The Lacuna

A Note on Historical References

Part 1

Mexico, 1929–1931

Part 2

Washington, D.C.

Part 3

San Angel and Coyoacán

Part 4

Asheville, North Carolina

Part 5

Asheville, North Carolina

Loose Pages, Montford

Afterward, 1959

by Violet Brown

About the Author

Other Books by Barbara Kingsolver

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

All articles and excerpts from the
New York Times
used in this text appear as originally published, reprinted with permission.

The following article excerpts are also used with permission.

All other newspaper articles in the novel are fictional. Historical persons are portrayed and quoted from the historical record, but their conversations with the character Harrison Shepherd are entirely invented. This is a work of fiction.

The author gratefully acknowledges the usefulness of Alain Dugrand,
Trotsky in Mexico, 1937–1940
(Manchester, England: Carcanet, 1992); Leon Trotsky,
My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography
(New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970);
The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005); Malka Drucker,
Frida Kahlo: Torment and Triumph
(Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1995); Hayden Herrera,
Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo
(New York: Harper & Row, 1983); Walter Bernstein,
Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist
(Da Capo, 2000); William Manchester,
The Glory and the Dream
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1973); Martha Norburn Mead,
Asheville: In Land of the Sky
(Richmond, Va.: Dietz Press, 1942); and Hernando Cortés,
Five Letters of Cortés to the Emperor
, trans. J. Bayard Morris (New York: Norton, 1969), as well as the estates of Lev Trotsky, Dolores Olmedo, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera for opening these persons’ homes and archives.
Gracias
to the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) for its meticulous care of Mexico’s historical treasures (notably the Rivera murals) and enduring dedication to public access. Finally, special thanks to Maria Cristina Fontes, Judy Carmichael, Terry Karten, Montserrat Fontes, Sam Stoloff, Ellen Geiger, Frances Goldin, Matt McGowan, Sonya Norman, Jim Malusa, Fenton Johnson, Steven Hopp, Lily Kingsolver, and Camille Kingsolver.

(
VB
)

In the beginning were the howlers. They always commenced their bellowing in the first hour of dawn, just as the hem of the sky began to whiten. It would start with just one: his forced, rhythmic groaning, like a saw blade. That aroused others near him, nudging them to bawl along with his monstrous tune. Soon the maroon-throated howls would echo back from other trees, farther down the beach, until the whole jungle filled with roaring trees. As it was in the beginning, so it is every morning of the world.

The boy and his mother believed it was saucer-eyed devils screaming in those trees, fighting over the territorial right to consume human flesh. The first year after moving to Mexico to stay at Enrique’s house, they woke up terrified at every day’s dawn to the howling. Sometimes she ran down the tiled hallway to her son’s bedroom, appearing in the doorway with her hair loose, her feet like iced fish in the bed, pulling the crocheted bedspread tight as a web around the two of them, listening.

It should have been like a storybook here. That is what she’d promised him, back in the cold little bedroom in Virginia North America: if they ran away to Mexico with Enrique she could be the bride of a wealthy man and her son would be the young squire, in a hacienda surrounded by pineapple fields. The island would be encircled with a shiny band of sea like a wedding ring, and somewhere on the mainland was its gem, the oil fields where Enrique made his fortune.

But the storybook was
The Prisoner of Zenda
. He was not a young
squire, and his mother after many months was still no bride. Enrique was their captor, surveying their terror with a cool eye while eating his breakfast. “That howling is the
aullaros
,” he would say, as he pulled the white napkin out of its silver ring into his silver-ringed fingers, placing it on his lap and slicing into his breakfast with a fork and knife. “They howl at one another to settle out their territories, before they begin a day of hunting for food.”

Their food might be us
, mother and son agreed, when they huddled together inside the spiderweb of bedspread, listening to a rising tide of toothsome roars. Y
ou had better write all this in your notebook
, she said,
the story of what happened to us in Mexico. So when nothing is left of us but bones, someone will know where we went
. She said to start this way: In the beginning were the
aullaros
, crying for our blood.

Enrique had lived his whole life in that hacienda, ever since his father built it and flogged the
indios
into planting his pineapple fields. He had been raised to understand the usefulness of fear. So it was nearly a year before he told them the truth: the howling is only monkeys. He didn’t even look across the table when he said it, only at the important eggs on his plate. He hid a scornful smile under his moustache, which is not a good hiding place. “Every ignorant Indian in the village knows what they are. You would too, if you went out in the morning instead of hiding in bed like a pair of sloths.”

It was true: the creatures were long-tailed monkeys, eating leaves. How could such a howling come from a thing so honestly ordinary? But it did. The boy crept outdoors early and learned to spot them, high in the veil of branches against white sky. Hunched, woolly bodies balanced on swaying limbs, their tails reaching out to stroke the branches like guitar strings. Sometimes the mother monkeys cradled little babes, born to precarious altitudes, clinging for their lives.

So there weren’t any tree demons. And Enrique was not really a wicked king, he was only a man. He looked like the tiny man on top
of a wedding cake: the same round head with parted, shiny hair, the same small moustache. But the boy’s mother was not the tiny bride, and of course there is no place on that cake for a child.

When Enrique wanted to ridicule him after that, he didn’t even need to mention devils, he only rolled his eyes up at the trees. “The devil here is a boy with too much imagination,” he usually said. That was like a mathematics problem, it gave the boy a headache because he couldn’t work out which was the wrong part of the equation: being a Boy, or being Imaginative. Enrique felt a successful man needed no imagination at all.

Here is another way to begin the story, and this one is also true.

The rule of fishes is the same as the rule of people: if the shark comes, they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten. They share a single jumpy heart that drives them to move all together, running away from danger just before it arrives. Somehow they know.

Underneath the ocean is a world without people. The sea-roof rocks overhead as you drift among the purple trees of the coral forest, surrounded by a heavenly body of light made of shining fishes. The sun comes down through the water like flaming arrows, touching the scaly bodies and setting every fin to flame. A thousand fishes make the school, but they always move together: one great, bright, brittle altogetherness.

It’s a perfect world down there, except for the one of them who can’t breathe water. He holds his nose, dangling from the silver ceiling like a great ugly puppet. Little hairs cover his arms like grass. He is pale, lit up by watery light on prickled boy skin, not the scaled slick silver merman he wants to be. The fish dart all around him and he feels lonely. He knows it is stupid to feel lonely because he isn’t a fish, but he does. And yet he stays there anyway, trapped in the below-life, wishing he could dwell in their city with that bright, liquid life flowing all around him. The glittering school pulls in at one side
and pushes out the other, a crowd of specks moving in and out like one great breathing creature. When a shadow comes along, the mass of fish darts instantly to its own center, imploding into a dense, safe core, and leaving the boy outside.

How can they know to save themselves, and leave him to be eaten? They have their own God, a puppet master who rules their one-fish mind, holding a thread attached to every heart in their crowded world. All the hearts but one.

The boy discovered the world of the fishes after Leandro gave him a diving goggle. Leandro, the cook, took pity on the flutie boy from America who had nothing to do all day but poke around in the cliffs along the beach, pretending to hunt for something. The goggle had glass lenses, and was made with gum rubber and most of the parts of an airman’s goggle. Leandro said his brother used it when he was alive. He showed how to spit in it before putting it on, so it wouldn’t go foggy.

“Andele.
Go on now, get in the water,” he said. “You will be surprised.”

The pale-skinned boy stood shivering in water up to his waist, thinking these were the most awful words in any language:
You will be surprised
. The moment when everything is about to change. When Mother was leaving Father (loudly, glasses crashing against the wall), taking the child to Mexico, and nothing to do but stand in the corridor of the cold little house, waiting to be told. The exchanges were never good: taking a train, a father and then no father. Don Enrique from the consulate in Washington, then Enrique in Mother’s bedroom. Everything changes
now
, while you stand shivering in the corridor waiting to slip through one world into the next.

And now, at the end of everything, this: standing waist-deep in the ocean wearing the diving goggle, with Leandro watching. A pack of village boys had come along too, their dark arms swinging, carrying the long knives they used for collecting oysters. White sand caked the sides of their feet like pale moccasins. They stopped to watch, all the
swinging arms stopped, frozen in place, waiting. There was nothing left for him to do but take a breath and dive into that blue place.

And
oh God
there it was, the promise delivered, a world. Fishes mad with color, striped and dotted, golden bodies, blue heads. Societies of fish, a public, suspended in its watery world, poking pointed noses into coral. They pecked at the pair of hairy tree trunks, his legs, these edifices that were nothing to them but more landscape. The boy got a bit of a stiffy, he was that afraid, and that happy. No more empty-headed bobbing in the sea, after this. No more believing in an ocean with nothing inside but blue water.

He refused to come out of the sea all day, until the colors began to go dark. Luckily his mother and Enrique had enough to drink, sitting on the terrace with the men from America turning the air blue with their cigars, discussing the assassination of Obregón, wondering who would now stop the land reforms before the
indios
took everything. If not for so much mezcal and lime, his mother might have grown bored with the man-talk, and thought to wonder whether her son had drowned.

It was only Leandro who wondered. The next morning when the boy walked out to the kitchen pavilion to watch breakfast cooking, Leandro said, “
Pícaro
, you’ll pay. A man has to pay for every crime.” Leandro had worried all afternoon that the goggle he brought to this house had become an instrument of death. The punishment was waking up with a sun-broilt spot the size of a tortilla, hot as fire. When the criminal pulled up his nightshirt to show the seared skin on his back, Leandro laughed. He was brown as coconuts, and hadn’t thought of sun burn. But for once he didn’t say
usted pagará
, in the formal language of servants to masters. He said
tú pagarás
, you will pay, in the language of friends.

The criminal was unrepentant: “You gave me the goggle, so it’s your fault.” And went back into the sea again for most of that day, and burnt his back as crisp as fat rinds in a kettle. Leandro had to rub lard on it that night, saying “
Pícaro
, rascal boy, why do you do such
stupid things?”
No seas malo
, he said, the familiar “you,” language of friends, or lovers, or adults to children. There is no knowing which.

On Saturday night before Holy Week, Salomé wanted to go into town to hear the music. Her son would have to go too, as she needed an elbow to hang upon while walking around the square. She preferred to call him by his middle name, William or just Will, conditioned as that is on future events: You
will
. Though on her tongue of course it sounded like
wheel
, a thing that serves, but only when in motion. Salomé Huerta was her name. She had run away at a young age to become an American Sally, and then Sally Shepherd for a while, but nothing ever lasted long. American Sally was finished.

This was the year of Salomé pouting, her last one in the hacienda on Isla Pixol, though no one knew it yet. That day she had pouted because Enrique had no intention of walking around with her on the zocalo, just to show off a frock. He had too much work to do. Work meant sitting in his library running both hands through his slick hair, drinking mezcal, and sweating through his collar while working out colonnades of numbers. By this means he learned whether he had money up to his moustache this week, or only up to his bollocks.

Salomé put on the new frock, painted a bow on her mouth, took her son by the arm and walked to town. They smelled the zocalo first: roasted vanilla beans, coconut milk candies, boiled coffee. The square was packed with couples walking entwined, their arms snaking around one another like the vines that strangle tree trunks. The girls wore striped wool skirts, lace blouses, and their narrow-waisted boyfriends. The mood of the fiesta was enclosed in a perfect square: four long lines of electric bulbs strung from posts at the corners, fencing out a bright piece of night just above everyone’s heads.

Lit from below, the hotel and other buildings around the square had eyebrow-shaped shadows above their iron balconies. The little cathedral looked taller than it was, and menacing, like a person who
comes into the bedroom carrying a candle. The musicians stood in the little round belvedere whose pointed roof and wrought-iron railings were all freshly painted white along with everything else, including the giant old fig trees around the square. Their trunks blazed in the darkness, but only up to a certain point, as if a recent flood of whitewash through town had left a high-water mark.

Salomé seemed happy to float with the moving river of people around the square, even though in her elegant lizard-skin shoes and flapper crepe that showed her legs, she looked like no other person there. The crowd parted for her. Probably it pleased her to be the green-eyed Spaniard among the Indians, or rather, the
Criolla
: Mexican-born but pure nonetheless, with no Indian blood mixed in. Her blue-eyed, half-American son was less pleased with his position, a tall weed growing among the broad-faced townspeople. They would have made a good illustration for a book showing the Castes of the Nation, as the schoolbooks did in those days.

“Next year,” Salomé said in English, pinching his elbow with her fierce crab claws of love, “you’ll be here with your own girl. This is the last
Noche Palmas
you’ll want to walk around here with your old wrinkle.” She liked using American slang, especially in crowds. “This is posalutely the berries,” she would announce, putting the two of them inside an invisible room with her words, and closing the door.

“I won’t have a girlfriend.”

“You’ll turn fourteen next year. You’re already taller than President Portes Gil. Why wouldn’t you have a girlfriend?”

“Portes Gil isn’t even a real president. He only got in because Obregón was iced.”

“And maybe you will likewise ascend to power, after some girl’s first
novio
gets the sack. Doesn’t matter how you get the job, ducky. She’ll still be yours.”

“Next year you could have this whole town, if you want it.”

“But you’ll have a girl. This is all I’m saying. You’ll go off and leave me alone.” It was a game she played. Very hard to win.

“Or if you don’t like it here, Mother, you could go somewhere else. Some smart city where people have better entertainments than walking in circles around the
zocalo
.”

“And,” she persisted, “you’d still have the girl.” Not just a girl but
the
girl, already an enemy.