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Return to the volcano
In 1936 Malcolm Lowry found the inspiration for his literary
masterpiece, Under the Volcano, in a sleepy town in central
Mexico. He also drank himself to the edge of sanity. Charles Montgomery
went looking for his ghost.
EXCERPT: For full story and photos, see Vancouver Magazine,
October 2002.
…I pushed through
a shuttered doorway into a Lowryan hallucination. El Danubio cantina
was filthy and packed with sad-eyed cowboys, greasers in Mike Tyson
T-shirts and businessmen nursing Coronas. A wrinkled mariachi wandered
the tables with a guitar, his crooning barely audible above the
rhythmic yelps of techno-cumbia blasting from the juke box.
A waitress in pink short-shorts winked at me with her one good eye.
I took the only seat left, under the Madonna poster--that's Madonna
with the push-up bra, not Madonna and child--beside a man who had
apparently just returned from the toilet. He had two fresh palm
prints on his T-shirt. The man pulled his shirt down across his
belly and introduced himself. Senor Felisiano – translated
roughly: Mr. Happy – grabbed the waitress by the thigh and
pulled her to the table.
"You like this chica?" Felisiano bellowed at me. "You
can have her right now. Upstairs."
And then he said some very dirty things about the one-eyed waitress.
She slugged him but then she looked at me with an affirmative nod
and a silver-toothed smile.
"Buy me a drink," she said.
"I am looking for a writer," I told her in halting Spanish.
"A famous drunk, a borracho."
"Well they all come here eventually. The borrachos, the doctors,
the lawyers , the mechanics, the truck drivers, the altar boys…"
Soon there were six of us around the table. It took me four cubanos–beer
with lime juice and lots of salt–to get my courage up.
"I want you to hear something. Something about the bars of
Cuernavaca," I told them. I pulled out a photocopy of a letter
Lowry had sent to Aiken–a poem he had written as he sat all
alone at another long-gone Cuernavaca cantina.
"Come on guys, shut up," I said. Then I translated for
them:
"Where are your friends you fool you have but one
And that a friend who also makes you sick
But much less sick than they: & this I know
Since I am the last drunkard,"
I paused for effect:
"And I drink alone."
My eyes got all teary at the profound tragedy of it all, and the
artfulness of my performance, and the discovery of the dark, sad,
anarchy of El Danubio, and these, my desperate friends, who must
surely have understood the pain of the great drunkard. I looked
up from my paper and my companions were howling with laughter. Felisiano
puts a greasy hand on my shoulder.
"I don’t know what you are looking for, my friend. But
here we are the happiest people in Cuernavaca. We pass these dulce
moments together, then we go back to work. Now why don’t you
buy the girl a drink?"
For full story and photos, see Vancouver Magazine, October
2002.
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