Read Online Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry - Free Book Online Page B

features seemed carefully Spanish, hanging behind the bar:
La simpatiquísima y encantadora María Landrock, notable artista alemana que pronto habremos de ver en sensacional Film
.
    â€˜ –
un momentito, señor. Con permiso…
’
    Sr Bustamente went out, not through the door by which they had entered, but through a side entrance behind the bar immediately on their right, from which a curtain had been drawn back, into the cinema itself. M. Laruelle had a good view of the interior. From it, exactly indeed as though the show were in progress, came a beautiful uproar of bawling children and hawkers selling fried potatoes and frijoles. It was difficult to believe so many had left their seats. Dark shapes of pariah dogs prowled in and out of the stalls. The lights were not entirely dead : they glimmered, a dim reddish orange, flickering. On the screen, over which clambered an endless procession of torchlit shadows, hung, magically projected upside down, a faint apology for the ‘suspended function’; in the
autoridades
box three cigarettes were lit on one match. At the rear where reflected light caught the lettering SALIDA of the exit he just made out the anxious figure of Sr Bustamente taking to his office. Outside it thundered and rained. M. Laruelle sipped his water-clouded
anís
which was first greenly chilling then rather nauseating. Actually it was not at all like absinthe. But his tiredness had left him and he began to feel hungry. It was already seven o’clock. Though Vigil and he would probably dine later at the Gambrinus or Charley’s Place. He selected, from a saucer, aquarter lemon and sucked it reflectively, reading a calendar which, next to the enigmatic María Landrock, behind the bar portrayed the meeting of Cortez and Moctezuma in Tenochtitlán:
El último Emperador Azteca
, it said below,
Moctezuma y Hernán Cortés representativo de la raza hispaña, quedan frente a frente: dos razas y dos civilizaciones que habían llegado a un alto grado de perfección se mezclan para integrar el núcleo de nuestra nacionalidad actual
. But Sr Bustamente was coming back, carrying, in one uplifted hand above a press of people by the curtain, a book…
    M. Laruelle, conscious of shock, was turning the book over and over in his hands. Then he laid it on the bar counter and took a sip of
anís. ‘Bueno, muchas gracias, señor
,’ he said.
    â€˜
De nada
,’ Sr Bustamente answered in a lowered tone; he waved aside with a sweeping somehow inclusive gesture, a sombre pillar advancing bearing a tray of chocolate skulls. ‘Don’t know how long, maybe two, maybe three years
aquí
.’
    M. Laruelle glanced in the flyleaf again, then shut the book on the counter. Above them the rain slammed on the cinema roof. It was eighteen months since the Consul had lent him the thumbed maroon volume of Elizabethan plays. At that time Geoffrey and Yvonne had been separated for perhaps five months. Six more must elapse before she would return. In the Consul’s garden they drifted gloomily up and down among the roses and the plumbago and the waxplants ‘like dilapidated
préservatifs
’, the Consul had remarked with a diabolical look at him, a look at the same time almost official, that seemed now to have said :’ I know, Jacques, you may never return the book, but suppose I lend it you precisely for that reason, that some day you may be sorry you did not. Oh, I shall forgive you then, but will you be able to forgive yourself? Not merely for not having returned it, but because the book will by then have become an emblem of what even now it is impossible to return.’ M. Laruelle had taken the book. He wanted it because for sometime he had been carrying at the back of his mind the notion of making in France a modern film version of the Faustus story with some such character as Trotsky for its protagonist: as a matter of fact he had not opened the