A House of My Own Read online

  If the universe is a cloth, then all humanity is interwoven with different-colored threads. Pull one string, and the whole cloth comes undone. That is why I believe in Destiny. Not the “destiny” of European origin. But la Divina Providencia de las Américas. Make the sign of the cross and kiss your thumb. Each person who comes into your life affects your destino, and you affect theirs.

  A friend of mine went to Mexico and was so overwhelmed by a vendor’s wares, she couldn’t make up her mind. The colors made her dizzy, drove her crazy. Exasperated, she finally appealed to the shopkeeper. “Which colors go well together, do you think?” “Señora,” he said gently, as if he were talking to a child, “let me teach you something. All colors go well together.”

  Color is a language. When I moved to San Antonio, I assumed everyone here was bilingual, but when I painted my Victorian house in the historic King William neighborhood a twilight shade of blue-violet, the Historic and Design Review Commission raised a red flag. They wanted me to choose from an approved palette of colonial colors that included Surrey beige, Sèvres blue, Hawthorne green, Frontier Days brown, and Plymouth Rock gray—colores tristes in my opinion, and ugly.

  To some, my “Purple House” needs no translation. Carmen Caballero’s third-grade class at Ball Elementary, San Antonio, wrote me letters of support. “In my opinion,” one little girl wrote in formal Spanish, “you should leave your house purple because San Antonio was once Mexico.” Memories are nudged awake. An old man selling paletas from a pushcart remembers. “Of course there were purple houses, right here in La Villita,” he says, citing a neighborhood a few blocks from my home. “There were houses of many colors when I was young: fresa, limón, sandía, lima…” He names colors as if he were naming flavors from his ice cream stock.

  “Vibrant—it gives energy!” A blond jogger shouts her approval without stopping.

  “Why are our Mexican colors okay for our city’s Fiesta, but not for our own houses?” a local radio deejay asks his listeners.

  The Mexican architect Luis Barragán has said that the sky is the true facade of a house. I moved here from the Midwest, yet felt I’d come home. Light, the transparent light of Mexico. Clouds so white it hurts to look at them, like linen puffed and drying on a clothesline. Sky and clouds don’t need papers to cross the border.

  When I lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a native told me houses are painted to match the sky. If this is true worldwide, then I was raised in Chicago neighborhoods where buildings are the color of bad weather. Tundra ice, tornado pewter, tempest gray, and do-not-go-gently-into-that-blizzard white.

  I painted my home in San Antonio the colors of my Mexican memories. I chose strong colors, colores fuertes, because the light is fuerte. I wanted something soothing that would draw together earth and sky, and nourish it—jacaranda violet with turquoise trim. At twilight, with the clouds aflame and the sun setting behind it, my house sizzles and sparkles, looks absolutely gorgeous. To me.

  Perhaps all houses are drawn from nostalgia. A local architect claims the Alamo doors remember blue paint. The San Antonio missions had elaborate designs imitating tiles inside and out. Even the building that now houses the San Antonio Conservation Society sported a joyful hue of pink stucco before O’Neil Ford “restored” San Antonio to fashionably acceptable white. History, after all, is layer upon layer of stories. What one considers history depends on who is telling the story and what story they consider telling.

  To some, my periwinkle home screams rascuache, the term for making something from readily available materials. An old tire transformed into a planter. A shed patched with hubcaps. A toy airplane made from a beer can. Poverty is the mother of invention.

  Once, when I was little, my mother pasted a travel poster in our kitchen with Karo corn syrup because we didn’t have glue. Now, that’s what I call rascuache.

  Colores alegres, happy colors, as opposed to sad colors. Colores fuertes, as opposed to weak. Colors that look, as my mother would say, like they were boiled for too long. Chillante, literally screaming. Vibrant colors, sensuous, intense, violent, frightening, passionate. Is that blue beautiful because it reminds you of Tiffany’s, or the Blessed Virgin Mary? Is it an Hermès orange or a Jarritos soft drink orange? It all depends on your memory.

  The grande dame of Mexican letters, Elena Poniatowska, says that in Mexico “the people set the colors to fight like roosters: all colors are enemies, and in the end the winner of the battle is art itself, because opposites attract each other and end up embracing.”

  The border is locked in a passionate embrace of north and south, of desire and rage, and from this coupling a new culture has erupted. I was told that my house was “not appropriate to history,” and that the issue was “not about taste” but about “historical context.” But my point is this: Whose history?

  Mexicans love color so much, everything is awash with it, including themselves. Long before punk rockers, pre-Columbian women dyed their hair green, yellow, and red. Even today the Nahua women of Tetelcingo, Morelos, a town known for its witchcraft, dye their hair green. Maybe, like punk rockers, to make themselves more powerful.

  Mexicans have such faith in color, if you visit the markets at the end of the year, you’ll see mobs rushing to buy red or yellow underwear before midnight. If it’s money you want in the incoming year, make sure you’re wearing yellow underwear at midnight. But if it’s love you’re after, remember to wear red. And if you’re especially greedy and desire both, you’re condemned like me to welcome the new year in two pairs of chones.

  Color is a story. An inheritance. Were the San Antonio missions rascuache because they imitated the elaborate Moorish tiles they could not afford? Nobody wants to live like they’re poor, not even the poor. The poor prefer to live like kings. That’s why they paint their houses with the only wealth they have—spirit.

  Mango yellow, papaya orange, cobalt blue. When colors arrive from “the nobodies who don’t create art, but handicrafts, who don’t have culture, but folklore,” as Eduardo Galeano sardonically says of the poor, they don’t count, they’re not valuable until a Rockefeller or a Luis Barragán borrows them and introduces them into the homes of the rich and gives them status.

  Recent research on the distressed colors popularly known as the “Santa Fe look” confirms that in their time the colors were much brighter than we know them. The tones we think of as authentic are actually stronger colors that have faded with age and weather. Originally, the hues were as intense as the contemporary colors of Mexico. The local Southwest version waters it down to sorbet, perhaps because the real thing is too strong for the palettes and palates of the timid.

  Although Mayan blue pigment has defied 1,400 years of sun and is still as intense as ever, the glory of my morning-glory house has already faded, settling to the soft color of a chambray workshirt, a disappointment to the curious searching for the Barney purple of their imagination.

  Two years after the original request for permission, the wise urban planning director found the Solomonic solution: submit the colors the house had faded to since the original paint job, and, lo and behold, the faded colors were deemed “historically accurate.”

  My house is still the most intense house on the block, but it looks un poco triste to me now. Next time I’d like to try a rosa mexicano, a color historically documented in my neighborhood, and on the historic king’s row of showcase mansions.

  Destiny works in strange ways.

  When I imagine la Divina Providencia, I think of una indígena weaving bare-breasted in the comfort of her courtyard, a backstrap loom tied to a tree. She is sitting on the ground upon a woven petate, carefully separating the threads from their groups, distributing them evenly with the aid of a maguey spine, threads pulled into a tight V with her big toe. Or she is seated on a low stool, legs shamelessly akimbo, cotton skirt gathered and tucked under her crotch. Yes, this is how I like to think of her.

  La Divina Providencia is mapping the motion of our lives like moon
and sun across the thirteen layers of sky and nine of night, weaving a design larger than our lives, too intricate for the eye to follow, but every thread woven with clarity, purpose, and pattern.

  Credit 20.2

  My house in 2014, renamed Casa Rosa

  Tenemos Layaway, or, How I Became an Art Collector

  Franco Mondini-Ruiz was on the board of the Blue Star Arts Space in San Antonio. Then as now, he could never get his fellow artists to understand issues of race and class. So in an effort to get a dialogue going, Franco convinced me to speak at a show he curated at the Blue Star called The Purple House, an installation of some of my art pieces and the objects surrounding them. This was after the Purple House brouhaha as described in the previous chapter. During that time, strangers would knock on my door and ask to come inside. Sigh, I padlocked the front gate forever after.

  I think it’s important to add that I wrote this during a period I felt most at home in San Antonio after several years of feeling like a carpetbagger, when I’d finally found my spiritual family and my home still made me feel private, secure, and safe. (But not for long.)

  This story was performed in November of 1998 at the Blue Star with pieces of creative writing interspersed to make my point, though I include only one poem here. I also had an opera singer friend sing “Júrame” at an appropriate moment, and I wish we could reproduce that here, but you can Google the song for yourself and get the vibe.

  A house for me has been a lifelong dream. Owning one, having one, retreating to a space one can call one’s own, where a radio or TV isn’t blaring, and someone isn’t knocking on the other side of a door saying, “Come on out of there!” A house for me is a space to decide whether I want to be sad and not turn on the lights, to sleep until noon or beyond, read a book propped up by fringed pillows, shut off the ringer of the phone, wear my pajamas all day, and not venture farther than the backyard fence if I feel like it. A house is the right to leave my hair uncombed, walk around barefoot, be rude. I don’t want to quedar bien, that terrible syndrome of las mujeres. I like the civility of incivility. If someone rings the doorbell, does that mean I have to answer it? If someone says hello, do I have to grin like a geisha? I like the military chin-flick of the men. I see you, you see me. A house for me is this freedom to be. To go back to bed after breakfast. Peruse mail order catalogs while in the tub. Eat pancakes for dinner. Study The New York Times while ironing. A house is about the safety and privacy of doing what others might think odd, or eccentric, or wrong, and as I live alone and there is no one to tell me “You can’t do that!” it’s the richest indulgence I know next to writing.

  We don’t have a model for what it means to be a Latina and a woman of letters, except for the genius nun Juana Inés de la Cruz, and even she was forced by the Church to stop writing. No thank you. Joining a nunnery is a high price to pay for being allowed a room of one’s own. We don’t have a blueprint for how to tell la familia we can’t come to Sunday dinner because we’re working on a novel, and no, we don’t want to attend the nephew’s birthday party. ¿Cómo? ¿Cómo que no vas a ir? Moving far away from my family was my way of creating the space I needed to create. But now the fame of the house has brought the public to my door. My friend the painter Terry Ybáñez painted a beautiful sign for me that reads “Please Do Not Ring the Bell Unless You Have an Appointment. Peace, Respect, Compassion, Wisdom,” and it’s a lucky thing. I was about to post this poem I wrote on the front gate:

  IT OCCURS TO ME I AM THE CREATIVE/DESTRUCTIVE GODDESS COATLICUE

  I deserve stones.

  Better leave me the hell alone.

  I am besieged.

  I cannot feed you.

  You may not souvenir my bones,

  knock on my door, camp, come in,

  telephone, take my Polaroid. I’m paranoid,

  I tell you. Lárguense. Scram.

  Go home.

  I am anomaly. Rare she who

  can’t stand kids and can’t stand you.

  No excellent Cordelia cordiality have I.

  No coffee served in tidy cups.

  No groceries in the house.

  I sleep to excess,

  smoke cigars,

  drink. Am at my best

  wandering undressed,

  my fingernails dirty,

  my hair a mess.

  Terribly

  sorry, Madame isn’t

  feeling well today.

  Must

  Greta Garbo.

  Pull an Emily D.

  Roil like Jean Rhys.

  Abiquiu myself.

  Throw a Maria Callas.

  Shut myself like a shoe.

  Stand back. Christ

  almighty. I’m warning.

  Do not. Keep

  out. Beware.

  Help! Honey,

  this means

  you.

  We all need a place to be. To cry without someone asking, “What’s wrong?” To laugh without explaining why. To scratch our butt without saying, “Oh, pardon me.” We need a house to fly. To hear the heart speak. To listen in earnest and then, talk back.

  When I’m at home writing, the house is absolutely silent, sometimes only partially lit, as if I wished to reduce the world to the printed page, and in a sense, I do. Sometimes my house is lonely, but mostly I enjoy the aloneness. Aloneness is a luxury, like grief. Something society tries to kill. “Don’t be sad.” “Why is this door locked? What are you doing in there!” For a writer, both loneliness and grief serve their purpose of allowing one the heart dia logues. Quoting the poet Gwendolyn Brooks: “I like being alone, but I don’t like being lonely.” A hazard of the trade. I have come to understand even loneliness can be whittled into something useful. A poem. A paragraph. A page if I’m lucky.

  A house for me is about permanence against the impermanence of the universe. Someplace to store all the things I love to collect. Rebozos, shoes, hats, gloves, a wardrobe that resembles a female impersonator’s. Someplace to centralize all the books and storage-unit boxes from the ten years when I meandered like a cloud. A place to hold the art treasures I’ve purchased from the many artist friends I know.

  When my father was dying, I needed to return to the stillness of my own home and look at my walls the way the thirsty return to water. There was such a pain in my belly that I couldn’t make sense of the world until I came home and just stared at the walls. The mango against the pink, the green against the yellow, a vase of magenta carnations beside an ocher painting, a wood sculpture against an Ave Maria blue. The art soothed me, comforted me, was a way of seeing the world in an orderly, calm way amid the chaos and cruel noise of those days.

  I think this is why artists live the way they do. Arranging and rearranging the little objects of every day until there is a beauty that heals. That’s why I like visiting the houses of my artist friends. I walk around and admire a stone, a photo next to a doll, a bowl of feathers and shells, with the awe of one visiting a church. This is true of the San Antonio artists I know, Anne Wallace and her lovely austerity with wood and unpainted furnishings, the colors and cloth of the home of Rolando Briseño and Angel Rodríguez Díaz, the passion and surprising juxtaposition of the tiny still lifes of toys and saints and salt shakers on the shelves and windowsills of the house of Terry Ybáñez. Because it matters a great deal if when you look up you see something that pleases the eye and delights the heart, even if that something is only a teapot next to a sugar bowl. My house is an homage to this sensitivity and respect for things of the spirit.

  Credit 21.1

  Altar para los hombres, by Terry Ybáñez

  When I was in elementary school, we were required to attend daily Mass before class each morning. It was a ritual that bored me beyond belief. But what saved me from fainting was the building, a modern 1960s creation with a wall filled with triangles of stained glass from top to bottom, each one different from the next. While the miracle of the Mass was going on, I couldn’t take my eyes off that other miracle, a certain triang
le of stained glass that made me shiver, a blue swirling into pink, like the tip of a cloud when the sun is setting. Sky blue pirouetting into a tender pink. It swirled inside my heart and made me happy in a way I couldn’t understand then or explain. I didn’t know it, but that blue next to pink was as holy as what was supposed to be going on at the altar. How come nobody told me an aria, a piece of stained glass, a painting, a sunset can be God too?

  “Wait till you get your house,” said my friend Liesel, who once worked in the German film industry. Her Greek house of the thirteen terraces is a kind of film set, high on a hill on a Greek island with a dramatic view of the Aegean. The Greeks think she’s so German about everything, muttering about the garbage the wind blows onto her property, picking up everything the sky tosses onto her thirteen terraces, even an olive. “They stain the whitewash. You think I’m crazy. Just you wait till you get your house, it will become your lover.”

  She was right. My house has become the beloved. When I drive away on a trip, I look over my shoulder and am filled with regret. When I return, my heart leaps when she’s in sight. Any nick on her walls, or split in her floorboards, or curled paint causes me to cringe. Adorning her is my pleasure. Furniture like a Carlota empress. Paintings like a Versailles. Unlike some people who buy a painting to match a couch, I upholster the furniture to match the paintings, in the jewel tones of ball gowns—royal blue, lemon yellow, emerald green. Like the sumptuous silks and grandiose skies of Angel Rodríguez Díaz’s paintings. Whatever my odalisque desires, nothing is too grand for her.

  What color to paint the exterior of such a beauty? Beige? White? Evergreen? Pleeeease! I consider a Mexican pink, a Greek cobalt, am tempted by a joyous Caribbean papaya, a ’40s seafoam green, but decide finally on a soothing periwinkle inspired by a photo of a house in India. Periwinkle is a pretty color. I’d seen periwinkle houses in Mexico, only there they called it jacaranda, after a tree that bursts into flower like a blue gas flame.