The Lacuna (14 page)

Señora gawked as if a fish had arrived in her home, wearing an apron. “Insólito. It’s just as I said. You’re the oddest egg. A boy who makes
rosca
.”

“Odd egg, go upstairs and get me a bowl,” commanded Olunda, rolling her eyes. She had argued against making a
rosca
in the first place. (Too much trouble. Not enough space.) Then she insisted there was no Pilzintecutli to hide in the cake. When Candelaria retrieved the porcelain figure from a storage chest, Olunda stomped out. Now the Christ Child himself was contradicting her.

It’s a new year in a house turned upside down. The mistress hangs bright, fluttery paper banderas over the Bauhaus windows, making the house embarrassed, like a plain girl in too much makeup. On the heads of her husband’s Azteca idols she puts red carnations, turning them into altars, and she sets the table the way a priest prepares the tabernacle: white lace tablecloth from Aguascalientes reverently unfolded from the cupboard, blue or yellow plates set out, each one blessed by her fingertips, then the Kahlo grandmother’s silverware. Finally, the flowers and fruit piled in the center of the table like a sculpture: pomegranates, bananas,
pitahaya
, everything chosen for color and shape. She was finishing the arrangement this morning when the monkey scuttered in and snatched out the bananas. The mistress bellowed, tiny as she is, and chased him out into the courtyard with a mimosa branch she was using in the centerpiece:
“Wicked child!”

The diagnosis of Olunda is that this hairy child is the best the señora can hope for. Only twice pregnant in six years of marriage and both times the baby bled out, one at a gringo hospital, the other one here. They say it’s because of a trolley accident years ago that ruined her woman parts and is “too horrible to discuss,” though Olunda and Candelaria still manage to do so. By their accounting, in the last two years she’s had two miscarriages, four surgeries, thirty doctor visits, and a giant fit over her husband’s affair: she broke a lot of the
talavera
crockery before she moved out. It took her all of last year to forgive him. “And that was only the affair with her sister Cristina, we’re not even counting women outside the family. Listen, how do you make the dough shiny like that?”

“You brush it with softened butter and then the white of one egg.”

“Mmph.” Olunda folded her arms across the mountain range of her bosom.

“Where did the señora live? Before she moved back in here?”

“An apartment on Insurgentes. Candelaria had to go clean it
sometimes. Give me those dried figs,
mi’ija
. Tell him about the mess, Candi, it was even harder to clean up over there than here.”

“It was because of the paintings,” Candelaria explained.

“He painted, in her apartment?”

“No, she did.”

“The Mistress Rivera is also a painter?”

“If you can call it that.” Olunda was shredding chicken breasts for the chalupas, grunting as she worked, settling an old grudge with those hens.

Candelaria said once she went to the señora’s apartment and found a sheet of metal covered with blood. “I thought she had cut herself while setting it up on the easel, or else murdered someone. Probably her husband, considering. But then the mistress sat down with her red pigments, whistling, and happily applied more blood on the picture.”

“Enough gossip,” said Olunda, who was clearly jealous not to have seen this sight herself. “Candi, you have to peel every tomato in that bucket, and you, Odd Egg, I want to see you chopping onions until tears come out of your ass.”

2 February

Eight kinds of tamales for the feast of Candlemas. Even César was ordered to help. He threatened all day to quit, as he is “a chauffeur, not a peon for women’s work.” He’s been angry since October because of having to share his room with an Odd Egg, and now he even has to put on an apron, the world may end soon. The Painter says he’s sorry, but that’s how it is, Frida rules the house. “And besides, old comrade, you’re getting too old for driving, so you better get used to peonage.” It’s true, yesterday César got lost four times on the way to the pharmacist’s. The mistress calls him General Wrong Turn.

Even more than aprons he despises this notebook. He calls it “the espionage.” He is adamant, shutting off the lights on pen and paper. But most nights, by the time every dish in the house has been
scraped, cleaned, and put away, he’s already snoring like a whale. The spy may do his work here unless the whale is roused from stupor. It is like being in a
casa chica
again with Mother,
Put out the damn candle before you burn us all
.

19 February

Candelaria doesn’t remember that day when she carried the parrot cage on her back through the Melchor market. She says she must have just come from the village then, the Painter and Mistress hired her when they were newlyweds, living at the Allende Street house with the señora’s parents. Candelaria doesn’t remember the parrots, or why they were purchased, or how long the couple lived in that place with the fantastic courtyard, before building this house. She couldn’t say if she liked it better there. She seems to forget almost everything. The secret to surviving the storms of Rivera service.

2 March

The señora is making a painting in the little studio next to her bedroom. It’s not such a mess, she uses a cloth under her chair. At the end of the day, it looks like it rained blue, red, and yellow. She cleans her own brushes and knives, a hundred times tidier than the Painter, who throws everything on the floor and stomps out in his cowboy boots. But Candelaria and Olunda refuse to carry her lunch upstairs, saying her temper is even worse when she’s painting. She never says
gracias
because life is made of survival not grace, she says, and servants are paid to bring what they’re asked. Today she demanded stuffed chiles, more blue pigment, and surprisingly, advice.

“The painting looks good so far, señora.” When people ask for advice, this is what they want. “Good progress too. We’ll see that finished by the end of the month.”

“We will?” She gave a fierce, quick smile like a cat showing itself to another cat. “As the fly said, sitting on the back of the ox, ‘We are plowing this field!’”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay, Insólito. If anybody says it’s ugly, I’ll tell them ‘we’ painted it.”

The painting has people floating in the air, connected by ribbons. She asked, “Do you like art? I mean, do you understand it?”

“Not really. Words, though. Those are nice. Poems and things like that.”

“What did you study in school?”

“Awful things, señora. Drill and psychomotricity. It was a military school.”

“
Dios mio
, you poor skinny dog. But they didn’t succeed in enslaving you, did they? I notice sometimes you still piss on the shoes of the master.”

“Excuse me, señora?”

“I’ve seen you reading the newspaper to the girls down in the dining room. Changing the headlines to make them laugh. Your little insurrections.” She still faced the painting, speaking without turning around. Was this going to be a dismissal?

“It’s just to pass the time, señora. We still do our work.”

“Don’t worry, I’m a revolutionist. I approve of insurrections. Where did they send you to school, Chicago or something? One of those freezing places?”

“Washington, D.C.”

“Ah. Throne of the kingdom of Gringolandia.”

“More or less. The cornfields outside the throne of the kingdom. The school was in the middle of farms and polo fields.”

“Polo? That’s some kind of crop?”

“A game. Rich people play baseball riding ponies.”

She put down her paintbrush and turned around. “Isn’t it crazy? Rich people in the United States don’t even know how to use money properly.” She peeked at her lunch plates now, inspecting the
rellenos
. “They don’t mind throwing big parties while people stand outside in the street with nothing. But then they serve puny little foods at the
party! And live in houses stacked on top of one another like chicken crates. The women look like turnips. When they dress up, they look like turnips in dresses.”

“You’re right, señora. Mexico is the better place.”

“Oh, Mexico’s going to the devil too. The gringos steal a little more of it every week, replacing the beauty of our campos and our Indios with the latest fashion in ugliness. Probably they’ll turn our maguey into fields for pony-
beisbol
. It can’t be helped, I suppose. The big fish always eats the little one.”

“Yes, señora.”

“Little dog, don’t give me this ‘
si señora
.’ I’m sick of that.”

“Sorry. But it’s right, what you said. My mother is Mexican, but all she’s ever wanted to do is dress like an American lady and marry American men.”

The eyebrow went up. “A
lot
of them?”

“Well, one at a time. And really she only succeeded once, with my father. The other slippery fish all got away.”

She laughed, shaking her head full of ribbons like a flag in the wind. She would never be converted to a turnip. “Insólito, you should come out and piss more often.”

“Olunda keeps my rope tied very short, señora.”

“You have to stop calling me señora. How old are you?”

“Twenty this summer.”

“Look, I’m practically the same as you, twenty-five. It’s Frida, only. César calls me that so you can too, it’s not a crime against the state.”

“César is like your grandfather.”

She tilted her head. “You’re not afraid of me, are you? Just shy, right?”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t have a lot of heat in your blood, is the problem. You’re not completely Mexican, and not all gringo either. You’re like this house, Insólito. A double person made of two different boxes.”

“That might be true, señora, Frida.”

“In the house of your mother, a taste for beauty and poetry. Secret passions, I suspect. And in the gringo side, a head that’s always thinking and surviving.”

“True, maybe. Except my house is only a kitchen, it seems. And very small indeed.”

“The kitchen of your house is ruled by Mexico, thank God.”

4 March

Our Lord Jesus has not yet risen. How do we know this? Olunda grumbles about another day of Lenten meals. But they can be some of the best: lima bean soup, potatoes in green sauce, fried beans. At supper this evening the Painter hinted he needs more boys on the plaster crew, and the mistress scolded him: “
Sapo-rana!
The way you eat, you should know we need your plaster boy here.” Toad-frog, she calls him, then gets up, walks over to him, and kisses his toad-frog face. They are the strangest couple. And why do these Communists observe Lent, in any case?

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 señora 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.

“Señor 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. Moisés Sáenz, 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, Señora 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 Cortés into the vanishing point of their future.