The Lacuna

  Frida says the police are stupid cockroaches, they confiscated anything written in English because they couldn't tell what it was, the idiots couldn't see it's only diaries and stories. The Scandals of the Ancients, evidence of no crime except Mistaken Identity: a young man possessed of the belief he was a writer. So distracted by his dreams, he was a careless secretary, the type to leave letters lying around. Or leave his boss at the mercy of a tedious visitor, one more deadly supplicant with a badly written article.

  Joe and Reba will pack up what's left of Lev, his thoughts crammed on paper, so it all can be sent to a library somewhere, sold for enough money to help Natalya get away. Van might arrange the sale, if he can be found. His last letter came from Baltimore; he was teaching French. He may not even know about Lev's death. Unthinkable. All of this is unthinkable, however much Lev and Natalya did think of it, anticipating death with each day's dawn. To think is not always to see.

  Natalya will finish out the bottle of Phanodorm day by day, holding tight to Miss Reed's hand until she can open her eyes and walk on a ship and sail away. The United States won't let her come back with Joe and Reba. So Paris, then, to live with the Rosmers. She has to go. Lorenzo believes she's now a target, a highly watched symbol of her husband. She can't sleep for fear of the GPU, the wolves of her dreams.

  Frida is going to San Francisco, where Diego is already. As usual she has a plan: her friend Dr. Eloesser will cure all her illnesses, and Diego will want her back. Melquiades plans to go south where he has relatives, Alejandro may go that way too. San Francisco, Paris, Oaxaca, the four winds--everyone scatters. Lev's writings will be kept together somewhere, but what of the secretaries who recorded them, their small contributions to his logic? Or even the contribution of a good breakfast, the satisfied stomach on which the greatest plans were launched, who will remember that? The New York boys versus the Mexicans in courtyard football, Casa Trotsky is gone, as if it never existed. The house will be swept and sold to new owners who will tear down the guard towers, puzzle over Lev's cactus gardens, and give away his chickens, or eat them.

  This household is like a pocketful of coins that jingled together for a time, but now have been slapped on a counter to pay a price. The pocket empties out, the coins venture back into the infinite circulations of currency, separate, invisible, and untraceable. That particular handful of coins had no special meaning together, it seems, except to pay a particular price. It might remain real, if someone had written everything in a notebook. No such record now exists.

  Frida says everybody had better knock the Trotsky dust off their shoes and get out of here. "Soli, I have a plan for you," she said, seated at the little wooden desk in her studio. She'd sent Perpetua running down the street with an urgent summons--Frida wants to see you right away. "We have to get you away from here, you're not safe. The police took everything from your room, even your socks. It's because of all those things you wrote. I'm sure they're watching you." The police took many things from many people, but she believes words are the most dangerous. She says maybe Diego was right about "your damn diaries," the confiscated notebooks might put their author in jeopardy.

  But she has a plan. She needs to send eight paintings to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for a show: Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art. And after that another show is planned, Twentieth-Century Portraits. Frida has become a fixture of her century. The Levy Gallery may be interested as well. She needs a consignment marshal. "Or whatever the hell you call it in English," she said; she'll look it up for the documents. Pastor de consignacion is what she called it, a "shipping shepherd," a legally authorized agent to accompany the paintings on the train all the way to New York. "Your passport is already fixed up. You were ready to go with Lev last fall, for that hearing."

  "Frida, the police won't allow an emigration. Not with a murder investigation still open."

  "Who says you're emigrating? I already talked with them about this. Leaving the country for a short time is okay, as long as you're not a suspect. I told them you're my consignment marshal."

  "You already talked with the police?"

  "Sure. I told them you have to oversee this delivery because I can't trust anybody else to do it," she said, tapping her pencil against the wooden desk. This plan had no complications at all, in her mind, beyond selecting which portraits to send for the show.

  "And then?"

  "No and then. You'll have to carry all these customs forms, one for each painting. You show them at the border, and get each one stamped. Declarations of value and all that. You have to be really careful to hold on to all the receipts from the lockup."

  "The lockup?"

  "Don't worry, you're not going to jail." Her hair has grown back, just barely long enough to coronate herself again, with the help of plenty of ribbons. When did she cut it off? The conversation of that morning is gone, that notebook is gone. Every time it hits like a rock. In Frida's studio, in front of the window, exactly where Van used to sit for dictation, she now had a half-finished portrait on her easel: Frida in a man's suit, cutting off her hair. Keeping your damn diaries, but these paintings are her own version of it.

  Today she rattled like a gourd full of seeds, talking and fidgeting with the things on her desk. "Okay, the porter captain on the train will make the guys bring the crates to a special part of the baggage car, where they have a cage. You follow him in there to see him do it. He'll lock the crates inside and give you a receipt for getting them back. So you don't want to lose that."

  "A cage?"

  "Not the kind of cage for lions. Well, maybe they would put lions in there if they were expensive ones." She seemed desperate to be cheerful. She picked up tubes of paint, like big silver cigars with brown paper labels around their middles, then fingered the brushes standing together in a cup. She was afraid. It took a while to understand that this was the problem: fear. Not for herself but for her friend, whom she had thrown to the lions many times before. This time she wants him saved.

  "Oh. So the paintings won't just be in a big suitcase or something?"

  "Oh my God, wait till you see. They build a traveling crate for each one. Diego has a man who does this, he's very expert. He wraps them in layers and layers of kraft paper like a mummy and then fits each painting in two wooden crates, one inside the other. There's a space in between that's stuffed with straw, to prevent damage during shipping. The crates are huge. You could get inside one yourself."

  That was on a Friday, because Perpetua was cooking fish. The day before the funeral? How long did it take to build those crates?

  The police returned a few things the following week, but not much, not even clothing. Knowing those pigs, she said, they stole anything useful and burned the rest. Reba had to ask Natalya to open the wardrobe and pass around Lev's shirts, so the possessionless guards could have something to wear. His shirts were so familiar. It was startling to see them from the back, walking through the garden. Of all of us, they fit Alejandro best: small devout Alejandro, no one would guess they were the same size. Lev was so much larger than his body.

  One day (which?), Frida said she went to the police station and screamed until they returned a few more items. Probably the officers locked the doors in terror, and threw things out the windows. So she had a small suitcase of items to hand over, along with the documents, for the trip to New York. That was yesterday. In the dining room of the Blue House, after one last look round the place, those mad blue walls and yellow wicker chairs. That glorious kitchen. Embraces from Belen and Perpetua.

  "The police already had destroyed a lot of your things," Frida said flatly when she produced the suitcase. "This is what you'll need for the trip, and the rest you wouldn't want. There were some really old clothes and things, but you won't need that junk right away. I had it packed up and stored in a trunk at Cristina's."

  "Anything else? Papers?"

  "Only some books I think you borrowed from Lev, so I gave them to Natalya. Your room was all in a big metal box marked 'C,' maybe t
he third one they tore apart. I could tell because it was your clothes. There was hardly anything else, just some old magazines. We can send you the trunk after you get an address in Gringolandia. Soli, jump! You're going to be a gringo!"

  "This is all?"

  She had packed the suitcase herself. It was hard to look inside: the unbearable persistence of hope. Of course there were no notebooks, no manuscript. Only shirts and trousers. A lot of woolen sweaters; Frida believes the sky of New York flings down snow at all times, even August. Also milk of magnesia, aspro gargle, and Horlick's powder for nerves, furthering Frida's vision of Gringolandia. Toothbrush, razor. She says it's not a good idea to bring more than this. A large trunk would draw suspicion.

  "Remember, this is not an emigration."

  But her embrace was like a child's farewell, dramatic and desperate. She didn't want to let go. "Look, okay. I brought you two presents. One is from Diego. He doesn't know yet. But I'm sure he would want you to have this. For Soli, the drifter between two houses, to commemorate your journey. Look, it's the codex!"

  It was the codex. The ancient book of the Azteca, a long tableau in pictures on accordion-folded paper, describing their journey from the land of the ancients, wandering until they found home. It was a copy, of course, not the original. But probably worth some money. Diego might not be pleased about this. It can always be returned.

  Her face brightened. "The other one is from me. I made a painting for you!"

  Frida only gives paintings to people she has loved. It was unexpectedly hard to keep from crying as she fetched the crate from the other room and lugged it in. It must be a small portrait; the outer crate is only the size of a suitcase, easily managed with regular baggage. But heavy as lead, for its size. She must have put a lot of paint on that canvas.

  "Unfortunately you can't see it, I've already packed it up to go. I hope you'll like it. Write and tell me what you think. But you have to wait until you arrive in your new life. This is very important, okay? You mustn't peek. This is my gift, so don't defy me. Don't open this damn thing until you get to your father's house, or wherever you end up. Okay, promise?"

  "Of course. Who would defy you, Frida?"

  "And don't get it mixed up with the others. Look, I had the man print your name on the outside of the crate to be sure. You have papers in the folder to get it through customs, the same as the others. But don't give it to the museum by accident."

  "Are you crazy? I won't forget."

  "Yes, I am crazy, I thought you knew." She stared at the crate. "Look at that, it's an omen. You and I came into life through the same doorway, and now you are supposed to go through this one for me. It's your destiny."

  "What makes you think so?"

  "Your name. For me you're just Soli, I forgot you're Shepherd. You were meant to be the pastor de consignacion." The shepherd of the shipment.

  Eight paintings, a suitcase of Viyella socks and milk of magnesia. And two gifts, from people whose faces already slide backward from memory as the train climbs north.

  Oh, the little stolen man. Forgotten until just now. Even he is left behind, the police must have taken him in the sweep, with everything. It's a pity. This train might be just the thing he was looking for, those thousands of years. A long, narrow channel through darkness, a tunnel through the earth and time. Take me away to another world.

  More memories bubble up every day. The sea cave in Isla Pixol, cold water on prickly boy-skin. Images, conversations, warnings. The first time seeing Frida in the market with Candelaria: What was she wearing? Mother in the little apartment on the alley off of Insurgentes. Billy Boorzai. The first days in Mexico City. Isla Pixol, the names of villages and of trees. Recipes and rules for life from Leandro: What were they? Whom did Mother love, and what made her so happy that day in the rainstorm? The reef full of fishes, what were their colors? What lay at the bottom of the cave? How long did it take, exactly, to swim through it without drowning?

  The notebooks are gone. It must have been like this for Lev at the end, with his past entirely stolen. A lifetime of people, unconfirmed by their living presences, or photographs or descriptions in a notebook, can only skulk in the corners like ghosts. They shift like chimeras. Careful words of warning reverse themselves like truth and newspaper stories, becoming their own opposites. An imperfectly remembered life is a useless treachery. Every day, more fragments of the past roll around heavily in the chambers of an empty brain, shedding bits of color, a sentence or a fragrance, something that changes and then disappears. It drops like a stone to the bottom of the cave.

  There will not be another notebook after this one. No need. No more pages piling up. Oh, the childish hope of that. As if a stack of pages could someday grow high enough that a boy could stand on top of it and be as tall as Jack London or Dos Passos. That is the sorest embarrassment: those hopeful hours of typing through the night shift while Lorenzo's boots tapped overhead on the roof, all of our hearts bursting with the certainty of our own purposes. No more of that, never another typewriter. Accumulating words is a charlatan's career. How important is anything that could burn to ash in a few minutes? Stuffed into an incineration barrel at the police station, set on fire on a chilly August evening--maybe an officer warmed his hands, and that is the use of that. Better to roam free like a chicken with no future and no past. Searching only to satisfy the hunger of the present: a beetle or lizard snapped up, or perhaps one day, a snake.

  Harrison W. Shepherd leaves Mexico with his pockets full of ash. An emancipated traveler.

  PART 4

  Asheville, North Carolina

  1941-1947

  (VB)

  ARCHIVIST'S NOTE

  My name is Violet Brown. Was, I will say. When you read this I'll not be living. I will explain that directly.

  If I sound colorful, I am not. It's nought but a pair of names, stamped on me by two people who never met. First, my mother. She was fond of romantic novels with "Violets" in them. She was tubercular and passed when I was young. The second name was from my husband Freddy Brown, who came and went quickly through his time also: lost in the great flood of 1916. The swell of the French Broad River wrecked most of Asheville that time, including the Rees Sons Tannery, where he worked. I was widowed the same year as married, yet still am known to this day as Mrs. Brown. A woman can be marked by others: embossed is a good word for it, one of a great many taught me by Mr. Shepherd. He remarked once that I had been embossed with names like an address on a package, by people who didn't know the contents but still got to decide how it would be sent.

  Mother pined to see me married before she passed, and it happened soon after, when I was fifteen. Now I am older than she ever did get to be, and can see other paths are worthy. I've lived a maiden's life and found happiness, including being helpmeet to a man. I served greatness. I don't wish for more. That is the beginning and end of what needs be said about me. The purpose of this is to make known the life of Mr. Shepherd. When this book lies open he is dead, and so be I. Our argument at rest, if such it was.

  He was given to a secretive temperament, and it gained the better of him when he fled Mexico. He stopped keeping his journals and became hopeless of the written word and its consequence. He told me that, later on. Every scrap of his writings lost, things he'd kept track of since boyhood. He let go the hope of becoming a man of letters. I can attest. We were acquainted at that time, and if pressed to say what this young man might become, I'd think first of the kitchen, or any profession that suits one who keeps to himself. But a well-known writer of books? No. He read them. But most did, in those days.

  He never went back to his notebooks exactly as before, probably due to the change in situation. He kept carbon copies of his letters, and filed the clippings of news that attracted him. And still did write personal things, on any day that stirred him. I've seen him go in his study and type out memory of a whole event, in a kind of a fury. I expect if he'd been married he would have ranted the tale to his wife. But he didn't have any wi
fe, so his typewriter did the listening. Often it was whole conversations he'd had. His memory for conversation was shocking, I suppose due to his years of taking dictation from impatient men. But he must have had a knack for it, before. Then he'd file it in one of his leather folders and be done with it. You could call it a letter to himself, or God. He had that saying, God speaks for the silent man. That must have been the One he was talking to.

  Mr. Shepherd seldom let me see the personal writings. He knew how to file something himself. If a man can cook, he can file. He was the most bashful person I ever did meet, very pained to speak forthrightly of his feelings.

  We met soon after the travel mentioned, from Mexico to the United States. The murder unsettled and wrenched something in him badly, I know that much. He never wanted to talk about that time in his life. He spent a few months in the city of New York, I only know because it was winter that he came on south and settled here. I haven't any record of what he did in New York, save for one exception. He visited the father of Sheldon Harte, the boy that was killed in the raid, to give condolence and tell that man about his son's last days, since no other soul ever would. The newspaper reports had been awful, young Sheldon accused of being an accomplice in the "staged attack." That he had turned on his friends and run off, that kind of thing.