The Lacuna (10 page)

“Nevertheless, sir. Do you need a plaster mixer?”

Now the paper dropped onto the round belly and he looked up, taking off his glasses, his bulging eyes like two boiled eggs in that enormous head. He glared for a moment, then brightened: “Sweet Buns! How I’ve missed you. Those other boys are hopeless.”

The Queen stood staring with such a fierce frown, her dark eyebrows joined in a handshake over the bridge of her nose. But her mouth remained amused as she watched her husband get up to clap this strange boy on the back, hiring him on the spot.

The great mural grows down the staircase day by day, like a root into the ground. Presidents and soldiers and Indians, all coming alive. The sun opens its eyes, a landscape grows like grass, and today fire
came out of the volcano. Señor Alva says the Painter is working his way toward the beginning of time, at the mural’s center, where the eagle will sit on a cactus and eat the serpent, home at last.

Señor Rivera makes charcoal sketches over the wall, and every day begins a new section. He frames the scene with long lines sloping to a point on the distant horizon, the Vanishing Point. Then holds the picture in his head as he works to paint in shadows, then color, finishing a panel as fast as we can mix plaster for the next one. The slake-lime paste burns our hands, white marble dust becomes the air we breathe. Today he scolded the pigmentist because the blue paste was too blue. But the plaster was perfect.

14 October

Ambassador Senator Morrow died in his sleep while his wife was playing golf. All the newspapers are about him, Best friend of Mexico. His daughter’s husband is Charles Lindbergh, so he only has to wave his cap at the crowd and everyone cheers, or mourns. Mother says she had that ambassador pegged from the start: the type to love his wife and die young. She’s sore because P. T. did not produce the cash after all.

26 October
, luna de octubre

Some of the boys at work say the Painter is going away again. Señor Alva says they want to make a big show of his paintings in a museum in New York. But his paintings are on the walls of Mexico. How could they leave here?

12 November

He’s gone. He took Señor Alva with him. In the forgotten white land at the bottom of our wall, the eagle has no cactus, no snake for his lunch, he can’t find home. The story of Mexico waits for its beginning.

1932–1934
(
VB
)

1 January 1932

For a son on the wrong track, Mother has found a different set of rails and packed him off on them.
Lock, stock, and barrel
, she said with a raised glass. Describing a firearm in its entirety.

This train runs north from the city. At the little struggling desert towns, children run alongside, reaching toward the windows. Then come the rocky flatlands where the towns give up altogether. Spiked maguey plants reach out of the ground like hands. A great clawed creature trapped underground. At evening, the light drained and the land went from brown to umber, then dried blood, then ink. In the morning the pigments reversed, the same colors rising out of a broad, flat land that looks like a mural.

This compartment has one other person, an American named Green who got on at Huichapan. Not old, but he stares out the window like an old person, rocking in rhythm with the suitcases over his head and water in a glass in his hand. He sips a little every hour, as if it’s the last water on earth. Overnight some flames appeared in the distance, each standing alone like a candle. Oil wells, burning to remove the gases.

Last night the conductor came through to say we were three hours from the border and it was twelve o’clock; his privilege was to wish us a prosperous New Year. He moved down the car repeating the same news and the same privileged wish.

Happy new year, Mr. Green.

Just before the border were pecan orchards, dark blocks of trees with their boughs half bright and half shadowed, lit by the electric
lights of the shelleries. People working there in the dead of night, New Year’s morning. The train sighed and stopped at the border, waiting for the customs agents to arrive at their offices. The whitening sky showed a thin stretch of river with dogs skulking along its shores, their up-curved tails reflected on the gray surface. The riverbank is a dumping ground: planks and metal, flaps of tarred paper. At daybreak children began walking from the scrap piles, not a dumping ground after all but a terrible kind of city. Women came out of the shacks too, and last the men, straightening to unfold themselves, placing both hands against their backs, shifting their trousers and pissing in the ditches. Squatting to splash their faces at the river’s edge.

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 hall
way 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. Ortíz 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 Cortés 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 seat, 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:

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.