The Lacuna

She has moved on from oil men, there was no future in that stock. Don Enrique has lost everything in the nationalization. Mother reports that the hacienda on Isla Pixol has been appropriated, turned over to the people of the village as a communal farm. They turned the house into a school.

“Well, good. One provincial school will have some books in it, anyway.”

“You would be on their side, wouldn’t you? Houseboy for the pinkos.”

“The point of the appropriation law is restitution, Mother. Meaning Don Enrique or his family must have taken that land from the villagers in the first place.”

“But look, were they really using it? Your Leandro is probably the president of the collective now, trying to work out how to put on a pair of shoes.”

“My Leandro? He had a wife. The only man in that house who did.”

“Ooh, you slay me. Poor old Enrique, he got his sock chorus, didn’t he? Can you imagine the scrow, when they put him off his own place? And his mother! Holy moly, that must have taken the army.” Mother took a nibble of her watermelon salad.

“Consorting with Americans has improved your English.”

“As far as I care, Enrique and his relatives can go chase themselves, and you can put that in your hat. There’s some jazz talk.”

“And you can put this in your hat, Mother. Washing the dishes of pinkos doesn’t make someone a pinko. It’s not like an influenza.”

“I’m just razzing you. I’d take up with a pinko in two toots, if he was famous and had a wad of tin. That artist’s little girlfriend is one lucky duck.”

“The little girlfriend is actually his wife.”

“Like I said. But what a piece of calico, all spuzzed up like an Indian. She’s no Garbo. How’d she get lucky?”

“He’s fond of the way she dresses. They’re nationalists.”

“No soap!” She shook her head. “To me she looks like a corn-eater.”

“You used to ask, What kind of man would chase after that? In Isla Pixol, remember? Now you know.”

“Hey, you got a gasper?” She took a cigarette and lit it, pushing away her unfinished lunch. Poor Mother, still living from one gasp to the next. She removed a piece of tobacco from her tongue, and announced: “A corn-eater will never be any more than she is.”

It was no use reminding Mother of her temporary craze for learning the sandunga. If corn-eaters are now having their day in nationalist Mexico, in Mother’s estimate they will soon lose the race to fillies and sweet patooties. The afternoon crowd at La Flor had waned, but she kept glancing around the patio, always on the alert.

“What’s become of Don Enrique, then? Is he begging on the streets?”

“Oh golly no. He’s living in one of his other places. Up in the oil fields somewhere in the Huasteca. Enrique could always pull more money out of his nalgas. No matter how much he complained to us about our spending.”

She leaned forward and looked up with big eyes under the brim of her cloche hat, and suddenly there she was: the other Mother. The mischievous girl, drawing another child into her conspiracy. “Don’t worry about Don Enrique, mi’ijo. Dios les da el dinero a los ricos, porque si no lo tuvieran, se morirían de hambre.”

God gives money to the rich because if they didn’t have it, they would starve.

1 July

The Riveras’ wad of tin must not be as big as Mother thinks. Señora Frida had to make a strategy for financing her birthday party: she painted a portrait of the lawyer’s wife and sold it to him. The party will be at the Allende Street house to hold all the people, as she has invited three quarters of the Republic, including mariachis. The painters and the gloomy writers are coming. Olunda is in a frenzy. Chicken escabeche, pork and nopales in pipián sauce, mole poblano. Sweet potatoes mashed with pineapple. Tomato and watercress salad. The pork-rib and tomato stew she calls “the tablecloth stainer.” At last report she also wants shrimps and marinated pigs’ feet. The señora might have to paint portraits of the guests as they come in, and sell them on the way out, to pay the butcher after this fiesta. A wearying twentieth birthday expected for the cook.

14 July

Housecleaning. Eight paintings moved from Señora Frida’s cramped studio into the storage room on the Painter’s side. The nice painting of her grandparents, the odd one of herself and the monkey, and the bloody one that Candelaria talks about, from when she lived in the apartment on Insurgentes. Each title has to go in the ledger before it’s moved upstairs: the bloody portrait of the stabbed girl is called A Few Little Pokes. She painted it after a man in the Zona Rosa stabbed his girlfriend twenty-six times, and when the police came and found her dead, the boyfriend said, “What’s the problem? I only gave her a few little pokes.” The story was in all the newspapers. Señora said, “Insólito, you’d be amazed what people will buy.” Did she mean the painting, or the man’s story?

5 August

The people who come to dinner with paint in their hair now have a name for themselves: the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors. After the plates are cleared they bring the typewriter from the Painter’s office and make a newspaper right on the dining table. The writer in charge, Señor Buerrero, was the pigmentist on the mural crew. They argue about everything: Which is better, art or philosophy? Easel art for the bourgeoisie, or murals for the public? Which is the more nationalist, pulque or tequila? The servants get an earful, better than any school yet. Tonight they argued about how to defeat fascism in Spain. Mexico opposes the Fascists, even though the gringos and British think a stern fellow like Franco is just the thing to straighten up Spain. The Riveras’ old friend Siqueiros is there now, fighting alongside the Spaniards.

But he was strange, Alfaro Siqueiros. The type to find a fight anywhere, war or no war. When he used to come to supper, Olunda would pull out her crucifix and say, “Dios mio, don’t use the good talavera, it will be in pieces before the pastry.” Rivera calls him a bang-bang artist, making murals with a spray gun and airplane paints. Siqueiros called Rivera a high-flying Communist, getting commissions from gringos and robber barons. Then Rivera would say, Look at your friend Stalin if you want to see the robber baron maximo, and usually that was when the talavera became endangered.

Really, those two have only one fight: Who is a better painter, Siqueiros or Rivera?