A House of My Own: Stories From My Life by Sandra Cisneros
I would like to ask, for example, “Do you approve of me, or am I silly?” Even if she didn’t approve, what does it matter? But it matters a lot. To me.
I would ask whether the stories I’ve told her are any good—worth repeating, worth remembering. That’s how I define a good story.
Does she get tired listening to stories all day and all week, year after year? How does one stay healthy at the end of a day full of stories? Does one have to shake oneself off like a dog after its bath?
And. What did you eat for breakfast today? Do you believe in an afterlife? What about a before-life? Does your husband read to you? Does passion exist until death? Have you ever seen a ghost? Did you have a good childhood? What is the most remarkable thing you remember about giving birth? Do you own a dog? Are you happy? What has la vida taught you? Does your husband listen to the story of your life before you put out the light?
When I was a child, there really was a girl I knew whose name was Sally, and who would later inspire bits and pieces of the character of the same name in The House on Mango Street. She was in my class all through middle and junior high, but it wasn’t until about midway that we actually began to talk to each other. I think it was only because we walked home the same way, and because she was mad at her best friend that day.
Her home was a half block before mine, on top of the corner grocery store. She invited me up, and I was allowed to walk through the big wide rooms of her apartment, an old Chicago-style building with wooden floors, high ceilings, and tall windows. I thought it was grand, but I could tell Sally didn’t think so.
Then she stunned me by asking something I didn’t expect: “Can I see your pajamas?” It was a strange request, but I was anxious for her to be my friend, so I took her home with me that instant.
Our two-story bungalow was tidy and full of spirit and, best of all, ours. Nothing luxurious, but I could tell Sally thought I was rich. Maybe it was our nice furniture that fooled her. Our father, after all, was an upholsterer. And we had art on the walls. A silk tiger our uncle Frankie brought back from Japan after he was in the service, and a set of paint-by-number geishas my mother had painted. Thanks to the previous owners, almost all our rooms were wallpapered, and some had carpeting. Sally didn’t seem to notice the sweaty walls and drafty space heaters, the bedrooms without doors.
I led Sally to the little closet that was my room, tugged back the bedspread and pillow from my twin bed, and showed her my neatly folded pajamas. I didn’t know for sure whether my pajamas disappointed or met her expectations. She didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything either, but I supposed she expected frilly silk and marabou feathers, not my flowered flannel.
After all these years, I think I finally get it. I would like to ask my therapist, “Can I see your pajamas?” It’s as if I want to understand, in a shorthand way, who she really is.
When I’m on the road giving readings, I sign books after my performances. I’m aware that my audience has waited a long time to tell me something. I often feel like a therapist then. So I try to pay attention and make eye contact, to be as present as I can possibly be, because the business of listening is much more difficult than speaking.
One evening after a reading I gave at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, the line to meet the author was especially long and slow-moving. I could feel myself flagging.
“You used too much energy tonight, didn’t you?”
I looked up and saw a woman who could’ve passed for my sister. A woman with a Mona Lisa grin that said, “I know you.”
“You’re a bruja, aren’t you?” I blurted out. I could tell she was a good witch, one who works in the light. She smiled, and we recognized each other the way animals recognize their own kind.
“Okay, then,” I said. “What can I do to recharge?”
This is what she told me: “When you get back to your room tonight, find a quiet space. I want you to close your eyes and imagine a white flower. Any kind will do, but it must be white. Imagine it as a bud. Now see it opening-opening-opening-opening. Imagine it in full bloom, as full and heavy as can be. Now blow all its petals away, so that nothing’s left but the stem.
“That’s for everyone you met and talked to today.
“Now I want you to imagine another white flower bud. See it opening again. Opening-opening-opening-opening. It’s beautiful. Enjoy it. Inhale it. Savor it. This flower is for you.”
Last month, after three years of being my therapist’s patient, I received an unusual message on my phone machine. My therapist was canceling our appointments for the time being, a family emergency, she would get back to me. And when she finally did return after a month’s absence, it was with the frank and calm announcement that her husband had died.
I wanted, then, to take care of my story listener. It was her turn to tell me a story, and it was my turn to listen. And finally I felt I could be of some use to her, that I could, for a change, give her something back for all she had given me. But I felt too shy to say this and couldn’t find the language for all the things swirling inside me. The next time I saw her I brought a white orchid, luminous as the full moon.
The Japanese say it’s a black cat that’s necessary when one is in mourning. They say black cats absorb one’s grief. This may be true, but I know from experience that white flowers know how to listen.
And because I could not say what I felt then, I say it here now. You are my white flower. I offer you this bouquet, to cleanse and soothe and salve you. These pages are for you.
Señor Cappuccino
Credit 29.1
I’m shy when forced to meet other writers. I suppose it’s like this for lots of writers. We’re an introverted species. And when we’re herded into one another’s company, what a jaded bunch we become! Nobody’s less impressed that you’re a writer than a roomful of writers.
And so it happened I found myself in just such discomfort for the 2005 Premio Napoli, where we were gathered like smiling beauty queens secretly sizing each other up. Maybe that’s not so. Maybe that’s just how I remember it. I remember sincerely desiring someone else to win. (This sounds like a lie, but it’s true.) Most of the writers I met were cordial. But one writer had thoughts like a scimitar and was amusingly competitive. I laugh even now when I see his name in print.
Only Ryszard Kapuściński won everyone’s respect and floated above the rabble. I wish I’d read his work before meeting him and not after. I lost an opportunity to ask him…to ask him what? I’d ask, “Does a writer have to live in a perpetual border in order to be able to see?”
The writer Ryszard Kapuściński died on January 23, 2007, at the age of seventy-four. The New York Times editorial of February 2nd featured a beautiful homenaje for this journalist, who wrote with the language of his senses and not, as the Times put it, the “everyday language of information that we use in the media.”
He was a border crosser in every sense of the word, crossing genres as easily as he crossed countries, a Pole who followed his stories across continents, witnessing wars, witnessing the grief of the poorest of humanity. My partner and I were lucky to have met Señor Kapuściński, only briefly, but that was all we needed to see who he was. He never mentioned he was world famous, that he was a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, that his several books—Travels with Herodotus, Shah of Shahs, The Emperor—had been translated into more than eighteen languages. He never said any of this, and it would be only after his death that I came to know his writing.
We met in September 2005 in Naples. He would win the Premio Napoli that year, surprisingly enough in the poetry category. We gathered in the foyer of the hotel where we were awaiting a representative from the Premio Napoli offices, and from that first meeting, Señor Kapuściński charmed us.
He was an older man, stocky as a prizefighter, with silver hair that stood straight up like brush bristles. I remember he contrasted sharply with the other invited writers, a flock of blackbirds, because he was dress
Finally our welcome committee arrived, a tiny creature as fragile as coral. She looked like a child to me, but this happens a lot now that I’m older. That day we were to visit several bookstores and community centers, since many people in Naples were reading and voting on our books. Did we want to walk or take a taxi to the plaza where the motor bus waited?
“It isn’t far,” the escort assured us, “just a few blocks.”
That should’ve clued us all in. I know from experience that for Italians “a few blocks” could mean kilometers. It was also unfortunate that it was a hot autumn day, and though it was early morning, we would be walking uphill. To make matters worse, Señor Kapuściński was dressed formally in suit and tie. He voted to walk.
The Naples streets looked like opera sets to my eyes. We would cross an entranceway and peer into a courtyard laced with laundry hanging from balconies—those proud flags of the housewives—turn a narrow corner, and a plaza would suddenly bloom before us. We walked past stationery shops filled with ordinary but intriguing items—composition books, fountain pens, sand timers—a writer’s heaven, and beyond to baroque monuments and splendidly stocked news kiosks. We dodged café tables where Donatella Versace look-alikes smoked cigarettes and flicked their platinum manes. It was pleasant, and since we had a lot to talk about, we didn’t complain. But after a while Señor Kapuściński began dabbing his face with his handkerchief and asking, “How many more blocks?”
Our child escort now seemed like someone sent from a horror film, the very picture of Death with her Cleopatra eyes and miniskirt. She kept luring us forward, promising, “It isn’t far now, it’s just up ahead.”
We passed a stoop where an ancient woman in black sat silently selling holy pictures from a basket. I gave her my Guadalupe holy card from my wallet, and she kissed and kissed it, blessing me in Italian a thousand times.
With every block, Señor Kapuściński grew more flushed. At times he would stand still to make a point in a story as much as to catch his breath. My partner and I lagged behind to keep him company since by then the rest of the party was far ahead.
Finally Señor Kapuściński had had enough. “I thought she said it was just up ahead! This is an outrage!” “Yes, it’s too much,” we agreed. We sat down at the next outdoor café with him and ordered cappuccinos, pretending to be upset too, even though we were fine.
It took a while for our hostess to realize we’d mutinied. She came back for us, and by then Señor Kapuściński was calmer after he’d rested and had something to drink.
“But we’re almost there,” she said, and by then her claim was true. The bus was purring at the next plaza, just around the corner. But Señor Kapuściński had walked too many blocks for un señor grande, and his rage was real, though aimed at the wrong target. It wasn’t the young hostess who had lied to him, but his own aging body.
I wanted then to take care of Señor Kapuściński. He reminded me of my grandfather, of my father, of all the men I’ve known who grow frustrated at the inadequacy of their aging bodies and blame it on you. “You see, you see what you made me do!”
I think it was then I dubbed him Señor Cappuccino, because in my mind he became, from then on, indelibly linked with that cup of coffee we shared together during our mutiny.
Señor Kapuściński laughed at his nickname, and when we said goodbye at the week’s end, he promised to send and did indeed send me his poetry. In Polish, for my Polish eye doctor. He apologized and was sorry the book was not yet translated into English for me. He never mentioned his extraordinary body of work, as compact as poetry, in exquisite prose I would discover and fall in love with later for its ability to exceed journalism and invent a new genre: reportage with literary power—poetic and precise.
So much was he in my thoughts this new year, I had a friend buy a Mexican calendar for me to send him, even though the days of his life were already over. That was the same day I would learn of his death in the newspaper.
“What kind of Mexican calendar should I buy?” my friend asked that morning on the phone.
“Buy him a traditional one,” I instructed. “It’s for an elder, un señor grande.”
Señor Cappuccino’s calendar arrived a few days later, when I’d almost forgotten about it. An Aztec warrior firing an arrow toward the sun.
Natural Daughter
Credit 30.1
Retrato de india cacique, 1757
In the spring of 2006, the San Antonio Museum of Art featured a show called Retratos: 2,000 Years of Latin American Portraits. It included a portrait of a chieftain’s daughter, a woman straddling the Old World and the New, dressed in a baroque huipil, an indigenous tunic altered with Spanish lace, as much a product of the mestizaje as she was.
It’s this woman I linger with and look upon when I’m invited to the show, and it’s she I have in mind as I search for the subject of my lecture for the prestigious Rome summer arts festival, Festival delle Letterature, where I’m to read in the Roman Forum. I don’t know what I’ll write about, but somehow I know this painting is the route.
I’ve been invited along with the Olympians—José Saramago and Doris Lessing. The topic is “Natural/Artificial.” Is writing this way natural? Isn’t it artificial to be force-fed a title and then have to produce something that suits the theme? For weeks I wake and sleep in a frenzy. Are Saramago and Lessing having as difficult a time as I am?
We are at war. I want to say something that will help heal, help bring peace to the planet, to my listeners. I don’t know what story I can tell that will be that powerful. I’m only one person, and I feel small to the task at hand. I always do. I’m only one writer, but I’m one of the writers they’ve invited.
I know that before I begin to write something, I need to ask for humility. I need to ask my father’s spirit to come and help me. I need to ask for the story that has heart and soul, a story I feel in my body. What story is that? I haven’t a clue.
I do what I always do when I’m lost: I take a nap.
When I wake, I ask myself this: What is the story we won’t tell? And when is it time to tell it? Is it a natural story—that is, born of the truth? Or is it an artificial story, one we have to make up to fill in all the gaps because no one will tell us the truth? I have just enough of a story, but not enough. Maybe it’s as I always suspected. The best stories are the ones we can’t tell.
I’m Jacob wrestling the angel. “I will not let thee go except thou bless me.” Day after day, week after week, I’m locked in a lucha libre with the Angel of Death. And when I finally finish, my back aches. She blessed me.
So why am I overwhelmed with grief?
Before you and your brothers were born,” my mother said to me, “before your father met me, he already had a kid in Mexico City. Illegitimately. With one of las muchachas who worked for your grandmother. A daughter.”
It was 1995. We were at Presbyterian St. Luke’s in Chicago, the hospital where I was born and where my father was under the knife having heart surgery. While we waited in the hospital lounge, my mother bared her own heart to me, her only daughter.
“Sometimes when we were in Mexico visiting, this woman and her daughter helped out with our laundry. You used to play with the girl. But you were little, you don’t remember.”
I didn’t tell my mother then, but I did remember. The face of this girl, my natural sister, traveled back to me, una paloma blanca fluttering across the expanse of forty years.
And though my f
There are some questions a daughter can’t ask a father.
I thought about this sister a lot as I wrote Caramelo. After my father died, I hesitated with whether to exploit this family secret as raw material for my story. I had to promise my father’s spirit that in the end it would all turn out bonito. The novel was finished years ago. But she haunts me still.
I somehow thought after Caramelo’s publication my family would be forced to sit down and talk, finally, like a real family, with one person speaking and the others listening. I imagined my six brothers and me having a moment like in the telenovelas where the music rises and tears fall, but in the end we would all embrace.
But that didn’t happen. We never talk about things that matter. We talk about breaded pork chops, the Chicago White Sox, the dog’s skin rash, voices shouting over one another and no one listening.
And because I don’t mention this woman, even thinking about her makes me feel like crying. So who could I seek out, who could tell me about her?
As Divine Providence would have it, when I telephone my mother in Chicago the following week, guess who’s visiting from Mexico? Señor Juchi is sitting at my mother’s kitchen table as if willed into being. Señor Juchi is a character in real life and in my novel. He’s also my father’s compadre from way back, from the Mexico City of their youth, after Father came back from serving in the U.S. Army in World War II.