Under the Volcano Read Online Free PDF Page B

theatre in time. The rain was falling in torrents.
    He stood, out of breath, under the
shelter of the theatre entrance which was, however, more like the entrance to
some gloomy bazaar or market. Peasants were crowding in with baskets. At the
box office, momentarily vacated, the door left half open, a frantic hen sought
admission. Everywhere people were flashing torches or striking matches. The van
with the loudspeaker slithered away into the rain and thunder. Las Manos de
Orlac, said a poster: 6 y 8.30. Las Manos de Orlac, con Peter Lorre.
    The street lights came on again,
though the theatre still remained dark. M. Laruelle fumbled for a cigarette.
The hands of Orlac... How, in a flash, that had brought back the old days of
the cinema, he thought, indeed his own delayed student days, the days of the
Student of Prague, and Wiene and Werner Krauss and Karl Grüne, the Ufa days
when a defeated Germany was winning the respect of the cultured world by the
pictures she was making. Only then it had been Conrad Veidt in Orlac.
Strangely, that particular film had been scarcely better than the present
version, a feeble Hollywood product he'd seen some years before in Mexico City
or perhaps--M. Laruelle looked around him--perhaps at this very theatre. It was
not impossible. But so far as he remembered not even Peter Lorre had been able
to salvage it and he didn't want to see it again... Yet what a complicated
endless tale it seemed to tell, of tyranny and sanctuary, that poster looming
above him now, showing the murderer Orlac! An artist with a murderer's hands;
that was the ticket, the hieroglyphic of the times. For really it was Germany
itself that, in the gruesome degradation of a bad cartoon, stood over him.--Or
was it, by some uncomfortable stretch of the imagination, M. Laruelle himself?
    The manager of the cine was standing
before him, cupping, with that same lightning-swift, fumbling-thwarting
courtesy exhibited by Dr. Vigil, by all Latin Americans, a match for his
cigarette: his hair, innocent of raindrops, which seemed almost lacquered, and
a heavy perfume emanating from him, betrayed his daily visit to the peluquería;
he was impeccably dressed in striped trousers and a black coat, inflexibly muy
correcto, like most Mexicans of his type, despite earthquake and thunderstorm.
He threw the match away now with a gesture that was not wasted, for it amounted
to a salute. "Come and have a drink," he said.
    "The rainy season dies
hard," M. Laruelle smiled as they elbowed their way through into a little
cantina which abutted on the cinema without sharing its frontal shelter. The
cantina, known as the Cervecería XX, and which was also Vigil's "place
where you know," was lit by candles stuck in bottles on the bar and on the
few tables along the walls. The tables were all full.
    "Chingar," the manager
said, under his breath, preoccupied, alert, and gazing about him: they took
their places standing at the end of the short bar where there was room for two.
"I am very sorry the function must be suspended. But the wires have
decomposed. Chingado. Every blessed week something goes wrong with the lights.
Last week it was much worse, really terrible. You know we had a troupe from
Panama City here trying out a show for Mexico."
    "Do you mind my--"
    "No, hombre," laughed the
other--M. Laruelle had asked Sr Bustamente, who'd now succeeded in attracting
the barman's attention, hadn't he seen the Orlac picture here before and if so
had he revived it as a hit. "¿--uno--?"
    M. Laruelle hesitated:
"Tequila" then corrected himself: "No, anís--anís, por favor,
señor."
    "Y una--ah--gaseosa," Sr
Bustamente told the barman. "No, señor," he was fingering
appraisingly, still preoccupied, the stuff of M. Laruelle's scarcely wet tweed
jacket. "Compañero, we have not revived it. It has only returned. The
other day I show my latest news here too: believe it, the first newsreels from
the Spanish war, that