Don’t they sound more beautiful without me trying to place them in the place that I just saw? Because what do I know of them except that the jacaranda will turn purple when it blooms, and that we could probably eat the chestnuts if we had carried them back with us. But it’s hard to know what is too intimate a gesture when you’re walking through the jungle with the woman your new father prefers. Stooping to gather chestnuts is probably such a one.
“So do you think that Jack will come around again?” I tried to sound as if I was making conversation, but C. was ever sly.
She smiled at me, visibly. “Not you too,” she smirked. Gallantly, she didn’t make me answer. “He always was a cat.”
I didn’t know what she meant by this, and I didn’t want her to catch me in my ignorance, so I didn’t ask.
“Have you known him a long time?” I asked, which seemed a perfectly reasonable question, but she was still staring at me. Like that.
“On and off,” she said. “As one does, with all the moving. He was sent away, you know, banned, earlier than the rest of us. Konrad and Jack both went to school with Schlechty.” She coughed, but held her hand up. “With the Führer. But Jack’s not interested in tact. Afraid he went out of his way to point out how hopeless the Great Führer was as an artist, how . . . tedious, you know? But some people can’t be teased. But then, I suppose it wasn’t really teasing. Jack probably smelled it, even then. How vengeful he could be. How . . . mad. I think it was infuriating for Schlechty to be around people who were gifted. And”—she held her finger up, as if conducting her own thoughts—“impertinent. Because Jack does it all, you know, collages, drawings, painting . . . he even writes sometimes. But he doesn’t care. He used to. Painted for the war, I don’t suppose you knew that?”
I let my throat make a muffled sound; I didn’t want her to stop talking.
“Official war artist. Can you imagine? Don’t suppose they’ll have those this time round. Sent to the front lines to paint.”
C. stopped in her path and bent down to inspect a stick insect that was either eating, or a part of, a green and spiny leaf.
“That’s how he got into Dadaism,” C. said. “Nothing meaning anything, all that. This was after the war. They tried to show the world the senselessness . . .” She stroked the insect’s back. “He believed it for a while, Jack. He really did. Back in Vienna, you should have seen what they got up to.” C. smiled, and stood up. Seemed determined to continue, and oh, I had a thrill!
“They really believed. Fire, fire, fire. Got people worked up about it, too. But then you had the clashes, and the ludicrous inflation. Really, it turns out that people just want to buy things, they don’t want to change their minds.”
I watched as the stick insect reached the place where the dirt road turned to jungle to join the other leaf things in the woods.
“Anyway, everyone says he’s done with making art. Which probably isn’t true. If it were true, he’d be dead. Some people need to create in order to be whole. I hope . . .” Her face was troubled. “I hope he gets that back.”
I could tell from the place her eyes were looking that she wasn’t talking about Jack anymore. I wasn’t immune to the talk; I’d lived in the houses, too. How something had broken inside Konrad at Les Milles, permanently taken. How it wasn’t as liberating as the artists had thought it would be, to experience real fear.
“Well,” I said, not wanting to venture into talk of Konrad, which would, in its own way, be talk about my mother, whom C. had once called “inconsequential” in front of me and Mum. “So you don’t think he’ll come around again?”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “When he finds time. You know, Jack’s not like the rest of us, sitting around banging our heads against the wall day after day for the right words. From what I gather, he lives like a real Mexican. Selling cattle, killing cattle, I don’t know.” She seemed rattled all of the sudden, and I feared it was my fault.
“But yes,” C. said, as if she’d decided to be kinder. “It would be nice to do something. Really do something. Something that’s not this.” Her gesture encompassed the walking, and also the waiting: the waiting for the boat to come, the waiting for the rain, the waiting for the time when she would be back to working proudly, without so many breaks.
“He’s a special man, you know,” C. said, her shoulders a bit higher. “He’s never belonged to anyone. Never could be bought.”
My cheeks burned. Who else could she be speaking of but Mum? And why would she, when we were having a nice talk? I had thought it obvious, almost like a rule even, that we wouldn’t talk of Mum.
It is hardly worth noting that we didn’t make it to the stables. Or that I didn’t dare say anything further to the woman after that. How terrible! The closer my life gets to something consequential, there’s always a reason, decorum, history, a suggestion to turn back.
I will have to learn to be bolder and stop swallowing my concerns! For example, I could have said: That is out of place! I realize about my mother and the things that people say, but Konrad would have starved to death if she hadn’t married him, and now here he is. Worse for wear, and surely, but C. is here too, and it certainly isn’t right to speak of a person’s mother in a manner where things are said that aren’t.
I find Charlotte appealing but she is also RUDE!
Lunes
Real news! Real news, at last. The National Socialists have taken Austria, so all is talk of Anschluss. A newspaper has been brought in from Vallarta: the Führer drove into his hometown in an automobile with over four thousand marching guards!
So now Austria and Germany are one again, and Baldomero is delighted. Not because of the Anschluss but because Mexico’s at arms! Apparently Mexico is the only country that thinks the Anschluss isn’t right, and Baldomero and Legrand couldn’t be prouder to be here. Even Caspar has been caught smiling.
Baldomero says how thrilling it is to see a place with bite, and Legrand was moved nearly to tears while cheering this impossible country’s fight against what he calls a “laziness of soul.”
Struggle, struggle they say, is at the heart of it—you maintain your essentialism if you’ve never had a silver spoon, so of course now there is talk of letting go of the servants once again.
Mother is amused by the pride and fury: it’s got the artists working. C.’s been writing feverishly, and Hetty’s been up in her room with the door thrown open, weeping about the boat. She’s sure that there will be war now and that a submarine will steal the paintings. She has no place to be worried but she’s always been like that. Konrad hasn’t been coming out of his room but Mum thinks it’s a phase. Walter is sick with something, green-skinned, in bed most of the time. News paralyzes or catalyzes: I am learning more than the names of all the weeds.
Maria has been making stews and making them quite hot: she puts a separate bowl out for me, but the main stew’s near inedible. I think she’s trying to remind the artists what is really Mexican, but no one dares complain because they’re so taken with the culture and the pride of it, right now. Mum’s talking about organizing a mission to Puerto Vallarta for news about her boat, and also she has planned another dinner party; she wants it to be Mexican. She wants to celebrate the fact that we have come to the right place. She has sent Jose Luis out with a note to invite Jack over, so! I’m not sure which night it will be but won’t that be quite grand.
Speaking of expeditions, Baldomero says there is no better time than now to find his little monkey. He says what with the large-scale work he is creating here, and the kinkajou he’ll rescue, the Mexicans will probably hang his portrait above their beds and in their little shops, and that is why it is essential that he find his creature while the air is filled with pride.
Mother has pointed out to him that he’s no more Mexican than she is; in fact, she is more Mexican, because she is a landowner, and Baldomero said his blood is filled with moons of Spanish rage.
Hura crepitans
The Early Gardeners
; A most curious development, Hura crepitans, the sandbox tree (equally referred to in these parts as the possumwood, the jabillo, and the monkey-no-climb), is an evergreen of the spurge family that prefers partial shade and is often cultivated for this same want of shade.
Soaring to heights of up to sixty meters, the sandbox is covered in pointed spines and smooth bark (very prized for furniture-making if one can rid the wood of spikes). The red flowers never petal, though a peculiar fruit is all the same produced, a volatile fruit known to spontaneously erupt when ripe, throwing its seeds as far as 100 meters at speeds of 250 kilometers per second. The sound produced at these explosions is very well near dynamite, and one would be advised to stay on the side of this curmudgeonly creation where the seeds aren’t being thrown.
I have been told that the sap from the sandbox is both milky and poisonous, and that indigenous fisherman coat their fishhooks with this poison. Arrow tips can also be dipped into this substance, so one is struck, as one is learning of the sandbox, that it is an ultimate foolishness to brave the jungle alone.
Jueves
New father is working on a painting. Mother woke me with the news. I don’t go into his studio, not the one in Mexico. The ones in the other houses have been harder to avoid.
Mother is flattered, delighted, thrilled. She pulled me up in my nightdress, said Konrad had gone out horseback riding, celebrating, no doubt, and that we should celebrate too. That the darkness might be leaving him. That it was quite a piece.
I’ve never liked going into the artist’s studio without the artist present. It feels for all the world like you are looking at the absent person’s entrails. Or sitting in their mind. It’s far more polite and comfortable when the maker is there with you, staring at something huge and frightening that even he doesn’t understand. The artist will always laugh or spill what they are drinking and say this or that thing about what it is they’ve done this time to keep the work from being right.
Konrad’s studio is in a vacant room that is circular, like mine, but on the second floor. The walls are white and the wooden shutters were closed, which made the light seem mauve. From the orientation of the house, I knew that there was a view of the ocean, and that if I moved to the window (and pulled open the shutters), I just might see C. and Konrad riding on the beach, which is when it also occurred to me that perhaps it was mother who had pulled those shutters closed.
There were canvases of all sizes leaning against the walls, some not even stretched yet, some sloped to the ground. Because of the circular shape of the room, the canvases seemed to crowd you even though they were turned the other way. It was strange to see so many empty paintings in a room already white. At home, at whatever home, there were always paintings: paint drying, paint dripping, attempts in all directions, wooden furniture painted when Konrad had painted everything else.
But here. Only a few things. A yellow shape doing a somersault, a woman like a fruit peel. A forest of calf spines. Brushstrokes that didn’t lead to anything at all.
In the center of the room, though, pinched upon an easel: the thing Mum had brought me in there for. “A bridal robing,” Mum said, barefoot of feet and smile. “Incredible,” she continued, with her small hand on her heart. “One of his very best.”
My feet were also bare and the tile floor was cold. It was early. There were no other footfalls, no voices calling out. Just mother and the cold floor and the terrifying thing.
Four figures. Four figures leaving the chasm of some room. A mirror behind them, the floor black and white checkers, a serpentine column to the right. On the left, a bird guard: a swan the color of gangrene with human hands holding a rusted arrow across the bridegroom’s groin, and this figure, the bride, a pale and lengthy human, legs endless, breasts pulsing, her face and shoulders covered in a red veil made of feathers and the widest-open eyes. Bird eyes, and a bird beak tangled up inside: the cloak fell to the floor around her, the effect of it like something ruined that has been left to decompose, and her nudity inside it. To the bride’s right, a lady-in-waiting, also naked, belly swelling, breasts swelling, her hair half made of eyeballs, facing the opposite direction from the guard. The bride as if blinded, a palm out to find purchase, but there is only the protruding breast of her companion, absconded in some task. But near her feet, nearly at her feet if the guard chooses not to steer her, a gruesome girl gnome, pregnant and distended, rubbing a green fist into her tears.
Mother clapped. “Isn’t it fantastical?” she swooned. “Look how well he’s painted me! The legs, just as slim as mine are, and the stomach, exceptionally flat. Especially compared to this figure here.” She pointed to the lady-in-waiting, whom I suspected to be C. “How embarrassing. I’m so pleased!”
Mother never expects me to comment on the paintings, to say they’re good or bad. She needs a witness to hear her call them something that they aren’t. And then that’s what’s said in public. That will be the impression that is decided on.
I’ve been in Konrad’s paintings before, the one where Mum had a horse head and a robe of organs. I know which figure I was because the hair was my hair. I was facing out to sea. I had on a nightshirt that stopped above my buttocks, and then nothing, not until the robin-blue slippers that used to be my favorites, the ones with the gold bows.
Of that piece, Mum told everyone that her likeness took up most of the space in the painting, that it was the largest one with the most elaborate brushstrokes, the robe of organs she was wearing, very complicated to paint. She said it showed Konrad’s loyalty, to include us as a family in such a large-scale work.
You are supposed to forget these things. You are not supposed to think into them. But they do come for you, the pink cleft, the blue shoes.
Lunes
Nothing good can come from lunch. This is one of mother’s sayings, but Jack could only come for lunch, and men can’t fish at night. So everyone assembled at two thirty, pulled from work, or hate.
We were back to stagnancy. The heat, as yet unbroken; the news, no news; the rain that teased to fall at any time, and then (truly teasing) didn’t.
Over the weekend, another horse gone from the stables. At night there are dark sounds, like a kind of heaving. Not neighs or whimpers, these are the cries of animals who are going to escape.
When Jack arrived for luncheon, even his own horse was like something tracked. Ears pinned, his bead eyes wide. Nostrils huge and desperate. No good can come at day.
Konrad found out that mother saw the painting and had been complimenting him to everyone. Boasting that he’d “returned.” As a punishment, he has stopped working, or he has been unable to. He said he took a knife to the canvas, but I don’t think he did. A knife to mother is more likely, now that we’re all here to watch.
I helped Maria make another flan but it wasn’t gay this time. Monday is usually a rest day, so none of the staff are happy. I don’t know why it had to be Monday, or fish, but it did, and so it was. Maria wasn’t humming as she normally does, a sung word from time to time, she just clucked at me, and then the head shaking, and I want to say, I’m fine! I’m here after all, I’m cooking with you, I am not my father’s darkness, I didn’t do those things. Sometimes, this day, I just want to be a child in a pink house on the beach, with English books to get through, my own friends to play with, sand and yellow cornmeal underneath our fingernails.
I changed for lunch. Who cares. Sometimes it feels as if my beauty is this expected thing I must show up with, so I try not to, but I guess I’m vain, as well. I didn’t want my mother to whine about how she would have preferred the white dress to the pink one, how my hair shouldn’t be bunned. Even Baldomero puts his word in: says when my hair’s down, that it’s striking. Legrand reaches for it, runs it through his stubby fingers. A treasure, he says. An international one.
Jack was late, and so the loons started one of their old games down by the pool. Hetty in a swimsuit, her shapely calves stretched out, and Legrand kneeled down before her, painting lines around her
toes.
“I’m a zebra!” Hetty yelped. She’d had wine; the others also. Pitchers kept on coming out; Maria’s mouth was pinched.
I was sitting underneath the palapa, reading my big book about the native scenery, which is tiring me some. The author is so taken by her world of plants, completely absorbed by it, always eating fruit. Always in some nice locale eating lovely fruit. Her life dedicated to the task of writing these plants down. How terribly wicked to be so single-minded. And fortunate for her.
Baldomero came and sat by Hetty, brought a brush up to her thigh. My mother said something that made everybody laugh, but I didn’t hear what.
Hetty had a big hat on; she was pleased with her appearance. C. was already half naked in the pool. Mum once said the first time she encountered C., she’d come to a drinks party completely naked with the soles of her feet painted in yellow mustard, left tracks all through the house. I both believe this and don’t believe it. But I suppose it’s true.
When Jack arrived, Baldomero was wielding his brush around Hetty’s groin, and I was pretending to be absorbed by my big book. Maria slouching when she was rung for more red wine.
The property was in a state again. Perhaps because it wasn’t nighttime, mother hadn’t gone to a great effort, and the litter from their other games was in the pool. A wilted paper lantern. A small table on which me and Walter had played cards. C. floating belly up with her breasts out, nipples to the sun like cherries on an île flottante, which is something I thought before Legrand actually said it, calling, “Maria, Maria, can we whip some cream! Our île flottante is floating!!” And everybody laughed. It would take a very clever person to diagram what the loonies think is fun.
Jack stood there with his bird face. Not everyone was there. Walter had long since stopped coming to meals with us, instead Mum had them trayed out to him, and I had only the sight of dirtied dishes to prove he wasn’t dead. Caspar was in the bushes, trying to catch a certain insect whose name I have forgotten, but it has a bright blue back and teethed antennae, and he has been making photographs of these insects using only water, shade, and sun. Ferdinand had been there earlier, but he wasn’t at that moment. He had taken to going on long walks across Teopa, gathering more rocks.
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