The Lacuna

Thank you also for the small stone figurine. I first found him lying on the bank, the day we had our picknick at Teotihuacán, while you napped. Please don’t report my larceny to Dr. Gamio, or to Diego, who might be nationalistic on the subject of stolen art. (It would not bring me favor in my new employment.) This little fellow begged to be taken to a new world, after waiting two thousand years facedown in dirt. You abetted his wish. He sends his gratitude, mingled with mine, from where he now sits on my desk near the window, surveying the surprising scenery of Carolina.

Your astonished and grateful friend,

INSÓLITO

November 2, 1943

Dear Frida,

A glittering shower falls at a slant across my window. Some form of god has come to visit our dark autumn tunnel, like Zeus making himself a beam of light to impregnate Danae. In this case, it is not really glittering light but beech leaves. You’ve never seen anything as dramatic as these American trees, dying their thousand deaths. The giant beech next door intends to shiver off every hair of its pelt. The world strips and goes naked, the full year of arboreal effort piling on the sidewalks in flat, damp strata. The earth smells of smoke and rainstorms, calling everything to come back, lie down, submit to a quiet, moldy return to the cradle of origins. This is how we celebrate the Day of the Dead in America: by turning up our collars against the scent of earthworms calling us home.

Mexico rules my kitchen, as you know. The pan de muerto is rising there now, filling the house with a yellow scent, reminding me how you shaped yours like skulls sprinkled with sugar. My neighbors wouldn’t care to see such things delivered on a plate. They celebrate the Day of the Dead very strangely here: they make pumpkins into heads with flaming eyes, and the children run about the neighborhood asking for cookies. But these urchins showed up two days early! Now that the cookies are made, the children seem finished with the whole thing. They have smashed the pumpkin-heads to orange gruel on the sidewalks. The cat may have to help eat the pan de muerto. In remembering the dead, one more this year: your father. Old Guillermo, how could he not still be there? Walking slowly around your house, blinking his huge eyes as he enters each room, not seeing the furniture but the angles of light on the floor.

Your grief is reasonable, but it’s no good to hear you’re a wreck from head to toe. Tuberculosis of the bones makes me shiver. It’s like the season’s last tomato that sat in a bowl in the kitchen this week, and when taken up to be sliced, collapsed to a limp sac of foul juice—its beautiful plump skin was hiding rot. Frida, you must feel tricked this way by your body. Even your cures sound like diseases, electricity and calcium therapy. But your doctors are good men, especially Dr. E. in San Francisco, who sounds kind. These surgeries are sure to be successful. You will have many more days like this one for remembering, and without number, abrazos from your friend,

SÓLI

May 21, 1944

Dear Frida,

This Sunday morning bright images of you keep nudging into my solitary confinement, urging me to write after the long silence. Here is a strange beetle, trapped inside the window near the desk. He bombs his head continually against the glass, distracting the revision of an unwieldy chapter: “The garrison stormed, heads all smashed!” This little bombardier wears a stunning uniform, emerald green with copper-colored linings to his wings, and a respectable proboscis. Words do the thing no justice. You would do better, if you saw it. You could put it in a painting.

And next: every young girl passing by on the sidewalk to catch the Haywood bus, another distraction. They’re all Fridas! Since the weather turned warm they all wear peasant clothes, colorful skirts and blouses with ruffled shoulders. They don’t wear their skirts long as you do because it’s unlawful here, punishable by a fine. I vow it’s true, fabric-conservation order. Not enough uniforms to cover all the boys at the front. The War Production Board announced also last week, no blouse may have more than one ruffle per sleeve. I thought you might like to know that, as you sit somewhere in your thousand ruffles reading this, flashing gold teeth—metal that could be used in some alloy for artillery casings, come to think of it. You can’t come here, you would be confiscated.

Your despair over the war is understandable. I undertake this letter to cheer you with another view of things. The gringos are embracing the antifascist fight with whole hearts, and that surely must be good, even if it’s many years late in the opinion of your friends who first went to fight fascism in Spain. But you should see the Yanks now, swearing unity with people from across borders just as you and Diego used to do, raising your glasses, singing “The Internationale” while we tried to clear the plates. I keep wondering what Lev would make of these times. He would abhor Roosevelt’s friendly partnership with Marshal Stalin as our two countries lean shoulder-to-shoulder in battle. But wouldn’t he agree with the president, that sacrifice must be made toward the ideal? Our GIs have genuinely rescued the Soviet State, scurrying tons of supplies across the Persian desert to save the starving Russians. And now Stalin’s army returns the favor, beating back Hitler on the Eastern Front. A year ago all seemed lost, the Axis was unstoppable in Europe or the Pacific. Now some say this war could be won.

If so, then the victory will belong to housewives as well as soldiers, because every one here is part of the fight. To you the war is useless destruction, a match played out over the wireless, but here it is the organizing principle of our days. If cloth is in short supply, the girls will wear only one ruffle per sleeve, no more, and no fuss. If the Axis sank eight million tons of warships last year, so be it, these ladies will hand over what appears to be eight million tons of hairpins, let the tresses fall where they may. The neighbor children use rocks to bang old hinges from gates for the metal drives, war brides turn in their silver, grandfathers their bronze-tipped canes. Sacrifice is a sacrament. How we all cheered when Howard Hughes’s new factory turned out a battleship just twenty-four days after laying its keel! This man Hughes drew my mother to her death, years ago when his stunt flight landed in Mexico City. But however I may miss her, I harbor no grudge as I watch him now, welding together the John Fitch from pieces of my neighborhood. All as one, with hairpins and paper clips, we vanquish Hirohito and his Mitsubishi warship factory.

The war is on every page of every magazine. Even in the advertisements, which strangely don’t encourage buying now, but the opposite. Manufacturers fly the “E” flag to show their whole production is needed for war use. Buy nothing but war bonds, give your blood to the Red Cross. “Follow doctor’s advice to the letter and keep appointments brief,” my magazine warns, because half our doctors are in the forces, leaving the home-front men with twice as many to care for. Travel for emergencies only. After victory is won, they promise us the world: a new model of radio, automobiles with synthetic rubber tires, things yet unseen by civilian eye. But for now, don’t ask even for a Dot fastener, and good luck finding butter or cheese with your ration stamps. Bacon has vanished from our land. So have new cars, not one this year for civilians, and if you already have one it wears an “A” stamp on its windscreen, for “Almost Empty”–gasoline is rationed. Horse droppings have made a bold comeback on Pack Square. One old cog on my street has roused his Stanley Steamer. He came through yesterday and a neighbor lady fainted, thinking it was an air attack. The new American motto is, “We make do with nothing new,” no wristwatches, new shirts, or bedsheets, it’s about the same plan as the church: endure your suffering to win a golden hereafter.