The Lacuna
Page 85
On the eve of your elections I share your thrill and dread, waiting to see what Mexico will declare for herself and her Revolution. The news is sparse, so I welcome any from you. I did read of the National Prize of Arts and Sciences, and so I congratulate you both. Your wife is a National Prize herself, as you know better than anyone.
The news from here is about what you’d expect. You wouldn’t care for the food: no empanadas dulces, I doubt there is a tablespoon of sugar right now in all Asheville. (My cake today, with molasses and pureed apples, was a sad, dark-brown cousin of its predecessors.) But rations are lifted on nearly everything else. Prices rise like balloons, and we all jump like children under a piñata, reaching for our material passions. Americans believe in water-proof gabardine and Vimm’s Vitamin Tablets. The housewives sent their butter to the Front for years, and now require their heavenly reward. To get it all manufactured on schedule, the sacrifice of laborers will have to be made permanent, it seems: they toiled like slaves for the war effort and still haven’t had a single pay adjustment. You could have heard a wrench drop on Pack Square this spring, when the unions shut down everything. But Truman seized the railroad and drafted the strikers into military service, to command them back to work.
So that is the report you asked for, not entirely good. Our newsmen mostly reviled the “workers’ rebellion.” Politics here now resemble a pillow fight. Lacking the unifying slogan (Win the War), our opposing parties sling absurd pronouncements back and forth, which everyone pretends carry real weight. How the feathers fly. The newsmen leap on anything, though it’s all on the order of, “Four out of five shoppers know this is the better dill pickle,” assertions that can’t be proven but sway opinion. “Dance for the crowd” is the new order, with newsmen leading the politicians like bears on the leash. Real convictions would be a hindrance. The radio is at the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment’s pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence. You can’t imagine the effect of this. The talkers are rising above the thinkers.
On my own advice, then, I’ll close this ramble. But first I have a confession. The day I left Mexico six years ago, Frida gave me your copy of the Codex Boturini. She said it was a gift from you, and gladly I accepted. But I wonder, did she actually ask, or just tell you it was stolen? The culprit herein revealed: the cook. In this parcel I enclose it, rightfully returned. You may remember I was enthralled by this codex, which you showed me in your office one day. I understood it to be a sort of Bible for the homeless. Yet, with its little drawings of people it also resembled the eight-pagers the boys used to have at school, and I’m abashed to admit, your codex had more effect on me than the naked Sally Rand ever did. When Frida put its accordion folds in my hand, I couldn’t refuse. I should have asked her whether you’d been informed of your generosity. But I wanted it badly, and took it, for this reason: in my experience, penitence is more attainable than permission.
I hope you’ll be pleased to know I made good use of it. My second novel, now complete, is the story of the Mexica people’s journey to their new home in the promised valley “Where the Eagle Tears the Snake” (my tentative title). Plot and dramatic interest all came directly from the codex: all those severed heads on stakes, fur-covered enemies, and eagles flying down to carry weapons to the rescue. I hardly needed to invent a thing. It was much like working as your typist: I only had to stay awake to a luminous presence, and make a good transcription.
So I’m in debt to you, not to mention the original author of the codex, attributed to Huitzilopotchli himself. I will soon send the manuscript to my publisher and receive a check for royalties-on-advance. If the Feather-Headed God expects his share, he had better get in contact right away.
With regards to all in your household,
H. SHEPHERD
July 8, 1946
The manuscript sailed off today. Mrs. Brown took it to the post office. Before going out the door she turned back and held out the bulky brown-paper package of it, resting flat on her white-gloved hands. “Look here, Mr. Shepherd, a little raft with all your hopes upon it, sailing for New York. Ye know not how light it feels in my hands.”
This afternoon she discovered my birth date had just passed. She is filing old documents, the birth certificate applications and so forth, now that the flurry of typing is done. She seemed hurt. “A man turns thirty years, that’s important,” she scolded, “and to think I sat here and knew nought of it, all the day long.”
I didn’t say what Frida would have. That you can’t really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece: the birthday like an invisible piñata hanging great and silent over his head, as he stands in his slippers boiling the water for coffee. The scarred, shrunken leg hidden under a green silk dress. A wife and son back in France. Something you never knew. That is the heart of the story.
August 27
Murderous dreams come even in daytime, memories that occlude vision. How can a friend’s blood be willed from the mind? Other men do it. They come home from a war, kiss the ground, and go forward, as easily as taking the Haywood bus to the library. Without meeting this rising panic and humiliation. Running out of the library bookless and hatless, rather than end up crumpled behind the newspaper stacks again, watching blood spread across the maple floor boards.
Last week, on the day itself, even the bedroom was too uncertain a place, its shifting walls and window’s glare, letting in the clouded sky. Mrs. Brown thought it must be the grippe. She brought tea and toast upstairs on a tray.
Today, one hundred ten paces to the corner market, step by counted step. An automobile passed slowly on the street: a Buick. Two women at the newsstand professed themselves as admirers. One had just come from the market and carried a bouquet of gladiolus wrapped in a paper cone. She meant no harm at all, she was only a young wife going home to some celebration. Not Jacson Mornard stalking Frida in Paris, arms loaded with flowers, any fool could know the difference. But anyone who rises, any greatness, attracts those who would cut it down at the root. Any fool knows that also.
Every day it seems possible to walk to the door. This time, step out. But the sidewalk leads to a bridge across a precipice. There is Mother up ahead slipping off her sling-back shoes, stepping out onto the planks above the rushing ravine. Don’t come. You wait here. The red-bellied spider pulls itself into a hole in the plank. Every hole could have something like that inside.
The news from here is about what you’d expect. You wouldn’t care for the food: no empanadas dulces, I doubt there is a tablespoon of sugar right now in all Asheville. (My cake today, with molasses and pureed apples, was a sad, dark-brown cousin of its predecessors.) But rations are lifted on nearly everything else. Prices rise like balloons, and we all jump like children under a piñata, reaching for our material passions. Americans believe in water-proof gabardine and Vimm’s Vitamin Tablets. The housewives sent their butter to the Front for years, and now require their heavenly reward. To get it all manufactured on schedule, the sacrifice of laborers will have to be made permanent, it seems: they toiled like slaves for the war effort and still haven’t had a single pay adjustment. You could have heard a wrench drop on Pack Square this spring, when the unions shut down everything. But Truman seized the railroad and drafted the strikers into military service, to command them back to work.
So that is the report you asked for, not entirely good. Our newsmen mostly reviled the “workers’ rebellion.” Politics here now resemble a pillow fight. Lacking the unifying slogan (Win the War), our opposing parties sling absurd pronouncements back and forth, which everyone pretends carry real weight. How the feathers fly. The newsmen leap on anything, though it’s all on the order of, “Four out of five shoppers know this is the better dill pickle,” assertions that can’t be proven but sway opinion. “Dance for the crowd” is the new order, with newsmen leading the politicians like bears on the leash. Real convictions would be a hindrance. The radio is at the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment’s pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence. You can’t imagine the effect of this. The talkers are rising above the thinkers.
On my own advice, then, I’ll close this ramble. But first I have a confession. The day I left Mexico six years ago, Frida gave me your copy of the Codex Boturini. She said it was a gift from you, and gladly I accepted. But I wonder, did she actually ask, or just tell you it was stolen? The culprit herein revealed: the cook. In this parcel I enclose it, rightfully returned. You may remember I was enthralled by this codex, which you showed me in your office one day. I understood it to be a sort of Bible for the homeless. Yet, with its little drawings of people it also resembled the eight-pagers the boys used to have at school, and I’m abashed to admit, your codex had more effect on me than the naked Sally Rand ever did. When Frida put its accordion folds in my hand, I couldn’t refuse. I should have asked her whether you’d been informed of your generosity. But I wanted it badly, and took it, for this reason: in my experience, penitence is more attainable than permission.
I hope you’ll be pleased to know I made good use of it. My second novel, now complete, is the story of the Mexica people’s journey to their new home in the promised valley “Where the Eagle Tears the Snake” (my tentative title). Plot and dramatic interest all came directly from the codex: all those severed heads on stakes, fur-covered enemies, and eagles flying down to carry weapons to the rescue. I hardly needed to invent a thing. It was much like working as your typist: I only had to stay awake to a luminous presence, and make a good transcription.
So I’m in debt to you, not to mention the original author of the codex, attributed to Huitzilopotchli himself. I will soon send the manuscript to my publisher and receive a check for royalties-on-advance. If the Feather-Headed God expects his share, he had better get in contact right away.
With regards to all in your household,
H. SHEPHERD
July 8, 1946
The manuscript sailed off today. Mrs. Brown took it to the post office. Before going out the door she turned back and held out the bulky brown-paper package of it, resting flat on her white-gloved hands. “Look here, Mr. Shepherd, a little raft with all your hopes upon it, sailing for New York. Ye know not how light it feels in my hands.”
This afternoon she discovered my birth date had just passed. She is filing old documents, the birth certificate applications and so forth, now that the flurry of typing is done. She seemed hurt. “A man turns thirty years, that’s important,” she scolded, “and to think I sat here and knew nought of it, all the day long.”
I didn’t say what Frida would have. That you can’t really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece: the birthday like an invisible piñata hanging great and silent over his head, as he stands in his slippers boiling the water for coffee. The scarred, shrunken leg hidden under a green silk dress. A wife and son back in France. Something you never knew. That is the heart of the story.
August 27
Murderous dreams come even in daytime, memories that occlude vision. How can a friend’s blood be willed from the mind? Other men do it. They come home from a war, kiss the ground, and go forward, as easily as taking the Haywood bus to the library. Without meeting this rising panic and humiliation. Running out of the library bookless and hatless, rather than end up crumpled behind the newspaper stacks again, watching blood spread across the maple floor boards.
Last week, on the day itself, even the bedroom was too uncertain a place, its shifting walls and window’s glare, letting in the clouded sky. Mrs. Brown thought it must be the grippe. She brought tea and toast upstairs on a tray.
Today, one hundred ten paces to the corner market, step by counted step. An automobile passed slowly on the street: a Buick. Two women at the newsstand professed themselves as admirers. One had just come from the market and carried a bouquet of gladiolus wrapped in a paper cone. She meant no harm at all, she was only a young wife going home to some celebration. Not Jacson Mornard stalking Frida in Paris, arms loaded with flowers, any fool could know the difference. But anyone who rises, any greatness, attracts those who would cut it down at the root. Any fool knows that also.
Every day it seems possible to walk to the door. This time, step out. But the sidewalk leads to a bridge across a precipice. There is Mother up ahead slipping off her sling-back shoes, stepping out onto the planks above the rushing ravine. Don’t come. You wait here. The red-bellied spider pulls itself into a hole in the plank. Every hole could have something like that inside.
