Under the Volcano

by Malcolm Lowry

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, And burnèd is Apollo’s laurel bough, That sometime grew within this learnèd man, Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall—

Finally the cat extended a preparate paw for the kill, opening her mouth, and the insect, whose wings had never ceased to beat, suddenly and marvellously flew out, as might indeed the human soul from the jaws of death, flew up, up, up, soaring over the trees: and at that moment he saw them. They were standing on the porch; Yvonne’s arms were full of bougainvillea, which she was arranging in a cobalt ceramic vase, “—but suppose he’s absolutely adamant. Suppose he simply won’t go … careful, Hugh, it’s got spikes on it, and you have to look at everything carefully to be sure there’re no spiders.” “Hi there, Suchiquetal!” the Consul shouted gaily, waving his hand, as the cat with a frigid look over her shoulder that said plainly, “I didn’t want it anyway; I meant to let it go,” galloped away, humiliated, into the bushes. “Hi there, Hugh, you old snake in the grass!”

Could it be Vigil considered his practised eye had detected approaching insanity (and this was funny too, recalling his thoughts on the subject earlier, to conceive of it as merely approaching) as some who have watched wind and weather all their lives can prophesy, under a fair sky, the approaching storm, the darkness that will come galloping out of nowhere across the fields of the mind. Not that there could be said to be a very fair sky either in that connection. Yet how interested would the doctor have been in one who felt himself being shattered by the very forces of the universe? What cataplasms have laid on his soul? What did even the hierophants of science know of the fearful potencies of, for them, unvintageable evil? The Consul wouldn’t have needed a practised eye to detect on this wall, or any other, a Mene-Tekel-Peres for the world, compared to which mere insanity was a drop in the bucket. Yet who would ever have believed that some obscure man, sitting at the centre of the world in a bathroom, say, thinking solitary miserable thoughts, was authoring their doom, that, even while he was thinking, it was as if behind the scenes certain strings were pulled, and whole continents burst into flame, and calamity moved nearer—just as now, at this moment perhaps, with a sudden jolt and grind, calamity had moved nearer, and, without the Consul’s knowing it, outside the sky had darkened. Or perhaps it was not a

man at all, but a child, a little child, innocent as that other Geoffrey had been, who sat up in an organ loft somewhere playing, pulling out all the stops at random, and kingdoms divided and fell, and abominations dropped from the sky—a child innocent as that infant sleeping in the coffin which had slanted past them down the Calle Tierra del Fuego …

—Stop it, for God’s sake, you fool. Watch your step. We can’t help you any more. —I would like the privilege of helping you, of your friendship. I would work you with. I do not care a damn for moneys anyway. —What, is this you, Geoffrey? Don’t you remember me? Your old friend, Abe. What have you done, my boy? —Ha ha, you’re for it now. Straightened out—in a coffin! Yeah. —My son, my son! —My lover. Oh come to me again as once in May.

“Haven’t you got any tenderness or love left for me at all?” Yvonne asked suddenly, almost piteously, turning round on him, and he thought: Yes, I do love you, I have all the love in the world left for you, only that love seems so far away from me and so strange too, for it is as though I could almost hear it, a droning or a weeping, but far, far away, and a sad lost sound, it might be either approaching or receding, I can’t tell which. “Don’t you think of anything except of how many drinks you’re going to have?”

There was no limit to their ingenuity. Though the most potent and final obstacle to doing anything about the Indian was this discovery that it wasn’t one’s own business, but someone else’s. And looking round him, Hugh saw that this too was just what everyone else was arguing. It is not my business, but, as it were, yours, they all said, as they shook their heads, and no, not yours either, but someone else’s, their objections becoming more and more involved, more and more theoretical, till at last the discussion began to take a political turn.

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: shortsighted 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 so outraged by his infidelities—“business-like, 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. …”)

“Or more specifically perhaps, Hugh, I was talking of nothing at all … Since supposing we settled anything—ah, ignoratio elenchi, Hugh, that’s what. Or the fallacy of supposing a point proved or disproved by argument which proves or disproves something not at issue. Like these wars. For it seems to me that almost everywhere in the world these days there has long since ceased to be anything fundamental to man at issue at all … Ah, you people with ideas! “Ah, ignoratio elenchi! … All this, for instance, about going to fight for Spain … and poor little defenceless China! Can’t you see there’s a sort of determinism about the fate of nations? They all seem to get what they deserve in the long run.”

“Not exactly original.” “Not long ago it was poor little defenceless Ethiopia. Before that, poor little defenceless Flanders. To say nothing of course of the poor little defenceless Belgian Congo. And to-morrow it will be poor little defenceless Latvia. Or Finland. Or Piddledeedee. Or even Russia. Read history. Go back a thousand years. What is the use of interfering with its worthless stupid course? Like a barranca, a ravine, choked up with refuse, that winds through the ages, and peters out in a—What in God’s name has all the heroic resistance put up by poor little defenceless peoples all rendered defenceless in the first place for some well-calculated and criminal reason—”

“Hell, I told you that—” “—to do with the survival of the human spirit? Nothing whatsoever. Less than nothing. Countries, civilisations, empires, great hordes, perish for no reason at all, and their soul and meaning with them, that one old man perhaps you never heard of, and who never heard of them, sitting boiling in Timbuctoo, proving the existence of the mathematical correlative of ignoratio elenchi with obsolete instruments, may survive.” “For Christ sake,” said Hugh.

“Then it was poor little defenceless Montenegro. Poor little defenceless Siberia. Or back a little further still, Hugh, to your Shelley’s, when it was poor little defenceless Greece—Cervantes!—As it will be again, of course. Or to Boswell’s—poor little defenceless Corsica! Shades of Paoli and Monboddo. Applesquires and fairies strong for freedom. As always. And Rousseau—not douanier—knew he was talking nonsense—” “I should like to know what the bloody hell it is you imagine you’re talking!” “Why can’t people mind their own damned business!” “Or say what they mean?” “It was something else, I grant you. The dishonest mass rationalisation of motive, justification of the common pathological itch. Of the motives for interference; merely a passion for fatality half the time. Curiosity. Experience—very natural … But nothing constructive at bottom, only acceptance really, a piddling contemptible acceptance of the state of affairs that flatters one into feeling thus noble or useful!” “But my God it’s against such a state of affairs that people like the Loyalists—”

“But with calamity at the end of it! There must be calamity because otherwise the people who did the interfering would have to come back and cope with their responsibilities for a change—” “Just let a real war come along and then see how blood-thirsty chaps like you are!” “Which would never do. Why all you people who talk about going to Spain and fighting for freedom—Cervantes!—should learn by heart what Tolstoy said about that kind of thing in War and Peace, that conversation with the volunteers in the train—”

“But anyhow that was in—” “Where the first volunteer, I mean, turned out to be a bragging degenerate obviously convinced after he’d been drinking that he was doing something heroic—what are you laughing at, Hugh?” “It’s funny.” “And the second was a man who had tried everything and been a failure in all of them. And the third—” Yvonne abruptly returned and the Consul, who had been shouting, slightly lowered his voice, “an artillery man, was the only one who struck...

misfits, all good for nothing, cowards, baboons, meek wolves, parasites, every man jack of them, people afraid to face their own responsibilities, fight their own fight, ready to go anywhere, as Tolstoy well perceived—” “Quitters?” Hugh said. “Didn’t Katamasov or whoever he was believe that the action of those volunteers was nevertheless an expression of the whole soul of the Russian people?—Mind you, I appreciate that a diplomatic corps which merely remains in San Sebastián hoping Franco will win quickly instead of returning to Madrid to tell the British Government the truth of what’s really going on in Spain can’t possibly consist of quitters!” “Isn’t your desire to fight for Spain, for fiddledee, for Timbuctoo, for China, for hypocrisy, for bugger all, for any hokery pokery that a few moose-head...

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.

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 toward 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.

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.

“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.”

“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.”

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.

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 guttering 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 tremours of lightning shuddering through the heavens and the horse—great God, the horse—and would this scene repeat itself endlessly and forever?—the horse, rearing, poised over her, petrified in midair, 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 t...

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 wer...

“I learn that the world goes round so I am waiting here for my house to pass by.” He held out his hand. “Amigo,” he said.

And he saw dimly too how Yvonne’s arrival, the snake in the garden, his quarrel with Laruelle and later with Hugh and Yvonne, the infernal machine, the encounter with Señora Gregorio, the finding of the letters, and much beside, how all the events of the day indeed had been as indifferent tufts of grass he had half-heartedly clutched at or stones loosed on his downward flight, which were still showering on him from above.

Where are you, Geoffrey? If I only knew where you were, if I only knew that you wanted me, you know I would have long since been with you. For my life is irrevocably and forever bound to yours. Never think that by releasing me you will be free. You would only condemn us to an ultimate hell on earth. You would only free something else to destroy us both. I am frightened, Geoffrey. Why do you not tell me what has happened? What do you need? And my God, what do you wait for? What release can be compared to the release of love? My thighs ache to embrace you. The emptiness of my body is the famished need of you. My tongue is dry in my mouth for the want of our speech. If you let anything happen to yourself you will be harming my flesh and mind. I am in your hands now. Save—”

Abruptly the radio, which, as Sanabria finished with the phone again, Diosdado had turned full blast, shouted in Spanish the Consul translated to himself in a flash, shouted like orders yelled in a gale of wind, the only orders that will save the ship: “Incalculable are the benefits civilisation has brought us, incommensurable the productive power of all classes of riches originated by the inventions and discoveries of science. Inconceivable the marvellous creations of the human sex in order to make men more happy, more free, and more perfect.

Without parallel the crystalline and fecund fountains of the new life which still remains closed to the thirsty lips of the people who follow in their griping and bestial tasks.”

The Chief of Rostrums was looking down at him. Sanabria stood by silent, grimly rubbing his cheek. “Norteamericano, eh,” said the Chief. “Inglés. You Jew.” He narrowed his eyes. “What the hell you think you do around here? You pelado, eh? It’s no good for your health. I

shoot de twenty people.” It was half a threat, half confidential. “We have found out—on the telephone—is it right?—that you are a criminal. You want to be a policeman? I make you policeman in Mexico.”

Presently the word “pelado” began to fill his whole consciousness. That had been Hugh’s word for the thief: now someone had flung the insult at him. And it was as if, for a moment, he had become the pelado, the thief—yes, the pilferer of meaningless muddled ideas out of which his rejection of life had grown, who had worn his two or three little bowler hats, his disguises, over these abstractions: now the realest of them all was close. But someone had called him “compañero” too, which was better, much better. It made him happy. These thoughts drifting through his mind were accompanied by music he could hear only when he listened carefully. Mozart was it? The Siciliana. Finale of the D minor quartet by Moses. No, it was something funereal, of Gluck’s perhaps, from Alcestis. Yet there was a Bach-like quality to it. Bach? A clavichord, heard from far away, in England in the seventeenth century. England. The chords of a guitar too, half lost, mingled with the distant clamour of a waterfall and what sounded like the cries of love.

But there was nothing there: no peaks, no life, no climb. Nor was this summit a summit exactly: it had no substance, no firm base. It was crumbling too, whatever it was, collapsing, while he was falling, falling into the volcano, he must have climbed it after all, though now there was this noise of foisting lava in his ears, horribly, it was in eruption, yet no, it wasn’t the volcano, the world itself was bursting, bursting into black spouts of villages catapulted into space, with himself falling through it all, through the inconceivable pandemonium of a million tanks, through the blazing of ten million burning bodies, falling, into a forest, falling—

Suddenly he screamed, and it was as though this scream were being tossed from one tree to another, as its echoes returned, then, as though the trees themselves were crowding nearer, huddled together, closing over him, pitying … Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.