The Lacuna (21 page)

The road to Regla passes near the great pyramids of Teotihuacán. Then through little mountain towns, steep streets filled with taverns, donkeys and dust, and pink colonial mansions from an earlier time, before it was shameful in Mexico to be rich. Now the mansions are all apartments, displaying laundry from their balconies.

Lev’s place at San Miguel Regla is a small apartment at the back of a large hacienda. It seems safe enough, a high wall and Lorenzo posted at the window, in a desert outpost visited mostly by vultures. The Landeros are rarely in residence, the family and servants in any case asked not to approach the rear of the house. With no women around, the rooms shared by Van, Lev, and Lorenzo look like drawers in a giant cabinet, the beds swimming among notebooks, pistols, shoes, and inkwells. If Lev stays much longer, he may drown in his river of paper.

Lev finds the desert air invigorating and takes long walks each morning on the empty roads. He has fallen in love with cactus, finding a hundred varieties populating the dry ravines. To Van’s dismay he digs them up, wraps them in burlap coats, and carries them home on his shoulder. Somehow, he plans to make a garden of these bizarre, prickled creatures. Van seems prickled also. Maybe missing life at the Golden Earring.

The return trip was even slower due to César’s somnambulant driving and the anticipation of Natalya’s poor eager face, the small bulldog sniffing for her absent master. She’ll have to be told; Lev indicated no plans for returning soon. He doesn’t mean to neglect her; it’s only his pure fascination with life as it is, however it is. For any homeless wanderer he is a miracle of instruction: now that he is exiled from every place on earth except a desert wilderness, he declares a passion for cactus.

Here, very little is to be done. Cooking for unemployed bodyguards and Natalya, who hardly eats. She has survived six weeks now on lemon-juice tonics and Phanodorm. Every afternoon at two o’clock she parks her black shoes like two tiny automobiles beside her bed and lies down, fully dressed, to survive the remainder of the day.

One of the messages carried to Lev concerned a visit from Joseph Hansen, a comrade from the Trotskyist Party of the United States. Natalya sees hope in it: Lev’s true appetite, she says, is for his work. The arrival of Hansen will bring him back.

8 September

Lev returns, as predicted, and with him the flood tides of paper. Idle days gone. Van works all day transcribing the wax cylinders, while Lev generates more. The typing is endless, interrupted only by the security drills.

Our menage is stirred like a soup: Diego wants Mr. Hansen and his wife Reba to have one of the connecting rooms. So all the guards will now share one tiny room, unless one would share a bed with old Perpetua, who snores like a boar pig. The house girls made a pallet under the fig in the courtyard so they can get some peace.

Members of the staff feel more than ever like inmates, because of the crowding and extreme security measures. The threats are real—this is understood, but not easy. Belén and Carmen Alba can’t visit their mothers. The door is rarely opened; even a trip to the market has to coincide with the change of guards, so as to interfere less with Lev’s work schedule. Van has ceased his nocturnal visits to the tavern. The bodyguards sleep with pistols in their belts, the possibility of death waiting behind every knock. The heat of summer has abated, and nothing is as it was.

12 September

Arrival of Joseph Hansen and his wife Reba. Lev and Joe are so happy to meet, they stayed up all the night talking. Reba helped make up extra beds, stuffed mattresses on the floor of a tiny room where now five men will sleep when not on duty. Reba apologized terribly and offered to share Perpetua’s bed. Diego didn’t forewarn her about the number of people already living here, probably because he neglected to notice it himself. She nearly wept. “And tomorrow you’ll have to
feed us all. You must be tired of salvaging these men who are saving the world.”

Hansen means to write a biography of Lev. In that case, this recording of events may no longer be necessary. Mr. Hansen understands politics far more perfectly, and can record conversations objectively, not laced with an ignorant cook’s prejudices for sweet and salt. History can fall into more capable hands.

In any case, a record maintained to another person’s standard is no real comfort to the spirit. Let it here be said, the writer understands this assignment was intended as a kindness, for which he is grateful. But the task has no freedom in it. A record meant for another’s eyes is not recording, but spying.

September 16

Frida.

Carmen Frida Kahlo de Rivera, to be precise. And Van.

Were discovered sleeping on the pallet under the fig tree, where the house girls usually sleep but were tonight sent home to their families for the national holidays.

Recorded here for history: the couple lay with limbs entwined, his great white arm sheltering her small, curved body. Her black hair surrounded both of them, rooting them to the bed as if they were growing there, a single plant. They seemed consoled by sleep, unaware of an observer who had consumed some beer, earlier in the evening during the Independence fiesta, and hoped to deposit a secret piss in the geranium bed. The pair did not know they had been discovered. Apparently they still do not. The observation is here reported. Some madness of penned dogs infects this camp.

November 7

The Dewey Commission formally acquitted Lev of every accusation from the Moscow Trials. After months of deliberation they have re
leased their written verdict to every nation. Of course Stalin still wants him murdered, more than ever. And the American and European newspapers that made him guilty in the first place have barely reported the Dewey Commission. Diego says the gringos are watching Hitler with a nervous eye, especially now with the Anschluss and the Rome-Berlin axis. He says Britain and the United States will want Russia on their side, if there is a war. So they can’t let Trotsky be right about Stalin being a monster. They are going to need that monster.

Still a cloud has lifted, in time to celebrate Lev’s birthday and the October Revolution. The Riveras made the largest-ever fiesta, hired marimbas, the patio and house filled entirely. The security men nearly exploded from nerves. The guests are not artistic Communists any more but peasants, white-trousered men in huaraches, unionists who support Lev. The women entered shyly with their heads down, braids nearly sweeping the courtyard stones. A few brought live chickens as gifts, their feet tied nicely with henequen ribbon. But the cooking for this fiesta started a week ago.

Señora Frida was especially extravagant in a gold Tehuana blouse, green skirt, and blue shawl. She arrived with a large parcel wrapped up in paper: a portrait of herself, a birthday gift for Lev. Somehow it did not get presented, in the middle of so much celebration. People were already sleeping on chairs and window ledges, and it was halfway to morning when she came in the kitchen demanding, “For the love of Petrograd, can anybody tell me why we celebrate the October Revolution on the seventh goddamned day of November?”

“Belén asked Van the same question. Apparently it took more than a month for the Russian proletariat to overthrow seven centuries’ worth of oppression.”

“Well, according to Diego you should go to bed now. He says it’s inappropriate to have the servants spend more than one day making so much food to honor the ten million starving peasants.”

“Don’t worry, all the other oppressed cooks have already gone to
bed. I was just cleaning the chocolate pots. And I’m sorry to report it, but the cooking for today started a week ago. What does Diego expect? For you to do that kind of work yourself?”

She sank delicately into one of the wooden chairs at the yellow table, perched like a canary. “Oh, Sóli. You know that frog and me. We can fight about any stupid thing.”

“Not to mention the things he doesn’t know about.”

You looked up then with a child’s dread, clutching your shawl as if it might protect you from bullets or ghosts. How interesting, to discover the power to frighten you.
When mankind is exhausted, he creates new enemies
, Lev says. The qualities of cruelty are spontaneous.
Our best task is to move forward
.

“Frida, forget it. Nobody will tell Diego about you and Van. It only went in the book so you would know you’ve been seen. You can tear out that page. But as the wife of a man who keeps a Luger next to his dentifrice? You could be more careful.”

“I thought you would be furious. Because of Van.”

“Fury demands a fire. For Van and me, no hope of a fire. As you pointed out that day on our boat outing. Had you already been with both of them, back then?”

“You make me sound like an animal. ‘A madness of penned dogs,’ that’s cruel.”

“It wasn’t you who surprised me, only Van. And Lev too, they seem such moral fellows. Forgive me for putting it that way.”

For once your eyes stayed steady, trained on the question, not looking for the door. “What do you know about love?”

“Nothing, apparently. That it winks on and off like an electric bulb.”

You seemed to be excavating your soul to locate some kindness. “People want to be consoled. You’re so young. You still have a lot of time for being moral.”

“You’re only a few years older. As you’ve said.”

“But old anyway, with all my patched-up parts. I’m as doomed as all these men, for lesser reasons of course.”

The pots were all shining now. Nothing more to do.

“Sóli, there’s an ache in this house. Tomorrow anybody could get a bullet in the head. Men like Diego and Lev have to make their vows of sacrifice. ‘Better to live on your fucking feet than die on your knees,’ and all that. But under all that fatalism, they want life.”

“Who doesn’t want life?”

“But they do, more than most. They want it so badly they shake the world until its teeth fall out. It’s why they’re the men they are.”

“And Frida can help them to be alive. When she feels like it.”

“It was only that one night, with Van. I think he had a lot to drink. But you can never tell with the big, quiet ones. He’s dying of loneliness.”

“Who is, Van?”

“Yes. Did you know he had a wife?”

“Van is married?”

“He was. To a girl in France. They were very young when they met, I gather, both working for the Party. They had a little boy. The wife’s name is Gabrielle. She wanted to come here but Natalya wouldn’t have it—apparently they had quite a row. You know how protective Natalya is, she thinks of Van as her son.”

“It’s understandable. After all they’ve been through. Her losses.”

“You’re right. Forget about Diego, I think Natalya would kill me if she found out about Van and me.”

A wife. Van had a wife named Gabrielle. He has a son. This is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.

This is the last report. November 7, 1937.

25 April 1938

Mother is gone. Dear God in whom she never could believe, please let her not be alone in some drear heaven without men or music. Salomé, motherless mother, never more than a child herself. Dead, with her heart in the wrong place.

In the beginning were the howlers, mother and son joined in terror of the devils stalking from above. No matter how many times men told her, “It’s nothing. It’s a practical matter.”
Write down the story of what happened to us
, she said.
Promise me. So when nothing is left but bones and scraps of clothes, someone will know where we went
. She said to begin this way: They are crying for our blood. But how can the story end so soon, and so bitterly? Salomé in a shattered sedan with her heart dislocated one last time. Nothing left but bones and scraps of clothes. Who can say where she went?

The new beau was a foreign-news correspondent. They were dashing to the airfield to catch a glimpse of a daredevil pilot said to be landing there for just a few hours. A stunt flyer, planning later this year to circle the world. These men with their great plans. The correspondent is an Englishman, Lewis. Probably he promised Mother the chance to meet famous people at the airfield. Instead they met head-on with a truck coming from Puebla, carrying cattle to market. Some cattle escaped. Lewis suffered a broken collarbone and lacerations from flying windshield glass. But it was on Mother’s lap that the engine of his Studebaker came to rest, causing what the doctor called a spontaneous pneumothorax. It means that a hole ripped in one lung
suddenly let out all the air, pulling the heart into the right half of her chest. Tearing it thus from the position it held for forty-two years, without ever settling in completely. Maybe for those last few shivering beats it was at rights. Maybe her heart stopped yearning to be somewhere else.

Lewis told what he remembered of it, offering condolences from a bed in the English hospital. His head was bandaged like a mummy from the films. “You’re the son,” the mummy observed. “She said you were planning on university, to be a solicitor.” He had only known her a short while. Didn’t feel entitled, really, to say anything at a funeral. Diego, with usual generosity, paid for the casket and a special mass despite his atheism. And despite Mother’s. The mistake passed unnoticed among the few friends gathered, none of whom had known her in life. Just the one son, bearing up the weight of his own bones and damp unmanly grief. What a raging, salted wound, that sad little passage, what arrogance the world holds against women like Salomé. So many salons she has entered on the arm of a beau, always ready to charm the necessary bureaucrats of this world. Yet in the end, not one proved willing to escort her out of it.

How could a life of such large hopes be so small in the end? Her last apartment: one room above a lace-and-girdle shop. One trunk of frocks and phonograph records, donated to a coworker. Every
casa chica
was smaller than the one before. Were the beaux less generous over time? Her assets less marketable? If she had lived to be old, would she have resided in a teacup, to be sipped at intervals beneath some gray moustache?

At least she made the papers, departing as she did. A small note in the big News Extra about a daredevil flyer called Howard Hughes: “Among the press mobs, a foreign correspondent was injured and female acquaintance killed in a collision while speeding to the site on the Viaducto Alemán.” Her mark on history: the female acquaintance.

26 April

Lev couldn’t attend the mass of course, for safety, but continues to say he was sorry for that. His whole body winced the morning of the news. He and Natalya are raw at every edge since Lyova’s murder in February. In a Paris hospital, where in heaven’s name any person should be safe. They have no children left now, only the grandchild Seva from the eldest daughter. Lev’s supporters are falling to a pogrom, everyone in the Vorkuta labor camp executed on the same day. And yet the United States claims Stalin as an ally,
still
. They have offered to help extradite Lev, for the purpose of execution.

Ever since Cárdenas expropriated the American oil, the news promises sanctions will come, and maybe war. Francia Street last week filled up with students shouting: “Let the gringos come. We already turned back Napoleon!”

Natalya takes Phanodorm morning and night, and cups of tea one after another: drowning her sorrows, as Frida would say, until the damn things learn to swim. But maybe some sorrows can’t be borne. When Lev pauses in his work to stare out the window, his eyes are as cold as his children’s bodies. The clear, bright future he once saw so plainly must now be charcoal lines, drawn down to a vanishing point.

Last night he came out to the courtyard to smoke a pipe and talk, just memories, not necessarily ordered. He told about a dinner he had with Stalin many years ago, when no one yet saw the man as anything more than an ambitious, irritating young bureaucrat. They were sharing a bottle of wine with Kamenev and Dzerzhinsky, talking nonsense as young men do, and the question came up: What did each like best in life?

Lev said the question exhilarated Stalin. “He leaned forward on the table gripping his knife like a pistol, leveling it at each one of us, and said: ‘To choose your victim, to prepare everything, to revenge yourself pitilessly. And then to go to sleep.’”

11 August

Teotihuacán is the place where gods live. Xipe Totec, who rules over lust and birth. Round-eyed Tlaloc who brings the rain. Even in the times of the Azteca this mysterious city of pyramids was already ancient, lying in ruins northwest of the lake when Cortés arrived. The priests showed him the gigantic temples and told him it was where the gods had lived while creating the world. It was only logical, to assume they had needed a central office.

The Avenue of the Dead runs down the center of the ancient city, with the Pyramid of the Moon standing mighty against the sky, and the Pyramid of the Sun opposite, even taller. Temples flank the central avenue all the way down its length, some with great carved snakes undulating across their facades. Coral bean trees sprout from between the huge pavement stones, reaching for the sky with their blood-red fingers of blossom. Really, no one knows who lived and died in Teotihuacán, to what end. Walking wide-eyed and human among the great temples, though, it was easy to imagine blood and flesh, hearts ripped out to appease a terrible destiny.

Going there with Frida made it seem an especially likely setting for human sacrifice: her usual custom for picnics. Strangely, it was the opposite. A day for the history books. She showed up at the Blue House after breakfast, leaning her head into the kitchen doorway and motioning to come outside quickly, as if hiding something.

“You have to come with me to Teotihuacán,” she announced. “Right now. For the day.” She looked ready for any possibility, dressed in a gabardine overall rolled to the knees, and the usual full-body armor of jewelry.

“I have a lot of work to do, Frida.”

“Sóli, this is important. You call yourself a Mexican, and you’ve never seen the pyramids of Teotihuacán.”

“I haven’t had affairs with all Mexico’s elite, either. Poor citizenship, I suppose.”

“Look, you and I have things to talk about.”

“We do. And it seems we won’t.”

“I have the Roadster out on Allende Street. It’s just you and me—I’m driving, not César. Are you going to be a big prick about this?”

“Sorry, Frida. I have a very large snapper in here, and he’s a good joe but he refuses to shed his scales and bathe himself in tomatoes and capers without supervision. There’s a dinner tonight. Twelve people coming to hear Diego and Lev and Mr. Breton present their paper. In case you’ve forgotten.”

“They can use their big paper to collect bird defecations for all I care. And Perpetua can cook that snapper—you’re not as important here as you think.”

“Are you firing me?”

“If that’s what it takes to get some goddamn company for the day. Okay. I’m going to smoke while you make up your mind.”

She leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette, in plain sight of the men if they bothered to look out the window of Lev’s study. Lev is adamantly old-fashioned about a few things. One of them: women shouldn’t smoke. Another: he doesn’t like women in trousers. Frida was diving from the steeple today.

“So. Here’s the story.” She slid her eyes toward the office window, exhaling a long plume. “Do you remember Gamio? He’s that friend of Diego’s, the Professor of Ancient Shit who excavated the pyramids. According to himself, he’s discovered something astonishing.”

“What a mood you’re in. A person would be crazy to get in a car with you.”

“Fine, stay here with Diego and the Old Man and Monsieur Lion-Maned Poet so full of himself he makes me want to piss in his wineglass. I’m certain you will be dazzled by their Manifesto on Revolutionary Art for the
pindonga Partisan Review
.”

“Well, I already know what it says. I typed it.”

“And?” Suddenly she was interested. Maybe she hadn’t been allowed to read it. But flying on a trapeze between Diego and Frida could end in a smashup. It would pay to be cautious.

“Mostly it condemns the restrictions Stalin imposed on artists in the revolutionary state. No surprise there. I thought Diego discussed everything with you.”

“Mrs. Breton, Mrs. Trotsky, and Mrs. Rivera are not a part of this historic conversation. Ever since that bedbug poet showed up here, it’s a boy’s club.”

“You’re not exaggerating about that. It’s noticeable.”

She pursed her lips. “At least Jacqueline likes to smoke and gossip. Otherwise we would have died of boredom up at Lake Pátzcuaro. While our husbands spent every damn minute working on their
chingado
paper.”

“You could have written it yourself, Frida, it’s no big manifesto. ‘The artistic imagination requires freedom from coercion. Artists have an inalienable right to choose their own subjects.’ That kind of thing.”

She whistled. “What genius. Fulang Chang could have written that.”

“There’s also a bit about surrealism. How Mexico is destined to become the true place of surrealist-revolutionary art, because of its flora and dynamism and all that. The mix of races. So what’s the astonishing discovery from the professor?”

“Okay, listen. He said they were putting back a wall of a temple that fell down or something. And accidentally uncovered a mass grave. This is
old
, Sóli. Diego adores all that ancient crap, Gamio knows it, so he invited us to come up and have a look before they have to move the bones and everything. But Diego has this meeting. So I’m going, as soon as this cigarette is finished. You have twenty more seconds to decide.”

It was a lively trip in the Roadster. Frida had more than her ordinary jittery energy, tugging at her necklaces and offering a steady stream of half-invented history lessons mixed with urgent personal advice. “Sóli,” she declared suddenly, “I have to teach you to drive this car. César isn’t going to live forever. You know, I’ve been think
ing maybe he died already. He’s been looking mummified all this year.”

The car was headed northwest at a fairly breakneck pace. The city’s outskirts trailed out into villages like the ones on the southern edge, tucked between lime orchards and stony stretches of desert. Hens picked through the roadside litter, and here and there a rooster stood in the center of the road with the authority of the police. Mangoes spread their leaves like umbrellas. The car shuddered when Frida abruptly veered to avoid a boy chasing an emaciated cow in the road. Mother’s death loomed large, an apparition.

“I’m serious,” Frida said, after relocating the road with the majority of the Roadster’s tires. “You have to learn to drive. I’m commanding you, as your boss.”

“Promoted! From secretarial assistant of the world’s leading political theorist, to Señora Rivera’s driver.”

“I’m trying to do you a favor. You could have more freedom.”

“A knowledge of driving, with no hope of ever owning a car. An interesting formulation of freedom. Maybe you should present a paper.”

“When did you become such a big
sangrón
? You used to be nice.”

She kept her mouth closed for several kilometers, which improved her driving. Running through the speeds in the Roadster with the gear-shifter on the floor looked simple, compared to the Model T with its hand-grip levers for running the accelerator and clutch. Even so, Frida grinds the gears like a butcher. The Chevrolet even has a gauge showing the gasoline level, so you don’t have to guess when it’s running out. Sometimes César forgets and lets the Model T run so low he has to back it up a hill, to drain out the last of the fuel from the tank under the seat. That would be Frida’s style as well.

Eventually she pulled over in a village, asked directions, and came back determined to get in on the passenger’s side. The driving lesson that followed was successful, until too successful.

“You can’t go this fast,” she admonished, though we moved at a
fraction of her former speed. “You have to move the shifting thing across to the other side first.”

“We’re in the highest gear.”

“Well, you must not be doing it right. It’s supposed to make a sound when you put it into high.”

“Not if you double-punch the clutch. Watch this, you stop the shifter in neutral, that’s the cross-part of the H, and let the clutch all the way out, then put it back in again to match the gear speed.”

“Bastard. How did you know that?”

“I’ve spent a thousand hours in the car with César, trying to keep him from wandering off the end of the earth. I learned the gears. What else was there to do? Listen for the one-millionth time to the story of Pancho Villa in Sanborn’s?”

Frida laughed. “Poor old Cesár. Drinking a citrate of magnesia in the presence of Pancho Villa. And that’s the best war story he’ll ever have.”

“At least with his slow-motion driving you can see how everything works. He treats the transmission like a woman. He’d rather cut off his fingers than grind the gears the way you do, Frida.”