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The implications are legion: the word asserts the Samaritan theme of Luke 10:30 ("A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho"); it echoes Baudelaire's 'Au lecteur' ("Chaque jour vers l'Enfer nous descendons d'un pas"); and it recalls Laruelle's "Facilis est descendus Averno" [see #219.1]. From this point on, the Consul's descent towards the abyss is irresistible.
Asals notes [Making, 20] that Carol Phillips, Lowry's LA typist, recalls the pre-1940 manuscript as opening with the bus trip and the dying Indian; the episode is thus literally the beginning (as well as the "germ") of the novel. The word ‘Downhill’ was placed first in the late revisions, and sets the tone for what follows, the bus a microcosm of a world plunging towards the abyss.
231.2 a 1918 Chevrolet.
The Chevrolet company was bought by General Motors in May 1918, and a new plant opened in St Louis, where the first Chevrolet trucks were produced. Although camión is the usual word in Mexico for bus, it literally means “truck”, and it seems likely that the camión consists of a bus-like top built on the frame of one of these early trucks.
231.3 the Baños de la Libertad, the Casa Brandes (La Primera en el Ramo de Electricidad).
For the Liberty Baths, see #53.5. The Casa Brandes, whose slogan means "The First in the Field of Electricity", is modelled on the Casa Broker, a pre-war firm of German origin reputedly the best in Mexico City for electrical equipment and tools. ‘Brandes’ is in stark contrast to ‘Libertad’ and is another reminder of the ubiquitous German presence.
231.4 At the market.
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The old market in Cuernavaca was a few blocks up the Avenida Guerrero, north of the zócalo; it was later relocated on the Acapantzingo side of the Amanalco barranca.
231.5 they did not smile.
In the 1940 Volcano [226-27], the impassivity of the old women makes the Consul think of the Sphinx, and something he had read in "some bogus theosophical work" that when confronted with the Sphinx he was less seen than seen through. In Ouspensky's New Model of the Universe [IX.iii, 362-65], the icy coldness of the Sphinx's look annihilates the author's transient sense of self.
Juan Modesto Guilloto (1906-69), ex-woodcutter and former sergeant of the Spanish Foreign Legion under Franco, but later trained in Russia. In 1938, the Communist general in charge of the Fifth Army Corps (the Army of the Ebro) and leader of the Republican forces as they retreated during the Battle of the Ebro [see #95.4]; eventually (February 1939), he led his army into internment in France. Earlier drafts read ‘Colonel Kopic’, but Lowry then read in Buckley [395] that by the time of the Ebro offensive the inflow of international volunteers had largely dried up, and that "Colonel Kopic had been taken away" in June, "before the Ebro show began" [UBC 30-10, 3].
232.2 The clock over the market arch, like the one in Rupert Brooke.
Rupert Brooke's 'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester' ends thus: "Stands the Church clock at ten to three? / And is there honey still for tea?" The poem, written while Brooke was in Berlin in 1912, celebrates the quietness and beauty of the English village of Grantchester, near Cambridge, where Brooke had taken rooms while studying at King's College. The poem illustrates the deceptive calm of a world about to plunge into war, an order that will dissolve into chaos, and a time that is out of joint. In the literal world, however, the clock's erratic performance was a local joke.
232.3 the Avenida de la Revolución.
Although there are two streets of this name in Cuernavaca, neither is the main highway out of town; Lowry has combined Cuernavaca's Avenida Guerrero, which runs north from the zócalo, with the main street, Morelos, which does not [see #23.3].
232.4 the rajah shakes.
The DTs; rajah having in Anglo-Indian parlance the sense of "mighty" or "impressive".
232.5 a parrot, head cocked, looked down from its perch.
In Chapter V of the 1940 Volcano[155-56] there is a shaggy-dog story about a parrot at sea who challenged the magician at the ship's concert to make something disappear. At the crucial moment the ship hit an iceberg and sank without trace, leaving the parrot on a little spar in an empty ocean: "Marvellous!" said the parrot. There, immediately after the words "Quo Vadis?" the Consul, in reply to Hugh's question about the rajah shakes, had said "Marvellous". Subsequent drafts show Lowry working to fit the anecdote into Chapter VIII at this point before deciding to omit it altogether. The parrot was originally intended to anticipate another parrot in Chapter XII, but Lowry changed this latter bird to a cock [372]. The story was dropped, presumably because the symbolic associations of the cock [see #371.3] were unsuited to the parrot, but the latter persisted right up to the galleys before being finally struck out: "The cock – or was it a parrot – flapped before his eyes" [UBC 28-16] leaving only the parrot in Chapter VIII, without even a "Marvellous!" to mark the place of what had once been.
As a further submerged intratextual curiosity, consider the Consul's earlier use of ‘marvellous’ [86], with reference to Donnelly's Atlantis. Hugh remarks in another draft [UBC 30-10, 3]: "that parrot was something else, though, in his mind, something familiar he couldn’t quite place." Lowry may have intended to signal by ‘familiar’ some kind of mystical correspondence, but in the event he preferred dramatic consistency.
232.6 Inhumaciones.
Sp. "Burials". In his A Heart for the Gods of Mexico [464], Conrad Aiken verifies the existence of this undertaker's shop with the Quo Vadis? sign and tells how, curious to find out its meaning, he entered the shop and found himself amongst a tasteful display of coffins of all sizes and colours, a young man tacking grey satin to a small kite-shaped lid, "And the cynical question, 'Quo Vadis?'" The funeral parlour, re-named the Funeraría Herrera, still exists at Matamoros 32, but the sign (and parrot) have long gone.
L. "Where are you going?"; Simon Peter to Christ [John 13:36] after the Last Supper:
Simon Peter said unto him, Lord, whither goest thou? Jesus answered him, Whither I go, thou canst not follow me now; but thou shalt follow me afterwards.
Peter said unto him, Lord, why can I not follow thee now? I will lay down my life for thy sake.
Jesus answered him, Wilt thou lay down thy life for my sake? Verily, verily, I say unto thee, The cock shall not crow, till thou hast denied me thrice.
Despite Lowry's marginal instruction [UBC 30-8, 1] to retype and make it look less like the name of the book, the reference to Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz (1848-1916) stands out: Quo Vadis? (1896) is an historical romance set in Nero's Rome, showing against a background of Petronius and Nero the love of the young pagan Vincinius for the Christian girl Ligia (a Samaritan), the young man's eventual conversion to Christianity, and his consequent martyrdom. The title reflects the necessity of choosing for or against the Christian faith; the Consul cannot be faithful to the Farolito and Yvonne both.
232.8 a secluded square with great old trees.
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Before the Leandro Valle road in Cuernavaca crosses the barranca, it goes past a tiny attractive park extending to the left along the ravine; de Davila [70] identifies this as the Emilio Carranza Park, named in honour of a valiant aviator who lost his life in Jersey. In a draft of La Mordida [UBC 13-18, 40], Lowry notes that the original of this figure, "who had made such an impression on Sigbjørn he even wrote him into the Valley of the Shadow of Death" [UTV], had been seen in Taxco. The figure was a very late addition, after Lowry's 1946 return to Cuernavaca.
232.9 ¿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!" This time the sign is correctly punctuated and translated [see #128.3]. In his drafts [UBC 28-21] Lowry had written of his worries about the sign:
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Whether later on the Consul should see it (in VII) in its correct form is what perplexes me –it stretches the imagination a bit that both signs should be wrong. On the other hand, if it is correct the second time he sees it, will he continue to translate it wrongly to himself? I feel it is important that he should always apply it to himself & see his own eviction in it for obvious reasons. Also, somewhere in the book, possibly in VIII, Hugh should see it, in its correct form, & translate it correctly. In any case I think the Spanish should be correct at the very end.
For an explanation of why the sign is now correctly punctuated and translated, see Lowry's letter to Albert Erskine [22 June 1946; CL 1, 586], where the solution to his problem is outlined: Hugh sees the sign in its correct form and translates it correctly.
233.1 Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus.
This phrase, which should be completed by "creditum est," is a theological maxim meaning "what has always, everywhere, and by all (been believed)." This is the Rule of Vincent, after St Vincent of Lérins, a fifth-century theologian whose Commonitoria tried to establish a definite criterion of orthodoxy (in part, an attack upon the more extreme implications of St Augustine's doctrine of predestination). The rule asserts that orthodox believers and the church must hold onto what has been implicitly believed from the start. The quotation was somewhat of a catchphrase among the Oxbridge shining university wits and was often applied to buses (omnibus = "vehicle for all") in this way.
233.2 Yvonne looked happy when Popocatepetl sprang into view.
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In the short story version [UBC 25-16, 2; not the original “germ”], Yvonne's happiness is at odds with the Consul's reaction: "To the Consul the volcano had taken on a sinister aspect: like a sort of Moby Dick, it had the air of beckoning them on, as it swung from one side of the horizon to the other, to some disaster, unique and immedicable."
233.3 El Amor de los Amores.
Sp. "The love of [all] loves"; the picturesque beauty of the name belied (as the Consul's ‘Viva Franco’ indicates) by the fact of its being a fascist joint.
234.1 He's not an aerial pigeon.
That is, rather than a little secret ambassador of peace [232], he is a stool pigeon, in cahoots with those "birds" the Consul mentions [247].
234.2 Hands of the Conquistador.
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The conquistadores (Sp. "conquerors") were the Spanish adventurers and soldiers, particularly those led by Cortés in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru, who in the early decades of the 16th century conquered the Aztec and Inca civilisations of the New World to carve out the huge territories of New Spain and Spanish South America. Capable but rapacious, they lived by the sword, and were guilty of many cruelties to those they subdued. They are summed up in the pelado [250], whose bloody hands, like those of Orlac, symbolise the collective guilt of all mankind ['LJC', 69] but also the personal guilt felt by the Consul over his own position in Mexico [see #212.2] and his inability to help the dying Indian.
234.3 a kind of cheap Homburg.
A man's felt hat, with a curled brim and length-wise crease. Asals comments [Making, 256] that the two hats, a Homburg on top of a sombrero, signal the German presence in Mexico.
In 1906 Spanish troops occupied the northern territories of Morrocco, and in November 1912 a Spanish protectorate in the north was recognised by other European powers. However, rebels under the able leadership of Abd-al-Krim exploited Spanish inefficiency in a long guerrilla war. A heavy defeat of the Spanish army in July 1921 and a series of setbacks in 1924, when the Spaniards lost a large area of territory, caused great political reverberations in Spain. Although the pacification of the 7,500-square-mile territory was completed in 1934 (with the aid of French troops), Spain emerged with little glory, and the war fueled the home fires of dissent before the outbreak of the Civil War. The Consul held a posting in nearby Rabat (French Morocco) at a key time during this war [158].
234.5 A pelado.
From the verb pelar, "to pull out the hair" or "to peel" (in the sense of divesting the shell or husk); hence one that is discarded, a nobody, or in Hugh's words, a shoeless illiterate. The Consul's explanation of the word is an excellent one: thief, exploiter, a term of abuse by which the aggressor discredits the one ravaged. The word assumes a variety of meanings, none of them complimentary, and is used in conscious opposition to ‘compañero’ [see #247.2].
Although the word is in the 1940 Volcano, and discussed at length, Lowry had difficulty in finally accepting it in stark contrast to ‘compañero’. He wanted the thief to be Spanish and had read in John Gunther's Inside Latin America (1941) that ‘gapuchine’ was the correct word, yet he took issue with Gunther’s description of the pelados as "illiterates who know nothing have nothing & want nothing" [UBC WT 1-21, 4].
235.1 Here the American highway really began.
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The American-style highway, leading in from the north but coming out as a goat-track, is described on the first page [3], but there is a slight contradiction within the novel at this point: the camión has taken a route twisting north and east through Quauhnahuac, but is now heading out of town in an easterly direction (following the present-day Plan de Ayala, a fine broad highway). In fact, the highway from Mexico to Acapulco, passing through the northeast of Cuernavaca, had been opened by President Plutarco Calles on 11 November 1927, and the description here, rather than that on page 3, tallies more closely with the actual geography of Cuernavaca.
This detail confirms Jan Gabrial's comment [Inside the Volcano, 115] that the incident of the dying Indian took place in life on a bus trip to Cuautla (the right distance as described), rather than the much closer Chapultepec (on the outskirts of Cuernavaca), otherwise the "setting" of the final chapters.
235.2 Pearce oiltanks.
Those previously belonging to the Pierce Oil Company, a subsidiary of Standard Oil, and one of the American firms whose holdings had been expropriated by the Cárdenas government some months earlier [see #30.1]. H. Clay Pierce [sic] was the Head of Standard Oil in Mexico in the 1930s; the manuscripts spell his name correctly [UBC 30-10, 8]. Lowry is indebted for the detail to Turner's Barbarous Mexico [241].
235.3 his pilgrim's bundle.
Hugh sees himself as travelling that night, like a medieval pilgrim or Bunyan's Christian, in the direction of Vera Cruz, the "True Cross".
236.1 a school fifteen.
A rugby team (of fifteen players). The "foreign twenty-five line" is that drawn twenty-five yards out from the opposing team's goal-line.
236.2 the best of all possible ideas.
An echo of Voltaire's Candide, where Dr Pangloss believes all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
236.3 convolvulus.
A kind of bindweed, profusive in growth, with long twining tendrils that thread about other plants. Convolvulus is used throughout Under the Volcano [98 & 123] as an emblem of something that strangles any blossoming hope.
236.4 though there were twenty-one other paths they might have taken!
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As Epstein has noted [153], the twenty-two paths in Cabbalistic usage correspond to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and, as the branches of the tree of life, constitute the paths that must be retraced towards Kether [see #39.3 & #84.3]. They are described in 'Forest Path' [272] as "the twenty-one paths that lead back to Eden." The ‘final curve to the left’ has the sinister implications of a deviation from the right and proper path, the left leading to the realm of the demonic powers.
237.1 God bless us.
As Hugh is wryly aware, his thoughts echo Tiny Tim's "God bless Us, Every One", in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol [see #152.4].
237.2 an idiotic syllogism.
In her analysis of alcoholic dependency [MLR 28: 16 & 22], Catherine MacGregor notes that Hugh has ideas of "saving" Yvonne from Geoffrey, but that this is equally futile as his intention to "intervene" in Spain, and save the Republic. Her point is that both Hugh and Yvonne in their futile efforts to rescue Geoffrey demonstrate the classic symptoms of alcoholic co-dependency, and cannot detach themselves from the inappropriate centrality of the alcoholic and the addiction.
238.1 they had signed their Munich agreement.
That is, their death warrant, for their fate is as inevitable as that of Czechoslovakia (or the Spanish Republicans) once Chamberlain had signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler, 30 September 1938 [see #99.2].
238.2 Su salud estára a salvo no escupiendo en el interior de este vehículo.
Sp. "For your health's sake, no spitting inside this vehicle."
238.3 Cooperación de la Cruz Roja.
Sp. "[With the] help of the Red Cross"; somewhat ironic, as the services are on strike when they are most needed. Pictures of the Virgin Mary, the Virgin of Guadalupe, or various saints are commonly found near the driver's seat in buses in Mexico.
238.4 marguerites.
The ox-eye daisy, of the family Compositas, with white petals and a yellow eye, which, like a miniature sunflower, keeps following the Consul around.
238.5 gangrened.
The extinguisher has turned green ("decomposed") because its copper metal has reacted with air; like the regular police and medical services, it is out of commission.
238.6 quite as Prescott informed one.
Although Prescott's Conquest of Mexico describes the approaches to Popocatepetl in similar fashion [III.viii, 284], Hugh appears to be recalling Prescott's description of another volcano, Cofre de Perote, also known as Nauhcampatepetl [III.i, 214]:
It exhibits now, indeed, no vestige of a crater on its top, but abundant traces of volcanic action at its base, where acres of lava, blackened scoriae, and cinders, proclaim the convulsions of nature, while numerous shrubs and mouldering trunks of enormous trees, among the crevices, attest the antiquity of these events.
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239.1 a feeling, almost, of the fiesta.
The description is very similar to that on page 52, where Lowry in his manuscripts acknowledged a debt to Eisenstein [see #72.2]. The suggestion of ¡Que Viva Mexico! and the sense of tragic gaiety is again to the fore.
239.2 candelabra cactus.
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Large cacti that are branched like a candelabra [see #331.4], their brutal appearance symbolising for Hugh so much of Mexico's history.
239.3 Burned, perhaps, in the revolution.
The scene, so like the empty chapel in Part V of Eliot’s The Waste Land, is the visible result of the conflict of church and state that has long been part of Mexico's history: churches were the natural targets of the anti-clerical, pro-liberal forces during the Revolution of 1910-20, just as schools were for the militant Cristeros.
239.4 he told Christ.
Asals suggests ['Spanish Civil War', 19] that Hugh's reflections echo Buckley, who speculates [404] that were Christ alive now he would be on the side of the Republic, fighting the cause of the poor and the oppressed. Asals adds [Making, 425-26] that Hugh's fantasia reflects the last chapter of Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, where the feverish journalist submits drafts of his column to God, who approves them.
239.5 the star of Lenin ... Hero of the Soviet Republic.
There is, strictly speaking, no Order of the USSR called the Star of Lenin, but there are the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Star, both instituted 6 April 1930. The title Hero of the Soviet Union was the highest official recognition for services to the state and was awarded for heroic deeds. A Hero of the Soviet Union received the Order of Lenin and a Gold Star award, and was entitled to special rewards and privileges.
240.1 buses to Tetecala, to Jujuta, to Xuitepec: buses to Xochitepec, to Xoxitepec .... Xiutepecanochtitlantehuantepec, Quintanarooroo, Tlacolula, Moctezuma, Juarez, Puebla, Tlampam.
In an earlier version of this chapter [UBC 26-1, 9; 1940 Volcano, 235], Lowry was more restrained: there were buses to "Tocula, to Jujuta, buses to Xiutepec, to Xochitepec" (all reasonable destinations from Cuernavaca), but in subsequent drafts he could not resist some odd names, and the result is a crash of likely and impossible destinations:
(a) Tetecala. A small town in the southwest of Morelos, some 25 miles from Cuernavaca; the site of the pyramid of Xochicaloo. Buses going there would not be on this route.
(b) Jujuta. Either Jojutla, a barrio or suburb of Jiutepec, now on the outskirts of Cuernavaca (the location is right, but it is unlikely to be a distinct destination); or Jojutla de Juárez, a reasonably large town in the south of Morelos, some 30 miles south of Cuernavaca (the direction is correct).
(c) Xuitepec. Otherwise, Jiutepec: in 1938, a town off the Cuernavaca-Cuautla road a few miles from the centre of Cuernavaca (now an outer suburb).
(d) Xochitepec. A small town, about fifteen miles south of Cuernavaca on the Mexico-Acapulco highway. A large Aztec pyramid there was dedicated to the flower-goddess, Xochiquetzal.
(e) Xoxitepec. A variant spelling of the same place.
(f) Xiutepecanochtitlantehuantepec. A composite (or the impressions of three buses fused) of Xiutepec, Anochtitlán [see #319.4] and Tehuantepec [see #6.6]. The last two destinations are likely only from Oaxaca and perhaps represent Lowry's efforts to create his fictional state of Parián from elements of both Morelos and Oaxaca; in "real" Mexico, they are impossible.
(g) Quintanarooroo. The territory of Quintana Roo, then administered by the State of Yucatán. There is no town of this name, and this fact, as well as the impossible distance, makes the labelling most unlikely.
(h) Tlacolula. The town of Tlacolula de Matamoros, some twenty-five miles from Oaxaca on the road to Mitla; it is significant as a rail terminus.
(i) Moctezuma. The tiny village of Moctezuma, on the Cuernavaca-Cuautla road some 8 miles from Cuernavaca; too small to be a terminal destination.
(j) Juarez. Again, Jojutla de Juárez, some thirty miles south of Cuernavaca (such alternative names are not unusual in Mexico).
(k) Puebla. The capital of the state of the same name and a large important city, which is not, however, served directly by buses from Cuernavaca.
(l) Tlampam. More usually, Tlalpan, south of Mexico City; in 1938, the last distinctive suburb before the open road to Cuernavaca (a bus going there would not be on this road).
240.2 an Indian screening sand.
Probably for the making of bricks.
240.3 a bald boy, with ear-rings.
One of the "spiders" who haunts the Consul's waking hours [30]; but in his letter to Clemens ten Holder [21 March 1951; CL 2, 348] Lowry hinted at mysterious depths. The book could be read, he suggested, "as a sort of fantastic movie through M. Laruelle's mind, to make provision for which I materialised the 'bald boy with ear-rings', of p.30 in Chapter VIII, p. 240 – where Hugh sees such a boy (after the klangmalerei for the bus in the middle): I don't dwell on this interpretation (that way madness lies) though there is a philosophical reason for it – partly I was perhaps having some fun myself with my own book ... it might be better to forget it."
Lowry is saying, in a contorted way, that there is some justification for half-assuming that the Consul is being followed or is perhaps a spy himself, within a "shadowy filmic fiction of M. Laruelle's." Curious details filter through the drafts with respect to the bald boy, as if to hint at "other dimensions" in the novel, of which the final, apparently uncomplicated detail is but the surface. Consider, for instance, the "fate" of the bald boy [UBC, 28-21]: "A man who wants to think on the patio kills an ugly child with a bald patch who has been singing out of tune for one hour & three quarters, & swinging in a creaking hammock he wanted to sleep in himself, & in so doing kills his own unhappy childhood, & incidentally destroys himself; which only goes to show that he has been already destroyed by that childhood. An ugly child with ear-rings, a bald patch, who sings out of tune & scratches itself between the legs continually. Jesus, come the millennium!"
240.4 ¡Atchis! ¡Instante! Resfriados, Dolores, Cafeasperina. Rechace Imitaciones. Las Manos de Orlac. Con Peter Lorre.
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The advertisements read "Atishoo! Instant Relief! Colds, Pains, Cafeasperina. Avoid other brands. The Hands of Orlac, with Peter Lorre." Once again, Cafeasperina (promising relief from dolores) [see #46.4] is juxtaposed with The Hands of Orlac.
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240.5 Lostwithiel.
"Lost within the hills": a small Cornish market town on the Fowey river surrounded (like Guanajuato) by steep hills. Small green signs of this kind are to be seen everywhere in the English countryside.
240.6 ¡Desviación! ¡Hombres Trabajando!
Sp. "Detour! Men Working!
241.1 a stone wayside cross.
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Such wayside crosses are frequent in Mexico: some mark the place of burial of those who have died along the way; others afford a stopping place to pray for the continuing safety of the journey. The dying Indian, arms outstretched, is a figure of the crucified Christ.
242.1 "Har you throw your cigarette?
The detail underlines the association between a cigarette and the value of a man's life.
243.1 You can't touch him – it's the law.
Mexican law is based upon the Code Napoléon, which means, broadly, that one is guilty until proved innocent. One ramification of this, which all tourists to Mexico are warned about, is that witnesses to an accident must not stop to help but must summon official aid. To become involved, even for charitable reasons, is to lay oneself open to charges of mal medicina, or aggravation. Both Geoffrey and Hugh appreciate the political necessity of non-intervention, especially with the police approaching, but the failure to be a Samaritan intensifies the Consul's already anguished feelings of guilt about his failure to extend pity to others. The incident is a crucial moment of truth which forms the emotional core of the novel and is closely linked to the mysterious Samaritan incident in the Consul's past [see #32.2], and to the moment of his death [374], when belatedly the Consul recognises in the figure of the old fiddler the humanity and charity that he has denied the dying Indian.
243.2 A single bird flew, high.
A neo-Platonic image of the flight of the soul [see #336.3].
243.3 ¡Diantre! ¿Dónde busamos un médico?
Sp. "Devil take it! Where can we find a doctor?"
244.1 Pobrecito .... Chingar.
Sp. "Poor little thing ... disgusting." The word pobrecito, though widely used, was especially associated in Morelos with the death of Zapata, 10 April 1919 [Womack, 7]. Chingar literally means "to fuck" or "to rape", but it can be used in a variety of ways; Lowry's emphasis was revealed in the short story version of this chapter [UBC 25-16, 15]: "these two words, the one of tender compassion, the other of fiendish contempt ... were taken up as a kind of refrain"; that is, while some of the passengers show genuine compassion, others merely express their unfeeling contempt. Asals [Making, 341 -43] describes these two words as "antiphonal keynotes", and discusses how late revisions contributed to the "fugal" orchestration of "an elaborately structured disorder".
245.1 the chingados.
Sp. "the bastards" (literally, "the rapists"); an expression of the feelings of the common people towards the vigilante rurales and special police.
245.2 the Servicio de Ambulancia had been suspended.
The ambulance service [44] is on strike, and this can only intensify the Consul’s feelings of guilt, since the chances of the Indian receiving aid are even further reduced.
245.3 a green cross.
The Green Cross is an international organisation, with its headquarters in France but also active in the Third World. It provides an ambulance service and other medical aids.
245.4 Dr Figueroa. Un hombre noble.
Although Dr Figueroa is "a good man" (as is the Consul, "with all his faults" [31]), the name of Ambrosio Figueroa stands out in Morelos as that of one of the most oppressive and reactionary political appointees in Cuernavaca during the early Revolution [Womack, 121-22]. The name was a late addition to the text, Lowry perhaps taking it from Gunther's Inside Latin America [38]. Figueroa was War Minister in 1938 under Cárdenas, and was proposed as his successor, but died suddenly after a brain operation.
245.5 there was a phone once ... but it had discomposed.
Like the wires of the ciné [25], and the Consul's eclectic systemë [144], the phone is descompuesto, "out of order" (the pun is much uglier now).
245.6 Vincente Gonzalez.
Vincente Gonzalez Fernandez, military chief of operations in Guerrero and Puebla before becoming chief of police in Mexico City under Cárdenas in 1934. He was responsible for carrying out the eviction from Mexico of Plutarco Calles and his henchmen [see #107.7], and in 1940 he was appointed governor of his native state, Oaxaca.
246.1 had Joshua appeared ... to make the sun stand still.
A reference to Joshua 10:12-13, where the Israelites are attacking the city of Gibeon, and Joshua calls upon the sun to stand still:
Then spake Joshua to the Lord in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.
And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.
247.1 a Scotch terrier barked at them merrily.
With the help of the manuscripts identifying Angus as the neighbour's dog [see #184.2], and the reference to the Argentinian ambassador next door [76], one may deduce who it is that half-recognises the Consul but "diplomatically" surges on past.
Sp. "companion" or "comrade"; perhaps the most important word in the novel, its etymology (one who shares bread) testifying to its human and religious significance. As Spender has noted [xxii], compañero was the word of address used by the Reds during the Spanish civil war (like most of the Civil War references, it did not appear in the early drafts of the novel); it appeals both to Hugh's sense of brotherhood and to the Consul's sense of isolation. Though there is an obvious touch of Whitman in the word, Lowry's general debt is to Ralph Bates's Spanish novel, The Olive Field (1936) and his particular debt to Bates's Mexican novel, The Fields of Paradise (1941), a tale of love and violence and of the making of an ejido; the reference [Ch. 8, 111] is very ambiguous:
Compañero! We are never truly compañeros until we are dead and there is no more thought and no more need of companionship. Then we can lie still and not trouble one another, for not troubling one another is the kindest love. Only the dead are true compañeros.
In the draft of a letter for Albert Erskine [UBC 2-5], Lowry admitted that the word was "vaguely suggested" by something in "The Rainbow Fields" [sic] by Ralph Bates, seeming to "link all the afflicted together". He later [UBC 2-6] called this a "colorful exciting but somehow wooden and rather soulless Marxist nove1", but dissociated himself from Bates's use of the word ("in a narrow Marxian sense"), in a manner that testifies to his fear of exposure as a plagiarist: "less an echo than a development of the same idea". Grace notes [CL 1, 598] that Bates had published Rainbow Fish in 1937, but she is incorrect to say that ‘compañero’ appears in both The Olive Field and The Fields of Paradise, as Bates uses the word only in the latter.
247.3 They're not the pukka police.
The "three smiling vigilantes" are either members of the Unión Militar or the rurales [see #183.3 and #108.6], and the Consul has no delusions about the probable fate of the Indian if left to their tender mercies. His use of ‘pukka’ wryly reflects the sense of British justice and fair play that Laruelle [31] suspects the Consul so passionately to believe in.
The Consul refers to Chapter 8 of Don Quixote, where the Knight of Sorry Aspect tilts at the windmills believing them to be giants; he means that they could have made, at best, only a quixotic gesture. The short story version [UBC 25-16, 21] made the point more clearly: "'What windmills?' Hugh looked about him, startled. 'No, no,' the Consul said, 'I meant something else, only that Don Quixote wouldn't have hesitated that long.'"
248.2 war's senseless Titus Andronicus.
Titus Andronicus (1594) is the bard's goriest play. It deals with the revenge exacted by Titus Andronicus, a Roman general, for the atrocities committed against his daughter Lavinia, himself, and his sons and for the murder of his daughter's lover by Tamora, Queen of the Goths, and Aaron the Moor, her paramour, in turn avenging the execution by Titus of Tamora's first-born son. As this twisted syntax suggests, the play as a whole is full of horrors and senseless murders that do not even faintly add up to a "good story". Hugh's vision was soon to find its equivalent in the nightmare of Picasso's 'Guernica'. To Clemens ten Holder [23 April 1951; CL 2, 380], Lowry invoked this "fantastically bad unimaginative and unbelievably gruesome play of Shakespeare's, in which all the characters are hideously mutilated and legs and arms are strewn about the stage." It is, he suggests, a good image of Hugh's contempt for modem war.
248.3 the days of revolution in the valley.
Hugh's vision of "the stupid props of war's senseless Titus Andronicus" merges with the words shouted by Weber that morning [99], about the atrocities that had taken place during the Mexican Revolution. The women remain frozen because, unlike Hugh, they sense the futility of a revolution that gets back "just where you'd begun" [see #101.10].
248.4 pity, the impulse to approach, and terror, the impulse to escape.
As Muriel Bradbrook first noted [131-32], these lines constitute a reference to I. A. Richards, The Principles Of Literary Criticism (1924) [Ch. 32, 245]:
What clearer instance of the "balance or reconciliation of opposite and discordant qualities" can be found than Tragedy. Pity, the impulse to approach, and Terror, the impulse to retreat, are brought in Tragedy to a reconciliation which they find nowhere else .... Their union in an ordered single response is the catharsis by which Tragedy is recognised.
A Cambridge man, Hugh could have heard Richards utter these very words. Conrad Aiken mentions in Ushant [358] that he and Lowry took a copy of Principles of Literary Criticism with them to a bullfight in Granada, where a tragic drama was enacted before their eyes; Clarissa Lorenz in 'Call it Misadventure' confirms that they were accompanied by Richards and his wife.
249.1 Tierra, Libertad, Justicia y Ley.
Sp. "Land, Liberty, Justice and Law". The Zapatista slogan, "Tierra y Libertad", was a summation of their revolutionary Plan de Ayala, the basis of which was agrarian reform and the restoration of ancient rights, individual and communal, to the People. Originally promulgated in November 1911, the plan was the basis of the agrarian law passed on 26 October 1915, which formed one of the lasting ideals of the Revolution. The law concluded: "Reforma, Libertad, Justicia, y Ley" [Womack, 411]; Hugh's addition of frijoles ("beans") casts cynical doubt upon the real substance of such ideals.
249.2 the wet blue bag, the lunar caustic, the camel's-hair brush.
Medical aids of limited and superficial worth; Hugh is recalling his boy scout training:
(a) the wet blue bag. A small bag containing an alkaline blue powder, as used by laundresses; a common antidote to bee-stings. In notes added to a letter to Clemens ten Holder [UBC 2-14; published in the German Briefwechsel but not the English Collected Letters], Lowry indicated Hugh was thinking of "instructions in the first-aid book, where it advises one always to have such things on hand – presumably for brushing glass out of wounds. Also one is instructed to be armed on such occasions with the lunar caustic and the wet blue bag. The first of these has many sinister & satanic meanings – so much so that it is the title of the book to follow Volcano."
(b) the lunar caustic. Fused silver nitrate used for cauterising and treating warts; the alchemical association of silver with the moon. There could be a cross-reference to the numbed emotions of his protagonist in Lunar Caustic [see #176.3].
(c) the camel's-hair brush. A small fine brush (usually made from the tail hairs of a squirrel) used by artists for delicate lines and retouches. Lowry asserts that the brush is made from the whiskers of that "superconsular" and noble animal, the camel, "a beast that according to some sources is even capable of climbing St Paul's Cathedral". This obscure speculation is echoed throughout Ultramarine.
250.1 They crouched, one on either side.
Lowry pencilled onto an early revision [UBC 30-10, 23], "like the Czech writer Kafka's assistants" and (crossed out) "for all the world like two characters out of Kafka". At the opening of The Castle, K. finds he has two assistants: merry, identical, ubiquitous - and finally sinister. The identification was not pursued, but as Asals notes [Making, 443], such "comic-sinister pairs" are behind the "chiefs" of Chapter XII.
250.2 a sad bloodstained pile of silver pesos and centavos.
The silver associates the pelado's guilt with that of the conquistadores and Judas.
251.1 the shadow of the Sierra Madre.
The phrase is an echo of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1935) by the mysterious B. Traven (?1890-1969); a tale of gold and blood and treachery, in which the unheroic hero, Dobbs, betrays or murders his partners for all their gold and is himself murdered by some mestizos, who, thinking it is sand, scatter the gold to the winds. The relationship between Dobbs and his "companions" is the antithesis of any kind of fellow-feeling.
252.1 a recognized thing, like Abyssinia.
Italian intervention in Abyssinia, 1934-36, is a shameful tale: Abyssinia had retained a precarious independence, but it was generally recognised by the European powers as an Italian "sphere of interest". When relations between Haile Selassie and Mussolini became strained in 1934, the Ethiopian emperor appealed in vain to the League of Nations for protection against Italian aggression. None was forthcoming, Italian guns and tanks crushed Abyssinian spears, and the sanctions subsequently applied by the League against Italy were a mockery. Equally shameful, Hugh's believes, was the willingness of the European powers, particularly England, to accept the barbarous invasion as a fait accompli, and, indeed, to ratify by the Anglo-Italian agreement of April 1938 an Italian protectorate there. Abyssinia is another hint of the abyss (the abyss-in-you); the 1940 Volcano [250; UBC 26-1, 24] reads "Ethiopia".
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252.2 a pulquería.
A cantina where pulque is sold [see #109.3]; the incidents of the chapter now giving particular point to Lowry's suggestions of Crime and Punishment.
253.1 Todos Contentos y Yo También.
Sp. "Everybody happy, including me". In the short story version [UBC 25-16, 23-24], the reasons for the Consul's happiness were explicit: "the certainty that he would drink a million tequilas between now and the end of his life stealing over him like a benison and postponing for the moment the necessity for the first one." Earlier in the same version [UBC 7-1, 19] he "was going to have fifty-seven drinks at the earliest opportunity"; that is, one for each of the cantinas mentioned on the first page of the novel. The drinks are thus the "ratification of death" that the vultures (the xopilotes) await.