herald dawn all night, the drumming, the moaning that will be found later
white plumage huddled on telegraph wires in back gardens or fowl roosting in
apple trees, the eternal sorrow that never sleeps of great Mexico. For myself I
like to take my sorrow into the shadow of old monasteries, my guilt into
cloisters and under tapestries, and into the misericordes of unimaginable
cantinas where sad-faced potters and legless beggars drink at dawn, whose cold
jonquil beauty one rediscovers in death. So that when you left, Yvonne, I went
to Oaxaca. There is no sadder word. Shall I tell you, Yvonne, of the terrible
journey there through the desert over the narrow gauge railway on the rack of a
third-class carriage bench, the child whose life its mother and I saved by
rubbing its belly with tequila out of my bottle, or of how, when I went to my
room in the hotel where we once were happy, the noise of slaughtering below in
the kitchen drove me out into the glare of the street, and later, that night,
there was a vulture sitting in the washbasin? Horrors portioned to a giant
nerve! No, my secrets are of the grave and must be kept. And this is how I
sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some
extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the
world: but the name of this land is hell.
    It is not Mexico of course but in the
heart. And today I was in Quauhnahuac as usual when I received from my lawyers
news of our divorce. This was as I invited it. I received other news too:
England is breaking off diplomatic relations with Mexico and all her
Consuls--those, that is, who are English--are being called home. These are
kindly and good men, for the most part, whose name I suppose I demean. I shall
not go home with them. I shall perhaps go home but not to England, not to that
home. So, at midnight, I drove in the Plymouth to Tomalín to see my
Tlaxcaltecan friend Cervantes the cockfighter at the Salon Ofelia. And thence I
came to the Farolito in Parián where I sit now in a little room off the bar at
four-thirty in the morning drinking ochas and then mescal and writing this on
some Bella Vista notepaper I filched the other night, perhaps because the
writing paper at the Consulate, which is a tomb, hurts me to look at. I think I
know a good deal about physical suffering. But this is worst of all, to feel
your soul dying. I wonder if it is because tonight my soul has really died that
I feel at the moment something like