The Lacuna

—VB

PART 3

San Angel and Coyoacán

1935–1941
(VB)

Directions for making empanadas dulces

They can be triangular, or curled like snails with the filling inside. The dough is the same, either way: white flour with lard and a little salt rubbed in. Beat egg yolks into a little cold water (as many eggs as Olunda will spare), then mix the liquid lake into the volcano of flour. Exactly like mixing plaster.

Roll the dough in a rectangle as wide as the whole counter in this kitchen, which is so small, if two ants are in the sugar it’s already too crowded in here. Next, with a clean machete cut the dough into squares like little handkerchiefs. Spoon some filling on each one and fold it diagonally to make a triangle. The square of the hipotenusa can go to hell. The filling can be custard or pineapple. For the custard, heat a liter of milk and some sugar with pieces of cinnamon. Beat seven egg yolks with some corn starch and pour it in a thin stream into the boiling milk. Stir until your arm is falling off. The lechecilla will be yellow and very thick.

For pineapple filling, cook the fruit with brown-sugar syrup and star anise.

The other way to make them is to spread the filling over the whole rectangle of dough and roll it into a log, then cut off round pieces, each one like a snail. For that, use the pineapple filling. The custard will make a devil of a mess.

Bake the pastries in the oven, if you live in a normal house. If you live in a supermodern house dreamed up by an idiot, go next door to the San Angel Inn. One of the cooks there, Montserrat, will meet you at the back door and take your trays to bake in the kitchen. She’ll send one of the hotel girls to tell you when they’re done.

Those are the instructions. If your boss has the appetite of an elephant and a kitchen the size of an insect, this is how to keep your job. Do it exactly this way, because he said, “Write out the recipe, mi’ijo, in case you ever leave me the way she did. You’re the only person who knows how to cook like my wife.”

What he doesn’t know is the servants did the cooking, not her, right from the beginning when they still lived with her parents. After they moved here, secretly she had most of the meals picked up from the San Angel next door.

The girl Candelaria is the angel of the birdcage, sighted years ago in the Melchor market hurrying behind her mistress. It took a few days of working here to be sure she is the same servant. It’s not a face you forget. Smooth skin, the countenance of a village girl, hair that reaches her knees. Olunda makes her tie her braids in loops, for safety and hygiene. Her mistress the Azteca Queen is gone. But Candelaria remains.

Could there be an uglier house in all Mexico than this one? Functionalismo, architecture as ugly as a fence made of dung. Except the fence here is the nicest part: a row of organ cactus surrounding the courtyard, planted so close together you can only see cracks of light between them. From upstairs you can look over it to the inn across the road, and a field where some cattle graze. San Angel is only two bus stops from the edge of the city, just one from Coyoacán, yet here is a farmer working in his field with an iron-bladed hoe that looks like it was forged during the reign of Moteczuma. When he stops to rest, that poor old man has to raise his eyes to this modern mess of glass and painted cement that looks like a mistake. It looks like a baby giant was playing with his blocks when his mother called him, so he ran away and left his toys lying in Calle Altavista.

Two blocks: the big pink one and small blue one standing separately, each with rooms stacked one above the other, screwed together by a curved cement staircase. The big pink block is the Painter’s domain, and his studio on the second floor is not so bad. That window is the size of a lake, a whole wall of glass looking down at the neighbor’s trees. The planks of the floor are yellow, like sun on your face. That room feels like someone could be happy in it. Everything else feels like being shut up inside a crate.

The small blue block is meant to be for the small wife. Servants are only allowed up the staircase as far as the kitchen (which is not worth the trip). Her rooms above it are sealed like a crypt since the Queen moved out. Good riddance, says Olunda. “She won’t be back, I promise you. I’ll eat a live dog if she ever shows up here again. After she caught master with his pants down as usual, but this time, humping her own sister!”

What a strange couple. Why would a man and wife live in separate houses? With only a little bridge between them, red pipe railings connecting one roof to the other. You can see it from the inn across the street. Functionalist tonteria. He is the one who eats, but the kitchen is on her side. If you manage to cook anything, you have to carry it down the staircase, which is like the inside of someone’s ear, outside into the blazing sun to cross the gravel courtyard, then up the other cement ear to the studio where the master stands with his pants belted high on his giant dumpling belly, waiting to be fed.

And now he says she’s coming back, he wants her greeted with empanadas and budines and enchiladas tapatías. He has never put his two giant feet in this tiny kitchen or he would know, you might as well try to make enchiladas in a peanut shell. Mixing plaster was easier. But living with Mother was not. So he’ll have his enchiladas.

November 30

Live dogs beware of Olunda. The mistress has come back after all. Moved back in with her furniture and strange collections packed into the rooms above the kitchen. It was like a surgery to carry her bed up the stair and through the narrow cement doorways without breaking out a glass-block wall. Candelaria and Olunda went up to help, and came back with hair standing on end. She has a pet monkey, they swear. He hides and leaps on your back when you carry food into her studio. Olunda moved her cot out of the little salon below the kitchen, because the mistress wants that space for a dining room. Olunda would rather sleep in the laundry closet under the house, anyway. The monkey is the least of it. The little queen has a temper like Mother’s.

This servant’s quarter out in the courtyard is probably the safest place to be, even with César the Flatulent for a roommate. He says this little block house wasn’t meant to be a servant’s quarter: they put it in the corner of the courtyard for keeping the motorcar, but the Painter decided to let the motorcar reside on Altavista Street, to make room for its driver in here. He says the architect planned for no driver or servant’s quarters because he was a Communist, like the Painter. Olunda agrees. They said it was to be a revolutionary house, free of class struggle, no servants’ rooms because they didn’t believe in laundry maids or cooks.