But Cortés was not the beginning of Mexico or its end, as the books say. These paintings say Mexico is an ancient thing that will still go on forever, telling its own story in slabs of color, leaves and fruits and proud naked Indians in a history without shame. Their great city of Tenochtitlan is still here beneath our shoes, and history was always just like today, full of markets and wanting. A beautiful lady lifts her skirt, showing her tattooed ankle. Maybe she is a puta, or a goddess. Or just someone like Mother who needs an admirer. The Painter makes you see that those three kinds of women might all be the same, because all the different ancestors are still inside us and don’t really die. Imagine being able to tell such stories, whispering miracles into people’s brains! To live by imagination alone, and get paid for it. Don Enrique was wrong.
Where was the Much-Discussed Painter? The guard said usually he’s here day and night, any hour he can get his plaster mixers and pigmentists to show up. Every day but not today.
The mural on the wall behind the grand staircase was enormous. And not even half finished. Ladders and platforms covered most of the wall, so he could reach the highest parts. The guard looked up there at the planks for a while, as though he expected to find the Painter sleeping there. But today, no.
“Maybe he shot someone,” the guard said. “Come back tomorrow. He has a lot of friends here at the ministry. He always gets out of prison.”
25 October
Today the Painter came to work. He was already on the scaffolds at nine o’clock. High up on the planks, hard to see, but plainly he was there because workers swarmed around him like his own hive of bees. The assistant boys were running all over the courtyard with water and plaster, planks and ladders. They mix plaster in buckets and haul it up to him on a rope. It’s not just a painting, these boys explained with proper scorn. A mural. Hard to say that in English: a wall-made. Not wall or painting but both combined, made at the same time so the picture will never fall off unless the wall itself tumbles. A Plaster Captain up on the scaffold works continuously at the Painter’s side, spreading the last thin coat of white paste. Not too quickly or too slow, so the Painter can put his pigments in the plaster as it dries.
“Those two have worked together since God was sucking his mother’s tit,” the boys said. They seemed more afraid of the Plaster Captain than the Painter, though both men shouted down like God sending commandments: too much water in the plaster, or not enough. Today every boy was stupid.
The problem was the man in charge of plaster mixing, named Santiago but today named mud, because absent. They said he broke his head in a fight over a woman. And according to the Painter, without Santiago none of these boys could mix plaster any better than his grandmother’s dog.
I can mix plaster.
Go ahead, then.
It was like mixing the flour for pan dulce: how could it be so different? The powder they called cal has the same fine grind, floating up in white clouds around the boys when they dumped bags of it into the mixing buckets. Their eyelashes and the backs of their hands were white, and the edges of their nostrils, from breathing it. They were dumping powder into the water, not the other way around.
Wait. Spread a canvas on the floor, make a mountain of the powder. Pour water in the center, a lake in the volcano. Mix the lagoons with your fingers into marshes, making the paste thick. Gradually, or there will be lumps.
Even the old Plaster Captain up on the platform stopped working to watch. It was terrifying. “Where did you learn that?”
“It’s like making dough for pan dulce.”
That caused the plaster boys to laugh. Boys don’t make bread. But they were in trouble, so got quiet again. One asked, “Like nixtamal for tortillas?”
“No, the white flour dough. You use it for European bread and sweet buns.”
Ha ha ha, Sweet Buns! So the new job has a new name to go with it. But the Plaster Captain and Painter both remarked on the plaster. The plaster captain is Señor Alva, the painter is Señor Rivera. He is even more fat than he looked in the newspaper, and feared by the boys, so it might be true he eats flesh. But when he climbed down from the scaffold to go make his water, he said, “Hey, Sweet Buns, come over here! Let me have a look at the boy who’s mixing this good plaster.”
He said, “Come back tomorrow. We may need you again.”
29 October
The Painter keeps boys running as late as the last trolley runs. Sometimes you mix, or tie ropes, or carry things up the scaffolds. The Palacio has spiked iron lanterns hanging from the ceiling, you have to watch your head or could crown yourself. The stairwell mural is the size of two walls, one above the other. It is meant to be finished before the end of the year.
A coarse plaster full of sand goes on first, to cover ridges and bumps in the brick wall. Next, three more layers, each smoother and whiter, more marble dust and less sand. The bumps are erased, like forgetting, and the painter begins the story new. Each day he leaves more history on the wall, and boys leave with more pesos in their pockets.
Today Señor Alva came down from the scaffold as fast as a monkey to fight with one of the guards. They are rude about the paintings. Four boys in tejano hats came in and said they would throw tar on the wall after the Painter goes home, to defend Mexico and save her national symbols from insult. Señor Alva shouted at the guards to keep those boys away. But the Painter seems not to care what they say. He keeps painting.
10 November
Señor Rivera is gone. And the wall only half painted. Indians and horsemen ride above white air. The mountains have no ground beneath them. The coal sketches on the rough white wall remain half alive, waiting. This can’t be the end, but Señor Alva says for sure he’s gone. To San Francisco to paint for the gringos. The only work now is to take apart the scaffold and clean the splatters of plaster off the floor. That’s it, boys, he said. The pesos have gone to San Francisco too.
18 January 1931, Feast of San Antonio
The priest did the blessing of animals. The society ladies brought parrots and canaries to church, clutching the cages against brocaded bosoms, baby-speaking to their birds with bird-pursed lips. Or holding cats that wriggled violently, hopeful of eating a parrot. Or hairless escuincles that watched with big disapproving eyes popping out of their dog skulls. At the back of the church, villagers waited with goats and burros on ropes. After dogs and parrots were satisfactorily blessed, the farm women were allowed to lead their beasts down the aisle, all eyes upon the burro blessings dropped on the floor.