Piecework

For Gallo, the task wasn’t simply a matter of chopping away at the book; first it had to be understood. “You see, you gotta distinguish between what appeals to you about Under the Volcano as a writer, which is the lyricism and the complexities of the pattern, and what appeals to you thematically, which is actually the story. It’s difficult to imagine this story without the narrative strategy that he employs to tell it. There is a strong, central thematic line in this book that is not impervious to dramatization: the character of the Consul, and that very central, dramatic issue of betrayal and the times, the historical inevitability. … In the novel you get to the kernel of the story through many different avenues, and the task you have to figure out, early on, is that you can’t duplicate those avenues.”

Gallo remembers working with Huston as if it were an intense seminar with an old master, which, in a way, it was. “There are a lot of things in the book — images, good images, startling images — but whenever I would have anything like that in the script, the question would always boil down to: ‘It’s very good, but what does it mean?* And the answer isn’t: ‘Well, this is a reference to Faustus, and that’s an adumbration of this particular fall and it’s prepared and it has to be.…’ What does it mean in terms of present tense? What does it mean for our character? And our situation? And if it didn’t do both something for the present tense and something for the overall structure, then it wasn’t doing enough.”

Inside the Farolito, someone yells, “Silencio, por favor!” The Mexican family on the hill behind Gallo has yet to say a word.

And now at last, though the feeling had perhaps been growing on him all morning, he knew what it felt like, the intolerable impact of this knowledge that might have come at twenty-two, but had not, that ought to at least have come at twenty-five, but still somehow had not, this knowledge, hitherto associated only with people tottering on the brink of the grave and A. E. Housman, that one could not be young forever — that, indeed, in the twinkling of an eye, one was not young any longer.

— Malcolm Lowry

Under the Volcano

Here is John Huston, seventy-seven years old, five times married, director of thirty-eight motion pictures, actor in dozens more, winner of awards, storyteller, poker player, horseman, long-ago prizefighter, legend. He is in the Farolito, his squinting eyes taking in everything. He sees an ancient Mexican man playing with a four-piece band, a man so old he remembers seeing Halley’s comet flash through the skies in the first year of the Mexican Revolution. He sees nine whores, a transvestite, a dwarf. Along one wall is a bar, and behind the bar is Indio Fernandez, one of the greatest Mexican directors, now almost eighty, a survivor of prisons and gunfights, acting in this movie as a favor to the man everybody calls John. Behind the camera is Gabriel Figueroa, the fine Mexican cinematographer, another old comrade. Huston looks at them all, suggests a change in a whore’s costume, adjusts the angle of the camera.

There is, of course, a judgmental line on John Huston these days: He doesn’t work at directing any more; he has the job done for him, looks on, and cynically picks up his fee. In the five days that I watched him direct Under the Volcano, the line turned out to be as false as most lines, political or artistic. He was involved in every shot; he cared about the details of setting and performance and the placement of the camera.

On this day of shooting, he seems to be everywhere, tall, slightly hunched, oddly frail, so bony now that his hands seem immense, like drawings by Egon Schiele. He has had a heart bypass and he wheezes from emphysema. But John Huston is not yet old.