The Lacuna Read online

  This servant's quarter out in the courtyard is probably the safest place to be, even with Cesar the Flatulent for a roommate. He says this little block house wasn't meant to be a servant's quarter: they put it in the corner of the courtyard for keeping the motorcar, but the Painter decided to let the motorcar reside on Altavista Street, to make room for its driver in here. He says the architect planned for no driver or servant's quarters because he was a Communist, like the Painter. Olunda agrees. They said it was to be a revolutionary house, free of class struggle, no servants' rooms because they didn't believe in laundry maids or cooks.

  Nobody does, really. Why should they? Only in having clean clothes, clean floors, and enchiladas tapatias.

  4 December 1935: The Queen Takes Notice

  She was on her throne, the chair at the head of the mahogany dining table. It's a wonder of the world she has fit her parents' furniture into that room, including a cupboard for dishes. The old carved chairs are so enormous she looks like a child, feet swinging below her ruffled skirts and not quite reaching the floor. She was in a foul mood, sneezing, wrapped in a red shawl and scribbling away, putting names in the ledger book where she means to keep better track of expenses and sales of her husband's paintings. One more thing she has taken over from Olunda, since moving in. All the names go in the book now, including the new kitchen boy, and what he is paid.

  "Xarrizzon Chepxairt!" She grasped her throat when she said it, like choking on a chicken bone. "Is that really what people call you?"

  "Not many people, senora. It sounds better in English."

  "I was saying it in English!"

  "Sorry, senora."

  18 December: Second Audience with the Queen

  She's sick in bed still; Olunda says she's twenty-five with the ailments of ninety. Kidneys and leg at the moment. Nevertheless she was propped up on pillows and dressed like an Indian bride: ruffled blouse, lip rouge, earrings, at least one ring on every finger, a crown of ribbons braided around her head. But she still looked half dead, staring up at the little windows at the top of the wall. Her bedroom is like a cement box, only slightly larger than the bed.

  "Senora, sorry to disturb. Olunda sent me to get your plates from lunch."

  "No wonder she won't come fetch the dishes herself, she's ashamed of that jocoque." She glanced up. "Olunda la Rotunda. Do they still call her that?"

  "Not if they're still alive, senora."

  "How does she get so fat on her own cooking? Look at me, I'm vanishing."

  "Fried bread with syrup is her secret."

  She made a little puzzled scowl. "And you, skinny creature. What's your name?"

  "It didn't please you much the first time. When you wrote it in the ledger."

  "Oh shit, that's right, you're that one. The unpronounceable." She seemed to wake up, sitting up straighter. When she looks at you, her eyes are like lit coals inside the hearth of those shocking eyebrows. "What does Diego call you?"

  "Muchacho, mix some more plaster! Muchacho, bring me my lunch!"

  She laughed. It was a good impersonation: it's all in his eyes, the way he opens them wide and leans forward when he bellows.

  "So, you make plaster for Diego's lunch?"

  "Never, senora. On my honor. He hired me first as a plaster boy, and a few months ago he moved me in here, to work in the kitchen."

  "Why?" She cocked her head, like a beautiful doll propped on the pillows. One among many, in fact. The bookshelf behind her bed was full of porcelain and cloth dolls. All of them, like her, look dressed up for some party that will be noisy for certain.

  "He likes my pan dulce and blandas, senora. I'm good at soft dough, in general. On the plaster crew they used to call me Sweet Buns."

  "You can make blandas in this house? In that stupid little kitchen with the fuego electrico? You must be the Son of God. Tell Olunda to put you in charge of everything."

  "She wouldn't take that kindly."

  "What do you think of that kitchen?"

  A pause, for guessing the right answer. It's well known that the Painter likes the house; a wrong answer in this interrogation could prove deadly. It felt like being back at the academy, but with a different category of officer.

  "Everyone says it's an outstanding house, senora."

  "Everyone will say horse shit smells like flowers," she stated, "if they want to be popular with a horse's ass."

  "And your opinion, senora, if I may ask?"

  She frowned at the white wall, the metal-cased window. "Bauhaus," she said, like a dog barking twice. "It's a monstrosity, isn't it? How do you even fit in that kitchen?"

  "The same way you fit in your water closet. It's the same size room, directly underneath."

  "But you're twice my size!"

  "Standing in the center of the kitchen, it's possible to touch all four walls, exactly."

  "It's that pendejo Juan O'Gorman showing off his modern ass. I don't know what he and Diego were thinking, it's like a hospital." She gestured with the back of her ring-ring hand. "And stairs! To get up to that stupid bridge and go across to Diego, I'm supposed to go out the window and climb little steps up the side of the house like an acrobat. What shit. He's not even worth it, I would kill myself, chulito. Who are you? Say it again, I swear I'll try to remember."

  "Harrison. Shepherd."

  "Christ, I'm not going to call you that. Diego calls you what, again?"

  "Sweet Buns."

  "The crew is very unkind to the plaster boys. As you know. But honestly, XARrizZON! It sounds like strangling. What kind of a name is that?"

  "It was a president, senora."

  "Of what? Some place where they don't have any oxygen?"

  "Of the United States."

  "As I said."

  One more country is now to be held as a grudge, then. The mother country, the fatherland, two is all you get. Best to keep quiet, and stack the lunch dishes onto the tray. In two minutes Cesar and Olunda would be fighting over everything left on those plates.

  "You're from Gringolandia, then," she pressed.

  "Born there, yes, senora. A half-citizen on my father's side. My mother sent me back there to be educated, but it didn't work."

  "Why not?"

  With the examination ending now, a quick last grasp at redemption: "The school kicked me out."

  "Really."

  It was a good guess: now even the ribbons in her hair curled forward to hear more. All the dolls stared. "Kicked out for what, chulito?"

  "For a scandal."

  "Involving?"

  "Another student."

  "Another student and?" Her hair practically standing on end.

  "Conducta insolita. Irregular conduct. Senora, no more can be said. You would have to put me out on the street if you knew the rest."

  She crossed her arms and smiled. "That's what I'm going to call you: Insolito."

  The examination: passed, with highest honors. The prize: a possible ally in this impossible house.

  5 January 1936

  After weeks lying in bed existing on air and pink bananas, the Queen has risen. She came down the stairs, ribboned and ruffled like a Oaxacan saint's day, to reclaim her rightful place in this house and terrorize the staff. She announced a hundred people are coming for the Feast of the Kings tomorrow. Later she said, "Really only sixteen are coming, but cook for one hundred in case." Chalupas, flautas, tacos, gaznates, and macaroons. The dining room is the only place Candelaria and Olunda can sit to cut up vegetables without poking out one another's eyes. And the rosca: the mistress started screaming when she remembered that, "Tell Cesar to get the car and take you into the city to find a rosca, they'll all be gone already from the bakeries here in San Angel." But Candelaria told her we have one already: "This boy knows how to make it."

  Senora gawked as if a fish had arrived in her home, wearing an apron. "Insolito. It's just as I said. You're the oddest egg. A boy who makes rosca."

  "Odd egg, go upstairs and get me a bowl," commanded Olunda, rolling her ey
es. She had argued against making a rosca in the first place. (Too much trouble. Not enough space.) Then she insisted there was no Pilzintecutli to hide in the cake. When Candelaria retrieved the porcelain figure from a storage chest, Olunda stomped out. Now the Christ Child himself was contradicting her.

  It's a new year in a house turned upside down. The mistress hangs bright, fluttery paper banderas over the Bauhaus windows, making the house embarrassed, like a plain girl in too much makeup. On the heads of her husband's Azteca idols she puts red carnations, turning them into altars, and she sets the table the way a priest prepares the tabernacle: white lace tablecloth from Aguascalientes reverently unfolded from the cupboard, blue or yellow plates set out, each one blessed by her fingertips, then the Kahlo grandmother's silverware. Finally, the flowers and fruit piled in the center of the table like a sculpture: pomegranates, bananas, pitahaya, everything chosen for color and shape. She was finishing the arrangement this morning when the monkey scuttered in and snatched out the bananas. The mistress bellowed, tiny as she is, and chased him out into the courtyard with a mimosa branch she was using in the centerpiece: "Wicked child!"

  The diagnosis of Olunda is that this hairy child is the best the senora can hope for. Only twice pregnant in six years of marriage and both times the baby bled out, one at a gringo hospital, the other one here. They say it's because of a trolley accident years ago that ruined her woman parts and is "too horrible to discuss," though Olunda and Candelaria still manage to do so. By their accounting, in the last two years she's had two miscarriages, four surgeries, thirty doctor visits, and a giant fit over her husband's affair: she broke a lot of the talavera crockery before she moved out. It took her all of last year to forgive him. "And that was only the affair with her sister Cristina, we're not even counting women outside the family. Listen, how do you make the dough shiny like that?"

  "You brush it with softened butter and then the white of one egg."

  "Mmph." Olunda folded her arms across the mountain range of her bosom.

  "Where did the senora live? Before she moved back in here?"

  "An apartment on Insurgentes. Candelaria had to go clean it sometimes. Give me those dried figs, mi'ija. Tell him about the mess, Candi, it was even harder to clean up over there than here."

  "It was because of the paintings," Candelaria explained.

  "He painted, in her apartment?"

  "No, she did."

  "The Mistress Rivera is also a painter?"

  "If you can call it that." Olunda was shredding chicken breasts for the chalupas, grunting as she worked, settling an old grudge with those hens.

  Candelaria said once she went to the senora's apartment and found a sheet of metal covered with blood. "I thought she had cut herself while setting it up on the easel, or else murdered someone. Probably her husband, considering. But then the mistress sat down with her red pigments, whistling, and happily applied more blood on the picture."

  "Enough gossip," said Olunda, who was clearly jealous not to have seen this sight herself. "Candi, you have to peel every tomato in that bucket, and you, Odd Egg, I want to see you chopping onions until tears come out of your ass."

  2 February

  Eight kinds of tamales for the feast of Candlemas. Even Cesar was ordered to help. He threatened all day to quit, as he is "a chauffeur, not a peon for women's work." He's been angry since October because of having to share his room with an Odd Egg, and now he even has to put on an apron, the world may end soon. The Painter says he's sorry, but that's how it is, Frida rules the house. "And besides, old comrade, you're getting too old for driving, so you better get used to peonage." It's true, yesterday Cesar got lost four times on the way to the pharmacist's. The mistress calls him General Wrong Turn.

  Even more than aprons he despises this notebook. He calls it "the espionage." He is adamant, shutting off the lights on pen and paper. But most nights, by the time every dish in the house has been scraped, cleaned, and put away, he's already snoring like a whale. The spy may do his work here unless the whale is roused from stupor. It is like being in a casa chica again with Mother, Put out the damn candle before you burn us all.

  19 February

  Candelaria doesn't remember that day when she carried the parrot cage on her back through the Melchor market. She says she must have just come from the village then, the Painter and Mistress hired her when they were newlyweds, living at the Allende Street house with the senora's parents. Candelaria doesn't remember the parrots, or why they were purchased, or how long the couple lived in that place with the fantastic courtyard, before building this house. She couldn't say if she liked it better there. She seems to forget almost everything. The secret to surviving the storms of Rivera service.

  2 March

  The senora is making a painting in the little studio next to her bedroom. It's not such a mess, she uses a cloth under her chair. At the end of the day, it looks like it rained blue, red, and yellow. She cleans her own brushes and knives, a hundred times tidier than the Painter, who throws everything on the floor and stomps out in his cowboy boots. But Candelaria and Olunda refuse to carry her lunch upstairs, saying her temper is even worse when she's painting. She never says gracias because life is made of survival not grace, she says, and servants are paid to bring what they're asked. Today she demanded stuffed chiles, more blue pigment, and surprisingly, advice.

  "The painting looks good so far, senora." When people ask for advice, this is what they want. "Good progress too. We'll see that finished by the end of the month."

  "We will?" She gave a fierce, quick smile like a cat showing itself to another cat. "As the fly said, sitting on the back of the ox, 'We are plowing this field!'"

  "Sorry."

  "It's okay, Insolito. If anybody says it's ugly, I'll tell them 'we' painted it."

  The painting has people floating in the air, connected by ribbons. She asked, "Do you like art? I mean, do you understand it?"

  "Not really. Words, though. Those are nice. Poems and things like that."

  "What did you study in school?"

  "Awful things, senora. Drill and psychomotricity. It was a military school."

  "Dios mio, you poor skinny dog. But they didn't succeed in enslaving you, did they? I notice sometimes you still piss on the shoes of the master."

  "Excuse me, senora?"

  "I've seen you reading the newspaper to the girls down in the dining room. Changing the headlines to make them laugh. Your little insurrections." She still faced the painting, speaking without turning around. Was this going to be a dismissal?

  "It's just to pass the time, senora. We still do our work."

  "Don't worry, I'm a revolutionist. I approve of insurrections. Where did they send you to school, Chicago or something? One of those freezing places?"

  "Washington, D.C."

  "Ah. Throne of the kingdom of Gringolandia."

  "More or less. The cornfields outside the throne of the kingdom. The school was in the middle of farms and polo fields."

  "Polo? That's some kind of crop?"

  "A game. Rich people play baseball riding ponies."

  She put down her paintbrush and turned around. "Isn't it crazy? Rich people in the United States don't even know how to use money properly." She peeked at her lunch plates now, inspecting the rellenos. "They don't mind throwing big parties while people stand outside in the street with nothing. But then they serve puny little foods at the party! And live in houses stacked on top of one another like chicken crates. The women look like turnips. When they dress up, they look like turnips in dresses."

  "You're right, senora. Mexico is the better place."

  "Oh, Mexico's going to the devil too. The gringos steal a little more of it every week, replacing the beauty of our campos and our Indios with the latest fashion in ugliness. Probably they'll turn our maguey into fields for pony-beisbol. It can't be helped, I suppose. The big fish always eats the little one."

  "Yes, senora."

  "Little dog, don't give me this
'si senora.' I'm sick of that."

  "Sorry. But it's right, what you said. My mother is Mexican, but all she's ever wanted to do is dress like an American lady and marry American men."

  The eyebrow went up. "A lot of them?"

  "Well, one at a time. And really she only succeeded once, with my father. The other slippery fish all got away."

  She laughed, shaking her head full of ribbons like a flag in the wind. She would never be converted to a turnip. "Insolito, you should come out and piss more often."

  "Olunda keeps my rope tied very short, senora."

  "You have to stop calling me senora. How old are you?"

  "Twenty this summer."

  "Look, I'm practically the same as you, twenty-five. It's Frida, only. Cesar calls me that so you can too, it's not a crime against the state."

  "Cesar is like your grandfather."

  She tilted her head. "You're not afraid of me, are you? Just shy, right?"

  "Maybe."

  "You don't have a lot of heat in your blood, is the problem. You're not completely Mexican, and not all gringo either. You're like this house, Insolito. A double person made of two different boxes."

  "That might be true, senora, Frida."

  "In the house of your mother, a taste for beauty and poetry. Secret passions, I suspect. And in the gringo side, a head that's always thinking and surviving."

  "True, maybe. Except my house is only a kitchen, it seems. And very small indeed."

  "The kitchen of your house is ruled by Mexico, thank God."

  4 March

  Our Lord Jesus has not yet risen. How do we know this? Olunda grumbles about another day of Lenten meals. But they can be some of the best: lima bean soup, potatoes in green sauce, fried beans. At supper this evening the Painter hinted he needs more boys on the plaster crew, and the mistress scolded him: "Sapo-rana! The way you eat, you should know we need your plaster boy here." Toad-frog, she calls him, then gets up, walks over to him, and kisses his toad-frog face. They are the strangest couple. And why do these Communists observe Lent, in any case?