IX

“No señor,” said the little man at the door of Las Novedades¹—ropa, abarrotes—ventas por mayor y menor²—“I tell you that it is quite impossible. The telephone is descompuesto.³ It is decomposed.”

“Decomposed?”

The little man shook his head vigorously.

“Yes,” he said.

“Well, that’s that,” said the Consul. “Come on, Hugh. By the way, what’s the right time?” he asked, turning to the man. “Por favor?”

The little man looked at his watch.

“Half past tree by the cock.”⁴

“Jesus—what? Oh, muchas gracias, señor.”

“The other guy in there says there was another phone once but someone carried it off or something one day and it got lost,” said Hugh.

As they walked away they heard the clock from San Francisco⁵ chime eleven times, faintly.

“It carries a long way,” said Hugh.

“We could hitch back to town, stop one of those cars from Oregon or Iowa,” said Yvonne, looking at the passing, familiar nameplates.

“Oregon,” observed the Consul, as the clock chimed twice more, echoing: sadness, sadness. “Oregon is huracán.⁶ Hurricane, don’t you see? Portuguese: furacão. Hence, ha ha, hurry, fury. And so forth. And my watch says three-thirty too. Strange.”

“We could always go back on the bus,” said Yvonne.

“It was a pity old Diplomático⁷ was going in the wrong direction,” said the Consul. “We might have got a hitch from him.”

“My countrymen,” said Hugh. “They’re usually too busy being afraid of each other to think of anybody else. In God We Trust,⁸ but only on the nickel. No trust! That’s what you see in every barber shop and behind every bar counter. Is that democracy? That’s what Melville said too in The Confidence Man. No trust. Is that America?”

“Come come, Hugh,” said the Consul. “Don’t be in such a furacán. America’s only in too much of a huracán, like all the rest of us. Or not enough—when it counts. But things will change. American—huracán, you can’t get away from the old Atlantean root. And there’s nothing you could have done. Nothing I could have done. And nothing you could have done, Yvonne. So let’s all be friends and stagger away quietly to see the superior bull.”⁹

“Why don’t you talk English, Father, and if we’re in earnest,” Yvonne persisted, “We ought to take the next bus right back again now.”

“But we’re not in earnest,” said Hugh. “That ought to be blatantly obvious to everyone by now. What the hell is the sense of being in earnest about anything? Let’s go.”

Yvonne turned, leaning against a stone wall with her arms folded over her head. She began to cry.

Two men in rags,¹⁰ with faces like obscure sculpturings of gods on Yucatecan ruins, drifted past them in the dust, conveying in their carriage the majesty of Xicotancatl, in the delicacy of the gestures of their refined, grimy hands the poise and dignity of Maximiliano, in the profundity of their nods the rapt concentration of University professors wandering in summer twilight through Clare College.

“Es absolutamente increíble, señor.”

“Sí—el hombre está perfectamente borracho.”

“Claro, hombre, pero esto es completamente fantástico.”

“Es la vida, señor. La vida impersonal!”

“Exactamente.”

“Please forgive me for making a fuss like this,” Yvonne was saying. “I feel a perfect idiot.”

Hugh put his arm around her waist.

“Come on, honey lamb,” he said gently.

“It’s all right. I’m not going to cry anymore. I’m all right now.”

“Come on, my children,” said the Consul. “Forward to the arena.”

Hugh took Yvonne’s arm and they all started to wander up the hill.

It was very hot now and the sun beat down on their temples. They could hear the slap slap of tortillas being made in cool caverns of malodorous dark. In a doorway a witch stirred a huge earthenware cauldron of chocolate colored mole.¹¹ Their shadows crawled before them in the dust,¹² slid down white walls of houses, were caught for a moment in the elliptical shade of the turning wheel of a boy’s bicycle. The spoked shadow of the wheel, enormous, gyred away. There was a smell of decaying vegetation, and of pulque, obscene and yeasty.

Before them was what appeared to be a glittering lake. It flashed brilliantly in the sun, welcoming them all, a delicious invitation which was already quenching their thirsts and washing their guilt away.

“There, Yvonne,” said Hugh, who longed to be near its cool assuagement, “we can have another swim.”

“No, the alberca’s¹³ in the other direction,” said the Consul, “and wait! all is not sea that shimmers.”¹⁴

They had now come up with their lake, which was a low, glass roof, and as they dismally looked at it Hugh felt that his keen sense of disappointment was shared by Yvonne who gave a little shiver.

“That’s dreadful somehow,” she said. “To think that our lake is only this glare.”

“Yes?” said the Consul. “I once read of something of this kind happening to some explorers in Tasmania.¹⁵ They were dying of thirst in the desert and then they saw this lake and ran towards it. And it wasn’t a mirage, although of course it wasn’t a lake either. What they saw were just acres and acres of broken glass.”

Yvonne shivered again, clutching Hugh tightly. “It reminds me of Maeterlinck’s greenhouse in the forest.”¹⁶

“Perhaps those explorers really wanted to die of thirst more than they wanted to drink,” the Consul said. “In the desert men have strange ambitions.” He pondered upon how long this heartiness would last.

Beyond the frames was the Plaza de Toros,¹⁷ the stop for which they had already mistakenly passed in the camión. Gradually, as they came in sight of the improvised grandstands, which from behind resembled the reconstructed skeletons of prehistoric monsters, Yvonne began to feel much better. Relieved that she had cried and reassured by Hugh’s presence she tried to look at the situation reasonably. After all, the truth was that they had been spiritually remote from what they had witnessed that afternoon even at the time. Even Hugh, however much she might admire him for having tried to help at his own risk, had not been a part of it. The poor fellow staring at the sky, or into his hat, had been associated with them all only in the vaguest way. It was not common sense to force too much significance upon the incident. None of them, she knew, were essentially heartless people. They merely faltered in a crisis, waiting for some tiny rider on the scales of understanding¹⁸ that would balance their decencies with their practicalities. How could they pretend to care in any essential sense about it? There was nothing in their own response to show them that they were not more concerned with excusing themselves. And, if anything, it was this concern that should be the cause of her dismay.

Yvonne was not even apprehensive of more bloodshed at the bullthrowing now as they found themselves wedged in the crowd making its way towards an improvised ladder, up to the flimsy grandstand.

Yvonne could see Mexicans in trees but nothing of what they must be so intently watching. They were helpless, buffeted to left and right by the push and press: then they were stuck again.

Now they were separated, and for a moment the idea flashed back to her that a common purpose threaded them: how could one justify his own mysterious share in a murder?

Groans, laughs, cheers, belches, half-hearted olés, came from the spectators above her.

Reaching the top of the ladder and at length a position from which they could see well, Yvonne began to understand that, if she had expected blood, she was misprising the nature of this sport.

It was a sleepy scene, in spite of the energy required to reach it, and the cheers. Some of the spectators seated on rude railings around the arena, which was grey with dust, nodded with slumber. Others were engaged in purely private pleasures: tearing a sombrero to pieces or trying to skim a straw hat, like a boomerang, at a friend, and each of these diversions, apart from that of the main performance, possessed its little orbit of laughter and applause.

Yvonne focussed her attention on the arena where six cowboys were attempting to pull a bull to its feet. The bull was in a coma. Drunks, also in a coma, drifted in and out of the ring, gripping by their necks bottles of tequila or mescal. After a while a boy bit the tail of the bull which climbed cumbersomely to its feet. This was as convulsive as an act of creation. It was an experiment no deity could have been very proud of, Yvonne thought, nor did the bull, actually tottering with slumber, boredom and panic, apparently see much reason for being created.

After a while a boy mounted a malicious looking horse and lassoed it. But the bull had only been roped about the foot, and after a few feeble tricks, was free.

Then nothing happened. The bull just walked away gloomily, shaking its head from side to side.

Yvonne felt herself flushing hotly. The events of the afternoon, herself, the bull, the present scene, the Mexican scene, the Mexican people—how impatient she was with all of them! She clenched her fists, tempted all at once to beat them on the bald head of a man sitting on the tier below.

“The pouncing sarpint,”¹⁹ said the Consul. “There’s an idea for a book for you. All about the great pouncing primeval consciousness. The pouncing sarpint! Will do any trick for ten centavos. Strangle your wife for twenty, mother-in-laws twenty-one. It’s alive—oh!”

“Wait a bit,” Hugh said in Spanish. “Don’t let’s all be so hasty. These peons here are different. These are the real people. Wait till they’ve waked up a little.”

“Talk in French,” said the Consul, “or one of these real people will wake up and put a knife in your back.”

“Oh,” Hugh went on, “they’re just sleepy, some of them. Surely you can’t blame them for that. Or the way they’re enjoying themselves. What about the strange tribal customs of the English? Or the Americans? Ott flied to DiMaggio.²⁰ Ripple popped to DiMaggio. That sort of stuff. McCarthy flied to DiMaggio. Ripple fanned. No runs, no hits, no errors. What sort of nonsense is that?”

“Careful,” said the Consul, “you’re talking American again now with your fanning and popping.”

“Careful? No. Don’t be careful,²¹ as the Mexicans say, that’s what’s wrong with us all. Fear. Hell, what have we got to be afraid of? But anyway these guys haven’t got going yet. The Mexicans are really the best horsemen in the world.”

“They have an unfortunate knack of falling off them!”

“Oh, that’s not what I mean! And that was a Spaniard, that fellow, that chap who came out of the canteen and stole the money, no mistaking him—”

“Astonishing fellow you are,” the Consul said. “A moment ago you were talking like Timon of Athens.²² But you’re right for that matter. He was not only a Spaniard, but a fascist, an active one I believe, in his sober moments. He runs that cantina. Which reminds me, did you ever hear of the newspaper called Timon?”

“Well, there it is,” Hugh said, shaking his head, “I was kind of mad at everything for the moment. I still half am. But those too Spanish Spaniards,”²³ he went on, “are the same sort of swine who’re trying to subdue Spain now, as I see it. Oh, one day we’ll be sorry and wake up. Maybe. A canteen keeper, eh? It’s a pity he was something so cheery. But that’ll do just the same. A Sunday arrives with the working people knocked off and the canteen keepers make them drunk! Then rob them! Just as we saw.”

“But your republicans are just as bad. Just so much rabble, scum of the earth, the whole bloody lot of them. And when I get drunk I don’t blame it on the canteen keeper.”

“Oh we all know you’d get drunk anywhere Dad.”

“I mean what I say,” said Hugh, “These are the sort of robbers who conquered this country too, only there was something behind it then, an idea at least, redeeming it a little,” he added, faltering as he realized he was now employing the argument he had overheard Yvonne using in rebuttal of herself about the English. “And those are the sort, only worse, because they’re not drunks, drunkards of blood only, that are trying to conquer Spain. Only the people aren’t letting them, at the moment. And Franco’s lot are the sort of swine who will threaten us eventually, and we just stand around and say the Spanish Government are Reds. And Holy war stuff, Franco’s is the war for Christ.²⁴ Who is it that misinforms the Pope? Because that thief in the bus wore a crucifix it doesn’t mean he’s fighting any war for Christ. There never was any war but a defensive one really fought for Christ, and perhaps not even then. For it’s we who decide, and not Christ, whether we are fighting for Him or not. But the fact remains that the Catholics, and the honorable priests too, the ones that truly believe in Christ and the compassionate things He did and who’d give anyone in trouble the cassocks off their backs, are with the Government. So the Catholics are Reds, I suppose! What about Bilbao²⁵—”

“Euzkadi,”²⁶ put in the Consul. “Es inevitable la muerte—”

For a moment Hugh saw again the advertisement in the field where they had landed that morning. Then he went on. “Reds! Were we Reds when we freed ourselves of the yoke of England? I suppose our forefathers were Reds at Bunker Hill.²⁷ Are all people who want to keep their freedom Reds? In the end, when the Reds realize themselves that any country whose revolution is to work must have religious freedom, there’ll be nothing to distinguish them from ourselves. We’ll call our policy by a different name though, once more: democracy. The communists are just as misinformed about us as the Pope is about Catholicism. And if their economic system is lousy, and if Karl Marx was a pimp,²⁸ what about our economic system? We’ll change that too. We’ll have different names for everything but the principle of freedom will remain. The trouble right here in Mexico is, they didn’t have a real revolution—they should have thrown all the Spaniards out.”

“What if the Indians had thrown you out?” asked the Consul. “And if they haven’t thrown the Spaniards out why do you have to go to Spain to fight for them?”

“Mexico’s revolution’s going on in Spain now,”²⁹ Hugh continued, ignoring this. “But it won’t end there. It will spread everywhere: it will spread here too, just you wait. I’m making up my mind about something now. Spain’s the last frontier but one of our democracy. And by the spirit of Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Gray Champion, sir, and as I’m a good American, by God, that’s true!”

“My oh my oh my,” said the Consul, “You really do have ideas after all. I was half hoping—but I read in the papers the other day,” he interrupted himself, “that Mexico’s revolution is not like any other revolution.”

Hugh smiled.

“An idea back of it,” continued the Consul. “Christ! These people with ideas!”

“Then you agree with me that—”

“Oh!” said the Consul. “There isn’t such a thing as an argument on this kind of subject. But roughly speaking and for the thousandth time of course I don’t. It will be better for everybody if Franco gets that war finished³⁰ as soon as possible. As I’m getting so tired of saying.”

“Oh dear!” sighed Yvonne, who was, nevertheless, impressed by Hugh’s tirade, “We seem to be wrong and there must be an answer somewhere. Hasn’t Franco got ideas too when it comes to that?”

“I’m not wrong,” Hugh said to the Consul. “What you really mean, sir, is that if Franco gets it finished we’ll all be finished sooner. Franco and Hitler are lovers. And gee, how they do love death!”

“I didn’t mean you were wrong,” Yvonne tried to explain, “it’s just that when you say ‘Mexico’s revolution’s going on in Spain now’ it doesn’t seem to make sense.”

“Yvonne will lead us all astray,” said the Consul.

“Oh the hell with it,” Hugh said. “Let’s watch.”

The bull was now cruising solemnly around the ring at an inconsiderable speed although raising much dust. So mild-seeming was its charge that those sitting on the fences didn’t even bother to draw their legs up, while those lying down did not withdraw an inch. The crowd began to jeer. Yvonne was so sorry for the bull, who, flattered by this show of attention, repeated its tour of the ring at a slightly increased gait, deviating only once when a little dog snapped at his heels, that she almost felt like crying again. But after a few snuffling sweeps of the head along the ground the animal lost interest, although the little dog had quite succeeded in making it forget where it was going.

Then Yvonne noticed that the markings on the bull’s flanks made a perfect picture of the Americas.³¹ Central America was accurately defined: the south bulged like a cello. There was Tierra del Fuego, Cape Horn, on the right foreleg. That was where Hugh thought he was going, to give himself over to the frozen sea’s storm. That was where she was going, to tack through icy blasts of contradictions, but get around somehow, get round! Every life, in its way, as Hugh had said, was going there—her father’s had already gone, was still there—or at the False Cape Horn³² Hugh had told her about, an adaption to a universal winter, to Diatom of the Antarctic ice, Protococcus³³ of the red snow.

Yvonne thought of her ride with Hugh that morning, which had started this train of thought, and a slow warmth radiated through her.

In the arena, everyone, whether on horseback or on foot, standing or swaying with an old serape or rug or even rag held out, as a tailor holds a coat for a customer to try on, was attempting to attract the bull.

To the Consul, giving himself over to a succession of delicious, caddish thoughts, the attitude of those in the ring was precisely that of Mexican salesmen towards the gringo.

They were anxious to attract, yet terrified of displeasing. Passionately desiring to humiliate their client, while profiting from him, they were all the while mortally afraid of what they suspected was his superior strength, of what they were almost sure was his superior intelligence, of what they were certain must be his superior consciousness, against which they longed to appear to advantage. But, above all, they were mortally afraid, even when there was nothing but a poor old ox, if ox he were, to be afraid of.

The spectators stamped on the wooden scaffoldings, clapping rhythmically. Inadvertently the bull had strayed into the center, into a position from which it could be lassoed from two sides of the ring at once. This being done, in a few seconds it was hopelessly entangled. It pulled against the opposing forces for a little while, skipping about, then subsided sleepily into the dust where it put Yvonne in mind of an enormous spider at the heart of a web of cord.

But she was reflecting that looked at another way, the whole business portrayed a complete life: the convulsive birth, the curious, despairing circulations of the ring, the circumspect endeavors to obtain one’s bearings in a hostile world, the apparent, deceptive encouragement, the swervings into the beginnings of disaster from what seemed a sensible course because of some negligible obstacle which should have been taken at a stride, the final enmeshment in the toils of enemies one was never altogether sure were not friends more clumsy than actively ill-disposed, followed by disaster itself: capitulation, disintegration, death—or a kind of death, bloodless, just as it was often in life. And now—resurrection!³⁴

First, however, there were to be at least the three days in the deathless tomb. Making mysterious knotty passes about him with their lariats the boys set about rigging the bull for its rider.

But meantime, there was the intermedio.³⁵

A bottle of habanero was passed round among the horsemen. The spectators bought lemonade, fruit, peanuts, pulque. The air was full of shocking, unidentifiable smells. A few drunks prematurely essayed to be the rider, but were escorted off, weak kneed, tottering and protesting and stepping high as if over obstacles, as the Spaniard had done. Newcomers swung gracefully up to the tops of fences: muscular hawkers lifted aloft, with one stretch of the forearm, heavy trays of multicolored fruits. A bearded giant, a white serape decorated with cobalt dragons flung over his shoulders, stalked importantly around the arena, propelling a peanut wagon that resembled pictures Yvonne remembered of the first locomotive, the Rocket.³⁶ She could see its little donkey engine³⁷ working away gaily inside, busily grinding the peanuts. From time to time its siren lanyard jerked, its fluted smokestack belched, its polished whistle shrieked. A boy stood high up in the crotch of a tree, shading his eyes as he gazed over the countryside.

But the giant apparently did not want to sell any peanuts. It was simply that he could not resist showing his engine to everybody: see, this is my possession, my joy, my faith. He pushed the Rocket proudly away, belching and squealing, out of the arena.

Watching this, Yvonne experienced a certain ecstasy. It was good to be alive, a part of the brilliantly colored serape of existence,³⁸ part of the smells, the sunlight, part of the laughter.

In the distance they could hear the sounds of the fair at Quauhnahuac coming and going.

Then absolutely nothing happened.

The crowd grew silent. It was a silence infectious as mirth, an awkward silence in one group begetting in another group a curious silence, which, in turn, induced a more general, imitative silence in a third, until it had spread everywhere.

There is nothing in the world so powerful as one of these silences, the Consul was thinking, nothing that could give one a profounder sense of the latent power of men who act together, or that could so convincingly and misleadingly persuade a spectator that such fundamental spontaneities are proof too, of the fundamental aims they hold in common. The silence in the stands, around the railings, up in the trees, disturbed the Consul; the slumbrous bull, the potentiality that would not behave, the bovine ambiguity in the center of the ring, reminded him uneasily of the chaos that was momentarily held in check within him, the calm that even now was being broken by the familiar, inner fever, by squalls and eddies of nervousness. Why had he not had the sense to fill his flask? He could barely wait for a drink. Afterwards, he would break away from the others and go to the Farolito.³⁹ The Lighthouse! The Lighthouse that invites the storm, and lights it.⁴⁰ The thought of the cantina in Parián, at a little distance from Chapultepec, filled him with love, with the greatest longing he had ever known, even for a woman. It was a strange place; at first it had appeared to him tiny. Only after he had grown to know it well had he discovered it was composed of numerous little rooms, each smaller than the last, opening into one another. Like boxes in a Japanese puzzle⁴¹ set in a row, these rooms were places where revolutions were hatched, where great, wheeling thoughts thronged and hovered in his brain. He saw it all now, the steep drop on one side of the cantina to the barranca; the proprietor, Ramon Diosdado,⁴² the Godgiven, known as the Elephant, who was reputed to have murdered his wife to cure her neurasthenia;⁴³ the beggars, hacked by war, one of whom one night had thought he was the Christ⁴⁴ and had fallen down on his knees before him. He saw all this and felt the atmosphere of the place already enclosing him with its certainty of evil. He saw the dawn,⁴⁵ watched in anguish from the door, a slow bomb bursting over the Sierra Madre, saw the oxcarts with their wooden disc wheels patiently waiting for their drivers outside in the sharp, chill, winged air of heaven. His longing was so great that his soul was embracing the very spirit of the place as he stood, and as he contemplated the night of despair before him he was beset by the passionate thoughts which harry a man about to meet his mistress after a long journey.

Yvonne was watching the high-piled thunder clouds, each one a galleon, freighted with memories.⁴⁶ There was Popocatepetl too, futurity brooding⁴⁷ on the worried earth and nauseous ocean, drifting, falling among collapsing palaces of lost opportunities. In the prolonged silence emotions rose up within her which were difficult to bear. So many men, so many women, so many different, passionate thoughts, so much love, mysterious and incalculable, whose face might have been hidden, for all she knew of it, away in the remote black rains or far up in the eternal snows. What abstract, cloudy thoughts these were, of ‘love,’ which in her recollections had never come near at all but which she had allowed to plunge past her with its threat of thunder from which her reasoning mind had always carried its white birds⁴⁸ so high in flight? Here was a tempest which had broken over everyone else’s province but her own, illumined by vivid lightning that was not hers, by which her own arid landscape had never been clearly defined.

Today, in spite of her excuses, she knew that she had drawn away physically from the reality of suffering just as in the past she had turned away with her mind. Never in her whole life had she really been ‘in love.’ For that matter she had never known a satisfactory friendship, whether with man or woman, and the deepest tie she had was to her father. It was disconcerting to realize now that the few affairs she had had, with one exception all of them in vacations from Cambridge years ago, had been cursory, matters of curiosity, no more than pleasureless tests of herself, and it distressed her now to think of the studied way she had gone about all this! Her lovers had never existed as persons for her at all. What existence they had was merely as a touchstone by which to estimate something as important to her as its nature was obscure. A touchstone! Yes, her affairs had been every bit as deliberate a part of the curriculum of her vacations as Aristotle or Matthew Arnold.⁴⁹ Nor had she kept any of her lovers as friends. How she hated their tact, their bribery, their sour usage, their dishonesty! And yet, she asked herself, how, after all, could she have expected such calculated passion as hers to have inspired much tenderness or affection? How could she pretend to be surprised that her lovers had grown to dislike her with the savage dislike men usually reserve for enemies of their own sex met on their own ground?

She realized now that after her third abortion in London which was not, however, her last, and which had been really unnecessary, a matter of nerves or hatred, or both, that the tenuity of her experience of ‘love’ had become complete, without predicate. It was a danger and a snare, and, paradoxically, part of the reason for this was that with an important but unconscious part of her she had so desired forthrightness, so desired to be completely ‘natural,’ that she had eschewed the very precautions such deliberation would imply. She had not wished to admit that deliberateness to herself, and she now saw her last experience in Paris the previous summer, when she had given herself to a man she did not even like, as one last attempt on her part to prove that it never had existed.

After the London debacle, she remembered bitterly, as if to compensate her for the affairs and the abortions, while simultaneously as if to mock her with their equal peril and stupidity, had come the accidents.⁵⁰ She saw them again, all of them, happening one after the other. First the motor bicycle accident in Sidney Street, then the motor accident in Trumpington Street, finally the bicycle accident in All Saints Passage, where she had no right to be bicycling anyway. So many accidents of one kind and another did she have that her doctor had suggested seriously to her, as she now recalled, that she might be inviting them in the same way she had invited the abortions and the failure of her affairs, that there had been no need for either and that all had come about, so to say, accidentally on purpose. And with that knowledge the accidents, as it happened, actually did cease.

She travelled, spending vacations with her mother in Paris or Sanary⁵¹ or with her father in Spain. And, by the time she was sure the accidents had really stopped the coincidences began. Hugh, who was Hugh? She had met Hughs all over the world without feeling a pang, but for this particular Hugh, whom she had also met all over the world, always by coincidence, she was beginning to cherish the sort of affection, she thought, that may come over one for the author of a familiar book, read many times, but which suddenly appears in an utterly new light. The experiences one has grown to know so well have become, on the instant, one’s own experiences; the conflicts, one’s own conflicts; the protagonist, oneself. But this protagonist is the projection of a being whose existence is a mystery, his obscure creator. And to him is transferred, from the protagonist, from the experiences and conflicts, from the book, an emotion that, partly narcissistic, is very like love, and like the love, too, of God, for by creating that identity has not the author, in a certain sense, created oneself?

It was the experience of this feeling, but which she had possessed only for authors who were dead, for Keats, and then for Shelley, and, in her adolescence, for Ernest Dowson,⁵² that had brought her closest in her life to what she imagined it to be. She wondered now as she had wondered then if such an emotion, separated from its element of hysterical identification,⁵³ could become, truly, the thing itself.⁵⁴ And as she was trying whimsically to fancy how she might have behaved had Keats or Shelley been alive, her question was answered, and, simultaneously, she knew that, even now, she was falling in love with Hugh. Looking at him by her side, clear-eyed and proud, she felt herself turning to him as the creative self turns on self for food, but turning, above all, in her heart, to the tenderness in him, which God knows she had never previously awakened in anyone.

The world was now totally different from the world of a moment or two before. Everything was charged with a different significance. The fact that this was Mexico and that Hugh and she had met for the first time in Spain became more important too. It was as though she herself were a spiritual conquistador, who had set out from the one country to find reward in the other. She touched the wood of the scaffolding which sent a little shock through her, as if it had responded. And a demon of light and brilliance that had been attempting to possess her all day danced at last with a victorious conflagration in her soul.

She now saw Hugh as the one person who had the power to free her; that by the fusion of their minds and bodies her own shapeless longings would be stilled, her identity completed. He had caused her to realize also, without any special intimacy with her, that her attempt to ‘find out’ something from her previous experiences, had been, in reality, an attempt to ‘be’ something. What a simple matter it was, yet how unexpected! She had only wanted to be a woman. She had wished to be simple and without fear in her answers to life. Yet it was precisely by fear and selfishness, of which the disasters that had occurred in her private life had been the outward configuration, that she had been implicated. Now she saw all this clearly through Hugh, she wanted urgently to tell him so. A peaceful nucleus was forming within her, beyond which was a reality as bright as this day with its gathering clouds, which was her acceptance of life, of its anguish and responsibilities, and its joys.

She divined now that some force⁵⁵ she couldn’t quite grasp, but working through both their lives, had set Hugh continually in her path, as if to say, here is your place on earth, now you are at home; as if he too were life, and goodness and simplicity. A delicious sense of peace rose to the surface of Yvonne’s mind when she realized that the motion of chance which had been responsible for their meetings need never again be obstructed, that having achieved its purpose it would now cooperate in the task of keeping them together. And it was possible finally, to see therefore her penultimate meeting with Hugh in Paris, his visits to her at the hospital, and their parting, in a more significant and poignant light. At that time, and it shamed her to think of it, although she was so happy now that nothing could seem very terrible, she had been having her last abortion and had had to lie about it to him. Now that he would have eventually to be told the truth, which she had not hidden from her father, however, it struck her as of small moment. So great was the strength of her faith in him that she was triumphantly certain it would make no difference, and as this certainty rooted itself, the sea, and all Hugh’s divided loyalties to it and love, the sea which had separated them⁵⁶ and caused him such anguish, took Yvonne’s mind, obliterating all and bridging all. Presently this sea receded until it became a shimmering lake and then that too slowly changed in her mind’s eye to a sheet of glass. But the ocean returned, shattering the glass, burying the past with its disappointments and horrors, spreading to the limits of her consciousness until it lay there boundless and calm.

When the band started Yvonne felt so lighthearted she wanted to sing and a jingle created itself along with the tune they were playing. She plucked at Hugh’s sleeve and took his arm.

“I’ve just thought of a song,” she said with a smile. “Or rather, I’ve been thinking about a song all day.”

“A song,” Hugh grinned, glad she had spoken to him for his thoughts were doleful, he was distressed because he thought she had been suffering and wanted to comfort her.

“It’s a song about money. I don’t know why.”

“We must hear it by all means,” said the Consul, preoccupied, knocking with his stick on the boards and looking first down at his shoes, then up at the sun, which was through his glasses permanently in eclipse, then around the arena and then peering sideways with disapproval at two carpenters in dungarees who had just climbed up behind him to lash something on the scaffolding. “But come round the other side. I’m deaf in that ear.”

“What’s it called?” he asked, as they changed places.

“It hasn’t got a name yet and I don’t know about the tune. It occurred to me all of a sudden when I was having my little neurotic thoughts, and I said to myself: perhaps the peasants don’t have such neurotic problems.”

“Like hell they don’t,” said the Consul. “They all behave like psychopaths.”

“Anyhow, that’s what I was thinking,” said Yvonne. “And I was thinking too that I’d read somewhere that if a fish should suddenly be able to talk, the last thing he’d talk about would be the water. The idea was, that in our case the water is money.”

“It might as well be water anyway,” said the Consul, looking round nervously: someone was behind him. No. But a minute later he had to look round again. Con permiso señor. He had a feeling the police were after him, he had always feared the police. Good God, you couldn’t trust these fellows. Los cacos!⁵⁷ He must have a drink soon or go mad. The effect of the marihuana and of the innumerable drinks he had had already was definitely wearing off. Once he looked up, thinking he heard his name pronounced: ‘Mr. A-ames—’ the sound seemed to come from high up. It was that eclipsed boy up that eclipsed tree over there, high up the tree turning his face to the good hills and trees in the valley and green water, to all the eclipsed mystery and beauty of life, forgetting those who fell by wayside crosses and blackened empty churches crouching among rocks. It was he who had said sadly, clearly, plainly, Mr. A-ames. Yes, his own boyhood, rich with plenitude of dreams of Popocatepetl and Cotopaxi,⁵⁸ had spoken to him, rebukingly, from the top of a tree, or was it the man in Quauhnahuac, who with a cry of triumph and greeting, had just reached the finial⁵⁹ of the slippery pole?

But the boy had only said something quite trivial to a comrade down below as he lolled against the softly swaying bole without hanging on. The band stopped.

“What are the words of your song?” Hugh was asking, looking protectingly down at Yvonne.

“Well, you’ve got to get the rhythm, the rhythm’s the most important part, and now this tune’s stopped it’s difficult, but here goes: a fish—”

“A mackerel.”

“All right, a mackerel then. Now I’ve got it! A mackerel takes the water.⁶⁰ He takes the water for granted. But if you suggested to him. It would be better to live in the fresh air—you have to run fresh and air together like that—you see, it’s like a song by—”

“Eisler,”⁶¹ said Hugh.

“Of course, can you go on?”

“I don’t quite get it,” interrupted the Consul, taking feverish relief in this conversation from the hullabaloo of his nerves. “Do you remember how I wrote all the lyrics of a Girton revue for you one year?”

“Yes, and very good they were, too.”

“Of an almost flawless unsuitability, I should have thought,” he said. “And I’ve never heard of Eisler. But about this fish and this fresh air. Wouldn’t it, so to speak, have jumped at the idea? Unless that is, he was one of those little anti-alcoholic fish⁶² I’m always reading about in the Universal.”

“To meet in a—what’s the word, Hugh? Damn, I’ve forgotten it.”

“Element?”

“That’s it, to meet in another element.”

“Cormorant,”⁶³ suggested the Consul.

“Thank you, Dad. To meet a cormorant. Oh, that won’t do.”

“Or alien,” said Hugh. “To meet in an alien element.”

“An alien-baiter,” said the Consul. “A little alien-baiter for a parlor pink.⁶⁴ Waiting for the fish that dies,”⁶⁵ he added, “a little Moscow goldfish. A splurgeon.”⁶⁶

“How’s this?” asked Yvonne, as the band struck up once more. “To meet in an alien element the lone sniper cormorant? And seagull. A seagull must come into the next line.”

“The holy mackerel,⁶⁷ that must have been,” said her father.

“Well, what would he do now?” asked Yvonne.

“What would he do when he met the cormorant?” asked her father, “or when you suggested to him it would be a good thing to do.”

“When you suggested it to him, of course.”

“He’d say you were crazy,” said the Consul. “He’d just gape at you. That mackerel didn’t know what was good for him. I told you you should have made him a goldfish.”

Hugh laughed.

“That’s right,” said Yvonne, “he would gape. But just how would he gape?”

“He would gape,” said the Consul, “how would he gape? Why, in some sort of goddamned submarine fashion I guess.” He closed his eyes, seeing the periscope rising slowly out of the North Sea and the docking bridge of the Samaritan, collapsing like a pack of cards, suddenly turn into a thunderstorm. “In a manner habitually submarine,”⁶⁸ he added, “how else would he gape?”

“That’s marvelous,” Hugh said. “To say the least he would gape in a manner habitually submarine. Gilbert and Sullivan could do no better.”

“Thank you ladies,” said the Consul, “you’ve got a good song there. But who’s going to sing it?”

“I am,” said Yvonne gaily.

The Consul chuckled. What a pleasant little conversation, he shook his head, how delightful life is! Yeah … But this prolonged intermedio—he couldn't stand this much longer. All this joking like jesting on the scaffold. This week is beginning well,⁶⁹ the condemned man said as they sprung the trap on Monday morning.

“Go ahead and sing it, Yvonne,” Hugh said, desire beginning subtly to nudge him once more.

But the spectators were sighing with relief, there was a leafy rustling among them. Thank God, at last something was beginning in earnest. The buzz of voices, subdued all this while was resumed; the air tingled with suggestions, eloquent insults, repartee, laughter.

The bull clambered to its feet with the rider, a tousle headed red faced Mexican, obviously as impatient and irritated by the whole business as the bull was tired and nervous.

The band struck up Guadalajara⁷⁰ in a bored, nervous manner. But this was a mistake. The tune had been played to death and no one wanted to hear it any more. Even the bull was distressed by it and wagged his head in disapproval. The wrong tone had been set for the show and it was evident that the rider was aware of this and that it didn’t help him. Down up down-down up down-down up down up down-down up down-down up down banged the guitars, and the rider glowered at them.

Then, with an angry look, he took a firmer grip while for a moment or two the animal actually did what was expected of it, convulsing itself violently like a rocking machine and giving little leaps into the air with all four feet.

But soon it relapsed into the old cruising gait and was no longer difficult to ride; making one ponderous circle of the arena, it headed for the pen, opened by the pressure of the crowd, for which it must have been longing for the last half hour, trotting along there with suddenly positive, twinkling hooves.

It was a grotesque, dusty, shuffling dance, it all somewhat resembled the delicious story of Ferdinand the Bull⁷¹ in the little book Yvonne had just read, but without its humor, for it was pathetic, it was almost tragic, she thought, it was like a ballet intended to represent universal impotence. And these feelings were intensified, in spite of the laughter she could not control, by the premature appearance of another, much larger bull which, driven at a near gallop from the loosed pen by the thrusts, pokes, and blows intended to arrest it, on reaching the center of the ring, fell down flat on its face.

The first rider dismounted, looking glum, discredited. Yvonne felt sorry for him as he stood by the fence scratching his head, trying to explain something to a boy standing, marvelously balanced, on the top railing.

Meanwhile, the new bull made two attempts to get up and then lay down again, a horse suddenly galloped triumphantly across the ring with its rider swinging its rope and shouting “Boo, shooo, boo,” in a husky tone, other horsemen appeared with more ropes, the little dog scampered up delightedly from nowhere, scuttling about in circles, but nothing definite happened any longer or seemed likely to happen. Everyone became inevitably resigned to another long wait.

“See the old unhappy bull,”⁷² said the Consul to Yvonne, looking round quickly and back again. “What about a song for the old bull, eh? In the plaza beautiful, waiting with a wild surmise,⁷³ for the ropes that tantalize. Or waiting with seven—why not?⁷⁴—wild surmises for the rope which tantalizes?” He stopped, imagining himself hanging head downward from the crippled maple tree in the front garden, upside down like the clown in the Tarot Pack,⁷⁵ in the branches condors brooding like bishops. “Stout Cortez, the least pacific of all men, ought to come into the next bit,” again he thought he heard his name pronounced: “Mr. A-ames,” the bell-like sound balanced on the wind: it was the boy all right; his own youth up a tree, gazing with a wild surmise at the horrific, at the pander that was Greece, at the whore we knew as Rome.⁷⁶ Mr. A-ames, again the awful sound drifted down to him. But the boy was silent there now, silent on a tree in Quauhnahuac. How did it go on really, he wondered. And the carrion birds⁷⁷ in the skies. “There they are, Yvonne,” he said, and there they were too, the xopilotes, banking beautifully, with fluted wings⁷⁸ catching the sunlight. “My God, what a dismal performance, isn’t anything going to happen?”

Guadalajara, Guadalajara, intoned the band.

“Guadalajara, do you hear that?” Hugh said. “Jesus, which Guadalajara?”⁷⁹

“It’s strange,” said the Consul, without explaining what was strange, and would have turned away altogether but for Hugh, who was obstructing him, gazing intently at the ring.

“Strange about what?” Hugh muttered.

“Strange about the bull,” the Consul was voicing Yvonne’s thoughts, winking, “Yes, the bull. He’s so elusive. There’s your enemy, but he doesn’t want to play ball today. After a time he lies down. Or just falls down like this one here. Say, he’s getting up. But never mind though. See those boys pulling his tail. That’s it. He lies down again. See that—you forget he’s your enemy, you pat him. Actually! Next time you see him you don’t seem to recognize him as an enemy at all. It’s all very confusing.”

“He was an ox,” Hugh said. “That explains everything.”

“Wisely foolish,” murmured the Consul. “An oxymoron.”⁸⁰

“Oh, I do wish they’d get going,” Yvonne groaned, for the show had now become a chaos of ropes and horsemen, so disorganized it was difficult to see purpose in anything or what even merely getting a move on would do. The whooping horsemen had tied up not only a bull—or ox—that had no intention of getting up anyhow but the proceedings as well. There was confusion as to who was going to ride, if the animal were to be ridden at all. It was considered by some spectators that the last rider had not had a fair chance, by others that he should not even have been given that chance. Further to complicate matters it appeared at various times that the scheduled rider was present, was not present, that he was present but was not going to ride, that he was not present but was trying hard to get here. It seemed that none save drunks were anxious to deputize but that drunks were being discouraged. It seemed also, however, that, to the contrary, drunks were being encouraged, for here was one just on the point of riding off now. At one time the first rider, who looked very sulky, was on the point of riding again in spite of all comments, then it turned out that he was too bitterly insulted and was not going to ride on any account.

Finally, the spectators found themselves being turned to, but whether the spokesmen were trying to pacify them or were making a general appeal for a rider Yvonne never found out.

For something had happened at last, and with astounding abruptness: and something enormous too, like the man fired out of the gun, the spinning scissors dancer.⁸¹

It was Hugh.

He had jumped from the scaffolding and landing in the dust at a full knee bend with the muffled bound of a beast, had started at once in the direction of the bull from whom instantly the ropes were being whipped as if by magic.

“Hugh, don’t be a fool, come back here,” called the Consul futilely.

“Hugh!” shouted Yvonne, “have you gone crazy?”

“Olé! Olé!”

“Hurra,”⁸² said the Consul, “you can’t get away from the hurracan.”

A sigh then that was only half applause burst from the spectators. Several in the immediate vicinity of the bull were trying to dissuade him but Hugh brushed them aside.

The bull, surprised by the uproar, had in fact already got to its feet when Hugh, not in the least deterred by this, swiftly mounted; then before anyone could stop him, he was madly cakewalking in the middle of the ring. The rigging was so arranged that he could take a firm grip with one hand while beating the animal’s sides with the other.

The bull, lowering its head, jumped to the left and right with both forelegs simultaneously, as though they were strung together. This too was like a dance or burlesque of a dance which the comic animal with man’s legs executes in the middle of the company at the final curtain of a revue.

Then the bull sank down on his knees. The next time they clambered up the creature tried every possible trick known not only to bulls, but it seemed to Yvonne, also to cats; the cakewalk, the great dipper, the two-backed beast, the galloping frog, the game of the darting paw, the twirley-whirley-trill,⁸³ while Hugh leaned back, holding on grimly, with feet splayed, heels knocking the sweaty flanks.

“Olé!”

“Olé! Olé!”

Yvonne, who had not yet really recovered from her astonishment, felt that she would never as long as she lived be able to forget this scene, the first bull with its map of the Americas on it, the white trousers and bright serapes of a man enticing the second bull shining against the dark trees and now lowering sky, the horses turned instantaneously into clouds of dust by their riders with scorpion-tailed whips, who leaned far out of their bucket saddles to throw, wildly, ropes anywhere and everywhere, Hugh’s absurd but somehow splendid performance in the midst of it all, the boy whose hair was now blowing over his face, high up in the tree.

She would never forget it but in some way she resented it.

Although its horns frequently got caught in the railings, and it was poked with sticks, tickled with switches, a machete, once by a garden rake, although they threw dust and dung in its red, unmysterious eyes, the animal, furiously now, and with an incensed regressive bitterness, hurled itself back time and time again at the pen it had prematurely left, until finally, like Charles Fort’s terrestrial whale,⁸⁴ or Melville’s⁸⁵ for that matter, it had overwhelmed its inanimate adversary, the pen, with catastrophic endearments.

It was not that the thing struck her as consciously cruel, nor was it at first the manifest danger to which Hugh was exposing himself, that tormented her: she implicitly trusted Hugh to be master of the situation: but what, she asked herself, if Hugh should go off to war in the same way, without one word of apology or explanation?

Sweat ran down the Consul’s face. At first, after his surprise, he had been secretly pleased, unable to resist the pleasant feeling that Hugh was showing up these monkeys for what they were worth by his skill, but as the performance grew wilder and wilder, and now as he saw that Hugh was riding straight towards the bullpen for the third time, he became angry and began to mutter nervously to himself.

“After all, it’s damn bad form,” he complained at last to Yvonne. “This showing off.”

“I hadn’t looked at it like that,” said Yvonne, “I’m sure Hugh doesn’t mean it that way.”

And Hugh, utterly concentrated upon the bull, really was not showing off, this side of it had not occurred to him, unless very fleetingly. He simply felt a sharp, irresistible necessity for action. His pent up fury and impotence of the afternoon had burst out and was now directed against a definite object. All his thought was bringing that bull to its knees. That is the way you like to play? This is the way I like to play. You don’t like the bull? Very well, I don’t like the bull either. These thoughts smote his mind, rigid with concentration upon subduing the bull.

There was a roar of generous applause accompanied by the immensely accelerated clangor of guitars, and when the bull was coaxed out into the arena again from the pen where Hugh had ridden it, Yvonne saw that he had not only retained his seat but was urging on the animal to further efforts.

She no longer tried to conceal from herself the effect that Hugh’s performance was having upon her.

She actually began to ache all over, and in response perhaps to some mysterious instinct within her to replace death with life, the longing to touch its very essence became almost unbearable.

The breaking down of the pen had freed a number of other bulls who, becoming really frightened, charged out, scattering in different directions, while Hugh’s creature, really stunned a minute or two before but miraculously too dense to realize it, Yvonne thought, raced back into the middle of the ring with them, like a man running away from a comfortless home a second time, only to fall flat upon its face once more, this time emphatically played out, ridden to a standstill.

The Consul looked away sharply for the bull had been endowed, for a fearful moment, with his own quickly fading features.

Hugh calmly walked off the bull, bowed, shook hands with the waiting rider, and vaulted over the nearest fence.

There was some hesitancy about the applause following him, as though the first time it was spontaneous, but now that the Mexicans had had an opportunity to think about it, to wonder who Hugh was, whether or not he was a gringo, which at first sight had not been apparent, they were not so sure whether they ought to cheer or not.

However thunderous cheers and olés sportingly greeted Hugh as he appeared again on the scaffolding behind Yvonne and the Consul, which increased steadily in volume when it was seen that the Mexican rider, encouraged by what was now a veritable tumult of approbation, had mounted another bull and was riding it without any rigging at all, positively outdoing Hugh’s performance.

Now a machine-gun fire of applause accompanied every antic. The whole show was becoming galvanized, was turning rapidly into a riot, even the bulls loosed from the pen might have smelt something festive in the air as they raced each other around the ring, snorting and shaking their heads with worried delight.

“Good,” said the Consul, sweating and scowling, “Fine. You ride like a fool. I thought that costume was a gag.”

“Thank you, sir,” Hugh panted, “No siree. Texas was once a part of Mexico⁸⁶ though. Would be still if America hadn’t stolen it.”

“So your father didn’t say,” said the Consul. “Have a cigarette? No, I haven’t any.”

“Nor have I.”

“We’ll go and get some, shall we?” said Yvonne, “And we must eat. I’m famished.” She took Hugh’s arm. “You certainly woke the show up—look now, there’s two of them on one bull.”

“Yes, let’s get out of here,” said the Consul, removing his glasses and wiping his forehead. “We’re attracting too much attention. We’ll overstay our welcome.”

“But it’s just getting good,” said Hugh, out of courtesy.

“I’m thirsty,” said the Consul.

“Well, so am I,” said Hugh.

They disentangled themselves from the scaffolding, Hugh, going first, took the Consul’s stick, then helped the others down. He noticed that the Consul, trembling violently, looked angrily at him, and he wondered why.

The Consul, knowing that Hugh had noticed, looked away as they walked on. It was obvious that unless he were to be frankly hostile he would have to make some compromise at first regarding the Farolito.

“What about going to the Salón Ofélia⁸⁷ to eat,” he asked, “if you must eat.”

“How charming,” said Yvonne, “let’s go.” Now they were walking, she was participating fully in Hugh’s triumph and feeling no resentment, only relief.

“And you could have some hamlet and eggs,” said the Consul.

“Ouch!” said Hugh.

Yvonne hummed to herself, taking his arm, she was already living in the preexistence of a new life, while every now and then, as they moved along, she had to jump to keep step with the absurd song about the mackerel that was haunting her. Her joy was so urgent that in the end she had to sing, and they kept step with the words as they marched along, and she taught the words to Hugh.

A mackerel shouldn’t take⁸⁸

Shouldn’t take the water for granted

Yet if you suggested to him

It would be better to live in the fresh air

To meet in an alien element

The lone sniper cormorant

The depth charge pelican

The harpoon gannet

And the rapacious seagull

To grow fine fluted wings

That put the flying fish to shame

If someone suggested to him

That he should have another name

For a fish that swims and sings

For a little fish that swims and sings

To say the least he would gape

In a manner habitually submarine

In a manner habitually submarine.

“How’s that?” she asked.

“Great stuff,” groaned the Consul. “But what does it mean?”

“I don’t know.”

The sky was lowering, a hot wind came in puffs, there was thunder in the air; the glass roof was a lake of silver as they marched down the hill toward the square.

At Las Novedades⁸⁹ they stopped to buy cigarettes. The little man nodded pleasantly to Hugh.

“You find many telephones?” he asked, and added, turning to the Consul as Hugh shook his head, “Qué marca?”

“Marca ‘Alas’.”

“Momentito, por buen favor.”⁹⁰

As they paused for the little man to find the Consul’s brand of cigarettes they saw the grandees approaching in their rags. They slipped by them in the opposite direction, still voyaging on strange seas of thought, gesturing to each other with the thumbs and little fingers of their right hands, their shadows like long birds moving.

“Es un problema insuperable, señor.”

“Claro, pero incontrovertible!”

“Incontestable!”

“Positivamente!”

“Excelentísimo!”⁹¹

The little man handed the Consul his cigarettes.

“Alas?”

“Alas!”

He put a tostón on the counter and waited for his change. He was sweating miserably, his hands trembled so that he could barely hold the white package with the embossed blue wings, he could not even look at his wrist watch. He was in an agony to go to the Farolito and now there would have to be dinner. He did not think he could stand it. Struggling to pick up his change, he asked for the time in English by mistake.

“The time, señor?” said the little man, consulting his watch. “Half past sick by the cock.”

“What?”

“Half past sick by the cock.”⁹²

But at the next moment, barely able to control their laughter, Hugh and Yvonne were counting the chimes, far away, from the San Francisco church: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

“It must be about half past four,” said Hugh.

Then it struck twice more; alas, whispered the echoes, alas, alas.

As they arrived in the town, their shadows were immensely elongated, falling full across the square before them to the door of the Todos Contentos y Yo También, below which the bottom of a crutch had appeared. They paused curiously, looking at their shadows, noticing that the crutch rested for some time where it was, the owner having an argument at the door, or a last drink perhaps.

Soon the sun would be set, Scorpio risen,⁹³ and then there would be no shadows and he would be in need of one,⁹⁴ the Consul thought, remembering Señora Gregorio.

Presently the crutch disappeared, seemed to be hoisted away, the door of the Todos Contentos y Yo También was propped back; they saw something emerge.

Bent double and groaning with the weight, an old lame Indian was carrying another Indian,⁹⁵ yet older and more decrepit, on his back, by means of a strap clamped to his forehead. He carried the older man and his crutches—he carried both their burdens—

They all stood watching the Indian as he disappeared with the old man around a bend in the road, shuffling through the grey white dust in his poor sandals …