The Lacuna (6 page)

Leandro said, Pray God forgives you for such talk. Get busy and make more masa.

Tonight the moon rose, the beach was quiet, and no one swam into the lacuna. The three Musketeers would have done it, diving in with scabbards in their teeth, not bandages on their fingers. But they were three, all for one and one for all.

Tonight a shadow passed across the moon. Don Enrique says an eclipse. But Leandro says it is El Dios and El Cristo putting their heads together, crying over everything that happens down here.

2 May

Birthday of Santa Rita de Casia. Mother needed cigarettes, but there wasn’t any market today because of the fiesta. All the women went to the procession in long ruffled skirts, their hair braided with ribbons and flowers. Boys carrying beeswax candles as tall as men. The old woman who sells nopal in the market was at the front, dressed like a wrinkled bride. Her old groom shuffled beside, holding her arm.

Leandro says they couldn’t have this fiesta last year because of the Silence against the church. But that Santa Rita de Casia is not really a saint, but a woman-god. Nothing is ever what they say, and no one holy one hundred percent.

12 May

Perfect tide today. Into the cave and back out. The water pushed, all the way in, to touch those bones again. Tomorrow the tide should be almost perfect again. But only a few more days this month, to look for the treasure hidden from Hernán Cortés.

13 May

Mother says tonight. In just a few hours we leave on the ferry. It isn’t possible just to go away from here, but she said, Oh yes it is. Leave everything.

Tell no one, she said: Don Enrique will be furious. Not even Cruz can know, don’t pack anything from your room yet because she would notice. Wait till it’s almost time. Take only what fits in one rucksack. Two books, only. Not those huaraches, don’t be ridiculous, your good shoes.

She said:
Bueno
. Very fine. If you want to stay here, stay. On this stupid island so far from everything, you have to yell three times before even Jesus Cristo can hear you. I will happily go without you, and light a candle for you in the Catedral Nacional when I get there. Because when Enrique finds out, he’ll kill you instead of me.

Mr. Produce the Cash is meeting us on the mainland.

You will not say one word to Leandro. Not one word, mister.

Dear Leandro, here is the note you won’t read because you can’t read. The pocket watch is in the jar in the cabinet, with the clay Pilzintecutli. It’s a gift to find next year when you have to make the
rosca
with no
sergente
to help mix the flour. The watch is gold, maybe you can take it to monte de piedad and get money for your family. Or keep it to remind you of the pest who is gone.

11 June

La luna de junio
, first full moon in June, a day to dive for treasure. But the nearest thing to ocean here is the rot-fish smell on Saturdays after all the wives on the alley cooked fish the day before, and their garbage is waiting for the slop-cart man. The ocean is the last dream in the morning before noise from the street comes in. Motorcars, police on horses, the tide goes out, the prisoner awakes on a new island. An apartment above a bakery shop.

Mother says a
casa chica
means probably his wife knows about her but doesn’t mind, because a Small House doesn’t cost too much. The maid doesn’t even sleep here, no room. The water closet and gas cooking eye are in the same room. The main kitchen is downstairs in the bakery, passed through from the street, with a key. No library and no garden here, in a city that stinks of buses. Mother thinks it is all wonderful and reminds her of childhood, even though that was a long time ago and not this city. And if it was so wonderful, why did she never go back to see her father and mother until dead?

“Quit your moping, mister, finally we’re off that island where nothing was ever going to happen. Here you don’t have to yell three times before Jesus Cristo can hear you.” Probably because after the second yell, Jesus would look down in time to see you get coshed by a trolley.

But, she says. God has a swell house here, the biggest cathedral in the world. One of the high marks of the Distrito Federal. So far we’ve seen only one high mark, La Flor, the shop where Mr. Produce
the Cash and his friends go for coffee. We went there alone, in defiance of orders. His businessman friends don’t yet know about his new enterprise, the secret kept in a small box, the
casa chica
. The lid of the box is mother’s hush money, which she says is not very much. So probably she will not be very quiet.

She needed to go to La Flor to have a look-see at how they dress here, so she won’t be a low-lid dumbdora like people on that island. On the streets you can see which men are farmers who’ve come to the city for the day: white trousers, rolled to the knees. The men taking coffee at La Flor were all black-trouser men. The ladies wore cloche hats and smart, short dresses like Mother’s, but with black stockings for modesty. The waitresses had white aprons and eyes wide with fright. This city is like Washington, and it isn’t. It’s difficult to remember real places from the book places. The patio had giant fern trees like the forest in
Journey to the Center of the Earth
, and very good chocolate. Cookies called cat’s tongues. The cat’s meow, Mother said, but really the cat’s not-meow. Our alley has so many, with a slingshot you could get a good supply of tongues.

Mother was in a jolly mood, and finally agreed to stop at the stationer’s on the way home, for a new notebook. She pouted: You love that little book more than me, you’ll go in your room and forget me.

But just now she came in and said, You poor thing. You’re like a fish that needed water. I didn’t even know.

Today the cathedral. It took all morning to reach the central plaza, the Zócalo, two buses and then a trolley to get there from the outside edge of the Distrito Federal. The
casa chica
is located in an unfashionable neighborhood south of the bullfighting plaza on a dirt alley that runs into Insurgentes. According to Mother, we reside halfway between the Capitol of Mexico and Tierra del Fuego, South America.

The Zócalo is a huge square with palm trees like parasols. Facing one side is the long Palacio Nacional of pink stone, with small
windows all the way down it like holes in a flute. The brick streets leading into the Zócalo are narrow as animal burrows in tall grass, the buildings close on both sides, as far as you can see. Downstairs are shops and people live above, you can see the women leaning on their elbows on the iron balconies watching everything below. Bicycle carts, horses, and automobiles, lines of them, sometimes going both ways in the same street.

The cathedral is immense as promised, with gigantic wooden doors that look as if they could shut you out for good. The front is all warbly with carvings: the Ship of the Church sailing over one door looked like a Spanish galleon, and over the other, Jesus is handing over the keys to the kingdom. He has the same worried look the bakery-shop man had when giving Mother the key to come through his shop to our apartment upstairs. Mr. Produce the Cash owns the building.

Inside the cathedral you have to pass the great Altar of Perdón, all golden with angels flying about. The black Christ of the Venom hangs there dead in his black skirt, surrounded by little balconies, maybe for the angels to land on when they get tired. It was such a monument of accusation, even Mother had to bow her head a little as she crept past it, sins dripping from her shoes as we walked around the nave, leaving invisible puddles on the clean tiles. Perhaps God said her name was mud. He would have to yell that more than three times, for her to hear.

Around the back outside the church was a little museum. A man there told us the cathedral was built by Spaniards right on top of the great temple of the Azteca. They did it on purpose, so the Azteca would give up hope of being saved by their own gods. Just a few pieces of temple left. The man said the Azteca came to this place in ancient times after wandering many hundred years looking for a true home. When they got here they saw an eagle sitting on a cactus, eating a snake, and that was their sign. A good enough reason to call a place home, better than all of Mother’s up to now.

The best artifact was the calendar of the ancients, a great carved piece of stone as big as a kitchen, circular, bolted to the wall like a giant clock. In the center was an angry face looking out, as if he’d come through that stone from some other place to have a look at us, and not very pleased about it. He stuck out his sharp tongue, and in taloned hands he held up two human hearts. Around him smiling jaguars danced in a circle of endless time. It might be the calendar Leandro knew about. He would be happy to know the Spaniards decided to keep it when they bashed up everything else. But Leandro can’t read a letter, so there is no use writing him anything about it.

Mr. P. T. Cash is to come on Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Mother could put a sign on her door like the bakery shop downstairs.

They discuss The Boy’s Future: P. T. says the Preparatoria in September, but Mother says no, he can’t get in there. It’s supposed to be difficult, with Latin, physics, and things of that kind. What will they make of a boy who has only attended the school of Jules Verne and the Three Musketeers for five years? Her idea is a little school organized by nuns, but P. T. Cash says she is a dreamer, the Revolution did away with those when the priests fled Mexico. If they know what’s good for them, he said, those schoolteacher nuns got married. Mother insists she saw a school on Avenida Puig south of here. But Preparatoria is free, and a
católica
school would cost money, if one could be found. We will see who wins: Mr. Produce the Cash or Miss No Cash Whatever.

24 June

St. John’s Day, all the church bells ringing on a Tuesday. The maid says it’s a signal for the lepers to bathe. Today is the only day of the year they are allowed to touch water. No wonder they smell as they do.

On the way back from the Colonia Roma dress shop today, it started to rain like pitchforks, and we bought paper hats from the newspaper boys. When it rains, they give up on shouting about the New Bureaucratic Plan and fold it up into something useful. Then we lost the way home and Mother laughed, her hair stuck like little black ribbons to her face, for once happy. For no reason.

Standing under an awning to hide from the rain, we noticed it was a shop of books, and went inside. It was fantastic, every sort of book including medical ones, the human eye drawn in cross-section and reproductive organs. Mother sighed for the slim chances of gaining entrance to the no-cost Preparatoria. She told the shopkeeper she needed something to put her boy on the Right Track, and he showed her the section of very old, worn-out ones. Then took pity on Mother and said if we brought them back later, he would return most of the price. Huzzah, something new to read. For your birthday, she said, because it passed almost a week ago and she was sorry for not celebrating. So pick out something for turning fourteen, she said. But still no adventure novels. Pick something serious, history for example. And no Pancho Villa, mister. According to her, if he hasn’t been dead twenty years, he isn’t history.

The Azteca are dead for hundreds, so we got two books about them. One is all of the letters written by Hernán Cortés to Queen Juana of Spain, who sent him off to conquer Mexico. He sent back plenty of reports, starting each one with “Most Lofty Powerful and Very Catholic Empress.” The other one is by a bishop who lived among the pagans and drew pictures of them, even naked.

More rain, a good day for reading. The great pyramid under the cathedral was built by King Ahuitzotl. Luckily the Spaniards wrote buckets about the Azteca civilization before they blew it to buttons and used its stones for their churches. The pagans had priests and temple virgins and temples of limestone blocks ornamented on every face with stone serpents. They had gods for Water, Earth, Night,
Fire, Death, Flowers, and Corn. Also many for War, their favorite enterprise. The war god Mejitli was born from a Holy Virgin who lived at the temple. The bishop wrote how curious it was that just like our Holy Virgin, when she turned up expecting a baby, the Azteca priests wanted to stone her but heard a voice saying: “Fear not Mother, thy honor is saved.” Then the war god was born with green feathers on his head, and a blue face. The mother must have had quite a fright that day, all round.

Because of all that, they gave her a temple with a garden for birds. And for her son, a temple for human sacrifice. Its door was a serpent’s mouth, a lacuna leading deep into the temple where a surprise waited for visitors. Towers were built from all their skulls. The priests walked about with their bodies blackened with the ashes of burnt scorpions. If only Mother had brought us here five hundred years sooner.

Every day it rains buckets, the alley is a river. Women do their washing in it. Then it dries up, flotsam everywhere. The maid says it’s a law that everyone has to clean a section of the street, so we should pay her husband for that. Mother says no dice, if we have to huddle like pigeons upstairs we aren’t paying any damn street cleaner.

Mother’s room has a tiny balcony facing outward to the alley, and this room is opposite, facing a courtyard inside the block of buildings. The family across keeps a garden there, hidden from the street. The grandfather wears white cotton trousers rolled to his knees, tending squash vines and his pigeon house, a round brick tower with cubbyholes around the top where his pigeons roost. The old man uses a broom to chase away parrots eating his flowers. When the moon is
D como Dios
, his pigeons cry all night.

Cortés is an adventure story, better than the Three Musketeers. He was the first Spaniard to find this city, which was Tenochtitlan then, capital of the Azteca empire. Somehow it was in a lake at that
time. They had causeways crossing the water, wide enough for Cortés and his horsemen to ride abreast. He heard of the great city and sent messages first so the Azteca wouldn’t kill him the minute he arrived. A good plan. King Moteczuma met him with two hundred nobles all dressed in nice capes, and gave Cortés a necklace made of gold prawns. Then they sat down to discuss the circumstances. Moteczuma explained that long ago their ancient lord went back to his native land where the sun rises, so they were expecting one of his descendants to come back any time and subject the people as his rightful vassals. Cortés had sent messages about being sent hither by a great king, so they thought he must be their natural lord. That was good luck for Cortés, who rejoiced and took leisure from the fatigues of his journey. Moteczuma gave him more gold things, and one of his daughters.

The Azteca in other cities were not so friendly to the Spaniards, and killed them. One was a big troublemaker, Qualpopoca. Cortés demanded him brought in for punishment, and to be safe decided to put Moteczuma in chains, but on a friendly basis. Qualpopoca arrived fuming, insisting he was a vassal of no Great King from anywhere, and hated all Spaniards. So he was burned alive in the public square.

Mother is tired of hearing bits of the story. She says she is not the damned queen of Spain, put the candle out before it falls on the bed and burns you alive.

She says we can’t keep the book even if it is the best adventure ever. And a birthday present. It is too long to copy the whole story out, only the main parts. Cortés let Moteczuma go free again and they were still friends, which seems strange. He showed Cortés the buildings and marketplaces, fine as any in Spain, and stone temples higher than the great church of Seville. Inside some, the walls were covered with the blood of human sacrifice. But the people had great culture and politeness of manners, with good government everywhere main
tained, and stone pipes to bring water down from the mountains. Moteczuma had a grand palace and lattice houses where he kept every manner of bird, waterfowl to eagle. It took three hundred men to look after them all.

But really Cortés wanted a tour of the gold mines. Playing dumbdora, he told Moteczuma the land looked very fertile, so the Great King should like to have a farm there (over the gold mine). They fixed it up with maize fields, a big house for His Majesty, even a pond with ducks. Crafty Cortés.

Next, the Governor of Honduras grew very jealous and sent eighty musketeers over to Mexico, declaring he had the true authority of Spain to conquer and suborn the natives. Just when Cortés was having such a grand time, he had to go with all haste back to the port of Veracruz to defend his position, then rush straight back to save the men he’d left at Tenochtitlan. For the people there finally got wise to Cortés, and his name was mud. The populace advanced upon his garrison, and they fought for their lives. King Moteczuma climbed a tower and shouted for everyone to stop, but he was struck in the head by a rock and died three days later. Cortés got out of that place by the skin of his neck. He had to leave behind almost all his golden shields, crests, and other such marvellous things as could not be described nor comprehended. That is what he wrote, but probably he was too embarrassed to describe or comprehend them because one-fifth share of the booty was supposed to go to her Extremely Catholic Majesty the Queen.