The Lacuna Read online

  The kitchen was connected to the house by the passageway of lime trees. It had low brick walls, planks for work counters, and was open all around to the sea air so smoke could escape from the firebox of the brick stove. Posts in the corners held up the roof, and the brick bread oven hunched in one corner. Natividad, the oldest servant, who was nearly blind, came out every dawn to sweep out the firebox and light it again, feeling his way to the flame, laying the sticks side by side like tucking children to bed.

  When Leandro came he would push the fire to the sides, keeping the heat away from the center of the heavy iron griddle. He mopped the griddle with a rag dipped in the lard jar so the tortillas wouldn't stick. Next to the lard jar he kept a big bowl of sticky corn dough, pinching up balls of it and pressing them flat by hand. The heat made a necklace of black pearls on each white tortilla as it cooked. In the thick ones, the gorditas, he cut ridges as they cooked, for holding the bean paste. But for empanadas he made them thin, folding the tortilla over the filling and sliding it into a pan of hot grease.

  Most of all, Enrique cared for pan dulces made with wheat-flour dough. Puffy and soft with a grit of coarse sugar on top, filled with pineapple, sweet and tart from the oven's wood smoke. Many a cook had been fired by Enrique, before this Leandro arrived from heaven. Pan dulce is no easy trick. The vanilla has to be from Papantla. The flour is ground in a stone metate. Not like masa for tortillas, corn soaked in lime water that's ground up coarse and wet. Any Mexican can do that, Leandro said. Dry flour for European bread is a different matter. It has to be ground so fine it comes up into the air in clouds. The hard part was mixing in the water, going too fast. Dumping water on the flour in a cold gush, causing a catastrophe of lumps.

  "Dios mio, what have you done there?"

  The boy's excuse: the bucket was too heavy.

  "Flojo, you're as tall as I am, you can lift the bucket."

  The dough had to be thrown away, and everything started over. Leandro from heaven, angel of patience, paused to rinse his hands in the wash bucket and dry them on his white trousers. Let me show you how to do this. Begin with two kilos of the flour. Make a mountain on the counter. Into this mound, with your fingers, crumble the flakes of butter, the salt and soda. Then pull it out like a ring of volcanic mountains around a crater. Pour a lake of cold water in the center. Little by little, pull the mountains into the lake, water and shore together, into a marsh. Gradually. No islands. The paste swells until there are no mountains left, and no lake, only a great blob of lava.

  "There. Not just any Mexican can do that, muchacho."

  Leandro flopped the dough over gently on the counter until it was smooth, fluid and solid at the same time. It would sleep overnight in a covered bowl. In the morning he would roll it flat, cut it with a machete into squares, spoon a dot of pineapple filling on each one, and fold it in a triangle, sprinkled with sugar grains soaked in vanilla. "Now you know the secret for making the boss happy," Leandro said. "Cooking in this house is like war. I am the capitan of bread and you are my sergente mayor. If he throws out your mother you might still have a job, if you can make pan dulce and blandas."

  "Which are the blandas?"

  "Sergente, you can't make this kind of mistake. Blandas are the big soft ones he's crazy for. Tortillas big enough to wrap a baby in, soft as an angel's wings."

  "Si, senor!" The tall boy saluted. "Big enough to wrap angels in, soft as a baby's crupper."

  Leandro laughed. "Small angels," he said. "Only baby ones."

  On the twenty-first of June, 1929, a giant iguana climbed up the mango by the patio, causing Salome to stand up from her lunch and scream. And on that day the Three Years Silence ended, though the iguana had nothing to do with it.

  It was a declaration signed by the president, ending the three-year ban on saying the mass. The war with the Cristeros ended. The church bells rang all day on Sunday, calling back the priests with their gold rings, landholdings, and sovereignty intact. Enrique took it as proof: Mexico falls on her knees at the altar, ready to return to the days of Porfirio Diaz. True Mexicans will always understand the virtues of humility, piety, and patriotism. "And decent women," he added pointedly to Salome, quoting Diaz: "Only in her home, like a butterfly in a glass jar, can woman progress to her highest level of decency." He expected her to take herself and her son to town for the Reconciliation Mass.

  "If he wants a butterfly, he should let me stay home in his damn glass jar," she fumed in the carriage on the way to church. Salome was all for the Three Years Silence. In her opinion the mass could only be more tedious if they made you wear cotton stockings. She too had lived under the reign of Porfirio, ruled by a dark supremacy of nuns who showed no mercy to a businessman's cheeky daughter who came to school with her ankles showing. Salome had maneuvered a miraculous escape, like the Count of Monte Cristo: a study tour in America, where she enlisted a claims accountant in her father's firm who was helpless before her charms. She'd solved the mathematical problem of age sixteen by saying she was twenty. At twenty-four she'd said the same thing again, balancing the equation. She became Sally, confirmed in the church of expediency. Even now, as they approached the cathedral in town, she rolled her eyes and said, "Opium of the masses," parroting the men in government who'd tried to rout the priests. But she didn't say it in Spanish, for the driver to hear.

  The cathedral was packed with solemn children, farmers, and old women on tree-trunk legs. Some worked their way through the Stations of the Cross, orbiting around the crowd's periphery as deliberately as planets. A long line of townspeople waited to receive communion, but Salome walked to the head of the line, accepting the host on her tongue as if this were a bakery line and she had plenty of other errands.

  The priest wore gold brocades and a pointed hat. He had managed to keep his clothes very nice, during his three years hiding out. All eyes followed him like plants facing light, except for those of Salome. She left as soon as possible and walked straight for the carriage, snapping at Natividad to get going, fiercely digging in her beaded bag for her aspirins. Everything about Salome came from a jar or a bottle: first, the powder and perfume, the pomade for her marcel wave. Next, the headache, from a bottle of mezcal. Then the cure, from a bottle of Bellans Hot-Water-Relief. Maybe some other bottle gave her the flapper-dancing, crank-up-the-Victrola Twenty-Three Skidoo. Stashed under a table drape in her room, something to help her keep it up.

  If Enrique didn't love her, she now announced in the carriage, it was not her fault. She didn't see how God was going to help any of this. Enrique's mother didn't approve of a divorcee, so that was one person to blame. And the servants, who did everything wrong. She would like to blame Leandro but couldn't. The white-flour dough he made for the pastries was perfect, as silky as Salome's white dress that could be poured out of a pitcher, in which she still hoped to be married one more time.

  The problem must be this long-legged son, bouncing with the bumps in the road, brushing hair out of his eyes, staring off at the ocean. No place on the top of the wedding cake for a boy already as tall as the president, who was not, himself, elected.

  To get to the oil fields in the Huasteca, Enrique had to take the ferry to shore, then the panga to Veracruz, then the train. If he had to be gone one day, he'd be gone a week, or better yet a month. Salome wanted to go with him to Veracruz, but he said she would only want to buy things. Instead, he allowed them to come in the carriage to the pier in town, to watch him leave on the ferry. In the flattering morning light she waved her handkerchief from the dock, elbowing the son to wave as well. They both had roles in the play called Enrique Makes Up His Mind. "Pretty soon he'll say the word, and then we can let our hair down, kiddo. Then we'll think what to do about you." Enrique had mentioned a boarding school in the Distrito Federal.

  The pasteboard notebook was running out of pages, the book called What Happened to Us in Mexico. He asked to purchase a new one at the tobacco stand. But Salome said, "First we'll have to see if there's more to the story."
r />   When the ferry was gone, they ate lunch on the malecon across from the shrimp jetty, watching seabirds wheel in circles trying to steal food. Out on the water, men in small wooden boats pulled in their nets, crumpling up mounds of gray netting that rose like storm clouds from each hull. By late morning the trawlers were already docked with their rusted hulls all listing the same direction along the dock, double masts leaning like married couples, equally drunken. The air smelled of fish and salt. The palm trees waved their arms wildly in the sea wind, a gesture of desperation ignored by all. The boy said, "There is always more to the story. This lunch will be the next part." But Salome said what she always said now: You need to stop doing that, put the book away. It makes me nervous.

  On the way home she directed the driver to stop at a little village near the lagoon. "Drop us off here and come back at six, never mind for what," she said. The horse knew how to go everywhere, and it was a good thing, because old Natividad was nearly blind. That was a good thing also, as far as Salome was concerned. She wanted no witnesses.

  The village was too small even to have a market, only an immense stone head in the town square, left over from a century when the Indians had huge ambitions. Salome stepped down from the coach and strode past the great head with the beard of grass under its chin. At the end of the lane she said, "It's this way, come on," and turned up a path into the forest, walking fast in her sling-back shoes, her lips pursed, chin tilted down so the marcel wave hung forward like a closed curtain. They came to a plank footbridge suspended on ropes over a ravine. Slipping off the pointed white shoes and dangling them from a hooked finger, she stepped out in her stockings onto the bridge over crashing water, then paused to look back. "Don't come," she said. "You should wait here."

  She was gone hours. He sat at the end of the plank bridge with his notebook on his lap. An enormous spider with a fire-red belly came along lifting one foot at a time, slowly pulling its entire body into a tiny hole in one of the planks. What a terrible thing to know: every small hole could have something like that inside. A flock of parrots shuffled in the leaves. A toucan looked down its long nose, shrieking: a mi, a mi! Squatting by the chasm, he believed again in the tree-devils. And so at dusk, howling, they arrived.

  When Salome returned, she took off her shoes again to cross the bridge, put them back on, and strode toward the village. Natividad was already waiting, a stone head himself, letting the horse graze. She climbed in the carriage and never spoke at all.

  It was a form of revenge to steal the pocket watch. Something he could keep from his mother, for refusing to tell why she'd gone into the jungle. He did it on the day the tailor rode out from town, eager for Salome's opinion about fabrics for Enrique's new suit. Enrique was away. It was only good manners for the tailor to take a glass of chinguirito with Salome, and then another one. There was plenty of time for a boy to creep into her room to look at the Father Box. It was covered with dust, shoved underneath the cabinet where she kept her toilet pot. She hated the man that much.

  No use crying over a spilt father, she always said. Only once had she let him look at the things in this box: a photograph of a man who had been his father somehow. A bunch of old coins, fobs, jeweled cuff links, and the pocket watch. He craved the watch. That first time, when she'd let him sit on the floor and touch everything in the box while she lay on her bed, propped on one elbow watching him, he'd dangled it on its chain in front of her eyes, making it swing, like a hypnotist: You are getting very sleepy.

  She said, "El tiempo cura y nos mata." Time cures you first, and then it kills you.

  Strictly speaking, these things are yours, she'd told him. But strictly speaking they were not even hers, she'd scooped them up in a hurry without asking, when she left and ran off to Mexico. "In case we needed something to sell later on, if we fell on hard times." If they fell on something harder than Enrique, she must have meant.

  Now the watch she'd stolen was stolen again: a double-cross. He'd crept in her room and taken it while she was in the parlor laughing at the tailor's jokes, lolling her head back on the silk sofa. Among all the treasures in the box, he'd only needed that one. The time that cures you first, and later stops everything that's happening in your heart.

  The blue fog of Tuxtlan cigars came out of the library and filled the whole house. Two Americans had come back with Enrique this time, to fumigate the southern shores of Mexico with their smoke and endless talk: the election campaign, Ortiz Rubio, that disaster Vasconcelos. Gringos always made Enrique nervous, and Salome excited. She poured cognac in their glasses and let them see her chest when she leaned over. One looked, the other never did. Both were said to have wives. At midnight they went out for a walk on the beach, in their fedoras and leather shoes. Salome collapsed in a chair, all the flapper draining out of her.

  "You should go to bed," she announced.

  "I'm not a child. You should go to bed."

  "No bunk, mister. If he gets any more cross, we'll both be hoofing it out of here."

  "Where would we go? Hoofs can't walk on water."

  One of the men was Mr. Morrow, the ambassador, and the other was an oil man like Enrique. According to Salome, that second one was high-hatty, but she could make him produce the cash if she wanted to. "He's richer than God," she said.

  "Then he must have sunrise in his pocket. And mercy in his shoes."

  She stared. "Is that from one of your books?"

  "Not completely."

  "What do you mean, not completely?"

  "I don't know. It sounds like it would be in Romancero Gitano. But it isn't."

  Her eyes grew wide. She had put her hair in a shellacked wave, hours ago, but now it was coming apart, the short curls across her forehead coming loose from the rest. She looked like a girl who had just come in from playing.

  "You made that up, sunrise in his pocket and mercy in his shoes. It's a poem." Her eyes clear as water, the points of her hair just touching her brows. The candlelight found long, narrow lines of satin in the cloth of her dress, a pattern that would never show up in ordinary daylight. He wondered how it would be to have a mother, really. A lovely, surprised woman like this, who looked at you. At least once, every day.

  "You do need another book, don't you? To write down your poems."

  But already he was on the last page. The scene of his mother in the candlelight filled most of it, and the ending wasn't good. When the men came back, they cranked up the Victrola, and the one called "I Could Make Him Produce the Cash" tried to dance the Charleston with Salome, but his shoes had no mercy in them at all. You could tell they pinched his feet.

  ARCHIVIST'S NOTE

  These pages record the early life of Harrison William Shepherd, a citizen of the United States born in 1916 (Lychgate, Virginia), taken by his mother to Mexico at a young age. The words are those of H. W. Shepherd, vouchsafed. But the pages preceding are plainly not from the hand of a boy. He came to his powers early, that is well known and many have remarked on it, but not so young as thirteen. He did acquire a notebook that year for making a journal, a habit kept on through life. The endeavor of it has passed unexpectedly from the author to myself, and all here collected.

  In January 1947 he began a memoir that was to be made of the early diaries. The pages here previous came to me from his hand, to be typed and filed as "Chapter One." I took it for a book's beginning. There was no call to doubt it, for he had written other books by then. He'd made what he could of that first pasteboard notebook mentioned, purchased on a dock in Isla Pixol, and probably disposed of it afterward. It was his habit, when he rewrote anything, to shed himself of all earlier versions. He kept a clean house.

  A few months afterward, he left off all intention of writing his memoir. Many were the reasons. One that he gave was: the next little notebook in the line had gone missing, his second boyhood diary, and he became discouraged of recalling what it contained. I believe he did remember a good deal of it, but I'll comment no further on it. He had concerns.

  T
here is a peculiar thing to tell about that second diary. He said he couldn't find it, and that was a fact. It only came to light in 1954. It turned up in a trunk of his things that had been stored many years in the home of an acquaintance in Mexico City. They found it after her death caused the household to be shuffled around. The diary is leather-bound, smaller than a sandwich (approx. 3 x 5 in.), easy to overlook. It was inside a trouser pocket, wrapped in a handkerchief. So it was never kept with all his later diaries, lying there lost a long while. He never did lay eyes on it again. It had no name inside it, only a date and heading on the first page as will be shown. It was only by luck and a certain letter of instruction that the trunk was recognized as his, and sent here to me. He was of course by that time gone. Without its surprising resurrection, that missing piece of the tale, there would be none to tell. Yet here it is. The writing is his for certain, the hand, style, and heading. He wrote similar things at the start of his notebooks even when much older.

  The difference in style, from the writer's memoir to the child's diary, the reader will shortly encounter. A man of thirty wrote the previous pages, a boy fourteen wrote the diary herein to follow. All the diaries after it show the normal progress of age. In all, he showed a habit that claimed him for life: his manner of scarcely mentioning himself. Anyone else would say in a diary, "I had this kind of a supper," but to his mind, if supper lay on the table it had reasons of its own. He wrote as if he'd been the one to carry the camera to each and every one of his life's events, and thus was unseen in all the pictures. Many were the reasons, again not mine to say.

  The little leather-bound booklet lost and found, then, was a diary he kept from 1929 until summer of 1930, when he left Isla Pixol. That one was a toil to transcribe, the nuisance being its size: small. He penciled it in the empty portions of a household accounts book. It was evidently a common type of booklet they had in the 1920s, stolen from a housekeeper, he plainly states. He hadn't yet the strong habit of putting a date to his entries.