The Lacuna

This household is like a pocketful of coins that jingled together for a time, but now have been slapped on a counter to pay a price. The pocket empties out, the coins venture back into the infinite circulations of currency, separate, invisible, and untraceable. That particular handful of coins had no special meaning together, it seems, except to pay a particular price. It might remain real, if someone had written everything in a notebook. No such record now exists.

Frida says everybody had better knock the Trotsky dust off their shoes and get out of here. “Sóli, I have a plan for you,” she said, seated at the little wooden desk in her studio. She’d sent Perpetua running down the street with an urgent summons—Frida wants to see you right away. “We have to get you away from here, you’re not safe. The police took everything from your room, even your socks. It’s because of all those things you wrote. I’m sure they’re watching you.” The police took many things from many people, but she believes words are the most dangerous. She says maybe Diego was right about “your damn diaries,” the confiscated notebooks might put their author in jeopardy.

But she has a plan. She needs to send eight paintings to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for a show: Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art. And after that another show is planned, Twentieth-Century Portraits. Frida has become a fixture of her century. The Levy Gallery may be interested as well. She needs a consignment marshal. “Or whatever the hell you call it in English,” she said; she’ll look it up for the documents. Pastor de consignación is what she called it, a “shipping shepherd,” a legally authorized agent to accompany the paintings on the train all the way to New York. “Your passport is already fixed up. You were ready to go with Lev last fall, for that hearing.”

“Frida, the police won’t allow an emigration. Not with a murder investigation still open.”

“Who says you’re emigrating? I already talked with them about this. Leaving the country for a short time is okay, as long as you’re not a suspect. I told them you’re my consignment marshal.”

“You already talked with the police?”

“Sure. I told them you have to oversee this delivery because I can’t trust anybody else to do it,” she said, tapping her pencil against the wooden desk. This plan had no complications at all, in her mind, beyond selecting which portraits to send for the show.

“And then?”

“No and then. You’ll have to carry all these customs forms, one for each painting. You show them at the border, and get each one stamped. Declarations of value and all that. You have to be really careful to hold on to all the receipts from the lockup.”

“The lockup?”

“Don’t worry, you’re not going to jail.” Her hair has grown back, just barely long enough to coronate herself again, with the help of plenty of ribbons. When did she cut it off? The conversation of that morning is gone, that notebook is gone. Every time it hits like a rock. In Frida’s studio, in front of the window, exactly where Van used to sit for dictation, she now had a half-finished portrait on her easel: Frida in a man’s suit, cutting off her hair. Keeping your damn diaries, but these paintings are her own version of it.

Today she rattled like a gourd full of seeds, talking and fidgeting with the things on her desk. “Okay, the porter captain on the train will make the guys bring the crates to a special part of the baggage car, where they have a cage. You follow him in there to see him do it. He’ll lock the crates inside and give you a receipt for getting them back. So you don’t want to lose that.”

“A cage?”

“Not the kind of cage for lions. Well, maybe they would put lions in there if they were expensive ones.” She seemed desperate to be cheerful. She picked up tubes of paint, like big silver cigars with brown paper labels around their middles, then fingered the brushes standing together in a cup. She was afraid. It took a while to understand that this was the problem: fear. Not for herself but for her friend, whom she had thrown to the lions many times before. This time she wants him saved.

“Oh. So the paintings won’t just be in a big suitcase or something?”

“Oh my God, wait till you see. They build a traveling crate for each one. Diego has a man who does this, he’s very expert. He wraps them in layers and layers of kraft paper like a mummy and then fits each painting in two wooden crates, one inside the other. There’s a space in between that’s stuffed with straw, to prevent damage during shipping. The crates are huge. You could get inside one yourself.”

That was on a Friday, because Perpetua was cooking fish. The day before the funeral? How long did it take to build those crates?

The police returned a few things the following week, but not much, not even clothing. Knowing those pigs, she said, they stole anything useful and burned the rest. Reba had to ask Natalya to open the wardrobe and pass around Lev’s shirts, so the possessionless guards could have something to wear. His shirts were so familiar. It was startling to see them from the back, walking through the garden. Of all of us, they fit Alejandro best: small devout Alejandro, no one would guess they were the same size. Lev was so much larger than his body.

One day (which?), Frida said she went to the police station and screamed until they returned a few more items. Probably the officers locked the doors in terror, and threw things out the windows. So she had a small suitcase of items to hand over, along with the documents, for the trip to New York. That was yesterday. In the dining room of the Blue House, after one last look round the place, those mad blue walls and yellow wicker chairs. That glorious kitchen. Embraces from Belén and Perpetua.

“The police already had destroyed a lot of your things,” Frida said flatly when she produced the suitcase. “This is what you’ll need for the trip, and the rest you wouldn’t want. There were some really old clothes and things, but you won’t need that junk right away. I had it packed up and stored in a trunk at Cristina’s.”

“Anything else? Papers?”

“Only some books I think you borrowed from Lev, so I gave them to Natalya. Your room was all in a big metal box marked ‘C,’ maybe the third one they tore apart. I could tell because it was your clothes. There was hardly anything else, just some old magazines. We can send you the trunk after you get an address in Gringolandia. Sóli, jump! You’re going to be a gringo!”