We’d as soon take the scissors and cut every ribbon of that.” Eventually, when Shepherd is subjected to investigation for Communist activity, he too becomes a human sacrifice, his career and life offered up to Americans’ sense of security. His secretary, Violet, warns him to watch out: Americans “don’t like to see ourselves joined hard to the past. Lifting her long skirt to reveal her withered, polio-damaged leg, she tells him, “The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.” Later he himself adds, “The most important part of any story is the missing piece.”įrida urges Shepherd to “crack open the mute culture” and write a “true history of Mexico.” After Trotsky’s murder in 1940, he does, moving to America and penning two best-selling historical novels about the Aztecs and the Spanish Conquest. Kahlo sympathizes with his need for secrecy. Shepherd has a lacuna in his own history as well: he is gay, and keeps his desires painfully hidden. He writes “so when nothing is left of us but bones, someone will know where we went.”
Shepherd hopes that the lies and errors of the public record-the Mexican press claim Rivera eats human flesh, while Trotsky is cast by both the Americans and the Russians as a Communist villain-can be countered, by his private account. The story is told in several different voices, pieced together from letters, newspaper articles, the recollections of Shepherd’s own loyal secretary, and especially Shepherd’s diaries.
When Trotsky comes, at Rivera’s invitation, to seek asylum in Mexico, Shepherd goes to work for him as a typist. He becomes so fascinated by Rivera and everything he represents-national identity, socialist politics, the power of art-that he takes a job in the artist’s household as a cook. The shy, bookish son of an American father and a gold-digging Mexican mother, he discovers, as a teenager in Mexico City, Diego Rivera’s murals depicting the history of Mexico. There to observe them is the American boy, Harrison Shepherd. History, and especially the gaps in the historical record, is the central theme of “The Lacuna.” Like other successful novels in recent years, this brilliantly constructed narrative includes both fictional characters and real people, in this case the colorful Mexican painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and their controversial guest, the exiled Communist leader Leon Trotsky. The underwater passage, he’s told, is called a “lacuna”: “an opening, like a mouth, that swallows things.… It goes into the belly of the world.” It’s a site of death, but also of buried treasure and escape. There’s a ruined temple there, and in the pool lie the bones of human sacrifice. There, an American boy swims through an underwater cave to find himself in a secret pool in the jungle. Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel begins in the year 1929, on a tropical island off the coast of Mexico.
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