2 March
The señora is making a painting in the little studio next to her bedroom. It’s not such a mess, she uses a cloth under her chair. At the end of the day, it looks like it rained blue, red, and yellow. She cleans her own brushes and knives, a hundred times tidier than the Painter, who throws everything on the floor and stomps out in his cowboy boots. But Candelaria and Olunda refuse to carry her lunch upstairs, saying her temper is even worse when she’s painting. She never says gracias because life is made of survival not grace, she says, and servants are paid to bring what they’re asked. Today she demanded stuffed chiles, more blue pigment, and surprisingly, advice.
“The painting looks good so far, señora.” When people ask for advice, this is what they want. “Good progress too. We’ll see that finished by the end of the month.”
“We will?” She gave a fierce, quick smile like a cat showing itself to another cat. “As the fly said, sitting on the back of the ox, ‘We are plowing this field!’”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay, Insólito. If anybody says it’s ugly, I’ll tell them ‘we’ painted it.”
The painting has people floating in the air, connected by ribbons. She asked, “Do you like art? I mean, do you understand it?”
“Not really. Words, though. Those are nice. Poems and things like that.”
“What did you study in school?”
“Awful things, señora. Drill and psychomotricity. It was a military school.”
“Dios mio, you poor skinny dog. But they didn’t succeed in enslaving you, did they? I notice sometimes you still piss on the shoes of the master.”
“Excuse me, señora?”
“I’ve seen you reading the newspaper to the girls down in the dining room. Changing the headlines to make them laugh. Your little insurrections.” She still faced the painting, speaking without turning around. Was this going to be a dismissal?
“It’s just to pass the time, señora. We still do our work.”
“Don’t worry, I’m a revolutionist. I approve of insurrections. Where did they send you to school, Chicago or something? One of those freezing places?”
“Washington, D.C.”
“Ah. Throne of the kingdom of Gringolandia.”
“More or less. The cornfields outside the throne of the kingdom. The school was in the middle of farms and polo fields.”
“Polo? That’s some kind of crop?”
“A game. Rich people play baseball riding ponies.”
She put down her paintbrush and turned around. “Isn’t it crazy? Rich people in the United States don’t even know how to use money properly.” She peeked at her lunch plates now, inspecting the rellenos. “They don’t mind throwing big parties while people stand outside in the street with nothing. But then they serve puny little foods at the party! And live in houses stacked on top of one another like chicken crates. The women look like turnips. When they dress up, they look like turnips in dresses.”
“You’re right, señora. Mexico is the better place.”
“Oh, Mexico’s going to the devil too. The gringos steal a little more of it every week, replacing the beauty of our campos and our Indios with the latest fashion in ugliness. Probably they’ll turn our maguey into fields for pony-beisbol. It can’t be helped, I suppose. The big fish always eats the little one.”
“Yes, señora.”
“Little dog, don’t give me this ‘si señora.’ I’m sick of that.”
“Sorry. But it’s right, what you said. My mother is Mexican, but all she’s ever wanted to do is dress like an American lady and marry American men.”
The eyebrow went up. “A lot of them?”
“Well, one at a time. And really she only succeeded once, with my father. The other slippery fish all got away.”
She laughed, shaking her head full of ribbons like a flag in the wind. She would never be converted to a turnip. “Insólito, you should come out and piss more often.”
“Olunda keeps my rope tied very short, señora.”
“You have to stop calling me señora. How old are you?”
“Twenty this summer.”
“Look, I’m practically the same as you, twenty-five. It’s Frida, only. César calls me that so you can too, it’s not a crime against the state.”
“César is like your grandfather.”
She tilted her head. “You’re not afraid of me, are you? Just shy, right?”
“Maybe.”
“You don’t have a lot of heat in your blood, is the problem. You’re not completely Mexican, and not all gringo either. You’re like this house, Insólito. A double person made of two different boxes.”
“That might be true, señora, Frida.”
“In the house of your mother, a taste for beauty and poetry. Secret passions, I suspect. And in the gringo side, a head that’s always thinking and surviving.”
“True, maybe. Except my house is only a kitchen, it seems. And very small indeed.”
“The kitchen of your house is ruled by Mexico, thank God.”
4 March
Our Lord Jesus has not yet risen. How do we know this? Olunda grumbles about another day of Lenten meals. But they can be some of the best: lima bean soup, potatoes in green sauce, fried beans. At supper this evening the Painter hinted he needs more boys on the plaster crew, and the mistress scolded him: “Sapo-rana! The way you eat, you should know we need your plaster boy here.” Toad-frog, she calls him, then gets up, walks over to him, and kisses his toad-frog face. They are the strangest couple. And why do these Communists observe Lent, in any case?
The Painter’s new mural in the Palacio Bellas Artes has the newspaper reports flying so fast, their pages might combust. He’s copying the mural he did in the United States that created a scandal and had to be torn down before completion. It frightened the gringos that badly. Scaring gringos can make a hero of any Mexican. Other artists now come to the house every night, crowding around the Riveras’ dining table with two colors of paint still in their hair. Writers, sculptors, bold women in makeup who want the vote, and students who are evidently waiting for San Juan Bautista to bathe, along with the lepers. Some are too old to be students, so who knows what they do. (If anything.) One is a Japanese in gringo clothes, arrived here to make a mural in the new Mercado.