The Lacuna

It seems an airy enough estate, from inside. The strange spectre of confinement becomes striking only from the outside, when one walks home to it from the market, for example. The compound occupies a flat-iron shaped lot in Coyoacán where Calle Viena and Rio Churubusco meet at an angle. The high, dark walls enclosing it come together at a point, looking exactly like the dark prow of an ocean liner: the great, slow ship of Trotsky’s fate setting sail down Churubusco, as if it were still a canal in the city on a lake, as Cortés found it. As if one could still build a ship in the desert, and set one’s sights on a new world.

Lorenzo’s mother came this week from the country, bringing one more pair of eager eyes for guard duty: her daughter’s boy, Alejandro. Also, two pairs of rabbits and some checkered hens. Lev is as happy as a lad with his new livestock. The rabbits now have hutches near the entry gate, but Lev says the chickens are “emancipated travelers,” free to roam the courtyard. Natalya objected on grounds of sanitation, and the hens’ safety.

“Nataloschka,” her husband said, “no wolves live here. The chickens are the only ones without the worry of a predator. Let them have an open visa.” Of course she conceded. In Lev’s new study, he sets his chair so he can see out the window into the courtyard where they scuttle around, cocking their heads at beetles in the dust.

Perpetua has walked down the street from the Blue House twice this week, to deliver some pottery Natalya liked especially. Her favorite is the white glazed platter with fish leaping over it, a gift from Frida when they first arrived. Natalya thanked Perpetua and put it away in a cabinet, but today she has brought it out and set it against the wall. In the years with Lev her world has been so constrained, with so few objects of beauty in it. She is not a bulldog, only a woman pressed into the shape of a small jar, possibly attempting to dance in there. It shows in the way she places a seashell on a window sill, a red-painted chair in the corner: she is practiced in the art of creating a still life and taking up residence inside it.

Lorenzo’s nephew, Alejandro, is the youngest of the guards, nineteen or twenty perhaps. From a tiny village near Puebla, he’s the only one of the guards who is not from the political movement, but Lorenzo guarantees his loyalty. Lev welcomes a new recruit.

Alejandro seems happy just to escape a certain village misery. He has a shy, odd manner, precisely what Frida would call a queer duck. She would say she approved, then make sure everyone watched him like a fish in a bowl. Probably she can’t help that, she’s been watched that way herself since marrying Diego.

In New York and Paris when she flew high, the newspaper stories tried to shoot her down. Now that she is coming home, apparently washed up, what they say about her is worse. Like Natalya, she must feel the need to retreat into a small space, making still-life creations and painting herself inside. She doesn’t have to hide from assassins, but being Much-Discussed appears to be its own kind of prison.

The chickens are not the only emancipated ones here. Lev allows writing of any kind. While he himself works tirelessly on Lenin’s biography and a dozen political articles at once, he confessed that really no book can beat a good novel. He wishes he could write one himself.

What a strange discovery. He came in the office late this evening to look for a dictionary, surprised to find one of his assistants still banging at a typewriter.

“Young Shepherd! What business could keep you so late in headquarters?” Headquarters of the Fourth International is his name for the big office next to the dining room. Natalya moved in all three typewriter tables and her roll-top desk, the telephone, bookshelves, file cabinets, and all. It was her idea to make a separate office so all can work here—herself, Van, the Americans who’ve come to study with Lev—without driving the commissar out of his mind. Lev keeps to his little study in the other wing by their bedroom, writing in peace until he needs someone to come and take a dictation.

“I’m sorry, sir.” Gather up the pages quick, put them in a folder. No confession unless forced. “It’s nothing that will liberate the people.”

He waited for more, standing wide-eyed at the doorsill in his shirt and tie. His white hair stood on end from a long day’s work. He pulls his hair while he thinks.

“Sir, I’m reluctant to say.”

“Oh, no. Some secret report to the adversary?”

“Please don’t suggest such an awful thing.”

“What, then? A love letter?”

“It’s more embarrassing than that, sir. A novel.”

The muscles of his face collapsed like a dumpling, all dimples and wrinkled eyes behind the beard and round glasses. Lev’s smile is like no other. He pulled out Natalya’s desk chair and sat in it backward, straddling it like a horse, leaning his elbows on its back and laughing until he nearly wept. “Oh, this is a mechaieh!”

There was nothing to do but wait for a more comprehensible verdict.

“I’ve been worrying where it is you go, my son. When your mind is not here.” He clucked his tongue, said some words in Russian. “A novel! Why do you say this won’t liberate anyone? Where does any man go to be free, whether he is poor or rich or even in prison? To Dostoyevsky! To Gogol!”

“It surprises me to hear you say it.”

His halo of white hair was lit from behind by the blue blaze of the street lamp outside. The windows facing the street are bricked up halfway, but light comes in from above. It looked like a setting for a detective film. He stood and walked to the back bookshelf, making his way between tables and the recording machine cabinet with its cords snaking across the floor. He clicked on the lamp near the bookshelf.

“I want to show you something. My first published book. An account of a young man only twenty-seven years old, imprisoned by the tsar for being a revolutionist, maneuvering a bold and dramatic escape to Europe where he plotted his return with the People’s Army.” Lev found the book and tapped it thoughtfully with his thumb. “This was a popular sensation among the workers of St. Petersburg. The entire Soviet, eventually. If a Russian can read, he has read this one.”

“A novel, sir?”

“Unfortunately, no. Every word of it is true.” He opened the book and turned a few pages. “And since then, only theory and strategy. What a bore I’ve become.”

“But your life is still a potboiler. Stalin’s assassins lurking, the Communist Party and Toledano scheming to poison your name. I hate to say it, but the newspapers might get on your side if you wrote it that way. They could carry your saga in weekly installments, the way they did for Pancho Villa during the war.”