A House of My Own: Stories From My Life

  This is my house.

  Bliss.

  —

  October 24, 2007. You come down from Chicago for a visit, Mama. You don’t want to come. I make you come. You don’t like to leave your house anymore, your back hurts, you say, but I insist. I built this office beside the river for you as much as for me, and I want you to see it.

  Once, years ago, you telephoned and said in an urgent voice, “When are you going to build your office? I just saw Isabel Allende on PBS and she has a HUGE desk and a BIG office.” You were upset because I was writing on the kitchen table again like in the old days.

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  My office in San Antonio

  And now here we are, on the rooftop of a saffron building with a river view, a space all my own just to write. We climb up to the room I work in, above the library, and out to the balcony facing the river.

  You have to rest. There are industrial buildings on the opposite bank—abandoned granaries and silos—but they’re so rain-rusted and sun-bleached, they have their own charm, like public sculptures. When you’ve recovered your breath, we continue.

  I’m especially proud of the spiral staircase to the rooftop. I’d always dreamt of having one, just like the houses in Mexico. Even the words for them in Spanish are wonderful—una escalera de caracol, a snail ladder. Our footsteps clang on each metal step, the dogs following so close we have to scold them.

  “Your office is bigger than in the pictures you sent,” you say, delighted. I imagine you’re comparing it to Isabel Allende’s.

  “Where did you get the drapes in the library? I bet they cost a pretty penny. Too bad your brothers couldn’t upholster your chairs for you and save you some money. Boy, this place is niiiiice!” you say, your voice sliding up the scales like a river grackle.

  I plop yoga mats on the rooftop, and we sit cross-legged to watch the sun descend. We drink your favorite, Italian sparkling wine, to celebrate your arrival, to celebrate my office.

  The sky absorbs the night quickly-quickly, dissolving into the color of a plum. I lie on my back and watch clouds scurry past in a hurry to get home. Stars come out shyly, one by one. You lie down next to me and drape one leg over mine like when we sleep together at your home. We always sleep together when I’m there. At first because there isn’t any other bed. But later, after Papa dies, just because you want me near. It’s the only time you let yourself be affectionate.

  “What if we invite everybody down here for Christmas next year?” I ask. “What do you think?”

  “We’ll see,” you say, lost in your own thoughts.

  The moon climbs the front-yard mesquite tree, leaps over the terrace ledge, and astonishes us. It’s a full moon, a huge nimbus like the prints of Yoshitoshi. From here on, I won’t be able to see a full moon again without thinking of you, this moment. But right now, I don’t know this.

  You close your eyes. You look like you’re sleeping. The plane ride must’ve tired you. “Good lucky you studied,” you say without opening your eyes. You mean my office, my life.

  I say to you, “Good lucky.”

  For my mother, Elvira Cordero Cisneros

  July 11, 1929–November 1, 2007

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  An Ofrenda for My Mother

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  My altar installation for my mother at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, Albuquerque

  I was in the room the moment my mother died. She was in intensive care hooked up to machines that were keeping her alive. I was on a cot asleep in the same room when the nurse shook me and said, “She’s going.” We’d been waiting for this moment for forty-eight hours and maybe all our lives, but it was still a surprise. It was dark out, November lst, just before sunrise. There wasn’t time to call anyone else except my brother Lolo, who had camped out in the hall. My mother’s doctor had said she was brain dead, but the nurses in ICU talked to her gently as if she were still present, as did we.

  I’d been there when my friend Danny López Lozano’s spirit crossed. I wasn’t in the hospital room with him, but in my backyard after receiving the news. I was trying to meditate, but I didn’t know how and was making a mess of it. My mind kept straying from Danny to whether I’d remembered to defrost the chicken. Then I was filled with guilt and tried again to think of Danny and only Danny. I mention this because I know I didn’t bring on what happened next. The strangest thing. I felt a heat at the crown of my head, as if someone had broken an egg and the yolk flowed down slow as honey, but warm as a fever. It wasn’t just the heat that startled me, but the overwhelming emotion that came with it. A feeling of joy so intense it made me cry. It moved through me vertically. By the time it entered my torso moving to my feet, the top of my head was already cooling down. It scared me as it was happening. What is this? I thought. Then I realized it was Danny’s spirit despidiéndose, I’ll be seeing you, I’m fine, don’t be sad, don’t worry, tell the others. And by the time I understood, my body went back to its normal temperature. He was gone.

  That’s why in the ICU room with my mother, I was ready like a baseball player waiting for a fly ball. My mother was a force of nature, so I was expecting a tsunami. Instead I almost didn’t notice the hovering emotion that moved about the room like moonlight shimmering on water. It was gentle and tender and sweet sweet sweet. Not like my mother at all. And it didn’t travel through me from crown to feet. It was as soft as a mouth and barely perceptible, like a moth fluttering just beyond reach. “Do you feel that?” I asked Lolo, but he just frowned. “Grab her hands, tell her she can go,” I said. I was excited the way I imagine you’re excited when you’re witnessing a birth; you can’t believe it’s happening. I felt like that, as if I were in a sacred room, lucky to help her to die, just as she had helped me to be born. “You have no idea,” I said to Mother. “No idea what you did in this life.” It cracked my heart in two to think this pure love was my mother all along, underneath all that bravado, under the thunder and rage. How had she gone from that to the woman I knew? Then the shimmering dimmed, then faded, and we were left alone.

  This story first appeared in print in Granta’s Chicago issue, in December 2009.

  I became a writer thanks to a mother who was unhappy being a mother. She was a prisoner-of-war mother banging on the bars of her cell all her life. Unhappy women do this. She searched for escape routes from her prison and found them in museums, the park, and the public library.

  As a child she lived in the parish of St. Francis of Assisi in Chicago, off Roosevelt Road and South Halsted Street, close enough to downtown she could walk there. I have a photo of her as a very young girl on the steps of a Chicago museum with her best friend, Frances. I know my mother often ran off all day with her friends and paid her younger sisters to do her chores. She did not know what awaited her in her life, and if she had she might’ve run farther than the museum.

  My mother (left) and Frances Casino

  My mother as a bridesmaid in her teens

  Because my mother needed to fortify her spirit, Saturdays were reserved for the library, Sundays for the concerts in Grant Park or visits to the many Chicago museums. I used to think this was for our sake, but now I realize it was for hers. She loved opera, Pearl Buck novels, and the movie based on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Later she would ditch Pearl Buck for Noam Chomsky, but in the beginning she read fiction. I know she dreamt of becoming some sort of artist—she could sing and draw—but I’m sure she never dreamt of mothering seven kids.

  I think she married my father because he rescued her from a house with peeling paint and beds crowded with sisters and bedbugs. At least this is what my father reminded her when they argued. He came from Mexico City and spoke an impeccable Spanish as stiff and formal as the beautiful suits he wore. He was a gentleman, and I imagine my mother saw him as cosmopolitan and sophisticated. She did not know he was a dreamer and would give her seven kids and an unimaginative life.

  My mother was the beauty of the family, used to being spoiled by her eldest sister. If
there was one thing my father knew how to do, it was how to spoil a woman. He believed women want words more than anything, and he had a lot of them. Mi cielo. Mi vida. Mi amor. So for a little while she must have been happy. I have a photo of them dancing and kissing. It’s obvious they’re in love. But it didn’t last very long and was replaced with a more durable, daily love, and the words were replaced with more durable, daily words, too.

  My parents before they married, at a Chicago party

  My parents

  My mother and me

  “¿Vieja, donde estás?” Where’s my old lady?

  “¡No me llames vieja, yo no soy vieja!” Don’t call me “old lady,” I’m not old!

  Sundays Father chauffeured us wherever Mother directed. A classical concert in the park, while he snored on a blanket under a tree. The Brookfield Zoo or a Grant Park museum. “I’ll wait here,” Father would say, and slide onto a bench. He would’ve preferred to stay home reading his Mexican magazines in bed or soaking his feet after a week of bobbing like a prizefighter around the sofas and chairs he upholstered. But Mother complained she had to get out of that house or go crazy.

  On Saturdays I walked with Mother to the library. For me, the library was a wonderful house. A house of ideas, a house of silence. Our own house was like that of the cook’s in Alice in Wonderland, a lot of shouting and shattering of dishes. Would someone hand me a baby and would the baby turn into a pig? Anything could happen in this kitchen. It was a nightmare, and I was condemned to the lowest job of scullery maid, because I was too daydreamy to learn how to cook. The rice burned on me—an expensive mistake. So I was ordered to cut potatoes into little squares, or scrub pans, or set the table, or anything else Mother thought of while she was busy banging pots and yelling.

  Hell was a kitchen. Hell was having to go to the supermarket every Friday with her. Sometimes Father drove us. Usually we walked there and back with a collapsible shopping cart and a red wagon. It was a cross, buying groceries for our army. Neither Mother nor I enjoyed it.

  Sometimes my father and mother went to the Randolph Street market to buy eggs and vegetables wholesale for the nine of us. Sometimes my mother walked down North Avenue, beyond Humboldt Park, to the day-old bakery to buy us sweet bread. On Sundays after scavenging the flea market at Maxwell Street, we stopped for Mexican groceries on 18th Street; carnitas and chicharrón served on hot tortillas with dollops of sour cream and sprigs of cilantro. These Sunday dinners were one of the few times Father “cooked.” He stood over the cutting board and chopped like a Japanese chef, humming while he worked, until the carnitas were diced to his liking.

  Father was meticulous. He liked to remind everyone he was from a good family, the son of a Mexican military man and the grandson of a pianist who was also an educator, but Father’s appreciation of the finer things in life did not extend beyond nightclubs. He loved dance halls and cabarets, the big bands of Xavier Cugat, Pérez Prado, and Benny Goodman, the sultry voice of Peggy Lee singing Lil Green’s “Why Don’t You Do Right?”—whose lyrics “Get out of here and get me some money too” always made him laugh. He was a good dancer and a sharp dresser. And then he got married.

  Like everybody we knew, we took road trips from Chicago to Mexico to visit family. In Mexico we didn’t have to ask Father to drive us to museums; the past and the present were all around us. We witnessed paper Judases exploding on Holy Week, saw Aztec pyramids sprouting in the middle of downtown, watched dancers swing like birds from a giant pole planted in front of the cathedral, listened to ancient music played on drums and conch shells in the central plaza. Art was in the paper flags fluttering above us at a fiesta, in the mangoes sliced like roses and served on a stick, in the cheap trinkets we bought with our Sunday allowance at the market, in the pastel wafer candies studded with pumpkin seeds. Art was a way of being.

  On these vacations, Father caught up on his reading. His library consisted of Mexican comic books and pocket-sized fotonovelas printed in a dark chocolate ink on paper so cheap it was used as toilet paper by the poor. When Father was done with his little books, he’d turn them over to me, and I painted over the ladies’ chocolate-tinted mouths with a red-lead pencil dipped in spit. This is how I learned to read in Spanish.

  Father also had a private library, a secret stash of ¡Alarma! magazines, whose covers were so savage, Mother forced him to keep them under the mattress in brown paper bags. ¡Alarma! featured sensational stories about everyday Mexican events—yet another bus drives off a cliff, yet another quake swallows a village, yet another machete murder. All with detailed photos. Mexicans love staring at death. I wasn’t allowed to read these magazines, but once in a while I did catch a headline when Father was reading in bed. “Wife Kills Husband and Serves His Head in Tacos.”

  Back in Chicago, Mother painted geishas in paint-by-number sets in the kitchen after her housework was done. She made fake flowers with crepe paper until she grew real flowers from seeds she sent away for. She sewed stuffed toys and doll clothes, designed theater sets and created puppets. But it wasn’t enough. Mother felt duped by life and sighed for the life that wasn’t hers. Father watched television in bed, content, chuckling, calling out for pancakes.

  —There’s no intelligent life around here, Mother said out loud to no one in particular.

  When she was in a bad mood, which was often, she threw sharp words like knives, wounding and maiming the guilty and the innocent.

  —Your mother, Father complained to me, near tears.

  Sick and tired, miserable, Mother raged and paced her cell. We tiptoed around her feeling gloomy and guilty.

  I understood Father. He understood me. Neither of us understood her, and she never understood us. But that didn’t matter. A stack of pancakes. A paycheck. A bouquet of dandelions. A ride to the Garfield Park Conservatory. A box of popcorn from “the Sears.” A language for the words we couldn’t say.

  Resurrections

  It occurs to me there’s a global conspiracy to keep me in the dark about certain simple truths. This is in regards to getting older and fatter, and other transmogrifications of aging, like losing your parents. Did someone forget to tell me, or was I not listening? I ask, “How come nobody told me?” almost on a daily basis.

  And so this piece was finished in 2011 and turned into the epilogue for my book Have You Seen Marie?, a story about the loss of a cat named Marie and the loss of a mother, with a cast of characters that included real San Antonio friends and neighbors—Reverend Chavana, the widow Helen, Cowboy Dave, Bill and Roger.

  Normally, I wouldn’t feel the need to add an epilogue, because I said what I wanted to say in the story. But there were some things I wanted to add as the author that couldn’t be said as the protagonist, things that might help others through their own time of mourning.

  In Mexico they say when someone you love dies, a part of you dies with them. But they forget to mention that a part of them is born in you, not immediately, I’ve learned, but eventually, and gradually. It’s an opportunity to be reborn. When you’re in between births, there should be some way to indicate to all, “Beware, I am not as I was before. Handle me with care.”

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  The real Bill and Roger (Sánchez and Solís) posing for the book

  I live in San Antonio on the left bank of the river in an area of the city called King William, famous for its historic homes. South of Alamo Street, beyond King William proper, the San Antonio River transforms itself into a wildlife refuge as it makes its way toward the Spanish missions. Behind my house the river is more creek than river. It still has its natural sandy bottom. It hasn’t been covered over with concrete yet. Wild animals live in the tall grass and in its waters. My dogs and I can wade across and watch tadpoles and turtles and fish darting about. There are hawks and cranes and owls and other splendid winged creatures in the trees. It is calming and beautiful, especially when you’re sad and in need of big doses of beauty.

  In the spring after my mother died, a doctor wanted to p
rescribe pills for depression. “But if I don’t feel,” I said, “how will I be able to write?” I need to be able to feel things deeply, good or bad, and wade through an emotion to the other shore, toward a rebirth, of sorts, a return to the living. I knew if I put off moving through grief, the wandering between worlds would only take longer. Even sadness has its place in the universe.

  I wish somebody had told me then that death allows you the chance to experience the world soulfully, that the heart is open like the aperture of a camera, taking in everything, painful as well as joyous, sensitive as the skin of water.

  I wish somebody had told me to draw near me objects of pure spirit when living between births. My dogs. The trees along the San Antonio River. The sky and clouds reflected in its water. Wind with its scent of spring. Flowers, especially the sympathetic daisy.

  I wish somebody had told me love does not die, that we can continue to receive and give love after death. This news is so astonishing to me even now, I wonder why it isn’t flashed across the bottom of the television screen on CNN.

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  Ester Hernández

  I wrote the story Have You Seen Marie? in the wake of death—poco a poco, slow by slow, little by little. A writer who had come to visit had lost her cat—Marie. The real Marie eluded capture for over a week, but searching for her forced me during those days to meet neighbors, and the idea for a book came about.