The Lacuna Read Free

would announce, putting the two of them inside an invisible room with her words, and closing the door.
    “I won’t have a girlfriend.”
    “You’ll turn fourteen next year. You’re already taller than President Portes Gil. Why wouldn’t you have a girlfriend?”
    “Portes Gil isn’t even a real president. He only got in because Obregón was iced.”
    “And maybe you will likewise ascend to power, after some girl’s first novio gets the sack. Doesn’t matter how you get the job, ducky. She’ll still be yours.”
    “Next year you could have this whole town, if you want it.”
    “But you’ll have a girl. This is all I’m saying. You’ll go off and leave me alone.” It was a game she played. Very hard to win.
    “Or if you don’t like it here, Mother, you could go somewhere else. Some smart city where people have better entertainments than walking in circles around the zocalo .”
    “And,” she persisted, “you’d still have the girl.” Not just a girl but the girl, already an enemy.
    “What do you care? You have Enrique.”
    “You make him sound like a case of the pox.”
    In front of the wrought-iron bandstand, the crowd had cleared a space for dancing. Old men in sandals held stiff arms around their barrel-shaped wives.
    “Next year, Mother, no matter what, you won’t be old.”
    She rested her head against his shoulder as they walked. He had won.
    Salomé hated that her son was now taller than she was: the first time she noticed, she was furious, then morose. In her formula of life, this meant she was two-thirds dead. “The first part of life is childhood. The second is your child’s childhood. And then the third, old age.” Another mathematics problem with no practical solution, especially for the child. Growing backward, becoming unborn: that would have been just the thing.
    They stopped to watch the mariachis on the platform, handsome men with puckered lips giving long kisses to their brass horns. Trails of silver buttons led down the sides of their tight black trousers. The zocalo was jammed now; men and women kept arriving from the pineapple fields with the day’s dust still on their feet, shuffling out of the darkness into the square of electric light. In front of the flat stone breast of the church, some of them settled in little encampments on the bare earth, spreading blankets where a mother and father could sit with their backs against the cool stones while babies slept rolled in a pile. These were the vendors who walked here for Holy Week, eachwoman wearing the particular dress of her village. The ones from the south wore strange skirts like heavy blankets wrapped in pleats, and delicate blouses of ribbon and embroidery. They wore these tonight and on Easter and every other day, whether attending a marriage or feeding pigs.
    They had come here carrying bundles of palm leaves and now sat untying them, pulling apart the fronds. All night their hands would move in darkness to weave the straps of leaf into unexpected shapes of resurrection: crosses, garlands of lilies, doves of the Holy Spirit, even Christ himself. These things had to be made by hand in one night, for the forbidden Palm Sunday mass, and burned afterward, because icons were illegal. Priests were illegal, saying the mass was illegal, all banned by the Revolution.
    Earlier in the year the Cristeros had ridden into town wearing bullets strapped in rows like jewelry across their chests, galloping around the square to protest the law banning priests. The girls cheered and threw flowers as if Pancho Villa himself had risen from the grave and located his horse. Old women rocked on their knees, eyes closed, hugging their crosses and kissing them like babies. Tomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in single-minded grace. Like the school of the fish, so driven to righteousness they could flout the law, declare the safety of their