The Lacuna

by Barbara Kingsolver

  The oil man named Thompson told Mother she should make a military man of that one, not some snake of a lawyer. President Ortiz Rubio sends his two sons to the Gettysburg Academy in America, just the ticket.

  Mother asked the doctor's wife if there were any little schools left, run by the Catholic Sisters. The Rock of Ages nearly started to cry, saying they are all gone due to the Revolution. But they still have a place for the ones who aren't clever enough for the Preparatoria. The government has let Accion Catolica take over the schools for the deaf mutes, cretins, and children of bad character.

  Mrs. Doctor said the Revolution has wrecked everyone's morals and turned the churches into newspaper offices or moving-picture theatres. She told Mother they used to have laws to restrict things like gambling, concerts, divorce, and somersaulters. In the time of Porfirio a person didn't have to see all that.

  Mother might quite like to see some somersaulters and divorce. Her favorite song is "Anything Goes." But she put her hand on Mrs. Doctor's lace sleeve. As a helpless mother trying to raise a young boy alone, she needed advice.

  13 August

  Feast of St. Hippolitus, and entrance exams at the Preparatoria. It was a scorching: most terrible of all, the maths. Latin was a guessing game. Outside the window, noisy green parrots came all afternoon to tear apart a patch of yellow tube-shaped flowers.

  25 August

  Today begins the year of all suffering at the School of Cretins, Deaf-Mutes, and Boys of Bad Character on Avenida Puig. The classroom is like a prison hall full of writhing convicts, its iron-barred windows set high along one wall. Small boys and monkeys for pupils. No one else there could be fourteen or anything near it, they're the size of baboons. The Holy Virgin feels very sorry but remains outside, on her cement pedestal in the small tidy garden. She has sent her son Jesus in with the other wretches, and he can't flee either. He is pegged to his cross on the wall, dying all the day, rolling his eyes behind the back of Senora Bartolome, even He can't stand the look of her clay-pipe legs and those shoes.

  She teaches one subject only: "Extricta Moralidad!" The tropical climate inclines young persons of Mexican heritage to moral laxity, she says.

  Senora Bartolome, perdon: We are at an elevation of 2,300 meters above sea level here, so it isn't tropical, strictly speaking. The average monthly temperature ranges from twelve to eighteen degrees Centigrade. It's from the Geographical Atlas.

  Punished for insolence. Bad Character accomplished, the first day of term. Tomorrow perhaps Deaf-Mute. After that, one could aspire to Cretin.

  1 September

  No reading in class. Senora Bartolome says a book will distract from her lessons of hygiene, morality, and self-control. You'll sing a different song in the administrator's office. She hints it may contain iron maidens and the wresting rack.

  After lunch the older boys fall into sword fights, and smaller ones play at Hawks and Hens. If one pupil stilts out for the afternoon, subtracting from the bedlam, the senora could only be the happier. Mother doesn't notice either. Too busy fuming about P. T.'s big house with nineteen maids in Colonia Juarez, which we will probably never see because of P. T.'s wife. Mother's big plans, washed out. Like flotsam in the alley after it rains.

  Saturday is the best day at the Melchor Ocampo market. One old cigarette seller named La Perla is boss of that place, telling the girls to tidy their flower stalls. Guapo, ven aqui, take this money and go buy me a pulque. I see you here every day, novio, are you too good-looking for the schoolroom?

  Handsome! To an old woman with the face of a lizard.

  13 September

  P. T. Cash came today to the casa chica, but left early. Everyone in a foul mood, God included. The rain kept pouring until it seemed the whole sky would drain like a tide. First Mother cried, then drank tea like a foreigner, trying to drown her Mexican passions. He shouted that her head is in the clouds, he is a man, not a fountain of money, the PNR is falling apart and everything he worked to build is running away like the water out in the streets. The American businesses will run across the border like Vasconcelos did. Mother knows this small house could fall at any moment. And we shall be beggars looking for scraps at the market. Bathing on St. John's Day.

  15 September

  Independence Day, the town boiling with parades for the Revolution. At school the cretins performed in costume: traditional dances, impaired by the absence of girls. The teachers made a Patriotism Banquet: rice in the colors of the flag, red and green salsa. Cups of rice water, sugared almonds, a little of everything, and of nothing quite enough. At the head of the table by the bowl of pomegranates, Senora Bartolome had put a note: Take only one, our Lord Jesus is watching!

  A second note appeared at the foot of the table beside the sugared almonds: Take all you want, Jesus is looking at the pomegranates. The other boys laughed and spit rice water. The prank earned great approval and a whipping. But the administrator has a weak arm. Halfway through, he had to sit and rest, saying, this squalid school, is there no better place for you?

  16 September

  Stilted out of school before morning roll call. North on Avenida Puig and straight on, past the Hospital for Lepers. Past the Plaza Santo Domingo, where the scribes write letters for the people who can't. Many blocks of multifamiliares with tiny balconies like ours, each building painted pink, blue, or ochre. The wooden trolleys run in straight lines: north to south, east to west. The Azteca built it this way, with the Templo Mayor the center of everything. The Spaniards couldn't change what's underneath.

  The Zocalo was crowded with men selling ices, women in long braids selling vegetables, charlatans selling miracles. The scent of copal. Music from the organ grinders. A man selling carnitas, the hungry boys following him like dogs. Some Preparatoria students put on a play in the street about Ortiz Rubio and Calles: the president was a puppet on strings, and old dictator Calles was his puppet master. The Preparatoria students had also stilted out from school.

  The shortest way home was to walk by the Viga canal, filled with floating newspaper pages and one dead dog, swelled up like a yellow melon.

  29 September

  Today at the Melchor market, a fantastical sight. A servant girl with a birdcage on her back, full of birds. She wore her blue shawl wrapped around the cage and tied in front to hold it. The willow cage must have been very light because she was not bent over, yet it towered over her head, with turrets like a Japanese pagoda. And full of birds: green and yellow, flapping about like dreams trying to escape from a skull. She looked like an angel moving down the rows following her mistress, looking at no one.

  The mistress had stopped to haggle with a man and buy another bird. She was so tiny, from the back she also looked like a servant girl. But when she turned, her skirts and silver earrings whirled and her face was very startling, an Azteca queen with ferocious black eyes. Her hair was braided in a heavy crown like the Isla Pixol girls, and her posture very regal, though she wore the same ruffled skirts as her maid. She gave the vendor his money and took two green parrots, slipping them neatly into the cage on the girl's back. Then moved off quickly toward the street.

  The old market woman La Perla said, "Don't fall in love with that one, guapo, she's taken. And her man carries a gun."

  Which one is married? The servant girl, or the queen?

  La Perla laughed, and so did her friend Cienfuegos the lizard-man. "That's no queen there," she said. More like a puta, was La Perla's opinion.

  But Cienfuegos didn't agree. "It's her husband who chases women, not the other way around." The two of them argued about whether the tiny Azteca queen was a harlot. The lizard found and consumed a scrap of tortilla in the street. Finally Cienfuegos and La Perla agreed on one thing: the regal little woman is married to the discutido pintador. The much-discussed painter.

  Who discusses him so much?

  Cienfuegos said: "The newspapers." La Perla said: "Everyone, guapo, because he is a Communist. Also the ugliest man you ever saw."

  Cienfue
gos asked how she knew what he looked like, did he come around courting her? La Perla said she saw him once at the Plaza Caballito, down there with the troublemakers when the workers had their strike. He was as fat as a giant and horribly ugly, with the face of a frog and the teeth of a Communist. They say he eats the flesh of young girls, wrapped in a tortilla. "He's a cannibal. And from the look of her, I would say his little bride there might also eat children for lunch."

  "From the look of things today, they're having parrot stew."

  "No, guapo," La Perla said. "Not to eat! Those birds are for his paintings. He paints pictures of the strangest things. If he gets up in the morning and wants to paint the hat of an Englishman, his wife has to go find him the hat of an Englishman. Small or big, if he wants to paint it, eso. She has to run to the market and buy it."

  "She must be carrying a lot of money in her purse then," said Cienfuegos, "because the newspaper says right now he's painting the National Palace."

  6 October

  Mother reached a diplomatic compromise with P. T. Cash. She gets to visit his house in Cuernavaca next week, and maybe some parties. Mother wants to learn the new dances. The Charleston is for dead hoofers, she says, only the meatballs are doing that now. In this city the smooth girls put on long skirts to do the sandunga and jarabe.

  Suddenly the butterfly girls with long skirts and braided hair are in fashion. Mr. Cash does not agree; he says only nationalists and outlaws let their girls do those dances. But Mother bought a phonograph record for practicing the sandunga. Finally the Victrola is unpacked from its box, finding its outlaw voice.

  15 October

  Mother in Cuernavaca all week with P. T. Cash. She has agreed to the theory that looking for some jobs is better than staying at the school of cretins. Because of the oil men's money running over the border like water. None yet, except running errands for La Perla, which is work but no job. Trying to hire as a scribe to write letters for people in Plaza Santo Domingo was a bad idea. The men with stalls there howled like monkeys, defending their territories. Even though lines are long, and people wait all day. For two days the baker downstairs needed help with mixing the dough, while his wife was away. But now she is back, and he says Run away, we don't need a beggar boy here.

  18 October

  Mother is back in fine feather, with extra hush money. She bought one of the newspapers that carries the long adventure of Pancho Villa. The story is told a little each Saturday, so you'll have to buy another paper. But when people finish, you can pick it up from the sidewalk for free. Yesterday's heroes fall beneath the shoes of the city.

  On Saturdays the university students have their carpas in the street, like a Poncho and Judas play, only with Vasconcelos and the president. Vasconcelos is always saving Mexico for the Mexican people: in a country school he takes down the cross from the wall, routs the nuns, and teaches the peasant children to read. He should come to Avenida Puig. President Ortiz Rubio gets to play more various roles: a puppet of gringos, or a baby in a basket, or a hairless escuincle dog. Everything but an iguana on a leash. Some newspapers agree with the students that the president is a villain, and others say he saved us from Vasconcelos, the foreigners, and the Russians. The newspapers only agree on the much-discussed painter: he covers the walls of our buildings with colors like a tree produces flowers. One newspaper showed a picture of him. La Perla was right: ugly!

  They say he's making a huge painting on the stairwell of the National Palace, the long red building on the Zocalo with windows like holes in a flute. Cienfuegos and La Perla disagree whether you can walk in and have a look. The old lizard man says they have to let you, because it's courts and public offices. "Tell them you're getting married."

  La Perla said, "Stupid old man, that won't work. Where is his wife?"

  "All right," Cienfuegos said. "Tell them you're getting a divorce."

  24 October

  Dios mio. The paintings pull you right up the walls. Cienfuegos was right, they're inside, but you can walk through the main door into the courtyard with a flying-horse fountain and a portico all the way around. In all the little offices, men stand in shirtsleeves recording marriages and tax accounts. Outside their doors on the hallway walls, Mexico bleeds and laughs, telling its whole story. The people in the paintings are larger than the men in the offices. Dark brown women among jungle trees. Men cutting stone, weaving cloth, playing drums, carrying flowers as big as brooms. Quetzalcoatl sits at the center of one mural in his grand green-feathered headdress. Everyone is there: Indians with gold bracelets on brown arms, Porfirio Diaz with his tall white hair and French sword. In one corner sketch, a native escuincle dog growls at the European sheep and cattle that have just arrived, as if he knows the trouble ahead. Cortes is there too, in the hallway outside Property Assessment. The painter has made him look like a white-faced monkey in his crested helmet. Moteczuma kneels, while the Spaniards make their mischief: fat monks stealing bags of gold, the Indians enslaved.

  But Cortes was not the beginning of Mexico or its end, as the books say. These paintings say Mexico is an ancient thing that will still go on forever, telling its own story in slabs of color, leaves and fruits and proud naked Indians in a history without shame. Their great city of Tenochtitlan is still here beneath our shoes, and history was always just like today, full of markets and wanting. A beautiful lady lifts her skirt, showing her tattooed ankle. Maybe she is a puta, or a goddess. Or just someone like Mother who needs an admirer. The Painter makes you see that those three kinds of women might all be the same, because all the different ancestors are still inside us and don't really die. Imagine being able to tell such stories, whispering miracles into people's brains! To live by imagination alone, and get paid for it. Don Enrique was wrong.

  Where was the Much-Discussed Painter? The guard said usually he's here day and night, any hour he can get his plaster mixers and pigmentists to show up. Every day but not today.

  The mural on the wall behind the grand staircase was enormous. And not even half finished. Ladders and platforms covered most of the wall, so he could reach the highest parts. The guard looked up there at the planks for a while, as though he expected to find the Painter sleeping there. But today, no.

  "Maybe he shot someone," the guard said. "Come back tomorrow. He has a lot of friends here at the ministry. He always gets out of prison."

  25 October

  Today the Painter came to work. He was already on the scaffolds at nine o'clock. High up on the planks, hard to see, but plainly he was there because workers swarmed around him like his own hive of bees. The assistant boys were running all over the courtyard with water and plaster, planks and ladders. They mix plaster in buckets and haul it up to him on a rope. It's not just a painting, these boys explained with proper scorn. A mural. Hard to say that in English: a wall-made. Not wall or painting but both combined, made at the same time so the picture will never fall off unless the wall itself tumbles. A Plaster Captain up on the scaffold works continuously at the Painter's side, spreading the last thin coat of white paste. Not too quickly or too slow, so the Painter can put his pigments in the plaster as it dries.

  "Those two have worked together since God was sucking his mother's tit," the boys said. They seemed more afraid of the Plaster Captain than the Painter, though both men shouted down like God sending commandments: too much water in the plaster, or not enough. Today every boy was stupid.

  The problem was the man in charge of plaster mixing, named Santiago but today named mud, because absent. They said he broke his head in a fight over a woman. And according to the Painter, without Santiago none of these boys could mix plaster any better than his grandmother's dog.

  I can mix plaster.

  Go ahead, then.

  It was like mixing the flour for pan dulce: how could it be so different? The powder they called cal has the same fine grind, floating up in white clouds around the boys when they dumped bags of it into the mixing buckets. Their eyelashes and the backs of their hands were white, an
d the edges of their nostrils, from breathing it. They were dumping powder into the water, not the other way around.

  Wait. Spread a canvas on the floor, make a mountain of the powder. Pour water in the center, a lake in the volcano. Mix the lagoons with your fingers into marshes, making the paste thick. Gradually, or there will be lumps.

  Even the old Plaster Captain up on the platform stopped working to watch. It was terrifying. "Where did you learn that?"

  "It's like making dough for pan dulce."

  That caused the plaster boys to laugh. Boys don't make bread. But they were in trouble, so got quiet again. One asked, "Like nixtamal for tortillas?"

  "No, the white flour dough. You use it for European bread and sweet buns."

  Ha ha ha, Sweet Buns! So the new job has a new name to go with it. But the Plaster Captain and Painter both remarked on the plaster. The plaster captain is Senor Alva, the painter is Senor Rivera. He is even more fat than he looked in the newspaper, and feared by the boys, so it might be true he eats flesh. But when he climbed down from the scaffold to go make his water, he said, "Hey, Sweet Buns, come over here! Let me have a look at the boy who's mixing this good plaster."

  He said, "Come back tomorrow. We may need you again."

  29 October

  The Painter keeps boys running as late as the last trolley runs. Sometimes you mix, or tie ropes, or carry things up the scaffolds. The Palacio has spiked iron lanterns hanging from the ceiling, you have to watch your head or could crown yourself. The stairwell mural is the size of two walls, one above the other. It is meant to be finished before the end of the year.

  A coarse plaster full of sand goes on first, to cover ridges and bumps in the brick wall. Next, three more layers, each smoother and whiter, more marble dust and less sand. The bumps are erased, like forgetting, and the painter begins the story new. Each day he leaves more history on the wall, and boys leave with more pesos in their pockets.