CHAPTER XII

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337.1 "Mescal," said the Consul.

An echo of the beginning of Chapter X and further confirmation of the earlier words [216]: "if I ever start to drink mescal again, I'm afraid, yes, that would be the end." This time, there is no afterthought or qualification of "mescal poquito" or "mescalito": in fact, in an earlier draft [UBC 28-12, 1] the Consul had demanded: "Mescal ... si, mescal doble, por buen favor, señorita. Si, mescal grande." The word, in Chapters X and XII, was added to the 1940 text in the 1941 revision [UBC 27-3, 1 & 27-5, 1], linking the two resonantly. The chapter thereafter began not with a stagger to the Farolito, but in Parián itself.

337.2 the ticking of his watch, his heart, his conscience.

The ticking was last heard at the end of Chapter X. The same ticking (of a soul awaiting death) is the theme of Lowry's poem, 'Thirty-five Mescals in Cuautla':

This ticking is most terrible of all –
You hear the sound I mean on ships and trains,
You hear it everywhere, for it is doom;
The tick of real death, not the tick of time;
The termite at the rotten wainscot of the world –
And it is death to you, though well you know
The heart's silent tick, the tick of real death,
Only the tick of time-still only the heart's chime
When body's alarm wakes whirring to terror.

Compare Conrad Aiken's Three Preludes (a poem chosen, probably by Lowry, for the sixth issue of Experiment, the Cambridge University magazine): "The alarm-clock ticks, the pulse keeps time with it, / Night and the mind are full of sound." It concludes:

These things are only the uprush from the void,
The wings angelic and demonic, the sound of the abyss
Dedicated to death. And this is you.

In both poems, and in the novel, the image of time running out is immediately reinforced by that of "subterranean collapse" as the foundations of the deep seem about to open. Compare, too, Frances Cornford, 'The Watch':

I waked on my hot hard bed.
Upon a pillow lay my head.
Beneath the pillow I could hear
My little watch was ticking clear.
I thought the throbbing of it went
Like my continued discontent.
I thought it said in every tick:
I am so sick, so sick, so sick.
O death, come quick, come quick, come quick,
Come quick, come quick, come quick, come quick.

337.3 a white rabbit.

Rabbits

Among the Aztecs the rabbit was an emblem of drunkenness, a crime punishable by death. Lewis Spence comments [M of M & P, 104]:

When a man was intoxicated with the native Mexican drink of pulque, a liquor made from the juice of the Argave Americana [sic], he was believed to be under the influence of a god or spirit. The commonest form under which the drink-god was worshipped was the rabbit, that animal being considered to be utterly devoid of sense. This particular divinity was known as Ome-tochtli. The scale of debauchery which it was desired to reach was indicated by the number of rabbits worshipped, the highest number, four hundred [see #3.6(f)], representing the most extreme degree of intoxication.

Spence elsewhere comments [M & M of M, 84] that a rabbit in the house was regarded among the Aztecs as a sign of bad luck, a portent borne out in the year of One-Rabbit in the cycle preceding the coming of the Spaniards, when there were ominous lights in the sky and other harbingers of disaster. To Clemens ten Holder [CL 2, 381 (23 April 1951)] Lowry commented: "it must be Peter Rabbit". It could equally be Alice in Wonderland.

337.4 Indian corn.

Corn with kernels of various colours, such as the purple and black here. The rabbit, nibbling at the "stops", is likened to someone playing a mouth organ. To Clemens ten Holder [23 April 1951; CL 2, 381], Lowry sees it as playing a harmonica: "I almost felt Hieronymus Bosch putting a claw of approbation out of his grave when I wrote that."

337.5 a beautiful Oaxaqueñan gourd of mescal ale olla.

The phrase de olla simply means "from the pot" (urn, gourd); mescal from Oaxaca, particularly in the cantinas, is often kept in gourds, often large and intricately decorated.

338.1 Bottles of Tenampa, Berreteaga, Tequila Añejo, Anís doble de Mallorca ... Henry Mallet's 'delicioso licor' ... Anís del Mono

(a) Tenampa. A raw, rum-based liquor, originally from Tenampa in the east of the state of Vera Cruz.

(b) Berreteaga. A kind of habanero from Tabasco, now produced more widely; its name derives from the original makers, "Berreteaga (Don Martín) y compañia." In the typescript of Dark as the Grave [UBC 9-1, 142], Lowry comments: "Berretaga, brandy with a strong sherry base, is a magnificent drink."

Anís

(c) Tequila Añejo. "Old Tequila," half a bottle of which is still in the bottom of the Consul's garden [see #127.3].

(d) Anîs doble de Mallorca. A high-proof anisette from Majorca.

(e) Henry Mallet's 'delicioso licor'. One of the many "deliciosos liquores" made since 1891 by the firm of Henri Vallet [sic], Mexico City. 

(f) Añis del Mono. Sp. "Anisette of the Monkey"; drunk on the terrace of the Casino de la Selva by Vigil and Laruelle, who also notice the demon on the label [see #4.3]. The voluted or spiral shape may intimate the shape of Dante's hell.

338.2 crossed long spoons.

The proximity of the bottle depicting the devil brandishing a pitchfork adds relish to the proverb, "he who sups with the devil needs a long spoon."

338.3 aguardiente.

Sp. agua, "water" and ardiente, "burning"; brandy or liquor generally, but in Mexican usage with the specific sense of a liquor distilled from cane sugar by adding a fermented wine or fruit stock to a liquid sugar base. Morelos, particularly in the last years of the Porfiriato, was the leading Mexican producer of aguardientes. The bulbous jars containing the aguardientes are not unlike Jacques's cuneiform stone idols [199].

Hotel Bella Vista

338.4 Hotel Bella Vista Gran Baile a Beneficio de la Crux Roja. Los Mejores Artistas del radio en acción. No falte Vd.

Sp. "Hotel Bella Vista Grand Ball for the benefit of the Red Cross. The best radio stars in action.  Don't miss it." As earlier [45], the advertisement obliquely comments on the Consul's inability to render the dying Indian first aid.

338.5 A Few Fleas.

The son of Diosdado, "God-given", is named ‘A Few Fleas’, as in the common expression "ser uno de pocas pulgas", or "de malas pulgas"; one who is easily irritated, quarrelsome (literally, "to be one of a few fleas", or "of bad fleas"). In Beau Geste, three brothers fleeing from justice are called the Three Fleas.

Ti-to

338.6 El Hijo del Diablo .... Ti-to.

Ti-to was a popular comic strip, serialized in many Mexican papers (Raul Ortíz to CA), reprinting from 1936 newspaper strips from the American comic book, Tip Top. The title here means "Son of the Devil".

338.7 chocolate skulls ... chocolate skeletons ... funeral wagons.

Day of the Dead

Items of confectionery, often very intricate and beautifully made, produced for the Day of the Dead. Eisenstein comments [The Film Sense, 197-98]:

Deathday in Mexico. Day of the greatest fun and merriment. The day when Mexico provokes death and makes fun of it – death is but a step to another cycle of life – why then fear it! Hat stores display skulls wearing top and straw hats. Candy takes the shape of skulls in sugar and coffins of confectionery. Parties go to the cemetery, taking food to the dead. Parties play and sing on the graves. And the food of the dead is eaten by the living.

As the word ‘yes’ implies, the Consul recalls Mr Quincey's testy reply to his "I'm on the wagon," [133]: "The funeral wagon, I'd say, Firmin."

338.8 De pronto, Dalia vuelve en Sigrita llamando la atención de un guardia que pasea. ¡Suélteme! ¡Suélteme!

Sp. "Suddenly Dalia turns from Sigrita, calling the attention of a policeman who is passing. Save me! Save me!" (literally, "release me").

338.9 went out for change.

The British text reads, in error, "went out for a change".

338.10 maybe the scorpion, not wanting to be saved, had stung itself to death.

Lowry notes [SL, 198]: "The scorpion is an image of suicide (Scorpions sting themselves to death, so they say – Dr. Johnson called this a lie, but there is in fact some scientific evidence for it)." As the 1940 Volcano [345] reveals, the Consul's source for this story, so emblematic of his own fate, is Boswell's Life of Johnson [beginning of 1768]:

I told him that I had several times, when in Italy, seen the experiment of placing a scorpion within a circle of burning coals; that it ran round and round in extreme pain; and finding no way to escape, retired to the centre, and like a true Stoick philosopher, darted its sting into its head, and thus at once freed itself from its woes .... Johnson would not admit the fact.

338.11 In Parián did Kubla Khan.

An echo of the opening lines of Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan':

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
     
Down to a sunless sea.

The implied reference, however, is to the "deep romantic chasm" of line 12 [see #200.3].

338.12 Shelley.

The Consul refers to Shelley's The Cenci [III.i.243-65]:

Beatrice:                     But I remember
Two miles on this side of the fort, the road
Crosses a deep ravine; 'tis rough and narrow,
And winds with short turns down the precipice;
And in its depth there is a mighty rock,
Which has, from unimaginable years,
Sustained itself with terror and with toil
Over a gulf, and with the agony
With which it clings seems slowly coming down;
Even as a wretched soul hour after hour,
Clings to the mass of life; yet clinging, leans;
And leaning, makes more dark the dread abyss
In which it fears to fall; beneath this crag
Huge as despair, as if in weariness,
The melancholy mountain yawns ... below,
You hear but see not an impetuous torrent
Ranging among the caverns, and a bridge
Crosses the chasm; and high above there grow,
With intersecting trunks, from crag to crag,
Cedars, and yews, and pines; whose tangled hair
Is matted in one solid roof of shade
By the dark ivy's twine. At noonday here
'Tis twilight, and at sunset blackest night.

Shelley

The Cenci (1819) is a poetic tragedy by Shelley about Count Francesco Cenci, who after a life of wickedness and debauchery conceives an implacable hatred, in the form of an incestuous passion, against his daughter Beatrice. To end her miseries, Beatrice plots with her stepmother and brother to murder the tyrant. The passage referred to by the Consul comes at the moment of plotting the count's death. Though the plot is successful, suspicions are aroused, and the three conspirators are executed.

338.13 Calderón.

Pedro Calderón dc la Barca (1600-81), Spanish poet and official dramatist at the court of Philip IV; a prolific writer of plays on historical and religious themes. His El Mágico Prodigioso (The Marvelous Magician) was translated in part by Shelley; it may have influenced Goethe's conception of Faust. Lowry’s implied allusion, however, is to La Vida es sueño (“Life Is a Dream”), 1636, the central theme of which is the tragic realisation by Segismund, "an imprisoned titan", that all who live are only dreaming. The play was edited in 1923 by H.J. Chaytor (Fellow of St. Catharine's and Lowry’s tutor), and later translated by Roy Campbell. The opening act describes the towering crags, and the funereal gap [line 54], "yawning wide, out of which night itself seems born."

Jan Gabrial cites a letter from Malcolm [Inside the Volcano, 177; 29 Dec. 1938] who is feeling "disassembled", controlled by an invisible player and part of the dream of a restless sleeper. He cites La Vida es sueño: "Que toda la vida es sueno y los suenos sueno son" ["that all life is a dream, and dreams are a dream"]. To Albert Erskine [UBC 2-6], Lowry wrote: "See Shelley's plagiarism of Calderon in The Cenci, his justification of same, Calderon himself, and The Cenci itself: I have used here, if I recall, bits of all 4."

339.1 La Despedida.

Sp. "The Parting"; the picture of the great rock torn apart by superlapidary forces [see #54.6], seen then by Yvonne and now by the Consul as symbolic of the impossibility of their reunion. The "spinning flywheel", already in motion that morning, has brought nearer the implacable machinery to crush the Consul.

339.2 Tartarus under Mt Aetna ... the monster Typhoeus.

Tartarus is the lower region of Hades, bound by a triple wall and surrounded by the waters of Phlegethon, to which the rebel Titans were consigned [see #131.1]. It was the home of Typhoeus, a monster with a hundred heads and fearful eyes and voices (Lowry is quoting Webster), conquered by Zeus and buried under Mount Etna, where he breathes out smoke and flames. Typhoeus is usually identified with another monster, Typhon, strictly his son. Lowry had noted this detail [UBC 31-8], and determined to work it in somewhere ("Top of 19 possible place for Typhoeus" [UBC 13-13]. Mount Etna is one entrance to Tartarus. As Asals notes [Making, 296], only in the late revisions did the book's title enter its text.

339.3 A mercurochrome agony down the west.

Mercurochrome is a crystalline dye, used in solution as an antiseptic for cuts and grazes and remarkable for its brilliant redness. The sky evokes the agony of Faustus, who sees Christ's blood stream in the firmament; the agony of Christ's passion; and the unbandaging of great giants in agony [see #35.6]. There is a conscious echoing, both here and at the end of the paragraph, of the end of Lord Jim: "The sky over Patusan was blood-red, immense, streaming like an open vein. An enormous sun had nested crimson amongst the tree-tops, and the forest below had a black and forbidding face." Jim's death resembles the Consul's in many ways: it takes place at sunset; both are shot by thugs and with a pistol; and both deaths are almost self-willed acts of contrition for past failures.

339.4 a soldier slept under a tree.

The same soldier ("or wasn't it a soldier, but something else?") is seen later [347], the hint being [Markson, 193] that this is the dead dog that will follow the Consul into the barranca.

339.5 The building ... glowered at him with one eye.

An ominous suggestion of the Cyclops, who wrought destruction among the men of Odysseus. Although there is no conscious attempt to sustain parallels with the Odyssey, allusions such as this, of dungeons like pig-pens [340], and men transformed into animals [341], show that Homer's poem has affinities with the Consul's nightmare world.

339.6 a clock pointing to six.

The barracks clock still points to six on page 347, which leads Markson [184] to suggest parallels with the Mad Hatter's Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland. More to the point is a reminder of Doctor Faustus, as Faustus realises that time is running out: "Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, / And then thou must be damned perpetually." Even more ominous is the suggestion of Rimbaud's 'Un Saison en Enfer':

Ah ça! L'horloge de la vie s'est arrêtée tout a l'heure. Je ne suis plus au monde. – La théologie est sérieuse, l'enfer est certainement en bas – et le ciel en haut. – Extase, cauchemar, sommeil dans un nid de flammes. 

("Ah, that! the clock of life has just stopped. I am no longer of the world. Theology is no joke, hell is certainly below, and heaven above. Ecstasy, nightmare, sleep in a nest of flames.")

340.1 puttees.

Strips of cloth wound round the legs from ankle to knee, as part of military uniforms. They were originally of Anglo-Indian origin.

340.2 inscribing something in copperplate handwriting.

Like the public scribe [53], the corporal is obscurely an embodiment of Thoth, scribe of the gods; the Consul will feel "oddly reassured" when the soldier is still there [341], but the implication is that a final "reckoning" is being made before the sudden change of worlds.

340.3 the fifty centavos.

With drunken logic, the Consul goes to ridiculous lengths to regain the fifty centavos that he was only too willing to give Sra Gregorio that afternoon.

341.1 his swagger stick.

A short cane carried by army officers, here connoting the paramilitary insolence so much at odds with the quality of simpatico, or quiet pride and dignity, of the two beggars.

341.2 Con German friends.

The Consul's earlier grisly pun on fried clams [see #290.4(e)] is here made explicit, and his suspicions of Nazi influence will soon be verified.

341.2 some unusual animals.

The Lost Weekend
Day of the Dead

Literally, celebrants of the Day of the Dead. To Albert Erskine [UBC 2-6], Lowry commented: "Though it is not true – as maintained in The Lost Weekend – that chaps with the heebie-jeebies never see large animals (a pal of mine once saw magenta mastadons dancing on the roof of the London Pavilion in Picadilly Circus, while someone else once saw a gorilla in flames running down the street) I'm not at all sure I approve of this passage. The stilts for one thing remind me too strongly of Dali. The passage – though I think it is unrecognizable – was suggested by a dream recorded by, of all people, J .B. Priestley in some book about 'Time' published about 1940." Lowry refers to ‘The Berkshire Beasts’ in Open House (1929), with its animals "not unlike elephants in appearance, except that they tapered more noticeably from head (their heads were enormous) to tail, and though they had the same huge flopping ears, they had no trunks."

See also "These animals that follow us about in dreams", that come out at night and are swallowed by the dawn, as in his poem 'Xochitepec'. That poem, curiously, is pencilled on the verso of a draft of Margerie Lowry's thriller, The Shapes that Creep, which begins: "They could see at once that the man was very dead" [Scherf, 'Issues in Editing', 38]. See also Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned [3]: "A procession of the damned."

342.1 the dreadful night.

An echo of 'The City of Dreadful Night' (1874) by James Thomson (1834-82), a Victorian poet from a poverty-stricken background, whose misery was aggravated by insomnia and alcoholic addiction. His poem is prefaced with Dante's "Per me si va nella citta dolente" [see #42.2], and Thomson describes the agonies of the night [lines 71-77]:

The City is of Night, but not of Sleep;
     There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain;
The pitiless hours like years and ages creep,
     A night seems termless hell. This dreadful strain
Of thought and consciousness which never ceases,
Or which some moments' stupor but increases,
     This, worse than woe, makes wretches there insane. 

The dreadful strains of demonic orchestras, the snatches of fearful sleep, imaginary parties arriving and the dark's spinets are all evoked in the Consul's letter [35], likewise composed in the Farolito of the mind.

342.2 El Bueno Tono … Monterey peeper.

El Buen Tono

A Monterey pipe (from Monterey, California, rather than Monterrey, Mexico) has connotations of the good life. The ‘El Buen Tono’ [sic] company was founded in 1875 by Ernest Pugibet (1855-1915), a French immigrant, and was soon Mexico’s largest manufacturer of tobacco and cigarettes; ‘Country Club’ (introduced in 1929) was one of its many brands. The company was acquired by Tabacalera Mexicana in 1961.

342.3 ¿ – es suyo? ... Si, señor, muchas gracias .... De nada, señor.

Sp. "Is this yours? ... Yes, many thanks, senor .... Not at all."

343.1 La rame inutile fatigua vainement une mer immobile.

Fr. "The useless oar vainly stirs a motionless sea." From Racine's Iphigénie [I.i.49-50], said by Agamemnon, King of the Greeks, as he waits in vain for the winds that will take them to Troy [see #284.4]. Lowry said that this line [UBC WT 1-9] "is excellent as describing a doldrums in drink." It was originally intended for Chapter X, where it worked neatly with the finally deleted "all stereless within a bote am I" [see #287.7], in turn defined here as "good for sense of despair".

343.2 In Spain .... Andalusia .... Granada.

Andalusia is the region of southern Spain, drained by the Guadalquivir and bounded to the north by the Sierra Morena (the "Dark Mountains"). The region consists of eight provinces, including Granada and Almeria, between which is found the Sierra Nevada (the "Snowy Mountains"), with the highest peaks in Spain: "the pride and delight of Granada; the source of her cooling breezes and perpetual verdure; of her gushing fountains and perennial streams" [Tales of the Alhambra, 69]. To James Stern [SL, 29], Lowry describes a similar incident as having happened to him in Oaxaca [see #35.11].

Granada

The confusion is generated by the reference to Granada. The Consul intends the place he met Yvonne, the romantic city of the popular song (paradise ... sunshine and orange groves ... the whispering breeze telling tales of love), but Diosdado hears grenadas, "grenades" [Jakobsen, 103], and immediately associates it with gun-running. Grenada was captured by the Nationalists in July 1936, but as a city with strong Republican sympathies it was a point of unrest throughout the war. As Asals comments [Making, 132]: "It is Geoffrey's single public affirmation of Yvonne and her importance to him – and the cost is his life."

343.3 one of the boxes in the Chinese puzzle.

Farolito

The Farolito was described [200] as "composed of numerous little rooms, each smaller and darker than the last, opening one into another, the last and darkest of all being no bigger than a cell." As W.H. New points out ['Lowry's Reading'; Woodcock, 126], "Lowry envisioned the universe as a series of Chinese boxes, with man in one of them, controlling some and controlled by others." In Dunne's An Experiment with Time [158], time is described as akin to a universe of Chinese boxes; and the attendant of the infernal machine (which is in one sense time) [221] is a Chinese hunchback.

343.4 the old Tarascan woman of the Bella Vista.

The presentiment of death that Yvonne earlier experienced [see #50.3] is now made manifest, but the Consul still does not heed it.

344.1 from one somnambulism into another.

In Macbeth [V.v. 17-23], Macbeth hears of the death of his sleep-walking queen:

She should have died hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.

Compare Bellini's opera, La Sonnambula (1831), outlined in Oscar Thompson's Plots of the Operas (which Lowry owned); and Hermann Broch's Die Schlafwandler (1928-31), a study of social decline that is obsessed with death and sees every system of values as having sprung from irrational impulses [see #309.5(c)]. The main allusion is to Das Cabinett der Dr Caligari [see #191.1], in which the somnambulist, Cesare, under the mad doctor's power, attempts to rape and murder. In Robert Wiene's film and Lowry's novel sleepwalking implies being under the hypnotic control of an alien, even deranged consciousness (a meaning stated in Éliphas Lévi's Transcendental Magic [67]).

344.2 in another country.

A reference to Marlowe's The Jew of Malta [IV.i.40-41], where Barabas the Jew is fencing accusations that he sent the poisoned broth that killed an entire nunnery:

Fr. Barn.  Thou hast committed – 
Bar.          Fornication – but that was in another country;
And besides, the wench is dead.

The phrase prefaces Eliot's 'Portrait of a Lady', which deals with emotional failure, and is echoed in the title of Ernest Hemingway's story, 'In Another Country' (in Men without Women, 1928), set in a military hospital and describing the fear of dying.

344.3 why is the barman's name Sherlock?

St Catharine's College
Riverside Inn

The name is unforgettable because it is that of Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). To the Consul's suspicious mind, the barman seems to be in cahoots with the police, investigating a suspicious fire. The private reference is to Ed Sherlock, proprietor of the Riverside Inn, Niagara-on-the-Lake, where the Lowrys had gone after their shack had burned down [DATG, 181]. There may be a further personal reference to the suicide of Lowry's college friend, Paul Fitte (an incident at the heart of October Ferry), Sherlock Court being part of St. Catharine's College.

344.4 Coriolanus is dead.

Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (1608) tells the story of Caius Marcius ,otherwise Coriolanus. Proposed as Consul, contempt of the Roman crowd makes him unpopular and he is banished. In revenge, he gathers forces to attack Rome, but he spares the city when beseeched to do so by his wife, mother and son. His supporters rebel, and Coriolanus, "an eagle in a dovecote", is slain by the conspirators in a public place in Antium.

345.1 it is this silence that frightens me.

Yvonne, probably unwittingly, is echoing Pascal’s Pensees #91 (in some editions #206): "Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie" ("the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me"). Pascal has been considering, frightened and astonished, the insignificant span of a man's life and the tiny space he occupies, "abimé dans l'infinie immensité des espaces que j'ignore et qui m'ignorant" ("abyssed in the infinite immensity of space, which I do not know and which does not know me").

346.1 Days filled with cheap and tarnished moments ... restless and haunted nights.

The sentiment and imagery are akin to T.S. Eliot's 'Prufrock' [see also #36.5]:

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels.

346.2 the letters of Heloise and Abelard.

A celebrated correspondence between Pierre Abélard (1079-1142), brilliant disputant and teacher at the schools of Ste Genevieve and Notre Dame in Paris, and Héloise (1101-64), his pupil, niece of Canon Fulbert of Notre Dame. The love intense affair ended in tragedy when Fulbert's men broke into Abélard's room one night and castrated him; Héloise retired to a convent, and the correspondence arose from the tragic separation. As the Consul observes, somewhat cynically, Yvonne's empassioned and rhetorically heightened prose bears a distinct resemblance to that of Héloise to Abélard.

Jan Gabrial

Jan Gabrial states bluntly: "Malc excerpted portions of my letter" [Inside the Volcano, 178]. Obviously annoyed at the Consul’s cynicism, she charged Lowry with reading them in a befuddled state, losing them in bars, and reconstructing them haphazardly. She cites a letter dated "Jan 5th": "My love, my love ... do you remember tomorrow? It is our anniversary. Yesterday I received word of you which brought only despair. Without you I feel brittle as coral, small pieces snapping off forever tumbled in a gray indifferent tide" (compare the 1940 Volcano [353]). In one draft [UBC 28-21], the Consul asks, "Was Yvonne plagiarising"?" Lowry answers this [UBC 31-13, 2]: "Yes – cut plagiarism, but substitute something." A glance at the rambling 1940 Volcano [351-56] indicates how essential the cuts were, however close they may have been to Jan's original; but also how, in revision, Lowry worked to make the letter in Chapter I "answer" those of Chapter XII.

346.3 mescal Xicotancatl.

The Tlaxcalan mescal (not identified) accentuates the theme of betrayal [see #301.3].

347.1 her rebozo.

A rebozo is a hand-woven woollen shawl worn by the women of Mexico.

347.2 bumblepuppy.

An outdoor game similar to tether-ball. A ball is tied to a post by a long cord, and two players bat the ball back and forth, attempting to wind the cord and ball completely around the post.  Chapter 3 of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World depicts a centrifugal version of the game, updated for Utopian consumption.

Lowry described the game to Clemens ten Holder [23 April 1951; CL 2, 382]: "it was played round a contraption like a maypole, to which was attached by a rope an object, with the hardness, thickness, and consistency of a mediaeval cannonball. You took up your stance on either side of this maypole armed with a kind of primeval club, at a distance of about one inch from your opponent. You then began magically and diabolically to persuade this rope with the cannonball on the end of it, by means, fair or foul, of the primeval club, to whisking round and round the maypole at the speed of thirteen uninvented engines of destruction with the subsidiary object of knocking out your opponent, preferably by depriving him of his nose, on the way. Once the rope really started and got into the groove – to use the terms of le jazz hot – it was damned difficult to stop, because it – like one of my flying machines in the square – naturally whirled higher and higher and higher round the maypole, round which with a final fizzle it would finally disappear altogether winding itself up into a neat knot to give you the game."

347.3 ¿Quiere María?

Sp. "Do you want Maria?" (the Spanish is casual, but acceptable). What follows is a direct analogue of that moment in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus when Mephistophilis, to deflect Faustus' thoughts from salvation, offers him the vision of Helen of Troy [see also #286.8]:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies!
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven be in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.

This moment seals the doom of Faustus, not simply because it represents intercourse with a demon, but because it convinces Faustus that he cannot be saved. Likewise, having made love to María, the Consul is only too willing to consider this "stupid unprophylactic rejection" of Yvonne as final and to use the fear of venereal disease as an excuse for not seeking further contact with his wife.

Lowry had tried in earlier drafts to stress a connection between this encounter and the moment in Goethe's Faust 2 that Faust wishes that his striving would cease (the moment before his death, immediately preceding the lines Lowry uses to preface his novel):

As with a shamed grimace he gave María ... her few pesos, a knowledge of what hell really was blazed on his soul. "Verweile doch, du bist so schön," he said, and laughed self-accusingly.

In the 1940 Volcano [357], the sexual encounter is brutal and short, with the Consul offering María her few pesos with a shameful grimace and the quotation from Goethe's Faust, but equally defending himself by remembering Laruelle (and so Yvonne's infidelity): "'At night all cats are grey,' he added to no one."

347.4 the mingitorio.

Sp. "the urinal": somewhat flattered by the title Señores, "gentlemen." The proximity to the excretory (Augustine’s "inter urinas et faeces nasquimur") further degrades the sexual activity, whatever the reckless murderous power that draws him on.

348.1 the final stupid unprophylactic rejection.

Unprophylactic has the sense of unable to protect against disease; the Consul's failure to use a prophylactic, or condom, convincing him "for brutal hygenic reasons alone" of the impossibility of approaching Yvonne again. This "hideously mismanaged act of intercourse" [287] is in marked contrast with his impotence of the morning [90].

348.2 erectis whoribus.

A mock-Latin pun uon ‘erection’ and ‘whore’ that forms a total perversion of the earlier copula maritalis [see #87.1], though, ironically, this grimoire achieves the successful act of intercourse. Jakobsen [9] points out the underlying L. erectis auribus "with attentive (or pricked) ears", and notes the reference to Virgil's Aeneid [1ines151-52]: "tum pietate gravem ac meritis si forte virum quem / conspexere, silent arrectisque auribus adstant"; ("then, if haply they set eyes on a man honoured for noble character and service, / they are silent and stand by with attentive ears"). The lines form part of an extended simile used by mighty Neptune as he calms the waves which Juno has raised to smash Aeneas' ships and which threaten the sailors with instant death. As Jakobsen notes [10], no voice comes for the Consul, as it did for Aeneas, to silence the storm.

348.3 a Spanish history of British India.

In revision [UBC 31-13] the title continues, "at the time of Warren Hastings"; the Consul starts because he sees ‘Kashmir’. Asals notes [Making, 424] that Hastings (1732-1818) was the first Governor-General of India, but was tried and acquitted. Lowry's intentions seem to have been to invoke the note of impeachment (the Samaritan affair), then to draw a parallel between the small dark rooms of the Farolito and the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta.

348.4 Zapotecan.

The language of the Zapotec Indians of the Oaxaca region; a tongue generically distinct from Nahua, the lingua franca of most of pre-Columbian Mexico. The language is still spoken today in the Oaxaca area by a few thousand native speakers; insofar as Lowry has located Parián near the volcanoes, María seems somewhat out of place.

349.1 the nightly escape from the sleeping Hotel Francia.

The Hotel Francia, Calle 20 de Noviembre, Oaxaca, is only a block or two from the Farolito, which also serves as a model for El Infierno, "the other Farolito." Lowry tells the story of the vulture in the washbasin and the slaughtered fawns in Dark as the Grave [see #35.11]; the latter, however, attributed to a restaurant in Mexico City. The references to "the cold shower-bath ... used only once before" and "the dark open sewers" are perhaps Lowry's chagrined recollections of an incident described in Conrad Aiken's Ushant [356], which tells how Lowry, disastrously drunk, had stumbled into "the Bilbo Canal", or sewage ditch, at the bottom of his garden in Cuernavaca.

349.2 how alike are the groans of love to those of the dying.

The phrase, repeated later [351], was originally intended to afford a contrast with Chapter XI, which, in the early drafts, was to conclude with Hugh and Yvonne (then the Consul's daughter) making love beneath the stars as the Consul was pitched into the abyss.

As Asals says [Making, 62-63], an essential difference between the 1940 Volcano and the final text concerns Lowry's investment of "all his real hope here in the figures of youth, Yvonne and Hugh". The earlier text lacks any sense of what the Consul's life (or death) might stand for: "Indeed, in this version it is often difficult to see on what his putative stature is based." The line was too good to be dropped, and survived the 1941 cuts, but as Lowry outgrew his obsession with "ideas" it assumed a different tonality. Cocteau somewhere tells of a priest disturbed all night by sounds of sexual congress, and knocking on the wall to suppress them, only to find in the morning that someone had died.

350.1 too heavy, like his burden of sorrow.

Like unto those of Christ on his way to Calvary, unable to shoulder the cross.

350.2 you cannot drink of it.

The words of Senora Gregorio [228], this time uncorrected; a reference to Mark 14:25, and the wine of the Last Supper: "Verily I say unto you, I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine, until the day that I drink it new in the Kingdom of God."

350.3 Salina Cruz.

The main port of Oaxaca State, on the Gulf of Tehuantepec. Wine from the area is not undistinguished; hence the hyperbole of ichor, in Greek mythology the ethereal fluid flowing instead of blood in the veins of the gods.

350.4 cold in its effect.

Compare Paradise Lost [II. 595]: "and cold performs th' effect of fire" [Cam La Bossière to CA].

351.1 through the secret passage.

The Consul had earlier picked out these words from the Tlaxcala travel folder [298]. He may be thinking of Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell, throughout which secret passages give entry to the underworld; or of Erich Pontoppidan's Natural History of Norway [see #175.8], in which strange fissures among the mountains are discussed [Pt.1, Ch.2]; his point being that after the Deluge the earth reunited, but some secret cause in the earth itself (a universal earthquake or the like) threw it into confusion, with cracks opening and "many chasms betwixt its ruins". In Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea [Pt.2, Ch.5], the Nautilus makes her way from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean by means of a secret passage known only to Captain Nemo. Secret passages are thus an intrinsic part of the antediluvian cosmology that so intrigues the Consul.

351.2 a picture of Canada.

A reminder of the northern paradise from which the Consul has now excluded himself; he will not be there, nor among the company of saints, in a month's time. Lowry's poem, 'Thirty-five Mescals in Cuautla', about the horrors of passing time, concludes with the lines:

On the pictured calendar, set to the future,
The two reindeer battle to death, white man,
The tick of real death, not the tick of time,
Hearing, thrusts his canoe into a moon,
Risen to bring us madness none too soon.

351.3 the Saints for each December day.

The Saints listed are those who have as their feast the first seven days of December (with the omission of Saint Barbara, whose feast is 4 December). Manuscript instructions [UBC 26-5, 16] stated "copy from original", but the "original has not been found:

(a) Santa Natalia. 1 December. The wife of Adrian, who was martyred at Nicomedia in 30; she instructed him in the Christian faith, visited him in prison, and took away his relics after the execution.

(b) Santa Bibiana. 2 December. Otherwise, Viviana, to whom a church in Rome was dedicated in the fifth century; patron saint of the insane and epilectics.

(c) S. Franciso Xavier. 3 December. Francis Xavier (1506-52), missionary to India, the East Indies, and Japan, who baptised numerous converts and did much to relieve the sufferings of oppressed native peoples. He died while secretly visiting China, but his body was taken back to Goa, where it is enshrined. He is patron saint of missionaries in foreign parts.

(d) Santa Sabas. 5 December. Saint Sabas (439-532), abbot, whose example and teaching influenced the development of eastern monasticism. After living for years in solitude, he founded a community near Jerusalem, and his monastery, Mar Saba, still exists, occupied by monks of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

(e) S. Nicolas de Bari. 6 December. Nicolas was a fourth-century bishop and one of the most popular saints of Christendom; the patron of sailors, children, merchants and pawnbrokers. Little is known of his actual life, but legend about him has been extensive, for example, the story of how he saved three girls from prostitution by throwing bags of gold into their windows at night. As patron saint of children, he is in part the origin of Father Christmas.

(f) S. Ambrosio. 7 December. Ambrose (334-97), bishop and doctor of the Church, was chosen by popular acclaim to be Bishop of Milan in 374. In 386 he baptised Augustine. He is numbered among the great thinkers of the early church.

The manuscript notes [UBC 26-5, 16] "copy from original", but the original has not been found; "set to the future" and strangely predictive of Canada, it must have had portrayed two stags fighting (later, reindeer) and a coracle (later, a canoe) set to the moon, because this scene is presented in Lowry's 1937 poem, 'Prelude to Another Drink' (later, 'Thirty-Five Mescals in Cuautla' [CP, #25]), sent to Aiken from Charlie's Bar, Cuernavaca. In the typescript of Dark as the Grave [UBC 9-8, 437], Lowry recalls it as "his first poem here, 'the tick of real death, not the tick of time' on the piece of notepaper, Vaughn, Aiken ... a prophecy of Canada after the Bousfield experience."

351.4 mercapatan.

From Fr. mercure, "mercury" and capler, "to capture." The mercaptans are various chemical substances (sometimes known as thiols) closely related to alcohols but whose oxygen molecules have been replaced by sulphur and adhere to mercury. They are characterised by their penetrating and disagreeable sulphuric smell, of which Lowry comments in a marginal note to an earlier draft [UBC 31-13, 14]; "mercapatan is the vilest smelling compound man has ever invented."

352.1 Clinica Dr Vigil, Enfermedades Secretas de Ambos Sexos, Vías Urinarias, Trastornos Sexuales, Debilidad Sexual, Derrames Nocturnos, Emisiones Prematuras, Espermatorrea, Impotencia. 666.

Sp. "Dr. Vigil's Clinic, Intimate Complaints of Both Sexes, Urinary Passages, Sexual Disturbances, Sexual Debility, Nocturnal Emissions, Premature Ejaculations, Spermatorrhea, Impotence. 666." The last detail, from the insecticide advertisement [see #188.2] is effectively illustrated by the dead scorpion (the Consul?) in the runnel. The slashed advertisements are very different from those in Dr. Vigil's window [23].

352.2 606 – The pricked peetroot, pickled betroot.

606 (the Penguin 666 is a presumably diabolical error) is the compound which, before the days of penicillin, proved to be the most successful in the treatment of syphilis. The "magic bullet", as the capsule of the drug was called, is associated with the name of Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915), but was in fact discovered by his collaborator, Sahachiro Hata, with Ehrlich handling the early testing and reluctantly agreeing to its release for general use in 1910. The drug was patented under the name of Salvarsan and marketed in the USA as Arsphenamine. The Consul, terrified by thoughts of VD, plays graphically with the phrases "half past sick by the cock" and the "pepped petroot" [sic] of the menu [290].

In Aleister Crowley's Autohagiography [note 1 to Ch. 79], "606" (Salvarsan) is described as a compound of arsenic used in the treatment of syphilis, so-called because it was the six hundredth and sixth substance that Paul Ehrlich had tested.

352.3 some sort of stool pigeon.

Lowry's "strictest sense of the term" is explained in his letter to James Stern [SL, 29], where he tells of his experiences in an Oaxaqueñan prison [see #35.11]:

it was an improving experience. For instance I learned the true derivation of the word stoolpigeon. A stool pigeon is one who sits at stool all day in prison and inveigles political prisoners into conversations, then conveys messages about them. If he's lucky, he gets a bit of buggery thrown in on the side.

353.1 the Corporal was no longer writing.

The "reckoning" is complete [see #340.2].

353.2 Pineaus Lake.

More correctly, Lake Pinaus, a high mountain lake in south-central B.C., halfway between Kamloops and Vernon, some eight miles up a rough road from the highway connecting the two (Henry C. Phelps to CA). In February the lake would be frozen over and covered with snow. Lowry avoids any explanation of how a Lithuanian citizen could be deep in the interior of the province and drowned in an solidly frozen, inaccessible lake; or how the Consul might have acquired an island there [see #120.1].

353.3 Indian Pipe.

Described by Armstrong [358] as:

an odd plant, all translucent, white, beautiful but unnatural, glimmering in the dark heart of the forest like a pallid ghost, mournfully changing to grey and black as it fades ... bearing a single flower, beautiful but scentless ... also called ghost-flower and corpse-plant.

353.4 a cock would crow over a drowned body.

Asals notes [Making, 424] that the cock had earlier been brought "from the Tarnmoor farm" [UBC 31-13, 14A] in deference to Melville, who had used the pseudonym Salvador R. Tarnmoor and had written a story called 'Cock-a-Doodle-Doo', where a cock crows not only over a dead body but over death itself. Tarnmoor is the surname of the protagonist of In Ballast to the White Sea. Like other suggestions of the New Testament, Hamlet and Huckleberry Finn, this echo disappeared in the later revisions.

353.5 acting Lithuanian Consul to Vernon.

Vernon, British Columbia, a town about 190 miles northeast of Vancouver, is too small for a full consular posting, but the Consul could be acting from a larger centre (Kamloops, or more probably Vancouver). Lithuania, briefly independent between the two world wars, would not have had representatives in such a place, but this kind of delegated authority is a common practice. The reference to the drowned Lithuanian (a kind of "other") is the only remaining trace of the Consul's previous career as a lecturer in Lithuania [see #56.4].

In one early revision [UBC 31-13, 14A] this element (not present in the 1940 text) was pronounced, a hand emerging from the water and the Consul with an impulse "to keep the incongruous secrets, that of the dead Lithuanian, for instance." Compare his comment [36]: "No, my secrets are of the grave and must be kept."

353.6 My little grey home in the west.

A song made popular in 1911 by Hermann Lohr (1876-1943), composer of romantic and sentimental themes, to words by D. Eardley-Wilmot:

When the golden sun sinks in the hills,
     And the toil of a long day is o'er –
Though the road may be long, in the lilt of a song
     I forget I was weary before.
Far ahead, where the blue shadows fall,
     I shall come to contentment and rest;
And the toils of the day will be all charmed away
     In my little grey home of the west.
There are hands that will welcome me in,
     There are lips I am burning to kiss –
There are two eyes that shine just because they are mine,
     And a thousand things other men miss.
It's a corner of heaven itself
     Though it's only a tumble-down nest –
But with love brooding there, why, no place can compare
     
With my little grey home in the west.

Compare Conrad Aiken's Blue Voyage [28], where Demarest envisions his own death while listening to the song, and imagines:

A brick vault in the cemetery, overgrown, oversnarled with gaudy trumpet vine, steaming in the tropic sun. Bones in the tropic dust. My little red home in the south. Bees and bones and trumpet flowers: nostalgia, Gauguin, heart of darkness.

354.1 their great Chinese wall.

An appropriate metaphor: the Great Wall of China, 2,400 miles long, was built in the third century BC to protect civilised China from the rampant Mongolian hordes. Again, the Consul uses his fears of venereal disease to evade the promise of a loving relation with Yvonne, but as he himself admits, "those reasons were without quite secure basis as yet."

354.2 at the bottom.

The repetition of the phrase suggests not only the barranca, but Gorki's The Lower Depths; "at the bottom" being a literal translation of the Russian Na D'ne.

355.1 some correspondence between the subnormal world itself and the abnormally suspicious delirious one within him.

Words echoed a year later by Laruelle, as he too recognises the rhyming (the chiming) of the natural and spiritual universes [see #34.4]. In October Ferry [146], Ethan Llewelyn describes the feeling as an "image or state of being that finally appeared to imply, represent, an unreality, a desolation, disorder, falsity that was beyond evil." If the phrase is a quotation, which it seems to be, the source has not yet been located.

355.2 ¿Qué hacéis aquí? ... Nada.

Sp. "What are you doing here ... Nothing" (the familiar ‘tu’ used in contempt). In 'The Consul's Murder' [55], Andrew Pottinger shows why Geoffrey Firmin looks so suspicious in the eyes of the police and how Lowry in rewriting made key changes to build up his apparent culpability: his failure to pay for the drinks and María, the loss of his passport, the incriminating telegraph and the map of Spain were all later additions. The final scene of the novel has been carefully constructed from two disturbed perspectives (the Consul's equally as distorted as that of the police), this underlining the tragic misunderstanding that leads to the shooting. An early revision [UBC 31-12, 10D] also reveals the Consul's desire to release the horse, an impulse less definite in the later rewriting.

355.3 Veo que la tierra anda; estoy esperando que pase mi casa por acquí para meterme en ella.

The Consul translates his joke below; the Spanish means literally: "I see that the world is turning; I am hoping that my house will pass by here to put myself into it."

355.4 sam browne.

A military belt with diagonal shoulder straps, designed to carry weight of a pistol or sword; named after General Sir Samuel J. Browne (1824-1901), British army officer.

356.1 otiose.

L. otium, "leisure"; often in the sense of serving no useful purpose.

356.2 Zicker.

Ger. sicher, "certainly"; the Consul's German, like his Spanish, letting him down. The Recknung is closer.

356.3 Castilian.

From Castile, in central Spain; with overtones of aristocratic or well-bred superiority.

357.1 Comment non .... Oui. Es muy asombrosa .... Jawohl. Correcto, señor.

A pot-pourri of French, Spanish, German and English. Comment non, Fr. "how no" (a meaningless variation of Sp. ¿como no?, "and why not?"); "Oui. Es muy asombrosa": Fr. "yes" plus Sp. "It is very wonderful"; "Jawohl. Correcto, senor": Ger. "yes, indeed"; plus pseudo-Sp. "correct, señor." There is no Portuguese, despite the reference to Pernambuco, a state (and formerly the city now called Recife) of northeast Brazil.

357.2 You make a map of the Spain.

Lowry told James Stern [SL, 29] of a similar incident in which he got into trouble with the police for drawing a map of the Sierra Madre mountains in tequila on a bar [see #35.11].

357.3 You have murdered a man and escaped through seven states.

This passage, now almost totally obscure, is clearer in various drafts [UBC 31-12, F13] where the Consul hears talk "going over his head" about a sailor who had deserted ship at Belize, British Honduras, and had walked there through Yucatán; he is may be identified with the sailor who accosts the Consul [363]. This not unlike the American desperado of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, though Lowry at one point [Asals, Making, 137] suggested he might have been a Canadian.

357.4 ¿Inglés? ¿Español? ¿Americano? ¿Alemán? ¿Russish? … the you-are-essy-essy?

The policeman asks in Spanish: "English? Spanish? American? German? Russian?" [URSS. = la Union de Republicas Socialistas Soviéticas; the usual adjective is ruso).

358.1 Progresión al culo.

Sp. "Progress to the bottom"; implying that the Consul is on his way down. The pun on ‘arse’ works in Spanish, as the Chief of Municipality's "obscene circular movement of the hips" [369] implies. Compare Vigil's "progresión a ratos" [138].

358.2 ¿Como se llama?

Trotsky

Sp. "What's your name?" The Consul flushes at the gibe of ‘Trotsky’, the exiled Bolshevik revolutionary then living in Mexico City and soon to be assassinated [see #28.2]. Trotsky's short goatee beard made him instantly recognisable anywhere in Mexico. In one revision [UBC 31-12, H1 9], "kommesenama". A marginal note to Chapter V [UBC 29-17, ts 21] reads: "Somewhere in last chapter: the Consul pretends to be: 'No, my real name of course is Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (Paracelsus)'." The alchemical impulse gave way to a more dramatic scenario (William Blackstone).

358.3 Zuzugoitea.

A strange name (perhaps with connotations of Sp. zuzo, "mutt"), which has already caught the Consul's eye as he flicked through Laruelle's phonebook [208]. Epstein [204] rather nicely suggests a pun on Goetia, "a Catalog listing demons." The Republican Minister of the Interior during the Spanish Civil War was named Julián Zuzugagoitia. Lowry noted this spelling from Buckley [UBC WT 1-11, 6] with the comment, "A good name".

358.4 Juden.

Ger. "Jewish"; the use of the German rather than Spanish judio an ominous reflection of the atrocities already beginning in Europe, and of the anti-Semitic campaign in Mexico City. The word ‘jewish’ appears in the incriminating telegram. In various revisions the Consul claimed to be or was willing to be thought of as Jewish.

358.5 Chief of Gardens .... Chief of Rostrums .... Chief of ... Municipality.

The word jefe means, roughly, "boss", and the titles, odd as they sound, are not untypical of the offices that might be delegated by those in power to political underlings (each being in effect a licence for corruption and graft). The Jefe de Jardineros, however, remains distinct from the others: a figure of God, of Mr McGregor, of inflexible authority. In a marginal note Lowry commented [UBC 31-12, H.20], "The Chief of Gardens – the fair man –just stands there, he is the deus ex machina." As Markson suggests [200], among all these "chiefs", the Consul must be seen as Bunyan's "Chief of Sinners."

359.1 at the crossroads of his career.

The phrase suggests the story of Oedipus, fated to meet and kill his father "where three highways meet"; but also Ibsen's Peer Gynt (mentioned by Hugh [163]). Peer, returning home from his wanderings, is greeted at the crossroads by the mysterious button-moulder who wishes to melt him down for having led a worthless existence, for having never been himself, and for having denied his love to the long-awaiting Solveig. Like Peer, the Consul is faced with a destiny that is inexorable; unlike Peer, he will not be redeemed by love.

359.2 Fructuoso Sanabria.

The name of the Jefe de Jardineros is not as improbable as might appear, since ‘Sanabria’ is a reasonably common surname; the connotation, nevertheless, is one of "fruitful health" and hence of the Garden of Eden from which the Consul is excluded.

360.1 Someone was sitting next to him.

The fair young man is an embodiment of the Consul himself as he once had been, his future all before him and at that stage rightly contemptuous of his later image. The scene is a perfect example of what Dunne describes as an image displaced in time [An Experiment with Time, 50]. Victor Segalen's Equipée (1929) describes how, in the mountains near Tibet, an exhausted traveller encounters the Autre at the end of his long "initiation au réel". This Other sends Segalen back on his tracks, where he meets on the path a strangely familiar man, blond, fifteen years younger, wandering "ready for anything, ready for other places, ready to live other possibilities."

360.2 this telephone ... seemed to be working properly.

Edmonds says [83] that the phone call has confirmed that the Consul is an enemy of the fascists and should be destroyed, but (as with other mysterious telephone calls) the sense of supernatural intercourse with the spiritual world is intimated.

360.3 no sail was in sight.

At the beginning of Act III of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, Tristan lies sick of a deadly wound, awaiting Isolde's ship, but the shepherd sent out to look for her sail reports (in the words of Eliot in The Waste Land), "Oed' und leer das Meer" ("Waste and void the sea"). The "Yeats" edition of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, which Lowry often used, includes Laurence Binyon's 'Tristram's End', and the line: "Sweet wife, there is no sail upon the sea."

360.4 if Yvonne, if only as a daughter.

The image is of Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, leading her blind father to Colonus, comforting him in his afflictions and acting as his guide. In the earliest versions of the novel, Yvonne had been intended as the Consul's daughter rather than his wife.

361.1 When he had striven upwards.

'Los borrachos'

Recollecting Laruelle's picture of Los Borrachones [see #199.1], the Consul relates its meaning to the message of eternal striving so central to Goethe's Faust, a crucial line of which Yvonne as das ewig Weibliche?) forms one of the three epigraphs to the novel.

362.1 did not each correspond ... to some faction of his being.

The British ‘fraction’ is incorrect. In one sense, all the figures around the Consul now, and the various familiars seen throughout the day, exist as projections of his spiritual being; having willed even this final nightmare [Jakobsen, 55], he must accept responsibility for it. In like manner, Ethan Llewelyn in October Ferry [145] suddenly sees the hotel beer parlour as "the exact outward representation of his inner state of mind."

Compare the final chapters of Claude Houghton's Julian Grant Loses His Way (a novel contemptuously dismissed by the Consul [UBC 31-5, 11] as a book about hell by a man who had obviously not been there), in which the central figure, Julian Grant, finds himself in a hell which is entirely the projection of his own interior state and of his failure (at the crossroads of his life) to have loved. To Albert Erskine [UBC 2-6], Lowry commented:

There are many influences here in the Consul's thought, as you doubtless perceive: of contemporary ones Ouspensky is the most drawn upon, though I seem to spot a bit of beastly old Spengler at work in one section; of the novelists I am somewhat mortified to find that Claude Houghton, an ‘uplift’ writer, usually as theatrical and feeble as his themes are grandiose or even sublime (though I am Jonathan Scrivener has its points) plays some part here.

See also Julian Grant Loses His Way, another novel about hell, where the author's method is just to throw in Swedenborg by the bushelful and leave it at that. These influences are assimilated here so far as this author is concerned: but it is a matter of some regret with him that the Consul could not draw upon some clearer deeper springs at his moment of crisis.

Ouspensky seems to have been "drawn upon" with reference to Chapters XIX & XX of Tertium Organum, the individual consciousness widening to absorb that about it, and infinity as "a precipice, an abyss", as awareness feels itself on the threshold of a new order. Similar sentiments are expressed in Keyserling’s The Recovery of Truth [see #154.1], with "no strict line between external and internal phenomena" and the Consul's unconscious that "conjures up the accidents that befall him."

362.2 a black dog.

The black dog is a common metaphor for melancholy, as in Lowry’s youthful piece called 'Travelling Light' (Leys Fortnightly, 49 #865, 255 [UBC 33-2]), describing his stay at home in terms of a black dog sitting on his back, its front paws down his neck. Here, however, there is an occult reference to the dog that was the constant follower or familiar of the magician Cornelius Agrippa, a force that embodies demonic powers to prevent the Consul (“Alas!”) from flying up to heaven; compare Goethe's Mephistopheles, who first appeared to Faust in the guise of a black poodle. This detail entered late [TM 12, 25].

362.3 One for the road.

As earlier [360], the Consul makes "no move" though his way is apparently clear. Hill [140] analyses his motivation:

A moment comes when they neglect to keep watch on him. He can walk out, and save his life. But he needs one more drink – "one for the road." He has, in fact, chosen to die. And it is not only for symbolic reasons that Lowry has him prefer that last drink to a run for survival. It is the choice an alcoholic might well make in such a situation. Accustomed to reaching for a drink whenever a difficult decision must be made, he finds it perfectly natural to do the same when faced with the most awesome decision of all.

363.1 limey.

American slang for an English sailor; either from the lime juice originally served on British ships to prevent scurvy, or from Limehouse, in the docklands area of London.

363.2 the country of Pope.

There are Pope Counties in Arkansas, Illinois and Minnesota, but in a letter to Gerald Noxon [CL, 1, 430 (28 Sept. 1943)] Lowry assumed the latter. He reported that he had been accosted, one New Year's Day, by a man who informed him: "I'm from the County of Pope. What do you think? Mozart was the man what writ the Bible. You're here to the off down here. Man here, on the earth, shall be equal. And let there be tranquillity. Tranquillity means Peace. Peace, on earth, of all man – " The Vancouver pub scene made its way into the Mexican one; and Lowry in revising Lunar Caustic was tempted to have the man in Bellevue as well [UBC 15-13]. In the typescript of Dark as the Grave [UBC 9-5, 332-33], Lowry tells how the "Babel" of Chapter XII began: shortly after the New Year (1937) he was in El Universal (Cuernavaca), and met "a bunch of complete borrachos" who were flattered by his copying down in a notebook every word they said; returning home, he had a huge quarrel with "Senora X" [Jan], and, unable to sleep, found a hidden bottle and wrote the ending of the novel, not stopping until he had completed the scene by lunchtime. Later in that draft [606-07] he describes the Oaxaca experience of being thrown into gaol ("After expressing mildly a liberal opinion on behalf of the Spanish Republic"); cites the line: "you are de spider, and we shoota de espiders in Mejico"; then adds a curious aside: "(Probe psychological significance of these near fibs and arrange to suit book – also U.T.V.)."

363.3 Mozart was the man what writ the Bible.

Mozart, composer of the D-minor quartet, is confused with Moses, Old Testament prophet and giver of the law (“a lawyer” [364]). At the moment of the Consul's death [see #374.3], the compliment is returned when the D-minor quartet is attributed to Moses.

363.4 The Black Swan is in Winchester.

The Black Swan

The Black Swan was a well-known pub and landmark in Winchester (a cathedral town in the south of England) until it was demolished shortly before World War II. During World War I, there had been a large military camp on the out-skirts of the city, which was used in the later days of the war to house POWs. There is a girls' boarding school directly opposite the site of the camp, but Weber (whose smuggled arms may include Winchester repeating rifles) seems to be living out a fantasy since it was not built until 1932-34.

364.1 Time was circumfluent.

The Consul's mescal-drugged consciousness of the circular flow of time and his heightened awareness of images from his past are almost a parody of Ouspensky's notion of time, A New Model of the Universe [238] (in relation to Tarot card 14, Temperance):

Men think that everything is flowing in one direction. They do not see that everything eternally meets, that one thing comes from the past and another from the future, and that time is a multitude of circles turning in different directions.

364.2 I am an outcast from myself, a shadow.

Echoing Señora Gregorio's "I have no house only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours" [see #230.1]. In like manner, fragments of Yvonne's letters alternate with the confused babel of voices over the next few pages.

364.3 They captured me in Flanders.

Weber had been captured at Flanders, where many bloody battles were fought in World War I. Weber is American, although his name suggests that he is now a "German friend".

364.4 I'm just a country b-hoy.

Either the country and western song published in 1954 by Fred Brooks and Marshall Barer (date of composition uncertain), which begins:

I'm just a country boy,
Money have I none,
But I have silver in the moon,
And gold in the noonday sun.

Or, "I'm Just a Country boy at heart," by "Pinky" Tomlin, Connie Lee, and Paul Parks, featured in the 1937 Melody Pictures musical film, Sing While You're Able:

I've seen the moon rise over Broadway,
I've felt enchantment from the start,
Yet I keep thinking of a harvest moon:
I guess I'm just a Country Boy at heart.

364.5 la Légion Etrangère.

A marching song of the French Foreign Legion, ‘Soldats de la Légion’:

Soldats de la Légion,
De la Légion Etrangère,
N'ayant pas de nation,
La France est votre mère.

("Soldiers of the Legion, / of the Foreign Legion, / having no nation, / France is your mother").

The verse (not accurately cited) is probably taken from the first chapter of Beau Geste. Lowry wrote to Gerald Noxon [CL 1, 354 (21 Sept. 1940)]: "As for films about regiments, the best one I ever did see was a French one about the Foreign Legion – not by Renoir, Duvivier, or Feyder, the director had some triple-barrelled name which I have forgotten. The music was by Eisler, and it was called simply, in Mexican, Una Aventura en Moroc." Grace suggests [356] that Lowry is conflating Josef von Sternberg's Morocco (1930) with Jacques Feyder's Le Grand jeu (1934), for which Hans Eisler composed the music; but Lowry's description sounds quite different.

364.6 ¡Mar Cantábrico! The doomed ship that took arms to the Republicans [see #300.2].

364.7 to walk in the light.

In alchemy, to have achieved the state of a perfect man, when the conscious will and intellect are flooded with the super-personal lumen naturae, or light of nature. In terms of the Cabbala, to have reached Kether, "Light", and to stand directly facing the godhead (Ain Soph). Yvonne has obviously been reading something.

365.1 the spreadeagle.

A horrific torture, with such refinements as cutting off the eyelids, the basic idea of which was to have the victim staked out, legs and arms spread, in the hot sun.

365.2 ¿Quiere usted la salvacián de México? ... ¿Quiere usted que Christo sea nuestro Rey?

Sp. "Do you want the salvation of Mexico? Do you want Christ to be our King?" Politically, the message has overtones of the Cristeros [see #107.6], whose religious fanaticism was allied with right-wing politics; personally, there is a suggestion of Faustus-like intercession, which the Consul, like Peter denying Christ, willfully rejects three times.

Notes from Gunther's Inside Latin America [UBC WT 1-21, 7] describe "the National Party of Public Salvation", led by Léon Ossario, whose brief was anti-semitic, and pro "acción Nacional, acción Catolica". But Lowry’s words were present long before he read Gunther.

366.1 hand in hand.

Yvonne's sentiment falls somewhere between the ending of Edward Lear's 'The Owl and the Pussy-Cat', "And hand in hand on the edge of the sand, / They danced by the light of the moon"; and the tragic conclusion of Milton's Paradise Lost: "They, hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way."

366.2 the Babel ... the trip to Cholula.

Cholula

Although the Consul seems to be recalling the associations between the Tower of Babel and the pyramid at Cholula [see #11.4], his deeper awareness of the betrayal associated with that trip [see #11.5 and #205.3] destroys any chance of Yvonne's prayers being heard. As Frater Achad points out [The Egyptian Revival, 41], "The fall of the Tower of Babel has resulted in the loss of the Universal Language, since when confusion has prevailed."

366.3 Japan no good for U.S., for America.

Japanese influence in Mexico was increasing throughout the 1930s, though never as strong as that of Germany. In the summer of 1938, Cárdenas announced that exports of oil to Japan would be stepped up, which made the United States all the more apprehensive.

366.4 No bueno. Mehican, diez y ocho.

Sp. "No good. Mexican, eighteen." The confused words reflect the limited enthusiasm for entering the war (as Mexico was to do, 24 May 1942) on the side of the United States, her traditional enemy. The words "diez y ocho" are a reminder of American intervention in Mexico during the Revolution, when American troops landed at Vera Cruz (though strictly speaking the American presence on Mexican soil was between 1914-16).

367.1 the Star Spangled Banner.

A patriotic song, composed by Francis Scott Key in 1814, as the British fleet attacked Fort McHenry, Baltimore (contrary to popular legend, Key was not a prisoner of the British at the time he wrote the ballad). The song achieved instant popularity, but it was not officially adopted by the United States as its national anthem until 1931. It begins:

O say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming? 
And the rocket's red glare, the bomb bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,
O say does that star spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

367.2 hombres, malos, Cacos .... Brutos. No bueno .... Comprendo.

In bad Spanish, "men, bad, thieves .... Brutes. No good .... Understand." Like the legless beggars, the potter had been noticed on the Consul's previous visit to the Farolito [35].

368.1 Muy malo .... no policía .... diablos .... Vámonos.

Sp. "Very bad .... not police .... devils .... Let's go." The old woman's statement that they have killed twenty viejos ("old men") is borne out by the Chief of Rostrums [372]: "I shoot de twenty people." The Consul's reply, "Gracias buena amiga" ("Thank you, good friend") is given even less expression by the Penguin misprint.

368.2 me gusta gusta gusta .... no savee nada.

Corrupt Spanish: "I like, like, like" … "he knows nothing."

368.3 Life for your pipe.

In Moby Dick [Ch. 30] Captain Ahab equates his pipe with his life and throws it, smouldering, into the sea.

368.4 it's a long, longy, longy, longy – way to Tipperaire.

A somewhat elasticated version of the well-known British marching song of World War I:

It's a long way to Tipperary, it's a long way to go.
It's a long way to Tipperary, to the sweetest girl I know.
Goodbye Picadilly, farewell Leicester Square,
It's a long long way to Tipperary, but my heart's right there.

368.5 Noch ein habanero .... Bolshevisten.

Ger. "Another habanero .... Bolshevists"; the language a clear intimation of German friends. Asals notes ['Spanish Civil War', 23-24] that Lowry took this word from Buckley [228].

368.6 Buenos tardes, señores.

The correct greeting for this time of the evening is "Buenas noches” [see #52.2].

369.1 la comida.

Sp. "the meal"; though hints of the comedy, divine or otherwise, are unavoidable.

369.2 ¿Donde están vuestras palomas?

Sp. "Where are your doves?" The use of vuestras, the familiar plural form of the second person possessive, conforms to Castilian rather than Latin American usage and, sounding alien, may confirm to those nearby hints of the Consul's involvement with Spain.

369.3 Chingao, cabrón.

Sp. "Screw you, cuckold."

370.1 Federación Anarquista Ibérica.

Sp. "Iberian Anarchist Federation", or FAI. The anarchists were a Communist movement espousing Bakunian rather than Marxist principles (that is, self-governing communes rather than the Communist state) and dedicated to the overthrowing of monarchy and central government. Banned since 1872, the movement continued underground, occasionally emerging to "hasten the millennium" [Thomas, 62] with unexpected acts of violence. The FAI itself was formed in Valencia in 1927 and became particularly strong in Barcelona. Though Republican in sympathy and commanding wide general support, its inefficient internal organisation and dedication to goals sometimes different from those of the Republicans made it a force not always to be relied upon. Hugh's affiliation with the group is somewhat unlikely, and is probably there for the sake of the pun on ‘Anti-Christ’.

Buckley defines this [307] as the "political side" of the C.N.T., and says that it "was very small and although its numbers were never revealed I should doubt that it ever exceeded 10,000 members." Lowry cites the name [UBC WT 1-1 1, 1], adding "N.B. for end".

370.2 the uncontrollable face on the bar-room floor.

Combining Yeats' "uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor" [see #146.2] with 'The Face on the Barroom Floor', by the popular vaudeville entertainer Taylor Holmes (1878-1959), recorded October 1923 with 'The Shooting of Dan McGrew' [Rust, 359]. This is mentioned in a letter from Conrad Aiken to Lowry [UBC 1-2]. Sugars notes [Aiken / Lowry Letters, 172] that Aiken uses this line in his poem ‘Exit’ in The Morning Song of Lord Zero [45], and that the original ballad was written by Hugh Antoine D’Arcy, published in the 7 Aug. 1887 issue of The New York Dispatch.  She adds that D'Arcy's poem was appropriated for Prohibitionist ends. Lowry blended this information with Yeats' phrase, above.

371.1 Al Capón.

Al Capone (1897-1947), nicknamed "Scarface" [see #267.9]; the most notorious gangster of the Prohibition period in Chicago, who was finally imprisoned on a charge of tax evasion. The Spanish el capón means “capon”, a castrated fowl.

371.2 Incalculable are the benefits civilization has brought us.

The source of this paragraph, if any, remains obscure, but the words echo the speech from Antigone that prefaces the novel, and testify, if ironically, to the survival of the human spirit. The sentiment accords in every way with Ouspensky's sense, as described in Tertium Organum [295] and in Chapter 3 of A New Model of the Universe, of a higher order emerging among humanity as a consequence of cosmic consciousness.

371.3 an enormous rooster.

The cock had once been a parrot [see #232.5], but as symbolic meanings accrued around ‘cock’, the parrot was dropped. Such meanings include:

(a) "Half past sick by the cock" [352] and the encounter with María; both surprisingly late additions to the manuscripts but crucial to the Faustian theme and to the various meanings of the Consul's impotence.

(b) Cervantes' bruto, which materialised in Chapter X in much this way. In the earlier drafts a major force driving the Consul to his chosen death was the thought of atoning for the afflictions wrought by the Europeans upon the Tlahuicans of the valley [see #212.2]. This was replaced with a more complex sense of betrayal, in part echoing Peter's betrayal of Christ, but associated above all with the "traitorous Tlaxcalans" who had "betrayed Christ into being in the Western Hemisphere" [see #286.8].

(c) The hint of Laruelle, Gallic cock and sexual betrayer (the emblem of France is the cockerel, and Lowry owned a print of Chagall’s ‘White Cock’), whom the Consul sees and strikes at in the person of the Chief of Rostrums; merded adds force to this suggestion. This is more evident in the 1940 Volcano. The Consul may have picked up the machete to chop off its head, but this is not how the police will see it (again, private mythology contributes to his fate).

371.4 You coxcoxes.

The 1940 Volcano gave the Consul's accusations in much greater detail and made this the basic reason for his being shot (there was even an affirmation of Cárdenas and La Vida Impersonal); the final shooting is deliberately more gratuitous. The word ‘coxcox’ is meaningless (it can mean "hop-scotch"), but the Consul is making a private and obscure reference to the story of Coxcox [see #86.4], with intimations of the deluge (Noah, the Hebrew Coxcox, was commonly portrayed as a drunk in the Middle Ages).

372.1 Only the poor, only through God .... Don Quixote.

This forms the Consul's personal version of Christ's Sermon on the Mount [Matthew 5-7], which begins: "Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." The allusion to "old men carrying their fathers" is to the end of Chapter IX, while the reference to Don Quixote takes up that to the windmills [248]. In an early version of that passage [UBC 28-1, 9] the Consul had added: "Perhaps Don Quixote wouldn't have hesitated so long .... A character for whom I've the greatest respect by the way."

373.1 glittering like a topaz.

A topaz is a semi-precious stone, a fluosilicate of aluminum, usually yellow in colour and often clear. Webb [314] cites A.E. Waite's 'Grand Orient' (in The Complete Manual of Occult Divination [195]) upon the occult significance of this jewel:"those who desire to regain lost perilous positions should not fail to carry [a topaz] about their persons." The topaz is the birthstone for November, or the stone of Scorpio [Olcott, Star Lore, 328].

373.2 A Colt .17.

As Mark Horgan points out [MLN 27: 6], not technically a "Colt .17", but a Colt M 1917 ('17), calibre .45, using standard .45 ACP ammunition (it does not throw out steel shavings). Manufactured in Hartford, Conn., for use by the US Army in World War I, it remained standard issue until World War II, though production ceased in June 1941. Perhaps obtained by the Mexican police as military surplus, or via the illegal gun trade; .45 ACP was standard issue to the Mexican military and Federal Police, in Colt M 1911 automatic pistols and locally made copies, the ammunition made in Cuernavaca and Guadalajara. In the 1940 Volcano one shot had sufficed, but in the early revisions there are three, to leave no doubt that this is an execution [Asals, Making, 139].

373.3 Lightning flashed.

The path of lightning

The "all-but-unretraceable path of God's lightning" [see #39.3(c)] is the flaming sword which descends from Kether to Malkuth and connects the ten Sephiroth. The Consul at the moment of his death has a vision of the path his soul should have taken towards the light.

373.4 Released, the horse reared.

Lowry comments ['LJC', 85]: "The slightly ridiculous horse that the Consul releases and which kills Yvonne is of course the destructive force ... which his own final absorption by the powers of evil re1eases."

373.5 Christ ... this is a dingy way to die.

The word ‘dingy’ appears in the letter to Yvonne [40]: "Oh Yvonne, we cannot allow what we created to sink down to oblivion in this dingy fashion – ." Like the Crucifixion of Christ, is this dinginess embraces humanity and God, and following the Consul's evocation of Christ are seven words that correspond to the seven last words from the cross.

373.6 A bell spoke out: Dolente ... dolore.

See #42.2: the passing bell, ringing out both damnation and compassion, tolls for all mankind. The Consul belatedly recognises, in the charity of the old fiddler, the love he had earlier withheld from the dying Indian. This recognition may be a love that comes too late, but at the same time it is one that affords a saving grace. As Lowry noted ['LJC'', 85]:

I don't think the chapter's final effect should be depressing: I feel you should most definitely get your katharsis, while there is even a hint of redemption for the poor old Consul at the end, who realises that he is after all part of humanity: and indeed, as l have said before, what profundity and final meaning there is in his fate should be seen also in its universal relationship to the ultimate fate of mankind.

The compañero reference was not originally present here; instead, in terms explicitly Christian (and thus somewhat alien from the Consul's consciousness), the beggar offered the dying man a drink from his bowl, and the Consul murmured in reply something about the water of everlasting life. In the final version, the word ‘compañero’ fulfils the pattern of guilt, penance, and forgiveness (exemplified by the Samaritan affair, the dying Indian and the dying Consul) in a way that if not outwardly Christian is nevertheless emotionally, morally, and aesthetically complete.

In place of the compañero reference, the 1940 Volcano [375] associated the old Indian with Dismas, the thief who was saved (and thus, perhaps, the pelado with Gestas, the thief who was damned). This was rejected as too schematic, but the dolente dolore of the bells was a suprisingly late addition (pencilled onto the "E" version [UBC 27-17, 46]).

373.7 It was raining softly.

Asals comments [Making, 139] that this permits a religious reading without insisting on one; it also suggests Portia's speech in The Merchant of Venice [IV.i.184-85] about the quality of mercy ("It droppeth as the gentle rain from Heaven"), again without insistence.

374.1 He could feel life slivering out of him like liver.

A simile used in Ultramarine [184], of the paper boy who died of a "Hymorrage", blood coming out of his mouth, slowly then quicker, "then it slivered out like liver –". The “tenderness” of the grass might suggest Keats’s ‘To a Nightingale’: “tender is the night”.

374.2 little bowler hats.

Bowler hats, part of the dress of British diplomats, are intimately associated with Charlie Chaplin, the figure of the little man beset by authority, yet ultimately triumphing over it.

374.3 The Siciliana. Finale of the D minor quarter by Moses.

A Siciliana is a dance of Sicilian origin, with a swaying rhythm; it is usually in a minor key and is often pastoral in character. Mozart's quartet in D-minor, K 421 (June 1783) is one of a set of six dedicated to Haydn, and its finale, modelled on Haydn's Op.33, no. 5, is a siciliano (Allegretto ma non troppo), in the form of a theme, four variations, and an extended return to the theme, the air having a plaintively melancholy quality about it.

374.4 Alcestis.

An opera in three acts by Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-87), first performed in 1767. In classical mythology Alcestis was the wife of Admetus. She agrees to die in place of her husband, but because of the great love and sorrow shown by Admetus, she is rescued at the gates of the underworld by Hercules, and the opera ends in general rejoicing, the couple restored. Lowry's evocation of the opera may have been in response to his reading of Julian Green's Journal, 16 January 1933, where Green discusses the "belle musique funebre" ("the beautiful funereal music") of Alcestis and concludes: "Le vrai sujet de cet opéra c'est la mort" ("the true subject of this opera is death").

374.5 The chords of a guitar.

An intimation at the moment of the Consul's death of Hugh and Yvonne in Chapter XI. The cross-reference was originally intended to be cynical, the Consul hearing their cries of love as he died [see #349.2], but humanity triumphed in the final version, the Consul dying partly in place of Hugh and with the awareness, if too late, of Yvonne's love.

374.6 He was in Kashmir.

'In the Sind Valley'

The description could be right out of the opening chapters of Francis Younghusband's Kashmir, in which the beauty of the mountains, meadows, and flowers (trefoil is clover) is given at length. The memory of the Consul's childhood and the mountains into which his father disappeared blends with his sacred Popocatepetl into an image of his life's journey, only to open out into the horrors of hell.

375.1 Ah, Yvonne, sweetheart, forgive me.

This beautiful cadence is in one sense Lowry's last word, being the final addition to the galleys [Asals, Making, 318].

375.2 the heights.

Pico de Orizabe

(a) Pico de Orizabe. Otherwise Citiatepetl, from Nah. citla, "star", and tepetl, "mountain"; the mountain that touches the stars. On the Vera Cruz-Puebla border, at 18,700 feet, the highest peak in Mexico, with a well-shaped, snow-covered cone.

(b) Malinche. Otherwise Matlalcueyatl, "she of the blue skirts" [see #301.2]. A dormant volcano, 14,636 feet, on the Puebla-Tlaxcala border, her several craters snow-covered in the winter. Malinche was the Mexican name for Doña Marina, mistress of Cortés and betrayer of her people.

(c) Cofre de Perote. Otherwise Naucampatepetl, from Nah. nauhcarnpa, "of four sides", and tepetl, "mountain." An extinct volcano, 14,048 feet, in the state of Vera Cruz not far from Pico de Orizabe. It takes its name, as Prescott notes [III.i, 214], from the huge coffer-like rock on its summit.

375.3 the world itself was bursting.

Pat McCarthy points out [letter to CA] the startling resemblance of Lowry's apocalyptic vision to a passage from Liam O'Flaherty's The Black Soul [Pt. 1, 'Winter', 60-61], where the Stranger, shell-shocked from the war, has fantastic drunken visions of "millions of dying men, worlds falling to pieces, continents being hurled into the air, the noise of the guns, millions of guns", before he falls unconscious to the ground.

375.4 pandemonium.

Gr. pan, "all" plus daimon, "demon", the abode of all devils. In Milton's Paradise Lost [I.756] it is "the high Capital" of Satan and his peers and the venue of their council.

375.5 Suddenly he screamed.

'The Scream'

Sherrill Grace points out ['Expressionist Vision', 101], the Expressionist elements of the ending, death and apocalypse, are here particularised in the evocation of Edvard Munch's woodcut, 'The Scream'.

375.6 somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.

What lies at the bottom...
Barranca

As Kilgallin has noted [201], John Sommerfield's Volunteer in Spain ends with a grotesque scene of a corpse in a gutter, its blood and brains mingling with those of a dead dog. This act is also one of total contempt, yet it shows that Geoffrey's familiar (like Yudhishthira's companion [129]) will accompany him even in death.

In The Egyptian Book of the Dead, the dog-headed Anubis is the conductor of souls to the underworld, and his role of guide is assumed in The Mexican Book of the Dead by the shade of a dead dog that assists its master across the final river [Lewis Spence, G of M, 64]. In Dark as the Grave [239], Lowry outlines the myth, which he there claims (dubiously, but for dramatic purposes) to have heard only after Under the Volcano was written:

The Mexicans believed that in the journey taken by the spirit in the realm of the dead there came a time when a wide river, difficult to cross, was reached. For this reason they killed a dog to accompany his master on the last journey. The spirit of the dog was supposed to reach the far side of the river in advance of the man, and upon seeing his master would jump into the water and help him across.

377.1 ¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDÍN QUE ES SUYO? ¡EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!

Sp "Do you like this garden that is yours? See to it that your children do not destroy it." These last words are very much part of the novel, and in his manuscript notes [see #232.9], Lowry was concerned that the Spanish at the very end should be in the correct form (the Penguin error is explained by the fact that, despite this concern, the wrong version persisted into the galleys, and in the British Cape edition of 1947 remained there), but the error in the British text is entirely his responsibility, as its presence in the final typescripts confirms [see #128.3]. The sign gives a last and terrible warning of Eden, the garden from which the Consul, drunk on guilt and terrified of the forces within him, has willfully evicted himself.