The Lacuna

“What is the difference,” he asked Leandro the next day, “between talking and making a noise?”

Salomé hadn’t yet learned Leandro’s name, she called him “the new kitchen boy.” The last galopina was a pretty girl, Ofelia, too much admired by Enrique, given the sack by Salomé. Leandro took up more space, standing with bare feet set apart, steady as the stuccoed pillars supporting the tile roofs above the walkways of this yellow-ochre house. A row of lime trees in large terra-cotta pots lined the breezeway between the house and kitchen pavilion. And like a tree, Leandro was planted there for most of each day, cutting up chayotes with his machete on the big work table. Or peeling shrimps, or making sopa de milpa: corn kernel soup with diced squash blossom and avocado. Xochitl soup, with chicken and vegetables in broth. Salads of cactus nopales with avocado and cilantro. The rice he made with a hint of something sweet in it.

Every day he said, You could pick up that knife and stop being a nuisance. But smiling, not the way Salomé said “nuisance.” Not the way she said, “If you come in here with those sandy feet your name is mud.”

Regarding the difference between talk and noise, Leandro said, “Ca depende.”

“Depends on what?”

“On intention. Whether he wants another fish to understand his meaning.” Leandro considered his pile of shrimps solemnly, as if they might have had a last wish prior to execution. “If the fish only wants to show he is there, it’s a noise. But maybe the fish-clicks are saying ‘Go away,’ or ‘My food, not yours.’”

“Or, ‘Your name is mud.’”

Leandro laughed, because in Spanish it sounds funny: Su nombre es lodo.

“Exacto,” Leandro said.

“Then to another fish, it’s talk,” the boy said. “But to me it’s only noise.”

Leandro needed help—too many mouths to feed in this house, the Americans liked to eat. Also it was Salomé’s birthday, and she wanted squid. The oil men’s wives’ eyes would swing like the pendulum of a clock beneath their cloche hats when they saw squid a la Veracruzana. But the men would eat tentacles without noticing, enthralled with their own stories. How their hired guns had put down the rebellion in Sonora and sent Escobar running like a dog. The more mezcal went into their glasses, the faster Escobar ran.

After supper Leandro said El flojo trabaja doble, the lazy man has to work double, because the boy tried to carry all the dishes to the kitchen at once. He dropped two white plates on the tile, shattering them all to buttons. So Leandro was right—sweeping up took twice as long as making an extra trip. But Leandro came out and helped pick up the mess, kneeling beneath the Americans’ gaze as they commiserated on the clumsiness of servants, here is one thing that’s the same in every country.

Afterward Salomé tried to get them all to cut a rug. She cranked up the Victrola and waved the mezcal bottle at the men, but they went to bed, leaving her fluttering around the parlor like a balloon of air, let go. It was her birthday, and not even her son to whom she had given life would cut a rug with her. “For God’s sake, William, you’re tedious,” she diagnosed. Nose in the books, you’re nothing but a canceled stamp. Flutie, green apples, wet blanket, this is only a small sample of the names that came to mind when Salomé was stewed to the hat. He did try to dance with her after that, but it was too late. She couldn’t hold herself up on her own stilts.

Salomé is airtight, the men liked to say. Copacetic, the cat’s meow, a snake charmer. Also a fire bell. One of the oil men said that to his wife, when the others were outside. Explaining the situation. Fire bell meant still married, to the husband in America. After all this time not divorced, some poor sod in D.C., an administration accountant. She had the affair right under his nose with this Mexican attaché, she couldn’t have been more than twenty-five at the time, and with that child already. Left the other fellow flat. Be careful of this fancy Salomé, he warned his wife. She’s a disappearing act.

On Cinco de Mayo the village celebrated with fireworks, commemorating the victory over Napoleon’s invasion in the battle at Puebla. Salomé had a headache, one last gift from the night before, and spent the day in her little bedchamber at the end of the hall. She called it Elba, her place of exile. Lately Enrique had been retiring early and closing the heavy door to his own bedroom. Today she was in no mood for noise. Today, she complained, they were making more explosions in the campo than it probably took to scare off Napoleon’s army in the first place.

The boy did not walk into town for the celebration. He knew that in the long run Napoleon’s generals still came back and cuffed Santa Ana, and took over Mexico long enough to make everyone speak French and wear tight pants until 1867, or something near it. He was supposed to finish the book on Emperor Maximiliano, from Enrique’s library. That was Salomé’s program for him, Reading Moldy Books, because there was no school in Isla Pixol suitable for a boy who was already taller than President Portes Gil. But the best place for reading was in the forest, not the house. Under a tree by the estuary, twenty minutes’ walk down the trail. And the book on Maximiliano was enormous. So it only made sense to carry The Mysterious Affair at Styles instead.

The biggest amate tree had buttresses like sails reaching out from the trunk, dividing out little rooms furnished with drapes of fern and patchouli. A rooming house for dragonflies and ant thrushes, and once, a coiled little snake. Many trees in that jungle were as broad around their bases as the huts in Leandro’s village, and held their branches too high to see. There was no knowing what lived up there. Once the saucer-eyed devils had howled for blood, but maybe those branches were only the balconies of monkey hotels, and nesting places for oropéndola birds, whose gurgling song sounded like water bubbling out of a tin canteen.

In Enrique’s library, every wall was covered with wooden cabinets. The room had no windows, only shelves, and all the book cabinets had iron grilles covering their fronts like prisoners’ windows, locked over shelves packed with books. The square openings between the welded bars were just large enough for a fine-boned, long-fingered boy to put his hand through, like slipping on an iron bracelet. He could reach in and touch the books’ spines, exactly as Count Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo had reached through the bars to touch his bride’s face, when she came to see him in prison. Carefully he could slide one book from its place in the packed shelf, and with both hands put through the bars he could turn and examine it, sometimes even open it, if the shelf were deep enough. But not remove it. The grilles had iron padlocks.