The Lacuna Read Online Free PDF Page A

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,” Leandrosaid. “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 amiraculous 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