The Lacuna

by Barbara Kingsolver

  The chickens are not the only emancipated ones here. Lev allows writing of any kind. While he himself works tirelessly on Lenin's biography and a dozen political articles at once, he confessed that really no book can beat a good novel. He wishes he could write one himself.

  What a strange discovery. He came in the office late this evening to look for a dictionary, surprised to find one of his assistants still banging at a typewriter.

  "Young Shepherd! What business could keep you so late in headquarters?" Headquarters of the Fourth International is his name for the big office next to the dining room. Natalya moved in all three typewriter tables and her roll-top desk, the telephone, bookshelves, file cabinets, and all. It was her idea to make a separate office so all can work here--herself, Van, the Americans who've come to study with Lev--without driving the commissar out of his mind. Lev keeps to his little study in the other wing by their bedroom, writing in peace until he needs someone to come and take a dictation.

  "I'm sorry, sir." Gather up the pages quick, put them in a folder. No confession unless forced. "It's nothing that will liberate the people."

  He waited for more, standing wide-eyed at the doorsill in his shirt and tie. His white hair stood on end from a long day's work. He pulls his hair while he thinks.

  "Sir, I'm reluctant to say."

  "Oh, no. Some secret report to the adversary?"

  "Please don't suggest such an awful thing."

  "What, then? A love letter?"

  "It's more embarrassing than that, sir. A novel."

  The muscles of his face collapsed like a dumpling, all dimples and wrinkled eyes behind the beard and round glasses. Lev's smile is like no other. He pulled out Natalya's desk chair and sat in it backward, straddling it like a horse, leaning his elbows on its back and laughing until he nearly wept. "Oh, this is a mechaieh!"

  There was nothing to do but wait for a more comprehensible verdict.

  "I've been worrying where it is you go, my son. When your mind is not here." He clucked his tongue, said some words in Russian. "A novel! Why do you say this won't liberate anyone? Where does any man go to be free, whether he is poor or rich or even in prison? To Dostoyevsky! To Gogol!"

  "It surprises me to hear you say it."

  His halo of white hair was lit from behind by the blue blaze of the street lamp outside. The windows facing the street are bricked up halfway, but light comes in from above. It looked like a setting for a detective film. He stood and walked to the back bookshelf, making his way between tables and the recording machine cabinet with its cords snaking across the floor. He clicked on the lamp near the bookshelf.

  "I want to show you something. My first published book. An account of a young man only twenty-seven years old, imprisoned by the tsar for being a revolutionist, maneuvering a bold and dramatic escape to Europe where he plotted his return with the People's Army." Lev found the book and tapped it thoughtfully with his thumb. "This was a popular sensation among the workers of St. Petersburg. The entire Soviet, eventually. If a Russian can read, he has read this one."

  "A novel, sir?"

  "Unfortunately, no. Every word of it is true." He opened the book and turned a few pages. "And since then, only theory and strategy. What a bore I've become."

  "But your life is still a potboiler. Stalin's assassins lurking, the Communist Party and Toledano scheming to poison your name. I hate to say it, but the newspapers might get on your side if you wrote it that way. They could carry your saga in weekly installments, the way they did for Pancho Villa during the war."

  "Getting the newspapers on our side, oh, my boy. That is a career for circus acrobats and worthless politicians."

  "Sorry, sir."

  He smiled. "Well, it would win the Russians. Our brains have a weakness for morose and thrilling plots." He snapped the book closed. "What is the subject of yours?"

  He listened carefully to the idea of a historical adventure about ancient Mexicans, even if it is more adventure than history, and will never be any good. He pulled a pile of books out of his shelf that might inspire a novelist just starting off.

  "Do you read Russian? No. Well, Jack London, certainly. And Colette, for the female view. Oh, and this one by Dos Passos, it's called The Big Money." He also offered one of his typewriters, the spare one that only needs a little oil to get working again, and a small table for use as a writing desk in the guardhouse room at night. "So you won't again have to creep into headquarters on the sly," he said. "With Lorenzo as nervous as he is, he might shoot you through the window by mistake. A fine potboiler you would make of yourself then, my son. And who would write it?"

  Alejandro, the village boy, almost never speaks. Yet claims he wants to learn English. One quiet assertion at a time, he begins: I am. You are. His room is the one at the opposite end of the guard house, but he comes to this one every morning at four, after finishing his shift of pacing the roof with his rifle cocked in darkness. This room that has housed no secrets up to now, except for a box of things hidden under the bed: a small stolen idol. A partly written, entirely dreadful novel. The little woven finger toy called a trapanovio, souvenir of a remarkable humiliation.

  Alejandro is the first one to see the trapanovio since that day in Xochimilco, and he didn't laugh when he heard the story. He inhaled sharply, fists on his face, and wept.

  At four o'clock while the world sleeps off its judgments, reliably he arrives. He has, they have. A strange kind of love it is. Or no kind of love at all. A solace of the soft tissues only, not the first or last of anything, grateful and urgent and terrified by turns. Afterward, in plain sight of his unsettled accomplice, Alejandro prays.

  Frida is home a month, and unraveling like a yarn doll. Diego wants a divorce. She suspected it last autumn, but her plan was to stay away so long, he would learn he couldn't live without her. Such plans rarely succeed. She's moved out of the Double House, living in Coyoacan now, and it's odd to see the Blue House filling up with her things. She has layered on more paint, the colors of blood and the depths of the sea. The bedroom that was Lev and Natalya's, spare as a servant's back then with its woven rug and neatly made bed, now is crammed with her dressing table, jewelry, doll shelves, and trunks of clothes. Lev's former study holds her ruckus of easels and paints. It should not seem strange, as it was her house all along, and her father's before she was born.

  This morning Perpetua sent Belen running down the block for help because the mistress had gone mad. Frida spends madness the way she spends money; it was all over by the time help could arrive. Perpetua answered the gate, pointed without a word, and returned to the kitchen. Frida sat on a stone bench in the courtyard with her hair all cut off. It lay in thick black parentheses on the bricks, all around her feet.

  "Natalya sent me to ask if there's anything you need."

  Frida smiled insincerely at the lie, revealing new gold caps on her incisors. It seemed she might have been drinking, even at this early hour.

  "What I need is to castrate the son of a bitch and be done with it." She made some menacing snips at the air with her scissors, startling the black cat that had been disguised in the nest of hair. It stood and arched its back.

  It seemed pointless to mention she has also been having affairs, in New York and Paris. At least, such things were much discussed in the press. A handsome Hungarian photographer. "Sorry, Frida. But with Diego and women it's nothing new, right?"

  "Is this the kind of mierda you walked over here to tell me? I've been miserable for a long time already, so I should be used to it now? Thank you, my friend."

  "Sorry." The cat slunk away into the laurel bushes.

  "Soli, you'll never guess: now I have fungus on my hands. A new ailment! One thousand operations, plaster corsets, medicines that taste like piss, collapsed organs, and there's still something new that can go wrong with me. Maybe I could be a little miserable about this?" She held up her hands, mottled pink, raw and dreadful.

  "All right. If you need permission."

  Eve
n in her disconsolate state she looked like a peacock, perfectly dressed in a green silk skirt and enough jewelry to sink a boat. Even drowning, Frida would cling to vanity. "Don't forget Paris and New York, Frida. They loved your show. Yesterday Van showed me a fashion magazine with you on the cover."

  "The opinion of me in Paris and New York, if you want to know, was the same as for a talking pony. Imagine it, a Mexican girl who dresses funny and curses like a soldier! Every day was, what do you call it? A bowl of fish."

  Translating Frida is no easy trick. "A kettle of fish? That means you're in bad trouble. Or else a goldfish bowl, which means people are looking at you all the time."

  "Both. I was in a kettle of goldfish. People pointed on the street."

  "Because you're famous. People saw your paintings."

  "Listen, don't ever become famous. It's killing. You should see what they wrote in the papers, those reviewers. They hardly bothered to look at the paintings, they only wanted to write about the painter herself. 'She should be making nice pictures of nature instead of these nightmares. And always herself--she's not even that good looking!'"

  "We saw the reviews. A lot of them were good. Diego says Picasso and Kandinsky think you're a bigger talent than both of them combined."

  "Okay, but that cockroach Andre Breton didn't bother to pick up my paintings from the customs house until I got there and screamed at him. And it's true what I'm telling you about the reviews. They write what they think you should be painting."

  That courtyard seemed more than ever like a fairy-tale house, with tree leaves for its ceiling and an ivy-covered floor. White calla lilies rose up through the ivy carpet, all of them bending their hooded heads toward Frida, like charmed cobras.

  "Obviously you had a miserable time. But you can't blame anyone for seeing you as a spectacle."

  She looked puzzled. Her earrings today were a pair of heavily embossed golden snakes, but with her newly shorn, glossy head she looked like a sea lion. With gold teeth. "What spectacle?"

  Carmen Frida Kahlo de Rivera. Who could explain her to anyone, least of all herself? "You play a certain role. You have to admit that. Mexican peasant, queen of the Azteca or what. You don't dress to blend in."

  Her gold incisors flashed. "If I don't choose, they choose for me: Wife of the Much-Discussed Painter. The newspapers would wrap me in gauze and make me a martyred angel, or else a boring jealous wife. Above all, a victim--of Diego and life. Of disease. Look at this leg." She yanked up the green silk to reveal her naked, lame leg. It was a more awful sight than the infected hands: thin as a stick because of the childhood polio, bent and scarred from the accident, years of limping and indignities uncountable.

  "You've never seen it, have you?" she asked.

  "No."

  "How long have you known me?"

  "Nearly ten years."

  "And in that time, have you thought of me as this?"

  It was hideous: the leg of a leper, a street beggar, a veteran of wars. Anything but the leg of a beautiful woman. "No."

  She tossed the long silk skirt back down, like covering a corpse. "People will always stare at the queer birds like you and me. We only get to choose if they'll stare at a cripple, or a glare of light. The jewelry and everything makes people go blind. The gossips will say a million things, but they never ask, 'That Mexican-Indian-Azteca girl, why does she always wear long dresses?'"

  With the points of her naked toes she carefully set about pushing the locks of hair on the ground into a round pile. Everything with her is an artful project, flowers laid out on a table, even her own self-destruction. "So," she said, "how is your wonderful story, the scandals of the ancients? Are you working on it every day?"

  It was tempting to tell her about the writing desk in the guardhouse room, a newly oiled typewriter, a pile of pages growing higher every night. It would excite Frida to make her an accomplice. But she is no good at secrets. "What do you mean, queer birds like us? Nobody is staring at me."

  "So you think."

  The cat circled warily near her feet, eyeing the strange black pelt.

  "And your dear comrade Van. How is he these days?"

  "Not staring at me. That is for sure."

  The cat decided the new animal between his mistress's feet was neither predator nor prey, so he crept away over the ivy, lifting his feet as if walking through shallow surf.

  "Being a peacock is not the only way to hide yourself, Frida. A pigeon can hide."

  "Is that what you are? A pigeon hiding in a little hole in the bricks?"

  "I'm a typist. And a cook. Sometimes now I get to clean rabbit cages."

  She sighed. "What a waste of time. I thought you had chispa. A spark, or some kind of discipline. It turns out you're a little gray pigeon." She smoothed her skirt over her leg and pulled her shawl around her shoulders, composing herself against what she had revealed.

  "I'm sorry about your leg. I'd heard different things."

  "Soli, let me tell you. The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know."

  Twelve people living in this household now, and only one bathroom. Miss Reed calls it The Dance of the Hours. The four Americans always stay up late--the strange, funny Miss Reed (who dresses like a boy) and her husband sleep in one of the guardhouse rooms but rarely retire to it until dawn, the same time Lev rises for his morning exercise. Joe and Reba still have their apartment, and take field trips to its bathroom. For everyone else the clock is ruled by quick dashes and rationed cups of coffee. Lorenzo and the other three guards have been known to piss over the side of the roof, declaring that the GPU must be defeated by every known weapon. But some weapons they hold in reserve. The competition of morning is not for the weak-hearted.

  The secret hour is seven forty-five. Lev has long finished his ablutions by then, and Natalya as well. The late risers are no threat as yet, and the morning shift are still holding off, respecting Natalya's privacy. It's possible then to slip from the dining room into Lev and Natalya's wing, tiptoe through Lev's study. Lev will soon be in there, as surely as the map of Mexico will be on the wall. But at seven forty-five he's still outside feeding the chickens.

  The narrow bathroom runs alongside Lev's study and bedroom under a tin shed roof, added on the house some time between Porfirio Diaz and modern plumbing. Its fixtures stand in a row like soldiers at attention: the bathtub on clawed feet, the lavatory on its pedestal, the cabinet with Lev's medicines and everyone's shaving things in a jumble. The pitcher and bowl on a stand. The dreadful hairy rug someone should throw out. Lev should write a paper: "The Political Challenge of a Commonly Held Bathroom: No One Has the Authority to Throw Out the Rug." And at the end, the captain of this army: the commode. Its tank above, the pull chain awaiting the private's salute.

  Rather than exiting by the door into Lev's study (he might be there now), it's less awkward to exit through the empty end room Natalya calls "Seva's room," still hoping their orphan grandson can be brought here from Paris. For now it houses a wooden wardrobe of coats and jackets. This morning it also contained Natalya, standing at the laundry table folding a pile of Lev's striped silk pajamas. Awkwardness sometimes cannot be escaped.

  "Good morning."

  "Good morning."

  It seemed necessary to say something else. "Lev has a lot of pajamas."

  "Yes, he does."

  "Nice ones. Most people don't dress as well, even during the day."

  She said, "Most people don't have to think of dying in their pajamas. And being photographed for the papers."

  "Dear God."

  "Don't apologize. We're accustomed." She lifted her eyes briefly, a pair of gray stones, then looked back to her work. "I've been wanting to tell someone, and probably rather than Van, I should mention this to you. His blood pressure is higher."

  "Lev's blood pressure? How high?"

  "Extremely. The doctor yesterday was very worried."

  "Is Lev worried?"

  She folded the last pajama. "Lev
thinks a bullet will find him before the stroke arrives. If that answers your question."

  "But you wanted someone else to know. Understandably."

  "Probably there's nothing you can do. He gets terrible headaches."

  "He seems calm."

  "Oh yes, Lev is calm, calm is Lev. What I said about wearing good pajamas when he is murdered. It's not photographs he worries about. I don't mean he is vain. I just cannot think of the word. My English."

  "The word is dignity, maybe?"

  "Dignity, yes."

  "He could rest a little more. He's out every morning taking care of the chickens, but any of us could do that."

  "Oh, he is crazy for those animals. I haven't seen him so affectionate for something since Benno and Stella. Two dogs we had in France." She grew quiet, visiting memories of dogs, and maybe living children. "I think the animals relieve him," she said finally. "Something in the world he can keep safe."

  "But maybe it wouldn't hurt to offer some help?"

  "Yes. To you, he might listen. He calls you 'son.' You notice it, of course."

  "Of course. Lev has a large heart. He's father to the whole world, it seems."

  "He said he finds you steadying."

  "He does?"

  "In your manner you resemble Sergei. He wouldn't have mentioned that, but it's true. Sergei was quiet. Always paying attention. He was for the good of other people."

  "You must miss him. All of them."

  She shook her head side to side, looking out the window, her lips tightly closed.

  Outside, the morning was cool, with puddles still standing from a rain in the night. In the far corner of the courtyard against a blaze of red bougainvilleas covering the wall, Lev stood in a circle of hens. He tossed out grain and clucked softly in some form of gallinaceous Russian, apparently engrossed. He looked up, startled.

  "Oh! Have you come asking my friends for proof of their dedication?"

  "No eggs needed just now. Breakfast is nearly ready."