The Lacuna
In the beginning were the howlers. They always commenced their bellowing in the first hour of dawn, just as the hem of the sky began to whiten. It would start with just one: his forced, rhythmic groaning, like a saw blade. That aroused others near him, nudging them to bawl along with his monstrous tune. Soon the maroon-throated howls would echo back from other trees, farther down the beach, until the whole jungle filled with roaring trees. As it was in the beginning, so it is every morning of the world.
The boy and his mother believed it was saucer-eyed devils screaming in those trees, fighting over the territorial right to consume human flesh. The first year after moving to Mexico to stay at Enrique's house, they woke up terrified at every day's dawn to the howling. Sometimes she ran down the tiled hallway to her son's bedroom, appearing in the doorway with her hair loose, her feet like iced fish in the bed, pulling the crocheted bedspread tight as a web around the two of them, listening.
It should have been like a storybook here. That is what she'd promised him, back in the cold little bedroom in Virginia North America: if they ran away to Mexico with Enrique she could be the bride of a wealthy man and her son would be the young squire, in a hacienda surrounded by pineapple fields. The island would be encircled with a shiny band of sea like a wedding ring, and somewhere on the mainland was its gem, the oil fields where Enrique made his fortune.
But the storybook was The Prisoner of Zenda. He was not a young squire, and his mother after many months was still no bride. Enrique was their captor, surveying their terror with a cool eye while eating his breakfast. "That howling is the aullaros," he would say, as he pulled the white napkin out of its silver ring into his silver-ringed fingers, placing it on his lap and slicing into his breakfast with a fork and knife. "They howl at one another to settle out their territories, before they begin a day of hunting for food."
Their food might be us, mother and son agreed, when they huddled together inside the spiderweb of bedspread, listening to a rising tide of toothsome roars. You had better write all this in your notebook, she said, the story of what happened to us in Mexico. So when nothing is left of us but bones, someone will know where we went. She said to start this way: In the beginning were the aullaros, crying for our blood.
Enrique had lived his whole life in that hacienda, ever since his father built it and flogged the indios into planting his pineapple fields. He had been raised to understand the usefulness of fear. So it was nearly a year before he told them the truth: the howling is only monkeys. He didn't even look across the table when he said it, only at the important eggs on his plate. He hid a scornful smile under his moustache, which is not a good hiding place. "Every ignorant Indian in the village knows what they are. You would too, if you went out in the morning instead of hiding in bed like a pair of sloths."
It was true: the creatures were long-tailed monkeys, eating leaves. How could such a howling come from a thing so honestly ordinary? But it did. The boy crept outdoors early and learned to spot them, high in the veil of branches against white sky. Hunched, woolly bodies balanced on swaying limbs, their tails reaching out to stroke the branches like guitar strings. Sometimes the mother monkeys cradled little babes, born to precarious altitudes, clinging for their lives.
So there weren't any tree demons. And Enrique was not really a wicked king, he was only a man. He looked like the tiny man on top of a wedding cake: the same round head with parted, shiny hair, the same small moustache. But the boy's mother was not the tiny bride, and of course there is no place on that cake for a child.
When Enrique wanted to ridicule him after that, he didn't even need to mention devils, he only rolled his eyes up at the trees. "The devil here is a boy with too much imagination," he usually said. That was like a mathematics problem, it gave the boy a headache because he couldn't work out which was the wrong part of the equation: being a Boy, or being Imaginative. Enrique felt a successful man needed no imagination at all.
Here is another way to begin the story, and this one is also true.
The rule of fishes is the same as the rule of people: if the shark comes, they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten. They share a single jumpy heart that drives them to move all together, running away from danger just before it arrives. Somehow they know.
After weeks lying in bed existing on air and pink bananas, the Queen has risen. She came down the stairs, ribboned and ruffled like a Oaxacan saint's day, to reclaim her rightful place in this house and terrorize the staff. She announced a hundred people are coming for the Feast of the Kings tomorrow. Later she said, "Really only sixteen are coming, but cook for one hundred in case." Chalupas, flautas, tacos, gaznates, and macaroons. The dining room is the only place Candelaria and Olunda can sit to cut up vegetables without poking out one another's eyes. And the rosca: the mistress started screaming when she remembered that, "Tell Cesar to get the car and take you into the city to find a rosca, they'll all be gone already from the bakeries here in San Angel." But Candelaria told her we have one already: "This boy knows how to make it."
Seora gawked as if a fish had arrived in her home, wearing an apron. "Insolito. It's just as I said. You're the oddest egg. A boy who makes rosca."
"Odd egg, go upstairs and get me a bowl," commanded Olunda, rolling her eyes. She had argued against making a rosca in the first place. (Too much trouble. Not enough space.) Then she insisted there was no Pilzintecutli to hide in the cake. When Candelaria retrieved the porcelain figure from a storage chest, Olunda stomped out. Now the Christ Child himself was contradicting her.
It's a new year in a house turned upside down. The mistress hangs bright, fluttery paper banderas over the Bauhaus windows, making the house embarrassed, like a plain girl in too much makeup. On the heads of her husband's Azteca idols she puts red carnations, turning them into altars, and she sets the table the way a priest prepares the tabernacle: white lace tablecloth from Aguascalientes reverently unfolded from the cupboard, blue or yellow plates set out, each one blessed by her fingertips, then the Kahlo grandmother's silverware. Finally, the flowers and fruit piled in the center of the table like a sculpture: pomegranates, bananas, pitahaya, everything chosen for color and shape. She was finishing the arrangement this morning when the monkey scuttered in and snatched out the bananas. The mistress bellowed, tiny as she is, and chased him out into the courtyard with a mimosa branch she was using in the centerpiece: "Wicked child!"
The diagnosis of Olunda is that this hairy child is the best the seora can hope for. Only twice pregnant in six years of marriage and both times the baby bled out, one at a gringo hospital, the other one here. They say it's because of a trolley accident years ago that ruined her woman parts and is "too horrible to discuss," though Olunda and Candelaria still manage to do so. By their accounting, in the last two years she's had two miscarriages, four surgeries, thirty doctor visits, and a giant fit over her husband's affair: she broke a lot of the talavera crockery before she moved out. It took her all of last year to forgive him. "And that was only the affair with her sister Cristina, we're not even counting women outside the family. Listen, how do you make the dough shiny like that?"
"You brush it with softened butter and then the white of one egg."
"Mmph." Olunda folded her arms across the mountain range of her bosom.
"Where did the seora live? Before she moved back in here?"
"An apartment on Insurgentes. Candelaria had to go clean it sometimes. Give me those dried figs, mi'ija. Tell him about the mess, Candi, it was even harder to clean up over there than here."
"It was because of the paintings," Candelaria explained.
"He painted, in her apartment?"
"No, she did."
"The Mistress Rivera is also a painter?"
"If you can call it that." Olunda was shredding chicken breasts for the chalupas, grunting as she worked, settling an old grudge with those hens.
Candelaria said once she went to the selora's apartment and found a sheet of metal covered with blood. "I thought she had cut herself while setting it up on the easel, or else murdered someone. Probably her husband, considering. But then the mistress sat down with her red pigments, whistling, and happily applied more blood on the picture."
"Enough gossip," said Olunda, who was clearly jealous not to have seen this sight herself. "Candi, you have to peel every tomato in that bucket, and you, Odd Egg, I want to see you chopping onions until tears come out of your ass."
It's two in the morning, and bright as day outside. The paved street has a watery shine, with the trees lined up along both banks like the canals of Xochimilco. The moon is not quite full: perfect down the left side but a little ragged on the right, so waning. C for Cristo means it is dying away. I couldn't sleep tonight so sat up to meet our birthday. But I must have fallen into a dream for a few seconds, because you were here in my room just now, in your wheelchair, your hair all done up. Working at an easel with your back to me. I said, "Frida, look, the streets have turned to rivers. Let's take a boat somewhere." You turned to me with empty eye sockets and said, "You go on, Soli. I have to stay."
The radio news may have put me off sleep. Stalin's blockade of Berlin is a horror, and not so difficult for us to imagine here. Asheville is also under siege, quarantined because of the polio. Today I walked downtown to put Mrs. Brown's wage in the bank, and I saw not one other living soul on the way. The school playgrounds, empty. The luncheonettes dark, their counters attended by lines of empty chrome stools. The city is a graveyard. My only compatriots today were the plaster models in the store windows, with their smug blind eyes and smart attire. Of course, the bank was closed.
I can imagine you here, Frida, limp-skipping through the streets to have a laugh at all this fear. You've already had the polio, you have your leg to show for it, your billowing woe and passion that can't be chased indoors for anything. It's a gift to survive death, isn't it? It puts us outside the fray. How strange, that I include myself, I wonder now what I mean. What was my childhood disease? Love, I suppose. I was susceptible to contracting great love, suffering the chills and delirium of that pox. But it seems I am safe now, unlikely to contract it again. The advantages of immunity are plain. People contort themselves around the terror of being alone, making any compromise against that. It's a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.
Mainly this summer my everything-else is the new book. I believe it will be serious, Frida, and worthy. But at any rate finished soon, in autumn I hope.