Salomé formulated her plan of attack. First, she instructed Leandro, we make only Enrique’s favorite foods every day. Starting with breakfast: cinnamon-flavored coffee, tortillas warm from the griddle, pineapple with ham, and what she called Divorced Eggs, two of them crowded onto a plate, one with mild red salsa and one with spicy green. Salomé maintained her own perspective on romance.
The kitchen was connected to the house by the passageway of lime trees. It had low brick walls, planks for work counters, and was open all around to the sea air so smoke could escape from the firebox of the brick stove. Posts in the corners held up the roof, and the brick bread oven hunched in one corner. Natividad, the oldest servant, who was nearly blind, came out every dawn to sweep out the firebox and light it again, feeling his way to the flame, laying the sticks side by side like tucking children to bed.
When Leandro came he would push the fire to the sides, keeping the heat away from the center of the heavy iron griddle. He mopped the griddle with a rag dipped in the lard jar so the tortillas wouldn’t stick. Next to the lard jar he kept a big bowl of sticky corn dough, pinching up balls of it and pressing them flat by hand. The heat made a necklace of black pearls on each white tortilla as it cooked. In the thick ones, the gorditas, he cut ridges as they cooked, for holding the bean paste. But for empanadas he made them thin, folding the tortilla over the filling and sliding it into a pan of hot grease.
Most of all, Enrique cared for pan dulces made with wheat-flour dough. Puffy and soft with a grit of coarse sugar on top, filled with pineapple, sweet and tart from the oven’s wood smoke. Many a cook had been fired by Enrique, before this Leandro arrived from heaven. Pan dulce is no easy trick. The vanilla has to be from Papantla. The flour is ground in a stone metate. Not like masa for tortillas, corn soaked in lime water that’s ground up coarse and wet. Any Mexican can do that, Leandro said. Dry flour for European bread is a different matter. It has to be ground so fine it comes up into the air in clouds. The hard part was mixing in the water, going too fast. Dumping water on the flour in a cold gush, causing a catastrophe of lumps.
“Dios mio, what have you done there?”
The boy’s excuse: the bucket was too heavy.
“Flojo, you’re as tall as I am, you can lift the bucket.”
The dough had to be thrown away, and everything started over. Leandro from heaven, angel of patience, paused to rinse his hands in the wash bucket and dry them on his white trousers. Let me show you how to do this. Begin with two kilos of the flour. Make a mountain on the counter. Into this mound, with your fingers, crumble the flakes of butter, the salt and soda. Then pull it out like a ring of volcanic mountains around a crater. Pour a lake of cold water in the center. Little by little, pull the mountains into the lake, water and shore together, into a marsh. Gradually. No islands. The paste swells until there are no mountains left, and no lake, only a great blob of lava.
“There. Not just any Mexican can do that, muchacho.”
Leandro flopped the dough over gently on the counter until it was smooth, fluid and solid at the same time. It would sleep overnight in a covered bowl. In the morning he would roll it flat, cut it with a machete into squares, spoon a dot of pineapple filling on each one, and fold it in a triangle, sprinkled with sugar grains soaked in vanilla. “Now you know the secret for making the boss happy,” Leandro said. “Cooking in this house is like war. I am the capitan of bread and you are my sergente mayor. If he throws out your mother you might still have a job, if you can make pan dulce and blandas.”
“Which are the blandas?”
“Sergente, you can’t make this kind of mistake. Blandas are the big soft ones he’s crazy for. Tortillas big enough to wrap a baby in, soft as an angel’s wings.”
“Si, señor!” The tall boy saluted. “Big enough to wrap angels in, soft as a baby’s crupper.”
Leandro laughed. “Small angels,” he said. “Only baby ones.”
On the twenty-first of June, 1929, a giant iguana climbed up the mango by the patio, causing Salomé to stand up from her lunch and scream. And on that day the Three Years Silence ended, though the iguana had nothing to do with it.
It was a declaration signed by the president, ending the three-year ban on saying the mass. The war with the Cristeros ended. The church bells rang all day on Sunday, calling back the priests with their gold rings, landholdings, and sovereignty intact. Enrique took it as proof: Mexico falls on her knees at the altar, ready to return to the days of Porfirio Díaz. True Mexicans will always understand the virtues of humility, piety, and patriotism. “And decent women,” he added pointedly to Salomé, quoting Díaz: “Only in her home, like a butterfly in a glass jar, can woman progress to her highest level of decency.” He expected her to take herself and her son to town for the Reconciliation Mass.
“If he wants a butterfly, he should let me stay home in his damn glass jar,” she fumed in the carriage on the way to church. Salomé was all for the Three Years Silence. In her opinion the mass could only be more tedious if they made you wear cotton stockings. She too had lived under the reign of Porfirio, ruled by a dark supremacy of nuns who showed no mercy to a businessman’s cheeky daughter who came to school with her ankles showing. Salomé had maneuvered a miraculous escape, like the Count of Monte Cristo: a study tour in America, where she enlisted a claims accountant in her father’s firm who was helpless before her charms. She’d solved the mathematical problem of age sixteen by saying she was twenty. At twenty-four she’d said the same thing again, balancing the equation. She became Sally, confirmed in the church of expediency. Even now, as they approached the cathedral in town, she rolled her eyes and said, “Opium of the masses,” parroting the men in government who’d tried to rout the priests. But she didn’t say it in Spanish, for the driver to hear.
The cathedral was packed with solemn children, farmers, and old women on tree-trunk legs. Some worked their way through the Stations of the Cross, orbiting around the crowd’s periphery as deliberately as planets. A long line of townspeople waited to receive communion, but Salomé walked to the head of the line, accepting the host on her tongue as if this were a bakery line and she had plenty of other errands.
The priest wore gold brocades and a pointed hat. He had managed to keep his clothes very nice, during his three years hiding out. All eyes followed him like plants facing light, except for those of Salomé. She left as soon as possible and walked straight for the carriage, snapping at Natividad to get going, fiercely digging in her beaded bag for her aspirins. Everything about Salomé came from a jar or a bottle: first, the powder and perfume, the pomade for her marcel wave. Next, the headache, from a bottle of mezcal. Then the cure, from a bottle of Bellans Hot-Water-Relief. Maybe some other bottle gave her the flapper-dancing, crank-up-the-Victrola Twenty-Three Skidoo. Stashed under a table drape in her room, something to help her keep it up.