The Lacuna

The only place big enough for washing that many dishes is in the laundry closet under the stair. Down in the courtyard you can still hear them up there drinking their way to an agreement, sometimes all night, like the men who used to visit Don Enrique. But this crowd wants to kick out all the American oil men. The señora shouts: “Save Mexico for the Mexicans! Save the Mexicans for Mexico! The two commandments of our revolution!” Then they all jerk back their heads, swallowing tequila for Mexico.

Tonight the Painter explained, for the benefit of servants trying to slide behind the guests’ chairs to clear the dinner plates, that this was a famous quote from Moses.

“Señor Rivera, Mexico is in the Bible?” Poor Candelaria, the Painter sometimes makes a sport of her. Possibly in more ways than one.

A different Moses, he told her. Moisés Sáenz, in 1926. “Ten years of revolution may not have saved all the Mexican children, but at least we’ve saved them from the pope and the Italian Renaissance.”

“The Renaissance had its good points,” his wife maintained.

“Honestly, Friducha. Who needs all those fat little cherubs flying around?”

As a matter of fact she is painting one with cherubs now. They look like unruly children with wings. She never seems happy with what she’s painting, and talks to herself: “Oh boy, that won’t work. What a lot of shit. That looks like it came out of the ass of a dog.” Candelaria won’t go near her. Next to Mother’s Museum of Bad Words, Señora Frida could construct a pyramid.

But in her husband she has perfect confidence. She always says to the guests: “Damn all other artists to hell, Diego is the cultural revolution!” Even when some of her guests are among the damned. One time in her studio she said, “He’s very great. Don’t forget that, if you think you’re looking at a fat frog who won’t pick up his pants from the floor. His work is the whole thing. He’s doing what nobody could do before.” Maybe she heard Olunda complaining about him. Voices carry in this strange cement house.

She says Mexicans have trouble making friends with their history because we’re many different nations: Toltec, Aztec, Mayan, Oaxacan, Sonoran, all fighting each other from the very beginning. That’s why the Europeans and gringos could come in and walk over everything. “But Diego can take all those different people and make them into one Mexicanized patria,” she said. He paints that on the wall, so big you won’t forget.

It explains a lot, what she said. Why he is much-discussed. And why some people want him torn down, not just gringos but also the Mexican boys in tejano hats who don’t want anyone saying they were born from between the legs of an Indian woman. He makes people feel things. How thrilling it must be, to tell the story of La Raza in bold colors and no apology: Indians walking out of history into the present, all in a line with their L-shaped noses, marching past Cortés into the vanishing point of their future.

9 April

President Cárdenas agrees with the Rivera dinner guests, it’s time to kick out the oil men. Mexican oil for the Mexican people now. The newspaper says the workers will only have to work eight hours a day from now on, and get a share of profits. Cárdenas even kicked out Big Chief Calles, boss of every Mexican president since the rocks of the earth were still warm. Now he can enjoy the company of his gringo business friends more than ever, because the president had him arrested and put on a plane to New York. “What a Boy Scout, that Cárdenas,” Olunda said. “Usually they just assassinate their rivals.”

It was also a day of liberation for the peons of the Kitchen of Microscopia. The señora wants a huge Easter party, and decided to have it at a regular house with a real kitchen: her father’s house on Allende Street. It’s where they lived before, near the Melchor market, with the jungle courtyard. She had César drive the staff there to get started cooking for Saturday, assisted by that house’s ancient housekeeper and two girls. The dining table was piled with newspapers; the Painter still gets a lot of mail there. The others begged to be entertained with dramatic readings while cutting up one thousand tomatoes. Candelaria is tender-hearted, but Olunda only wants the motorcar plunges into the canyons of Orizaba, so the kitchen readings always involve some compromise. The Allende Street house staff were an easier audience: old Perpetua seems deaf, and the two girls laughed at anything: Upon arrival in New York City, Calles told reporters…“I was thrown out of Mexico because I forgot my pants and wallet in the bedroom of a puta on Avenida Colón.” Candelaria and the girls shrieked and giggled.

Mistress Frida appeared in the doorway, completely unexpectedly. Olunda threw down the fork she was using to mash avocados and cupped her hands over her fleshy ears. The house girls ardently peeled the nopales without looking up.

“My concern is for your ignorance,” the señora snapped. “This is a historic day. Read it to them correctly.”

“Yes, señora.”

She stood, waiting.

“Upon arrival in New York City, the former Jefe Maximo told reporters, ‘I was exiled because I opposed the attempts to create a dictatorship of the proletariat.’”

“Very good. Keep going.” She swirled and walked out to attend to her father, leaving the kitchen proletariat to absorb the real news of the day. The State Department of Chiapas, responding to the Syndicate of Indigenous Workers, has voted to raise the wages of all coffee workers throughout the state. In a formal declaration to the Congress, President Cárdenas stated, “In the new democracy, organized laborers exert a genuine influence on the political and economic leadership of our country.”

Olunda’s eyes darted from her avocados to the doorway, to the newspaper, and back to her bowl. Dreaming, perhaps, of a Syndicate of Avocado Mashers.

19 April

The mistress is having a relapse of difficulties with her back, an infection of her eyes, kidney stones, and an affair with the Japanese sculptor. So says Olunda, but it hardly seems possible: when would she have time? But Candelaria has evidence: the last time she let the Japonés through the gate, the Painter came barreling down the spiral stair with his pistol out. The sculptor is no longer welcome in either half of the double house.

22 April

The señora packed herself off to the hospital, taking paintbrushes and some dolls. Today she sent word she also needed chiles rellenos, so the master dispatched the male servants to the hospital with her lunch. Possibly to see if the Japonés is lurking there, attempting sexual liaisons with a woman in a plaster spinal corset. César got lost twice on the way, then remained in the car to nap and recover himself for the voyage home.