The Lacuna Read Online Free PDF

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.
    If Enrique didn’t love her, she now announced in the carriage, it was not her fault. She didn’t see how God was going to help any of this. Enrique’s mother didn’t approve of a divorcée, so that was one person to blame. And the servants, who did everything wrong. She would like to blame Leandro but couldn’t. The white-flour doughhe made for the pastries was perfect, as silky as Salomé’s white dress that could be poured out of a pitcher, in which she still hoped to be married one more time.
    The problem must be this long-legged son, bouncing with the bumps in the road, brushing hair out of his eyes, staring off at the ocean. No place on the top of the wedding cake for a boy already as tall as the president, who was not, himself, elected.
     
    To get to the oil fields in the Huasteca, Enrique had to take the ferry to shore, then the panga to Veracruz, then the train. If he had to be gone one day, he’d be gone a week, or better yet a month. Salomé wanted to go with him to Veracruz, but he said she would only want to buy things. Instead, he allowed them to come in the carriage to the pier in town, to watch him leave on the ferry. In the flattering morning light she waved her handkerchief from the dock, elbowing the son to wave as well. They both had roles in the play called Enrique Makes Up His Mind . “Pretty soon he’ll say the word, and then we can let our hair down, kiddo. Then we’ll think what to do about you.” Enrique had mentioned a boarding school in the Distrito Federal.
    The pasteboard notebook was running out of pages, the book called What Happened to Us in Mexico . He asked to purchase a new one at the tobacco stand. But Salomé said, “First we’ll have to see if there’s more to the story.”
    When the ferry was gone, they ate lunch on the malecón across from the shrimp jetty, watching seabirds wheel in circles trying to steal food. Out on the water, men in small wooden boats pulled in their nets, crumpling up mounds of gray netting that rose like storm clouds from each hull. By late morning the trawlers were already docked with their rusted hulls all listing the same direction along the dock, double masts leaning like married couples, equally drunken. The air smelled of fish and salt. The palm trees waved their arms wildly in the sea wind, a gesture of desperation ignored by all. Theboy said, “There is always more to the story. This lunch will be the next part.” But Salomé said what she always said now: You need to stop doing that, put the book away. It makes me nervous .
    On the way home she directed the driver to stop at a little village near the lagoon. “Drop us off here and come back at six, never mind for what,” she said. The horse knew how to go everywhere, and it was a good thing, because old Natividad was nearly blind. That was a good thing also, as far as Salomé was concerned. She wanted no witnesses.
    The village was too small even to have a market, only an immense stone head in the town square,