Leandro said, Pray God forgives you for such talk. Get busy and make more masa.
Tonight the moon rose, the beach was quiet, and no one swam into the lacuna. The three Musketeers would have done it, diving in with scabbards in their teeth, not bandages on their fingers. But they were three, all for one and one for all.
Tonight a shadow passed across the moon. Don Enrique says an eclipse. But Leandro says it is El Dios and El Cristo putting their heads together, crying over everything that happens down here.
2 May
Birthday of Santa Rita de Casia. Mother needed cigarettes, but there wasn’t any market today because of the fiesta. All the women went to the procession in long ruffled skirts, their hair braided with ribbons and flowers. Boys carrying beeswax candles as tall as men. The old woman who sells nopal in the market was at the front, dressed like a wrinkled bride. Her old groom shuffled beside, holding her arm.
Leandro says they couldn’t have this fiesta last year because of the Silence against the church. But that Santa Rita de Casia is not really a saint, but a woman-god. Nothing is ever what they say, and no one holy one hundred percent.
12 May
Perfect tide today. Into the cave and back out. The water pushed, all the way in, to touch those bones again. Tomorrow the tide should be almost perfect again. But only a few more days this month, to look for the treasure hidden from Hernán Cortés.
13 May
Mother says tonight. In just a few hours we leave on the ferry. It isn’t possible just to go away from here, but she said, Oh yes it is. Leave everything.
Tell no one, she said: Don Enrique will be furious. Not even Cruz can know, don’t pack anything from your room yet because she would notice. Wait till it’s almost time. Take only what fits in one rucksack. Two books, only. Not those huaraches, don’t be ridiculous, your good shoes.
She said: Bueno. Very fine. If you want to stay here, stay. On this stupid island so far from everything, you have to yell three times before even Jesus Cristo can hear you. I will happily go without you, and light a candle for you in the Catedral Nacional when I get there. Because when Enrique finds out, he’ll kill you instead of me.
Mr. Produce the Cash is meeting us on the mainland.
You will not say one word to Leandro. Not one word, mister.
Dear Leandro, here is the note you won’t read because you can’t read. The pocket watch is in the jar in the cabinet, with the clay Pilzintecutli. It’s a gift to find next year when you have to make the rosca with no sergente to help mix the flour. The watch is gold, maybe you can take it to monte de piedad and get money for your family. Or keep it to remind you of the pest who is gone.
Mexico City, 1930 (vb)
11 June
La luna de junio, first full moon in June, a day to dive for treasure. But the nearest thing to ocean here is the rot-fish smell on Saturdays after all the wives on the alley cooked fish the day before, and their garbage is waiting for the slop-cart man. The ocean is the last dream in the morning before noise from the street comes in. Motorcars, police on horses, the tide goes out, the prisoner awakes on a new island. An apartment above a bakery shop.
Mother says a casa chica means probably his wife knows about her but doesn’t mind, because a Small House doesn’t cost too much. The maid doesn’t even sleep here, no room. The water closet and gas cooking eye are in the same room. The main kitchen is downstairs in the bakery, passed through from the street, with a key. No library and no garden here, in a city that stinks of buses. Mother thinks it is all wonderful and reminds her of childhood, even though that was a long time ago and not this city. And if it was so wonderful, why did she never go back to see her father and mother until dead?
“Quit your moping, mister, finally we’re off that island where nothing was ever going to happen. Here you don’t have to yell three times before Jesus Cristo can hear you.” Probably because after the second yell, Jesus would look down in time to see you get coshed by a trolley.
But, she says. God has a swell house here, the biggest cathedral in the world. One of the high marks of the Distrito Federal. So far we’ve seen only one high mark, La Flor, the shop where Mr. Produce the Cash and his friends go for coffee. We went there alone, in defiance of orders. His businessman friends don’t yet know about his new enterprise, the secret kept in a small box, the casa chica. The lid of the box is mother’s hush money, which she says is not very much. So probably she will not be very quiet.
She needed to go to La Flor to have a look-see at how they dress here, so she won’t be a low-lid dumbdora like people on that island. On the streets you can see which men are farmers who’ve come to the city for the day: white trousers, rolled to the knees. The men taking coffee at La Flor were all black-trouser men. The ladies wore cloche hats and smart, short dresses like Mother’s, but with black stockings for modesty. The waitresses had white aprons and eyes wide with fright. This city is like Washington, and it isn’t. It’s difficult to remember real places from the book places. The patio had giant fern trees like the forest in Journey to the Center of the Earth, and very good chocolate. Cookies called cat’s tongues. The cat’s meow, Mother said, but really the cat’s not-meow. Our alley has so many, with a slingshot you could get a good supply of tongues.
Mother was in a jolly mood, and finally agreed to stop at the stationer’s on the way home, for a new notebook. She pouted: You love that little book more than me, you’ll go in your room and forget me.
But just now she came in and said, You poor thing. You’re like a fish that needed water. I didn’t even know.
Today the cathedral. It took all morning to reach the central plaza, the Zócalo, two buses and then a trolley to get there from the outside edge of the Distrito Federal. The casa chica is located in an unfashionable neighborhood south of the bullfighting plaza on a dirt alley that runs into Insurgentes. According to Mother, we reside halfway between the Capitol of Mexico and Tierra del Fuego, South America.
The Zócalo is a huge square with palm trees like parasols. Facing one side is the long Palacio Nacional of pink stone, with small windows all the way down it like holes in a flute. The brick streets leading into the Zócalo are narrow as animal burrows in tall grass, the buildings close on both sides, as far as you can see. Downstairs are shops and people live above, you can see the women leaning on their elbows on the iron balconies watching everything below. Bicycle carts, horses, and automobiles, lines of them, sometimes going both ways in the same street.