The Lacuna Read online

  A grumbling sound like thunder seemed to come out of the street.

  An out-of-breath newsboy grabbed the corner of a building as he came round it and flung himself against the wall, gasping. "It's a tank!" he shouted. "The treads are turning the pavement into gravy!"

  It seemed a fair time to leave, but escape was impossible. The front of the crowd began backing up from the street, shoving the rest of us against the window of a telegraph office, jammed between men in straw boaters and secretaries in point-heeled shoes. Two girls in cloche hats, one white hat and one black, stepped out of the door of the telegraph office and said, "Gee, what's the story?" People were pouring out of buildings with nowhere to go, milling in the street across from the Bonus Marchers.

  The cavalry arrived just then, clopping up the street. It was Major Patton. Probably he'd arrived ahead of MacArthur's tanks because the horses could dodge around the stalled motorcars choking up Pennsylvania Avenue. The horses reared and pranced sideways, spooked by the crowd. Their riders had long sabers, held high in their right hands. Behind them came a machine gun detachment, audibly marching in step.

  "Gee whiz," said the white-hat girl again. Bayonets appeared, bristling above the heads of the crowd. People pressed back harder against the buildings as the tanks rolled up, their treads chewing the road as they came. The Bonus Marchers were lined up across the street, standing steady. Women struggled to hold babies, but all the men stood at attention, like the soldiers they are. They saluted the cavalry's color guard, and one small ragged boy on a man's shoulders pumped his own little flag in the air. A lady in the crowd of onlookers raised up a high shout and the whole throng took it up: Three cheers for our men who served, hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!

  Patton's horsemen wheeled and charged the crowd.

  Everyone ducked and shoved, the white-hat girl screaming, stepping sideways with her pointed white shoe, stabbing like a knife, and everyone tumbled. "Pull her up quick!" Bull's Eye said, helping from his side to drag her up by the elbows, but she seemed to be swooning. A man fell against her, someone else against the man, and then it was a whole smash-up of secretaries and bean counters. With flat hands pressed against the stone wall of the telegraph office, it was possible to inch back up to standing. Bull's Eye began to swim with his elbows toward the street, while everyone else pressed back, and that was a good time to say so long to Bull's Eye. Between the stone wall and the crush of shoulders, it was hard to breathe. Over the sea of heads and hats you could catch sight of cavalrymen leaning down from the waist, on their horses, flailing their saber blades against whatever was below them.

  Against people. That hit with a shock. They were beating at the Bonus Army men and women with the razor-sharp blades of sabers.

  Someone pushed into the near crowd with a bloody face, the meat of his cheek sliced back and bone shining. Roar after roar rose from the crowd in front, leaving those at the rear to guess and dread the cause of it. The cavalry men kept shouting to clear out, but the crowd shouted "Shame! Shame!" until it became a chant. The Bonus Army had linked arms to form a colonnade across the street, and the cavalry flung their horses through the line, snapping bones. The crowd howled, screams erupting with every charge of horsemen into flesh.

  Bull's Eye suddenly reappeared: "Come on!"

  "We can't get through. I'm smashed potatoes."

  Bull's Eye swung open the door of the telegraph office and, like a magician pulling a scarf through a ring, yanked us both through the knot of people into the office. The people trapped inside all looked up, the same shocked face.

  "Back to the alley," Bull's Eye yelled, but no one else made for it as he threaded through the desks and clerks to the washroom, climbed onto the radiator, and popped open the window. Outside, the alleyway was surprisingly empty. Trash heaps and crates of sodden lettuce, it must be a restaurant next door--it was a stench to beat the band. Not one other person had thought to escape from the melee by this route. Bull's Eye turned south at a hard trot.

  "School's the other way."

  "Right!" he said, without slowing up.

  A burning stench began to choke out the restaurant smell. "God," Bull's Eye croaked. "It's gas. Come on, this way or we're cooked."

  People came into the alley with hands over their faces, coming from the direction of the river. What followed was the sight of blindness itself coming on, and a feeling exactly like trying to breathe saltwater. Like swimming into the cave, the longest possible held breath. Every gulp of air tasted like poison. People were stumbling over trash heaps and people heaps. A newsboy curled like a fetus on his big stack of papers; suddenly the whole pile was old news.

  "Come on," Bull's Eye said, "he's not dead. You don't die of gas."

  Bull's Eye's face was purple as liver, his eyes streaming tears, but he still moved at a clip that wasn't easy to follow. An ambulance entered the alley, and people mobbed it. Between two buildings a tableau of the riot appeared: an infantryman pulling a blue bottle from his belt, uncorking it, and hurling it into the haze.

  July 29

  It's all in the newspapers today. Bull's Eye sat reading on his bed without a word, handing the papers over when he finished reading each part.

  Gallinger Hospital filled to overflowing with the casualties. Any Bonus Marchers who made it to the Eleventh Street bridge joined the ones at the riverbank encampment. Mr. Hoover sent orders for troops to stop at the bridge, but MacArthur "couldn't be bothered with new orders," so he mounted machine guns on the bridge and led a column of infantry across the Potomac into the encampment. They set flaming torches to the canvas and pasteboard homes. Exactly as Cortes said it: Much grieved to burn up the people, but since it was still more grievous to them, he determined to do it.

  It was shameful to read those newspapers, to feel any eagerness for knowing each awful detail of the massacre. How the artillery marched right over the camp on the riverbank, destroying the hobo jungle of fruit crates, chicken coops, tarpaper shacks, and dirt-colored tents. God Bless Our Home. Families must have been kneeling in there, praying for any miracle a tightfisted God might have left for them.

  The Bonus Army families had crops planted in their camp. Every Saturday this summer Bull's Eye had pointed those out--how we cheered for the measly corn rows sprouting by the Potomac. They made the encampment look like Mexico. A real village, where people might live and eat. Hungry kids were waiting for those almost-ready ears--after months of porridge, sweet corn roasted in the coals. To think of MacArthur's horses trampling it on purpose: somehow that small part of the story made tears come.

  Bull's Eye never came to bed after lights-out. He turned up hiding in the infirmary, sitting hunched on the side of a bed, smoking. With more newspapers.

  "Look at this." He threw it.

  The penalty for prowling around after lights-out is severe, but the infirmary was deserted. The late extra: After sunset yesterday the flames in the Anacostia encampment rose fifty feet in the air and spread to the surrounding woods. Six companies of firemen were required to defend adjacent property. The president observed from the White House windows an unusual glow in the eastern sky, and conceded MacArthur was right to proceed with the routing. In his opinion the Bonus Army consists of Communists and persons with criminal records.

  The editorial writer applauded MacArthur for sparing the public treasury: The nation is being bled dry by persons like these who offend the common decency.

  "Why would the paper say they're criminals?"

  "They were treated like criminals," Bull's Eye replied. "So people want to think it. The paper says whatever they want."

  It was no use reading more, but hard to stop. The late extra had photos. A society page. While soldiers poured gasoline on the shacks, the upper crust were cruising the river on their yachts, watching MacArthur spare the public treasury. A Mrs. Harcourt required medical attention after she saw a small boy receive a bayonet through his lower body. Senator Hiram Bingham of Connecticut was badly jostled on the street in front of the wa
rehouse while attempting to leave his office. His injuries were not mortal, but earned as many newspaper inches as all the others together, including a woman in the Anacostia camp who lost her sight to flaming gasoline thrown in her face, and the vets from the Argonne shot dead in their own country. A dozen kids got shattered limbs or broken skulls. Two infants died of inhaling gas.

  "Was one of them Nick's baby, do you think?"

  Bull's Eye kept his head turned away. "For Christ's sake," he said. "A gas bomb costs more than a hundred loaves of bread."

  ARCHIVIST'S NOTE

  The next journal after this one will not appear to the reader, for it was destroyed in 1947. This note presents an intrusion, and I beg pardon for it. The notebook was burned in a metal tar bucket outdoors on a September evening, at the start of a rain. Mr. Shepherd watched through an upstairs window. The one doing the burning was myself.

  It was a slim book of lined paper and cotton-duck binding with "Potomac Academy" stamped on it, a type of thing issued to the boys there, probably in great number. But this one in particular he had used for a diary, in 1933. It isn't my place to give an opinion about the burning. I'm a typist. But he made it plain he didn't want that little book to reach the public view. Nor any of these personal writings, truth be told. He was averse to making himself known. Even when greatly misunderstood. He liked to say, "Dios habla por el que calla," meaning God speaks for the silent man. If he believed that, after all that happened, I am not sure how.

  So, any regrets over the missing "Potomac Academy" 1933 would not be his. Evidently the notebook had something in it to disturb him, and he decided to destroy it. Later he would make the same judgment about all the rest of his diaries. But that particular one he plucked out first from among all the notebooks and pages he kept in portmanteau bindings on a shelf in his study. I won't try to say why a man would write pages he meant no one to see, let alone keep them nice in bindings. The sole place he let his words be seen was in the books published with his name on their spines. Harrison Shepherd. You might think of him as your friend, when closing one of these books. Many did. But he never let any photograph of himself go on the dust jacket, to encourage that kind of feeling. Even though he was a good-looking man, well groomed with dark hair and Roman features, about six feet and five inches in height. He did not have physical deformities, as has been said. The height alone was unusual.

  But maybe you'll not have heard of him at all, nor have any idea why you should have. Until reading all this here.

  The notebook that burned, then. People who make a study of old documents have a name for this very kind of thing, a missing piece. A lacuna, it's called. The hole in the story, and this one truly missing still, I know it is gone and won't turn up later in any trunk, as that first little leather-bound one finally did. The burned book from the Potomac Academy probably described his friendships and so forth until his leaving the school in 1934, midway through the graduation year. I didn't read it, before putting it to the flame. I am not concealing any scandal. Mr. Shepherd spoke of having made a disaster of his schooling, but said little else of it. He went back to Mexico then to live with his mother, who had abandoned her liaison with the American and found work as a seamstress in a Coyoacan dress shop. Mr. Shepherd and his mother accumulated some disagreements. He took a position again with the painter Diego Rivera, as a plaster-mixer to start. By late in the year 1935 he was paid as a member of their household staff.

  Some writings did survive from his time at the Potomac Academy, sheafs of typewritten pages describing battle scenes and dialogues he later used in his novel Vassals of Majesty (1945). But as to the journal, his express wish was to see it removed from this earth. In time, with full voice and sound mind, he expressed that same wish for the other journals too: all these now collected in a volume.

  I didn't make this plain at the beginning. I do so now. If you're of the mind to honor a dead man's wishes, always and regardless, be now fairly warned. If you feel it is best or kindest, then put these pages down and read no more.

  --VB

  PART 3

  San Angel and Coyoacan

  1935-1941

  (VB)

  Directions for making empanadas dulces

  They can be triangular, or curled like snails with the filling inside. The dough is the same, either way: white flour with lard and a little salt rubbed in. Beat egg yolks into a little cold water (as many eggs as Olunda will spare), then mix the liquid lake into the volcano of flour. Exactly like mixing plaster.

  Roll the dough in a rectangle as wide as the whole counter in this kitchen, which is so small, if two ants are in the sugar it's already too crowded in here. Next, with a clean machete cut the dough into squares like little handkerchiefs. Spoon some filling on each one and fold it diagonally to make a triangle. The square of the hipotenusa can go to hell. The filling can be custard or pineapple. For the custard, heat a liter of milk and some sugar with pieces of cinnamon. Beat seven egg yolks with some corn starch and pour it in a thin stream into the boiling milk. Stir until your arm is falling off. The lechecilla will be yellow and very thick.

  For pineapple filling, cook the fruit with brown-sugar syrup and star anise.

  The other way to make them is to spread the filling over the whole rectangle of dough and roll it into a log, then cut off round pieces, each one like a snail. For that, use the pineapple filling. The custard will make a devil of a mess.

  Bake the pastries in the oven, if you live in a normal house. If you live in a supermodern house dreamed up by an idiot, go next door to the San Angel Inn. One of the cooks there, Montserrat, will meet you at the back door and take your trays to bake in the kitchen. She'll send one of the hotel girls to tell you when they're done.

  Those are the instructions. If your boss has the appetite of an elephant and a kitchen the size of an insect, this is how to keep your job. Do it exactly this way, because he said, "Write out the recipe, mi'ijo, in case you ever leave me the way she did. You're the only person who knows how to cook like my wife."

  What he doesn't know is the servants did the cooking, not her, right from the beginning when they still lived with her parents. After they moved here, secretly she had most of the meals picked up from the San Angel next door.

  The girl Candelaria is the angel of the birdcage, sighted years ago in the Melchor market hurrying behind her mistress. It took a few days of working here to be sure she is the same servant. It's not a face you forget. Smooth skin, the countenance of a village girl, hair that reaches her knees. Olunda makes her tie her braids in loops, for safety and hygiene. Her mistress the Azteca Queen is gone. But Candelaria remains.

  Could there be an uglier house in all Mexico than this one? Functionalismo, architecture as ugly as a fence made of dung. Except the fence here is the nicest part: a row of organ cactus surrounding the courtyard, planted so close together you can only see cracks of light between them. From upstairs you can look over it to the inn across the road, and a field where some cattle graze. San Angel is only two bus stops from the edge of the city, just one from Coyoacan, yet here is a farmer working in his field with an iron-bladed hoe that looks like it was forged during the reign of Moteczuma. When he stops to rest, that poor old man has to raise his eyes to this modern mess of glass and painted cement that looks like a mistake. It looks like a baby giant was playing with his blocks when his mother called him, so he ran away and left his toys lying in Calle Altavista.

  Two blocks: the big pink one and small blue one standing separately, each with rooms stacked one above the other, screwed together by a curved cement staircase. The big pink block is the Painter's domain, and his studio on the second floor is not so bad. That window is the size of a lake, a whole wall of glass looking down at the neighbor's trees. The planks of the floor are yellow, like sun on your face. That room feels like someone could be happy in it. Everything else feels like being shut up inside a crate.

  The small blue block is meant to be for the small wife. Servants are only allowe
d up the staircase as far as the kitchen (which is not worth the trip). Her rooms above it are sealed like a crypt since the Queen moved out. Good riddance, says Olunda. "She won't be back, I promise you. I'll eat a live dog if she ever shows up here again. After she caught master with his pants down as usual, but this time, humping her own sister!"

  What a strange couple. Why would a man and wife live in separate houses? With only a little bridge between them, red pipe railings connecting one roof to the other. You can see it from the inn across the street. Functionalist tonteria. He is the one who eats, but the kitchen is on her side. If you manage to cook anything, you have to carry it down the staircase, which is like the inside of someone's ear, outside into the blazing sun to cross the gravel courtyard, then up the other cement ear to the studio where the master stands with his pants belted high on his giant dumpling belly, waiting to be fed.

  And now he says she's coming back, he wants her greeted with empanadas and budines and enchiladas tapatias. He has never put his two giant feet in this tiny kitchen or he would know, you might as well try to make enchiladas in a peanut shell. Mixing plaster was easier. But living with Mother was not. So he'll have his enchiladas.

  November 30

  Live dogs beware of Olunda. The mistress has come back after all. Moved back in with her furniture and strange collections packed into the rooms above the kitchen. It was like a surgery to carry her bed up the stair and through the narrow cement doorways without breaking out a glass-block wall. Candelaria and Olunda went up to help, and came back with hair standing on end. She has a pet monkey, they swear. He hides and leaps on your back when you carry food into her studio. Olunda moved her cot out of the little salon below the kitchen, because the mistress wants that space for a dining room. Olunda would rather sleep in the laundry closet under the house, anyway. The monkey is the least of it. The little queen has a temper like Mother's.