The Lacuna Read online

  Old men thin as bones walked along the stopped train, looking in the windows. They lingered at the rear until police came with sticks to beat them away from the iron-sided cars. These people look as poor as could ever be, worse than the beggars and borrachos of Mexico City, who at least always have a ballad of the Revolution to sing into their shirt collars as they lean on a doorway. Here is the end of Mexico, end of the world and Chapter One. This train ride is like the long, narrow cave in the sea. With luck it might open on the other side into someplace new. But not here.

  6 January

  Five days and the train has passed through many underworlds. Grass hills, dark swamps of standing trees. And now, almost nothing but fields of dead sticks, immense as the sea. Not a green leaf anywhere. The gringos read magazines, failing to notice their world has nothing left alive in it. Only the Mexicans look out the windows and worry. A woman and four children are the only others who have come this same unimaginable distance, from Mexico City. Today when the train crossed a bridge over a high river gorge, she made the children sing for the Feast of the Kings so they wouldn't cry. She took a rosca cake from her bag, crumbling out of its paper wrappings into the worn velvet seats. The family huddled together, locking their small holiday from the inside.

  7 January: Federal District of North America

  Lock, stock, and barrel the human cargo arrived today at Union Station, delivered into such fierce cold, stepping off the train felt like being thrown into water and commanded to breathe it. The Mexican mother reached her little foot down from the doorway like the feeler of a snail. The freezing air set her to panic, rolling her children up in shawls like tamales, pushing them ahead of her into the station, adios.

  Would he be here? And if not? Mother had suggested no other plan, if the father should fail to arrive and claim his baggage. But now here he was: a painful clap on the shoulder, the blue eyes measuring, how strange, a relative with pale eyes. Who could have picked that one, from just the one tinted photograph? Of course, he must have been experiencing similar disappointments in the son. "Your train was an hour late."

  "Sorry, sir." Ragtag boys rushed past like pigeons flushed from the bush, coshing people's suitcases into their knees.

  "A bunch of little tramps on the rods," he said.

  "On the rods?"

  "They ride into town on the outside of the train."

  The cold was killing, every breath prickling into needles of nostril-ice. And clothes itching like mange after so many days. People in long coats, the howling steam engines. Finally it dawned, what he'd said: these ragged boys rode outside the train. Dios mio. "Where will they go now?"

  "Bunk on their ears in some hobo jungle. Or else they'll go listen to the Christers. Accept the Lord for one night in exchange for a mulligan."

  "Is mulligan a kind of money?"

  His laugh was a loud burst, like notes exploding from a mariachi trumpet. He was amused by this empty bank of bewilderment, his son. The inside of the station was like the cathedral: so much space overhead, a great dome rising toward heaven, but not enough room down here for all the people jammed in. A grand marble doorway opened to the street, but outdoors the sun was cold, shining without heat, like an electric bulb. Crowds hurried along, unconcerned their star had no fire.

  "Where is everybody going?"

  "Home, son! Time for a two-bit square and a working man's nap. This is nothing. You should see it Monday morning."

  Could a street hold more people? Inside the station the trains were still shrieking, the sound of digestion in the belly of that monument. Like an Aztec temple drinking blood. Mother's parting advice: Try to put a positive face on things, the man hates whining, let me tell you.

  "Union Station looks like a temple."

  "A temple." Father gave a sideways look. "How old are you now, fourteen?"

  "Fifteen. Sixteen this summer."

  "Right. Temples. Built with government money by Hoover's swindlers." He scowled at the trolley stop, as if the city had slyly shifted around behind his back while he was in the station. A freckled, pinkish man, the pale moustache discolored along its bottom edge. The photograph hadn't recorded the unheroic complexion--that skin would broil to a crisp in Mexico. One mystery solved.

  He dodged into the crowd and moved fast, leaving no choice but to tuck-chin like a boxer and watch out for horse droppings, tugging the behemoth trunk. Mother's driver had put it on the train; porters carried it after that. No more help now, America was help-yourself.

  "They're planning to put up a whole string of your temples here on the south side of Pennsylvania. See that eye-popper? Washington's Monument." He pointed into a leafless park, the pale stone rising above the trees. A memory rose with it: the long, narrow box of hallway rising like a dark mouse tunnel. An echoing argument in the stairwell, Mother's hand pulling downward, back to safety.

  "We went in there, didn't we? One time with Mother?"

  "You remember that? Small fry. You got the screaming heebies on the stairs."

  He'd stopped at a corner, panting, emitting breath in bursts of steam like a kettle. "They've put an elevator to the top now. One more temple to Hoover's swindlers, if you ask me." He chuckled, tasting his clever remark again after the fact, like a belch. People were gathering here, a trolley stop. An officer clopped past on a huge bay horse.

  "Mother said you worked for President Hoover."

  "Who says I don't?" A hint of ire, suggesting he might not. Or not in any capacity Mr. Hoover would know about. A bean counter in a government office, Mother said, but one of the last men in America with a steady job, so it serves him right to get his boy sent him on the train.

  "President Hoover is the greatest man ever lived," he said, overly loud. People looked. "They've just had a telephone put in on his desk, for calling his chief of staff. He can get MacArthur quick as snapping his fingers. You think your president of Mexico has a telephone on his desk?"

  Mexico will be held as a grudge, then. Probably for reasons to do with Mother. Ortiz Rubio does have a telephone; the newspapers say he can't make a move without ringing up Calles first, at his house on the Street of Forty Thieves in Cuernavaca. But Father didn't want to hear about that. People ask without wanting to know. He boarded the trolley through the brew of people, shouldering his way toward the seats. The trunk wouldn't fit under the wooden bench, but hunched in the aisle: an embarrassment. People coming on the trolley flowed around it like a river over a boulder.

  The ride was long. He stared out the window. It was impossible to imagine this man in the same room with Mother, the same bed. She would swat him like a fly. Then call a maid to wipe up the residue.

  The men here wear suits like businessmen in Mexico City, but with more layers due to the cold. The women have complicated stuff, long scarves and things to put their hands in, hard to name. One had a shawl around her neck made from a whole fox with its head still on, biting its tail. If Cortes came here, he could write the Queen a whole chapter about the ladies' clothes.

  After many stops, Father said: "We are going out to the school. They said it's the best to start right away, in your situation." He spoke slowly, as if "situation" meant a boy with a damaged brain. "It's bread and board. You'll bunk there with your pals, Harry."

  "Yes, sir." (Harry. It will be Harry now?)

  "That'll be a barrel of laughs." He bit his moustache, then added, "It better be."

  Meaning, it is costing some money. Harry. Harry Shepherd looked out the window. Whoever pays the bill, names the boy.

  Scenes passed by: marble edifices, parks of skeletal trees, boarded warehouses. Pale white men in black suits and hats. And then the opposite: dark-colored men in pale shirts and trousers, no hats at all. They were digging a long trench with pickaxes, their muscled arms bare even in this cold. In all Mexico there is not one Indian so black as those men. Their arms had a shine, like the rubbed wood of black piano keys.

  At the end of the trolley ride, a motorbus. The great trunk occupied its own sea
t, with a window for viewing the scenery of mansions strung along a river. Father took long fishing expeditions into his pocket to find his watch, pull it out, and frown at its face. Did he remember the other watch, the one Mother took, later on pinched again from her jewelry case? The memory of it feels like a sickness now, not for the sin of thievery but for the dreadful longing pinned to it. For this man. This father.

  17 January

  Most Lofty Excellent Empress, the place called Potomac Academy is marvellous bad. A prison camp in brick buildings built to look like mansions, where native leaders called Officers rule over the captives. The Dormitory is a long house of beds like a hospital, with every patient required to go dead at Twenty One Hours. Lights Out means no more reading or else. In the morning the corpses rise again on command.

  The strangest thing: the captive boys don't seem to wish for escape. In class they take their orders and knuckle under, but the minute the officer leaves the room, they commence to rapping heads with inkwells and aping the language of radio men named Amos and Andy. In the dormitory they gawk at someone's eight-pager with a girl called Sally Rand in it, naked with feathery fans. She looks like a cold baby bird.

  The captives are released Saturday afternoon, no classes or exercises for once, and the dormitory empties out. Boys go to homes if they have them. The morning is Chapel first, then Mess Hall, then Freedom.

  All the other boys in form nine are younger. But taller than the cretins anyway, and less spittle. Form nine was a compromise, because of being too tall to go all the way back to form six. The officers teach Latin, maths, and other things. Drill and psychomotricity. Best is literature. The officer recommended a pass to the form-eleven literature class, Samuel Butler, Daniel Defoe, and Jonathan Swift. Who gives a fig if they are Restoration or neoclassicists? New books in endless supply.

  Drill is cleaning and display of firearms, not so different from cleaning dishes.

  Mathematics: the worst. Nothing past the tablas de multiplicar will ever fit in this calabash. Algebra, a language spoken on the moon. For a boy with no plans to go there.

  Sunday, January 24

  Notes on how to speak in America:

  1. Do not say "Pardon me." People in books say it constantly. Here, they ask who sent you to prison.

  2. Shouting "Go fry asparagus!" won't make them leave you alone, as it would in Spanish.

  3. "Beat it" means Go fry asparagus.

  4. "Punk" means fluter. Also: chump, ratso, and "sure it ain't the YMCA."

  5. "Mexico" is not a country, but a name. Hey Mexico, comeer.

  The United States is the land of the square deal and the working stiff. Even though the newspapers say nobody has a job, and deals are not very geometric.

  The boys move in cloudish groups, like schools of fish on the reef. In the hallways the groups approach, pass by, and join up again behind, as if you were a rock, not a sentient being. A splay-legged thing dangling in the wrong world.

  February 21

  So many people are sore at President Hoover, he had to chain up the gates to the White House and lock himself in. According to the boy named Bull's Eye. Yesterday a one-armed vet tried to break through the gate, got his ass beat up, and was hauled off to the hoosegow, where the one-armed man received his first square in a fortnight.

  6. A square is a meal.

  Bull's Eye pinches newspapers and cigarettes from the Officers' Mess. When he pulls the papers out of his jacket in the lavatory, the boys crowd around. They can't wait for him to read his made-up headlines in the loud voice of a news hawker: EXTREY, HEXTREY! CHICKEN LIVER HOOVER CRAWLS UNDER PRESIDENTIAL BED! MRS. HOOVER TO GET SOME PEACE AT LAST!

  The real name of Bull's Eye is Billy Boorzai. He isn't a regular student. He was, until his pop lost his job at a radio shop and his mam lost her marbles. Now he takes classes only half the day, then works in the kitchen and mops the lavs. At night he reads what he has swiped from teachers' desks, getting his education on the lam, he says.

  Bull's Eye has admirers but no friends in here, he says, his friends are all on the outside. He gets to leave the grounds because of his job in the kitchen (the mess). The cooks send him to the butcher's, the canvas man's, even the gunsmith's sometimes. He says the cooks need firearms for self-defense, the food is that bad.

  February 28

  A logic problem: is the tedium of maths class better or worse than the tedium of maths detention? Being held prisoner in the library with an algebra book is not improving. But, that great hall full of books is not punishment, either. For certain it is safer than outdoors with boys shoulder-banging at American football, screaming in the language of Gee Whiz and Your Old Man.

  March 13

  Every morning Bull's Eye stands naked in the lav, shaving his face. He looks twenty. He says he's only the same age as everybody else here, plus a few hard knocks. He says you grow up fast when the South Sea Bubble bursts and your dad gets the boot. He doesn't go home either. We have that in common: dads who won't look a son in the eye. He says it's good as any reason for friendship.

  It's the only one so far. The boy called Pencil in the next bed will talk if no one else is around. The Greek boy named Damos says, "Hey Mexico, comeer," but he also says, "Hey Brush Ape." Bull's Eye told them to watch out, the kid from Mexico is ace at firearms, maybe he used to ride with Pancho Villa.

  Now they use that name: Pancho Villa. It took a while to recognize it because they pronounce it something like Pants Ville: Hey, Pantsville, comeer! It sounds like a location, one of the hanging-laundry neighborhoods you see from the train to Huichapan.

  March 14

  Lucky Lindy's baby is kidnapped, and everyone is afraid, even boys locked up in a brick school. For the hero who flew across the ocean, a terrible crash. The newspapers say any child is in danger if Lindbergh could be that unlucky. But this country already had bad-luck people everywhere, sleeping in the parks, wearing newspapers for coats. The people who have good cloth coats look out the trolley windows and say, Those bums need to buck up. Unlucky Lindy makes them afraid because it happened to a hero.

  March 20

  Bull's Eye smells like peeled potatoes, cigarettes, and the mop bucket. When the others go home on Saturday, he says, "Hey-Pancho-Villa, you are cor-di-ally invited to assist me with my labors." These include scrubbing the lunch mess, running with the wet mop in the commissary, jumping on it, and sliding across the floor between the long tables. And so forth. The assistant receives no pay except getting his head squeezed inside Bull's Eye's elbow and his hair scrubbed with knuckles. That is how boys touch here, Bull's Eye especially.

  March 27

  Military strategy is interesting. Running an army is similar to running a household of servants. Mother is good at that kind of warfare, she has instincts for reconnaissance and the surprise attack. Officer Ostrain says the United States has the sixteenth largest army in the world, ranking leagues behind Great Britain, Spain, Turkey, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and many others. (Mexico was not mentioned.) Our poorly equipped military seems to offend Officer Ostrain to the limits of his brass-buttoned endurance. He says it's a disgrace that General MacArthur and Major Eisenhower have to stand on Pennsylvania Avenue waiting like common citizens for the Mt. Pleasant trolley car, to get to the Senate chambers.

  The boys say they have seen them and Major Patton also, playing polo on Saturdays at Myer Field. They want to grow up to have ponies like the generals, and sport them around polo fields on Saturdays with Sally Rand riding behind, her breasts bouncing like footballs. That is why they never plot an escape from the academy.

  April 10

  The K Street market is like a piece of Mexico. The fish hawkers sing the same as on the malecon, but in a kind of English: four-bits a mack-rel, la-yay-dies! Old women with teas and herbs promise to cure any ailment. The air smells like home: charred meat, salt fish, horse dung. Going there today was like bursting through the surface of water and finally breathing. After being in a tunnel of dark, for thirteen Su
ndays.

  The outer part of the market has stalls selling leather goods, teakettles, every earthly thing for anyone that still has a nickel to rub against a dime. Inedibles are sold on the outside of the market, comestibles in the interior. The knife grinders with big naked arms stand at the entrance to the butchers' avenue. Oystermen in white aprons wheel full carts up from the wharves. The cilindro man has one missing ear, and a monkey in a blue cap to dance to his organ music. Women sell figs and roses, eggs and sausages, chickens and cheese, racks of dressed rabbits, even live birds in cages like the market in Coyoacan. One woman sells conejillos de Indias. Bull's Eye says they are not called Indian rabbits here, but Guinean pigs. He has no good explanation for it, and agrees they are probably more rabbit than pig.

  This morning he told the head cook he needed an assistant for his errands at the market. Have a heart, Bull's Eye told her, you're asking for more than one poor sod can carry. His first destination is the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, which he calls the A and P, and which sells more than tea. The week's supply of rice, beef, flour, coffee, and fifty more things for the Potomac Academy go into crates from there onto a horse-truck every Saturday. The week's changes to the list have to be brought in person, the shop men want a boy to help with the boxing up. Other things are purchased from the rest of the market. The boy for the errand is Bull's Eye, and now his assistant Pancho Villa.

  It took hours to get to the A and P. With so many swell things to look at on the way, dogs to be fed, friends to cuff on the shoulder. Blue-black workmen to be stared at as they pick open a trench as long as Pennsylvania Avenue. Where do they come from?

  "Africa acourse," was Bull's Eye's reply.

  "From Africa, all that way, just for the job of digging ditches?"

  "No, you lob. They were slaves first. Before they all got put free by Abe Lincoln. Didn't you ever hear of the slaves?"

  "Maybe. But not like these. Mexico didn't have them."

  A lob is a pendejo. But Bull's Eye will answer questions that can't be asked of other boys. Those dark men and their wives can't shop here or ride the trolleys, he said, it's against the law. Even to get lunch in a restaurant. If one of them needs to make water whilst digging the ditch on Pennsylvania Avenue, or get a drink, he has to walk two miles out Seventh Street to find a restaurant that will let him touch a glass or use the lav.