The streets outside afterward were like a festival. People pouring in from the provinces, maybe some even from Isla Pixol. All eyes turn to the Virgin as she is conveyed about town in many different processions, dressed in her jeweled diadem and many new frocks at once.
Uninteresting days without number. A National Geographic pinched from the bookshop. It had a photograph of a Hindu with six hundred pins inserted in his body. Two skewers through his abdomen, one through the tongue. Dressing each morning takes him one hour and a half. For overcoming life’s catastrophes, he walks through fire.
8 May
The administrator called Mother in for a talk before school ends. She would sooner walk through fire, yet she put on her worst dress and went. The administrator told Mother it was in the boy’s interest that he should attend a different school next year. There were choices—technical, professional—but his advice was the Preparatoria. He lectured Mother using many conjugations of the verb “to prepare.” Preparation for Preparatoria. But Mother prepares for nothing. She informed him it was none of his business, but her son was going to the United States to live with his father, and she was certain the schools there were of higher caliber.
Is it true? On the angry walk home, she refused to say.
10 June
The angel servant girl of the birdcage reappeared at the Melchor market. This time she was without the birdcage, but again followed hastily behind the Azteca queen, accepting every form of purchase that dark little woman could shove in her arms. Clay bowls, sacks of beans, a devil’s head made of papier-mâché. The mistress limped slightly but otherwise was exactly the same, snapping her fingers at the servant girl and everyone else as she moved down the rows. Measuring every object with fearsome black eyes.
La Perla recognized them too: That scandal, the painter’s wife, she called her. “They went away, but see, they’re back, probably kicked out by the gringos. It will be in the newspapers. The Communists always make trouble so they can get in the papers.”
24 June, St. John’s Day
The lepers bathe again.
La Perla was right, the Painter is in the newspapers. The president wants him to finish what he started on the Palacio stair wall. All the top-level men want this Painter now, Ambassador Morrow hired him to paint his palace in Cuernavaca. Mother claims she saw it when she was there, and the ambassador also, who is now a senator of the United States. She says she spoke to him on the street, and why not, they’re acquainted. Ambassador Morrow came to visit Don Enrique, it was the time she made P. T. Cash dance with her in his black-and-white shoes. Now she thinks Morrow would have been the better bet.
6 July, cumpleaños. Fifteen years of age.
No birthday fiesta, but Mother said to take some extra coins from her purse and buy some carne asada or something nice at the market. Only, no coins.
The Painter’s wife was there today buying buckets of food, getting ready for a fiesta at her house from the looks of it. But no servant! The little queen looked like a burro under all her baskets. Two bananas fell on the street behind her as she walked. Down at the end of the market, men were unloading a wagon of green-tamale corn in the husk, stacking the ears in tall pyramids. The queen pointed through her bundles, making a man fill a big sack for her.
La Perla said, “Stop staring, guapo. Just because it’s your birthday, you don’t get any girl you want. Your eyes will roll in the street behind her like those bananas.”
“How is she going to carry that corn? She’ll collapse for sure.”
“So, go talk to her. Tell her for ten pesos you’ll carry it. She’ll pay you, she’s rich. Go on, go.” La Perla pushed with her little hands like knives. Crossing the street was like walking through water.
Señora Rivera. Would you like some help carrying something?
She set down her two baskets, picked up the great bulging sack, and handed it over with a thump. “Go ahead. Anybody has the right to make a kite from his pants.”
There was no further discussion. Following behind her was a whole conversation by itself: her swirling skirts, her short legs walking as fast as a little dog’s, her proud head crowned with its circle of braids. Make way for the queen, pulling a boy behind like a kite on a string. Her house was down four streets and over one, on Londres at the corner of Allende. She walked through the tall front door without saying “Follow” or “Stop here” or anything, sweeping past an old woman with her apron bunched up in one hand, who took the sack of corn and went away. But the Queen stood where she was, framed in the entry by bright sunlight beyond. The high wall enclosed a beautiful courtyard inside, with the rooms of the house all around it.
It was impossible to turn away from the sight of her strange little figure there, the palms and fig trees waving behind her like fans. The courtyard was a dream. Birds in cages, fountains, plants sprawling from their pots, vines climbing the trunks of the trees. And in that jungle, the Painter! Sprawled in a chair in the sun, wearing the wrecked clothes of a beggar and the glasses of a professor. He was smoking a cigar and reading a newspaper.
“Oh! Good morning, sir.”
“Who is it?” He barely glanced up. His wife gave a warning look.
“Sir, the nation rejoices in your return.”
“The nation considers me to be worth approximately two peanuts, at most.”
“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.