Bajo el volcán

It is Day of the Dead and Geoffrey Firmin strolls through the Quauhnáhuac cantinas while two volcanoes, the Popocatépetl and the Iztaccíhuatl, loom as a tragic reminder of the crisis he has with Yvonne, who has just returned to Mexico as a last resort to avoid the fall of her marriage and Firmin, her husband. In 1947 Malcolm Lowry published in the English language one of the fundamental works for Mexican letters: Under the volcano, a kind of premonition that becomes prophecy, the delirious story of a man ruined by alcohol, of lovers out of his element, its Eden ... Quauhnáhuac is that tempestuous city - as real as imagined - of taverns to drink to sobriety, of stray dogs, of dying indigenous people, of meandering streets through which a procession descends during the Day of the Dead. A poetic city, the myth of self-destruction dominated by two volcanoes and wielded by means of the cabal and mezcal.