Under the Volcano Read Free Page A

intended turning
down another lane to the right, that led past the model farm where the Casino
de la Selva grazed its horses, directly into his street, the Calle Nicaragua.
But on a sudden impulse he turned left along the road running by the prison. He
felt an obscure desire on his last night to bid farewell to the ruin of
Maximilian's Palace.
     To the south an immense archangel, black as
thunder, beat up from the Pacific. And yet, after all, the storm contained its
own secret calm... His passion for Yvonne (whether or not she'd ever been much
good as an actress was beside the point, he'd told her the truth when he said
she would have been more than good in any film he made) had brought back to his
heart, in a way he could not have explained, the first time that alone, walking
over the meadows from Saint Pres, the sleepy French village of backwaters and
locks and grey disused watermills where he was lodging, he had seen, rising
slowly and wonderfully and with boundless beauty above the stubble fields
blowing with wildflowers, slowly rising into the sunlight, as centuries before
the pilgrims straying over those same fields had watched them rise, the twin
spires of Chartres Cathedral. His love had brought a peace, for all too short a
while, that was strangely like the enchantment, the spell, of Chartres itself,
long ago, whose every side-street he had come to love and cafe where he could
gaze at the Cathedral eternally sailing against the clouds, the spell not even
the fact he was scandalously in debt there could break. M. Laruelle walked on
swiftly towards the Palace. Nor had any remorse for the Consul's plight broken
that other spell fifteen years later here in Quauhnahuac; for that matter, M.
Laruelle reflected, what had reunited the Consul and himself for a time, even
after Yvonne left, was not, on either side, remorse. It was perhaps, partly,
more the desire for that illusory comfort, about as satisfying as biting on an
aching tooth, to be derived from the mutual unspoken pretence that Yvonne was
still here.
    --Ah, but all these things might have
seemed a good enough reason for putting the whole earth between themselves and
Quauhnahuac! Yet neither had done so. And now M. Laruelle could feel their
burden pressing upon him from outside, as if somehow it had been transferred to
these purple mountains all around him, so mysterious, with their secret mines
of silver, so withdrawn, yet so close, so still, and from these mountains
emanated a strange melancholy force that tried to hold him here bodily, which
was its weight, the weight of many things, but mostly that of sorrow.
    He passed a field where a faded blue
Ford, a total wreck, had been pushed beneath a hedge on a slope: two bricks had
been set under its front wheels against involuntary departure. What are you
waiting for, he wanted to ask it, feeling a sort of kinship, an empathy, for
those tatters of ancient hood flapping... Darling, why did I leave? Why did you
let me?   It was not to M. Laruelle that
these words on that long-belated postcard of Yvonne's had been addressed, that
postcard which the Consul must have maliciously put under his pillow some time
on that last morning--but how could one ever be sure when?--as though the
Consul had calculated it all,   knowing   M. Laruelle would
discover it at the precise moment that Hugh, distraughtly, would call from
Parián.--Parián! To his right towered the prison walls. Up on the watchtower,
just visible above them, two policemen peered east and west with binoculars. M.
Laruelle crossed a bridge over the river, then took a short cut through a wide
clearing in the woods evidently being laid out as a botanical garden. Birds
came swarming out of the southeast: small, black, ugly birds, yet too long,
something like monstrous insects, something like crows, with awkward long
tails, and an undulating, bouncing, laboured flight. Shatterers of the twilight
hour, they were flapping their way feverishly home, as