Authors: Rosamond Bernier
Some of My Lives (5 page)
T
here was no plane service from Mexico City to Acapulco in those early days. I am talking about the late 1930s, early 1940s.
here was no plane service from Mexico City to Acapulco in those early days. I am talking about the late 1930s, early 1940s.
To get to Acapulco from Mexico City, you had to take the winding, climbing, dipping main roadânot yet an autorouteâdown from Mexico City's seventy-five hundred feet to balmy Cuernavaca at fifty-five hundred, on to Taxco, avoiding Bill Spratling's silver shops, up again to the chilly peaks of Tres MarÃasâLew thought it advisable to stop for a tequila for good luckâkeep going through Chilpancingo and its fly-specked café, finally, several weary hours later, down to the tropical vegetation of Acapulco.
There was a rudimentary airstrip, just a flat stretch of baked mud, and a tin shanty. There might be a few small planes parked there belonging to Chante Obregón Santacilla, who took people on excursions, or to Ãngel Zárate, who was gameânot always advisablyâto take passengers on longer hops. Service was casual. Zárate asked me once if I would mind holding the door.
We put ourselves in Zárate's hands to get us to Morelia. There was one other passenger, an aged French miner. Somewhere between Acapulco and Morelia there was engine trouble, and we crash-landed in a cornfield.
Somewhat shaken, I got out, not failing to take the book I was reading, Céline's
Voyage au Bout de la Nuit
, and an unopened bottle of red wine.
Voyage au Bout de la Nuit
, and an unopened bottle of red wine.
The three of us trudged toward a nearby village while Zárate fiddled with the engine. It was a small village, with just a few palm-thatched huts. The Indian ladies kindly offered me the hospitality of a hammock.
It was getting late, and a chicken was brought out to be cooked on a charcoal brazier. On an impulse, to improve the flavor, I poured in a good slug of red wine. This provoked much surprise and merriment.
The ladies huddled around me. I spoke very little Spanish then, but understood they wanted to know which one was my
marido
(husband):
el viejo
(the old French miner) or
el joven
(my husband). “
El joven
,” I answered.
marido
(husband):
el viejo
(the old French miner) or
el joven
(my husband). “
El joven
,” I answered.
They seemed relieved. “How long have you been married?” they asked. “Two years,” I told them. “How many children do you have?” was the next question. “None,” I answered.
This caused quite some agitation. They obviously talked it over and came back to me. “We want to know how you do it,” they asked me.
My limited Spanish was not up to that one.
I spent the night in the one hammock, and by the next day Ãngel Zárate had fixed the crippled engine. Hoping for the best, we climbed back in and actually made it to Morelia.
On another flight he crashed, badly, landing at Acapulco. We were not on that flight, but went out to the airstrip to try to help the wounded. We heard later that Zárate's luck had run out. He had crashed again. This time was his last.
We acquired our first plane; it was a little Piper Cub. Later, there was a larger Beechcraft. Chante Obregón gave Lew flying lessons and some sort of paper that purported to be a license. And Lew taught me.
To this day I have a very poor sense of direction, but here I couldn't go wrong. All I had to do was to follow the coastline until I came across an inviting uninhabited beach. We went on delightful flying and swimming picnics.
One time we realized we were very short of petrol for the return. I remembered there was a naval station at Icacos, halfway back to Acapulco. We landed there; I climbed out in my bathing suit, brandishing a beach towel, and talked the astonished sailors into selling me a little
gasolina
. I filtered the gasoline through my beach towel, not being too confident of its purity.
gasolina
. I filtered the gasoline through my beach towel, not being too confident of its purity.
It had begun to get dark, and our friends were worrying about
us. There were no lights on the landing strip, so they gathered their cars around it and put on their lights so that we could see to land.
us. There were no lights on the landing strip, so they gathered their cars around it and put on their lights so that we could see to land.
Landing there was always tricky; there was the bay on one side and a mountain range on the other. You had to sideslip in. We made it.
I
am the only white woman in the world who has witnessed the birth of a volcano. The only other woman who was there was the wife of a poor Tarascan farmer, Dionisio Pulido, who had a small cornfield in the village of ParicutÃn, in the state of Michoacán.
am the only white woman in the world who has witnessed the birth of a volcano. The only other woman who was there was the wife of a poor Tarascan farmer, Dionisio Pulido, who had a small cornfield in the village of ParicutÃn, in the state of Michoacán.
Pulido was working his plot when there was a sudden fissure in the earth. He tried to cover it. It widened and let out a spout of sulfurous vapor. It opened up further with a great roar and a flinging skyward of a torrent of molten lava.
Terrified, Pulido called out for his wife. They fled in frantic haste.
I was living in Mexico at that time. The day of the eruption, February 20, 1943, a friend and I had decided we would try the famous hot water springs at the Balneario de Agua Blanca of San José Purúa, Michoacán. We left Mexico City and drove due west.
Before we had a chance to test the curative powers of the vaunted hot springs, we picked up a whispered rumor that something extraordinary was happening at a hamlet called ParicutÃn.
We decided to investigate. There was no road to ParicutÃn, only a mule track. So we rented mules and were off.
Even before we arrived, the sky was livid with great gusts of flames. Once nearer, we saw a cone rising above rivers of molten rocks. It was dark by then and bitterly cold. A few Indians arrived wrapped in their serapes.
We lay down on the ground, all close together like sardines, for warmth. We watched all night, overcome by the awesome spectacle and the noise. There were earth-shattering roars as the volcano shot up streams of flaming lava. As the molten rocks hit the cold earth, they split in furious explosions.
We were there all night, small human beings in the face of a gigantic cataclysm. Nobody spoke. I had brought a bottle of tequila, and we passed it up and down the line until it was empty.
By daylight, we saw that our faces were black from the falling ash. What trees had been there before were stripped bare of foliageâblackened trunks, twisted branches in a Dantean landscape.
More Indians arrived to stare silently at the devastation. Then there were
abrazos
all around with our new friends from that extraordinary night, and we went our separate ways.
abrazos
all around with our new friends from that extraordinary night, and we went our separate ways.
Soon after this, the whole area was cordoned off; no one was allowed anywhere near the still-active volcano.
We learned later that the eruption had completely wiped out ParicutÃn and the neighboring hamlet of Parangaricutiro. The inhabitants were relocated. The eruption continued until 1952, and the volcano grew to well over 1,345 feet aboveground.
I do not imagine that it was of much comfort to the villagers who had lost all their crops and farm animals to learn that this epochal calamity was a onetime thing.
T
here was one real hotel at the time, the Mirador, run by fat Don Carlos Barnard and his fat family. Boys were already earning pesos diving off the high rocks below the hotel dining room.
here was one real hotel at the time, the Mirador, run by fat Don Carlos Barnard and his fat family. Boys were already earning pesos diving off the high rocks below the hotel dining room.
There was one bar in townâwe are in Acapulco in 1938âcalled the Siete Mares, run by a reedy Mexican. The one waiter was a broken-down former boxer known to everyone as Champ.
The one place to have a drink and dance was the open courtyard of the local brothel called, inevitably, El Foco Rojo (The Red Light).
The tourist invasion had not begun. Lew and I were the only English speakers around.
We were building a house. This involved a slow-beat progress in keeping with the tropical heat. And it was hot. Meanwhile, we lived in rented rooms above the town.
It was there that a boyâthe
mozo
âcame up with a message from the bar. A foreigner, ragged and bleeding, had been thrown off the Cuernavaca bus, with no money, speaking no Spanish. He had been dumped there. Would we come down?
mozo
âcame up with a message from the bar. A foreigner, ragged and bleeding, had been thrown off the Cuernavaca bus, with no money, speaking no Spanish. He had been dumped there. Would we come down?
We went. There was a chunky fellow of about thirty, matted blond hair, unshaven, clothes indeed torn and bloodstained, ranting incoherently.
The verdict of the Siete Mares was clear: “
borracho, borracho
Ӊdrunk. I knew enough Spanish to recognize the next word
cárcel
âprison. But in spite of the haze of alcohol, the words he was mumbling had an unmistakable echo of a literate English background.
borracho, borracho
Ӊdrunk. I knew enough Spanish to recognize the next word
cárcel
âprison. But in spite of the haze of alcohol, the words he was mumbling had an unmistakable echo of a literate English background.
There was something about him, despite his unpromising appearance, that made me feel he was worth helping.
Impulsively, I said, “We'll take him home and clean him up.”
This is how we became the temporary guardians of the highly gifted and spectacularly drunken English writer Malcolm Lowry. I had never heard of him. This was some years before he finally had his tortured semiautobiographical novel
Under the Volcano
publishedâit was to be widely admiredâand long before John Huston made it even better known by his highly fantasized film treatment, with Albert Finney as the doomed dipsomaniac.
Under the Volcano
publishedâit was to be widely admiredâand long before John Huston made it even better known by his highly fantasized film treatment, with Albert Finney as the doomed dipsomaniac.
I had had no experience whatsoever with drunks. I thought that with care, a systematic hiding of bottlesâeven a regimen of exerciseâhe would shape up. I would take him to the beach and supervise his swimming. He loved the water. He used to talk about having served on a Norwegian freighter.
Of course I was wrong. But once sober, he was so articulate, so amusing, so totally original, that I persevered in spite of constant lapses. Because however ingenious I was in doing away with the bottles, he always outwitted me. There would be tearful promises of reform, secret slipping of pesos to the maid for more bottles, then plunges via his favorite mescal with what he called his demons.
It was hard to piece his story together. Bits and strands would emerge, then tangle and twist. The American writer Conrad Aiken, a serious drinker himself, was a boozing father figure. Lowry mentioned Cambridge. There were constant references to sinister forces bent on trapping him. The avenging angels of fate were after him. He seemed to be on the run because of unpaid bills and overstaying his Mexican visa. He was terrified of the police and convinced he was being spied upon. He apparently had been living in Cuernavaca. What was he doing, penniless, on that bus? A wife was mentioned vaguely; she seemed to have disappeared from the scene. He alluded to his family sending him money, but evildoers took it away from him.
He was adept at wordplay and vastly entertaining when he was not in the grip of whisky, tequila, and/or mescal. Not surprisingly, he was obsessed by the nightmare world of German Expressionist cinema. He loved American jazz, particularly Bix Beiderbecke. He said he had owned a ukulele, and said he played it very well.
He invented a little dance to the tune of Grieg's “Death of Aase”; we would stomp around in a circle singing, “All we need is capital, capital, capital.”
He had DTs and would storm terrified into my room in the middle of the night. In Mexico, the cocks often make their raucous serenades at an ungodly hour instead of waiting until dawn. This would bring on further terrors, horrors. I became so aware of his fears that I started to absorb them myself.
In the classic mold, he fell in love with his nurse. The situation became untenable. Finally, we had to send him on his way, in clean clothes, with money in his pocket, back to the Cuernavaca bus.
A few years ago Malcolm Lowry's biographer Gordon Bowker tracked me down in London and came to interview me. He told me about an unpublished novella by Lowry called
La Mordida
â
The Payback
âwhich included a fictionalized account of his time with us.
La Mordida
â
The Payback
âwhich included a fictionalized account of his time with us.
The events he wrote about never happened. One described how he had beaten my husband in a swimming race, which very much impressed me. In fact, Lew was an expert swimmer and had taught Malcolm the crawl.
More poignant was his tormented mea culpa of having raped me while my husband was away. Nothing of the sort ever happened.
To quote from his
La Mordida
:
La Mordida
:
Certainly he had not been able to help falling in love with Peggy. [This was a childhood family nickname, long since discarded] ⦠The anguish of the Riley incident, and writing that poem here:
Love which comes too late is like that black storm That breaks out of its season, when you stand Huddled yet with upturned tentative hand To the strange rain.
What a bestial thing that had been of him to do! Drunk or not he could find no forgiveness in his heart for it, even if he never knew preciselyâand alas!âwhat he had done. But to have betrayed someone who had befriended him as unselfishly as had Riley and Peggy, finding him drunk and penniless there writing poems in the Siete Mares, and then buying
him clothes, ⦠succouring him as well as they could for the reason which above all others should have secured his loyalty, that they believed in his talent, ⦠feeding him, ⦠offering him their car, even at the very end, their carâthe warm-hearted, generous kindliness of these two people who could have been friends all his life: and who were indeed as husband and wife so well matched, ⦠singing on their guitar together, swimming together, celebrating their anniversary every month: where were they now? Had he done, he wondered, any permanent damageâto say the leastâto that relationship? ⦠There had not been excuse for, when R's back was turned, trying to rape herâthough had he? He would never know.
him clothes, ⦠succouring him as well as they could for the reason which above all others should have secured his loyalty, that they believed in his talent, ⦠feeding him, ⦠offering him their car, even at the very end, their carâthe warm-hearted, generous kindliness of these two people who could have been friends all his life: and who were indeed as husband and wife so well matched, ⦠singing on their guitar together, swimming together, celebrating their anniversary every month: where were they now? Had he done, he wondered, any permanent damageâto say the leastâto that relationship? ⦠There had not been excuse for, when R's back was turned, trying to rape herâthough had he? He would never know.
Malcolm disappeared from our life with that bus to Cuernavaca. Many years later, in 1947, when I was living in Europe, I read about the publication of a tormented novel,
Under the Volcano
.
Under the Volcano
.
Only then did I learn more about him. He had begun drinking at fifteen. He confided in his diary, “Secretly I had decided that I would be a drunkard when I grew up.” He came from a substantial English family who sent him money regularly via bankers who rationed the handouts, but nevertheless it invariably was spent on drink. He was in and out of jails and mental institutions on three continents and was constantly being evicted for drunkenness. He managed to get into Cambridgeâprobably through family pullâbut did poorly.
Out of all this turmoil emerged a splendid if flawed novel,
Under the Volcano
.
Under the Volcano
.
Malcolm died in 1957 at a cottage in Ripe, East Sussex. He was not yet fifty. Mystery always surrounded his death. Two causes were reported: one was that he had committed suicide; the other, acute alcoholism. A broken gin bottle was near the body sprawled on the bedroom floor.
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