Under the Volcano: A Novel by Malcolm Lowry

Author:Malcolm Lowry [Lowry, Malcolm]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction, Classics, Literary
ISBN: 9780060955229
Google: PimjXornK_wC
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2000-04-26T21:49:57+00:00

7

On the side of the drunken madly revolving world hurtling at 1.20 p.m. towards Hercules's Butterfly the house seemed a bad idea, the Consul thought--

There were two towers, Jacques's zacualis, one at each end and joined by a catwalk over the roof, which was the glassed-in gable of the studio below. These towers were as if camouflaged (almost like the Samaritan, in fact): blue, grey, purple, vermilion, had once been slashed on in zebra stripes. But time and weather had combined to render the effect from a short distance of a uniform dull mauve. Their tops, reached from the catwalk by twin wooden ladders, and from inside by two spiral staircases, made two flimsy crenellated miradors, each scarcely larger than a bartizan, tiny roofless variants of the observation posts which everywhere commanded the valley in Quauhnahuac.

On the battlements of the mirador to their left, as the Consul and Hugh confronted the house, with the Calle Nicaragua stretching downhill to their right, now appeared to them two bilious-looking angels. The angels, carved out of pink stone, knelt facing one another in profile against the sky across the intervening crenels, while behind, upon corresponding merlons at the far side, sat solemnly two nameless objects like marzipan cannonballs, evidently constructed from the same material.

The other mirador was unadorned save by its crenellations and it often struck the Consul that this contrast was somehow obscurely appropriate to Jacques, as indeed was that between the angels and the cannonballs. It was perhaps also significant he should use his bedroom for working whereas the studio itself on the main floor had been turned into a dining-room often no better than a camping-ground for his cook and her relatives.

Coming closer it could be seen that on the left and somewhat larger tower, below that bedroom's two windows--which, as if degenerate machicolations, were built askew, like the separated halves of a chevron--a panel of rough stone, covered with large letters painted in gold leaf, had been slightly set into the wall to give a semblance of bas-relief. These gold letters though very thick were merged together most confusingly. The Consul had noticed visitors to the town staring up at them for half an hour at a time. Sometimes M. Laruelle would come out to explain they really spelt something, that they formed that phrase of Frey Luis de Leon's the Consul did not at this moment allow himself to recall. Nor did he ask himself why he should have come to be almost more familiar with this extraordinary house than his own as, preceding M. Laruelle now, who was prodding him cheerfully from behind, he followed Hugh and Yvonne into it, into the studio, empty for once, and up the spiral staircase of its left-hand tower. "Haven't we overshot the drinks?" he asked, his mood of detachment expiring now he remembered that only a few weeks before he'd sworn never to enter this place again. "Don't you ever think of anything else?" it seemed Jacques had said.

The Consul

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