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

“Get this straight, Geoffrey, I’m thinking of Yvonne, not you.” “Get it a little straighter still. You’re thinking of yourself.

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

katzenjammer?”

“What’s the use of escaping,” he drew the moral with complete seriousness, “from ourselves?

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

“What is it Goethe says about the horse?” he said. “‘Weary of liberty he suffered himself to be saddled and bridled, and was ridden to death for his pains.

“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

Ah, a woman could not know the perils, the complications, yes, the importance of a drunkard’s life!

In the final analysis there was no one you could trust to drink with you to the bottom of the bowl. A lonely thought.