Authors: Barbara Kingsolver
9 April
President Cárdenas agrees with the Rivera dinner guests, it’s time to kick out the oil men. Mexican oil for the Mexican people now. The newspaper says the workers will only have to work eight hours a day from now on, and get a share of profits. Cárdenas even kicked out Big Chief Calles, boss of every Mexican president since the rocks of the earth were still warm. Now he can enjoy the company of his gringo business friends more than ever, because the president had him arrested and put on a plane to New York. “What a Boy Scout, that Cárdenas,” Olunda said. “Usually they just assassinate their rivals.”
It was also a day of liberation for the peons of the Kitchen of Microscopia. The señora wants a huge Easter party, and decided to have it at a regular house with a real kitchen: her father’s house on Allende Street. It’s where they lived before, near the Melchor market, with the jungle courtyard. She had César drive the staff there to get started cooking for Saturday, assisted by that house’s ancient housekeeper and two girls. The dining table was piled with newspapers; the Painter still gets a lot of mail there. The others begged to be entertained with dramatic readings while cutting up one thousand tomatoes. Candelaria is tender-hearted, but Olunda only wants the
motorcar plunges into the canyons of Orizaba, so the kitchen readings always involve some compromise. The Allende Street house staff were an easier audience: old Perpetua seems deaf, and the two girls laughed at anything:
Upon arrival in New York City, Calles told reporters…“I was thrown out of Mexico because I forgot my pants and wallet in the bedroom of a
puta
on Avenida Colón
.” Candelaria and the girls shrieked and giggled.
Mistress Frida appeared in the doorway, completely unexpectedly. Olunda threw down the fork she was using to mash avocados and cupped her hands over her fleshy ears. The house girls ardently peeled the nopales without looking up.
“My concern is for your ignorance,” the señora snapped. “This is a historic day. Read it to them correctly.”
“Yes, señora.”
She stood, waiting.
“Upon arrival in New York City, the former Jefe Maximo told reporters, ‘I was exiled because I opposed the attempts to create a dictatorship of the proletariat.’”
“Very good. Keep going.” She swirled and walked out to attend to her father, leaving the kitchen proletariat to absorb the real news of the day. The State Department of Chiapas, responding to the Syndicate of Indigenous Workers, has voted to raise the wages of all coffee workers throughout the state. In a formal declaration to the Congress, President Cárdenas stated, “In the new democracy, organized laborers exert a genuine influence on the political and economic leadership of our country.”
Olunda’s eyes darted from her avocados to the doorway, to the newspaper, and back to her bowl. Dreaming, perhaps, of a Syndicate of Avocado Mashers.
19 April
The mistress is having a relapse of difficulties with her back, an infection of her eyes, kidney stones, and an affair with the Japanese
sculptor. So says Olunda, but it hardly seems possible: when would she have time? But Candelaria has evidence: the last time she let the Japonés through the gate, the Painter came barreling down the spiral stair with his pistol out. The sculptor is no longer welcome in either half of the double house.
22 April
The señora packed herself off to the hospital, taking paintbrushes and some dolls. Today she sent word she also needed chiles rellenos, so the master dispatched the male servants to the hospital with her lunch. Possibly to see if the Japonés is lurking there, attempting sexual liaisons with a woman in a plaster spinal corset. César got lost twice on the way, then remained in the car to nap and recover himself for the voyage home.
“Insólito!” she cried from her hospital bed. “Look at your poor Friducha, falling all to pieces and dying. Let me have that basket.” She wore only half the usual pirate’s chest of jewelry today, but her hair was pinned up the usual way. She must have nurses and stretcher-bearers at her command at the Hospital Inglés.
“Did you stop by my father’s house to give him some of this?”
“Of course. Señor Guillermo sends you his heart.”
“He’s going to starve, with Mother gone. She’s the only one who ever ordered those servants to get up off their
nalgas
.” She pulled out the napkins and silver, arranging her bed for dining as carefully as she sets the table at home.
“With respect, señora, his housekeeper is the same one who managed to keep you alive through your childhood.”
“My point exactly. She’s ancient. It’s like an archaeological ruin over there.”
“Everything is fine at Allende Street, you shouldn’t worry. Perpetua hired two new housegirls. Belén and something. Today they were planting lilies in the courtyard.”
“Lilies! The whole house needs repairs and a good coat of paint. I
would make it plumbago blue. With red trim. What’s the news from home?” she asked, tearing into the rellenos. She had an excellent appetite for a dying woman.
“You don’t want to know.”
“Meaning?
Has Diego replaced me already?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that. It’s all the same people coming over in the evenings.”
“The painters?”
“Mostly the writers and the theater ones.”
“The Contemporáneos. Oh boy, you’re right, I don’t want to know about them. Villaurrutia with his
Nostalgia for Death!
Just go ahead and drink the poison,
muchacho
, get it over with. I think he and Novo are having an affair with each other, they’re both impervious to flirtation. And Azuela is just gloomy.”
“Mariano Azuela? That’s him? The author of
Los de abajo
?”
“The one. Don’t you find him gloomy?”
“He’s a very great writer.”
“But very cynical, don’t you think? Look, that character Demetrio in
Los de abajo
: What kind of hero is he? Fighting in the Revolution without a single idea in his head about
why
. Remember the scene where his wife asks him why he’s fighting?”
“Of course. He throws a rock into the canyon.”
“And the two of them just stand like a pair of dummies, watching the rock roll all the way down the hill.”
“It’s a moving scene, Señora Frida. Isn’t it?”
“Maybe if you’re a rock. I’d like to think I’m being pulled through history by something more than the force of gravity.”
“But gravity is winning. Look how short you are.”
“This is no joke, I’m warning you, Sóli. Be careful of your heart going cold. The Mexican writers are cynics. Our painters are the idealists. Take my advice, if you ever need a party to cheer yourself up, invite the painters, not the writers.”
She cocked her head, like a cat inspecting a mouse prior to
consumption. “But…you are a writer, aren’t you? You write at night.”
How could she know that? Now they will make it stop.
“Pages and pages. César told me that. He said it’s like you’re possessed.”
No confession
.
“I also believe you find it
most
interesting that Novo and Villaurrutia are sleeping with boys instead of girls? Don’t you.”
None
.
“I’m not charging you with crimes, you know.”
“No. No secrets, Señora Frida.”
“What a lot of
mierda
. You always call me señora when you’re lying. So tell me, how are things in the soap opera of Los de Kitchen?”
“The same, Frida. We’re just tedious little servants.”
“Sóli, you are neither small nor tedious. Sooner or later you’re going to have to confide in me, one pierced soul to another. Sleep on it, Sóli. Consult your pillow.”
4 May
A visit with Mother, to take her to La Flor for her birthday. She was dazzling as always in a violet frock and dyed-to-match wool cloche. Her new plan is to win the heart of an American engineer contracting for the government. She describes him as “plenty rugged.” Also plenty married: they met when he came in the dress shop to buy a gift, not for his wife but his mistress. “Former mistress,” Mother calls her hopefully.
“It’s inspiring, Mother. You never shrink from competition.”
“What about you? That girl came in the shop again last week. This is the Rebeca I told you about, the friend of that little jelly bean you took to the Posadas last winter, and if you ask me, this Rebeca is ten times prettier. If the other one is a wet sock, that’s your good luck. She was a half-portion, if you ask me. But the friend is really swell.”
“I didn’t ask you.”
“Rebeca, this one is. Write it down,
mi’ijo
, at least pretend you’re interested. Or am I going to have to hire a
puta
to get a woman in your little
pinche
life?”
“A
pinche
life full of women, thanks all the same. One more and it might split open like a pomegranate.”
“I mean a woman in
bed
.”
“That house is ruled by a woman in a bed. Completely.”
“Mi’ijo,
you exasperate me. This Rebeca, look, she’s a smart one like you. She wants to go to university, but right now she’s a seamstress. Did she stop in? I told her where you’re working. I didn’t tell her the kitchen, of course, I said you were some kind of a secretary. Intending to become a lawyer. It isn’t a lie to say you’re
intending
.”
“Let’s go back to your love life. It’s more interesting.”
“It had better get that way soon, let me tell you. Forty! Look at me, I’m a rock of ages.” She covered her face with her hands. Then peeked through, because the watermelon salad arrived. “And you, almost twenty! It’s unbelievable.”
“Half a rock of ages.”
“And what will you be doing on your twentieth birthday, mister?”
“Cooking, probably. The señora has the same birthday. She doesn’t know it.”
“Listen, if we go anywhere together now, you are not to say you’re my son, do you hear me. Look at you, a
man
! How could you do that to me? That’s it, mister. The men nowadays want fillies and pips and sweet patooties and no-o-o dotie brodies.”
She has moved on from oil men, there was no future in that stock. Don Enrique has lost everything in the nationalization. Mother reports that the hacienda on Isla Pixol has been appropriated, turned over to the people of the village as a communal farm. They turned the house into a school.
“Well, good. One provincial school will have some books in it, anyway.”
“You would be on their side, wouldn’t you? Houseboy for the pinkos.”
“The point of the appropriation law is restitution, Mother. Meaning Don Enrique or his family must have taken that land from the villagers in the first place.”
“But look, were they really using it? Your Leandro is probably the president of the collective now, trying to work out how to put on a pair of shoes.”
“
My
Leandro? He had a wife. The only man in that house who did.”
“Ooh, you slay me. Poor old Enrique, he got his sock chorus, didn’t he? Can you imagine the scrow, when they put him off his own place? And his mother! Holy moly, that must have taken the army.” Mother took a nibble of her watermelon salad.
“Consorting with Americans has improved your English.”
“As far as I care, Enrique and his relatives can go chase themselves, and you can put that in your hat. There’s some jazz talk.”
“And you can put this in your hat, Mother. Washing the dishes of pinkos doesn’t make someone a pinko. It’s not like an influenza.”
“I’m just razzing you. I’d take up with a pinko in two toots, if he was famous and had a wad of tin. That artist’s little girlfriend is one lucky duck.”
“The little girlfriend is actually his wife.”
“Like I said. But what a piece of calico, all spuzzed up like an Indian. She’s no Garbo. How’d she get lucky?”
“He’s fond of the way she dresses. They’re nationalists.”
“No soap!” She shook her head. “To me she looks like a corn-eater.”
“You used to ask, What kind of man would chase after that? In Isla Pixol, remember? Now you know.”
“Hey, you got a gasper?” She took a cigarette and lit it, pushing away her unfinished lunch. Poor Mother, still living from one gasp
to the next. She removed a piece of tobacco from her tongue, and announced: “A corn-eater will never be any more than she is.”
It was no use reminding Mother of her temporary craze for learning the
sandunga
. If corn-eaters are now having their day in nationalist Mexico, in Mother’s estimate they will soon lose the race to fillies and sweet patooties. The afternoon crowd at La Flor had waned, but she kept glancing around the patio, always on the alert.
“What’s become of Don Enrique, then? Is he begging on the streets?”
“Oh golly no. He’s living in one of his other places. Up in the oil fields somewhere in the Huasteca. Enrique could always pull more money out of his
nalgas
. No matter how much he complained to us about our spending.”
She leaned forward and looked up with big eyes under the brim of her cloche hat, and suddenly there she was: the other Mother. The mischievous girl, drawing another child into her conspiracy. “Don’t worry about Don Enrique,
mi’ijo. Dios les da el dinero a los ricos, porque si no lo tuvieran, se morirían de hambre.”
God gives money to the rich because if they didn’t have it, they would starve.
1 July
The Riveras’ wad of tin must not be as big as Mother thinks. Señora Frida had to make a strategy for financing her birthday party: she painted a portrait of the lawyer’s wife and sold it to him. The party will be at the Allende Street house to hold all the people, as she has invited three quarters of the Republic, including mariachis. The painters and the gloomy writers are coming. Olunda is in a frenzy. Chicken
escabeche
, pork and nopales in
pipián
sauce,
mole poblano
. Sweet potatoes mashed with pineapple. Tomato and watercress salad. The pork-rib and tomato stew she calls “the tablecloth stainer.” At last report she also wants shrimps and marinated pigs’
feet. The señora might have to paint portraits of the guests as they come in, and sell them on the way out, to pay the butcher after this fiesta. A wearying twentieth birthday expected for the cook.