—
Carranza’s Meat Market is where we stop next for barbacoa Tex-Mex. It amuses you because of the railroad across the street. “What poetic justice,” you say. “Mexican president Carranza was plagued by the Zapatistas bombing the railroads, and now here are the railroads across the street plaguing his descendants.”
—
I think, when I look at you, how did you do it, remain human, after everything? What is left after so many goodbyes, after everything? After much pain, much fear? I’m not a writer in exile. I’ve never been exiled from anything, except maybe a bar or two.
I can’t imagine being in exile.
—
I look and can’t find you in the books you write. You do a Sally Rand fan dance. I find you only in this book—Days and Nights of Love and War. Only here do I catch glimpses of you refracted in the mirror of other faces, dreams, stories of other dreamers, stories of other storytellers.
—
You write: “I’ve known few people who have survived the tests of pain and violence—a rare feat—with their capacity for tenderness intact.”
—
You don’t talk about yourself, Eduardo. You talk about my house, my dogs, the book I’m writing, and sometimes for a wisp of a moment you mention you. But only by inference. On our way to run errands you say, “I didn’t expect so many trees and hills here. San Antonio is very pleasant. It looks like a good town to walk in.” “Oh, do you like to walk?” “I walk all the time,” you say. “Blocks and blocks.” And I try to imagine you walking through the streets of Montevideo, through Buenos Aires, through Calella de la Costa, Spain, where you’ve written this book.
I imagine you walking through all the cities where you’ve lived exiled from your last life. I imagine you drinking in bars and eating as you do here with me, con gusto. I gather from sharing beer and food with you a little of who you are. I see you riding trains and buses. The waiter fills your glass with beer, a woman hands you change. People talk to you without knowing who you are. People like to talk to you because you like to listen. You are a writer, you are a witness.
—
You once told me a writer can write of life only if they’ve experienced death. You weren’t talking about yourself, but I thought of you and your first death at nineteen chronicled in Days and Nights of Love and War. Your body was already in the morgue, until someone, “Saint Coincidence” perhaps, chanced to notice you were still breathing. Since this death and the subsequent deaths and resurrections, you write with life. One way to conquer death.
—
Your memory startles me. Your attention to detail. You quote poems as easily as you do history. On the ride to Acoma your face furrows into Xs when you grill me about a short story of mine. “What did you mean here: ‘I believe love is always eternal. Even if eternity is only five minutes’?” And I explain myself. “Ah,” you say, “is that it?” Silence. Then you add, “You love like a man.”
—
Love resuscitates the living dead, don’t you think? For others, it’s laughter. For writers, the pen is our savior. For some the needle, I suppose, or the bottle, or perhaps that rare elixir: poetry. I don’t know how it is for others, for those without words, I mean. I can only imagine. For me, there are the writers like you, who remind me why I write.
—
“And what about love, Eduardo?”
“Love? The Brazilian poet Vinícius de Moraes says it best. No es infinito pero es infinito en cuanto dura. It’s not infinite, but it’s infinite while it lasts.”
I make you write this down for me, and you do, adding your signature pig.
—
We walk into a shop full of piñatas. Hundreds of piñatas. Piñatas shaped like superheroes and cartoons, like soldiers and like Chihuahuas, but no collapsible piñatas. At least you and I are in agreement. These piñatas are bien feas, truly ugly. The best kind is the old-fashioned piñata. The one shaped like a star.
—
You teach me to remain faithful to the word. To revere the syllable as a poet does, to remain attentive to writing as if one’s life, several lives, depended upon it.
This is what I want. To believe one can write to change the world.
To change the world.
—
I do not believe, Eduardo, you are as you claim an atheist. You believe in “Saint Coincidence,” the power of love, and in brujos: that religion called superstition by the uncoverted and spirituality by the devout. In short, you believe in humanity.
—
On that first visit to Albuquerque you had a hard time reading the English translations of your work. With one vignette in particular, you’re obsessed with the English translation, how it doesn’t ring as true as the original Spanish. “We have to revise it,” you plead. You make me sit down with you at the Albuquerque airport and get to work. You insist. The little furrows on your forehead don’t disappear until we’ve gone over the vignette and revised and revised and revised.
—
After hearing you speak, we don’t sleep for days. Some of us want to write like you. Some of us want to be you. Our crush is laughable. Television producers, journalists, university professors, cashiers, lesbian lawyers, dentists, opera singers, students, writers, retired schoolteachers, nurses, gay painters, and straight architects. We are in love with your words, with the deep voice saying them, with the way you speak English, the way you speak Spanish.
Admiration is a love potion.
—
In Days and Nights of Love and War, you write, “I have known the machinery of terror from the inside and that exile has not always been easy. I could celebrate that at the end of so much sorrow and so much death, I still keep alive my capacity for astonishment at marvelous things, and my capacity for indignation at infamy, and that I continue to believe the advice of the poet who told me not to take seriously anything that does not make me laugh.”
—
A table full of San Antonio artists and poets have come to the Liberty Bar to have an encore of Eduardo after his reading. A penniless painter pulls like a rabbit from a hat a gift he’s made for you that evening. He had to run home to make it.
It’s a collapsible piñata!
You’re overjoyed! You laugh like a child. Greedy and grateful.
—
You write: “I thought I knew some good stories to tell other people, and I discovered, or confirmed, that I had to write. I had often been convinced that this solitary trade wasn’t worthwhile if you compare it, for example, to political activism or adventure. I had written and published a lot, but I hadn’t the guts to dig down inside and open up and give of myself. Writing was dangerous, like making love the way one should.”
—
Eduardo, I love your books because you write like a woman.
Infinito Botánica
There are so many stories about Franco Mondini-Ruiz. Some he invented himself, and some we were lucky enough to have witnessed, and some became San Antonio legend. Franco is part artist, part eccentric, part genius, part clown, part demon. Sometimes all at the same time. When his collection of sculptures and stories were featured in book form, High Pink: Tex-Mex Fairy Tales, he asked to include a poem I’d written for him years before. But I asked if I could write the introduction, too. I was grateful; Franco, and before him Danny López Lozano, were part of an arts scene in San Antonio that made me feel, finally, at home. Their art happenings in the ’90s were revolutionary gatherings, terrifically inclusive, and brought down the apartheid walls of class, color, and sexuality existent in San Antonio for generations. By the time I finished this introduction, on September 11, 2004, the party was definitely over.
Amor, dinero, y salud, y el tiempo para gozarlos.
(Love, money, and health, and the time to enjoy them.)
—Mexican dicho painted on the side of Infinito Botánica’s building, South Flores Street, San Antonio, Texas
I first met Franco Mondini-Ruiz in the kitchen of his Genese
o Street house. He was living the life of a successful lawyer then. I had my hands in sudsy water and was furiously washing dishes the moment he poked his head through the kitchen doorway and introduced himself. His houseguest had invited us over for an impromptu party, and I remember our panic trying to get the house clean again before Franco walked in from an out-of-town trip.
There was no need to worry, I’d later find out. Franco’s house was always full of strangers. He never locked the doors. Often beautiful boys fell asleep there, and more often beautiful boys ripped him off. He lived like an Italian movie: part Fellini, part Pasolini. This was part of el mundo Mondini, a chapter of my life that was to run its course during the decade of the ’90s.
Falling into Franco’s life was like falling down Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit hole. The house on Geneseo was famous for parties where wealthy little old ladies in gold lamé might appear, as well as six-foot-tall transvestites and a parade of live chickens.
But Franco’s most remarkable feat would be the alchemy of Infinito Botánica, a crumbling Mexican magic shop filled with folk medicine as well as high art. It was the only place in the city where a working-class person might hobnob with a millionaire. Rich Houston ladies shopped alongside tatooed vatos, big Botero-esque babes from the south-side dyke bars, Mexican nationals dressed in impeccable designer wear, and Mexican illegals sweaty from hard labor, the neighborhood Catholic priest. Everyone was welcome. In a sense, it was like one of Franco’s parties, high low, or high rascuache.*
The predecessor of this high-camp living was a man who had inspired us all and introduced us to each other. Danny López Lozano of Tienda Guadalupe Folk Art. It was Danny who provoked a generation of Chicano artists to relook at the bueno, bonito, y rascuache of San Antonio and transform it into glamour. The gatherings at his shop on South Alamo Street, as well as at his parties at his home, became our salon. If anyone was our mother, it was Danny, and we belonged devotedly to the House of Guadalupe.
Franco at his glorious botánica
When Danny died of throat cancer in 1992, it was up to others to carry the torch. Franco stepped in with Infinito Botánica, on South Flores Street. Other artists followed, living upstairs or next door, so that when an arts event occurred, it involved several open studios and the space between. Anything could happen and often did. Performances on the sidewalk spilling onto the street. Backyard cookouts featuring feasts more magnificent than Moctezuma’s. A spontaneous eruption of Pancho Villa moustaches painted on the women and Frida eyebrows on the men.
Some of us aren’t speaking to each other anymore, but for a time not only were we speaking, we were singing arias. Whatever inspired one of us was sure to inspire us all. An outbreak of Buddha art. Day of the Dead altars. Maria Callas look-alike nights. Paquita la del Barrio. Oh, honey, do I have to tell you?
Franco taught us to play. At the Liberty Bar, the name wasn’t just a name, it was a way of life. We might compete for the same boys: “You can have him after me.” A fight might break out over mole—from a jar versus from scratch. But we did see the world through the same rose-tinted glasses called Mexican nostalgia.
Franco taught me to see beauty in pink cupcakes, plastic champagne cups filled with colored water, Mexican pan dulce adorned with pre-Columbian artifacts. I still have the Marie Antoinette living room set I bought at Infinito, full of woodworms and horsehair stuffing, chairs so uncomfortable they’re not for sitting.
That was then. Before 9/11. Before we started getting harassed for looking like the Arab Jews we are. We were escape artists in our escapades, looking for a shortcut to Berlin or Buenos Aires, trying to make high glam from whatever we had on hand. Those times. As a drunk woman so aptly put it at the final Infinito party, “It’s the end of an error.”
* * *
* “High rascuache” comes from the brilliant imagination of the art critic Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, who coined the phrase to name objects that are at once funky and glamorous, like a plaster Virgen de Guadalupe statue covered in Swarovski crystals.
El Pleito/The Quarrel
My friends are highly competitive. After I’d written an intro for the artist Franco Mondini-Ruiz’s book High Pink: Tex-Mex Fairy Tales, Rolando Briseño asked if I’d write something for his upcoming art book Moctezuma’s Table, which would feature his paintings about food. I’m not a writer who can write on assignment, but I said I’d give it a try. It’s a tricky business; when a friend asks you to write about them, it’s like asking you to create their portrait. I warned Rolando, “It might not be a pretty picture.”
Moctezuma’s Table: Rolando Briseño’s Mexican and Chicano Tablescapes was published by Texas A&M University Press in 2010.
It was the night Astrid Hadad sang at the Guadalupe Theater in San Antonio. She had a spectacular show, complete with bandoliers across her corseted chichis, papier-mâché pyramids and cacti, sequined skirts, a holster, pistols that fired blanks, and jokes that hit their targets on both sides of the border. Well, she was the best thing to ride into San Antonio in a long time. We still talk about that night even now though it was years ago.
Astrid Hadad is a Mexican-Lebanese performance artist from el D.F. (Mexico City). She and I once had our photo taken nariz a nariz, because with her Lebanese profile and my Aztec/Arab one, we could be twins, I’m not lying.
Credit 26.1
My nose is the one on the left.
After her show, we invited Astrid to the only twenty-four-hour restaurant we’re not ashamed of, Mi Tierra. With its sugary trays of pan dulce and Mexican candy, enough twinkling lights to illuminate a city, papel picado flags fluttering overhead, strolling músicos, and a room where it’s Christmas all year round, it’s as campy as Astrid.
It was in the shimmering Christmas Room where they seated our party. The table was longer than the Last Supper, with the lucky ones at the center next to Astrid, and the ones who got there early and weren’t thinking seated at the no-man’s-land at the end, like Judas. We were the tontos seated at the end.
Now, you have to know this was when Astrid was really famous. Maybe you haven’t heard of her, but anyone who lives in Mexico or watches Mexican television would know that nose anywhere. She had risen from singing her political feminista numbers in cafés and bars, where I first saw her, to appearing in a popular telenovela. I wish I could tell you the name, but to tell the truth I never knew it. So this happened when she was on television, and Astrid Hadad was on everyone’s tongue, from the mex-intelligentsia to the pobre who offered to wash your windows at the stoplight.
Mi Tierra Restaurant, the Christmas Room
I don’t know why everyone wants to go to dinner with a famosa, because you never get to talk to the guest of honor, and even if you do, she’s tired after a show where she’s been belting them out, and to make matters worse, that night she was coming down with something. “My throat hurts,” Astrid said, reaching into her purse and bringing out her own medicine, a tequila she swore she never traveled without. And again I wish I could tell you the name, but you know how I am. Unless I write it down, forget it.
It was time finally to order dinner. The waiter was having a hell of a time with so many folks seated at such a long table, and with a woman who looked like a cross between Cleopatra and Vampira slugging back tequila from her own botella, well, imagine.
Rolando Briseño to my right, Ito Romo to his right, and my best friend, Josie Garza, on his right
Then it was our turn to be humble and act like groupies, after that show where she knocked us out with songs like “Un Calcetín” and “Mala,” we were ready to genuflect right then and there and kiss her red high heels with the spurs. And to make matters even better, she was whip-smart and well read, a woman of tremendous intelligence, not the vapid vedettes of Mexican television.
So we’re at Mi Tierra restaurant in el Mercado, right? It’s probably just past midnight, the beginning of the evening for me, but in sleepy, pueblerino San Antonio, the middle of the night. We’re here because this is
one of the few spots open, and because they serve drinks, and even though the place is flooded with tourists in the day, after midnight the locals pile in for a bowl of menudo for their cruda, or pan dulce and Mexican hot chocolate after a velorio, or to slurp up a big bowl of tortilla soup after a night out, and I mean big, even bigger than your head.
Here we are, then, the writer/artist Ito Romo, the visual artist Rolando Briseño, and me, and I don’t know who else besides Astrid and her musicians, but the table is filled with a whole lot of hangers-on hanging on. I remember Ito decides to order enchiladas de mole, and that’s where the whole pleito begins.
More or less the conversation that night, the way I remember it:
ROLANDO: [in an incredulous tone, as if he were about to bite into cat caquita] You’re going to order enchiladas…de mole! Here? You wouldn’t catch me ordering mole. Forget it, I bet they make it from a jar. You could never get me to eat them in a million years. In my house we grew up with my mother making mole FROM SCRAAATCH. [This last part was with an accompanying Jackie Gleason hand gesture and leer.]
ITO: A poco. [And here he starts to laugh in a typical Ito risa, with his shoulders hunched like a vampire, and a giggle rising out of him like a gurgling fountain overflowing.] What a liar you are, Rolando! Your mother made jar mole from Doña María like everyone else’s mother from here to Torreón.
ROLANDO: My mother made mole FROM SCRAAATCH. Not from a jar. I can’t BELIEVE your family would eat mole from a jar!
ITO: Aw, come on. You’re trying to say your mother dried the chiles, and ground them up, and took days and days to make mole from scratch? You’ve got to be kidding! Who do you think we are to believe such a story?