They can be triangular, or curled like snails with the filling inside. The dough is the same, either way: white flour with lard and a little salt rubbed in. Beat egg yolks into a little cold water (as many eggs as Olunda will spare), then mix the liquid lake into the volcano of flour. Exactly like mixing plaster.
Roll the dough in a rectangle as wide as the whole counter in this kitchen, which is so small, if two ants are in the sugar it’s already too crowded in here. Next, with a clean machete cut the dough into squares like little handkerchiefs. Spoon some filling on each one and fold it diagonally to make a triangle. The square of the hipotenusa can go to hell. The filling can be custard or pineapple. For the custard, heat a liter of milk and some sugar with pieces of cinnamon. Beat seven egg yolks with some corn starch and pour it in a thin stream into the boiling milk. Stir until your arm is falling off. The lechecilla will be yellow and very thick.
For pineapple filling, cook the fruit with brown-sugar syrup and star anise.
The other way to make them is to spread the filling over the whole rectangle of dough and roll it into a log, then cut off round pieces, each one like a snail. For that, use the pineapple filling. The custard will make a devil of a mess.
Bake the pastries in the oven, if you live in a normal house. If you live in a supermodern house dreamed up by an idiot, go next door to the San Angel Inn. One of the cooks there, Montserrat, will meet you at the back door and take your trays to bake in the kitchen. She’ll send one of the hotel girls to tell you when they’re done.
Those are the instructions. If your boss has the appetite of an elephant and a kitchen the size of an insect, this is how to keep your job. Do it exactly this way, because he said, “Write out the recipe, mi’ijo, in case you ever leave me the way she did. You’re the only person who knows how to cook like my wife.”
What he doesn’t know is the servants did the cooking, not her, right from the beginning when they still lived with her parents. After they moved here, secretly she had most of the meals picked up from the San Angel next door.
The girl Candelaria is the angel of the birdcage, sighted years ago in the Melchor market hurrying behind her mistress. It took a few days of working here to be sure she is the same servant. It’s not a face you forget. Smooth skin, the countenance of a village girl, hair that reaches her knees. Olunda makes her tie her braids in loops, for safety and hygiene. Her mistress the Azteca Queen is gone. But Candelaria remains.
Could there be an uglier house in all Mexico than this one? Functionalismo, architecture as ugly as a fence made of dung. Except the fence here is the nicest part: a row of organ cactus surrounding the courtyard, planted so close together you can only see cracks of light between them. From upstairs you can look over it to the inn across the road, and a field where some cattle graze. San Angel is only two bus stops from the edge of the city, just one from Coyoacán, yet here is a farmer working in his field with an iron-bladed hoe that looks like it was forged during the reign of Moteczuma. When he stops to rest, that poor old man has to raise his eyes to this modern mess of glass and painted cement that looks like a mistake. It looks like a baby giant was playing with his blocks when his mother called him, so he ran away and left his toys lying in Calle Altavista.
Two blocks: the big pink one and small blue one standing separately, each with rooms stacked one above the other, screwed together by a curved cement staircase. The big pink block is the Painter’s domain, and his studio on the second floor is not so bad. That window is the size of a lake, a whole wall of glass looking down at the neighbor’s trees. The planks of the floor are yellow, like sun on your face. That room feels like someone could be happy in it. Everything else feels like being shut up inside a crate.
The small blue block is meant to be for the small wife. Servants are only allowed up the staircase as far as the kitchen (which is not worth the trip). Her rooms above it are sealed like a crypt since the Queen moved out. Good riddance, says Olunda. “She won’t be back, I promise you. I’ll eat a live dog if she ever shows up here again. After she caught master with his pants down as usual, but this time, humping her own sister!”
What a strange couple. Why would a man and wife live in separate houses? With only a little bridge between them, red pipe railings connecting one roof to the other. You can see it from the inn across the street. Functionalist tonteria. He is the one who eats, but the kitchen is on her side. If you manage to cook anything, you have to carry it down the staircase, which is like the inside of someone’s ear, outside into the blazing sun to cross the gravel courtyard, then up the other cement ear to the studio where the master stands with his pants belted high on his giant dumpling belly, waiting to be fed.
And now he says she’s coming back, he wants her greeted with empanadas and budines and enchiladas tapatías. He has never put his two giant feet in this tiny kitchen or he would know, you might as well try to make enchiladas in a peanut shell. Mixing plaster was easier. But living with Mother was not. So he’ll have his enchiladas.
November 30
Live dogs beware of Olunda. The mistress has come back after all. Moved back in with her furniture and strange collections packed into the rooms above the kitchen. It was like a surgery to carry her bed up the stair and through the narrow cement doorways without breaking out a glass-block wall. Candelaria and Olunda went up to help, and came back with hair standing on end. She has a pet monkey, they swear. He hides and leaps on your back when you carry food into her studio. Olunda moved her cot out of the little salon below the kitchen, because the mistress wants that space for a dining room. Olunda would rather sleep in the laundry closet under the house, anyway. The monkey is the least of it. The little queen has a temper like Mother’s.
This servant’s quarter out in the courtyard is probably the safest place to be, even with César the Flatulent for a roommate. He says this little block house wasn’t meant to be a servant’s quarter: they put it in the corner of the courtyard for keeping the motorcar, but the Painter decided to let the motorcar reside on Altavista Street, to make room for its driver in here. He says the architect planned for no driver or servant’s quarters because he was a Communist, like the Painter. Olunda agrees. They said it was to be a revolutionary house, free of class struggle, no servants’ rooms because they didn’t believe in laundry maids or cooks.
Nobody does, really. Why should they? Only in having clean clothes, clean floors, and enchiladas tapatías.
4 December 1935: The Queen Takes Notice
She was on her throne, the chair at the head of the mahogany dining table. It’s a wonder of the world she has fit her parents’ furniture into that room, including a cupboard for dishes. The old carved chairs are so enormous she looks like a child, feet swinging below her ruffled skirts and not quite reaching the floor. She was in a foul mood, sneezing, wrapped in a red shawl and scribbling away, putting names in the ledger book where she means to keep better track of expenses and sales of her husband’s paintings. One more thing she has taken over from Olunda, since moving in. All the names go in the book now, including the new kitchen boy, and what he is paid.
“Xarrizzon Chepxairt!” She grasped her throat when she said it, like choking on a chicken bone. “Is that really what people call you?”
“Not many people, señora. It sounds better in English.”
“I was saying it in English!”
“Sorry, señora.”
18 December: Second Audience with the Queen
She’s sick in bed still; Olunda says she’s twenty-five with the ailments of ninety. Kidneys and leg at the moment. Nevertheless she was propped up on pillows and dressed like an Indian bride: ruffled blouse, lip rouge, earrings, at least one ring on every finger, a crown of ribbons braided around her head. But she still looked half dead, staring up at the little windows at the top of the wall. Her bedroom is like a cement box, only slightly larger than the bed.
“Señora, sorry to disturb. Olunda sent me to get your plates from lunch.”
“No wonder she won’t come fetch the dishes herself, she’s ashamed of that jocoque.” She glanced up. “Olunda la Rotunda. Do they still call her that?”
“Not if they’re still alive, señora.”
“How does she get so fat on her own cooking? Look at me, I’m vanishing.”
“Fried bread with syrup is her secret.”
She made a little puzzled scowl. “And you, skinny creature. What’s your name?”
“It didn’t please you much the first time. When you wrote it in the ledger.”
“Oh shit, that’s right, you’re that one. The unpronounceable.” She seemed to wake up, sitting up straighter. When she looks at you, her eyes are like lit coals inside the hearth of those shocking eyebrows. “What does Diego call you?”
“Muchacho, mix some more plaster! Muchacho, bring me my lunch!”
She laughed. It was a good impersonation: it’s all in his eyes, the way he opens them wide and leans forward when he bellows.
“So, you make plaster for Diego’s lunch?”
“Never, señora. On my honor. He hired me first as a plaster boy, and a few months ago he moved me in here, to work in the kitchen.”
“Why?” She cocked her head, like a beautiful doll propped on the pillows. One among many, in fact. The bookshelf behind her bed was full of porcelain and cloth dolls. All of them, like her, look dressed up for some party that will be noisy for certain.
“He likes my pan dulce and blandas, señora. I’m good at soft dough, in general. On the plaster crew they used to call me Sweet Buns.”
“You can make blandas in this house? In that stupid little kitchen with the fuego electrico? You must be the Son of God. Tell Olunda to put you in charge of everything.”
“She wouldn’t take that kindly.”
“What do you think of that kitchen?”
A pause, for guessing the right answer. It’s well known that the Painter likes the house; a wrong answer in this interrogation could prove deadly. It felt like being back at the academy, but with a different category of officer.
“Everyone says it’s an outstanding house, señora.”
“Everyone will say horse shit smells like flowers,” she stated, “if they want to be popular with a horse’s ass.”
“And your opinion, señora, if I may ask?”
She frowned at the white wall, the metal-cased window. “Bauhaus,” she said, like a dog barking twice. “It’s a monstrosity, isn’t it? How do you even fit in that kitchen?”
“The same way you fit in your water closet. It’s the same size room, directly underneath.”
“But you’re twice my size!”
“Standing in the center of the kitchen, it’s possible to touch all four walls, exactly.”
“It’s that pendejo Juan O’Gorman showing off his modern ass. I don’t know what he and Diego were thinking, it’s like a hospital.” She gestured with the back of her ring-ring hand. “And stairs! To get up to that stupid bridge and go across to Diego, I’m supposed to go out the window and climb little steps up the side of the house like an acrobat. What shit. He’s not even worth it, I would kill myself, chulito. Who are you? Say it again, I swear I’ll try to remember.”
“Harrison. Shepherd.”
“Christ, I’m not going to call you that. Diego calls you what, again?”
“Sweet Buns.”
“The crew is very unkind to the plaster boys. As you know. But honestly, XARrizZON! It sounds like strangling. What kind of a name is that?”
“It was a president, señora.”
“Of what? Some place where they don’t have any oxygen?”
“Of the United States.”
“As I said.”
One more country is now to be held as a grudge, then. The mother country, the fatherland, two is all you get. Best to keep quiet, and stack the lunch dishes onto the tray. In two minutes César and Olunda would be fighting over everything left on those plates.
“You’re from Gringolandia, then,” she pressed.
“Born there, yes, señora. A half-citizen on my father’s side. My mother sent me back there to be educated, but it didn’t work.”
“Why not?”
With the examination ending now, a quick last grasp at redemption: “The school kicked me out.”
“Really.”
It was a good guess: now even the ribbons in her hair curled forward to hear more. All the dolls stared. “Kicked out for what, chulito?”
“For a scandal.”
“Involving?”
“Another student.”
“Another student and?” Her hair practically standing on end.
“Conducta insólita. Irregular conduct. Señora, no more can be said. You would have to put me out on the street if you knew the rest.”
She crossed her arms and smiled. “That’s what I’m going to call you: Insólito.”
The examination: passed, with highest honors. The prize: a possible ally in this impossible house.
5 January 1936
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 César 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.”
Señora gawked as if a fish had arrived in her home, wearing an apron. “Insólito. 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 señora 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 señora 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 señora’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.”
2 February
Eight kinds of tamales for the feast of Candlemas. Even César was ordered to help. He threatened all day to quit, as he is “a chauffeur, not a peon for women’s work.” He’s been angry since October because of having to share his room with an Odd Egg, and now he even has to put on an apron, the world may end soon. The Painter says he’s sorry, but that’s how it is, Frida rules the house. “And besides, old comrade, you’re getting too old for driving, so you better get used to peonage.” It’s true, yesterday César got lost four times on the way to the pharmacist’s. The mistress calls him General Wrong Turn.
Even more than aprons he despises this notebook. He calls it “the espionage.” He is adamant, shutting off the lights on pen and paper. But most nights, by the time every dish in the house has been scraped, cleaned, and put away, he’s already snoring like a whale. The spy may do his work here unless the whale is roused from stupor. It is like being in a casa chica again with Mother, Put out the damn candle before you burn us all.
19 February
Candelaria doesn’t remember that day when she carried the parrot cage on her back through the Melchor market. She says she must have just come from the village then, the Painter and Mistress hired her when they were newlyweds, living at the Allende Street house with the señora’s parents. Candelaria doesn’t remember the parrots, or why they were purchased, or how long the couple lived in that place with the fantastic courtyard, before building this house. She couldn’t say if she liked it better there. She seems to forget almost everything. The secret to surviving the storms of Rivera service.
2 March
The señora is making a painting in the little studio next to her bedroom. It’s not such a mess, she uses a cloth under her chair. At the end of the day, it looks like it rained blue, red, and yellow. She cleans her own brushes and knives, a hundred times tidier than the Painter, who throws everything on the floor and stomps out in his cowboy boots. But Candelaria and Olunda refuse to carry her lunch upstairs, saying her temper is even worse when she’s painting. She never says gracias because life is made of survival not grace, she says, and servants are paid to bring what they’re asked. Today she demanded stuffed chiles, more blue pigment, and surprisingly, advice.
“The painting looks good so far, señora.” When people ask for advice, this is what they want. “Good progress too. We’ll see that finished by the end of the month.”
“We will?” She gave a fierce, quick smile like a cat showing itself to another cat. “As the fly said, sitting on the back of the ox, ‘We are plowing this field!’”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay, Insólito. If anybody says it’s ugly, I’ll tell them ‘we’ painted it.”
The painting has people floating in the air, connected by ribbons. She asked, “Do you like art? I mean, do you understand it?”
“Not really. Words, though. Those are nice. Poems and things like that.”
“What did you study in school?”
“Awful things, señora. Drill and psychomotricity. It was a military school.”
“Dios mio, you poor skinny dog. But they didn’t succeed in enslaving you, did they? I notice sometimes you still piss on the shoes of the master.”
“Excuse me, señora?”
“I’ve seen you reading the newspaper to the girls down in the dining room. Changing the headlines to make them laugh. Your little insurrections.” She still faced the painting, speaking without turning around. Was this going to be a dismissal?
“It’s just to pass the time, señora. We still do our work.”
“Don’t worry, I’m a revolutionist. I approve of insurrections. Where did they send you to school, Chicago or something? One of those freezing places?”
“Washington, D.C.”
“Ah. Throne of the kingdom of Gringolandia.”
“More or less. The cornfields outside the throne of the kingdom. The school was in the middle of farms and polo fields.”
“Polo? That’s some kind of crop?”
“A game. Rich people play baseball riding ponies.”
She put down her paintbrush and turned around. “Isn’t it crazy? Rich people in the United States don’t even know how to use money properly.” She peeked at her lunch plates now, inspecting the rellenos. “They don’t mind throwing big parties while people stand outside in the street with nothing. But then they serve puny little foods at the party! And live in houses stacked on top of one another like chicken crates. The women look like turnips. When they dress up, they look like turnips in dresses.”
“You’re right, señora. Mexico is the better place.”
“Oh, Mexico’s going to the devil too. The gringos steal a little more of it every week, replacing the beauty of our campos and our Indios with the latest fashion in ugliness. Probably they’ll turn our maguey into fields for pony-beisbol. It can’t be helped, I suppose. The big fish always eats the little one.”
“Yes, señora.”
“Little dog, don’t give me this ‘si señora.’ I’m sick of that.”
“Sorry. But it’s right, what you said. My mother is Mexican, but all she’s ever wanted to do is dress like an American lady and marry American men.”
The eyebrow went up. “A lot of them?”
“Well, one at a time. And really she only succeeded once, with my father. The other slippery fish all got away.”
She laughed, shaking her head full of ribbons like a flag in the wind. She would never be converted to a turnip. “Insólito, you should come out and piss more often.”
“Olunda keeps my rope tied very short, señora.”
“You have to stop calling me señora. How old are you?”
“Twenty this summer.”
“Look, I’m practically the same as you, twenty-five. It’s Frida, only. César calls me that so you can too, it’s not a crime against the state.”
“César is like your grandfather.”
She tilted her head. “You’re not afraid of me, are you? Just shy, right?”
“Maybe.”
“You don’t have a lot of heat in your blood, is the problem. You’re not completely Mexican, and not all gringo either. You’re like this house, Insólito. A double person made of two different boxes.”
“That might be true, señora, Frida.”
“In the house of your mother, a taste for beauty and poetry. Secret passions, I suspect. And in the gringo side, a head that’s always thinking and surviving.”
“True, maybe. Except my house is only a kitchen, it seems. And very small indeed.”
“The kitchen of your house is ruled by Mexico, thank God.”
4 March
Our Lord Jesus has not yet risen. How do we know this? Olunda grumbles about another day of Lenten meals. But they can be some of the best: lima bean soup, potatoes in green sauce, fried beans. At supper this evening the Painter hinted he needs more boys on the plaster crew, and the mistress scolded him: “Sapo-rana! The way you eat, you should know we need your plaster boy here.” Toad-frog, she calls him, then gets up, walks over to him, and kisses his toad-frog face. They are the strangest couple. And why do these Communists observe Lent, in any case?
The Painter’s new mural in the Palacio Bellas Artes has the newspaper reports flying so fast, their pages might combust. He’s copying the mural he did in the United States that created a scandal and had to be torn down before completion. It frightened the gringos that badly. Scaring gringos can make a hero of any Mexican. Other artists now come to the house every night, crowding around the Riveras’ dining table with two colors of paint still in their hair. Writers, sculptors, bold women in makeup who want the vote, and students who are evidently waiting for San Juan Bautista to bathe, along with the lepers. Some are too old to be students, so who knows what they do. (If anything.) One is a Japanese in gringo clothes, arrived here to make a mural in the new Mercado.
The only place big enough for washing that many dishes is in the laundry closet under the stair. Down in the courtyard you can still hear them up there drinking their way to an agreement, sometimes all night, like the men who used to visit Don Enrique. But this crowd wants to kick out all the American oil men. The señora shouts: “Save Mexico for the Mexicans! Save the Mexicans for Mexico! The two commandments of our revolution!” Then they all jerk back their heads, swallowing tequila for Mexico.
Tonight the Painter explained, for the benefit of servants trying to slide behind the guests’ chairs to clear the dinner plates, that this was a famous quote from Moses.
“Señor Rivera, Mexico is in the Bible?” Poor Candelaria, the Painter sometimes makes a sport of her. Possibly in more ways than one.
A different Moses, he told her. Moisés Sáenz, in 1926. “Ten years of revolution may not have saved all the Mexican children, but at least we’ve saved them from the pope and the Italian Renaissance.”
“The Renaissance had its good points,” his wife maintained.
“Honestly, Friducha. Who needs all those fat little cherubs flying around?”
As a matter of fact she is painting one with cherubs now. They look like unruly children with wings. She never seems happy with what she’s painting, and talks to herself: “Oh boy, that won’t work. What a lot of shit. That looks like it came out of the ass of a dog.” Candelaria won’t go near her. Next to Mother’s Museum of Bad Words, Señora Frida could construct a pyramid.
But in her husband she has perfect confidence. She always says to the guests: “Damn all other artists to hell, Diego is the cultural revolution!” Even when some of her guests are among the damned. One time in her studio she said, “He’s very great. Don’t forget that, if you think you’re looking at a fat frog who won’t pick up his pants from the floor. His work is the whole thing. He’s doing what nobody could do before.” Maybe she heard Olunda complaining about him. Voices carry in this strange cement house.
She says Mexicans have trouble making friends with their history because we’re many different nations: Toltec, Aztec, Mayan, Oaxacan, Sonoran, all fighting each other from the very beginning. That’s why the Europeans and gringos could come in and walk over everything. “But Diego can take all those different people and make them into one Mexicanized patria,” she said. He paints that on the wall, so big you won’t forget.
It explains a lot, what she said. Why he is much-discussed. And why some people want him torn down, not just gringos but also the Mexican boys in tejano hats who don’t want anyone saying they were born from between the legs of an Indian woman. He makes people feel things. How thrilling it must be, to tell the story of La Raza in bold colors and no apology: Indians walking out of history into the present, all in a line with their L-shaped noses, marching past Cortés into the vanishing point of their future.
9 April
President Cárdenas agrees with the Rivera dinner guests, it’s time to kick out the oil men. Mexican oil for the Mexican people now. The newspaper says the workers will only have to work eight hours a day from now on, and get a share of profits. Cárdenas even kicked out Big Chief Calles, boss of every Mexican president since the rocks of the earth were still warm. Now he can enjoy the company of his gringo business friends more than ever, because the president had him arrested and put on a plane to New York. “What a Boy Scout, that Cárdenas,” Olunda said. “Usually they just assassinate their rivals.”
It was also a day of liberation for the peons of the Kitchen of Microscopia. The señora wants a huge Easter party, and decided to have it at a regular house with a real kitchen: her father’s house on Allende Street. It’s where they lived before, near the Melchor market, with the jungle courtyard. She had César drive the staff there to get started cooking for Saturday, assisted by that house’s ancient housekeeper and two girls. The dining table was piled with newspapers; the Painter still gets a lot of mail there. The others begged to be entertained with dramatic readings while cutting up one thousand tomatoes. Candelaria is tender-hearted, but Olunda only wants the motorcar plunges into the canyons of Orizaba, so the kitchen readings always involve some compromise. The Allende Street house staff were an easier audience: old Perpetua seems deaf, and the two girls laughed at anything: Upon arrival in New York City, Calles told reporters…“I was thrown out of Mexico because I forgot my pants and wallet in the bedroom of a puta on Avenida Colón.” Candelaria and the girls shrieked and giggled.
Mistress Frida appeared in the doorway, completely unexpectedly. Olunda threw down the fork she was using to mash avocados and cupped her hands over her fleshy ears. The house girls ardently peeled the nopales without looking up.
“My concern is for your ignorance,” the señora snapped. “This is a historic day. Read it to them correctly.”
“Yes, señora.”
She stood, waiting.
“Upon arrival in New York City, the former Jefe Maximo told reporters, ‘I was exiled because I opposed the attempts to create a dictatorship of the proletariat.’”
“Very good. Keep going.” She swirled and walked out to attend to her father, leaving the kitchen proletariat to absorb the real news of the day. The State Department of Chiapas, responding to the Syndicate of Indigenous Workers, has voted to raise the wages of all coffee workers throughout the state. In a formal declaration to the Congress, President Cárdenas stated, “In the new democracy, organized laborers exert a genuine influence on the political and economic leadership of our country.”
Olunda’s eyes darted from her avocados to the doorway, to the newspaper, and back to her bowl. Dreaming, perhaps, of a Syndicate of Avocado Mashers.
19 April
The mistress is having a relapse of difficulties with her back, an infection of her eyes, kidney stones, and an affair with the Japanese sculptor. So says Olunda, but it hardly seems possible: when would she have time? But Candelaria has evidence: the last time she let the Japonés through the gate, the Painter came barreling down the spiral stair with his pistol out. The sculptor is no longer welcome in either half of the double house.
22 April
The señora packed herself off to the hospital, taking paintbrushes and some dolls. Today she sent word she also needed chiles rellenos, so the master dispatched the male servants to the hospital with her lunch. Possibly to see if the Japonés is lurking there, attempting sexual liaisons with a woman in a plaster spinal corset. César got lost twice on the way, then remained in the car to nap and recover himself for the voyage home.
“Insólito!” she cried from her hospital bed. “Look at your poor Friducha, falling all to pieces and dying. Let me have that basket.” She wore only half the usual pirate’s chest of jewelry today, but her hair was pinned up the usual way. She must have nurses and stretcher-bearers at her command at the Hospital Inglés.
“Did you stop by my father’s house to give him some of this?”
“Of course. Señor Guillermo sends you his heart.”
“He’s going to starve, with Mother gone. She’s the only one who ever ordered those servants to get up off their nalgas.” She pulled out the napkins and silver, arranging her bed for dining as carefully as she sets the table at home.
“With respect, señora, his housekeeper is the same one who managed to keep you alive through your childhood.”
“My point exactly. She’s ancient. It’s like an archaeological ruin over there.”
“Everything is fine at Allende Street, you shouldn’t worry. Perpetua hired two new housegirls. Belén and something. Today they were planting lilies in the courtyard.”
“Lilies! The whole house needs repairs and a good coat of paint. I would make it plumbago blue. With red trim. What’s the news from home?” she asked, tearing into the rellenos. She had an excellent appetite for a dying woman.
“You don’t want to know.”
“Meaning? Has Diego replaced me already?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that. It’s all the same people coming over in the evenings.”
“The painters?”
“Mostly the writers and the theater ones.”
“The Contemporáneos. Oh boy, you’re right, I don’t want to know about them. Villaurrutia with his Nostalgia for Death! Just go ahead and drink the poison, muchacho, get it over with. I think he and Novo are having an affair with each other, they’re both impervious to flirtation. And Azuela is just gloomy.”
“Mariano Azuela? That’s him? The author of Los de abajo?”
“The one. Don’t you find him gloomy?”
“He’s a very great writer.”
“But very cynical, don’t you think? Look, that character Demetrio in Los de abajo: What kind of hero is he? Fighting in the Revolution without a single idea in his head about why. Remember the scene where his wife asks him why he’s fighting?”
“Of course. He throws a rock into the canyon.”
“And the two of them just stand like a pair of dummies, watching the rock roll all the way down the hill.”
“It’s a moving scene, Señora Frida. Isn’t it?”
“Maybe if you’re a rock. I’d like to think I’m being pulled through history by something more than the force of gravity.”
“But gravity is winning. Look how short you are.”
“This is no joke, I’m warning you, Sóli. Be careful of your heart going cold. The Mexican writers are cynics. Our painters are the idealists. Take my advice, if you ever need a party to cheer yourself up, invite the painters, not the writers.”
She cocked her head, like a cat inspecting a mouse prior to consumption. “But…you are a writer, aren’t you? You write at night.”
How could she know that? Now they will make it stop.
“Pages and pages. César told me that. He said it’s like you’re possessed.”
No confession.
“I also believe you find it most interesting that Novo and Villaurrutia are sleeping with boys instead of girls? Don’t you.”
None.
“I’m not charging you with crimes, you know.”
“No. No secrets, Señora Frida.”
“What a lot of mierda. You always call me señora when you’re lying. So tell me, how are things in the soap opera of Los de Kitchen?”
“The same, Frida. We’re just tedious little servants.”
“Sóli, you are neither small nor tedious. Sooner or later you’re going to have to confide in me, one pierced soul to another. Sleep on it, Sóli. Consult your pillow.”
4 May
A visit with Mother, to take her to La Flor for her birthday. She was dazzling as always in a violet frock and dyed-to-match wool cloche. Her new plan is to win the heart of an American engineer contracting for the government. She describes him as “plenty rugged.” Also plenty married: they met when he came in the dress shop to buy a gift, not for his wife but his mistress. “Former mistress,” Mother calls her hopefully.
“It’s inspiring, Mother. You never shrink from competition.”
“What about you? That girl came in the shop again last week. This is the Rebeca I told you about, the friend of that little jelly bean you took to the Posadas last winter, and if you ask me, this Rebeca is ten times prettier. If the other one is a wet sock, that’s your good luck. She was a half-portion, if you ask me. But the friend is really swell.”
“I didn’t ask you.”
“Rebeca, this one is. Write it down, mi’ijo, at least pretend you’re interested. Or am I going to have to hire a puta to get a woman in your little pinche life?”
“A pinche life full of women, thanks all the same. One more and it might split open like a pomegranate.”
“I mean a woman in bed.”
“That house is ruled by a woman in a bed. Completely.”
“Mi’ijo, you exasperate me. This Rebeca, look, she’s a smart one like you. She wants to go to university, but right now she’s a seamstress. Did she stop in? I told her where you’re working. I didn’t tell her the kitchen, of course, I said you were some kind of a secretary. Intending to become a lawyer. It isn’t a lie to say you’re intending.”
“Let’s go back to your love life. It’s more interesting.”
“It had better get that way soon, let me tell you. Forty! Look at me, I’m a rock of ages.” She covered her face with her hands. Then peeked through, because the watermelon salad arrived. “And you, almost twenty! It’s unbelievable.”
“Half a rock of ages.”
“And what will you be doing on your twentieth birthday, mister?”
“Cooking, probably. The señora has the same birthday. She doesn’t know it.”
“Listen, if we go anywhere together now, you are not to say you’re my son, do you hear me. Look at you, a man! How could you do that to me? That’s it, mister. The men nowadays want fillies and pips and sweet patooties and no-o-o dotie brodies.”
She has moved on from oil men, there was no future in that stock. Don Enrique has lost everything in the nationalization. Mother reports that the hacienda on Isla Pixol has been appropriated, turned over to the people of the village as a communal farm. They turned the house into a school.
“Well, good. One provincial school will have some books in it, anyway.”
“You would be on their side, wouldn’t you? Houseboy for the pinkos.”
“The point of the appropriation law is restitution, Mother. Meaning Don Enrique or his family must have taken that land from the villagers in the first place.”
“But look, were they really using it? Your Leandro is probably the president of the collective now, trying to work out how to put on a pair of shoes.”
“My Leandro? He had a wife. The only man in that house who did.”
“Ooh, you slay me. Poor old Enrique, he got his sock chorus, didn’t he? Can you imagine the scrow, when they put him off his own place? And his mother! Holy moly, that must have taken the army.” Mother took a nibble of her watermelon salad.
“Consorting with Americans has improved your English.”
“As far as I care, Enrique and his relatives can go chase themselves, and you can put that in your hat. There’s some jazz talk.”
“And you can put this in your hat, Mother. Washing the dishes of pinkos doesn’t make someone a pinko. It’s not like an influenza.”
“I’m just razzing you. I’d take up with a pinko in two toots, if he was famous and had a wad of tin. That artist’s little girlfriend is one lucky duck.”
“The little girlfriend is actually his wife.”
“Like I said. But what a piece of calico, all spuzzed up like an Indian. She’s no Garbo. How’d she get lucky?”
“He’s fond of the way she dresses. They’re nationalists.”
“No soap!” She shook her head. “To me she looks like a corn-eater.”
“You used to ask, What kind of man would chase after that? In Isla Pixol, remember? Now you know.”
“Hey, you got a gasper?” She took a cigarette and lit it, pushing away her unfinished lunch. Poor Mother, still living from one gasp to the next. She removed a piece of tobacco from her tongue, and announced: “A corn-eater will never be any more than she is.”
It was no use reminding Mother of her temporary craze for learning the sandunga. If corn-eaters are now having their day in nationalist Mexico, in Mother’s estimate they will soon lose the race to fillies and sweet patooties. The afternoon crowd at La Flor had waned, but she kept glancing around the patio, always on the alert.
“What’s become of Don Enrique, then? Is he begging on the streets?”
“Oh golly no. He’s living in one of his other places. Up in the oil fields somewhere in the Huasteca. Enrique could always pull more money out of his nalgas. No matter how much he complained to us about our spending.”
She leaned forward and looked up with big eyes under the brim of her cloche hat, and suddenly there she was: the other Mother. The mischievous girl, drawing another child into her conspiracy. “Don’t worry about Don Enrique, mi’ijo. Dios les da el dinero a los ricos, porque si no lo tuvieran, se morirían de hambre.”
God gives money to the rich because if they didn’t have it, they would starve.
1 July
The Riveras’ wad of tin must not be as big as Mother thinks. Señora Frida had to make a strategy for financing her birthday party: she painted a portrait of the lawyer’s wife and sold it to him. The party will be at the Allende Street house to hold all the people, as she has invited three quarters of the Republic, including mariachis. The painters and the gloomy writers are coming. Olunda is in a frenzy. Chicken escabeche, pork and nopales in pipián sauce, mole poblano. Sweet potatoes mashed with pineapple. Tomato and watercress salad. The pork-rib and tomato stew she calls “the tablecloth stainer.” At last report she also wants shrimps and marinated pigs’ feet. The señora might have to paint portraits of the guests as they come in, and sell them on the way out, to pay the butcher after this fiesta. A wearying twentieth birthday expected for the cook.
14 July
Housecleaning. Eight paintings moved from Señora Frida’s cramped studio into the storage room on the Painter’s side. The nice painting of her grandparents, the odd one of herself and the monkey, and the bloody one that Candelaria talks about, from when she lived in the apartment on Insurgentes. Each title has to go in the ledger before it’s moved upstairs: the bloody portrait of the stabbed girl is called A Few Little Pokes. She painted it after a man in the Zona Rosa stabbed his girlfriend twenty-six times, and when the police came and found her dead, the boyfriend said, “What’s the problem? I only gave her a few little pokes.” The story was in all the newspapers. Señora said, “Insólito, you’d be amazed what people will buy.” Did she mean the painting, or the man’s story?
5 August
The people who come to dinner with paint in their hair now have a name for themselves: the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors. After the plates are cleared they bring the typewriter from the Painter’s office and make a newspaper right on the dining table. The writer in charge, Señor Buerrero, was the pigmentist on the mural crew. They argue about everything: Which is better, art or philosophy? Easel art for the bourgeoisie, or murals for the public? Which is the more nationalist, pulque or tequila? The servants get an earful, better than any school yet. Tonight they argued about how to defeat fascism in Spain. Mexico opposes the Fascists, even though the gringos and British think a stern fellow like Franco is just the thing to straighten up Spain. The Riveras’ old friend Siqueiros is there now, fighting alongside the Spaniards.
But he was strange, Alfaro Siqueiros. The type to find a fight anywhere, war or no war. When he used to come to supper, Olunda would pull out her crucifix and say, “Dios mio, don’t use the good talavera, it will be in pieces before the pastry.” Rivera calls him a bang-bang artist, making murals with a spray gun and airplane paints. Siqueiros called Rivera a high-flying Communist, getting commissions from gringos and robber barons. Then Rivera would say, Look at your friend Stalin if you want to see the robber baron maximo, and usually that was when the talavera became endangered.
Really, those two have only one fight: Who is a better painter, Siqueiros or Rivera?
19 August
The señora in the hospital all week; it seems very serious. They moved her again to the Inglés. It’s a long drive to take her lunch. On the way back today we brought food to the Painter in the Palacio Bellas Artes, where he’s touching up that mural after they put some electric wires in the wall behind. It’s the re-creation of the one that frightened people in New York so badly. Last summer the plaster boys made bets it would show monsters with devils’ heads, or worse. Seeing it now, it’s hard to guess which part is frightening. No monsters. Maybe the white and dark-skinned workers side by side. In the United States they require different bathrooms. But the Painter says no, it was only the face of Lenin, leader of the Russian Revolution.
The boys on the plaster crew are all different ones from last summer, so no one there today remembered Sweet Buns. That name is gone. Sometimes the past can vanish.
25 August
Señora Frida is still in the hospital. The house is both dull and chaotic, the blue side ruled by the monkey lurking on the stairs, awaiting the return of his mistress. He hangs by one hand from the stair rail, scratching his nalgas. The Painter, on his side of the house, is doing approximately the same. She is the center of everything.
29 August
The Painter is working like a madman in his studio. Candelaria refuses to take him his food or clean the studio while he’s in there, for reasons she won’t disclose. An acceptable reason would be: it looks as if a giant dog, after a large lunch of food, socks, paints, trousers, and pencils, walked into that room and vomited everywhere.
It’s no easy trick to clean up around him. The man takes up a lot of space. He seems to be painting landscapes. Unlike his wife, he does not ask for a servant’s opinion on his work. He interrogates. Yesterday: “How long have you been in this house?”
“All day, señor. My bed is in the little carriage house, shared with César.”
“I know that. And you used to be on the plaster crew. Sweet Buns, they called you. I’m asking how long you’ve been with us here in San Angel.”
“Living here, since last October, sir. Before that, two times in the summer when you had those gatherings and needed an extra cook. You hired me full-time after a girl left. Olunda recommended me to your service. Probably she regrets it now.”
“Why is that?”
A pause. “Modesty should prevent my saying it, but my bread is better than hers. Beyond that, Olunda views life in general as a regrettable contract.”
“I see your point. That’s enough for now.”
But today he launched a second interrogation, even more blunt. Beginning with: “Your name is Shepherd, and you’re a foreigner. Is that right?”
“Only one-half foreign, sir. Mexican mother, gringo father.”
“He lives in the United States? Doing what?”
“Keeping track of money in a government office. Building and road repairs.”
“I see. And are you trustworthy?”
“It’s a hard question to answer, sir. Saying ‘yes’ could prove either case.”
He seemed to like that answer, smiling a little.
“Half American does not mean half loyal, Señor Rivera. Your household is generous and inspiring. A worker could not ask for much more.”
“But workers do, every minute. I understand you’re a writer.”
“Señor, what on earth gives you that understanding?”
“One person. By name, César.”
“He does?”
“He says you scribble every night. Are you reporting on us to someone?”
César is a perseverant snitch. “It’s nothing like that. Just a diary of kitchen nonsense and little stories. Romantic adventures set in other times. Nothing of consequence, meant for no one else’s eyes.”
“César says you write in English. Why is that?”
“With respect to your old comrade driver. How does he know it’s English?”
The Painter considered this. “Meant for no one else’s eyes, including César’s.”
“You could understand the need for privacy.”
His toad-frog face broadened helplessly. “You’re talking to a man who smears his soul on the walls of public buildings. How would I understand?”
“Well, no sir. But consider how your wife views her art, something she does for herself. It’s more like that. But of course it isn’t art, these little notebooks, there’s no comparison. What she does is very good.”
“Don’t panic, I’m not going to fire you. But we have to start being careful about security. We can’t have a spy in our midst.”
“Of course not.” A long pause. Clearly it is important not to ask why. Does he want more reassurance, something personal? “About the English, sir. It’s a habit from school. They taught us to use typewriters, which are very handy, I have to say. But they didn’t have the Spanish characters. So a story begun in English keeps going in English.”
“You know how to use a typewriter?” He seemed quite surprised.
“Yes, señor. When the question of Spanish characters came up, the officer at school said no typewriter anywhere has characters beyond those needed for English. But it isn’t true. The one you sometimes leave on the dining-room table has them.”
“Those gringos. What jingoists.”
“That was the problem at school. You can’t get far on a story without the accents and eñe. You begin with Señor Villaseñor in the bath, reflecting on the experience of his years, but instead he is ‘en el bano, reflexionando en las experiencias de sus anos.’”
The Painter laughed, throwing a streak of blue across his big belly. Olunda will offer up some curses over those trousers. The big toad has a wonderful laugh. That must be what women like about him, besides the wad of tin. Not his face, for sure. But his joy, the way he gives himself up entirely. As he said, a soul smeared on walls.
The suspect was then released, carrying a pile of dirty plates from the room of interrogations. If César can read his name here, let him worry. Let him fret all day over Senor Villasenor in the bath, reflecting on the experiences of his anuses.
3 September
Señora Frida is back from the hospital, but not well. Both master and mistress are in the house now, requiring service day and night. Candelaria, forced to choose between devil and dragon, has chosen the one that needs her hair combed. Just as well, because the other devil needs a typist. The Communist Party has thrown him out over the never-ending argument of who is better, Stalin or Stotsky or Potsky or what. The other Communists won’t come over for supper and do his typing anymore. And the mistress seems angry with him over some private matter. Olunda has plenty of theories. Poor toad-frog Diego, losing people faster than he can paint new ones on a wall.
14 September
Today General Wrong Turn got lost on the way to the house in Coyoacán where he lived for forty-one years. The errand was the usual, taking food to Señor Kahlo. When César first began driving Guillermo Kahlo around for making his photographs, it was in a carriage. Not a motor coach in all Mexico City, he says, and those were the good days. It’s true that horses have certain advantages: namely, knowing the way home.
It’s strange every time, returning to the Allende Street house where Señora Frida marched home from the Melchor market that birthday long ago, a stranger, with a shy boy carrying her bags because Every Man has the Right to make a Kite from his Pants. And in the courtyard inside, the Painter sat under the trees reading his newspaper, waiting to be found, all on a chance. How strange that a boy could make a kite of his pants, fly them around the world, and somehow arrive back at the house where everything began.
1 October
A tiresome day. Being the Painter’s typist is harder than mixing his plaster. The worst of it isn’t the typing but his interrogations. He says cleverness in a servant is not always a good thing. Candelaria, for example, could straighten all the papers on his desk and come away with no more idea of what’s written there than Fulang Chang the monkey. And the master doesn’t hold Fulang Chang entirely above suspicion. Only the illiterate, wide-eyed Candelaria. “How about you?” he needled. “What did you see just now, while you were typing the invoice letters?”
“Nothing, Señor Rivera.”
“Nothing, including the official letterhead of the President of the Republic? You didn’t notice a letter from Cárdenas?”
“Señor, I have to admit, that did catch my eye. The seals are outstanding. But you’re an important person. Commissions from the government are nothing exceptional. I didn’t care enough to read the letter, that’s the truth. I’m uncurious about politics.”
He closed his newspaper, took the glasses off his nose, and stared across the room from the armchair where he likes to sit while reading and dictating. “Uncurious?”
“Señor Rivera, you stand for the people, anyone can see the good of that. But leaders all seem the same, no matter what they promise. In the end they’ll let the poor people go to the dogs.”
“A cynic! A rarity, in revolutionary Mexico. In your age group, anyway.”
“I didn’t go to university. Perhaps that’s helped me maintain my position.”
“A severe young man. You allow for no exceptions?”
“Exceptions haven’t presented themselves. I read the newspapers a little. Which I take from your studio when you’re finished, señor. I offer that confession.”
“Here, take this one too, it’s nothing but junk.” He folded it and tossed it at the desk. “Did you ever hear of a man named Trotsky?”
“No, sir. Is he a Pole?”
“A Russian. There’s a letter from him over there as well. In the same stack with the president’s.”
“That one I did not see, Señor Rivera. I swear it’s the truth.”
“I’m not accusing. The point I want to make is that you’re wrong, idealism does exist. Have you heard of the Russian Revolution at least?”
“Yes, sir. Lenin. He got you in trouble with the gringos on your mural.”
“That one. Leader of the Bolsheviks. He sent the monarchs packing, along with all the rich bloodsuckers living off the workers and peasants. He put the workers and peasants in charge. What do you say about that?”
“With no disrespect, señor, I would say, how long did he last?”
“Through the revolution and seven years after. He did what was best for his people, until death. All the while living in a rather cold little apartment in Moscow.”
“It’s admirable, señor. And then he was murdered?”
“He died of a stroke. With two men poised to succeed him: one with scruples, the other with cunning. I suppose you’ll say it’s predictable, the cunning one took power.”
“Did he?”
“He did. Stalin. A selfish, power-mad bureaucrat, everything you seem to require in a leader of men.”
“I’m sorry, sir. It’s not that I want to be right about this.”
“But I contend you are not. The other one, with scruples, could just as easily be in charge now. He was Lenin’s right hand and best friend. Elected president of the Petrograd Soviet, a populist, certain to succeed Lenin. Different in every way from Stalin, who was infatuated with party bureaucracy. How could the people fail to support the populist over the bureaucrat?”
“And yet they failed to do so?”
“Only thanks to an accident of history.”
“Ah. The populist with scruples was murdered.”
“No, to Stalin’s frustration, he remains alive in exile. Writing strategic theory, organizing support for a democratic People’s Republic. And avoiding Stalin’s ant colony of assassins, who are crawling over the earth right now looking for him.”
“It’s a good story, señor. Strictly from the point of view of plot. May I ask, what was the accident of history?”
“You can ask the man himself. He’ll be here in a few months.”
“Here?”
“Here. It’s the Trotsky I mentioned, the letter lying over there on the desk under Cárdenas. I’ve asked the president to grant him political asylum under my custody.”
So. For this, all the questions and mystery. The Painter stood grinning, his hair in an unruly halo around his head, or perhaps it was a devil’s horns. His smile underlined by double chins. “Well, my young friend. Do you remain uncurious?”
“Señor, I confess, I maintain that position with increasing difficulty.”
8 October
Sometimes when the Painter is reading over the day’s typing, there’s time to look at the books in his library. The whole wall is shelves. On the bottom are Frida’s wooden-spined box folders where she files the household papers. Each one she has identified with a picture drawn on its spine: a naked woman, for Diego’s personal letters. The Evil Eye, for hers. The one for accounting has only a dollar sign.
The rest is books, a wall of them about everything: political theory, mathematical theory, European art, Hinduism. One shelf the length of the room is devoted to Mexico’s ancient people: archaeology, mythology. Scientific journals on the antiquities, which look tedious. But others are fascinating. The Painter took one down to show it off: a codex. Made a hundred years ago by monks, who labored to make exact replicas of the ancient books the Mexica people made on thick tree-bark paper. It didn’t have pages exactly, but was one long folded panel like an accordion. The ancient language is pictures, little figures. Here, a man cut in half. There, men standing in boats, rowing.
He said it was the Codex Boturini, about the peregrinations of the Azteca. On the advice of gods they left Aztlán in search of their new home, and took 214 years to find it. The long page was divided into two hundred fourteen small boxes, each one recording the main thing that happened in that year. Not good, mostly. A head hanging on a rotisserie over a fire! A man with eyeballs falling out! But most of the years showed simply their search for home. Anyone could feel the anguish of this book—what longing is keener? Pictographs of weary people walking, carrying babies or weapons. Small, inked footprints trailed down the full length of the book, the sad black tracks of heartache. When completely unfolded, the codex stretched almost the whole length of the studio. That is how long it is possible to walk, looking for home.
November 2
Day of the Dead. The señora made altars all over the house to recall her beloved dead: ancients, half-born children. “Who are your dead, Insólito?” she keeps asking.
They request a suspension of all writing, this notebook put away. César will enforce the ruling. They set their trap and pounced in the Painter’s study at lunchtime, husband and wife in one room for once, for this purpose. For security. No more of your little notes. We’ve promised extraordinary measures for the Visitor, you can’t imagine how frightened he is. Devil and dragon in one lair, the Painter sitting at his desk, and she pacing the yellow floorboards with rippling skirts, a tiny tempest. Not even a market list. They claim César is becoming agitated, convinced he’s sleeping in the same room with an agent of the GPU. “Poor old General Wrong Turn, I know he’s confused,” she said. This woman who has said many times: Sóli, to stop painting would feel like being dead. She understands what she’s asking. To stop writing and be dead.
“It’s for safety,” he added. A man who throws paint in the face of safety.
Where are your dead, Sóli? Here, and the devil take it, a notebook for the altar of the dead in this lonely house. Dead and gone, the companionship of words.