Traffic was in chaos due to a demonstration, so the taxi took an unfamiliar route out of Cuernavaca. We passed the boarded-up entrance to the Hotel Casino de la Selva, and as we turned off the main boulevard, I noticed a street sign saying Gutenburg. If we were in Gutenburg, Humboldt could not be far away. We were driving straight into the territory covered in Malcolm Lowry's novel, Under the Volcano, that inimitable chronicle of mid-20th century angst, which recounts a day in the life of the consul Geoffrey Firmin. Lowry alternates alcoholic hallucination with brutal reality in intricately-wrought prose reminiscent of Jacobean tragedy. The book, long a cult classic, was described by Anthony Burgess as "a Faustian masterpiece which still awaits general recognition".
In Lowry's day the Hotel Casino de la Selva was already run-down, but retained "a certain air of desolate splendour". This was where, in Lowry's book, Jacques Laruelle and Dr Vigil played tennis on the Day of the Dead, 1939. It had somehow stayed open until only last year, and still stood, awaiting either demolition or resurrection.
Hotel on a hill
The taxi driver said Humboldt was a long street. What was I looking for? I explained about an English writer who had lived there in the 1930s, and he sucked in his breath. That was a very long time ago, he said. The name Malcolm Lowry meant nothing to him, so I tried Bajo el Volcan, and struck gold. "There is a hotel up ahead on the right," he said. "El Hotel Bajo el Volcan." I had spotted it already, on the crest of a hill, a large stuccoed building with a red tiled roof, topped by a four-sided viewing tower. Not two miradors, as in the book, but one. It was the house Lowry lived in, which he had assigned to the French filmmaker Laruelle in the novel, the house on whose walls you could read, with difficulty, the words of Frey Luis de Leon: No se Puede Vivir sin Amar ("You can't live without loving.")
There was no writing on the wall; only a tired-looking blueand-white plastic sign with the hotel's name. As we swung past I realised that in good visibility from the mirador you could see the snow-capped volcanos, Ixtaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, 50 kilometres away across the valley. Today, you'd be lucky to see 50 metres. Scrub fires had been burning for the past four days, and a pall of brown smoke surrounded us.
The taxi emerged at a familiar sight, a liquor store and corner shop named El Farolito - the little lighthouse, the name Lowry gave to the country bar where the hero of his novel is mistaken for a spy and murdered.
I always thought that his house must be somewhere near. Now I knew where. Next morning I took a taxi directly to the Bajo El Volcan. The woman at the desk confirmed that it had indeed been the home of the English writer Malcolm Lowry, but had been extensively remodelled. She gave me a hotel brochure and a tourist map, neither of which mentioned Lowry, and invited me to look around.
Whatever about remodelling, the sheer size of the place was impressive. Lowry was living in Mexico on a small allowance from his cotton-broker father. What a remittance man could rent in Cuernavaca in 1932 was no less than baronial. The ground floor included a spacious lobby leading into an attractive timber-roofed indooroutdoor dining room, the size of a small ballroom. This was a middle grade hotel, £35 a night for two. The menu was a standard mix of bland Mexican and American dishes. No mescal, no Lowry specials. No stale rum, sardines and peas on the breakfast menu.
Vodka stash
The garden where the Consul pretended to search for Oedipuss the cat while really trying to locate his secret vodka stash has been paved for car parking, with a few well-tended beds of tropical foliage. The garden extends behind the house on two levels for at least 100 metres, descending steeply towards the barranca. In its centre a raised swimming pool has been built, with white plastic tables and lounging chairs on the deck around it. A family of four were eating a late breakfast on the terrace of their room.
Nowadays Humboldt is too far down town to be a soughtafter address, but before heavy traffic it must have been a most pleasant place to live. The market is a two-block walk in one direction, and one block in the other direction lies the city centre - the Palace of Cortes, built from the stones of an Aztec temple, the 16th-century cathedral, the Borda Gardens where the Emperor Maximilian on a tall white horse courted his India bonita, and the main square, the Zocalo, where "backwards revolved the luminous wheel", at the end of Under the Volcano's first chapter.
Ferris wheel
On a visit to Cuernavaca in 1978 there really was a Ferris wheel in the Zocalo, and I have a photograph to prove it. This time, in spite of my having found his house, Lowry eluded me. Should I not at least have drunk a tequila at the Bajo El Volcan even if it was only 11 in the morning? I wandered around the city centre, trying to separate the new from what might have been there in the 1930s - which was mainly the very old, the 16th- and 17th-century stone buildings. The rest is so changed that when John Houston made his travesty of a film of Lowry's novel in 1982, he didn't film in Cuernavaca at all, but used a smaller town nearby, Cuautla. This was one of Lowry's boltholes, scene of one of his many cries of despair, the poem Thirty-Five Mescals in Cuautla.
A sign on the governor's palace, "Ristorante Galeria Diego Rivera", led to a first floor cafe. Like the hotel, it had nothing to do with its namesake; bad local art was for sale on the walls, but there was a good view of the Zocalo across a shady balcony. One couple was having an early lunch, otherwise it was empty. I ordered an iced coffee with a scoop of vanilla. It was a long way from Thirty-Five Mescals in Cuautla, but it would have to do.