DOWNHILL…
‘Let in the clutch, step on the gas,’ the driver threw a smile over his shoulder. ‘Sure, Mike,’ he went on Irish-American for them.
The bus, a 1918 Chevrolet, jerked forward with a noise like startled poultry. It wasn’t full, save for the Consul, who spread himself, in a good mood, drunk-sober-uninhibited; Yvonne sat neutral but smiling: they’d started anyhow. No wind; yet a gust lifted the awnings along the street. Soon they were rolling in a heavy sea of chaotic stone. They passed tall hexagonal stands pasted with advertisements for Yvonne’s cinema: Las Manos de Orlac. Elsewhere posters for the same film showed a murderer’s hands laced with blood.
They advanced slowly, past the Baños de la Libertad, the Casa Brandes (La Primera en el Ramo de Electricidad), a hooded hooting intruder through the narrow tilted streets. At the market they stopped for a group of Indian women with baskets of live fowl. The women’s strong faces were the colour of dark ceramic ware. There was a massiveness in their movements as they settled themselves. Two or three had cigarette stubs behind their ears, another chewed an old pipe. Their good-humoured faces of old idols were wrinkled with sun but they did not smile.
— ‘Look! O.K.,’ the driver of the bus invited Hugh and Yvonne, who were changing places, producing, from beneath his shirt where they’d been nestling, little secret ambassadors of peace, of love, two beautiful white tame pigeons. ‘My — ah —my aerial pigeons.’
They had to scratch the heads of the birds who, arching their backs proudly, shone as with fresh white paint. (Could he have known, as Hugh, from merely smelling the latest headlines had known, how much nearer even in these moments the Government were to losing the Ebro, that it would now be a matter of days before Modesto withdrew altogether?) The driver replaced the pigeons under his white open shirt: ‘To keep them warm. Sure, Mike. Yes, sir,’ he told them.’ Vâmonos!’
Someone laughed as the bus lurched off!; the faces of the other passengers slowly cracked into mirth, the camión was welding the old women into a community. The clock over the market arch, like the one in Rupert Brooke, said ten to three; but it was twenty to. They rambled and bounced into the main highway, the Avenida de la Revolución, past offices whose windows proclaimed, while the Consul nodded his head deprecatingly, Dr Arturo Díaz Vigil, Médico Cirujano y Partero, past the cinema itself. — The old women didn’t look as though they knew about the Battle of the Ebro either. Two of them were holding an anxious conversation, in spite of the clatter and squeak of the patient floorboards, about the price of fish. Used to tourists, they took no notice of them. Hugh conveyed to the Consul:
‘How are the rajah shakes?’
Inhumaciones: the Consul, laughingly pinching one ear, was pointing for answer at the undertakers’ jolting by, where a parrot, head cocked, looked down from its perch suspended in the entrance, above which a sign inquired:
Quo Vadis?
Where they were going immediately was down, at a snail’s pace, by a secluded square with great old trees, their delicate leaves like new spring green. In the garden under the trees were doves and a small black goat. ¿Le gusta este jardin, que es suyo? ¡Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan! Do you like this garden, the notice said, that is yours? See to it that your children do not destroy it!
… There were no children, however, in the garden; just a man sitting alone on a stone bench. This man was apparently the devil himself, with a huge dark red face and horns, fangs, and his tongue hanging out over his chin, and an expression of mingled evil, lechery, and terror. The devil lifted his mask to spit, rose, and shambled through the garden with a dancing, loping step towards a church almost hidden by the trees. There was a sound of clashing machetes. A native dance was going on beyond some awnings by the church, on the steps of which two Americans, Yvonne and he had seen earlier, were watching on tiptoe, craning their necks. ‘Seriously,’ Hugh repeated to the Consul, who seemed calmly to have accepted the devil, while Hugh exchanged a look of regret with Yvonne, for they had seen no dancing in the zócalo, and it was now too late to get out.
‘Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus.’
They were crossing a bridge at the bottom of the hill, over the ravine. It appeared overtly horrendous here. In the bus one looked straight down, as from the maintruck of a sailing ship, through dense foliage and wide leaves that did not at all conceal the treachery of the drop; its steep banks were thick with refuse, which even hung on the bushes. Turning, Hugh saw a dead dog right at the bottom, nuzzling the refuse; white bones showed through the carcass. But above was the blue sky and Yvonne looked happy when Popocatepetl sprang into view, dominating the landscape for a while as they climbed the hill beyond. Then it dropped out of sight around a corner. It was a long circuitous hill. Half-way up, outside a gaudily decorated tavern, a man in a blue suit and strange headgear, swaying gently and eating half a melon, awaited the bus. From the interior of this tavern, which was called El Amor de los Amores, came a sound of singing. Hugh caught sight of what appeared to be armed policemen drinking at the bar. The camión slithered, banking with wheels locked to a stop alongside the sidewalk.
The driver dashed into the tavern, leaving the tilted camión, which meanwhile the man with the melon had boarded, throbbing away to itself. The driver emerged; he hurled himself back on to the vehicle, jamming it almost simultaneously into gear. Then, with an amused glance over his shoulder at the man, and a look to his trusting pigeons, he urged his bus up the hill:
‘Sure, Mike. Sure. O.K. boy.’
The Consul was pointing back at the El Amor de los Amores:
’Viva Franco… That’s one of your Fascist joints, Hugh.’
‘So?’
“That hophead‘s the brother of the proprietor, I believe. I can tell you this much… He’s not an aerial pigeon.’
‘A what?… Oh.’
‘You may not think it, but he’s a Spaniard.’
The seats ran lengthwise and Hugh looked at the man in the blue suit opposite, who had been talking thickly to himself, who now, drunk, drugged, or both, seemed sunk in stupor. There was no conductor on the bus. Perhaps there would be one later, evidently fares were to be paid the driver on getting off, so none bothered him. Certainly his features, high, prominent nose and firm chin, were of strongly Spanish cast. His hands — in one he still clutched the gnawed half-melon — were huge, capable and rapacious. Hands of the conquistador, Hugh thought suddenly. But his general aspect suggested less the conquistador than, it was Hugh’s perhaps too neat idea, the confusion that tends eventually to overtake conquistadores. His blue suit was of quite expensive cut, the open coat, it appeared, shaped at the waist. Hugh had noticed his broad-cuffed trousers draped well over expensive shoes. The shoes however — which had been shined that morning but were soiled with saloon sawdust — were full of holes. He wore no tie. His handsome purple shirt, open at the neck, revealed a gold crucifix. The shirt was torn and in places hung out over his trousers. And for some reason he wore two hats, a kind of cheap Homburg fitting neatly over the broad crown of his sombrero.
‘How do you mean Spaniard?’ Hugh said.
‘They came over after the Moroccan war,’ the Consul said. ‘A pelado,’ he added, smiling.
The smile referred to an argument about this word he’d had with Hugh, who’d seen it defined somewhere as a shoeless illiterate. According to the Consul, this was only one meaning: pelados were indeed ‘peeled ones’, the stripped, but also those who did not have to be rich to prey on the really poor. For instance those half-breed petty politicians who will, in order to get into office just for one year, in which year they hope to put by enough to forswear work the rest of their lives, do literally anything whatsoever, from shining shoes, to acting as one who was not an ‘aerial pigeon’. Hugh understood this word finally to be pretty ambiguous. A Spaniard, say, could interpret it as Indian, the Indian he despised, used, made drunk. The Indian, however, might mean Spaniard by it. Either might mean by it anyone who made a show of himself. It was perhaps one of those words that had actually been distilled out of conquest, suggesting, as it did, on the one hand thief, on the other exploiter. Interchangeable ever were the terms of abuse with which the aggressor discredits those about to be ravaged !
The hill behind them, the bus was stopping opposite the foot of an avenue, with fountains, leading to a hotel: the Casino de la Selva. Hugh made out tennis courts, and white figures moving, the Consul’s eyes pointed — there were Dr Vigil and M. Lamelle. M. Lamelle, if it was he, tossed a ball high into the blue, smacked it down, but Vigil walked right past it, crossing to the other side.
Here the American highway really began; and they enjoyed a brief stretch of good road. The camión reached the railway station, sleepy, signals up, points locked in somnolence. It was closed like a book. Unusual pullmans snored along a siding. On the embankment Pearce oiltanks were pillowed. Their burnished silver lightning alone was awake, playing hide-and-seek among the trees. And on that lonely platform tonight he himself would stand, with his pilgrim’s bundle.
‘How are you?’ (meaning how much more!) Hugh smiled, leaning over to Yvonne.
‘This is such fun –’
Like a child Hugh wanted everyone to be happy on a trip. Even had they been going to the cemetery he would have wanted them to be happy. But Hugh felt more as if, fortified by a pint of bitter, he were going to play in some important ‘away’ match for a school fifteen in which he’d been included at the last minute: when the dread, hard as nails and boots, of the foreign twenty-five line, of the whiter, taller goalposts, expressed itself in a strange exaltation, an urgent desire to chatter. The noonday languor had passed him by: yet the naked realities of the situation, like the spokes of a wheel, were blurred in motion towards unreal high events. This trip now seemed to him the best of all possible ideas. Even the Consul seemed still in a good mood. But communication between them all soon became again virtually impossible; the American highway rolled away into the distance.
They left it abruptly, rough stone walls shut out the view. Now they were rattling between leafy hedges full of wild flowers with deep royal bluebells. Possibly, another kind of convolvulus. Green and white clothing hung on the cornstalks outside the low grass-roofed houses. Here the bright blue flowers climbed right up into the trees that were already snowy with blooms.
To their right, beyond a wall that suddenly became much higher, now lay their grove of the morning. And here, announced by its smell of beer, was the Cervecería Quauhnahuac itself. Yvonne and Hugh, around the Consul, exchanged a look of encouragement and friendship. The massive gate was still open. How swiftly they clattered past! Yet not before Hugh had seen again the blackened and leaf-covered tables and, in the distance, the fountain choked with leaves. The little girl with the armadillo had gone, but the visored man resembling a gamekeeper was standing alone in the courtyard, his hands behind his back, watching them. Along the wall the cypresses stirred gently together, enduring their dust.
Beyond the level-crossing the Tomalín road became smoother for a time. A cool breeze blew gratefully through the windows into the hot camión. Over the plains to their right wound now the interminable narrow-gauge railway, where — though there were twenty-one other paths they might have taken! — they had ridden home abreast. And there were the telegraph poles refusing, for ever, that final curve to the left, and striding straight ahead… In the square too they’d talked of nothing but the Consul. What a relief, and what a joyful relief for Yvonne, when he’d turned up at the Terminal after all! — But the road was rapidly growing much worse again, it was now well-nigh impossible to think, let alone talk —
They jogged on into ever rougher and rougher country. Popocatepetl came in view, an apparition already circling away, that beckoned them forward. The ravine appeared once more on the scene, patiently creeping after them in the distance. The camión crashed down a pothole with a deafening jolt that threw Hugh’s soul between his teeth. And then crashed into, and over, a second series of deeper potholes:
‘This is like driving over the moon,’ he tried to say to Yvonne.
She couldn’t hear… He noticed new fine lines about her mouth, a weariness that had not been there in Paris. Poor Yvonne ! May she be happy. May everything come, somehow, right. May we all be happy. God bless us. Hugh now wondered if he should produce, from his inside pocket, a very small pinch bottle of habanero he had acquired, against emergency, in the square, and frankly offer the Consul a drink. But he obviously didn’t need it yet. A faint calm smile played about the Consul’s lips which from time to time moved slightly, as if, in spite of the racket, the swaying and jolting, and their continually being sent sprawling against one another, he were solving a chess problem, or reciting something to himself.
Then they were hissing along a good stretch of oiled road through fiat wooded country with neither volcano nor ravine in sight. Yvonne had turned sideways and her clear profile sailed along reflected in the window. The more even sounds of the bus wove into Hugh’s brain an idiotic syllogism: I am losing the Battle of the Ebro, I am also losing Yvonne, therefore Yvonne is…
The camión was now somewhat fuller. In addition to the pelado and the old women there were men dressed in their Sunday best, white trousers and purple shirts, and one or two younger women in mourning, probably going to the cemeteries. The poultry were a sad sight. All alike had submitted to their fate; hens, cocks, and turkeys, whether in their baskets, or still loose. With only an occasional flutter to show they were alive they crouched passively under the long seats, their emphatic spindly claws bound with cord. Two pullets lay, frightened and quivering, between the hand brake and the clutch, their wings linked with the levers. Poor things, they had signed their Munich agreement too. One of the turkeys even looked remarkably like Neville Chamberlain. su salud estará a salvo no escupiendo en el interior de este vehículo: these words, over the windscreen, ran the entire breadth of the bus. Hugh concentrated upon different objects in the camión; the driver’s small mirror with the legend running round it — Cooperación de la Cruz Roja, the three picture postcards of the Virgin Mary pinned beside it, the two slim vases of marguerites over the dashboard, the gangrened fire extinguisher, the dungaree jacket and whiskbroom under the seat where the pelado was sitting — he watched him as they hit another bad stretch of road.
Swaying from side to side with his eyes shut, the man was trying to tuck in his shirt. Now he was methodically buttoning his coat on the wrong buttons. But it struck Hugh all this was merely preparatory, a sort of grotesque toilet. For, still without opening his eyes, he had now somehow found room to lie full length on the seat. It was extraordinary, too, how, stretched out, a corpse, he yet preserved the appearance of knowing everything that was going on. Despite his stupor, he was a man on guard. The half-melon jumped from his hand, the chawed fragment full of seeds like raisins rolled on the seat; those closed eyes saw it. His crucifix was slipping off; he was conscious of it. The Homburg fell from his sombrero, slid to the floor, he knew all about it, though he made no effort to pick the hat up. He was guarding himself against theft, while at the same time gathering strength for more debauchery. In order to get into another cantina not his brother’s he might have to walk straight. Such prescience was worthy of admiration.
Nothing but pines, fircones, stones, black earth. Yet that earth looked parched, those stones, unmistakably, volcanic. Everywhere, quite as Prescott informed one, were attestations to Popocatepetl’s presence and antiquity. And here the damned thing was again! Why were there volcanic eruptions? People pretended not to know. Because, they might suggest tentatively, under the rocks beneath the surface of the earth, steam, its pressure constantly rising, was generated; because the rocks and the water, decomposing, formed gases, which combined with the molten material from below; because the watery rocks near the surface were unable to restrain the growing complex of pressures, and the whole mass exploded; the lava flooded out, the gases escaped, and there was your eruption. — But not your explanation. No, the whole thing was a complete mystery still. In movies of eruptions people were always seen standing in the midst of the encroaching flood, delighted by it. Walls fell over, churches collapsed, whole families moved away their possessions in a panic, but there were always these people, jumping about between the streams of molten lava, smoking cigarettes…
Christ! He hadn’t realized how fast they were going, in spite of the road and their being in a 1918 Chevrolet, and it seemed to him that because of this a quite different atmosphere now pervaded the little bus; the men were smiling, the old women gossiping knowingly and chuckling, two boys, newcomers hanging on by their eyebrows at the back, were whistling cheerfully — the bright shirts, the brighter serpentine confetti of tickets, red, yellow, green, blue, dangling from a loop on the ceiling, all contributed to a sense of gaiety, a feeling, almost, of the fiesta itself again, that hadn’t been there before.
But the boys were dropping off, one by one, and the gaiety, short-lived as a burst of sunlight, departed. Brutal-looking candelabra cactus swung past, a ruined church, full of pumpkins, windows bearded with grass. Burned, perhaps, in the revolution, its exterior was blackened with fire, and it had an air of being damned.
— The time has come for you to join your comrades, to aid the workers, he told Christ, who agreed. It had been His idea all the while, only until Hugh had rescued Him those hypocrites had kept him shut up inside the burning church where He couldn’t breathe. Hugh made a speech. Stalin gave him a medal and listened sympathetically while he explained what was on his mind. ‘True… I wasn’t in time to save the Ebro, but I did strike my blow –’ He went off, the star of Lenin on his lapel; in his pocket a certificate; Hero of the Soviet Republic, and the True Church, pride and love in his heart —
Hugh looked out of the window. Well, after all. Silly bastard. But the queer thing was, that love was real. Christ, why can’t we be simple, Christ Jesus why may we not be simple, why may we not all be brothers?
Buses with odd names on them, a procession out of a side-road, were bobbing past in the opposite direction: buses to Tetecala, to Jujuta, to Xuitepec: buses to Xochitepec, to Xoxitepec —
Popocatepelt loomed, pyramidal, to their right, one side beautifully curved as a woman’s breast, the other precipitous, jagged, ferocious. Cloud drifts were massing again, high-piled, behind it. Ixtaccihuatl appeared…
— Xiutepecanochtitlantehuantepec, Quintanarooroo, Tlacolula, Moctezuma, Juarez, Puebla, Tlampam — bong! suddenly snarled the bus. They thundered on, passing little pigs trotting along the road, an Indian screening sand, a bald boy, with ear-rings, sleepily scratching his stomach and swinging madly on a hammock. Advertisements on ruined walls swam by. ¡Atchis!¡ Instante! Resfriados, Dolores, Cafeasperina. Rechace Imitaciones. Las Manos de Orlac. Con Peter horre.
When there was a bad patch the bus rattled and sideslipped ominously, once it altogether ran off the road, but its determination outweighed these waverings, one was pleased at last to have transferred one’s responsibilities to it, lulled into a state from which it would be pain to waken.
Hedges, with low steep banks, in which grew dusty trees, were hemming them in on either side. Without decreasing pace they were running into a narrow, sunken section of road, winding, and so reminiscent of England one expected at any point to see a sign: Public Footpath to Lostwithiel.
¡Desviaciónl¡ Hombres Trabajando!
With a yelping of tyres and brakes they made the detour leftward too quickly. But Hugh had seen a man, whom they’d narrowly missed, apparently lying fast asleep under the hedge on the right side of the road.
Neither Geoffrey nor Yvonne, staring sleepily out of the opposite window, had seen him. Nor did anyone else, were they aware of it, seem to think it peculiar a man should choose to sleep, however perilous his position, in the sun on the main road.
Hugh leaned forward to call out, hesitated, then tapped the driver on the shoulder; almost at the same moment the bus leaped to a standstill.
Guiding the whining vehicle swiftly, steering an erratic course with one hand, the driver, craning out of his seat to watch the corners behind and before, reversed out of the detour back into the narrow highway.
The friendly harsh smell of exhaust gases was tempered with the hot tar smell from the repairs, ahead of them now, where the road was broader with a wide grass margin between it and the hedge, though nobody was working there, everyone knocked off for the day possibly hours before, and there was nothing to be seen, just the soft, indigo carpet sparkling and sweating away to itself.
There appeared now, standing alone in a sort of rubbish heap where this grass margin stopped, opposite the detour, a stone wayside cross. Beneath it lay a milk bottle, a funnel, a sock, and part of an old suitcase.
And now, farther back still, in the road, Hugh saw the man again. His face covered by a wide hat, he was lying peacefully on his back with his arms stretched out towards this wayside cross, in whose shadow, twenty feet away, he might have found a grassy bed. Nearby stood a horse meekly cropping the hedge.
As the bus jerked to another stop the pelado, who was still lying down, almost slid from the seat to the floor. Managing to recover himself though, he not only reached his feet and an equilibrium he contrived remarkably to maintain but had, with one strong counter-movement, arrived half-way to the exit, crucifix fallen safely in place around his neck, hats in one hand, what remained of the melon in the other. With a look that might have withered at its inception any thought of stealing them, he placed the hats carefully on a vacant seat near the door, then, with exaggerated care, let himself down to the road. His eyes were still only half open, and they preserved a dead glaze. Yet there could be no doubt he had already taken in the whole situation. Throwing away the melon he started over towards the man, stepping tentatively, as over imaginary obstacles. But his course was straight, he held himself erect.
Hugh, Yvonne, the Consul, and two of the male passengers got out and followed him. None of the old women moved.
It was stiflingly hot in the sunken deserted road. Yvonne gave a nervous cry and turned on her heel; Hugh caught her arm.
‘Don’t mind me. It’s just that I can’t stand the sight of blood, damn it.’
She was climbing back into the camión as Hugh came up with the Consul and the two passengers.
The pelado was swaying gently over the recumbent man who was dressed in the usual loose white garments of the Indian.
There was not, however, much blood in sight, save on one side of his hat.
But the man was certainly not sleeping peacefully. His chest heaved like a spent swimmer’s, his stomach contracted and dilated rapidly, one fist clenched and unclenched in the dust…
Hugh and the Consul stood helplessly, each, he thought, waiting for the other to remove the Indian’s hat, to expose the wound each felt must be there, checked from such action by a common reluctance, perhaps an obscure courtesy. For each knew the other was also thinking it would be better still should one of the passengers, even the pelado, examine the man.
As nobody made any move at all Hugh grew impatient. He shifted from foot to foot. He looked at the Consul expectantly: he’d been in this country long enough to know what should be done, moreover he was the one among them most nearly representing authority. Yet the Consul seemed lost in reflection. Suddenly Hugh stepped forward impulsively and bent over the Indian — one of the passengers plucked his sleeve.
‘Har you throw your cigarette?’
‘Throw it away.’ The Consul woke up. ‘Forest fires.’
‘Si, they have prohibidated it.’
Hugh stamped his cigarette out and was about to bend over the man once more when the passenger again plucked his sleeve:
‘No, no,’ he said, tapping his nose, ‘they har prohibidated that, también.’
‘You can’t touch him — it’s the law,’ said the Consul sharply, who looked now as though he would like to get as far from this scene as possible, if necessary even by means of the Indian’s horse. ‘For his protection. Actually it’s a sensible law. Otherwise you might become an accessory after the fact.’
The Indian’s breathing sounded like the sea dragging itself down a stone beach.
A single bird flew, high.
‘But the man may be dy –’ Hugh muttered to Geoffrey.
‘God, I feel terrible,’ the Consul replied, though it was a fact he was about to take some action, when the pelado anticipated him: he went down on one knee and, quick as lightning, whipped off the Indian’s hat.
They all peered over, seeing the cruel wound on the side of his head, where the blood had almost coagulated, the flushed moustachioed face turned aside, and before they stood back Hugh caught a glimpse of a sum of money, four or five silver pesos and a handful of centavos, that had been placed neatly under the loose collar to the man’s blouse, which partly concealed it. The pelado replaced the hat and, straightening himself, made a hopeless gesture with hands now blotched with half-dried blood.
How long had he been here, lying in the road?
Hugh gazed after the pelado on his way back to the camión, and then, once more, at the Indian, whose life, as they talked, seemed gasping away from them all. ‘Diantre! ¿Dónde buscamos un médico?’ he asked stupidly.
This time from the camión, die pelado made again that gesture of hopelessness, which was also like a gesture of sympathy: what could they do, he appeared trying to convey to them through the window, how could they have known, when they got out, that they could do nothing?
‘Move his hat farther down though so that he can get some air,’ the Consul said, in a voice that betrayed a trembling tongue; Hugh did this and, so swiftly he did not have time to see the money again, also placed the Consul’s handkerchief over the wound, leaving it held in place by the balanced sombrero.
The driver now came for a look, tall, in his white shirt sleeves, and soiled whipcord breeches like bellows, inside high-laced, dirty boots. With his bare tousled head, laughing dissipated intelligent face, shambling yet athletic gait, there was something lonely and likeable about this man whom Hugh had seen twice before walking by himself in the town.
Instinctively you trusted him. Yet here, his indifference seemed remarkable; still, he had the responsibility of the bus, and what could he do, with his pigeons?
From somewhere above the clouds a lone plane let down a single sheaf of sound.
— ‘Pobrecito.’
— ‘Chingar.’
Hugh was aware that gradually these remarks had been taken up as a kind of refrain around him — for their presence, together with the camión having stopped at all, had ratified approach at least to the extent that another male passenger, and two peasants hitherto unnoticed, and who knew nothing, had joined the group about the stricken man whom nobody touched again — a quiet rustling of futility, a rustling of whispers, in which the dust, the heat, the bus itself with its load of immobile old women and doomed poultry, might have been conspiring, while only these two words, the one of compassion, the other of obscene contempt, were audible above the Indian’s breathing.
The driver, having returned to his camión, evidently satisfied all was as it should be save he had stopped on the wrong side of the road, now began to blow his horn, yet far from this producing the desired effect, the rustling punctuated by a heckling accompaniment of indifferent blasts, turned into a general argument.
Was it robbery, attempted murder, or both? The Indian had probably ridden from market, where he’d sold his wares, with much more man that four or five pesos hidden by the hat, with mucho dinero, so that a good way to avoid suspicion of theft was to leave a little of the money, as had been done. Perhaps it wasn’t robbery at all, he had only been thrown from his horse? Posseebly. Imposseebly.
Sí, hombre, but hadn’t the police been called? But clearly somebody was already going for help. Chingar. One of them now should go for help, for the police. An ambulance — the Cruz Roja — where was the nearest phone?
But it was absurd to suppose the police were not on their way. How could the chingados be on their way when half of them were on strike? No it was only a quarter of them that were on strike. They would be on their way, all right though. A taxi? No, hombre, there was a strike there too. — But was there’ any truth, someone chimed in, in the rumour that the Servicio de Ambulancia had been suspended? It was not a red, but a green cross anyhow, and their business began only when they were informed. Get Dr Figueroa. Un hombre noble. But there was no phone. Oh, there was a phone once, in Tomalín, but it had decomposed. No, Dr Figueroa had a nice new phone. Pedro, the son of Pepe, whose mother-in-law was Josefina, who also knew, it was said, Vincente González, had carried it through the streets himself.
Hugh (who had wildly thought of Vigil playing tennis, of Guzmán, wildly of the habanero in his pocket) and the Consul also had their personal argument. For the fact remained, whoever had placed the Indian by the roadside — though in that case why not on the grass, by the cross? — who had slipped the money for safety in his collar — but perhaps it slipped there of its own accord — who had providently tied his horse to the tree in the hedge it was now cropping — yet was it necessarily his horse? —probably was, whoever he was, wherever he was — or they were, who acted with such wisdom and compassion — even now getting help.
There was no limit to their ingenuity. Though the most potent and final obstacle to doing anything about the Indian was this discovery that it wasn’t one’s own business, but someone else’s. And looking round him, Hugh saw that this too was just what everyone else was arguing. It is not my business, but, as it were, yours, they all said, as they shook their heads, and no, not yours either, but someone else’s, their objections becoming more and more involved, more and more theoretical, till at last the discussion began to take a political turn.
This turn, as it happened, made no sense to Hugh, who was thinking that had Joshua appeared at this moment to make the sun stand still, a more absolute dislocation of time could not have been created.
Yet it was not that time stood still. Rather was it time was moving at different speeds, the speed at which the man seemed dying contrasting oddly with the speed at which everybody was finding it impossible to make up their minds.
However the driver had given up blowing his horn, he was about to tinker with the engine, and leaving the unconscious man the Consul and Hugh walked over to the horse, which, with its cord reins, empty bucket saddle, and jangling heavy iron sheaths for stirrups, was calmly chewing the convolvulus in the hedge, looking innocent as only one of its species can when under mortal suspicion. Its eyes, that had shut blandly at their approach, now opened, wicked and plausible. There was a sore on its hipbone and on the beast’s rump a branded number seven.
‘Why — good God — this must be the horse Yvonne and I saw this morning!’
‘You did, eh? Well.’ The Consul made to feel, though did not touch, the horse’s surcingle. ‘That’s funny… So did I. That is, I think I saw it.’ He glanced over at the Indian in the road as though trying to tear something out of his memory. ‘Did you notice if it had any saddlebags on when you saw it? It had when I think I saw it.’
‘It must be the same fellow.’
‘I don’t suppose if the horse kicked the man to death it would have sufficient intelligence to kick its saddlebags off too, and hide them somewhere, do you –’
But the bus, with a terrific hooting, was going off without them.
It came at them a little, then stopped, in a wider part of the road, to let through two querulous expensive cars that had been held up behind. Hugh shouted at them to halt, the Consul half waved to someone who perhaps half recognized him, while the cars, that both bore upon their rear number-plates the sign ‘Diplomático’, surged on past, bouncing on their springs, and brushing the hedges, to disappear ahead in a cloud of dust. From the second car’s rear seat a Scotch terrier barked at them merrily.
‘The diplomatic thing, doubtless.’
The Consul went to see to Yvonne; the other passengers, shielding their faces against the dust, climbed on board the bus which had continued to the detour where, stalled, it waited still as death, as a hearse. Hugh ran to the Indian. His breathing sounded fainter, and yet more laboured. An uncontrollable desire to see his face again seized Hugh and he stooped over him. Simultaneously the Indian’s right hand raised itself in a blind groping gesture, the hat was partially pushed away, a voice muttered or groaned one word:
‘Compañero.’
— ‘The hell they won’t,’ Hugh was saying, why he scarcely knew, a moment later to the Consul. But he’d detained the camión, whose engine had started once more, a little longer, and he watched the three smiling vigilantes approach, tramping through the dust, with their holsters slapping their thighs.
‘Come on, Hugh, they won’t let you on the bus with him, and you’ll only get hauled into jail and entangled in red tape for Christ knows how long,’ the Consul was saying. ‘They’re not the pukka police anyhow, only those birds I told you about… Hugh –’
‘Momentito —’ Hugh was almost immediately expostulating with one of the vigilantes — the other two had gone over to the Indian — while the driver, wearily, patiently, honked. Then the policeman pushed Hugh towards the bus: Hugh pushed back. The policeman dropped his hand and began to fumble with his holster: it was a manoeuvre, not to be taken seriously. With his other hand he gave Hugh a further shove, so that, to maintain balance, Hugh was forced to ascend the rear step of the bus which, at that instant suddenly, violently, moved away with them. Hugh would have jumped down only the Consul, exerting his strength, held him pinned to a stanchion.
‘Never mind, old boy, it would have been worse than the windmills.’ –’ What windmills?’
Dust obliterated the scene…
The bus thundered on, reeling, cannonading, drunk. Hugh sat staring at the quaking, shaking floor.
— Something like a tree stump with a tourniquet on it, a severed leg in an army boot that someone picked up, tried to unlace, and then put down, in a sickening smell of petrol and blood, half reverently on the road; a face that gasped for a cigarette, turned grey, and was cancelled; headless things, that sat, with protruding windpipes, fallen scalps, bolt upright in motorcars; children piled up, many hundreds; screaming burning things; like the creatures, perhaps, in Geoff’s dreams: among The stupid props of war’s senseless Titus Andronicus, the horrors that could not even make a good story, but which had been, in a flash, evoked by Yvonne when they got out, Hugh moderately case-hardened, could have acquitted himself, have done something, have not done nothing…
Keep the patient absolutely quiet in a darkened room. Brandy may sometimes be given to the dying.
Hugh guiltily caught the eye of an old woman. Her face was completely expressionless… Ah, how sensible were these old women, who at least knew their own mind, who had made a silent communal decision to have nothing to do with the whole affair. No hesitation, no fluster, no fuss. With what solidarity, sensing danger, they had clutched their baskets of poultry to them, when they stopped, or peered round to identify their property, then had sat, as now, motionless. Perhaps they remembered the days of revolution in the valley, the blackened buildings, the communications cut off, those crucified and gored in the bull-ring, the pariah dogs barbecued in the market place. There was no callousness in their faces, no cruelty. Death they knew, better than the law, and their memories were long. They sat ranked now, motionless, frozen, discussing nothing, without a word, turned to stone. It was natural to have left the matter to the men. And yet, in these old women it was as if, through the various tragedies of Mexican history, pity, the impulse to approach, and terror, the impulse to escape (as one had learned at college), having replaced it, had finally been reconciled by prudence, the conviction it is better to stay where you are.
And what of the other passengers, the younger women in mourning – there were no women in mourning; they’d all got out, apparently, and walked; since death, by the roadside, must not be allowed to interfere with one’s plans for resurrection, in the cemetery. And the men in the purple shirts, who’d had a good look at what was going on, yet hadn’t stirred from the bus? Mystery. No one could be more courageous than a Mexican. But this was not clearly a situation demanding courage. Frijoles for all : Tierra, Libertad, Justicia y Ley. Did all that mean anything? ¿Quién sabe? They weren’t sure of anything save that it was foolish to get mixed up with the police, especially if they weren’t proper police; and this went equally for the man who’d plucked Hugh’s sleeve, and the two other passengers who’d joined in the argument around the Indian, now all dropping off the bus going full speed, in their graceful, devil-may-care fashion.
While as for him, the hero of the Soviet Republic and the True Church, what of him, old camarado, had he been found wanting? Not a bit of it. With the unerring instinct of all war correspondents with any first-aid training he had been only too ready to produce the wet blue bag, the lunar caustic, the camel’s-hair brush.
He had remembered instantly that the word shelter must be understood as including an extra wrap or umbrella or temporary protection against the rays of the sun. He had been on the lookout immediately for possible clues to diagnosis such as broken ladders, stains of blood, moving machinery, and restive horses. He had, but it hadn’t done any good, unfortunately.
And the truth was, it was perhaps one of those occasions when nothing would have done any good. Which only made it worse than ever. Hugh raised his head and half looked at Yvonne. The Consul had taken her hand and she was holding his hand tightly.
The camión, hastening towards Tomalín, rolled and swayed as before. Some more boys had jumped on the rear, and were whistling. The bright tickets winked with the bright colours. There were more passengers, they came running across the fields, and the men looked at each other with an air of agreement, the bus was out-doing itself, it had never before gone so fast, which must be because it too knew today was a holiday.
An acquaintance of the driver’s, perhaps the driver for the return journey, had by now added himself to the vehicle. He dodged round the outside of the bus with native skill, taking the fares through the open windows. Once, when they were breasting an incline, he even dropped off to the road on the left, swerved round behind the camión at a run, to appear again on the right, grinning in at them clownishly.
A friend of his sprang on the bus. They crouched, one on either side of the bonnet, by the two front mudguards, every so often joining hands over the radiator cap, while the first man, leaning dangerously outwards, looked back to see if one of the rear tyres, which had acquired a slow puncture, was holding. Then he went on taking fares.
Dust, dust, dust — it filtered in through the windows, a soft invasion of dissolution, filling the vehicle.
Suddenly the Consul was nudging Hugh, inclining his head towards the pelado, whom Hugh had not forgotten however : he had been sitting bolt upright all this time, fidgeting with something in his lap, coat buttoned, both hats on, crucifix adjusted, and wearing much the same expression as before, though after his oddly exemplary behaviour in the road, he seemed much refreshed and sobered.
Hugh nodded, smiling, lost interest; the Consul nudged him again :
‘Do you see what I see?’
‘What is it?’
Hugh shook his head, looked obediently towards the pelado, could see nothing, then saw, at first without comprehending.
The pelado’s smeared conquistador’s hands, that had clutched the melon, now clutched a sad bloodstained pile of silver pesos and centavos.
The pelado had stolen the dying Indian’s money.
Moreover, surprised at this point by the conductor grinning in the window, he carefully selected some coppers from this little pile, smiled round at the preoccupied passengers as though he almost expected some comment to be made upon his cleverness, and paid his fare with them.
But no comment was made, for the good reason none save the Consul and Hugh seemed aware quite how clever he was.
Hugh now produced the small pinch bottle of habanero, handing it to Geoff, who passed it to Yvonne. She choked, had still noticed nothing; and it was as simple as that; they all took a short drink.
– What was so astonishing on second thoughts was not that on an impulse the pelado should have stolen the money, but that he was making now only this half-hearted effort to conceal it, that he should be continually opening and closing his palm with the bloody silver and copper coins for anyone to see who wished.
It occurred to Hugh he was not trying to conceal it at all, that he was perhaps attempting to persuade the passengers, even though they knew nothing about it, that he had acted from motives explicable as just, that he had taken the money merely to keep it safe which, as had just been shown by his own action, no money could reasonably be called in a dying man’s collar on the Tomalín road, in the shadow of the Sierra Madre.
And further, suppose he were suspected of being a thief, his eyes, that were now fully open, almost alert, and full of mischief, said to them, and were arrested, what chance then would the Indian should he survive have of seeing his money again? Of course, none, as everyone well knew. The real police might be honourable, of the people. But were he arrested by these deputies, these other fellows, they would simply steal it from him, that much was certain, as they would even now be stealing it from the Indian, but for his kindly action.
Nobody, therefore, who was genuinely concerned about the Indian’s money, must suspect anything of the sort, or at any rate, must not think too clearly about it; even if now, in the camión, he should choose to stop juggling the money from hand to hand, like that, or slip part of it into his pocket, like that, or even supposing what remained happened to slip accidentally into his other pocket, like that – and this performance was undoubtedly rather for their own benefit, as witnesses and foreigners — no significance attached to it, none of these gestures meant that he had been a thief, or that, in spite of excellent intentions, he had decided to steal the money after all, and become a thief.
And this remained true, whatever happened to the money, since his possession of it was open and above board, for all the world to know about. It was a recognized thing, like Abyssinia.
The conductor went on taking the remaining fares and now, concluded, gave them to the driver. The bus trampled on faster; the road narrowed again, becoming dangerous.
Downhill… The driver kept his hand on the screaming emergency brake as they circled down into Tomalín. On the right was a sheer unguarded drop, a huge scrub-covered dusty hill leaned from the hollow below, with trees jutting out side-ways —
Ixtaccihuatl had slipped out of sight but as, descending, they circled round and round, Popocatepetl slid in and out of view continually, never appearing the same twice, now far away, then vastly near at hand, incalculably distant at one moment, at the next looming round the corner with its splendid thickness of sloping fields, valleys, timber, its summit swept by clouds, slashed by hail and snow…
Then a white church, and they were in a town once more, a town of one long street, a cul-de-sac, and many paths, that converged upon a small lake or reservoir ahead, in which people were swimming, beyond which lay the forest. By this lake was the bus stop.
The three of them stood again in the dust, dazzled by the whiteness, the blaze of the afternoon. The old women and the other passengers had gone. From a doorway came the plangent chords of a guitar, and at hand was the refreshing sound of rushing water, of a falls. Geoff pointed the way and they set off in the direction of the Arena Tomalín.
But the driver and his acquaintance were going into a pulquería. They were followed by the pelado. He walked very straight, stepping high, and holding his hats on, as though the wind were blowing, on his face a fatuous smile, not of triumph, almost of entreaty.
He would join them; some arrangement would be made. ¿Quién sabe?
They stared after them as the twin doors of the tavern swung to: — it had a pretty name, the Todos Contentos y Yo También. The Consul said nobly:
‘Everybody happy, including me.’
And including those, Hugh thought, who effortlessly, beautifully, in the blue sky above them, floated, the vultures – xopilotes, who wait only for the ratification of death.