The Lacuna

Here, very little is to be done. Cooking for unemployed bodyguards and Natalya, who hardly eats. She has survived six weeks now on lemon-juice tonics and Phanodorm. Every afternoon at two o’clock she parks her black shoes like two tiny automobiles beside her bed and lies down, fully dressed, to survive the remainder of the day.

One of the messages carried to Lev concerned a visit from Joseph Hansen, a comrade from the Trotskyist Party of the United States. Natalya sees hope in it: Lev’s true appetite, she says, is for his work. The arrival of Hansen will bring him back.

8 September

Lev returns, as predicted, and with him the flood tides of paper. Idle days gone. Van works all day transcribing the wax cylinders, while Lev generates more. The typing is endless, interrupted only by the security drills.

Our menage is stirred like a soup: Diego wants Mr. Hansen and his wife Reba to have one of the connecting rooms. So all the guards will now share one tiny room, unless one would share a bed with old Perpetua, who snores like a boar pig. The house girls made a pallet under the fig in the courtyard so they can get some peace.

Members of the staff feel more than ever like inmates, because of the crowding and extreme security measures. The threats are real—this is understood, but not easy. Belén and Carmen Alba can’t visit their mothers. The door is rarely opened; even a trip to the market has to coincide with the change of guards, so as to interfere less with Lev’s work schedule. Van has ceased his nocturnal visits to the tavern. The bodyguards sleep with pistols in their belts, the possibility of death waiting behind every knock. The heat of summer has abated, and nothing is as it was.

12 September

Arrival of Joseph Hansen and his wife Reba. Lev and Joe are so happy to meet, they stayed up all the night talking. Reba helped make up extra beds, stuffed mattresses on the floor of a tiny room where now five men will sleep when not on duty. Reba apologized terribly and offered to share Perpetua’s bed. Diego didn’t forewarn her about the number of people already living here, probably because he neglected to notice it himself. She nearly wept. “And tomorrow you’ll have to feed us all. You must be tired of salvaging these men who are saving the world.”

Hansen means to write a biography of Lev. In that case, this recording of events may no longer be necessary. Mr. Hansen understands politics far more perfectly, and can record conversations objectively, not laced with an ignorant cook’s prejudices for sweet and salt. History can fall into more capable hands.

In any case, a record maintained to another person’s standard is no real comfort to the spirit. Let it here be said, the writer understands this assignment was intended as a kindness, for which he is grateful. But the task has no freedom in it. A record meant for another’s eyes is not recording, but spying.

September 16

Frida.

Carmen Frida Kahlo de Rivera, to be precise. And Van.

Were discovered sleeping on the pallet under the fig tree, where the house girls usually sleep but were tonight sent home to their families for the national holidays.

Recorded here for history: the couple lay with limbs entwined, his great white arm sheltering her small, curved body. Her black hair surrounded both of them, rooting them to the bed as if they were growing there, a single plant. They seemed consoled by sleep, unaware of an observer who had consumed some beer, earlier in the evening during the Independence fiesta, and hoped to deposit a secret piss in the geranium bed. The pair did not know they had been discovered. Apparently they still do not. The observation is here reported. Some madness of penned dogs infects this camp.

November 7

The Dewey Commission formally acquitted Lev of every accusation from the Moscow Trials. After months of deliberation they have released their written verdict to every nation. Of course Stalin still wants him murdered, more than ever. And the American and European newspapers that made him guilty in the first place have barely reported the Dewey Commission. Diego says the gringos are watching Hitler with a nervous eye, especially now with the Anschluss and the Rome-Berlin axis. He says Britain and the United States will want Russia on their side, if there is a war. So they can’t let Trotsky be right about Stalin being a monster. They are going to need that monster.

Still a cloud has lifted, in time to celebrate Lev’s birthday and the October Revolution. The Riveras made the largest-ever fiesta, hired marimbas, the patio and house filled entirely. The security men nearly exploded from nerves. The guests are not artistic Communists any more but peasants, white-trousered men in huaraches, unionists who support Lev. The women entered shyly with their heads down, braids nearly sweeping the courtyard stones. A few brought live chickens as gifts, their feet tied nicely with henequen ribbon. But the cooking for this fiesta started a week ago.

Señora Frida was especially extravagant in a gold Tehuana blouse, green skirt, and blue shawl. She arrived with a large parcel wrapped up in paper: a portrait of herself, a birthday gift for Lev. Somehow it did not get presented, in the middle of so much celebration. People were already sleeping on chairs and window ledges, and it was halfway to morning when she came in the kitchen demanding, “For the love of Petrograd, can anybody tell me why we celebrate the October Revolution on the seventh goddamned day of November?”

“Belén asked Van the same question. Apparently it took more than a month for the Russian proletariat to overthrow seven centuries’ worth of oppression.”

“Well, according to Diego you should go to bed now. He says it’s inappropriate to have the servants spend more than one day making so much food to honor the ten million starving peasants.”

“Don’t worry, all the other oppressed cooks have already gone to bed. I was just cleaning the chocolate pots. And I’m sorry to report it, but the cooking for today started a week ago. What does Diego expect? For you to do that kind of work yourself?”

She sank delicately into one of the wooden chairs at the yellow table, perched like a canary. “Oh, Sóli. You know that frog and me. We can fight about any stupid thing.”

“Not to mention the things he doesn’t know about.”

You looked up then with a child’s dread, clutching your shawl as if it might protect you from bullets or ghosts. How interesting, to discover the power to frighten you. When mankind is exhausted, he creates new enemies, Lev says. The qualities of cruelty are spontaneous. Our best task is to move forward.

“Frida, forget it. Nobody will tell Diego about you and Van. It only went in the book so you would know you’ve been seen. You can tear out that page. But as the wife of a man who keeps a Luger next to his dentifrice? You could be more careful.”