ARENA Tomalín…
— What a wonderful time everybody was having, how happy they were, how happy everyone was! How merrily Mexico laughed away its tragic history, the past, the underlying death!
It was as though she had never left Geoffrey, never gone to America, never suffered the anguish of the last year, as though even, Yvonne felt a moment, they were in Mexico again for the first time; there was that same warm poignant happy sense, indefinable, illogically, of sorrow that would be overcome, of hope — for had not Geoffrey met her at the Bus Terminal? — above all of hope, of the future —
A smiling, bearded giant, a white serape decorated with cobalt dragons flung over his shoulder, proclaimed it. He was stalking importantly around the arena, where the boxing would be on Sunday, propelling through the dust — the ‘Rocket’ it might have been, the first locomotive.
It was a marvellous peanut wagon. She could see its little donkey engine toiling away minutely inside, furiously grinding the peanuts. How delicious, how good, to feel oneself, in spite of all the strain and stress of the day, the journey, the bus, and now the crowded rickety grandstand, part of the brilliantly coloured serape of existence, part of the sun, the smells, the laughter!
From time to time the peanut wagon’s siren jerked, its fluted smokestack belched, its polished whistle shrieked. Apparently the giant didn’t want to sell any peanuts. Simply, he couldn’t resist showing off this engine to everyone: see, this is my possession, my joy, my faith, perhaps even (he would like it to be imagined) my invention! And everyone loved him.
He was pushing the wagon, all of a final triumphant belch and squeal, from the arena just as the bull shot out of a gate on the opposite side.
A merry bull at heart too — obviously. ¿Por qué no? It knew it wasn’t going to be killed, merely to play, to participate in the gaiety. But the bull’s merriment was controlled as yet; after its explosive entrance it began to cruise round the edge of the ring slowly, thoughtfully, though raising much dust. It was prepared to enjoy the game as much as anyone, at its own expense if need be, only its dignity must receive proper recognition first.
Nevertheless some people sitting on the rude fence that enclosed the ring scarcely bothered to draw their legs up at its approach, while others lying prone on the ground just outside, with their heads as if thrust through luxurious stocks, did not withdraw an inch.
On the other hand some responsive borrachos straying into the ring prematurely essayed to ride the bull. This was not playing the game : the bull must be caught in a special way, fair play was in order, and they were escorted off, tottering, weak-kneed, protesting, yet always gay…
The crowd, in general more pleased with the bull even than with the peanut vendor, started to cheer. Newcomers gracefully swung up on to fences, to appear standing there, marvellously balanced, on the top railings. Muscular hawkers lifted aloft, in one sinewy stretch of the forearm, heavy trays brimmed with multi-coloured fruits. A boy stood high upon the crotch of a tree, shading his eyes as he gazed over the jungle at the volcanoes. He was looking for an airplane in the wrong direction; she made it out herself, a droning hyphen in abyssal blue. Thunder was in the air though, at her back somewhere, a tingle of electricity.
The bull repeated his tour of the ring at a slightly increased though still steadily measured gait, deviating only once when a smart little dog snapping at his heels made him forget where he was going.
Yvonne straightened her back, pulled down her hat, and began to powder her nose, peering into the traitorous mirror of the bright enamel compact. It reminded her that only five minutes ago she had been crying and imaged too, nearer, looking over her shoulder, Popocatepetl.
The volcanoes! How sentimental one could become about them! It was ‘volcano’ now; however she moved the mirror she couldn’t get poor Ixta in, who, quite eclipsed, fell away sharply into invisibility, while Popocatepetl seemed even more beautiful for being reflected, its summit brilliant against pitch-massed cloud banks. Yvonne ran one finger down her cheek, drew down an eyelid. It was stupid to have cried, in front of the little man at the door of Las Novedades too, who’d told them it ‘was half past three by the cock’, then that it was ‘imposseebly’ to phone because Dr Figueroa had gone to Xiutepec…
‘ – Forward to the bloody arena then,’ the Consul had said savagely, and she had cried. Which was almost as stupid as to have turned back this afternoon, not at the sight, but at the mere suspicion of blood. That was her weakness though, and she remembered the dog that was dying on the street in Honolulu, rivulets of blood streaked the deserted pavement, and she had wanted to help, but fainted instead, just for a minute, and then was so dismayed to find herself lying there alone on the kerb —what if anyone had seen her?— she hurried away without a word, only to be haunted by the memory of the wretched abandoned creature so that once — but what was the good thinking of that? Besides, hadn’t everything possible been done? It wasn’t as if they’d come to the bullthrowing without first making sure there was no phone. And even had there been one! So far as she could make out, the poor Indian was obviously being taken care of when they left, so now she seriously thought of it, she couldn’t understand why — She gave her hat a final pat before the mirror, then blinked. Her eyes were tired and playing tricks. For a second she’d had the awful sensation that, not Popocatepetl, but the old woman with the dominoes that morning, was looking over her shoulder. She closed the compact with a snap, and turned to the others smiling.
Both the Consul and Hugh were staring gloomily at the arena.
From the grandstand around her came a few groans, a few belches, a few half-hearted olés, as now the bull, with two shuffling broom-like sweeps of the head along the ground, drove away the dog again and resumed his circuit of the ring. But no gaiety, no applause. Some of the rail sitters actually nodded with slumber. Someone else was tearing a sombrero to pieces while another spectator was trying unsuccessfully to skim, like a boomerang, a straw hat at a friend. Mexico was not laughing away her tragic history; Mexico was bored. The bull was bored. Everyone was bored, perhaps had been all the time. All that had happened was that Yvonne’s drink in the bus had taken effect and was now wearing off. As amid boredom the bull circled the arena and, boredom, he now finally sat down in a corner of it.
‘Just like Ferdinand –’ Yvonne began, still almost hopefully.
‘Nandi,’ the Consul (and ah, had he not taken her hand in the bus?) muttered, peering sideways with one eye through cigarette smoke at the ring, ‘the bull, I christen him Nandi, vehicle of Siva, from whose hair the River Ganges flows, and who has also been identified with the Vedic storm-god Vindra — known to the ancient Mexicans as Huracán.’
‘For Jesus’ sake, papa,’ Hugh said, ‘thank you.’
Yvonne sighed; it was a tiresome and odious spectacle, really. The only people happy were the drunks. Gripping tequila or mescal bottles they tottered into the ring, approached the recumbent Nandi, and sliding and tripping over each other were chased out again by several charros, who now attempted to drag the miserable bull to its feet.
But the bull would not be dragged. At last a small boy no one had seen before appeared to nip its tail with his teeth, and as the boy ran away, the animal clambered up convulsively. Instantly it was lassoed by a cowboy mounted on a malicious-looking horse. The bull soon kicked itself free: it had been roped only around one foot, and walked from the scene shaking its head, then catching sight of the dog once more, wheeled, and pursued it a short distance…
There was suddenly more activity in the arena. Presently everyone there, whether on horseback, pompously, or on foot —running or standing still, or swaying with an old serape or rug or even a rag held out — was trying to attract the bull.
The poor old creature seemed now indeed like someone being drawn, lured, into events of which he has no real comprehension, by people with whom he wishes to be friendly, even to play, who entice him by encouraging that wish and by whom, because they really despise and desire to humiliate him, he is finally entangled.
… Yvonne’s farther made his way towards her, through the seats, hovering, responding eagerly as a child to anyone who held out a friendly hand, her father, whose laughter in memory still sounded so warmly rich and generous, and whom the small sepia photograph she still carried with her depicted as a young captain in the uniform of the Spanish-American war, with earnest candid eyes beneath a high fine brow, a full-lipped sensitive mouth beneath the dark silky moustache, and a cleft chin — her father, with his fatal craze for invention, who had once so confidently set out for Hawaii to make his fortune by raising pineapples. In this he had not succeeded. Missing army life, and abetted by his friends, he wasted time tinkering over elaborate projects. Yvonne had heard that he’d tried to make synthetic hemp from the pineapple tops and even attempted to harness the volcano behind their estate to run the hemp machine. He sat on the lanai sipping okoolihao and singing plaintive Hawaiian songs, while the pineapples rotted in the fields, and the native help gathered round to sing with him, or slept through the cutting season, while the plantation ran into weeds and ruin, and the whole place hopelessly into debt. That was the picture; Yvonne remembered little of the period save her mother’s death. Yvonne was then six. The World War, together with the final foreclosure, was approaching, and with it the figure of her Uncle Macintyre, her mother’s brother, a wealthy Scotchman with financial interests in South America, who had long prophesied his brother-in-law’s failure, and yet to whose large influence it was undoubtedly due that, all at once and to everyone’s surprise, Captain Constable became American consul to Iquique.
— Consul to Iquique!… Or Quauhnahuac! How many times in the misery of the last year had Yvonne not tried to free herself of her love for Geoffrey by rationalizing it away, by analysing it away, by telling herself — Christ, after she’d waited, and written at first hopefully, with all her heart, then urgently, frantically, at last despairingly, waited and watched every day for the letter — ah, that daily crucifixion of the post!
She looked at the Consul, whose face for a moment seemed to have assumed that brooding expression of her father’s she remembered so well during those long war years in Chile. Chile! It was as if that republic of stupendous coastline yet narrow girth, where all thoughts bring up at Cape Horn, or in the nitrate country, had had a certain attenuating influence on his mind. For what, precisely, was her father brooding about all that time, more spiritually isolated in the land of Bernardo O’Higgins than was once Robinson Crusoe, only a few hundred miles from the same shores? Was it of the outcome of the war itself, or of obscure trade agreements he perhaps initiated, or the lot of American sailors stranded in the Tropic of Capricorn? No, it was upon a single notion that had not, however, reached its fruition till after the Armistice. Her father had invented a new kind of pipe, insanely complicated, that one took to pieces for purposes of cleanliness. The pipes came into something like seventeen pieces, came, and thus remained, since apparently none save her father knew how to put them together again. It was a fact that the Captain did not smoke a pipe himself. Nevertheless, as usual, he had been led on and encouraged… When his factory in Hilo burned down within six weeks of its completion he had returned to Ohio where he was born and for a time worked in a wire-fence company.
And there, it had happened. The bull was hopelessly entangled. Now one, two, three, four more lassoes, each launched with a new marked lack of friendliness, caught him. The spectators stamped on the wooden scaffolding, clapping rhythmically, with-out enthusiasm. — Yes, it struck her now that this whole business of the bull was like a life; the important birth, the fair chance, the tentative, then assured, then half-despairing circulations of the ring, an obstacle negotiated — a feat improperly recognized — boredom, resignation, collapse: then another, more convulsive birth, a new start; the circumspect endeavours to obtain one’s bearings in a world now frankly hostile, the apparent but deceptive encouragement of one’s judges, half of whom were asleep, the swervings into the beginnings of disaster because of that same negligible obstacle one had surely taken before at a stride, the final enmeshment in the toils of enemies one was never quite certain weren’t friends more clumsy than actively ill-disposed, followed by disaster, capitulation, disintegration —
— The failure of a wire-fence company, the failure, rather less emphatic and final, of one’s father’s mind, what were these things in the face of God or destiny? Captain Constable’s be-setting illusion was that he’d been cashiered from the army; and everything started up to this imagined disgrace. He set out on his way back yet once more to Hawaii, the dementia that arrested him in Los Angeles however, where he discovered he was penniless, being strictly alcoholic in character.
Yvonne glanced again at the Consul who was sitting meditative with pursed lips apparently intent on the arena. How little he knew of this period of her life, of that terror, the terror, terror that still could wake her in the night from that recurrent night-mare of things collapsing; the terror that was like that she had been supposed to portray in the white-slave-traffic film, the hand clutching her shoulder through the dark doorway; or the real terror she’d felt when she actually had been caught in a ravine with two hundred stampeding horses; no, like Captain Constable himself, Geoffrey had been almost bored, perhaps ashamed, by all this: that she had, starting when she was only thirteen, supported her father for five years as an actress in ‘serials’ and ‘westerns’; Geoffrey might have nightmares, like her father in this too, be the only person in the world who ever had such nightmares, but that she should have them… Nor did Geoffrey know much more of the false real excitement, or the false flat bright enchantment of the studios, or the childish adult pride, as harsh as it was pathetic, and justifiable, in having, somehow, at that age, earned a living.
Beside the Consul Hugh took out a cigarette, tapped it on his thumbnail, noted it was the last in the package, and placed it between his lips. He put his feet up on the back of the seat beneath him and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, frowning down into the arena. Then, fidgeting still, he struck a match, drawing his thumbnail across it with a crackle like a small cap-pistol, and held it to the cigarette, cupping his quite beautiful hands, his head bent… Hugh was coming towards her this morning, in the garden, through the sunlight. With his rolling swagger, his Stetson hat on the back of his head, his holster, his pistol, his bandolier, his tight trousers tucked inside the elaborately stitched and decorated boots, she’d thought, just for an instant, that he was — actually! — Bill Hodson, the cowboy star, whose leading lady she’d been in three pictures when she was fifteen. Christ, how absurd! How marvellously absurd! The Hawaiian Islands gave us this real outdoor girl who is fond of swimming, golf, dancing, and is also an expert horsewoman! She… Hugh hadn’t said one word this morning about how well she rode, though he’d afforded her not a little secret amusement by explaining that her horse — miraculously — didn’t want to drink. Such areas there are in one another we leave, perhaps for ever, unexplored! — She’d never told him a word about her movie career, no, not even that day in Robinson… But it was a pity Hugh himself hadn’t been old enough to interview her, if not the first time, that second awful time after Uncle Macintyre sent her to college, and after her first marriage, and the death of her child, when she had gone back once more to Hollywood. Yvonne the Terrible! Look out, you sarong sirens and glamour girls, Yvonne Constable, the ‘Boomp Girl’, is back in Hollywood! Yes, Yvonne is back, determined to conquer Hollywood for the second time. But she’s twenty-four now, and the ‘Boomp Girl’ has become a poised exciting woman who wears diamonds and white orchids and ermine — and a woman who has known the meaning of love and tragedy, who has lived a lifetime since she left Hollywood a few short years ago. I found her the other day at her beach home, a honey-tanned Venus just emerging from the surf. As we talked she gazed out over the water with her slumbrous dark eyes and the Pacific breezes played with her thick dark hair. Gazing at her for a moment it was hard to associate the Yvonne Constable of today with the rough-riding serial queen of yesteryear, but the torso’s still terrific, and the energy is still absolutely unparalleled! The Honolulu Hellion, who at twelve was a war-whooping tomboy, crazy about baseball, disobeying everyone but her adored Dad, who she called ‘The Boss-Boss’, became at fourteen a child actress, and at fifteen, leading lady to Bill Hodson. And she was a powerhouse even then. Tall for her age, she had a little strength that came from a childhood of swimming and surfboarding in the Hawaiian breakers. Yes, though you may not think it now, Yvonne has been submerged in burning lakes, suspended over precipices, ridden horses down ravines, and she’s an expert at ‘double pick-offs’. Yvonne laughs merrily today when she remembers the frightened determined girl who declared she could ride very well indeed, and then, the picture in progress, the company on location, tried to mount her horse from the wrong side! A year later she could do a ‘flying mount’ without turning a hair. ‘But about that time I was rescued from Hollywood,’ as she smilingly puts it, ‘and very unwillingly too, by my Uncle Macintyre, who literally swooped down, after my farther died, and sailed me back to Honolulu!’ But when you’ve been a ‘Boomp Girl’ and are well on your way to being an ‘Oomph Girl!’ at eighteen, and when you’ve just lost your beloved ‘Boss-Boss’, it’s hard to settle down in a strict loveless atmosphere. ‘Uncle Macintyre’, Yvonne admits, ‘never conceded a jot or tittle to the tropics. Oh, the mutton broth and oatmeal and hot tea!’ But Uncle Macintyre knew his duty and, after Yvonne had studied with a tutor, he sent her to the University of Hawaii. There — perhaps, she says, ‘because the word “star” had undergone some mysterious transformation in my mind’— she took a course in astronomy! Trying to forget the ache in her heart and its emptiness, she forced an interest in her studies and even dreamed briefly of becoming the ‘Madame Curie’ of astronomy ! And there too, before long, she met the millionaire playboy, Cliff Wright. He came into Yvonne’s life at a moment when she was discouraged in her University work, restless under Uncle Macintyre’s strict régime, lonely, and longing for love and companionship. And Cliff was young and gay, his rating as an eligible bachelor was absolutely blue ribbon. It’s easy to see how he was able to persuade her, beneath the Hawaiian moon, that she loved him, and that she should leave college and marry him. (‘Don’t tell me for Christ sake about this Cliff,’ the Consul wrote in one of his rare early letters, ‘I can see him and I hate the bastard already: short-sighted and promiscuous, six foot three of gristle and bristle and pathos, of deep-voiced charm and casuistry.’ The Consul had seen him with some astuteness as a matter of fact — poor Cliff! — one seldom thought of him now and one tried not to think of the self-righteous girl whose pride had been outraged by his infidelities — ‘businesslike, inept and unintelligent, strong and infantile, like most American men, quick to wield chairs in a fight, vain, and who, at thirty still ten, turns the act of love into a kind of dysentery…’) Yvonne has already been a victim of ‘bad Press’ about her marriage and in the inevitable divorce that followed, what she said was misconstrued, and when she didn’t say anything, her silence was misinterpreted. And it wasn’t only the Press who misunderstood: ‘Uncle Macintyre’, she says ruefully, ‘simply washed his hands of me.’ (Poor Uncle Macintyre. It was fantastic, it was almost funny — it was screamingly funny, in a way, as one related it to one’s friends. She was a Constable through and through, and no child of her mother’s people ! Let her go the way of the Constables! God knows how many of them had been caught up in, or invited, the same kind of meaningless tragedy, or half-tragedy, as herself and her father. They rotted in asylums in Ohio or dozed in dilapidated drawing-rooms in Long Island with chickens pecking among the family silver and broken teapots that would be found to contain diamond necklaces. The Constables, a mistake on the part of nature, were dying out. In fact, nature meant to wipe them out, having no further use for what was not self-evolving. The secret of their meaning, if any, had been lost.) So Yvonne left Hawaii with her head high and a smile on her lips, even if her heart was more achingly empty than ever before. And now she’s back in Hollywood and people who know her best say she has no time in her life now for love, she thinks of nothing but her work. And at the studio they’re saying the tests she’s been making recently are nothing short of sensational. The ‘Boomp Girl’ has become Hollywood’s greatest dramatic actress! So Yvonne Constable, at twenty-four, is well on the way for the second time to becoming a star.
– But Yvonne Constable had not become a star for the second time. Yvonne Constable had not even been on her way to becoming a star. She had acquired an agent who managed to execute some excellent publicity — excellent in spite of the fact that publicity of any kind, she persuaded herself, was one of her greatest secret fears — on the strength of her earlier rough-riding successes; she received promises, and that was all. In the end she walked alone down Virgil Avenue or Mariposa beneath the dusty dead shallow-planted palms of the dark and accursed City of the Angels without even the consolation that her tragedy was no less valid for being so stale. For her ambitions as an actress had always been somewhat spurious : they suffered in some sense from the dislocations of the functions — she saw this — of womanhood itself. She saw it, and at the same time, now it was all quite hopeless (and now that she had, after everything, outgrown Hollywood), saw that she might under other conditions have become a really first-rate, even a great artist. For that matter what was she if not that now (if greatly directed) as she walked or drove furiously through her anguish and all the red lights, seeing, as might the Consul, the sign in the Town House window ‘Informal Dancing in the Zebra Room’ turn ‘Infernal’ —or ‘Notice to Destroy Weeds’ become ‘Notice to Newlyweds’. While on the hoarding — ‘Man’s public inquiry of the hour’ —the great pendulum on the giant blue clock swung ceaselessly. Too late! And it was this, it was all this that had perhaps helped to make meeting Jacques Laruelle in Quauhnahuac such a shattering and ominous thing in her life. It was not merely that they had the Consul in common, so that through Jacques she had been mysteriously able to reach, in a sense to avail herself of, what she had never known, the Consul’s innocence; it was only to him that she’d been able to talk of Holywood (not always honestly, yet with the enthusiasm with which close relatives may speak of a hated parent and with what relief!) on the mutual grounds of contempt and half-admitted failure. Moreover they discovered that they were both there in the same year, in 1932, had been once, in fact, at the same party, outdoor-barbe-cue-swimming-pool-and-bar; and to Jacques she had shown also, what she had kept hidden from the Consul, the old photographs of Yvonne the Terrible dressed in fringed leather shirts and riding-breeches and high-heeled boots, and wearing a ten-gallon hat, so that in his amazed and bewildered recognition of her this horrible morning, she had wondered was there not just an instant’s faltering — for surely Hugh and Yvonne were in some grotesque fashion transposed!… And once too in his studio, where the Consul was so obviously not going to arrive, M. Laruelle had shown her some stills of his old French films, one of which it turned out — good heavens! — she’d seen in New York soon after going east again. And in New York she’d stood once more (still in Jacques’s studio) on that freezing winter night in Times Square — she was staying at the Astor — watching the illuminated news aloft travelling around the Times Building, news of disaster, of suicide, of banks failing, of approaching war, of nothing at all, which, as she gazed upward with the crowd, broke off abruptly, snapped off into darkness, into the end of the world, she had felt, when there was no more news. Or was it — Golgotha? A bereaved and dispossessed orphan, a failure, yet rich, yet beautiful, walking, but not back to her hotel, in the rich fur trappings of alimony, afraid to enter the bars alone whose warmth she longed for then, Yvonne had felt far more desolate than a streetwalker; walking — and being followed, always followed — through the numb brilliant jittering city — the best for less, she kept seeing, or Dead End, or Romeo and Juliet, and then again, the best for less— that awful darkness had persisted in her mind, blackening still further her false wealthy loneliness, her guilty divorced dead helplessness. The electric arrows thrust at her heart — yet they were cheating: she knew, increasingly frightened by it, that darkness to be still there, in them, of them. The cripples jerked themselves slowly past. Men muttered by in whose faces all hope seemed to have died. Hoodlums with wide purple trousers waited where the icy gale streamed into open parlours. And everywhere, that darkness, the darkness of a world without meaning, a world without aim — the best for less— but where everyone save herself, it seemed to her, however hypocritically, however churlish, lonely, crippled, hopeless, was capable, if only in a mechanical crane, a cigarette butt plucked from the street, if only in a bar, if only in accosting Yvonne herself, of finding some faith… Le Destin de Yvonne Griffaton… And there she was — and she was still being followed — standing outside the little cinema in Fourteenth Street which showed revivals and foreign films. And there, upon the stills, who could it be, that solitary figure, but herself, walking down the same dark streets, even wearing the same fur coat, only the signs above her and around her said: Dubonnet, Amer Picon, Les Io Frattelinis, Moulin Rouge. And ‘Yvonne, Yvonne!’ a voice was saying at her entrance, and a shadowy horse, gigantic, filling the whole screen, seemed leaping out of it at her: it was a statue that the figure had passed, and the voice, an imaginary voice, which pursued Yvonne Griffaton down the dark streets, and Yvonne herself too, as if she had walked straight out of that world outside into this dark world on the screen, without taking breath. It was one of those pictures that, even though you have arrived in the middle, grip you with the instant conviction that it is the best film you have ever seen in your life; so extraordinarily complete is its realism, that what the story is all about, who the protagonist may be, seems of small account beside the explosion of the particular moment, beside the immediate threat, the identification with the one hunted, the one haunted, in this case Yvonne Griffaton — or Yvonne Constable! But if Yvonne Griffaton was being followed, was being hunted — the film apparently concerned the downfall of a French-woman of rich family and aristocratic birth — she in turn was also the hunter, was searching, was groping for something, Yvonne couldn’t understand what at first, in this shadowy world. Strange figures froze to the walls, or into alleyways, at her approach: they were the figures of her past evidently, her lovers, her one true love who had committed suicide, her father – and as if seeking sanctuary from them she had entered a church. Yvonne Griffaton was praying, but the shadow of one follower fell on the chancel steps: it was her first lover and at the next moment she was laughing hysterically, she was at the Folies Bergères, she was at the Opéra, the orchestra was playing Leoncavallo’s Zaza; then she was gambling, the roulette wheel spun crazily, she was back in her room; and the film turned to satire, to satire, almost, of itself: her ancestors appeared before her in swift succession, static dead symbols of selfishness and disaster, but in her mind romanticized, so it seemed, heroic, standing weary with their backs to the walls of prisons, standing upright in tumbrils in wooden gesticulation, shot by the Commune, shot by the Prussians, standing upright in battle, standing upright in death. And now Yvonne Griffaton’s father, who had been implicated in the Dreyfus case, came to mock and mow at her. The sophisticated audience laughed, or coughed, or murmured, but most of them presumably knew what Yvonne never as it happened ever found out later, how these characters and the events in which they had participated, contributed to Yvonne Griffaton’s present estate. All this was buried back in the earlier episodes of the film. Yvonne would have first to endure the newsreel, the animated cartoon, a piece entitled The Life of the African Lungfish and a revival of Scarf ace, in order to see, just as so much that conceivably lent some meaning (though she doubted even this) to her own destiny was buried in the distant past, and might for all she knew repeat itself in the future. But what Yvonne Griffaton was asking herself was now clear. Indeed the English sub-titles made it all too clear. What could she do under the weight of such a heritage? How could she rid herself of this old man of the sea? Was she doomed to an endless succession of tragedies that Yvonne Griffaton could not believe either formed part of any mysterious expiation for the obscure sins of others long since dead and damned, but were just frankly meaningless? Yes, how? Yvonne wondered herself. Meaningless — and yet, was one doomed? Of course one could always romanticize the unhappy Constables: one could see oneself, or pretend to, as a small lone figure carrying the burden of those ancestors, their weakness and wildness (which could be invented where it was lacking) in one’s blood, a victim of dark forces —everybody was, it was inescapable! — misunderstood and tragic, yet at least with a will of your own! But what was the use of a will if you had no faith? This indeed, she saw now, was also Yvonne Griffaton’s problem. This was what she too was seeking, and had been all the time, in the face of everything, for some faith — as if one could find it like a new hat or a house for rent! —yes, even what she was now on the point of finding, and losing, a faith in a cause, was better than none. Yvonne felt she had to have a cigarette and when she returned it looked much as though Yvonne Griffaton had at last succeeded in her quest. Yvonne Griffaton was finding her faith in life itself, in travel, in another love, in the music of Ravel. The chords of Bolero strutted out redundantly, snapping and clicking their heels, and Yvonne Griffaton was in Spain, in Italy; the sea was seen, Algiers, Cyprus, the desert with its mirages, the Sphinx. What did all this mean? Europe, Yvonne thought. Yes, for her, inevitably Europe, the Grand Tour, the Tour Eiffel, as she had known all along. — But why was it, richly endowed in a capacity for living as she was, she had never found a faith merely in ‘life’ sufficient? If that were all!… In unselfish love — in the stars! Perhaps it should be enough. And yet, and yet, it was entirely true, that one had never given up, or ceased to hope, or to try, gropingly, to find a meaning, a pattern, an answer –
The bull pulled against the opposing forces of ropes a while longer, then subsided gloomily, swinging his head from side to side with those shuffling sweeps along the ground, into the dust where, temporarily defeated but watchful, he resembled some fantastic insect trapped at the centre of a huge vibrating web… Death, or a sort of death, just as it so often was in life; and now, once more, resurrection. The charros, making strange knotty passes at the bull with their lariats, were rigging him for his eventual rider, wherever, and whoever, he might be.
— ‘Thank you.’ Hugh had passed her the pinch bottle of habanero also absently. She took a sip and gave it to the Consul who sat holding the bottle gloomily in his hands without drinking. And had he not, too, met her at the Bus Terminal?
Yvonne glanced around the grandstand : there was not, so far as she could see, in this whole gathering one other woman save a gnarled old Mexican selling pulque. No, she was wrong. An American couple had just climbed up the scaffolding farther down, a woman in a dove-grey suit, and a man with hornrimmed spectacles, a slight stoop, and hair worn long at the back, who looked like an orchestra conductor; it was the couple Hugh and she had seen before in the zócalo, at a corner Novedades buying huaraches and strange rattles and masks, and then later, from the bus, on the church steps, watching the natives dancing. How happy they seemed in one another; lovers they were, or on their honeymoon. Their future would stretch out before them pure and untrammelled as a blue and peaceful lake, and thinking of this Yvonne’s heart felt suddenly light as that of a boy on his summer holidays, who rises in the morning and disappears into the sun.
Instantly Hugh’s shack began to take form in her mind. But it was not a shack — it was a home! It stood, on wide-girthed strong legs of pine, between the forest of pine and high, high waving alders and tall slim birches, and the sea. There was the narrow path that wound down through the forest from the store, with salmonberries and thimbleberries and wild blackberry bushes that on bright winter nights of frost reflected a million moons; behind the house was a dogwood tree that bloomed twice in the year with white stars. Daffodils and snowdrops grew in the little garden. There was a wide porch where they sat on spring mornings, and a pier going right out into the water. They would build this pier themselves when the tide was out, sinking the posts one by one down the steep slanting beach. Post by post they’d build it until one day they could dive from the end into the sea. The sea was blue and cold and they would swim every day, and every day climb back up a ladder on to their pier, and run straight along it into their house. She saw the house plainly now; it was small and made of silvery weathered shingles, it had a red door, and casement windows, open to the sun. She saw the curtains she had made herself, the Consul’s desk, his favourite old chair, the bed, covered with brilliant Indian blankets, the yellow light of the lamps against the strange blue of long June evenings, the crab-apple tree that half supported the open sunny platform where the Consul would work in summer, the wind in the dark trees above and the surf beating along the shore on stormy autumn nights; and then the mill-wheel reflections of sunlight on water, as Hugh described those on the Cervecería Quauhnahuac, only sliding down the front of their house, sliding, sliding, over the windows, the walls, the reflections that, above and behind the house, turned the pine boughs into green chenille: and at night they stood on their pier and watched the constellations, Scorpio and Triangulum, Bootes and the Great Bear, and then the millwheel reflections would be of moonlight on water ceaselessly sliding down the wooden walls of silver overlapping shingles, the moonlight that on the water also embroidered their waving windows —
And it was possible. It was possible ! It was all there, waiting for them. If only she were alone with Geoffrey so she could tell him of it! Hugh, his cowboy hat on the back of his head, his feet in their high-heeled boots on the seat in front, seemed now an interloper, a stranger, part of the scene below. He was watching the rigging of the bull with intense interest, but becoming conscious of her gaze, his eyelids drooped nervously and he sought and found his cigarette package, corroborating its emptiness more with his fingers than his eyes.
Down in the arena a bottle was passed among the men on horseback who handed it to the others working on the bull. Two of the horsemen galloped about the ring aimlessly. The spectators bought lemonade, fruit, potato chips, pulque. The Consul himself made as if to buy some pulque but changed his mind, fingering the habanero bottle.
More drunks interfered, wanting to ride the bull again; they lost interést, became sudden horse fanciers, lost that concern too, and were chased out, careening.
The giant returned with the belching squealing Rocket, vanished, was sucked away by it. The crowd grew silent, so silent she could almost make out some sounds that might have been the fair again, in Quauhnahuac.
Silence was as infectious as mirth, she thought, an awkward silence in one group begetting a loutish silence in another, which in turn induced a more general, meaningless silence in a third, until it had spread everywhere. Nothing in the world is more powerful than one of these sudden strange silences —
— the house, dappled with misty light that fell softly through the small new leaves, and then the mist rolling away across the water, and the mountains, still white with snow appearing sharp and clear against the blue sky, and blue wood-smoke from the driftwood fire curling out of the chimney; the sloping shingled woodshed on whose roof the dogwood blossoms fell, the wood packed with beauty inside; the axe, the trowels, the rake, the spade, the deep, cool well with its guardian figure, a flotsam, a wooden sculpture of the sea, fixed above it; the old kettle, the new kettle, the teapot, the coffee pot, the double boilers, the saucepans, the cupboard. Geoffrey worked outside, longhand, as he liked to do, and she sat typing at a desk by the window — for she would learn to type, and transcribe all his manuscripts from the slanting script with its queer familiar Greek e’s and odd t’s into neat clean pages — and as she worked she would see a seal rise out of the water, peer round, and sink soundlessly. Or a heron, that seemed made of cardboard and string, would flap past heavily, to alight majestically on a rock and stand there, tall and motionless. Kingfishers and swallows flitted past the eaves or perched on their pier. Or a seagull would glide past perched on a piece of floating driftwood, his head in his wing, rocking, rocking with the motion of the sea… They would buy all their food, just as Hugh said, from a store beyond the woods, and see nobody, save a few fishermen, whose white boats in winter they would see pitching at anchor in the bay. She would cook and clean and Geoffrey would chop the wood and bring the water from the well. And they would work and work on this book of Geoffrey’s, which would bring him world fame. But absurdly they would not care about this; they would continue to live, in simplicity and love, in their home between the forest and the sea. And at half-tide they would look down from their pier and see, in the shallow lucid water, turquoise and vermilion and purple starfish, and small brown velvet crabs sidling among barnacled stones brocaded like heart-shaped pin-cushions. While at weekends, out on the inlet, every little while, ferry-boats would pass ferrying song upstream —
The spectators sighed with relief, there was a leafy rustling among them, something, Yvonne couldn’t see what, had been accomplished down below. Voices began to buzz, the air to tingle once more with suggestions, eloquent insults, repartee.
The bull was clambering to its feet with its rider, a fat tousle-headed Mexican, who seemed rather impatient and irritated with the whole business. The bull too looked irritated and now stood quite still.
A string band in the grandstand opposite struck up Guadalajara out of tune. Guadalajara, Guadalajara, half the band was singing…
’Guadalajara,’ Hugh slowly pronounced each syllable.
Down up, down down up, down down up, banged the guitars, while the rider glowered at them, then, with a furious look, took a firmer grip of the rope round the bull’s neck, jerked it, and for a moment the animal actually did what was apparently expected of it, convulsing itself violently, like a rocking-machine, and giving little leaps into the air with all four feet. But presently it relapsed into its old, cruising gait. Ceasing to participate altogether, it was no longer difficult to ride, and after one ponderous circuit of the arena, headed straight back for its pen which, opened by the pressure of the crowd on the fences, it’d doubtless been secretly longing for all the time, trotting back into it with suddenly positive, twinkling innocent hooves.
Everyone laughed as at a poor joke: it was laughter keyed to and somewhat increased by a further misfortune, the premature appearance of another bull, who, driven at a near gallop from the open pen by the cruel thrusts and pokes and blows intended to arrest him, on reaching the ring stumbled, and fell headlong into the dust.
The first bull’s rider, glum and discredited, had dismounted in the pen: and it was difficult not to feel sorry for him too, as he stood by the fence scratching his head, explaining his failure to one of the boys standing, marvellously balanced, on the top railing —
— and perhaps even this month, if there had been a late Indian summer, she would stand on their porch looking down over Geoffrey’s work, over his shoulder into the water and see an archipelago, islands of opalescent foam and branches of dead bracken — yet beautiful, beautiful — and the reflected alder trees, almost bare now, casting their sparse shadows over the brocaded stones like pincushions, over which the brocaded crabs scuttled among a few drowned leaves —
The second bull made two feeble attempts to get up, and lay down again; a lone horseman galloped across the ring swinging a rope and shouting at it in a husky tone: ‘Booa, shooa, booa’ — other charros appeared with more ropes; the little dog came scampering up from nowhere, scuttling about in circles; but it did no good. Nothing definite happened and nothing seemed likely to budge the second bull who was roped casually where it lay.
Everybody became resigned to another long wait, another long silence, while below, and with a bad conscience, they halfheartedly set about rigging the second bull.
‘See the old unhappy bull’, the Consul was saying, ‘in the plaza beautiful. Do you mind if I have a very small drink, darling, a poquitín… No? Thank you. Waiting with a wild surmise for the ropes that tantalize –’
— and gold leaves too, on the surface, and scarlet, one green, waltzing downstream with her cigarette, while a fierce autumn sun glared up from beneath the stones —
‘Or waiting with seven — why not? — wild surmises, for the rope which tantalizes. Stout Cortés ought to come into the next bit, gazing at the horrific, who was the least pacific of all men… Silent on a peak in Quauhnahuac. Christ, what a disgusting performance –’
‘Isn’t it?’ Yvonne said, and turning away thought she saw standing opposite below the band, the man in dark glasses who’d been outside the Bella Vista this morning and then later — or had she imagined it? — standing up beside Cortez Palace. ‘Geoffrey, who’s that man?’
‘Strange about the bull,’ the Consul said. ‘He’s so elusive. —There’s your enemy, but he doesn’t want to play ball today. He lies down… Or just falls down; see, he’s quite forgotten he’s your enemy now, so you think, and pat him… Actually… Next time you meet him you might not recognize him as an enemy at all.’
‘Es ist vielleicht an ox,’ Hugh muttered.
‘An oxymoron… Wisely foolish.’
The animal lay supine as before, but momentarily abandoned. People were huddled down below in argumentative groups. Horsemen also arguing continued to whoop about the ring. Yet there was no definite action, still less any indication that such was forthcoming. Who was going to ride the second bull? seemed the main question in the air. But then what of the first bull, who was raising Cain in the pen and was even with difficulty being restrained from taking the field again. Meanwhile the remarks around her echoed the contention in the arena. The first rider hadn’t been given a fair chance, verdad? No hombre, he shouldn’t even have been given that chance. No hombre, he should be given another. Imposseebly, another rider was scheduled. Vero, he wasn’t present, or couldn’t come, or was present but wasn’t going to ride, or wasn’t present but was trying hard to get here, verdad? — still, that didn’t change the arrangement or give the first rider his opportunity to try again.
Drunks were as anxious as ever to deputize; one was mounted on the bull now, pretending to ride it already, though it hadn’t moved a fraction. He was dissuaded by the first rider, who looked very sulky: just in time: at that moment the bull woke up and rolled over.
The first rider was on the point now, in spite of all comments, of trying again when — no; he had been too bitterly insulted, and wasn’t going to ride on any account. He walked away over towards the fence, to do some more explaining to the boy still balanced on top.
A man down below wearing an enormous sombrero had shouted for silence and paddling his arms was addressing them from the ring. They were being appealed to, either for their continued patience, or for a rider to volunteer.
Yvonne never found out which. For something extraordinary had happened, something ridiculous, yet with earth-shattering abruptness —
It was Hugh. Leaving his coat behind he had jumped from the scaffolding into the arena and was now running in the direction of the bull from which, perhaps in jest, or because they mistook him for the scheduled rider, the ropes were being whipped as by magic. Yvonne stood up: the Consul came to his feet beside her.
‘Good Christ, the bloody fool!’
The second bull, not indifferent as might have been supposed to the removal of the ropes, and perplexed by the confused uproar that greeted his rider’s arrival, had clambered up bellowing; Hugh was astride him and already cake-walking crazily in the middle of the ring.
‘God damn the stupid ass!’ the Consul said.
Hugh was holding the rigging tightly with one hand and beating the brute’s flanks with the other, and doing this with an expertness Yvonne was astonished to find she was still almost competent to judge. Yvonne and the Consul sat down again.
The bull jumped to the left, then to the right with both forelegs simultaneously, as though they were strung together. Then it sank to its knees. It clambered up, angry; Yvonne was aware of the Consul beside her drinking habanero and then of him corking the bottle.
‘Christ… Jesus.’
‘It’s all right, Geoff. Hugh knows what he’s doing.’
‘The bloody fool…’
‘Hugh’ll be all right — Wherever he learnt it.’
‘The pimp… the poxbox.’
It was true that the bull had really waked up and was doing its best to unseat him. It pawed the earth, galvanized itself like a frog, even crawled on its belly. Hugh held on fast. The spectators laughed and cheered, though Hugh, really indistinguishable from a Mexican now, looked serious, even grim. He leaned back, holding on determinedly, with feet splayed, heels knocking the sweaty flanks. The charros galloped across the arena.
‘I don’t think he means to show off,’ Yvonne smiled. No, he was simply submitting to that absurd necessity he felt for action, so wildly exacerbated by the dawdling inhuman day. All his thoughts now were bringing that miserable bull to its knees. ‘This is the way you like to play? This is the way I like to play. You don’t like the bull for some reason? Very well, I don’t like the bull either.’ She felt these sentiments helping to smite Hugh’s mind rigid with concentration upon the defeat of the bull. And somehow one had little anxiety watching him. One trusted him implicitly in this situation, just as one trusted in a trick diver, a tightrope walker, a steeplejack. One felt, even, half ironically, that this was the kind of thing Hugh might be best fitted to do and Yvonne was surprised to recall her instant’s panic this morning when he had jumped on the parapet of the bridge over the barranca.
‘The risk… the fool,’ the Consul said, drinking habanero.
Hugh’s troubles, in fact, were only beginning. The charros, the man in the sombrero, the child who’d bitten the first bull’s tail, the serape and rag hombres, even the little dog who came sneaking in again under the fence, were all closing in to increase them; all had their part.
Yvonne was abruptly aware that there were black clouds climbing the sky from the north-east, a temporary ominous darkness that lent a sense of evening, thunder sounded in the mountains, a single grumble, metallic, and a gust of wind raced through the trees, bending them: the scene itself possessed a remote strange beauty; the white trousers and bright serapes of the men enticing the bull shining against the dark trees and lowering sky, the horses, transformed instantly into clouds of dust by their riders with their scorpion-tailed whips, who leaned far out of their bucket saddles to throw wildly, ropes anywhere, everywhere. Hugh’s impossible yet somehow splendid performance in the midst of it all, the boy, whose hair was blowing madly over his face, high up in the tree.
The band struck up Guadalajara again in the wind, and the bull bellowed, his horns caught in the railings through which, helpless, he was being poked with sticks in what remained of his testicles, tickled with switches, a machete, and, after getting clear and re-entangled, a garden rake; dust too and dung was thrown in his red eyes; and now there seemed no end to this childish cruelty.
‘Darling,’ Yvonne whispered suddenly, ‘Geoffrey — look at me. Listen to me, I’ve been… there isn’t anything to keep us here any longer… Geoffrey…’
The Consul, pale, without his dark glasses, was looking at her piteously; he was sweating, his whole frame was trembling. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No… No,’ he added, almost hysterically.
‘Geoffrey darling… don’t tremble… what are you afraid of? Why don’t we go away, now, tomorrow, today… what’s to stop us?’
‘No…’
‘Ah, how good you’ve been –’
The Consul put his arm around her shoulders, leaning his damp head against her hair like a child, and for a moment it was as if a spirit of intercession and tenderness hovered over them, guarding, watching. He said wearily:
‘Why not. Let’s for Jesus Christ’s sweet sake get away. A thousand, a million miles away, Yvonne, anywhere, so long as it’s away. Just away. Away from all this. Christ, from this.’
— into a wild sky full of stars at rising, and Venus and the golden moon at sunrise, and at noon blue mountains with snow and blue cold rough water — ‘Do you mean it?’
‘Do I mean it!’
‘Darling…’ It ran in Yvonne’s mind that all at once they were talking — agreeing hastily — like prisoners who do not have much time to talk; the Consul took her hand. They sat closely, hands clasped, with their shoulders touching. In the arena Hugh tugged’; the bull tugged, was free, but furious now, throwing himself at any place on the fence that reminded him of the pen he’d so prematurely left, and now, tired, persecuted beyond measure, finding it, hurling himself at the gate time after time with an incensed, regressive bitterness until, the little dog barking at his heels, he’d lost it again… Hugh rode the tiring bull round and round the ring.
‘This isn’t just escaping, I mean, let’s start again really, Geoffrey, really and cleanly somewhere. It could be like a rebirth.’
‘Yes. Yes it could.’
‘I think I know, I’ve got it all clear in my mind at last. Oh Geoffrey, at last I think I have.’
‘Yes, I think I know too.’
Below them, the bull’s horns again involved the fence.
‘Darling…’ They would arrive at their destination by train, a train that wandered through an evening land of fields beside water, an arm of the Pacific —
‘Yvonne?’
‘Yes, darling?’
‘I’ve fallen down, you know… Somewhat.’
‘Never mind, darling.’
‘… Yvonne?’
‘Yes?’
‘I love you… Yvonne?’
‘Oh, I love you too!’
‘My dear one… My sweetheart.’
‘Oh, Geoffrey. We could be happy, we could –’
‘Yes… We could.’
— and far across the water, the little house, waiting —
There was a sudden roar of applause followed by the accelerated clangour of guitars deploying downwind; the bull had pulled away from the fence and once more the scene was becoming animated: Hugh and the bull tussled for a moment in the center of a small fixed circle the others created by their exclusion from it within the arena; then the whole was veiled in dust; the pen gate to their left had broken open again, freeing all the other bulls, including the first one, who was probably responsible; they were charging out amid cheers, snorting, scattering in every direction.
Hugh was eclipsed for a while, wrestling with his bull in a far corner: suddenly someone on that side screamed. Yvonne pulled herself from the Consul and stood up.
‘Hugh… Something’s happened.’
The Consul stood up unsteadily. He was drinking from the habanero bottle, drinking, till he almost finished it. Then he said:
‘I can’t see. But I think it’s the bull.’
It was still impossible to make out what was happening on the far side in the dusty confusion of horsemen, bulls, and ropes. Then Yvonne saw yes it was the bull, which, played out, was lying in the dust again. Hugh calmly walked off it, bowed to the cheering spectators, and, dodging other bulls, vaulted over the distant fence. Someone restored his hat to him.
‘Geoffrey –’ Yvonne began hurriedly, ‘I don’t expect you to — I mean — I know it’s going to be –’
But the Consul was finishing the habanero. He left a little for Hugh, however.
… The sky was blue again overhead as they went down into Tomalín; dark clouds still gathered behind Popocatepetl, their purple masses shot through with the bright late sunlight, that fell too on another little silver lake glittering cool, fresh, and inviting before them, Yvonne had neither seen on the way, nor remembered.
‘The Bishop of Tasmania,’ the Consul was saying, ‘or somebody dying of thirst in the Tasmanian desert, had a similar experience. The distant prospect of Cradle Mountain had consoled him a while, and then he saw this water… Unfortunately it turned out to be sunlight blazing on myriads of broken bottles.’
The lake was a broken greenhouse roof belonging to El Jardín Xicotancatl : only weeds lived in the greenhouse.
But their house was in her mind now as she walked: their home was real: Yvonne saw it at sunrise, in the long afternoons of south-west winds, and at nightfall she saw it in starlight and moonlight, covered with snow: she saw it from above, in the forest, with the chimney and the roof below her, and the foreshortened pier: she saw it from the beach rising above her, and she saw it, tiny, in the distance, a haven and a beacon against the trees, from the sea. It was only that the little boat of their conversation had been moored precariously; she could hear it banging against the rocks; later she would drag it up farther, where it was safe. — Why was it though, that right in the centre of her brain, there should be a figure of a woman having hysterics, jerking like a puppet and banging her fists upon the ground?
‘Forward to the Salón Ofelia,’ cried the Consul.
A hot thundery wind launched itself at them, spent itself, and somewhere a bell beat out wild tripthongs.
Their shadows crawled before them in the dust, slid down white thirsty walls of houses, were caught violently for a moment in an elliptical shade, the turning wrenched wheel of a boy’s bicycle.
The spoked shadow of the wheel, enormous, insolent, swept away.
Now their own shadows fell full across the square to the raised twin doors of the tavern, Todos Contentos y Yo También: under the doors they noticed what looked like the bottom of a crutch, someone leaving. The crutch didn’t move; its owner was having an argument at the door, a last drink perhaps. Then it disappeared: one door of the cantina was propped back, something emerged.
Bent double, groaning with the weight, an old lame Indian was carrying on his back, by means of a strap looped over his forehead, another poor Indian, yet older and more decrepit than himself. He carried the older man and his crutches, trembling in every limb under this weight of the past, he carried both their burdens.
They all stood watching the Indian as he disappeared with the old man round a bend of the road, into the evening, shuffling through the grey white dust in his poor sandals…