Under the Volcano Read Free

nothing better than to get wet, soaked through to the skin, to walk on
and on through this wild country in his clinging white flannels getting wetter
and wetter and wetter. He watched the clouds: dark swift horses surging up the
sky. A black storm breaking out of its season! That was what love was like, he
thought; love which came too late. Only no sane calm succeeded it, as when the
evening fragrance or slow sunlight and warmth returned to the surprised land!
M-Laruelle hastened his steps still farther. And let such love strike you dumb,
blind, mad, dead--your fate would not be altered by your simile. Tonnerre de
dieu ... It slaked no thirst to say what love was like which came too late.
    The town was almost directly to his
right now and above him, for M. Laruelle had been walking gradually downhill
since leaving the Casino de la Selva. From the field he was crossing he could
see, over the trees on the slope of the hill, and beyond the dark castled shape
of Cortez Palace, the slowly revolving Ferris wheel, already lit up, in the
square of Quauhnahuac; he thought he could distinguish the sound of human
laughter rising from its bright gondolas and, again, that faint intoxication of
voices singing, diminishing, dying in the wind, inaudible finally. A despondent
American tune, the St Louis Blues, or some such, was borne across the fields to
him, at times a soft wind-blown surge of music from which skimmed a spray of
gabbling, that seemed not so much to break against as to be thumping the walls
and towers of the outskirts; then with a moan it would be sucked back into the
distance. He found himself in the lane that led away through the brewery to the
Tomalín road. He came to the Alcapancingo road. A car was passing and as he waited,
face averted, for the dust to subside, he recalled that time motoring with
Yvonne and the Consul along the Mexican lake-bed, itself once the crater-of a
huge volcano, and saw again the horizon softened by dust, the buses whizzing
past through the whirling dust, the shuddering boys standing on the backs of
the lorries holding on for grim death, their faces bandaged against the dust
(and there was a magnificence about this, he always felt, some symbolism for
the future, for which such truly great preparation had been made by a heroic
people, since all over Mexico one could see those thundering lorries with those
young builders in them, standing erect, their trousers flapping hard, legs
planted wide, firm) and in the sunlight, on the round hill, the lone section of
dust advancing, the dust-darkened hills by the lake like islands in driving
rain. The Consul, whose old house M. Laruelle now made out on the slope beyond
the barranca, had seemed happy enough too then, wandering around Cholula with
its three hundred and six churches and its two barber shops, the
"Toilet" and the "Harem," and climbing the ruined pyramid
later, which he had proudly insisted was the original Tower of Babel. How
admirably he had concealed what must have been the babel of his thoughts!
    Two ragged Indians were approaching
M. Laruelle through the dust; they were arguing, but with the profound
concentration of university professors wandering in summer twilight through the
Sorbonne. Their voices, the gestures of their refined grimy hands, were
unbelievably courtly, delicate. Their carriage suggested the majesty of Aztec
princes, their faces obscure sculpturings on Yucatecan ruins:
    "--perfectamente
borracho--"
    "--completamente
fantástico--"
    "Sí, hombre, la vida
impersonal--"
    "Claro, hombre--"
    "¡Positivamente!"
    "Buenas noches"
    "Buenas noches"
    They passed into the dusk. The Ferris
wheel sank from sight: the sounds of the fair, the music, instead of coming
closer, had temporarily ceased. M. Laruelle looked into the west; a knight of
old, with tennis racket for shield and pocket torch for scrip, he dreamed a
moment of battles the soul survived to wander there. He had