The Lacuna

“I thought you would be furious. Because of Van.”

“Fury demands a fire. For Van and me, no hope of a fire. As you pointed out that day on our boat outing. Had you already been with both of them, back then?”

“You make me sound like an animal. ‘A madness of penned dogs,’ that’s cruel.”

“It wasn’t you who surprised me, only Van. And Lev too, they seem such moral fellows. Forgive me for putting it that way.”

For once your eyes stayed steady, trained on the question, not looking for the door. “What do you know about love?”

“Nothing, apparently. That it winks on and off like an electric bulb.”

You seemed to be excavating your soul to locate some kindness. “People want to be consoled. You’re so young. You still have a lot of time for being moral.”

“You’re only a few years older. As you’ve said.”

“But old anyway, with all my patched-up parts. I’m as doomed as all these men, for lesser reasons of course.”

The pots were all shining now. Nothing more to do.

“Sóli, there’s an ache in this house. Tomorrow anybody could get a bullet in the head. Men like Diego and Lev have to make their vows of sacrifice. ‘Better to live on your fucking feet than die on your knees,’ and all that. But under all that fatalism, they want life.”

“Who doesn’t want life?”

“But they do, more than most. They want it so badly they shake the world until its teeth fall out. It’s why they’re the men they are.”

“And Frida can help them to be alive. When she feels like it.”

“It was only that one night, with Van. I think he had a lot to drink. But you can never tell with the big, quiet ones. He’s dying of loneliness.”

“Who is, Van?”

“Yes. Did you know he had a wife?”

“Van is married?”

“He was. To a girl in France. They were very young when they met, I gather, both working for the Party. They had a little boy. The wife’s name is Gabrielle. She wanted to come here but Natalya wouldn’t have it—apparently they had quite a row. You know how protective Natalya is, she thinks of Van as her son.”

“It’s understandable. After all they’ve been through. Her losses.”

“You’re right. Forget about Diego, I think Natalya would kill me if she found out about Van and me.”

A wife. Van had a wife named Gabrielle. He has a son. This is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.

This is the last report. November 7, 1937.

Coyoacán notebook

25 April 1938

Mother is gone. Dear God in whom she never could believe, please let her not be alone in some drear heaven without men or music. Salomé, motherless mother, never more than a child herself. Dead, with her heart in the wrong place.

In the beginning were the howlers, mother and son joined in terror of the devils stalking from above. No matter how many times men told her, “It’s nothing. It’s a practical matter.” Write down the story of what happened to us, she said. Promise me. So when nothing is left but bones and scraps of clothes, someone will know where we went. She said to begin this way: They are crying for our blood. But how can the story end so soon, and so bitterly? Salomé in a shattered sedan with her heart dislocated one last time. Nothing left but bones and scraps of clothes. Who can say where she went?

The new beau was a foreign-news correspondent. They were dashing to the airfield to catch a glimpse of a daredevil pilot said to be landing there for just a few hours. A stunt flyer, planning later this year to circle the world. These men with their great plans. The correspondent is an Englishman, Lewis. Probably he promised Mother the chance to meet famous people at the airfield. Instead they met head-on with a truck coming from Puebla, carrying cattle to market. Some cattle escaped. Lewis suffered a broken collarbone and lacerations from flying windshield glass. But it was on Mother’s lap that the engine of his Studebaker came to rest, causing what the doctor called a spontaneous pneumothorax. It means that a hole ripped in one lung suddenly let out all the air, pulling the heart into the right half of her chest. Tearing it thus from the position it held for forty-two years, without ever settling in completely. Maybe for those last few shivering beats it was at rights. Maybe her heart stopped yearning to be somewhere else.

Lewis told what he remembered of it, offering condolences from a bed in the English hospital. His head was bandaged like a mummy from the films. “You’re the son,” the mummy observed. “She said you were planning on university, to be a solicitor.” He had only known her a short while. Didn’t feel entitled, really, to say anything at a funeral. Diego, with usual generosity, paid for the casket and a special mass despite his atheism. And despite Mother’s. The mistake passed unnoticed among the few friends gathered, none of whom had known her in life. Just the one son, bearing up the weight of his own bones and damp unmanly grief. What a raging, salted wound, that sad little passage, what arrogance the world holds against women like Salomé. So many salons she has entered on the arm of a beau, always ready to charm the necessary bureaucrats of this world. Yet in the end, not one proved willing to escort her out of it.

How could a life of such large hopes be so small in the end? Her last apartment: one room above a lace-and-girdle shop. One trunk of frocks and phonograph records, donated to a coworker. Every casa chica was smaller than the one before. Were the beaux less generous over time? Her assets less marketable? If she had lived to be old, would she have resided in a teacup, to be sipped at intervals beneath some gray moustache?

At least she made the papers, departing as she did. A small note in the big News Extra about a daredevil flyer called Howard Hughes: “Among the press mobs, a foreign correspondent was injured and female acquaintance killed in a collision while speeding to the site on the Viaducto Alemán.” Her mark on history: the female acquaintance.

26 April

Lev couldn’t attend the mass of course, for safety, but continues to say he was sorry for that. His whole body winced the morning of the news. He and Natalya are raw at every edge since Lyova’s murder in February. In a Paris hospital, where in heaven’s name any person should be safe. They have no children left now, only the grandchild Seva from the eldest daughter. Lev’s supporters are falling to a pogrom, everyone in the Vorkuta labor camp executed on the same day. And yet the United States claims Stalin as an ally, still. They have offered to help extradite Lev, for the purpose of execution.