The Lacuna

29 September

Today at the Melchor market, a fantastical sight. A servant girl with a birdcage on her back, full of birds. She wore her blue shawl wrapped around the cage and tied in front to hold it. The willow cage must have been very light because she was not bent over, yet it towered over her head, with turrets like a Japanese pagoda. And full of birds: green and yellow, flapping about like dreams trying to escape from a skull. She looked like an angel moving down the rows following her mistress, looking at no one.

The mistress had stopped to haggle with a man and buy another bird. She was so tiny, from the back she also looked like a servant girl. But when she turned, her skirts and silver earrings whirled and her face was very startling, an Azteca queen with ferocious black eyes. Her hair was braided in a heavy crown like the Isla Pixol girls, and her posture very regal, though she wore the same ruffled skirts as her maid. She gave the vendor his money and took two green parrots, slipping them neatly into the cage on the girl’s back. Then moved off quickly toward the street.

The old market woman La Perla said, “Don’t fall in love with that one, guapo, she’s taken. And her man carries a gun.”

Which one is married? The servant girl, or the queen?

La Perla laughed, and so did her friend Cienfuegos the lizard-man. “That’s no queen there,” she said. More like a puta, was La Perla’s opinion.

But Cienfuegos didn’t agree. “It’s her husband who chases women, not the other way around.” The two of them argued about whether the tiny Azteca queen was a harlot. The lizard found and consumed a scrap of tortilla in the street. Finally Cienfuegos and La Perla agreed on one thing: the regal little woman is married to the discutido pintador. The much-discussed painter.

Who discusses him so much?

Cienfuegos said: “The newspapers.” La Perla said: “Everyone, guapo, because he is a Communist. Also the ugliest man you ever saw.”

Cienfuegos asked how she knew what he looked like, did he come around courting her? La Perla said she saw him once at the Plaza Caballito, down there with the troublemakers when the workers had their strike. He was as fat as a giant and horribly ugly, with the face of a frog and the teeth of a Communist. They say he eats the flesh of young girls, wrapped in a tortilla. “He’s a cannibal. And from the look of her, I would say his little bride there might also eat children for lunch.”

“From the look of things today, they’re having parrot stew.”

“No, guapo,” La Perla said. “Not to eat! Those birds are for his paintings. He paints pictures of the strangest things. If he gets up in the morning and wants to paint the hat of an Englishman, his wife has to go find him the hat of an Englishman. Small or big, if he wants to paint it, eso. She has to run to the market and buy it.”

“She must be carrying a lot of money in her purse then,” said Cienfuegos, “because the newspaper says right now he’s painting the National Palace.”

6 October

Mother reached a diplomatic compromise with P. T. Cash. She gets to visit his house in Cuernavaca next week, and maybe some parties. Mother wants to learn the new dances. The Charleston is for dead hoofers, she says, only the meatballs are doing that now. In this city the smooth girls put on long skirts to do the sandunga and jarabe.

Suddenly the butterfly girls with long skirts and braided hair are in fashion. Mr. Cash does not agree; he says only nationalists and outlaws let their girls do those dances. But Mother bought a phonograph record for practicing the sandunga. Finally the Victrola is unpacked from its box, finding its outlaw voice.

15 October

Mother in Cuernavaca all week with P. T. Cash. She has agreed to the theory that looking for some jobs is better than staying at the school of cretins. Because of the oil men’s money running over the border like water. None yet, except running errands for La Perla, which is work but no job. Trying to hire as a scribe to write letters for people in Plaza Santo Domingo was a bad idea. The men with stalls there howled like monkeys, defending their territories. Even though lines are long, and people wait all day. For two days the baker downstairs needed help with mixing the dough, while his wife was away. But now she is back, and he says Run away, we don’t need a beggar boy here.

18 October

Mother is back in fine feather, with extra hush money. She bought one of the newspapers that carries the long adventure of Pancho Villa. The story is told a little each Saturday, so you’ll have to buy another paper. But when people finish, you can pick it up from the sidewalk for free. Yesterday’s heroes fall beneath the shoes of the city.

On Saturdays the university students have their carpas in the street, like a Poncho and Judas play, only with Vasconcelos and the president. Vasconcelos is always saving Mexico for the Mexican people: in a country school he takes down the cross from the wall, routs the nuns, and teaches the peasant children to read. He should come to Avenida Puig. President Ortíz Rubio gets to play more various roles: a puppet of gringos, or a baby in a basket, or a hairless escuincle dog. Everything but an iguana on a leash. Some newspapers agree with the students that the president is a villain, and others say he saved us from Vasconcelos, the foreigners, and the Russians. The newspapers only agree on the much-discussed painter: he covers the walls of our buildings with colors like a tree produces flowers. One newspaper showed a picture of him. La Perla was right: ugly!

They say he’s making a huge painting on the stairwell of the National Palace, the long red building on the Zócalo with windows like holes in a flute. Cienfuegos and La Perla disagree whether you can walk in and have a look. The old lizard man says they have to let you, because it’s courts and public offices. “Tell them you’re getting married.”

La Perla said, “Stupid old man, that won’t work. Where is his wife?”

“All right,” Cienfuegos said. “Tell them you’re getting a divorce.”

24 October

Dios mio. The paintings pull you right up the walls. Cienfuegos was right, they’re inside, but you can walk through the main door into the courtyard with a flying-horse fountain and a portico all the way around. In all the little offices, men stand in shirtsleeves recording marriages and tax accounts. Outside their doors on the hallway walls, Mexico bleeds and laughs, telling its whole story. The people in the paintings are larger than the men in the offices. Dark brown women among jungle trees. Men cutting stone, weaving cloth, playing drums, carrying flowers as big as brooms. Quetzalcoatl sits at the center of one mural in his grand green-feathered headdress. Everyone is there: Indians with gold bracelets on brown arms, Porfirio Díaz with his tall white hair and French sword. In one corner sketch, a native escuincle dog growls at the European sheep and cattle that have just arrived, as if he knows the trouble ahead. Cortés is there too, in the hallway outside Property Assessment. The painter has made him look like a white-faced monkey in his crested helmet. Moteczuma kneels, while the Spaniards make their mischief: fat monks stealing bags of gold, the Indians enslaved.