The Lacuna Read online

  They had come here carrying bundles of palm leaves and now sat untying them, pulling apart the fronds. All night their hands would move in darkness to weave the straps of leaf into unexpected shapes of resurrection: crosses, garlands of lilies, doves of the Holy Spirit, even Christ himself. These things had to be made by hand in one night, for the forbidden Palm Sunday mass, and burned afterward, because icons were illegal. Priests were illegal, saying the mass was illegal, all banned by the Revolution.

  Earlier in the year the Cristeros had ridden into town wearing bullets strapped in rows like jewelry across their chests, galloping around the square to protest the law banning priests. The girls cheered and threw flowers as if Pancho Villa himself had risen from the grave and located his horse. Old women rocked on their knees, eyes closed, hugging their crosses and kissing them like babies. Tomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in single-minded grace. Like the school of the fish, so driven to righteousness they could flout the law, declare the safety of their souls, then go home and destroy the evidence.

  It was late now, the married couples had begun to surrender dancing space to a younger group: girls with red yarn braided into their hair and wound around their heads into thick crowns. Their white dresses swirled like froth, with skirts so wide they could take the hems in their fingertips and raise them up to make sudden wings, like butterflies, fluttering as they turned. The men's high-heeled boots cut hard at the ground, drumming like penned stallions. When the music paused, they leaned across their partners in the manner of animals preparing to mate. Move away, come back, the girls waggled their shoulders. The men put handkerchiefs under their arms, then waved them beneath the girls' chins.

  Salome decided she wanted to go home immediately.

  "We would have to walk, Mother. Natividad won't come for us until eleven, because that's what you told him."

  "Then we'll walk," she said.

  "Just wait another half hour. Otherwise we'll be walking in the dark. Bandits might murder us."

  "Nobody will murder us. The bandits are all in the zocalo trying to steal purses." Salome was practical, even as a hysteric.

  "You hate to walk."

  "What I hate is watching these primitives showing off. A she-goat in a dress is still a she-goat."

  Darkness fell down on everything then, like a curtain. Someone must have shut off the lights. The crowd breathed out. The butterfly girls had set glasses with lighted candles onto their braid-crowned heads. As they danced, their candles floated across an invisible surface like reflections of the moon across a lake.

  Salome was so determined to walk home, she had already started in the wrong direction. It wasn't easy to overtake her. "Indian girls," she spat. "What kind of man would chase after that? A corn-eater will never be any more than she is."

  The dancers were butterflies. From a hundred paces Salome could see the dirt under these girls' fingernails, but not their wings.

  Enrique was confident the oil men would come to an agreement. But it could take some time. The oil men had come to Isla Pixol with their wives; they all took rooms in town. Enrique tried to persuade them to stay at the hacienda, since the advantages of his hospitality might work in his favor in the negotiations. "That hotel was built before the flood of Noah. Have you seen the elevator? A birdcage hanging from a watch chain. And the rooms are smaller than a cigar tin."

  Salome shot her eyes at him: How would he know that?

  The wives wore bobbed hair and smart frocks, but all had entered the third of what Salome called the Three Portions of Life. Possibly, they'd entered the fourth. After dinner, while the men smoked Tuxtlan cigars in the library, the women stood outside in point-heeled shoes on the tiled terrace with their little hats pinned against the wind and cheek-curls plastered down. Holding glasses of vino tinto, they gazed across the bay, speculating about the silence under the sea. "Seaweeds swaying like palm trees," they all agreed, "quiet as the grave."

  The boy who sat on the low wall at the edge of the terraza thought: These budgies would be disappointed to know, it's noisy as anything down there. Strange, but not quiet. Like one of the mysterious worlds in Jules Verne's books, filled with its own kinds of things, paying no attention to ours. Often he shook the bubbles from his ears and just listened, drifting along, attending the infinite chorus of tiny clicks and squeaks. Watching one fish at a time as it poked its own way around the coral, he could see it was talking to the others. Or at any rate, making noises at them.

  "What is the difference," he asked Leandro the next day, "between talking and making a noise?"

  Salome hadn't yet learned Leandro's name, she called him "the new kitchen boy." The last galopina was a pretty girl, Ofelia, too much admired by Enrique, given the sack by Salome. Leandro took up more space, standing with bare feet set apart, steady as the stuccoed pillars supporting the tile roofs above the walkways of this yellow-ochre house. A row of lime trees in large terra-cotta pots lined the breezeway between the house and kitchen pavilion. And like a tree, Leandro was planted there for most of each day, cutting up chayotes with his machete on the big work table. Or peeling shrimps, or making sopa de milpa: corn kernel soup with diced squash blossom and avocado. Xochitl soup, with chicken and vegetables in broth. Salads of cactus nopales with avocado and cilantro. The rice he made with a hint of something sweet in it.

  Every day he said, You could pick up that knife and stop being a nuisance. But smiling, not the way Salome said "nuisance." Not the way she said, "If you come in here with those sandy feet your name is mud."

  Regarding the difference between talk and noise, Leandro said, "Ca depende."

  "Depends on what?"

  "On intention. Whether he wants another fish to understand his meaning." Leandro considered his pile of shrimps solemnly, as if they might have had a last wish prior to execution. "If the fish only wants to show he is there, it's a noise. But maybe the fish-clicks are saying 'Go away,' or 'My food, not yours.'"

  "Or, 'Your name is mud.'"

  Leandro laughed, because in Spanish it sounds funny: Su nombre es lodo.

  "Exacto," Leandro said.

  "Then to another fish, it's talk," the boy said. "But to me it's only noise."

  Leandro needed help--too many mouths to feed in this house, the Americans liked to eat. Also it was Salome's birthday, and she wanted squid. The oil men's wives' eyes would swing like the pendulum of a clock beneath their cloche hats when they saw squid a la Veracruzana. But the men would eat tentacles without noticing, enthralled with their own stories. How their hired guns had put down the rebellion in Sonora and sent Escobar running like a dog. The more mezcal went into their glasses, the faster Escobar ran.

  After supper Leandro said El flojo trabaja doble, the lazy man has to work double, because the boy tried to carry all the dishes to the kitchen at once. He dropped two white plates on the tile, shattering them all to buttons. So Leandro was right--sweeping up took twice as long as making an extra trip. But Leandro came out and helped pick up the mess, kneeling beneath the Americans' gaze as they commiserated on the clumsiness of servants, here is one thing that's the same in every country.

  Afterward Salome tried to get them all to cut a rug. She cranked up the Victrola and waved the mezcal bottle at the men, but they went to bed, leaving her fluttering around the parlor like a balloon of air, let go. It was her birthday, and not even her son to whom she had given life would cut a rug with her. "For God's sake, William, you're tedious," she diagnosed. Nose in the books, you're nothing but a canceled stamp. Flutie, green apples, wet blanket, this is only a small sample of the names that came to mind when Salome was stewed to the hat. He did try to dance with her after that, but it was too late. She couldn't hold herself up on her own stilts.

  Salome is airtight, the men liked to say. Copacetic, the cat's meow, a snake charmer. Also a fire bell. One of the oil men said that to his wife, when the others were outside. Explain
ing the situation. Fire bell meant still married, to the husband in America. After all this time not divorced, some poor sod in D.C., an administration accountant. She had the affair right under his nose with this Mexican attache, she couldn't have been more than twenty-five at the time, and with that child already. Left the other fellow flat. Be careful of this fancy Salome, he warned his wife. She's a disappearing act.

  On Cinco de Mayo the village celebrated with fireworks, commemorating the victory over Napoleon's invasion in the battle at Puebla. Salome had a headache, one last gift from the night before, and spent the day in her little bedchamber at the end of the hall. She called it Elba, her place of exile. Lately Enrique had been retiring early and closing the heavy door to his own bedroom. Today she was in no mood for noise. Today, she complained, they were making more explosions in the campo than it probably took to scare off Napoleon's army in the first place.

  The boy did not walk into town for the celebration. He knew that in the long run Napoleon's generals still came back and cuffed Santa Ana, and took over Mexico long enough to make everyone speak French and wear tight pants until 1867, or something near it. He was supposed to finish the book on Emperor Maximiliano, from Enrique's library. That was Salome's program for him, Reading Moldy Books, because there was no school in Isla Pixol suitable for a boy who was already taller than President Portes Gil. But the best place for reading was in the forest, not the house. Under a tree by the estuary, twenty minutes' walk down the trail. And the book on Maximiliano was enormous. So it only made sense to carry The Mysterious Affair at Styles instead.

  The biggest amate tree had buttresses like sails reaching out from the trunk, dividing out little rooms furnished with drapes of fern and patchouli. A rooming house for dragonflies and ant thrushes, and once, a coiled little snake. Many trees in that jungle were as broad around their bases as the huts in Leandro's village, and held their branches too high to see. There was no knowing what lived up there. Once the saucer-eyed devils had howled for blood, but maybe those branches were only the balconies of monkey hotels, and nesting places for oropendola birds, whose gurgling song sounded like water bubbling out of a tin canteen.

  In Enrique's library, every wall was covered with wooden cabinets. The room had no windows, only shelves, and all the book cabinets had iron grilles covering their fronts like prisoners' windows, locked over shelves packed with books. The square openings between the welded bars were just large enough for a fine-boned, long-fingered boy to put his hand through, like slipping on an iron bracelet. He could reach in and touch the books' spines, exactly as Count Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo had reached through the bars to touch his bride's face, when she came to see him in prison. Carefully he could slide one book from its place in the packed shelf, and with both hands put through the bars he could turn and examine it, sometimes even open it, if the shelf were deep enough. But not remove it. The grilles had iron padlocks.

  Every Sunday Enrique brought out the skeleton key, unlocked the case, and took out four books exactly, which he left in a pile on the table without discussion. Invariably historical, stinking of mold, these were to be a boy's education. A few were all right, Zozobra, and also Romancero Gitano, poems by a young man who loved gypsies. Cervantes held promise, but had to be puzzled out in some ancient kind of Spanish. One week only with Don Quixote, before turning him in to be locked up again and exchanged for a new week's pile, had felt like a peek through a keyhole.

  And anyhow not a single one of those books could hold eight minutes to Agatha Christie or the others he'd brought from before, when they came here on the train. His mother had let him carry two valises: one for books, one for clothes. The clothes were a waste, outgrown instantly. He should have filled both with books. The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Count of Monte Cristo, Around the World in Eighty Days, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, books in English that didn't stink of mold. He'd already read most of them now, more than once. The Three Musketeers still called out to him, waving their swords, but he always shoved them back in the valise. Because what would be left, when all these books were in the past? He lay awake nights dreading it.

  The program of a real school was vague in Salome's convictions, and frankly in his own: dank memories of wool coats and rough boys, and sport, a terrible thing, daily enforced. One lady in a brown sweater used to give him books to keep, that was the best thing he recalled from home. But that is not what we call home now, Salome said, "We're here and there isn't a school so you'll just have to read every book in that damned library, if we're allowed to stay." If not, her program became less certain.

  The library often stank, from the oil men in there smoking Tuxtlan cigars all night. Salome hated all of it: cigars, men talking. Also locked-up books, or any other kind it seemed, and flutie boys who read them too much. But even so, she bought him a notebook from the shop by the ferry docks, on the day they'd tried to run away from Enrique and cried because of having absolutely nowhere to go. She sat limp on the iron bench in her silk-crepe dress, shoulders shaking, for such a long time he'd had to wander over to the window of the tobacco stand and leaf through magazines. There he'd found the pasteboard notebook: the most beautiful book ever, it could become anything.

  She came up behind him while he was looking at it. Set her chin on top of his shoulder, wiped her cheek with the back of a hand, and said, "We'll take it, then." The man wrapped it carefully in brown paper, tied with a string.

  That was the story she had wanted him to begin, to tell what happened in Mexico before the howlers swallowed them down without a trace. Later on, many times, she would change her mind and tell him to stop writing. It made her nervous.

  At the end of that day, after running away, buying a notebook, and eating boiled shrimps from a paper cone while standing on the pier watching ferries leave, they'd gone back to Enrique, of course. They were prisoners on an island, like the Count of Monte Cristo. The hacienda had heavy doors and thick walls that stayed cool all day, and windows that let in the sound of the sea all night: hush, hush, like a heartbeat. He would grow thin as bones here, and when the books were all finished, he would starve.

  But no, now he would not. The notebook from the tobacco stand was the beginning of hope: a prisoner's plan for escape. Its empty pages would be the book of everything, miraculous and unending like the sea at night, a heartbeat that never stops.

  Salome for her part was not worried about running out of books, only of having her clothes go out of fashion. You can't buy a thing on this island. Unless he wants me to be a she-goat, wear skirts down to the ground. A trunk with her nicest things had been mailed overland from Washington, D.C., last year, according to the lawyer who was supposed to be taking care of these matters. But both the trunk and the divorce seemed to have lost their way. Enrique said they might see that trunk one day, ojala, if the Lord is willing. Meaning if the Lord is not, the Zapatistas held up the train and took everything. The boy cried, "Oh yes, imagine it! The Zapatistas in their gun belts, reading Miss Agatha Christie by the campfire. Eating off Mother's Limoges and wearing her dressing gowns."

  Enrique pinched his moustache and said, "Imagine it! Too bad you can't sell daydreams like that for money."

  "Revolution in Mexico is a fashion," he announced to the oil men at supper on their last night. "Like the silly hats worn by our wives. I don't care what they told you in Washington, this country will work hard for the foreign dollar." He raised his glass. "The heart of Mexico is like that of a loyal woman, married forever to Porfirio Diaz."

  The deal was made, the oil men went away. The next morning Enrique let Salome sit on his lap at breakfast and give him a kiss like a trumpet player. A sign of progress, she declared, after he'd gone out to inspect a new packing house. "Did you hear him say that, hats worn by our wives?" Her first project now was to get herself moved back into his bedroom. Her second one was to fire his maid.

  The boy's best plan on any day was to make himself scarce. Walk out the back through the kitchen, do
wn a long lane of mulata trees with red skin peeling away from their trunks, exposing smooth black skin underneath. Cut across the sand trail through the pineapple field, over the low rock wall out to the sea, carrying a rucksack with a book and a packet of tortillas for lunch, the diving goggle and a bathing costume. No one would see but Leandro, whose eyes following him down the sand trail could make him feel naked when he was not. Leandro, who came barefoot up the lane every morning carrying the smoky smell of breakfast fires from his village, but wearing a clean shirt laundered by his wife. Salome said Leandro already had a wife, a child, and a baby. As young as he is, she clucked, happy that someone had wrecked his life even faster than she had wrecked hers. If Leandro was already in the Second Portion of Life (the part with children), it was going to be short.

  Out on the reef, the fish came every day for the scraps of tortilla the boy brought from the kitchen and tore into pieces, casting his bread upon the waters. One fish had a mouth like a parrot's beak and a fire-red belly, and was always the first in line to come banging up for the day's handout. So really it wasn't a friend. It was like the men who came to visit for the free eats and their eyes full of Salome in a V-neck satin dress.

  Salome formulated her plan of attack. First, she instructed Leandro, we make only Enrique's favorite foods every day. Starting with breakfast: cinnamon-flavored coffee, tortillas warm from the griddle, pineapple with ham, and what she called Divorced Eggs, two of them crowded onto a plate, one with mild red salsa and one with spicy green. Salome maintained her own perspective on romance.