The Lacuna (22 page)

“Screw yourself.”

Pupil and teacher were relieved when the tops of the pyramids rose into sight, looming over the tile roofs and palm trees of San Juan Teotihuacán. The archaeological site was closed because of the excavations, and the crew had vacated for a long lunch. Their trowels and notebooks lay about every which way. While awaiting Gamio’s return, Frida decided to climb to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun, to get a perspective on the place. It took half an hour because of the steepness and number of steps: two hundred twenty-eight. She dragged her bad leg up every one, counting them with a hail of obscenities: cuarenta-y-
dos
-chingada, cuarenta-y-
tres
-chingada. Sometimes the steps were so steep she had to climb “on all four paws,” but she never accepted a hand. “I might be a damn cripple but I’m not dead yet,”
she spat. “If my heart stops, fine, you can carry me back down.” Still angry from the driving lesson.

The view from the pinnacle could stop any heart: the complex geometric forms of the ancient city revealed themselves below, and beyond them, a landscape of black volcanic mountains. The pyramids of lava rock seemed to rise straight from the land, rather than having conquered it. And in fact, a half hour later when we stood on a platform in the ancient city’s central plaza looking back at the Pyramid of the Sun, you could plainly see what she called “the joke of the ancient guys.” The profile of the Sun Pyramid—its staircases, balustrades, and rounded top—perfectly follows the shape of the volcanic mountain rising behind it. A giant monument playing copycat to a mountain.

“They were laughing. The joke is on God,” she said, and sat down on the dusty plaza to make a sketch of the pyramid and mountain.

“If you say so. But it’s a joke with years of planning behind it, and terrible labors. Probably people died building it. Why throw away life to play a joke on God?”

She held a spare pencil in her mouth, and didn’t look up from her drawing.

When Dr. Gamio arrived, he had plenty of theories on the subject. The people wanted greatness. They worked hard to be remembered by eternity. Alignment was a sacred matter, as important as water and bread. He escorted Frida to the excavation site holding her arm, warning her against tripping over every pebble. His first words were to say how sorry he was that Diego couldn’t come, but he was not sorry. He was enamored of her, like everyone else.

The excavation lay open: a mass grave, protected under a temporary tin roof set on posts. Down a few dirt steps, there they were, skeletons of men lying in a row like fish in a box, their narrow, dust-colored bones only faintly lighter than the reddish dirt in which they were embedded. Oddly, the skeletons were perfectly flattened, as if all these humans had been pressed under a hot iron. It took a mo
ment for the eye to adjust to the increments of dust, discerning the human from nonhuman elements. The dead wore jewelry that had survived where flesh did not, bracelets loosely encircling bones. Most peculiar of all: around each neck, a sort of cravat or necklace made of human lower jaws, with the teeth still in place! It was a riveting sight, these bizarre, scalloped strands of mandibles strung together, looping low across the former chests, a fashion beyond anything even Frida might wear. The professor pointed out cut marks here and there on the bones, butchery marks, which he claimed as proof that these unfortunates were sacrificed.

A cool breeze whistled past our ankles, causing the tin roof to tremble. A storm was rising in the distance, but this cool air seemed to come from beneath the ground. The professor said in fact, it did. The place has lava tubes, long caves where the molten earth once ran as rivers. The ground beneath the whole ancient city is laced with them.

“Tunnels, you mean? Like the water caves out on the coast?”

He said it’s different rock but a similar formation. The ancients were directed by their gods to look for a doorway from the earth, and here they found them.

The professor talked and talked without releasing Frida’s elbow. She shot a few trapped glances before the final escape, a quick getaway down the Avenue of the Dead while Gamio was distracted by a student volunteer. To avoid the dazzling heat, Frida suggested leaving the ancient stone pavement and climbing down the bank of the little San Juan River. It was nearly dry, a trickle in the bottom of a grassy ravine. She flung out a tablecloth in a grove of old pepper trees with gnarled trunks and birds singing from their drooping fernlike boughs. She collapsed on the ground, panting, “Help, we’re saved! I thought I would be a human sacrifice. Bored to death by Theories of Antiquity.” Then set about unpacking the heavy picknick basket she’d brought from home.

“Why do you think they made necklaces like that, of human mandibles?”

She fingered her own necklace, huge jade stones, a wedding present from Diego.

“Fashion,” she said. “Diego showed me pictures of that before. Most of the people weren’t important enough to collect real human teeth, you know, the regular low-class citizens. So they made fake ones, flint teeth stuck into clay jawbones.” She pulled a bottle of wine from the basket and uncorked it, pouring it into two good crystal glasses that probably shouldn’t have risked the journey. But that is Frida, using her best, the devil can take the shards.

“Isn’t it awfully sad to think that’s all history amounts to, just following the next stupid fashion?”

“Fashion isn’t stupid,” she said, handing over a glass, spilling a dark red splash on the knee of her overall.

“It’s worse than stupid. There’s damage in it. Mother lived and died in dread of wearing last year’s frock. And look at what Lev loses, every time the newspapers jump in line to call him a villain. When one says it they all have to say it, for fear of being left behind. It’s all the same thing more or less. Following fashion.”

“
Fashion
is not the same as
idiocy
.”

She produced an impressive meal from her basket: pork tamales in banana leaves, stuffed chayotes, prickly pear fruits fried in batter.

“Don’t tell your professor boyfriend, but I agree with you about the pyramid copying the shape of the mountain. It’s a joke. They were just people. We come here to be dazzled by sculptures of giant snakes, imagining the ancients labored for us, so we will remember them for all time. But maybe they just liked the look of snakes.”

“When did you have this big revelation?”

“Today.”

“I told you, every Mexican has to come here.”

“Look, Frida. I’m going to tell you something, and it doesn’t even matter if you make fun of me. Ever since I was fourteen and read Cortés, I’ve been writing a story about the Azteca. Mostly in my head,
but a lot is on paper. And now I can see I’ve had the story wrong, all this time. I’ve spent years writing something really stupid.”

She nodded, biting into a tamale. “Tell me in what way it’s stupid.”

“My impression was from books. The ancients seemed to be…what the professor said. Locked in the struggle for greatness. Heroes and battles, mythic kings.”

“Well, nobody knows how they were, so you can make up anything you want.” She pawed through the basket for napkins. She brought the blue-and-yellow ones. “A story is like a painting, Sóli. It doesn’t have to look like what you see out the window.”

“Well, the ancients might not have been very heroic. Most of them were probably like Mother, crouched somewhere trying to work out how to make fake jawbone jewelry that would look like the real thing.”

“That’s a better story, to tell you the truth,” she said. “Greatness is very boring.”

The prickly pear fruit was delicious: thick slices, lightly fried with sugar and anise. “Did you cook all this today, this morning?”

“Montserrat, at the San Angel Inn,” she said with her mouth full. She chewed thoughtfully. “I mean it. Your idea for the story sounds good.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter because I can’t be a writer.”

“Dumb kid, you
are
a writer. Cesár tried to get you fired for always writing in your notebooks, and Diego tried to make you stop, too. It killed me to see him try. Now these men want to make you an efficient secretary. But you keep writing about soft hearts and scandal. The question is, why do you think you can’t be a writer?”

“To be a writer, you need readers.”

“I’m no painter, then. Who ever looks at my dumb little pieces of shit?”

“An American movie star, to name one. Diego told me that fellow looked at all your paintings and bought a couple.”

She was pouring more wine but glanced up, under her dark brows. “Edward G. Robinson. He bought four of them, if you want to know. Two hundred dollars each.”

“Dios mio.
You see?”

“I see nothing. I see a boy who chews off the ends of his fingers and bleeds ink.”

“A dumb kid, is what you said.”

“Let’s get back to the topic of your story. What do you think people want, if it’s not greatness and to be remembered for all time?”

There was hardly anything left of that huge lunch but greasy fingers and a crackle of anise between the teeth. The wine bottle was empty. “Mostly? I believe people want to eat a good lunch, and then take a good piss.”

She was digging in that basket again, and unbelievably, produced another half-bottle of wine, recorked from some previous adventure. “And love, Sóli, don’t forget that. We are bodies, sometimes with dreams and always with desires.”

“Love. But the pure kind of love, what Lev has for humanity, I don’t think that comes very often. Most of us are ordinary. If we do anything great, it’s only so we’ll be loved ourselves. Maybe just for ten minutes.”

“Love is love, Sóli. We give greatly to receive. Don’t spit yourself out like a seed all the time. When Lev was your age, he was probably more like you than you think.”

“All right. People are ruled by love, and our kidneys. That’s my opinion, and now I really do have to take a piss. Don’t watch, please.”

“Hey, you could have found a bigger tree,” she called out. “A skinny guy like you, and you’re not even halfway hidden.”

“You could allow a gentleman the privacy of his piss.”

Frida in her dungarees lay back against the bank, looking through her black eyelashes. It’s impossible to explain how or why, but she
had completely transformed. From venomous snake to friend. “If you want to write romantic novels about the Azteca,” she said, “I mean, if that’s what moves you, then you should do it.”

It was a true conversation. About whether our ancestors had more important lives than we do. And how they’ve managed to trick us, if they did not. Frida felt it helped them not to put anything in writing. The people at Teotihuacán had no written language, according to Dr. Gamio. “So we can’t read their diaries,” she pointed out, “or the angry letters they sent their unfaithful lovers. They died without telling us their complaints.”

She is right about that. No regrets or petty jealousies. Only stone gods and magnificent buildings. We only get to see their perfect architecture, not their imperfect lives. But it’s a strange point to argue for an artist whose paintings are rants and confessions. Without regrets and jealousies, she would have blank canvas.

“You’d better burn all your paintings then, Frida. If you want people in the future to think you were heroic.”

She fingered her beads and knit her eyebrows. Raised her glass up to the light and rolled the red liquid around, studying it. “I think an artist has to tell the truth,” she said finally. “You have to use the craft very well and have a lot of discipline for it, but mostly to be a good artist you have to know something that’s true. These kids who come to Diego wanting to learn, I’ll tell you. They can paint a perfect tree, a perfect face, whatever you ask. But they don’t know enough about life to fill a thimble. And
that’s
what has to go in the painting. Otherwise, why look at it?”

“How does an artist learn enough about life to fill a thimble?”

“Sóli, I’m going to tell you. He needs to go rub his soul against life. Go work in a copper mine for a few months, or a shirt factory. Eat some terrible greasy tacos, just for the experience. Have sex with some Mexican boys.”

“Thank you for the advice. You seem to favor foreigners.”

“Never mind about me. I’ve done everything already—nothing is left for these bones but the grave.” She drained her glass. “You’ve been so angry with me. Why?”

“Good God, Frida. Because you treat me like a child.”

She looked truly startled.

“I understand. I’m not an important person like you. Or Van, for that matter. But working for you and Diego, sometimes I don’t even feel human. I’m a mouse creeping around the shoes of giant people, trying not to get stepped on.”

“Look, if I don’t flirt with you, you should take that as a compliment. I don’t always respect myself, but I almost never respect men. They’re like flowers, all showy, a lot of color and lust. You pick them and throw them on the ground. But you I respect. I always did. From the first day I saw you.”

“You don’t even remember the first time you saw me. It was before I ever came to work in the house, years before. On your birthday.”

“In the Melchor market.” She tilted her head, but without the coy smile. “You asked if you could help me carry a bag of corn. I told you any man has the right to make a kite from his pants.”

She is a marvel or a trickster, a brilliant, terrifying friend. She divines the unknown. There will never be another Frida.

“I approve of your program, Sóli.”

“What program is that?”

“Cortés and the Azteca. Writing a true history of Mexico. I think you’re right, you should crack open the mute culture, give those boring heroes some sweat and piss.”

“Do you think?”

“Look, there’s no sense pretending history is a goddamn Homeric Odyssey.”

A brilliant red bird landed overhead, the same color as the coral-bean blossoms, resting briefly on the swaying branch before it flew away. Frida packed up the last of the meal. “It’s good we talked today. We don’t have a lot of time.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have to get ready for a show. I’m having a real show, my own paintings entirely. Can you imagine?”