Under the Volcano: A Novel (P.S.)

Nothing in the world was more terrible than an empty bottle! Unless it was an empty glass.

Yet this opportunity to be brilliant was, in turn, more like something else, an opportunity to be admired; even, and he could at least thank the tequila for such honesty, however brief its duration, to be loved. Loved precisely for what was another question: since he’d put it to himself he might answer: loved for my reckless and irresponsible appea

“Hi there, Hugh, you old snake in the grass!”

the Consul, sucking a lemon, felt the fire of the tequila run down his spine like lightning striking a tree which thereupon, miraculously, blossoms.

But behind the volcanoes themselves he saw now that storm clouds were gathering. “Sokotra,” he thought, “my mysterious island in the Arabian Sea, where the frankincense and myrrh used to come from, and no one has ever been—” There was something in the wild strength of this landscape, once a battlefield, that seemed to be shouting at him, a presence

a drowsy hum rose up from the morning, the mares nodded, there were the foals, here was the dog, and it is all a bloody lie, he thought: we have fallen inevitably into it, it is as if, upon this one day in the year the dead come to life, or so one was reliably informed on the bus, this day of visions and miracles, by some contrariety we have been a

Ixtaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, that image of the perfect marriage, lay now clear and beautiful on the horizon under an almost pure morning sky. Far above him a few white clouds were racing windily after a pale gibbous moon. Drink all morning, they said to him, drink all day. This is life! Enormously high too, he noted some vultures waiting, more gr

katzenjammer?”

“Been away quite a time, hasn’t she?” the other asked mildly, leaning forward so that he could see, more clearly, the Consul’s bungalow. “Your brother still here?” “Brother? Oh, you mean Hugh … No, he’s in Mexico City.” “I think you’ll find he’s got back.” The Consul now glanced up at the house himself. “Hicket,” he said briefly, apprehensively. “I