The Lacuna Read online

  The Painter's new mural in the Palacio Bellas Artes has the newspaper reports flying so fast, their pages might combust. He's copying the mural he did in the United States that created a scandal and had to be torn down before completion. It frightened the gringos that badly. Scaring gringos can make a hero of any Mexican. Other artists now come to the house every night, crowding around the Riveras' dining table with two colors of paint still in their hair. Writers, sculptors, bold women in makeup who want the vote, and students who are evidently waiting for San Juan Bautista to bathe, along with the lepers. Some are too old to be students, so who knows what they do. (If anything.) One is a Japanese in gringo clothes, arrived here to make a mural in the new Mercado.

  The only place big enough for washing that many dishes is in the laundry closet under the stair. Down in the courtyard you can still hear them up there drinking their way to an agreement, sometimes all night, like the men who used to visit Don Enrique. But this crowd wants to kick out all the American oil men. The senora shouts: "Save Mexico for the Mexicans! Save the Mexicans for Mexico! The two commandments of our revolution!" Then they all jerk back their heads, swallowing tequila for Mexico.

  Tonight the Painter explained, for the benefit of servants trying to slide behind the guests' chairs to clear the dinner plates, that this was a famous quote from Moses.

  "Senor Rivera, Mexico is in the Bible?" Poor Candelaria, the Painter sometimes makes a sport of her. Possibly in more ways than one.

  A different Moses, he told her. Moises Saenz, in 1926. "Ten years of revolution may not have saved all the Mexican children, but at least we've saved them from the pope and the Italian Renaissance."

  "The Renaissance had its good points," his wife maintained.

  "Honestly, Friducha. Who needs all those fat little cherubs flying around?"

  As a matter of fact she is painting one with cherubs now. They look like unruly children with wings. She never seems happy with what she's painting, and talks to herself: "Oh boy, that won't work. What a lot of shit. That looks like it came out of the ass of a dog." Candelaria won't go near her. Next to Mother's Museum of Bad Words, Senora Frida could construct a pyramid.

  But in her husband she has perfect confidence. She always says to the guests: "Damn all other artists to hell, Diego is the cultural revolution!" Even when some of her guests are among the damned. One time in her studio she said, "He's very great. Don't forget that, if you think you're looking at a fat frog who won't pick up his pants from the floor. His work is the whole thing. He's doing what nobody could do before." Maybe she heard Olunda complaining about him. Voices carry in this strange cement house.

  She says Mexicans have trouble making friends with their history because we're many different nations: Toltec, Aztec, Mayan, Oaxacan, Sonoran, all fighting each other from the very beginning. That's why the Europeans and gringos could come in and walk over everything. "But Diego can take all those different people and make them into one Mexicanized patria," she said. He paints that on the wall, so big you won't forget.

  It explains a lot, what she said. Why he is much-discussed. And why some people want him torn down, not just gringos but also the Mexican boys in tejano hats who don't want anyone saying they were born from between the legs of an Indian woman. He makes people feel things. How thrilling it must be, to tell the story of La Raza in bold colors and no apology: Indians walking out of history into the present, all in a line with their L-shaped noses, marching past Cortes into the vanishing point of their future.

  9 April

  President Cardenas agrees with the Rivera dinner guests, it's time to kick out the oil men. Mexican oil for the Mexican people now. The newspaper says the workers will only have to work eight hours a day from now on, and get a share of profits. Cardenas even kicked out Big Chief Calles, boss of every Mexican president since the rocks of the earth were still warm. Now he can enjoy the company of his gringo business friends more than ever, because the president had him arrested and put on a plane to New York. "What a Boy Scout, that Cardenas," Olunda said. "Usually they just assassinate their rivals."

  It was also a day of liberation for the peons of the Kitchen of Microscopia. The senora wants a huge Easter party, and decided to have it at a regular house with a real kitchen: her father's house on Allende Street. It's where they lived before, near the Melchor market, with the jungle courtyard. She had Cesar drive the staff there to get started cooking for Saturday, assisted by that house's ancient housekeeper and two girls. The dining table was piled with newspapers; the Painter still gets a lot of mail there. The others begged to be entertained with dramatic readings while cutting up one thousand tomatoes. Candelaria is tender-hearted, but Olunda only wants the motorcar plunges into the canyons of Orizaba, so the kitchen readings always involve some compromise. The Allende Street house staff were an easier audience: old Perpetua seems deaf, and the two girls laughed at anything: Upon arrival in New York City, Calles told reporters..."I was thrown out of Mexico because I forgot my pants and wallet in the bedroom of a puta on Avenida Colon." Candelaria and the girls shrieked and giggled.

  Mistress Frida appeared in the doorway, completely unexpectedly. Olunda threw down the fork she was using to mash avocados and cupped her hands over her fleshy ears. The house girls ardently peeled the nopales without looking up.

  "My concern is for your ignorance," the senora snapped. "This is a historic day. Read it to them correctly."

  "Yes, senora."

  She stood, waiting.

  "Upon arrival in New York City, the former Jefe Maximo told reporters, 'I was exiled because I opposed the attempts to create a dictatorship of the proletariat.'"

  "Very good. Keep going." She swirled and walked out to attend to her father, leaving the kitchen proletariat to absorb the real news of the day. The State Department of Chiapas, responding to the Syndicate of Indigenous Workers, has voted to raise the wages of all coffee workers throughout the state. In a formal declaration to the Congress, President Cardenas stated, "In the new democracy, organized laborers exert a genuine influence on the political and economic leadership of our country."

  Olunda's eyes darted from her avocados to the doorway, to the newspaper, and back to her bowl. Dreaming, perhaps, of a Syndicate of Avocado Mashers.

  19 April

  The mistress is having a relapse of difficulties with her back, an infection of her eyes, kidney stones, and an affair with the Japanese sculptor. So says Olunda, but it hardly seems possible: when would she have time? But Candelaria has evidence: the last time she let the Japones through the gate, the Painter came barreling down the spiral stair with his pistol out. The sculptor is no longer welcome in either half of the double house.

  22 April

  The senora packed herself off to the hospital, taking paintbrushes and some dolls. Today she sent word she also needed chiles rellenos, so the master dispatched the male servants to the hospital with her lunch. Possibly to see if the Japones is lurking there, attempting sexual liaisons with a woman in a plaster spinal corset. Cesar got lost twice on the way, then remained in the car to nap and recover himself for the voyage home.

  "Insolito!" she cried from her hospital bed. "Look at your poor Friducha, falling all to pieces and dying. Let me have that basket." She wore only half the usual pirate's chest of jewelry today, but her hair was pinned up the usual way. She must have nurses and stretcher-bearers at her command at the Hospital Ingles.

  "Did you stop by my father's house to give him some of this?"

  "Of course. Senor Guillermo sends you his heart."

  "He's going to starve, with Mother gone. She's the only one who ever ordered those servants to get up off their nalgas." She pulled out the napkins and silver, arranging her bed for dining as carefully as she sets the table at home.

  "With respect, senora, his housekeeper is the same one who managed to keep you alive through your childhood."

  "My point exactly. She's ancient. It's like an archaeological ruin over there."

  "Eve
rything is fine at Allende Street, you shouldn't worry. Perpetua hired two new housegirls. Belen and something. Today they were planting lilies in the courtyard."

  "Lilies! The whole house needs repairs and a good coat of paint. I would make it plumbago blue. With red trim. What's the news from home?" she asked, tearing into the rellenos. She had an excellent appetite for a dying woman.

  "You don't want to know."

  "Meaning? Has Diego replaced me already?"

  "Oh, no, nothing like that. It's all the same people coming over in the evenings."

  "The painters?"

  "Mostly the writers and the theater ones."

  "The Contemporaneos. Oh boy, you're right, I don't want to know about them. Villaurrutia with his Nostalgia for Death! Just go ahead and drink the poison, muchacho, get it over with. I think he and Novo are having an affair with each other, they're both impervious to flirtation. And Azuela is just gloomy."

  "Mariano Azuela? That's him? The author of Los de abajo?"

  "The one. Don't you find him gloomy?"

  "He's a very great writer."

  "But very cynical, don't you think? Look, that character Demetrio in Los de abajo: What kind of hero is he? Fighting in the Revolution without a single idea in his head about why. Remember the scene where his wife asks him why he's fighting?"

  "Of course. He throws a rock into the canyon."

  "And the two of them just stand like a pair of dummies, watching the rock roll all the way down the hill."

  "It's a moving scene, Senora Frida. Isn't it?"

  "Maybe if you're a rock. I'd like to think I'm being pulled through history by something more than the force of gravity."

  "But gravity is winning. Look how short you are."

  "This is no joke, I'm warning you, Soli. Be careful of your heart going cold. The Mexican writers are cynics. Our painters are the idealists. Take my advice, if you ever need a party to cheer yourself up, invite the painters, not the writers."

  She cocked her head, like a cat inspecting a mouse prior to consumption. "But...you are a writer, aren't you? You write at night."

  How could she know that? Now they will make it stop.

  "Pages and pages. Cesar told me that. He said it's like you're possessed."

  No confession.

  "I also believe you find it most interesting that Novo and Villaurrutia are sleeping with boys instead of girls? Don't you."

  None.

  "I'm not charging you with crimes, you know."

  "No. No secrets, Senora Frida."

  "What a lot of mierda. You always call me senora when you're lying. So tell me, how are things in the soap opera of Los de Kitchen?"

  "The same, Frida. We're just tedious little servants."

  "Soli, you are neither small nor tedious. Sooner or later you're going to have to confide in me, one pierced soul to another. Sleep on it, Soli. Consult your pillow."

  4 May

  A visit with Mother, to take her to La Flor for her birthday. She was dazzling as always in a violet frock and dyed-to-match wool cloche. Her new plan is to win the heart of an American engineer contracting for the government. She describes him as "plenty rugged." Also plenty married: they met when he came in the dress shop to buy a gift, not for his wife but his mistress. "Former mistress," Mother calls her hopefully.

  "It's inspiring, Mother. You never shrink from competition."

  "What about you? That girl came in the shop again last week. This is the Rebeca I told you about, the friend of that little jelly bean you took to the Posadas last winter, and if you ask me, this Rebeca is ten times prettier. If the other one is a wet sock, that's your good luck. She was a half-portion, if you ask me. But the friend is really swell."

  "I didn't ask you."

  "Rebeca, this one is. Write it down, mi'ijo, at least pretend you're interested. Or am I going to have to hire a puta to get a woman in your little pinche life?"

  "A pinche life full of women, thanks all the same. One more and it might split open like a pomegranate."

  "I mean a woman in bed."

  "That house is ruled by a woman in a bed. Completely."

  "Mi'ijo, you exasperate me. This Rebeca, look, she's a smart one like you. She wants to go to university, but right now she's a seamstress. Did she stop in? I told her where you're working. I didn't tell her the kitchen, of course, I said you were some kind of a secretary. Intending to become a lawyer. It isn't a lie to say you're intending."

  "Let's go back to your love life. It's more interesting."

  "It had better get that way soon, let me tell you. Forty! Look at me, I'm a rock of ages." She covered her face with her hands. Then peeked through, because the watermelon salad arrived. "And you, almost twenty! It's unbelievable."

  "Half a rock of ages."

  "And what will you be doing on your twentieth birthday, mister?"

  "Cooking, probably. The senora has the same birthday. She doesn't know it."

  "Listen, if we go anywhere together now, you are not to say you're my son, do you hear me. Look at you, a man! How could you do that to me? That's it, mister. The men nowadays want fillies and pips and sweet patooties and no-o-o dotie brodies."

  She has moved on from oil men, there was no future in that stock. Don Enrique has lost everything in the nationalization. Mother reports that the hacienda on Isla Pixol has been appropriated, turned over to the people of the village as a communal farm. They turned the house into a school.

  "Well, good. One provincial school will have some books in it, anyway."

  "You would be on their side, wouldn't you? Houseboy for the pinkos."

  "The point of the appropriation law is restitution, Mother. Meaning Don Enrique or his family must have taken that land from the villagers in the first place."

  "But look, were they really using it? Your Leandro is probably the president of the collective now, trying to work out how to put on a pair of shoes."

  "My Leandro? He had a wife. The only man in that house who did."

  "Ooh, you slay me. Poor old Enrique, he got his sock chorus, didn't he? Can you imagine the scrow, when they put him off his own place? And his mother! Holy moly, that must have taken the army." Mother took a nibble of her watermelon salad.

  "Consorting with Americans has improved your English."

  "As far as I care, Enrique and his relatives can go chase themselves, and you can put that in your hat. There's some jazz talk."

  "And you can put this in your hat, Mother. Washing the dishes of pinkos doesn't make someone a pinko. It's not like an influenza."

  "I'm just razzing you. I'd take up with a pinko in two toots, if he was famous and had a wad of tin. That artist's little girlfriend is one lucky duck."

  "The little girlfriend is actually his wife."

  "Like I said. But what a piece of calico, all spuzzed up like an Indian. She's no Garbo. How'd she get lucky?"

  "He's fond of the way she dresses. They're nationalists."

  "No soap!" She shook her head. "To me she looks like a corn-eater."

  "You used to ask, What kind of man would chase after that? In Isla Pixol, remember? Now you know."

  "Hey, you got a gasper?" She took a cigarette and lit it, pushing away her unfinished lunch. Poor Mother, still living from one gasp to the next. She removed a piece of tobacco from her tongue, and announced: "A corn-eater will never be any more than she is."

  It was no use reminding Mother of her temporary craze for learning the sandunga. If corn-eaters are now having their day in nationalist Mexico, in Mother's estimate they will soon lose the race to fillies and sweet patooties. The afternoon crowd at La Flor had waned, but she kept glancing around the patio, always on the alert.

  "What's become of Don Enrique, then? Is he begging on the streets?"

  "Oh golly no. He's living in one of his other places. Up in the oil fields somewhere in the Huasteca. Enrique could always pull more money out of his nalgas. No matter how much he complained to us about our spending."

  She leane
d forward and looked up with big eyes under the brim of her cloche hat, and suddenly there she was: the other Mother. The mischievous girl, drawing another child into her conspiracy. "Don't worry about Don Enrique, mi'ijo. Dios les da el dinero a los ricos, porque si no lo tuvieran, se moririan de hambre."

  God gives money to the rich because if they didn't have it, they would starve.

  1 July

  The Riveras' wad of tin must not be as big as Mother thinks. Senora Frida had to make a strategy for financing her birthday party: she painted a portrait of the lawyer's wife and sold it to him. The party will be at the Allende Street house to hold all the people, as she has invited three quarters of the Republic, including mariachis. The painters and the gloomy writers are coming. Olunda is in a frenzy. Chicken escabeche, pork and nopales in pipian sauce, mole poblano. Sweet potatoes mashed with pineapple. Tomato and watercress salad. The pork-rib and tomato stew she calls "the tablecloth stainer." At last report she also wants shrimps and marinated pigs' feet. The senora might have to paint portraits of the guests as they come in, and sell them on the way out, to pay the butcher after this fiesta. A wearying twentieth birthday expected for the cook.

  14 July

  Housecleaning. Eight paintings moved from Senora Frida's cramped studio into the storage room on the Painter's side. The nice painting of her grandparents, the odd one of herself and the monkey, and the bloody one that Candelaria talks about, from when she lived in the apartment on Insurgentes. Each title has to go in the ledger before it's moved upstairs: the bloody portrait of the stabbed girl is called A Few Little Pokes. She painted it after a man in the Zona Rosa stabbed his girlfriend twenty-six times, and when the police came and found her dead, the boyfriend said, "What's the problem? I only gave her a few little pokes." The story was in all the newspapers. Senora said, "Insolito, you'd be amazed what people will buy." Did she mean the painting, or the man's story?