The Lacuna (4 page)

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 Salomé said, “First we’ll have to see if there’s more to the story.”

When the ferry was gone, they ate lunch on the
malecón
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 Salomé 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 Salomé 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. Salomé 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 Salomé 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 Salomé’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 Salomé, 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, Ortíz Rubio, that disaster Vasconcelos. Gringos always made Enrique nervous, and Salomé 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. Salomé 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 Salomé, 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 Salomé, 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.

There 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.

The third diary runs from June 1930 until November 12, 1931. He took more faith with dating the entries after enrolling in school. That one he kept in a hardbound tablet of a type used by schoolchildren of the time, purchased in a Mexico City bookshop.

The rest follow in order, many notebooks in all, an odd lot for shape and size but all one gloss within. No man ever set a greater store in words, his own or others. I have taken pains to do the same. His penmanship was fair to good, and I was no stranger to his hand. I believe these texts to be loyal and stanch to his, apart from some small favors to a boy’s spelling and grammars. And small is the need, for a boy that took his lessons from
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
and so forth. I took some reliable help with translating the Spanish, which he used now and again, probably without full understanding of the difference when young. He spoke both languages as a routine. English with the mother, Spanish with most others until his return to the United States. But sometimes he twixed the two, and I’ve had to guess on some.

The common custom is to place a note such as this at a book’s beginning. Instead, I let his own Chapter One stand to the fore. He plainly meant it to be the start of a book. I stand behind the man, with ample reason in this instance. I had good years to learn the wisdom of it. My small explanations here are meant to introduce the remainder. I have set upon the whole of it certain headings, for organizing purposes. These I marked with my initials. My only hope is to be of use.

—VB

Do not read this. El delito acusa.

2 November, Dead People’s Day

Leandro is at the cemetery to put flowers on his dead people: his mother and father, grandmothers, a baby son that died when it was one minute old, and his brother who died last year. Leandro said it’s wrong to say you don’t have a family. Even if they are dead, you still have them. That isn’t nice to think about, ghost people standing in rows outside the windows, waiting to get acquainted.

Leandro, wife, and dead people are having their party at the graveyard behind the rock beach on the other side. Tamales in banana leaves,
atole
, and
pollo pipian
. Leandro said those are the only foods that could attract his brother away from a lady. He meant Lady of the Dead, who is called Mictec-something—Leandro couldn’t spell it. He can’t read. He didn’t cook the tamales this time. At his house, the wife is Captain of Tortillas, and the
sergentes
are his nieces. When he leaves here, he goes home to a mud thatch house and women who cook for him. Maybe he sits in a chair and complains about us. No one comes to take off his boots. None to take off.

All the maids went off also for
Día de los Muertos
, and Mother had to warm the
caldo
for lunch herself. She complained about Mexican servants running off for every excuse. In Washington, D.C., who ever heard of the kitchen help having to go throw marigolds on a grave? She says the
indios
have so many gods they have an excuse to stilt out of work every day of the year.
These Mexican girls
. But
Mother is one herself. A good thing to remind her, if you want a slap on the kisser.

This morning she said,
I am no mestizo, mister, and don’t you forget it
. Don Enrique is proud of no
indios
mixed up in his blood, Pure Spanish only, so now Mother is proud of that too. But she has nothing to celebrate, because of no Indian gods. Not even the God of Pure Spaniards, she doesn’t like him either. She said
chingado
when she burned her hand after the maids went to their party.
Pinche, malinche
. Mother is a museum of bad words.

Don Enrique brought back the accounts books from a shop in Veracruz so we can keep track of the truth around here. He told Mother,
Desconfía de tu mejor amigo como de tu peor enemigo
. Trust your loved ones as you trust your worst enemy. Write. Everything. Down. He slapped the little books on her dressing table, making her jump and the sleeves of her dressing gown tremble. He calls them Truth Books.

Here is the truth. One booklet was pinched by the household thief. Mother was finished with it anyway. She started, but then Cruz took over the job of writing down which days Mother pays them. Otherwise Mother says she paid but really didn’t, because she was juiced. Don Enrique told Cruz to keep tabs whilst he is away in the Huasteca. He says money runs out of this house like blood from a wound.

7 November

Seventy-two seconds, longest time ever. If Mother could hold her breath that long she could be divorced. But that time does not really count, it is on land only. On a bed
cercado de tierra
, locked by land. Kneeling by the pillow with a pinched nose, holding the watch up to the candle to see the seconds. It’s harder to go that long in the water, because of cold. One way is to breathe a lot first, very fast, then take in one large breath and hold it. Leandro says
in the name of God don’t try that when you’re diving, it’s a good way to faint and drown
.
Leandro used to dive for lobster and sponge for his living, before he was a cooking boy.

That is some slide down the stairs, from a soldier’s life out there diving to a
galopino. Cookie! That’s as dangerous as sucking on a nurse’s tit!
It was a very rude thing to say this morning to Leandro, who isn’t allowed to be angry. He came back from the Day of the Dead with his hair tied in a special way, the horse-tail in back wound with henequen string. Probably his wife did that.

Leandro said his brother who made the diving goggle was drowned last year whilst diving for sponge. He was thirteen,
younger than you and already supporting his mother
. Leandro said that without looking up, hitting the knife hard against the board, chopping onions.

Natividad came in then with the tomatoes and epazote from market, so there was no chance to say
No lo supe
. Usually there is something terrible you don’t know.

Or for Leandro to say,
You don’t know anything
.

From the exciting life of diving, his brother got to be dead.
That is the truth about soldiering, in case you want to know something
, Leandro said.
Cooking won’t kill you
.

This morning low tide was early. The village boys collecting oysters came into the cove and said this beach belonged to them. They screamed
Vete rubio
, go away blond boy, scramble away like a crab over the coral rocks. The path by the lagoon makes a dark tunnel through mangrove trees to the other side of the point. The beach over there is only a thin strip of rocks, and disappears when the tide comes up. This morning the tide was lowest ever. Knobs of the reef cropped out of the water, like heads of sea animals watching. That side is too rocky for boats. No one goes there. No oyster boys to scream at a
rubio
who is not rubio, with hair as Mexican black as Mother’s. When they look, do they see anything at all?

Floating on the sea is like flying: looking down on the city of fishes, watching them do their shopping. Flying away
como el pez
volador
. Like a flying fish. The bottom falls, and in deep water you can soar, slipping away from the crowded coral-head shallows to the quiet dark blue. Shadows of hunters move along the bottom.

At the back of the cove on that side, a rock ledge rises up from the water. You can see that cliff from the ferry. It has long white stripes of guano, banners marking the roost holes where seabirds think they are hiding. At the base of that cliff, something lay under the water that can’t be seen from a boat. A dark something, or really a dark nothing, a great deep hole in the rock. It was a cave, big enough to dive down and crawl into. Or feel around the edges and go a little way inside. It was very deep. A water-path tunneling into the rock, like the path through the mangroves.

An unexpected visit from Mr. Produce the Cash. Mother was in a mood when he left. His fancy shoes must have pinched her also. She started a spat with Don Enrique.

24 November

Today the cave was gone. Saturday last, it was there. Searching the whole rock face below the cliff did not turn it up. Then the tide came higher and waves crashed too hard to keep looking. How could a tunnel open in the rock, then close again? The tide must have been much higher today, and put it too far below the surface to find. Leandro says the tides are complicated and the rocks on that side are dangerous, to stay over here in the shallow reef. He wasn’t pleased to hear about the cave. He already knew about it, it is called something already,
la lacuna
. So, not a true discovery.

Laguna?
The lagoon?

No, lacuna. He said it means a different thing from lagoon. Not a cave exactly but an opening, like a mouth, that swallows things. He opened his mouth to show. It goes into the belly of the world. He says Isla Pixol is full of them. In ancient times God made the rocks melt and flow like water.

It wasn’t God, it was volcanoes. Don Enrique has a book on them.

Leandro said some of the holes are so deep they go to the center of the earth and you’ll see the devil at the bottom. But some only go through the island to the other side.

How can you know which is which?

It doesn’t matter, because either one can drown a boy who thinks he knows more than God because he reads books. Leandro was very angry. He said stay away from that place, or God will show you who made those holes.

25 December

The village wakes up in a hurry, whilst the sun seems to struggle with the job as Mother does. Last night was the party for Christmas Eve. Today she will sleep until noon, then wake up with one hand across her forehead, the frilled elbows of her dressing gown shuddering. Her voice like a Browning machine rifle sending the house girls running for her headache powders. And everyone else out of the house.

On the road walking to the village for Christmas mass, a lot of people passed by, nuggets of family in brown shells. A man leading his pregnant wife on a burro, like Joseph and Mary. Three long-legged girls in dresses straddling one gray mare, their legs hanging down like a giant insect. A peevish rooster that ought to have been in a better mood, because look here my friend: at the roadside butcher stand, all your comrades hang upside-down ready for roasting. Sau
sages also were slung over the line like stockings, and a whole white pig skin just hanging, as if the pig went off and left his overcoat. His wife the sow was alive, tied to a papaya tree in the yard with her piglets rooting all round. They could be free to run away, but don’t, because of their mother chained on the spot.

The little church in the village has no bell, only copal-tree incense floating out the open windows to mix with the fish-rot smell of ocean. Leandro was there with his family, resting one hand on each of his children’s heads, like grapefruits. Later at the fiesta he didn’t ever say
Feliz Navidad
or
Hello friend I come to your house every day
. He only clapped together his small son’s hands for the piñata strung from the fig tree. There were firecrackers for the holy babe snapping blue smoke in the road, and amongst all the nut-brown families, one invisible boy.

1 January 1930: First day of the year and decade
.

Every
cabeza
in the house is full of headache powders. Shattered glasses in twinkling pools on the terraza. No word is heard from the turkey that chased children from the yard all December. He greets the New Year from the kitchen, a carcass of bones attended by his audience of flies.

A fine day to go out looking for a tunnel to another world. Perhaps to meet the devil. Mother called out
Callete malinche dios mio don’t slam the door!
Not even the usual warning about sharks, let them have boy-flesh if they want. Clear sky, empty beach, and the water like a cool pair of hands, begging. Even the reef fishes didn’t speak today.

The lacuna was there again, a dark mouth in the rock. This time the opening was deeper below the surface, but it was still possible to dive down and feel between the lips of rock into a gullet that broadened in darkness. It was the last day of the world then, time to swim inside, thinking of Leandro’s dead brother. Stroking through cold water, counting the pounding heartbeats: thirty, forty, forty-five, one
half of ninety. Waiting that long before turning around, feeling the way back toward the entrance, swimming with aching lungs back to the light.

Sun and air. Breathing. Alive, after all. The hand of the watch returned to the top for one more year of life, stolen back.

5 January

Tomorrow is Feast of the Kings. Only here it will be the Feast of Don Enrique’s Sisters and Mother, who came over on the ferry. Leandro has to cook for them all. Cruz and the others went to their villages for the fiesta, but Mother is determined to have a feast for the guests, with or without servants. She pretends she and Don Enrique are married, and the señora is to be called
abuela
. The so-called grandmother in her chic frock lights a cigarette, crosses her legs, blows smoke out the window.

Mother wants green and red
chalupas
, and scrambled egg
torta
with sugar. Leandro would like to be with his family. He’s put out with Mother for making him stay, so he made fun of the señora. A scandal. But he knows he won’t be caught. The
capitan
and his
sergente
have a conspiracy.