A House of My Own: Stories From My Life by Sandra Cisneros
I’m reminded of something the novelist Helena María Viramontes shared. When she was young and still living at home, her mother would see her writing at the dining room table and say, “Mi’ja, ayúdame, no estás haciendo nada.” Daughter, help me, you’re not doing anything. Her mom worked so hard physically that Helena would feel what she was doing in comparison wasn’t really work. She’d sigh, get up, and help her mom.
When I was young and still living at home, my father would call me vampira for writing at night. I couldn’t tell him the night was my own private house.
In grad school we were assigned to read Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space for a seminar. It left a wrinkle in my brain then, and rereading it all these years later wrinkles me now. He said: “If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” He forgot to add: but only if one lives alone and can afford to have someone else clean it.
My first house was my invented Mexico. I painted, decorated, and built it according to the Mexico of my childhood memories. (Only now as I write this do I realize that my house in San Antonio is painted the same shade of pink as the Little House of the storybook. We’d found a historic house in the neighborhood that had originally been pink when it was built in the 1880s. Its original owner, it turns out, was Cuban. Maybe he was homesick too.)
When I added an office to my house, I chose a Mexican Bauhaus style that reminded me of Mexico City, a building with un lavadero, an outdoor laundry sink, and a spiral staircase leading up to a rooftop terrace. I built it with the idea of taking care of others—my mother, my fellow writers, a space for an assistant or houseguests.
And now I’m searching for my last house. I imagine one with a high wall. Someplace to protect me from folks who want to interrupt my writing. At sixty I want a house pared down to what nourishes my own spirit. I want a wall for privacy, un zaguán, a vestibule between the outside and inside areas, and again un lavadero, an outdoor sink, so I can wash under the sky and think and think. I want a house to take care of me.
The Little House planted a seed without my knowing it all these years. What I’ve longed for is a refuge as spiritual as a monastery, as private as a cloistered convent, a sanctuary all my own to share with animals and trees, not one to satisfy the needs of others as my previous homes have done, but a house as solid as the Little House, a fortress for the creative self.
Credit 41.2
The day I announced I was leaving my house in San Antonio, March 31, 2011
Epilogue: Mi Casa Es Su Casa
Why would you want to buy an old house?
It’s like choosing to marry an old man!
—MY FATHER
I came to Guanajuato because they sent for me. My mother’s people. Grandfather José Eleuterio Cordero Rodríguez and Grandmother Felipa Anguiano Rizo, and perhaps their people as well, spirits all. I wake in the middle of the night and receive their message.
In the fifty-sixth year of my life, I’m invited to speak at a writers’ conference in San Miguel de Allende. I’d visited the town only once, twenty years prior, a visit so brief it barely left an impression. This time I accept the conference invitation because it’s the only way I can be sure I’ll have a Mexican vacation. I’ve decided in advance I won’t like San Miguel—too many expats—and am ashamed and surprised when I do. I like the people, both native and foreign, and I come back of my own accord a few weeks after.
This happens, then, on the return trip to San Miguel that fifty-sixth spring. Walking down one particularly steep alley in the Atascadero neighborhood, beneath a bright canopy of bougainvillea, I pause. I’m reminded of my island in Greece and am overwhelmed with happiness. I remember the dream I had while living there, of swimming with the dolphins even though in real life the sea terrifies me. But in my dream I felt at home in the ocean, at peace. Does home mean being unafraid?
On this visit to San Miguel, a friend invites me to accompany him to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. I go out of curiosity, as I’ve never been. It’s not much different from a literary reading, except here the storytellers are reeling their tale right in front of you, dangling like spiders with no safety net. There are testimonies of incredible pain, of humiliations that would knock out anyone. I’m almost afraid to watch. I too perform the death-defying act, and I know how tricky and dangerous it is. But I give birth to my stories in the privacy of my office, then wash them clean before presenting them to the public, without the messy placenta and afterbirth in view. These speakers weave their story without a script, tossing out filament after filament into the audience, words that must arc and reach and snag us, and boy—and how! That night I go to bed wobbly and weepy for reasons I can’t explain.
It’s as if a tooth has been pulled I didn’t realize was loose. After I had listened to the testimonies of shame at the AA meeting, an old shame bubbles and resurfaces in me. It wakes me in the middle of the night, and this is when the spirits speak. Not through words, but through light driven through my heart. And what they have to say to me is this: “You are not your house.”
This seems elemental, ridiculously simple, but it’s a major discovery for me at fifty-six years of age, even though I discovered this same truth in Iowa City years and years ago. Do all major truths have to be learned and relearned like a spiral?
I am not my house. Therefore, I can walk away. I can let go everything I’ve built, the art collections purchased to take care of painter friends, the office I created to please my mother, the foundations for fellow writers, the house I thought I would leave upon death.
—
What strikes me about Mexico is the fluidity between the physical and spiritual world, a porous border where the living and the dead cross without papers. It’s a culture of profound spiritual knowledge, but with no superiority over those who are spiritually innocent. In the deepest spiritual tradition, humility is a state of grace, misunderstood as inferiority by those who don’t have it.
In the First World, Mexico is considered a Third World nation. But in order to create that hierarchy, certain values were put into place. Money. It appears to me the countries with money created this hierarchy where they would come first.
Are communities who have suffered the most, the cultures with the most spiritual wealth? Is there a correlation between aguantando, enduring, and soul? Is the transformation of pain into light the alchemy that creates soul?
If that is the case, then by the measurement of soul spirit, Mexico would be a First World nation.
—
It’s a magnificent heaven, the sky of Guanajuato. Like the Virgin Mary’s cloak. A pure, buoyant blue, bright as the Pacific. And drifting upon this sea, a fleet of clouds wide as galleons sailing so close, you think if you stood on a chair you could maybe touch them.
One of the main attractions of this region is that you can look out and see undeveloped land, hills and countryside like a Mexican taquería calendar.
But for how long?
I have roots in these lands centuries old, but though we drove through neighboring Querétaro often on our way to visit Father’s relatives in Mexico City when I was a child, we always bypassed Guanajuato. There was no one, after all, we knew. Mother’s family had all fled north during the time of violence, the Mexican Revolution, with stories they wish they could forget. They took with them only what could fit inside a shawl, only what they could haul with their own bodies.
Now, one hundred years after that migration north, I find myself returning in their place. Again, during the time of violence.
I’m going back to a region where we came from—Guanajuato; to a town founded seventy-nine years before the Pilgrims’ Mayflower landing.
—
Since before the conquest, Mexico has been a world of haves and have-nots. And even though there was more than a decade of bloodshed in the revolution of 1911, things have only gotten worse since then.
C
The young girls can only imagine love as the greatest accomplishment of their small lives. I watch them chewing on the lips of their boyfriends on the park benches in front of the church, and wish I could tell them—tell them what?
—
Most of the cabdrivers have worked up north, and admit the pay is good; here they earn a miseria, but they want to be near their families. They count themselves lucky even though San Miguel is inundated with foreigners taking the best of what is best from here, including the natural resources. The locals are grateful they have employment at all.
Instead of sombreros, the humble Mexican men of today wear baseball caps. Instead of baskets, the humble women of today carry plastic buckets the color of Easter eggs. Everywhere you see nopalitos, prickly pear, gathered from the wild countryside; nopalitos offered from these bright buckets, cleaned and de-spined with a sharp knife. A way for women with great need and no education to try to make ends meet.
Police, there are too few, but they give priority to protecting the wealthy, the center of town, not the colonias where the poor Mexicans live.
It’s an apartheid existence. Over there in San Antonio where I once lived. Over here in San Miguel where I live now. Perhaps this is a universal truth.*1
—
Walking the dogs, I come upon two men hauling a wheelbarrow filled with three boulders the size of cement sacks, a delivery for someone’s garden. They’re hauling these as a beast with a cart would, one pulling and the other pushing, with all their might.
It’s February, the time for the Feast of the Candelaria, and Juárez Park is filled with vendors selling plants. I meet the two men in the Balcones neighborhood, at one of the highest points of the town, a neighborhood of huge houses with huge vistas, as if the larger the house, the larger the slice of sky to go with it.
These two pobres infelices, unhappy souls. One, an older man, just a piece of gristle on bone, hauling the wheelbarrow. A face like a sock stretched from overuse, slack and baggy. The other, thick from a bad diet, has tied a yellow mecate, a plastic rope, round and round his waist, and is pulling the wheelbarrow uphill like a workhorse.
“What do you have there? A pyramid?” I ask.
“We’ve brought it all the way from Juárez Park,” the grandfather says proudly. “The cabdrivers refused to take us.”
“So we’ve had to walk,” the chubby one adds.
“What a Calvary!” I say. “I hope you’ll mention you came walking all the way so you’ll get reimbursed for your efforts.”
“We hope so,” they say, and after resting only a moment they continue upward, tugging beyond their strength, aguantando beyond anyone’s imagination.
—
After walking into town to buy a baguette, I sit to rest on the way back at los Arcos de Atascadero. The walk to my house is uphill. Los Arcos is a series of arches by a wild scrub of land I call los duendes, where mulberry trees were planted to feed silkworms back in the time of the dictator/president Porfirio Díaz. It’s here I find myself talking to a lanky, dusty boy with a skinny dog, both the color of coffee with not enough milk. He sits next to me and tells me all about his pet, whose name is Bacha, which I at first mistake for Russian, but later in the conversation he explains Bacha is named after the stub of a marijuana cigarette, what we would call a roach. He tells me this calmly. I say, “Be careful.” “I only smoke at home,” he says. I suggest meat for his dog to fatten her up since she’s skinnier than any of the town’s street dogs. But he tells me he doesn’t have money for meat. I ask if I can give her a piece of my bread. “Yes,” he says, and I tear off a piece for him too and some for me, so he won’t feel bad. And we eat and talk and then say goodbye. I feel sad about his not having money to buy meat, and then sadder I hadn’t given him more bread or at least the whole loaf. And I felt I was as bad as San Martín, who gave away only half his cape—but I didn’t do even that. Am I even worse than San Martín?
—
When I was in high school, I took a class for Spanish speakers. One of the assignments each week was a list of vocabulary words. One of the vocabulary words was ametralladora, machine gun. When will I ever need to use that word? I thought.
Now that I’m living in Mexico, I’m startled by the ubiquity of machine guns the local police carry as calmly as if carrying plastic shopping bags. At the downtown street corners, in every national parade, at the Office Depot. Even now with no machine gun in sight, I can’t go into the Office Depot without experiencing an involuntary shudder.
When Aunty Baby Doll was alive, she had to go into Mexico City regularly to collect the rents on a building she owned.
“But, Aunty,” I asked. “Aren’t you afraid?”
“Oh, no,” Aunty told me over the telephone. “Not at all. I stay over by the military school where they have policemen everywhere carrying ametralladoras. I feel nice and safe.”
Where is the country where a woman can feel safe? Is there such a country?
When I was living in Europe I often cited Virginia Woolf: “As a woman I have no country, as a woman, my country is the whole world.” I would amend that to the current times: “As a woman I have no country, as a woman I’m an immigrant in the whole world.”
—
The Texas poet José Antonio Rodríguez says writers have “the power of just the right words.”
I have the power to make people laugh. That’s a power, isn’t it? And to have it here in Mexico is a gift I can give daily, often, and generously, like handing someone a flower or a piece of bread. My father often handed out these flores. He liked to give people something even if it was only a kind word. “Oh, she was polite and beautiful, just like you.”
When I make people laugh in English, it’s wonderful. When I make them laugh with something I’ve said in Spanish, it’s pure glory. I walk with a higher step. I’m at peace with myself. I go to bed feeling I’ve improved the world. Maybe not by much, but just enough.
—
I have no place in Mexican society as a woman who has borne no children. If I were young I might have a future purpose. But as I’m past childbearing years, well beyond being una señorita, the town doesn’t know what to think of me.
Calixto and Catalina, my employees, insist on calling me señora, out of respect, but as I am no one’s mother, how can I answer to that? Besides, señora smacks of a prissy church lady. I don’t ever want to be una señora.
One morning when walking into town, I salute two laborers on the street near los Arcos. They’re country people wearing baseball caps, resting along the side of the road where the natural springs spout and the cabdrivers like to park to wash their cars.
“Buenos días,” I say to them both.
“¡Buenos días, señito!” they reply buoyantly.
They use the country word that is neither señora nor señorita, but something like a cross between the two, like “ma’am.”
“¡Buenos días, señito!”
It occurs to me then and there, that’s who I am here in Mexico. I’m señito.
—
A dog barks. In the distance the drums from the Matachines dancers who have been drumming and dancing all day for today’s fiesta like a tribe announcing warfare. At night the town echoes with boleros, mariachi, Banda music. Fireworks. A rooster. Always add a rooster. Church bells. I think of Emily Dickinson’s recip
—
I feel lucky to have at my side my assistant, driver, dog trainer, handyman, and jack-of-all-trades, Calixto, a San Miguel native. He’s a young man who was once in a rock band but now works to support his family as a domestic, or an electrician, or a mason, or a bartender, or whatever it takes. He’s only twenty-eight, but already has a family of two, a wife, and too much responsibility.
Calixto insists I go see the house his grandparents are selling once he hears I’m house hunting. Not at once. It takes me a while to understand that I’m going to live here. It seems I’m the last to know.
Calixto says I need to see his grandparents’ house as it’s in the neighborhood I want. We arrive in the late afternoon before dark falls. It’s a narrow house with an open door like a mouth saying “Ahhh.” In the doorway there are a few vegetables in crates, just a few, like in a store. It’s then I realize this is a store. A tiny neighborhood convenience store, but with only four tomatoes, some dried chiles, a few onions. That’s it. Like many locals, a table is set up in the doorway to sell one or two items—maybe mangoes on a stick served with chili and lime. Or fried pork rinds. Or a small sign might be taped along a corridor announcing tortillas hechas a mano, homemade. A way to earn a few needed extra pesos. So why shouldn’t Calixto’s grandparents sell a bit of produce?
Calixto introduces me. The abuelo, dark and dry as machaca, beef jerky, sits in a shadowy corner. We exchange “Buenas tardes.” He nods and shakes my hand and asks me how I am, as courteous as only Mexican country people can be. The house is as dark as he is, with only a bare bulb illuminating the room, a yellow light that can’t quite flush out the darkness in the corners. I can make out a series of mismatched furniture, a dresser from the 1930s, a bed in the same room, a television murmuring in the corner like someone praying a novena. A “Buenas tardes” bubbles up from the grandmother seated on the bed, but she can’t tear her face from the telenovela as she says this. She talks to us as a blind person would, without turning her head, without looking in our direction.