Under the Volcano Read Online Free PDF

magnificent Olympic pool. The springboards stand empty and mournful. Its jai-alai courts are grass-grown and deserted. Two tennis courts only are kept up in the season.
    Towards sunset on the Day of the Dead in November 1939, two men in white flannels sat on the main terrace of the Casinodrinking
anís
. They had been playing tennis, followed by billiards, and their rackets, rainproofed, screwed in their presses – the doctor’s triangular, the other’s quadrangular – lay on the parapet before them. As the processions winding from the cemetery down the hillside behind the hotel came closer the plangent sounds of their chanting were borne to the two men; they turned to watch the mourners, a little later to be visible only as the melancholy lights of their candles, circling among the distant trussed cornstalks. Dr Arturo Díaz Vigil pushed the bottle of Anís del Mono over to M. Jacques Laruelle, who now was leaning forward intently.
    Slightly to the right and below them, below the gigantic red evening, whose reflection bled away in the deserted swimming pools scattered everywhere like so many mirages, lay the peace and sweetness of the town. It seemed peaceful enough from where they were sitting. Only if one listened intently, as M. Laruelle was doing now, could one distinguish a remote confused sound – distinct yet somehow inseparable from the minute murmuring, the tintinnabulation of the mourners – as of singing, rising and falling, and a steady trampling – the bangs and cries of the
fiesta
that had been going on all day.
    M. Laruelle poured himself another
anís
. He was drinking
anís
because it reminded him of absinthe. A deep flush had suffused his face, and his hand trembled slightly over the bottle, from whose label a florid demon brandished a pitchfork at him.
    â€˜ –I meant to persuade him to go away and get
déalcoholisé
,’ Dr Vigil was saying. He stumbled over the word in French and continued in English. ‘But I was so sick myself that day after the ball that I suffer, physical, really. That is very bad, for we doctors must comport ourselves like apostles. You remember, we played tennis that day too. Well, after I lookèd the Consul in his garden I sended a boy down to see if he would come for a few minutes and knock my door, I would appreciate it to him, if not, please write me a note, if drinking have not killèd him already.’
    M. Laruelle smiled.
    â€˜But they have gone,’ the other went on, ‘and yes, I think to ask you too that day if you had lookèd him at his house.’
    â€˜He was at my house when you telephoned, Arturo.’
    â€˜Oh, I know, but we got so horrible drunkness that night before, so
perfectamente borracho
, that it seems to me, the Consul is as sick as I am.’ Dr Vigil shook his head. ‘Sickness is not only in body, but in that part used to be call: soul. Poor your friend he spend his money on earth in such continuous tragedies.’
    M. Laruelle finished his drink. He rose and went to the parapet; resting his hands one on each tennis racket, he gazed down and around him: the abandoned jai-alai courts, their bastions covered with grass, the dead tennis courts, the fountain, quite near in the centre of the hotel avenue, where a cactus farmer had reined up his horse to drink. Two young Americans, a boy and a girl, had started a belated game of ping-pong on the veranda of the annex below. What had happened just a year ago today seemed already to belong in a different age. One would have thought the horrors of the present would have swallowed it up like a drop of water. It was not so. Though tragedy was in the process of becoming unreal and meaningless it seemed one was still permitted to remember the days when an individual life held some value and was not a mere misprint in a communiqué. He lit a cigarette. Far to his left, in the north-east, beyond the valley and the terraced foothills of the