Ever since Cárdenas expropriated the American oil, the news promises sanctions will come, and maybe war. Francia Street last week filled up with students shouting: “Let the gringos come. We already turned back Napoleon!”
Natalya takes Phanodorm morning and night, and cups of tea one after another: drowning her sorrows, as Frida would say, until the damn things learn to swim. But maybe some sorrows can’t be borne. When Lev pauses in his work to stare out the window, his eyes are as cold as his children’s bodies. The clear, bright future he once saw so plainly must now be charcoal lines, drawn down to a vanishing point.
Last night he came out to the courtyard to smoke a pipe and talk, just memories, not necessarily ordered. He told about a dinner he had with Stalin many years ago, when no one yet saw the man as anything more than an ambitious, irritating young bureaucrat. They were sharing a bottle of wine with Kamenev and Dzerzhinsky, talking nonsense as young men do, and the question came up: What did each like best in life?
Lev said the question exhilarated Stalin. “He leaned forward on the table gripping his knife like a pistol, leveling it at each one of us, and said: ‘To choose your victim, to prepare everything, to revenge yourself pitilessly. And then to go to sleep.’”
11 August
Teotihuacán is the place where gods live. Xipe Totec, who rules over lust and birth. Round-eyed Tlaloc who brings the rain. Even in the times of the Azteca this mysterious city of pyramids was already ancient, lying in ruins northwest of the lake when Cortés arrived. The priests showed him the gigantic temples and told him it was where the gods had lived while creating the world. It was only logical, to assume they had needed a central office.
The Avenue of the Dead runs down the center of the ancient city, with the Pyramid of the Moon standing mighty against the sky, and the Pyramid of the Sun opposite, even taller. Temples flank the central avenue all the way down its length, some with great carved snakes undulating across their facades. Coral bean trees sprout from between the huge pavement stones, reaching for the sky with their blood-red fingers of blossom. Really, no one knows who lived and died in Teotihuacán, to what end. Walking wide-eyed and human among the great temples, though, it was easy to imagine blood and flesh, hearts ripped out to appease a terrible destiny.
Going there with Frida made it seem an especially likely setting for human sacrifice: her usual custom for picnics. Strangely, it was the opposite. A day for the history books. She showed up at the Blue House after breakfast, leaning her head into the kitchen doorway and motioning to come outside quickly, as if hiding something.
“You have to come with me to Teotihuacán,” she announced. “Right now. For the day.” She looked ready for any possibility, dressed in a gabardine overall rolled to the knees, and the usual full-body armor of jewelry.
“I have a lot of work to do, Frida.”
“Sóli, this is important. You call yourself a Mexican, and you’ve never seen the pyramids of Teotihuacán.”
“I haven’t had affairs with all Mexico’s elite, either. Poor citizenship, I suppose.”
“Look, you and I have things to talk about.”
“We do. And it seems we won’t.”
“I have the Roadster out on Allende Street. It’s just you and me—I’m driving, not César. Are you going to be a big prick about this?”
“Sorry, Frida. I have a very large snapper in here, and he’s a good joe but he refuses to shed his scales and bathe himself in tomatoes and capers without supervision. There’s a dinner tonight. Twelve people coming to hear Diego and Lev and Mr. Breton present their paper. In case you’ve forgotten.”
“They can use their big paper to collect bird defecations for all I care. And Perpetua can cook that snapper—you’re not as important here as you think.”
“Are you firing me?”
“If that’s what it takes to get some goddamn company for the day. Okay. I’m going to smoke while you make up your mind.”
She leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette, in plain sight of the men if they bothered to look out the window of Lev’s study. Lev is adamantly old-fashioned about a few things. One of them: women shouldn’t smoke. Another: he doesn’t like women in trousers. Frida was diving from the steeple today.
“So. Here’s the story.” She slid her eyes toward the office window, exhaling a long plume. “Do you remember Gamio? He’s that friend of Diego’s, the Professor of Ancient Shit who excavated the pyramids. According to himself, he’s discovered something astonishing.”
“What a mood you’re in. A person would be crazy to get in a car with you.”
“Fine, stay here with Diego and the Old Man and Monsieur Lion-Maned Poet so full of himself he makes me want to piss in his wineglass. I’m certain you will be dazzled by their Manifesto on Revolutionary Art for the pindonga Partisan Review.”
“Well, I already know what it says. I typed it.”
“And?” Suddenly she was interested. Maybe she hadn’t been allowed to read it. But flying on a trapeze between Diego and Frida could end in a smashup. It would pay to be cautious.
“Mostly it condemns the restrictions Stalin imposed on artists in the revolutionary state. No surprise there. I thought Diego discussed everything with you.”
“Mrs. Breton, Mrs. Trotsky, and Mrs. Rivera are not a part of this historic conversation. Ever since that bedbug poet showed up here, it’s a boy’s club.”
“You’re not exaggerating about that. It’s noticeable.”
She pursed her lips. “At least Jacqueline likes to smoke and gossip. Otherwise we would have died of boredom up at Lake Pátzcuaro. While our husbands spent every damn minute working on their chingado paper.”
“You could have written it yourself, Frida, it’s no big manifesto. ‘The artistic imagination requires freedom from coercion. Artists have an inalienable right to choose their own subjects.’ That kind of thing.”
She whistled. “What genius. Fulang Chang could have written that.”
“There’s also a bit about surrealism. How Mexico is destined to become the true place of surrealist-revolutionary art, because of its flora and dynamism and all that. The mix of races. So what’s the astonishing discovery from the professor?”
“Okay, listen. He said they were putting back a wall of a temple that fell down or something. And accidentally uncovered a mass grave. This is old, Sóli. Diego adores all that ancient crap, Gamio knows it, so he invited us to come up and have a look before they have to move the bones and everything. But Diego has this meeting. So I’m going, as soon as this cigarette is finished. You have twenty more seconds to decide.”