their queer
familiar blooms, once emblematic of life, now of an evil phallic death. You do
not know how to love these things any longer. All your love is the cantinas
now: the feeble survival of a love of life now turned to poison, which only is
not wholly poison, and poison has become your daily food, when in the
tavern--"
"Has Pedro gone too then?"
Yvonne was holding his arm tightly but her voice was almost natural, he felt.
"Yes, thank God!"
"How about the cats?"
"Perro!" the Consul,
removing his glasses, said amiably to the pariah dog that had appeared
familiarly at heel. But the animal cowered back down the drive. "Though
the garden's a rajah mess, I'm afraid. We've been virtually without a gardener
at all for months. Hugh pulled up a few weeds. He cleaned out the swimming-pool
too... Hear it? It ought to be full today." The drive widened to a small
arena then debouched into a path cutting obliquely across the narrow sloping
lawn, islanded by rose beds, to the "front" door, actually at the
back of the low white house which was roofed with imbricated flower-pot-coloured
tiles resembling bisected drainpipes. Glimpsed through the trees, with its
chimney on the far left, from which rose a thread of dark smoke, the bungalow
looked an instant like a pretty little ship lying at anchor. "No.
Skulduggery and suings for back wages have been my lot. And leaf-cutter ants,
several species. The house was broken into one night when I was out. And flood:
the drains of Quauhnahuac visited us and left us with something that smelt like
the Cosmic Egg till recently. Never mind though, maybe you can--"
Yvonne disengaged her arm to lift a
tentacle from a trumpet vine growing across the path:
"Oh Geoffrey! Where're my
camellias?--"
"God knows." The lawn was
divided by a dry runnel parallel with the house bridged by a spurious plank.
Between floribundia and rose a spider wove an intricate web. With pebbly cries
a covey of tyrant flycatchers swept over the house in quick dark flight. They
crossed the plank and they were on the "stoop."
An old woman with a face of a highly
intellectual black gnome the Consul always thought (mistress to some gnarled
guardian of the mine beneath the garden once, perhaps), and carrying the
inevitable mop, the trapeador or American husband, over her shoulder, shuffled
out of the "front" door, scraping her feet--the shuffling and the
scraping however seemingly unidentified, controlled by separate mechanisms.
"Here's Concepta," the Consul said. Yvonne: "Concepta. Concepta,
Señora Firmin." The gnome smiled a childlike smile that momentarily
transformed its face into an innocent girl's. Concepta wiped her hands on her
apron: she was shaking hands with Yvonne as the Consul hesitated, seeing now,
studying with sober interest (though at this point all at once he felt more
pleasantly "tight" than at any time since just before that blank
period last night) Yvonne's luggage on the stoop before him, three bags and a
hatbox so bespangled with labels they might have burst forth into a kind of
bloom, to be saying too, here is your history: Hotel Hilo Honolulu, Villa
Carmona Granada, Hotel Theba Algeciras, Hotel Peninsula Gibraltar, Hotel
Nazareth Galilee, Hotel Manchester Paris, Cosmo Hotel London, the S.S. Ile de
France, Regis Hotel Canada, Hotel Mexico D.F.--and now the new labels, the
newest blossoms: Hotel Astor New York, the Town House Los Angeles, S.S.
Pennsylvania, Hotel Mirador Acapulco, the Compañía Mexicana de Aviación.
"¿El otro señor?" he was saying to Concepta who shook her head with
delighted emphasis. "Hasn't returned yet. A right, Yvonne, I dare say you
want your old room. Anyhow Hugh's in the back one with the machine."
"The machine?"
"The mowing machine."
"--por qué no, agua
caliente," Concepta's soft musical humorous voice rose and fell as she
shuffled and scraped off with two of the bags.
"So there's hot water for
familiar blooms, once emblematic of life, now of an evil phallic death. You do
not know how to love these things any longer. All your love is the cantinas
now: the feeble survival of a love of life now turned to poison, which only is
not wholly poison, and poison has become your daily food, when in the
tavern--"
"Has Pedro gone too then?"
Yvonne was holding his arm tightly but her voice was almost natural, he felt.
"Yes, thank God!"
"How about the cats?"
"Perro!" the Consul,
removing his glasses, said amiably to the pariah dog that had appeared
familiarly at heel. But the animal cowered back down the drive. "Though
the garden's a rajah mess, I'm afraid. We've been virtually without a gardener
at all for months. Hugh pulled up a few weeds. He cleaned out the swimming-pool
too... Hear it? It ought to be full today." The drive widened to a small
arena then debouched into a path cutting obliquely across the narrow sloping
lawn, islanded by rose beds, to the "front" door, actually at the
back of the low white house which was roofed with imbricated flower-pot-coloured
tiles resembling bisected drainpipes. Glimpsed through the trees, with its
chimney on the far left, from which rose a thread of dark smoke, the bungalow
looked an instant like a pretty little ship lying at anchor. "No.
Skulduggery and suings for back wages have been my lot. And leaf-cutter ants,
several species. The house was broken into one night when I was out. And flood:
the drains of Quauhnahuac visited us and left us with something that smelt like
the Cosmic Egg till recently. Never mind though, maybe you can--"
Yvonne disengaged her arm to lift a
tentacle from a trumpet vine growing across the path:
"Oh Geoffrey! Where're my
camellias?--"
"God knows." The lawn was
divided by a dry runnel parallel with the house bridged by a spurious plank.
Between floribundia and rose a spider wove an intricate web. With pebbly cries
a covey of tyrant flycatchers swept over the house in quick dark flight. They
crossed the plank and they were on the "stoop."
An old woman with a face of a highly
intellectual black gnome the Consul always thought (mistress to some gnarled
guardian of the mine beneath the garden once, perhaps), and carrying the
inevitable mop, the trapeador or American husband, over her shoulder, shuffled
out of the "front" door, scraping her feet--the shuffling and the
scraping however seemingly unidentified, controlled by separate mechanisms.
"Here's Concepta," the Consul said. Yvonne: "Concepta. Concepta,
Señora Firmin." The gnome smiled a childlike smile that momentarily
transformed its face into an innocent girl's. Concepta wiped her hands on her
apron: she was shaking hands with Yvonne as the Consul hesitated, seeing now,
studying with sober interest (though at this point all at once he felt more
pleasantly "tight" than at any time since just before that blank
period last night) Yvonne's luggage on the stoop before him, three bags and a
hatbox so bespangled with labels they might have burst forth into a kind of
bloom, to be saying too, here is your history: Hotel Hilo Honolulu, Villa
Carmona Granada, Hotel Theba Algeciras, Hotel Peninsula Gibraltar, Hotel
Nazareth Galilee, Hotel Manchester Paris, Cosmo Hotel London, the S.S. Ile de
France, Regis Hotel Canada, Hotel Mexico D.F.--and now the new labels, the
newest blossoms: Hotel Astor New York, the Town House Los Angeles, S.S.
Pennsylvania, Hotel Mirador Acapulco, the Compañía Mexicana de Aviación.
"¿El otro señor?" he was saying to Concepta who shook her head with
delighted emphasis. "Hasn't returned yet. A right, Yvonne, I dare say you
want your old room. Anyhow Hugh's in the back one with the machine."
"The machine?"
"The mowing machine."
"--por qué no, agua
caliente," Concepta's soft musical humorous voice rose and fell as she
shuffled and scraped off with two of the bags.
"So there's hot water for
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