The Lacuna

by Barbara Kingsolver

  4 June

  A telegram this morning from Lyova, as always in code. The purges in the Soviet Union are terrible. The chief of the Soviet Secret Service has resigned his post in protest of the killings, and announced his loyalty to Trotsky and the Fourth International.

  Lev fears for the safety of Chief Reiss, but is cheered by news he has broken from Stalin. A congenial day in the office, despite sweltering heat. Lev had the big red worktable from his office carried outside to the courtyard. The commissar was quite a sight, working in his big straw hat and old-fashioned balbriggans. Even Van has finally stripped from gob shirts to Vee Lines, and over the course of the day his great Dutch shoulders began to glow. Tonight they are nearly the same maroon color as the desk.

  This afternoon he knocked over the ink bottle and laughed about it, for a change. His sympathies are improving. He gratefully accepted help with changing the typewriter ribbon, and later with a repair of the electrical cord of the Ediphone. He complimented a small correction in a translation, saying we make a fine team. Who knows where else the pair of us might work, outside of these walls, if such a day should come.

  5 June

  Senora Frida's wish this evening was to dine intimately with the Visitors. Natalya is not well and remained in bed. Van went out for the evening.

  8 June

  Let it be noted: Every time Sra. Frida brings out a tray of tea, the commissar lights up like the sun. He used to bear interruptions with polite tolerance. Now he glances up often to see if it's time yet for another. Listening for the jingle of bracelets. Van agrees, Lev's behavior is strange. Today Lev and the senora went in the automobile to Sra. Cristina's house on an undisclosed mission, and stayed several hours, not for the first time. The lack of security is extremely worrisome. Frida, this is not an opinion.

  10 June

  Today while Lev was out for the afternoon, he instructed the office should be well cleaned and the table moved back indoors. Rains are expected.

  Evidently the commissar didn't expect such a thorough tidying-up. Van found a box of letters that worry him greatly. The nature of these letters may be known to Sra. Frida. The new workers need not only your husband's murals, but also what you offer: beauty, truth, passion. True art and revolution are joined at the lips and the heart. Some letters, even more explicit, had been placed inside books he's borrowed from Sra. Frida. He means to return these later, evidently. The letters remain in place.

  Tonight Van paces like a prisoner around his cot in this tiny cupboard of a room. He sucks on licorice pastilles when he is anxious, after first laying out the evening's ration end-to-end as Mother used to do with her cigarettes.

  "Can we say anything about this, to anyone?"

  "How could we?"

  Van is desperate for his chief's safety. And feels loyalty to Natalya as well; he has lived with them so many years. He wants this behavior explained. But not the explanation.

  "For the sake of heaven," he keeps saying, alternately pacing and slumping onto his cot. His broad shoulders and white V-shirt glow in the darkness of this bedroom with its closed-up windows. "I thought she looked up to him as a father. For the sake of heaven, she calls him El Viejo."

  "The old man is only five years older than Diego. Maybe she says that to disguise her feelings."

  Bricked into this tiny cell: two men wrapped in heat like a blanket, whipped into two entirely separate frenzies. At the root of each man's distress, although from entirely separate quarters: the damages wrought by love, the cruelties of sexual attraction.

  He hasn't any notion. In a moment he will be naked, it happens every night. Innocently he lays out his body, piece by piece like a banquet. His long, flat belly like a white-flour tortilla. His beautiful feet extended beyond the wildest hopes of his little cot.

  "How can they be so foolish?" he keeps asking.

  "Love can be like a sickness, Van. They didn't want it to happen."

  11 June

  Four of Sra. Frida's paintings will be included in an exhibition at the National University. Likely she is happy about it, though she has not mentioned this, or anything else of a personal nature, since the last inspection of this journal. She comes to the house almost daily to see Lev, but avoids the staff. Most especially she avoids Van.

  The personal confidences of her cook, for which she has earnestly asked on several occasions, have gone unnoticed here, or at any rate passed without comment.

  12 June

  An unforgettable outing: strange and wondrous, but in the end, bitter humiliation. The confidences of this report have been used against their author. Fact, not opinion.

  The workings of a household are like those of the world. The Russians tolerate Stalin's tyranny, Lev says, only because they know nothing else, from centuries of isolation under the Tsar. So it may be here, as well. So it may be with a mistress whose cruelty merely contains her past. Cruelties imposed on her by a husband, or life itself.

  Yet, as Lev said at his trial: our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.

  The authorized reporting of history, then: Sra. Frida proposed the outing as a kindness to all, "to escape this insufferable heat." But Natalya of course is still unwell, and Diego too busy even to be told about the outing. The escapees included only herself, Lev, and his two secretaries--two pairs, like playing cards in her hand. She arranged it with more than the usual secrecy and drove the motorcar herself because Cesar can't keep his mouth shut, she said. And that much is true.

  A long drive to the dusty edge of the city, out to the embarcadero. Xochimilco is a strange village, farm fields that appear to float on the water. Really they are built-up islands, farmed since the time of the Azteca, when this city still stood in a lake. The canals and square farm-islands are the last evidence of what lies beneath all this history and claptrap called Mexico City. Sra. Frida lectured with great flair during the drive, sometimes letting go of the steering wheel to wave her hands, telling how the ancients supplemented their diet of frogs by making these islands for growing vegetables. How the layers of water lily leaves and fertile mud are built up inside a fence of interlaced reeds, until the island gets above water level and the farmer can plant his crop.

  Now it is a mad maze of colors and cool water. Squash and cornfields, floral explosions, with waterways running on a perfect grid between the island fields. Angel's trumpets dangle their pink bellflowers over the water, and white herons stand one-legged among the reeds. Giant old poplars tower along the borders of each field, shading the watery lanes. You can see how it's all constructed; they begin by planting these poplar saplings in a rectangle under the water, for anchoring the interlaced reeds and poles that will become the island's perimeter. Now the saplings planted long ago are ancient, leafy giants, with coral beans crowding in thickets between them. Some islands have the farmers' reed-thatched huts built right upon them, with children running and swimming from one to the next, naked as fish. Women cast lines into the water or hawk jugs of pulque to the boaters passing by. Every side channel offers another thrilling glimpse, a long ribbon of shining green water overarched with a tunnel of trees.

  The passenger boats made for the canals are broad, flat-bottomed trajineras. Gaudy ducklike things, every one is painted up in red, blue, and yellow, with an arch across the front of each one spelling out a woman's name in flowers. Made to order with each hire. Frida and Lev had a dispute when they hired the boat: she wanted to call it Revolucion. Not the best (Van pointed out) for the security of our comrade guest. Lev prevailed, and the boatman spelled out Carmen, Sra. Frida's first name. She snuggled up happily with the "old man" on the bench on their side, with Van and HS on the other bench, two pairs facing one another across the plank-table. All the boats have one, a long, narrow table for picnicking bolted right in, running from prow to stern. Ours was painted the brightest yellow, which seemed to suit Frida's mood. She would know a name for this color. The canals were jammed with these boats, all painted with similarly violent imag
ination, bobbing with couples and families escaping the city's heat, pushed along by boatmen with poles. The farmers in canoes full of vegetables had some trouble poling between the traffic jams, making their way out to the marketplaces of the city.

  A canoe swept by carrying marimba players, two men in white shirts standing side by side at their long instrument of wooden blocks, rolling their hands over the rippling wooden notes. Frida tossed the marimba men a few pesos to play "The Internationale." Other boatloads of musicians bobbed past also; the place was filled with them, even a whole mariachi band standing up in their canoe, entirely precarious, balancing the enthusiasm of song with their will to keep dry.

  It was a wild, floating marketplace. Men selling flowers, women with giant aluminum pots balanced in tiny boats, pulling up alongside to sell you a lunch: roasted corn, pollo mole, carne asada and tortillas, handed up into your boat on crockery that would be washed afterward in the canal. Lev bought a bunch of red roses and tucked them one by one into Frida's crown of braids. He poured glasses of red wine for all of us, and then refilled them. He paid a band to play "Cielito Lindo" and then twelve or fourteen other songs, all about the heart and not one concerned with the Revolution. When he leaned out over the water to pay the musicians, he forgot to let go her hand, which he was holding under the table. The lovers were quite on display, cuddling all the afternoon, her little elbow folded neatly against his.

  Van looked away, listing various sights as we passed by them in a childish way that was very unlike him, thanks to his discomfort. It would have been just as well to stare at these two; they make a better physical match than the little dove and the toad-frog. A more pleasing alignment: the Indian girl and her compact Russian peasant. Across from them, the Nordic god and native typist were shoved so close together on the bench, every turn of the boat pressed some part of a leg or shoulder against another. The air was breathlessly still, a cottony hot roar that swallowed everything: heat and music, a pounding pulse. Van close enough to touch his cheek, or clasp his knee. It took everything not to do it.

  Then suddenly, loud screaming split the quiet. Our sleepy boatman raised his pole in alarm, but it was only a boatload of schoolgirls. They came alongside, waving wildly, with another boat following behind in right pursuit. That one, of course, filled with schoolboys, splashing and hurling flowers at their victims.

  "It's a war of flowers!" the girls shrieked, launching back long-stemmed arrows across the water. They fell short every time, like the Azteca warriors uselessly slinging arrows at Cortes, just before their hearts were blown apart with cannon fire.

  "En garde!" cried Frida, arming herself from the bower encircling her head, tossing roses in every direction. Lev also threw some flowers: a probable first in his long career as a militant. Frida reached into the water to catch a long-stemmed carnation and pointed it like a sword, swiping Lev's cheek and then his chest.

  "I am hit!" he cried, clasping his chest in mock drama, falling back against the bench. "Struck in the breast by a posey. What do you call this one?"

  "Encarnado," she said.

  "Descargado por encarnado," he said. Carnal wounds. Injury may be mortal.

  She kissed his cheek. Van looked carefully at the trees. The two boatloads of warriors moved away down a side canal, leaving the water behind them clotted with their colorful ammunition. Another canoe approached, and a man selling toys climbed aboard our boat, his pockets filled with trinkets of woven palm leaves. "Any children here?"

  "No," Frida said, and Lev said "Yes" at the same time. Van explained, "I'm afraid the children have all gotten away."

  "Well, this one is indispensable for people of any age." The man pulled from his pocket a long, woven tube. "A trapanovio. You had better try it, senorita." He held it toward Frida, who obligingly put her finger in the end of the tube and then made a show of not being able to escape. Everyone knows this trick. The weave of the tube holds tighter, the harder one pulls away.

  "Senor, you'll have to buy it now, and hold on to the other end yourself," the man told Lev, extracting from him five pesos. "Otherwise she'll have this dangerous device for catching boyfriends, entirely at her disposal. Who else here needs to trap a few novias? You, young men?"

  "That one maybe," said Frida laughing, pointing across the table. "He's desperate to trap a particular novio."

  There was no need to say it like that. Novio, the masculine form.

  "But forget about the other one." She tugged her trapped finger free of Lev's grip, its long prosthesis still attached, and shook it at Van as if he were a naughty child. "He needs no devices for trapping girls, apparently he has his own equipment. What time is it now, four o'clock? They're already lined up waiting for him at the Golden Earring."

  "What is this?" Lev sat forward. "You go to that bar at night?"

  "Not every night. And the girls don't make a queue."

  "Oh, I've heard some stories!" Frida said. She seemed quite intoxicated, but maybe it was an act. She can seem that way at any time, for her own reasons. The toy man sensed that he had stepped in the pie, and scurried back to his canoe.

  "What is this, Van?" Lev asked again, seeming interested but not disapproving. "You didn't tell me about any girls."

  Van blushed acutely. "Not girls. One girl. Her name is Maria del Carmen."

  "Maria del Carmen," Frida sang. "So this boat named Carmen carries more than one torch. Tell me about this young lady. Is she a bar girl?"

  "A waitress. But educated at university. She tutors me in Spanish sometimes in the evening."

  "Oh, very good, very good," Frida said, smiling ferociously, a cat with the mouse beneath its paw. "University educated and pretty, I have no doubt. Tutoring you in Spanish! Have you learned this one yet, esternon?" She touched her breastbone, leaning forward, and then cupped her own breasts in her hands. "What about pezones?"

  Van's complexion gave over completely to his blush. His ears and even the back of his neck. "I know the words. If that's what you are asking."

  She stood up and leaned across the table, close to his face: "Y besos suaves?"

  Lev pulled her back by the hand. "Frida, he's a man, not a child. If he has a lover in the town, it's not your concern."

  "Everything is my concern, mi viejo. Lovers, most of all." The looks she gave to Van were smoldering. She worked the woven boyfriend trap gently off of her finger and studied it for a moment, before tossing it across the table to the object of no one's desire.

  "Insolito, you're the one who needs this. Better go trap yourself a different fish."

  14 June

  The household has exploded. Diego and Natalya learned of their spouses' affair, leading to the unpleasantness one could reasonably expect. Lev left this morning for a house in the desert at San Miguel Regla, loaned on short notice by trusted friends of Diego. When Sra. Frida came to the house today, Natalya made a very painful spectacle of her anger. Poor Belen was so frightened she dropped a plate of fritters.

  Of course Van went with him, and Lorenzo also, but not the other bodyguards. Lev says he can't impose an army on the hospitality of the Riveras' friends, even if they support the Fourth International. Diego fears the place can't properly be guarded. And to complicate the arrangement, Diego may count himself among those lined up to assassinate his comrade guest.

  Frida seems both disconsolate and unrepentant. A strange mix. Surely, senora, you don't blame anyone but yourself? You wanted to be discovered, that was obvious. Remember what you asked for in these pages: a history without deceit.

  17 June

  In the kitchen, the stories burn hotter than the stove. Perpetua says Senora Frida went up to San Miguel Regla yesterday, on the excuse that she needed to give some money to the Landeros family for taking Lev in their house. Perpetua clucked her tongue. "What business could she have up there except monkey business? But once you're on the horse you have to hold on, I suppose. Even if he bucks."

  "That old man must have spice in his sauce yet," said Carmen Alba.


  "Old?" Perpetua spat. "He's not even sixty. You girls are children, you don't know. The longer the sauce cooks, the spicier it gets."

  Belen kept a nervous eye on the kitchen door, fearing the wife of the sauce in question.

  30 August

  A telegram came yesterday: Lev's former secretary Erwin Wolf, murdered in Spain by the GPU. Natalya felt someone should take the sad message to Lev. It was a quiet drive to San Miguel; Cesar seems more than ever suspicious, even though he no longer has to share his room with a notebook-keeping spy.

  The road to Regla passes near the great pyramids of Teotihuacan. Then through little mountain towns, steep streets filled with taverns, donkeys and dust, and pink colonial mansions from an earlier time, before it was shameful in Mexico to be rich. Now the mansions are all apartments, displaying laundry from their balconies.

  Lev's place at San Miguel Regla is a small apartment at the back of a large hacienda. It seems safe enough, a high wall and Lorenzo posted at the window, in a desert outpost visited mostly by vultures. The Landeros are rarely in residence, the family and servants in any case asked not to approach the rear of the house. With no women around, the rooms shared by Van, Lev, and Lorenzo look like drawers in a giant cabinet, the beds swimming among notebooks, pistols, shoes, and inkwells. If Lev stays much longer, he may drown in his river of paper.

  Lev finds the desert air invigorating and takes long walks each morning on the empty roads. He has fallen in love with cactus, finding a hundred varieties populating the dry ravines. To Van's dismay he digs them up, wraps them in burlap coats, and carries them home on his shoulder. Somehow, he plans to make a garden of these bizarre, prickled creatures. Van seems prickled also. Maybe missing life at the Golden Earring.