englishness

'Why, here comes the cartero', Yvonne called out ahead, half turning round and disengaging her arm from M. Laruelle's. She was pointing to the corner on the left at the top of the hill where the Calle Nicaragua met the Calle Tierra del Fuego. 'He's simply amazing,' she was saying volubly. 'The funny thing is that all the postmen in Quauhnahuac look exactly alike. Apparently they're all from the same family and have been postmen for positively generations. I think this one's grandfather was a cartero at the time of Maximilian. Isn't it delightful to think of the post-office collecting all these grotesque little creatures like so many carrier pigeons to dispatch at their will?'

Why are you so voluble? Hugh wondered: 'How delightful, for the post-office,' he said politely. They were all watching the cartero's approach. Hugh happened not to have observed any of these unique postmen before. He could not have been five feet in height, and from a distance appeared like an unclassifiable but somehow pleasing animal advancing on all fours. He was wearing a colourless dungaree suit and a battered official cap and Hugh now saw he had a tiny goatee beard. Upon his small wizened face as he lunged down the street towards them in his inhuman yet endearing fashion there was the friendliest expression imaginable. Seeing them he stopped, unshouldered the bag and began to unbuckle it."

M. Lowry, Under the Volcano

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não tem muita importância mas, chegando ao mesmo local, não li a coisa da mesma maneira ligeira. aliás, penso que a disfunção relativamente ao local/cenário é um elemento estrutura deste Volcano. as leituras da New Yorker:
"Of course it’s not just Yvonne who’s condescending to this man, speaking of him as if he were a trained pet. “Grotesque little creatures” is her phrase, but “an unclassifiable but somehow pleasing animal” and “inhuman yet endearing” are in the third person, attributable only to Lowry. It’s strange, because nowhere else did I detect any kind of race stereotyping. Am I reading too much into this?
MICHAUD: I just assumed that Lowry was describing an actual Mexican postal carrier whom he recalled from his time there. To me, that bit read like a journal entry copied directly into the novel. There are numerous occasions of this throughout the book—clear-eyed descriptions of things that rise out of the book’s sometimes soupy imagery like the volcanoes rising out of the mist.
RAAB: Yvonne’s dismissal of the postman, whom I read as another sort of ancient messenger, seems to me not so much racist as intuitive and symbolic: the postman is, in fact, her enemy, the emblem of miscommunication and of all that is dysfunctional to her in Mexico. Her letters to the Consul have missed their mark and gone astray. Had they been delivered in time, her fate might have been different."

ou antes, o encontro entre o cliché mexicano deles e o meu cliché inglês.