SUNSET. Eddies of green and orange birds scattered aloft with ever wider circlings like rings on water. Two little pigs disappeared into the dust at a gallop. A woman passed swiftly, balancing on her head, with the grace of a Rebecca, a small light bottle…
Then, the Salón Ofelia at last behind them, there was no more dust. And their path became straight, leading on through the roar of water past the bathing place, where, reckless, a few late bathers lingered, toward the forest.
Straight ahead, in the north-east, lay the volcanoes, the towering dark clouds behind them steadily mounting the heavens.
— The storm, that had already dispatched its outriders, must have been travelling in a circle: the real onset was yet to come. Meantime the wind had dropped and it was lighter again, though the sun had gone down at their back slightly to their left, in the south-west, where a red blaze fanned out into the sky over their heads.
The Consul had not been in the Todos Contentos y Yo También. And now, through the warm twilight, Yvonne was walking before Hugh, purposely too fast for talking. None the less his voice (as earlier that day the Consul’s own) pursued her.
‘You know perfectly well I won’t just run away and abandon him,’ she said.
‘Christ Jesus, this never would have happened if I hadn’t been here!’
‘Something else would probably have happened.’
The jungle closed over them and the volcanoes were blotted out. Yet it was still not dark. From the stream racing along beside them a radiance was cast. Big yellow flowers, resembling chrysanthemums, shining like stars through the gloom, grew on either side of the water. Wild bougainvillea, brick-red in the half-light, occasionally a bush with white handbells, tongue downwards, started out at them, every little while a notice nailed to a tree, a whittled, weather-beaten arrow pointing, with the words hardly visible: a la Cascada —
Farther on worn-out ploughshares and the rusted and twisted chassis of abandoned American cars bridged the stream which they kept always to their left.
The sound of the falls behind was now lost in that of the cascade ahead. The air was full of spray and moisture. But for the tumult one might almost have heard things growing as the torrent rushed through the wet heavy foliage that sprang up everywhere around them from the alluvial soil.
All at once, above them, they saw the sky again. The clouds, no longer red, had become a peculiar luminous blue-white, drifts and depths of them, as though illumined by moon rather than sunlight, between which roared still the deep fathomless cobalt of afternoon.
Birds were sailing up there, ascending higher and higher. Infernal bird of Prometheus!
They were vultures, that on earth so jealously contend with one another, defiling themselves with blood and filth, but who were yet capable of rising, like this, above the storms, to heights shared only by the condor, above the summit of the Andes —
Down the south-west stood the moon itself, preparing to follow the sun below the horizon. On their left, through the trees beyond the stream appeared low hills, like those at the foot of the Calle Nicaragua; they were purple and sad. At their foot, so near Yvonne made out a faint rustling, cattle moved on the sloping fields among gold cornstalks and striped mysterious tents.
Before them, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl continued to dominate the north-east, the Sleeping Woman now perhaps the more beautiful of the two, with jagged angles of blood-red snow on its summit, fading as they watched, whipped with darker rock shadows, the summit itself seeming suspended in mid-air, floating among the curdling ever mounting black clouds.
Chimborazo, Popocatepetl — so ran the poem the Consul liked — had stolen his heart away! But in the tragic Indian legend Popocatepetl himself was strangely the dreamer: the fires of his warrior’s love, never extinct in the poet’s heart, burned eternally for Ixtaccihuatl, whom he had no sooner found than lost, and whom he guarded in her endless sleep…
They had reached the limit of the clearing, where the path divided in two. Yvonne hesitated. Pointing to the left, as it were straight on, another aged arrow on a tree repeated: a la Cascada. But a similar arrow on another tree pointed away from the stream down a path to their right: a Pariàn.
Yvonne knew where she was now, but the two alternatives, the two paths, stretched out before her on either side like the arms — the oddly dislocated thought struck her — of a man being crucified.
If they chose the path to their right they would reach Parián much sooner. On the other hand, the main path would bring them to the same place finally, and, what was more to the point, past, she felt sure, at least two other cantinas.
They chose the main path: the striped tents, the cornstalks dropped out of sight, and the jungle returned, its damp earthy leguminous smell rising about them with the night.
This path, she was thinking, after emerging on a sort of main highway near a restaurant-cantina named the Rum-Popo or the El Popo, took, upon resumption (if it could be called the same path), a short cut at right angles through the forest to Parián, across to the Farolito itself, as it might be the shadowy crossbar from which the man’s arms were hanging.
The noise of the approaching falls was now like the awakening voices downwind of five thousand bobolinks in an Ohio savannah. Toward it the torrent raced furiously, fed from above, where, down the left bank, transformed abruptly into a great wall of vegetation, water was spouting into the stream through thickets festooned with convolvuli on a higher level than the topmost trees of the jungle. And it was as though one’s spirit too were being swept on by the swift current with the uprooted trees and smashed bushes in a débâcle towards that final drop.
They came to the little cantina El Petate. It stood, at a short distance from the clamorous falls, its lighted windows friendly against the twilight, and was at present occupied, she saw as her heart leaped and sank, leaped again, and sank, only by the barman and two Mexicans, shepherds or quince farmers, deep in conversation, and leaning against the bar. — Their mouths opened and shut soundlessly, their brown hands traced patterns in the air, courteously.
The El Petate, which from where she stood resembled a sort of complicated postage stamp, surcharged on its outside walls with its inevitable advertisements for Moctezuma, Criollo, Cafeas-pirina, Mentholatum — no se rasque las picaduras de los insectos! — was about all remaining, the Consul and she’d once been told, of the formerly prosperous village of Anochtitlán, which had burned, but which at one time extended to the westward, on the other side of the stream.
In the smashing din she waited outside. Since leaving the Salón Ofélia and up to this point, Yvonne had felt herself possessed of the most complete detatchment. But now, as Hugh joined the scene within the cantina — he was asking the two Mexicans questions, describing Geoffrey’s beard to the barman, he was describing Geoffrey’s beard to the Mexicans, he was asking the barman questions, who, with two fingers had assumed, jocosely, a beard — she became conscious she was laughing unnaturally to herself; at the same time she felt, crazily, as if something within her were smouldering, had taken fire, as if her whole being at any moment were going to explode.
She started back. She had stumbled over a wooden structure close to the Petate that seemed to spring at her. It was a wooden cage, she saw by the light from the windows, in which crouched a large bird.
It was a small eagle she had startled, and which was now shivering in the damp and dark of its prison. The cage was set between the cantina and a low thick tree, really two trees embracing one another: an amate and a sabina. The breeze blew spray in her face. The falls sounded. The intertwined roots of the two tree lovers flowed over the ground toward the stream, ecstatically seeking it, though they didn’t really need it; the roots might as well have stayed where they were, for all around them nature was out-doing itself in extravagant fructification. In the taller trees beyond there was a cracking, a rebellious tearing, and a rattling, as of cordage; boughs like booms swung darkly and stiffly about her, broad leaves unfurled. There was a sense of black conspiracy, like ships in harbour before a storm, among these trees, suddenly through which, far up in the mountains, lightning flew, and the light in the cantina flickered off, then on again, then off. No thunder followed. The storm was a distance away once more. Yvonne waited in nervous apprehension: the lights came on and Hugh — how like a man, oh God! but perhaps it was her own fault for refusing to come in — was having a quick drink with the Mexicans. There the bird was still, a long-winged dark furious shape, a little world of fierce despairs and dreams, and memories of floating high above Popocatepetl, mile on mile, to drop through the wilderness and alight, watching, in the timberline ghosts of ravaged mountain trees. With hurried quivering hands Yvonne began to unfasten the cage. The bird fluttered out of it and alighted at her feet, hesitated, took flight to the roof of El Petate, then abruptly flew off through the dusk, not to the nearest tree, as might have been supposed, but up — she was right, it knew it was free — up soaring, with a sudden cleaving of pinions into the deep dark blue pure sky above, in which at that moment appeared one star. No compunction touched Yvonne. She felt only an inexplicable secret triumph and relief: no one would ever know she had done this; and then, stealing over her, the sense of utter heartbreak and loss.
Lamplight shone across the tree roots; the Mexicans stood in the open door with Hugh, nodding at the weather and pointing on down the path, while within the cantina the barman helped himself to a drink from under the bar.
— ‘No!…’ Hugh shouted against the tumult. ‘He hasn’t been there at all! We might try this other place though!’
‘_’
‘On the road!’
Beyond the El Petate their path veered to the right past a dog-kennel to which an anteater nuzzling the black earth was chained. Hugh took Yvonne’s arm.
‘See the anteater? Do you remember the armadillo?’
‘I haven’t forgotten, anything!’
Yvonne said this, as they fell into step, not knowing quite what she meant. Wild woodland creatures plunged past them in the undergrowth, and everywhere she looked in vain for her eagle, half hoping to see it once more. The jungle was thinning out gradually. Rotting vegetation lay about them, and there was a smell of decay; the barranca couldn’t be far off. Then the air blew strangely warmer and sweeter, and the path was steeper. The last time Yvonne had come this way she’d heard a whip-poor-will. Whip-poor-will, whip-peri-will, the plaintive lonely voice of spring at home had said, and calling one home — to where? To her father’s home in Ohio? And what should a whip-poor-will be doing so far from home itself in a dark Mexican forest? But the whip-poor-will, like love and wisdom, had no home; and perhaps, as the Consul had then added, it was better here than routing around Cayenne, where it was supposed to winter.
They were climbing, approaching a little hilltop clearing; Yvonne could see the sky. But she couldn’t get her bearings. The Mexican sky had become strange and tonight the stars found for her a message even lonelier than that remembered one of the poor nestless whip-poor-will. Why are we here, they seemed to say, in the wrong place, and all the wrong shape, so far away, so far, so far away from home? From what home? When had not she, Yvonne, come home? But the stars by their very being consoled her. And walking on she felt her mood of detachment returning. Now Yvonne and Hugh were high enough to see, through the trees, the stars low down on the western horizon.
Scorpio, setting… Sagittarius, Capricornus; ah, there, here they were, after all, in their right places, their configurations all at once right, recognized, their pure geometry scintillating, flawless. And tonight as five thousand years ago they would rise and set: Capricorn, Aquarius, with, beneath, lonely Fomalhaut; Pisces; and the Ram; Taurus, with Aldebaran and the Pleiades. ‘As Scorpio sets in the south-west, the Pleiades are rising in the north-east.” ‘As Capricorn sets in the west, Orion rises in the east. And Cetus, the Whale, with Mira.’ Tonight, as ages hence, people would say this, or shut their doors on them, turn in bereaved agony from them, or towards them with love saying: “That is our star up there, yours and mine’; steer by them above the clouds or lost at sea, or standing in the spray on the forecastle head, watch them, suddenly, careen, put their faith or lack of it in them; train, in a thousand observatories, feeble telescopes upon them, across whose lenses swam mysterious swarms of stars and clouds of dead dark stars, catastrophes of exploding suns, or giant Antares raging to its end — a smouldering ember yet five hundred times greater than the earth’s sun. And the earth itself still turning on its axis and revolving around that sun, the sun revolving around the luminous wheel of this galaxy, the countless unmeasured jewelled wheels of countless unmeasured galaxies turning, turning, majestically, into infinity, into eternity, through all of which all life ran on — all this, long after she herself was dead, men would still be reading in the night sky, and as the earth turned through those distant seasons, and they watched the constellations still rising, culminating, setting, to rise again — Aries, Taurus, Gemini, the Crab, Leo, Virgo, the Scales and the Scorpion, Capricorn the Sea-goat and Aquarius the Water Bearer, Pisces, and once more, triumphantly, Aries! — would they not, too, still be asking the hopeless eternal question: to what end? What force drives this sublime celestial machinery? Scorpio, setting… And rising, Yvonne thought, unseen behind the volcanoes, those whose culmination was at midnight tonight, as Aquarius set; and some would watch with a sense of fleeting, yet feeling their diamonded brightness gleam an instant on the soul, touching all within that in memory was sweet or noble or courageous or proud, as high overhead appeared, flying softly like a flock of birds towards Orion, the beneficent Pleiades…
The mountains that had been lost from sight now stood ahead again as they walked on through the dwindling forest. — Yet Yvonne still hung back.
Far away to the south-east the low leaning horn of moon, their pale companion of the morning, was setting finally, and she watched it — the dead child of the earth! — with a strange hungry supplication. — The Sea of Fecundity, diamond-shaped, and the sea of Nectar, pentagonal in form, and Frascatorius with its north wall broken down, the giant west wall of Endymion, elliptical near the Western limb; the Leibnitz mountains at the Southern Horn, and east of Proclus, the Marsh of a Dream. Hercules and Atlas stood there, in the midst of cataclysm, beyond our knowledge —
The moon had gone. A hot gust of wind blew in their faces and lightning blazed white and jagged in the north-east: thunder spoke, economically; a poised avalanche…
The path growing steeper inclined still further to their right and began to twist through scattered sentinels of trees, tall and lone, and enormous cactus, whose writhing innumerable spined hands, as the path turned, blocked the view on every side. It grew so dark it was surprising not to find blackest night in the world beyond.
Yet the sight that met their eyes as they emerged on the road was terrifying. The massed black clouds were still mounting the twilight sky. High above them, at a vast height, a dreadfully vast height, bodiless black birds, more like skeletons of birds, were drifting. Snowstorms drove along the summit of Ixtaccihuatl, obscuring it, while its mass was shrouded by cumulus. But the whole precipitous bulk of Popocatepetl seemed to be coming towards them, travelling with the clouds, leaning forward over the valley on whose side, thrown into relief by the curious melancholy light, shone one little rebellious hilltop with a tiny cemetery cut into it.
The cemetery was swarming with people visible only as their candle flames.
But suddenly it was as if a heliograph of lightning were stammering messages across the wild landscape; and they made out, frozen, the minute black and white figures themselves. And now, as they listened for the thunder, they heard them: soft cries and lamentations, wind-borne, wandering down to them. The mourners were chanting over the graves of their loved ones, playing guitars softly or praying. A sound like windbells, a ghostly tintinnabulation, reached their ears.
A titanic roar of thunder overwhelmed it, rolling down the valleys. The avalanche had started. Yet it had not overwhelmed the candle flames. There they still gleamed, undaunted, a few moving now in procession. Some of the mourners were filing off down the hillside.
Yvonne felt with gratitude the hard road beneath her feet. The lights of the Hotel y Restaurant El Popo sprang up. Over a garage next door an electric sign, was stabbing: Euzkadi.– A radio somewhere was playing wildly hot music at an incredible speed.
American cars stood outside the restaurant ranged before the cul-de-sac at the edge of the jungle, giving the place something of the withdrawn, waiting character that pertains to a border at night, and a border of sorts there was, not far from here, where the ravine, bridged away to the right on the outskirts of the old capital, marked the state line.
On the porch, for an instant, the Consul sat dining quietly by himself. But only Yvonne had seen him. They threaded their way through the round tables and into a bare ill-defined bar where the Consul sat frowning in a corner with three Mexicans. But none save Yvonne noticed him. The barman had not seen the Consul. Nor had the assistant manager, an unusually tall Japanese also the cook, who recognized Yvonne. Yet even as they denied all knowledge of him (and though by this time Yvonne had quite made up her mind he was in the Farolito) the Consul was disappearing round every corner, and going out of every door. A few tables set along the tiled floor outside the bar were deserted, yet here the Consul also sat dimly, rising at their approach. And out behind by the patio it was the Consul who pushed his chair back and came forward, bowing, to meet them.
In fact, as often turns out for some reason in such places, there were not enough people in the El Popo to account for the number of cars outside.
Hugh was casting round him, half for the music, which seemed coming from a radio in one of the cars and which sounded like absolutely nothing on earth in this desolate spot, an abysmal mechanic force out of control that was running itself to death, was breaking up, was hurtling into dreadful trouble, had abruptly ceased.
The patio of the pub was a long rectangular garden overgrown with flowers and weeds. Verandas, half in darkness, and arched on their parapets, giving them an effect of cloisters, ran down either side. Bedrooms opened off the verandas. The light from the restaurant behind picked out, here and there, a scarlet flower, a green shrub, with unnatural vividness. Two angry-looking macaws with bright ruffled plumage sat in iron rings between the arches.
Lightning, flickering, fired the windows a moment; wind crepitated the leaves and subsided, leaving a hot void in which the trees thrashed chaotically. Yvonne leaned against an arch and took off her hat; one of the cockatoos screeched and she pressed the palms of her hands against her ears, pressing them harder as the thunder started again, holding them there with her eyes shut absently until it stopped, and the two bleak beers Hugh ordered had arrived.
‘Well,’ he was saying, ‘this is somewhat different from the Cervecería Quauhnahuac… Indeed !… Yes, I guess I’ll always remember this morning. The sky was so blue, wasn’t it?’
‘And the woolly dog and the foals that came with us and the river with those swift birds overhead –’
‘How far to the Farolito now?’
‘About a mile and a half. We can cut nearly a mile if we take the forest path.’
‘In the dark?’
‘We can’t wait very long if you’re going to make the last bus back to Quauhnahuac. It’s after six now. I can’t drink this beer, can you?’
‘No. It tastes like gun-metal — hell — Christ,’ Hugh said, ‘let’s –’
‘Have a different drink,’ Yvonne proposed, half ironically.
‘Couldn’t we phone?’
‘Mescal,’ Yvonne said brightly.
The air was so full of electricity it trembled.
‘Comment?’
‘Mescal, por favor,’ Yvonne repeated, shaking her head solemnly, sardonically. ‘I’ve always wanted to find out what Geoffrey sees in it.’
‘¿Cómo no? let’s have two mescals.’
But Hugh had still not returned when the two drinks were brought by a different waiter questioning the gloom, who, balancing the tray on one palm, switched on another light.
The drinks Yvonne had had at dinner and during the day, relatively few though they’d been, lay like swine on her soul: some moments passed before she reached out her hand and drank.
Sickly, sullen, and ether-tasting, the mescal produced at first no warmth in her stomach, only, like the beer, a coldness, a chill. But it worked. From the porch outside a guitar, slightly out of tune, struck up La Paloma, a Mexican voice was singing, and the mescal was still working. It had in the end the quality of a good hard drink. Where was Hugh? Had he found the Consul here, after all? No: she knew he was not here. She gazed round the EI Popo, a soulless draughty death that ticked and groaned, as Geoff himself once said — a bad ghost of an American road-house; but it no longer appeared so awful. She selected a lemon from the table and squeezed a few drops into her glass and all this took her an inordinately long time to do.
All at once she became conscious she was laughing unnaturally to herself, something within her was smouldering, was on fire: and once more, too, in her brain a picture shaped of a woman ceaselessly beating her fists on the ground…
But no, it was not herself that was on fire. It was the house of her spirit. It was her dream. It was the farm, it was Orion, the Pleiades, it was their house by the sea. But where was the fire? It was the Consul who had been the first to notice it. What were these crazy thoughts, thoughts without form or logic? She stretched out her hand for the other mescal, Hugh’s mescal, and the fire went out, was overwhelmed by a sudden wave through her whole being of desperate love and tenderness for the Consul.
— very dark and clear with an onshore wind, and the sound of surf you couldn’t see, deep in the spring night the summer stars were overhead, presage of summer, and the stars bright; clear and dark, and the moon had not risen; a beautiful strong clean onshore wind, and then the waning moon rising over the water, and later, inside the house, the roar of unseen surf beating in the night–-
‘How do you like the mescal?’
Yvonne jumped up. She had been almost crouching over Hugh’s drink; Hugh, swaying, stood over her, carrying under his arm a long battered key-shaped canvas case.
‘What in the world have you got there?’ Yvonne’s voice was blurred and remote.
Hugh put the case on the parapet. Then he laid on the table an electric torch. It was a boy scout contraption like a ship’s ventilator with a metal ring to slip your belt through. ‘I met the fellow on the porch Geoff was so bloody rude to in the Salón Ofelia and I bought this from him. But he wanted to sell his guitar and get a new one so I bought that too. Only ocho pesos cincuenta –’
‘What do you want a guitar for? Are you going to play the Internationale or something on it, on board your ship?’ Yvonne said.
‘How’s the mescal?’ Hugh said again.
‘Like ten yards of barbed-wire fence. It nearly took the top of my head off. Here, this is yours, Hugh, what’s left of it.’
Hugh sat down: ‘I had a tequila outside with the guitar hombre’…
‘Well,’ he added, ‘I’m definitely not going to try and get to Mexico City tonight, and that once decided there’re various things we might do about Geoff.’
‘I’d rather like to get tight,’ Yvonne said.
‘Como tu quieras. It might be a good idea.’
‘Why did you say it would be a good idea to get tight?’ Yvonne was asking over the new mescals; then, ‘What did you get a guitar for?’ she repeated.
‘To sing with. To give people the lie with maybe.’
‘What are you so strange for, Hugh? To give what people what lie?’
Hugh tilted back his chair until it touched the parapet behind him, then sat like that, smoking, nursing his mescal in his lap.
‘The kind of lie Sir Walter Raleigh meditates, when he addresses his soul. “The truth shall be thy warrant. Go, since I needs must die. And give the world the lie. Say to the court it glows, and shines like rotten wood. Say to the church it shows, what’s good and doth no good. If Church and Court reply, then give them both the lie.” That sort of thing, only slightly different.’
‘You’re dramatizing yourself, Hugh. Salud y pesetas.’
‘Salud y pesetas.’
‘Salud y pesetas.’
He stood, smoking, drink in hand, leaning against the dark monastic archway and looking down at her:
‘But on the contrary,’ he was saying, ‘we do want to do good, to help, to be brothers in distress. We will even condescend to be crucified, on certain terms. And are, for that matter, regularly, every twenty years or so. But to an Englishman it’s such terribly bad form to be a bona-fide martyr. We may respect with one part of our minds the integrity, say, of men like Gandhi, or Nehru. We may even recognize that their selflessness, by example, might save us. But in our hearts we cry “Throw the bloody little man in the river”. Or “Set Barabbas free!” “O’Dwyer for ever!”Jesus! — It’s even pretty bad form for Spain to be a martyr too; in a very different way of course… And if Russia should prove –’
Hugh was saying all this while Yvonne was scanning a document he’d just skimmed on to the table for her. It was an old soiled and creased menu of the house simply, that seemed to have been picked up from the floor, or spent a long period in someone’s pocket, and this she read, with alcoholic deliberation, several times:
This much was typed in blue and underneath it — she made out with the same deliberation — was a design like a small wheel round the inside of which was written ‘Lotería Nacional Para La Beneficencia Pùblica’, making another circular frame, within which appeared a sort of trade or hallmark representing a happy mother caressing her child.
The whole left side of the menu was taken up by a full-length lithographic portrait of a smiling young woman surmounted by the announcement that Hotel Restaurant El Popo se observa la más estricta moralidad, siendo esta disposición de su proprietario una garantía para el pasajero, que llegue en compañía: Yvonne studied this woman: she was buxom and dowdy, with a quasi-American coiffure, and she was wearing a long, confetti-coloured print dress: with one hand she was beckoning roguishly, while with the other she held up a block of ten lottery tickets, on each of which a cowgirl was riding a bucking horse and (as if these ten minute figures were Yvonne’s own reduplicated and half-forgotten selves waving good-bye to herself) waving her hand.
‘Well,’ she said.
‘No, I meant on the other side,’ Hugh said.
Yvonne turned the menu over and then sat staring blankly.
The back of the menu was almost covered by the Consuls handwriting at its most chaotic. At the top on the left was written:
This was signed G. Firmin. It was a small bill left here by the Consul some months ago, a chit he’d made out for himself —No, I just paid it, said Hugh, who was now sitting beside her.
But below this ‘reckoning’ was written, enigmatically, dearth… filth… earth, below that was a long scrawl of which one could make nothing. In the center of the paper were seen these words: rope… cope… grope, then, of a cold cell, while on the right, the parent and partial explanation of these prodigals, appeared what looked a poem in process of composition, an attempt at some kind of sonnet perhaps, but of a wavering and collapsed design, and so crossed out and scrawled over and stained, defaced, and surrounded with scratchy drawings — of a club, a wheel, even a long black box like a coffin — as to be almost indecipherable; at last it had this semblance:
Some years ago he started to escape
… has been… escaping ever since
Not knowing his pursuers gave up hope
Of seeing him (dance) at the end of a rope
Hounded by eyes and thronged terrors now the lens
Of glaring world that shunned even his defence
Reading him strictly in the preterite tense
Spent no… thinking him not worth
(Even)… the price of a cold cell.
There would have been a scandal at his death
Perhaps. No more man this. Some tell
Strange hellish tales of this poor foundered soul
Who once fled north…
Who once fled north, she thought. Hugh was saying:
’Vámonos.’
Yvonne said yes.
Outside the wind was blowing with an odd shrillness. A loose shutter somewhere banged and banged, and the electric sign over the garage prodded the night: Euzkadi —
The clock above it – man’s public inquiry of the hour! — said twelve to seven: ‘Who once fled north.’ The diners had left the porch of the El Popo…
Lightning as they started down the steps was followed by volleys of thunder almost at once, dispersed and prolonged. Piling black clouds swallowed the stars to the north and east; Pegasus pounded up the sky unseen; but overhead it was still clear: Vega, Deneb, Altair; through the trees, towards the west, Hercules. ‘Who once fled north,’ she repeated. — Straight ahead of them beside the road was a ruined Grecian temple, dim, with two tall slender pillars, approached by two broad steps: or there had been a moment this temple, with its exquisite beauty of pillars, and, perfect in balance and proportion, its broad expanse of steps, that became now two beams of windy light from the garage, falling across the road, and the pillars, two telegraph poles.
They turned into the path. Hugh, with his torch, projected a phantom target, expanding, becoming enormous, and that swerved and transparently tangled with the cactus. The path narrowed and they walked, Hugh behind, in single file, the luminous target sliding before them in sweeping concentric ellipticities, across which her own wrong shadow leaped, or the shadow of a giantess. — The candelabras appeared salt grey where the flashlight caught them, too stiff and fleshy to be bending with the wind, in a slow multitudinous heaving, an inhuman cackling of scales and spines.
‘Who once fled north…’
Yvonne now felt cold sober: the cactus fell away, and the path, still narrow, through tall trees and undergrowth, seemed easy enough.
‘Who once fled north.’ But they were not going north, they were going to the Farolito. Nor had the Consul fled north then, he’d probably gone of course, just as tonight, to the Farolito. ‘There might have been a scandal at his death.’ The treetops made a sound like water rushing over their heads. ‘At his death.’
Yvonne was sober. It was the undergrowth, which made sudden swift movements into their path, obstructing it, that was not sober; the mobile trees were not sober; and finally it was Hugh, who she now realized had only brought her this far to prove the better practicality of the road, the danger of these woods under the discharges of electricity now nearly on top of them, who was not sober: and Yvonne found she had stopped abruptly, her hands clenched so tightly her fingers hurt, saying:
‘We ought to hurry, it must be almost seven,’ then, that she was hurrying, almost running down the path, talking loudly and excitedly: ‘Did I tell you that the last night before I left a year ago Geoffrey and I made an appointment for dinner in Mexico City and he forgot the place, he told me, and went from restaurant to restaurant looking for me, just as we’re looking for him now.’
‘En los talleres y arsenales
a guerral todos, tocan ya;’
Hugh sang resignedly, in a deep voice.
‘ – and it was the same way when I first met him in Granada. We made an appointment for dinner in a place near the Alhambra and I thought he’d meant us to meet in die Alhambra, and I couldn’t find him and now it’s me, looking for him again — on my first night back.’
‘—todas, tocan ya;
morir ¿quién quiere por la gloria
o por vendedores de cañones?’
Thunder volleyed through the forest, and Yvonne almost stopped dead again, half imagining she had seen, for an instant, beckoning her on at the end of the path, the fixedly smiling woman with the lottery tickets.
‘How much farther?’ Hugh asked.
‘We’re nearly there, I think. There’s a couple of turns in the path ahead and a fallen log we have to climb over.’
‘Adelante, la juventud,
al asalto, vamos ya,
y contra los imperialismos,
para un nuevo mundo hacer.
I guess you were right then,’ Hugh said.
There was a lull in the storm that for Yvonne, looking up at the dark treetops’ long slow swaying in the wind against the tempestuous sky, was a moment like that of the tide’s turning, and yet that was filled with some quality of this morning’s ride with Hugh, some night essence of their shared morning thoughts, with a wild sea-yearning of youth and love and sorrow.
A sharp pistol-like report, from somewhere ahead, as of a back-firing car, broke this swaying stillness, followed by another and another. ‘More target practice,’ Hugh laughed; yet these were different mundane sounds to hold as a relief against the sickening thunder that followed, for they meant Pariàn was near, soon its dim lights would gleam through the trees: by a lightning flash bright as day they had seen a sad useless arrow pointing back the way they’d come, to the burned Anochtitlán: and now, in the profounder gloom, Hugh’s own light fell across a tree mink on the left side where a wooden sign with a pointing hand confirmed their direction.
A PARIÁN 
Hugh was singing behind her… It began to rain softly and a sweet cleanly smell rose from the woods. And now, here was the place where the path doubled back on itself, only to be blocked by a huge moss-covered bole that divided it from that very same path she had decided against, which the Consul must have taken beyond Tomàlin. The mildewed ladder with its wide-spaced rungs mounted against the near side of the bole was still there, and Yvonne had clambered up it almost before she realized she had lost Hugh’s light. Yvonne balanced herself someway on top of this dark slippery log and saw his light again, a little to one side, moving among the trees. She said with a certain note of triumph:
‘Mind you don’t get off the path there, Hugh, it’s sort of tricky. And mind the fallen log. There’s a ladder up this side, but you have to jump down on the other.’
‘Jump then,’ said Hugh.’ I must have got off your path.’
Yvonne, hearing the plangent complaint of his guitar as Hugh banged the case, called: ‘Here I am, over here.’
‘Hijos del pueblo que oprimen cadenas
esa injusticia no debe existir
si tu existencia es un mundo de penas
antes que esclavo, prefiere morir prefiere morir…’
Hugh was singing ironically.
All at once the rain fell more heavily. A wind like an express train swept through the forest; just ahead lightning struck through the trees with a savage tearing and roar of thunder that shook the earth…
There is, sometimes in thunder, another person who thinks for you, takes in one’s mental porch furniture, shuts and bolts the mind’s window against what seems less appalling as a threat than as some distortion of celestial privacy, a shattering insanity in heaven, a form of disgrace forbidden mortals to observe too closely: but there is always a door left open in the mind — as men have been known in great thunderstorms to leave their real doors open for Jesus to walk in — for the entrance and the reception of the unprecedented, the fearful acceptance of the thunderbolt that never falls on oneself, for the lightning that always hits the next street, for the disaster that so rarely strikes at the disastrous likely hour, and it was through this mental door that Yvonne, still balancing herself on the log, now perceived that something was menacingly wrong. In the slackening thunder something was approaching with a noise that was not the rain. It was an animal of some sort, terrified by the storm, and whatever it might be — a deer, a horse, unmistakably it had hooves — it was approaching at a dead run, stampeding, plunging through the undergrowth: and now as the lightning crashed again and the thunder subsided she heard a protracted neigh becoming a scream almost human in its panic. Yvonne was aware that her knees were trembling. Calling out to Hugh she tried to turn, in order to climb back down the ladder, but felt her footing on the log give way: slipping, she tried to regain her balance, slipped again and pitched forward. One foot doubled under her with a sharp pain as she fell. The next moment attempting to rise she saw, by a brilliant flash of lightning, the riderless horse. It was plunging sideways, not at her, and she saw its every detail, the jangling saddle sliding from its back, even the number seven branded on its rump. Again trying to rise she heard herself scream as the animal turned towards her and upon her. The sky was a sheet of white flame against which the trees and the poised rearing horse were an instant pinioned —
They were the cars at the fair that were whirling around her; no, they were the planets, while the sun stood, burning and spinning and glittering in the centre; here they came again, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto; but they were not planets, for it was not the merry-go-round at all, but the Ferris Wheel, they were constellations, in the hub of which, like a great cold eye, burned Polaris, and round and round it here they went: Cassiopeia, Cepheus, the Lynx, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, and the Dragon; yet they were not constellations, but, somehow, myriads of beautiful butterflies, she was sailing into Acapulco harbour through a hurricane of beautiful butterflies, zigzagging overhead and endlessly vanishing astern over the sea, the sea, rough and pure, the long dawn rollers advancing, rising, and crashing down to glide in colourless ellipses over the sand, sinking, sinking, someone was calling her name far away and she remembered, they were in a dark wood, she heard the wind and the rain rushing through the forest and saw the tremors of lightning shuddering through the heavens and the horse — great God, the horse — and would this scene repeat itself endlessly and for ever? — the horse, rearing, poised over her, petrified in mid-air, a statue, somebody was sitting on the statue, it was Yvonne Griffaton, no, it was the statue of Huerta, the drunkard, the murderer, it was the Consul, or it was a mechanical horse on the merry-go-round, the carrousel, but the carrousel had stopped and she was in a ravine down which a million horses were thundering towards her, and she must escape, through the friendly forest to their house, their little home by the sea. But the house was on fire, she saw it now from the forest, from the steps above, she heard the crackling, it was on fire, everything was burning, the dream was burning, the house was burning, yet here they stood an instant, Geoffrey and she, inside it, inside the house, wringing their hands, and everything seemed all right, in its right place, the house was still there, everything dear and natural and familiar, save that the roof was on fire and there was this noise as of dry leaves blowing along the roof, this mechanical crackling, and now the fire was spreading even while they watched, the cupboard, the saucepans, the old kettle, the new kettle, the guardian figure on the deep cool well, the trowels, the rake, the sloping shingled woodshed on whose roof the white dogwood blossoms fell but would fall no more, for the tree was burning, the fire was spreading faster and faster, the walls with their millwheel reflections of sunlight on water were burning, the flowers in the garden were blackened and burning, they writhed, they twisted, they fell, the garden was burning, the porch where they sat on spring mornings was burning, the red door, the casement windows, the curtains she’d made were burning, Geoffrey’s old chair was burning, his desk, and now his book, his book was burning, the pages were burning, burning, burning, whirling up from the fire they were scattered, burning, along the beach, and now it was growing darker and the tide coming in, the tide washed under the ruined house, the pleasure boats that had ferried song upstream sailed home silently over the dark waters of Eridanus. Their house was dying, only an agony went there now.
And leaving the burning dream Yvonne felt herself suddenly gathered upwards and borne towards the stars, through eddies of stars scattering aloft with ever wider circlings like rings on water, among which now appeared, like a flock of diamond birds flying softly and steadily towards Orion, the Pleiades…