She can’t know that John and she will have nothing to say to each other in a few years. They have little in common. That even though she will seek out the divorce in Los Angeles, by then John will have outgrown his love with the girl saint. Saints don’t make good housewives.
It’s when she’s expecting her child in New York that she hears her father is ill, and finally that he has died. Teresita with life in her belly and with a contract that is keeping her in New York, what is she thinking now?
How is it that Teresita finally becomes aware of the duplicity of her employers and hires a lawyer to cancel her contract with the medical company? She’s exhausted. She wants to go home. And she does go home, with her two girls, but not with their father. She has given up being a saint.
With her savings from her touring she’s able to open a small hospital in Clifton, and here she lives until she contracts tuberculosis in her thirty-third year and dies. During Teresita’s short but extraordinary life, doors opened for her wherever she went even though she was Mexican. She never forgot her indigenous roots and always allied herself with the poor even in the United States. While living in Los Angeles it’s said she supported the Mexicans organizing a union. She was a bridge between communities in conflict, and this in a time when Mexicans were even more oppressed than now.
Teresita Urrea was not a writer, so we don’t know how she felt about the things that happened to her. We have accounts by witnesses. We have newspaper interviews, but these were translations of her words. We don’t have her words directly, we have to trust those who put words in her mouth. And it seems as if everyone has put their own thoughts, their own politics, their own spin on how they see her, including this writer.
But perhaps that’s the mystery and power of Teresita Urrea, a woman from both sides of the border. Activists, revolutionaries, historians, writers, indigenous communities, kin, friends, and enemies alike have used her to carry their own words, their own stories across borders. Over a century after her death, she continues to live as an immortal, because those remembered in stories never die.
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING
Teresita, by William Curry Holden
Ringside Seats to a Revolution, by David Dorado Romo
Hummingbird’s Daughter and Queen of America, both by Luis Alberto Urrea
Chavela Vargas: Una Mujer Muy Mujer
I was walking along the beach in Miami when the call came: Did I want to write a tribute to Chavela Vargas for The New York Times? I said I’d finish my walk and decide. My first response was “I can’t do this,” not because I wasn’t capable, but because I didn’t feel I was the best person for the job. But the more I walked I realized if I refused, The New York Times would ask the Latino writer du jour, who most probably was a man. This motivated me to call back and accept the assignment. I meant to write about Chavela the woman of self-myth, not Chavela the scandalous. But the space I had was limited, and finally, with all the cuts and edits, my homenaje was reduced to puro chisme, pure gossip. ¡Ay, Chavelita, perdóname!
The article appeared in The New York Times Magazine’s “The Lives They Lived” issue on December 28, 2012.
Once, when Mexico was the belly button of the universe, Isabel Vargas Lizano ran away from Costa Rica and resolved to make herself into a Mexican singer. This was in the 1930s, when Europe was on fire, the United States out of work, and Mexico busy giving birth to herself after a revolution.
At fourteen, Isabel was busy birthing herself too. Cast off from her Costa Rican kin for being too “strange,” she would become Mexico’s beloved Chavela Vargas.
It was the country’s golden era. Visitors came from across the globe. Sergei Eisenstein, Luis Buñuel, Leonora Carrington. Mexico was a knockout, and everyone was crazy about her.
At first, Vargas made her living doing odd jobs: cooking, selling children’s clothes, chauffeuring an elderly lady. She was adopted by artists and musicians and sang at their parties and favorite bars. When she was not yet twenty-five, she was invited to the Blue House of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in Coyoacán. “Who’s that girl, the one in the white shirt?” Kahlo asked. Kahlo summoned her over, and Vargas sat at her side the rest of the night. Because Vargas lived all the way up in the Condesa neighborhood, Rivera and Kahlo offered her lodging for the night. Rivera suggested she take to bed some of their xoloitzcuintlis, their Mexican hairless dogs. “Sleep with them,” he told her. “They warm the bed and keep away rheumatism.” Vargas had found her spiritual family.
Eventually Vargas apprenticed with Mexico’s finest musicians: the composer Agustín Lara and Antonio Bribiesca and his weeping guitar. She fine-tuned her singing style listening to Toña la Negra and the Texas songbird Lydia Mendoza, among others. The songwriter José Alfredo Jiménez became her maestro with his songs that “expressed…the common pain of all who love,” Vargas said. “And when I came out onstage they were mine, because I added my own pain too.”
With just a guitar and her voice, Vargas performed in a red poncho and pants at a time when Mexican women didn’t wear pants. She sang with arms open wide like a priest celebrating Mass, modeling her singing on the women of the Mexican Revolution. “A mexicana is a very strong woman,” Vargas said. “Starting with la Adelita, la Valentina—mujeres muy mujeres.” Chavela Vargas belonged to this category of women-very-much-women.
Even when Vargas was young and her voice still as transparent as mescal, she danced with her lyrics tacuachito style, cheek to cheek, pounded them on the bar, made them jump like dice, spat and hissed and purred like the woman jaguar she claimed to be, and finished with a volley that entered the heart like a round of bullets from the pistol she stashed in her belt.
“She was chile verde,” Elena Poniatowska, the Mexican writer, recalls when I ask. “Chavela was a tortillera and flaunted it at a time when others hid their sexuality. She lived and sang a lo macho. Chavela sang love songs written for men without changing the pronouns.
“Her big hit was ‘Macorina,’ ” Poniatowska went on. “ ‘Put your hand here, Macorina,’ she sang with her hand like a great big seashell over her sex, long before Madonna.”
In her autobiography, Y si quieres saber de mi pasado, Vargas writes, “I always began with ‘Macorina.’…And lots of times I finished with that song. So that folks would go home to their beds calientitos, nice and horny.”
Because she immortalized popular rancheras, Vargas is often labeled a country singer. But she kidnapped romantic boleros and made them hers too. Her songs appealed to drinkers of pulque as well as champagne.
The critic Tomás Ybarra-Frausto remembers the Vargas of the early ’60s. “I used to see her at La Cueva de Amparo Montes, a club frequented by the underground in downtown Mexico City. She dressed in black leather and would roar over on a motorcycle with a blond gringa on her back.”
Someone else told this story. In a Mexico City club, Vargas serenaded a couple. Then she slipped off the man’s tie, lassoed it around his woman’s neck, gave it a passionate yank, and kissed her.
She had a reputation as a robaesposas. Did she really run off with everyone’s wife? A European queen? Ava Gardner? Frida? What was true, and what was mitote? You only have to look at Vargas’s photos when she was young to know some of the talk was true.
In the town of Monclova, Coahuila, go ask the elders. They’ll tell you: Chavela came to town and sang. And then ran off with the doctor’s daughter. People still remember.
Judy Garland, Grace Kelly, Bette Davis, Elizabeth Taylor…She was invited to their parties, danced with the wives of powerful políticos, claimed to have shared un amor with “the most famous woman in the world,” but would not say more.
And then, somewhere in her sixties, Vargas disappeared. Some thought she had died, and in a way, she had.
“Sometimes I don’t have any other alternative but to joke about my alcoholism as if it was just a one-night parranda,” she said. “It was no joke…Those who lived it with me know it.”
Before Pedro
Almodóvar and Salma Hayek featured her in their films, there were friends who helped Vargas walk through fire and be reborn. Performers Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe invited Chavela to make her 1991 comeback in their Mexico City theater, El Hábito.
“There were only a few minutes left before her entrance, and the place was packed,” Rodríguez remembers. “All the hipsters of that era were waiting. No one could believe Chavela was returning to sing.
“She was nervous. Well, she’d never appeared onstage without drinking. When we gave her the second call, she panicked and asked for a tequila. Liliana and I looked at one another, and then Liliana said, ‘Chavela, if you drink, it’s better if we just cancel the show.’ ‘But how?’ said Chavela. ‘There’s a full house.’ ‘Well, it doesn’t matter,’ we said. ‘We’ll just give everyone their money back, and that’ll be that.’
“Chavela looked serious for a few moments, then she took a deep breath and said, ‘Let’s go!’ We gave the third call, she climbed up on the stage, stood there like an ancient tree, and sang for…years, without stopping, without drinking.”
Her voice had become another voice. Ravaged but beautiful in a dark way, like glass charred into obsidian.
Vargas’s specialty was el amor y el desamor, love and love lost, songs of loneliness and goodbyes in a voice as ethereal as the white smoke from copal, but as powerful as the Pacific. Songs that sucked you in, threatened to drown you; then, when you least expected it, pulled down your pants and slapped you on the ass. Audiences broke out into spontaneous gritos, that Mexican yodel barked from the belly and a lifetime of grief.
Every nation has a singer who captures its soul. Mexican parties always end with everyone crying, the journalist Alma Guillermoprieto once noted. Vargas satisfied a national urge to weep. She embodied Mexico, that open wound unhealed since the conquest and, a century after a useless revolution, in need of tears now more than ever.
This summer 2012, at the age of ninety-three, Vargas returned to Mexico from Spain. She was sick. On August 5th, Death came at last and ran off with her.
Chocolate and Donuts
When I’ve told a story aloud more than once, then it’s time to capture it in print. I began this story on paper in April of 2013 and read the first two pages to Franco over the phone, but not the finished version a year later. I hope he doesn’t get angry with me for going past the veneer of his house and examining it in a light he might not find flattering. I was trying to examine myself, and, as always, houses help me do that.
Even in dreams I conjure up houses, some from my past, some in invented neighborhoods I return to again and again during a dream series. In the houses of my past I go back to live at an old address with my parents, who in the dream are still alive, and with my brothers as single adults.
Or I dream I’ve forgotten to feed the animals I keep as pets, goldfish, or once even penguins, and in the dream someone warns me, “Don’t forget to feed your penguins!” Then the panic, because I didn’t even know I had penguins. An overwhelming dread and urge to get home, wondering what I’ll find when I get there.
Often I dream I’m living in a hotel lobby, or in a room without doors, or I unlock my hotel room only to find it filled with writers seated in a workshop circle or with guests sleeping in my bed. Then I know the dream is telling me it’s time to retreat from society. When I feel safe and alone, but not lonely, I write my best.
We’d just breakfasted on dim sum, but hadn’t had enough helpings of talk. Franco suggested we go over to his house for cups of Mexican chocolate and donuts from The Original Donut Shop, a drive-through taco/donut shop on Fredericksburg Road. No one was hungry, but Franco’s home is a feast for the senses.
The house once belonged to Franco’s great-grandfather, a watch repairer, and later his grandfather, an elevator operator in San Antonio’s tallest downtown building, where Franco would work one day as a lawyer. Now their descendant was an international artist living like a Roman emperor in one of the city’s humblest neighborhoods—the West Side. Hard to believe this bungalow, four rooms without doors, had once been home to a family of nine.
Credit 39.1
Getting ready for the house’s close-up; I’m seated far right.
Now chandeliers illuminate the front porch, the garden, every room inside, including the studio next door and the aviary, enough to dub this house the West Side Versailles. Blue maguey and prickly pear sprout from massive mosaic garden planters. Plaster cherubs and Greek goddesses do war with Aztec gods and Cantinflas. A glass gallery with paintings big as doors.
Interior walls are lacquered black as Mexican Olinalá jewelry boxes to better showcase the art, antiques, pottery, sculptures, and pastry. Outside galvanized watering troughs with water lilies and koi fish serve as water garden. And about the grounds, turtles, stray cats, fancy chickens, white doves, and handsome gardeners strut about like the peacocks Franco also keeps. It’s a fusion of worlds, Old and New, of high and low art, of Roman middle class meets Tejano working class.
Franco grew up in Boerne, a small town now practically a San Antonio suburb. In his former life, when he was a high-paid lawyer, he lived in a minimalist glass house in San Antonio’s swankiest neighborhood. Now he finds living in the West Side romantic. Who am I to argue?
So it’s Franco’s idea to install a bed in the living room, the way my family did growing up. For him it’s aesthetics. For us it was necessity.
From the kitchen the sound of coffee cups clinking, Mexican chocolate being whisked with a wooden molinillo, the voices of my friends gossiping and laughing. I lie down on the living room bed, a chocolate faux-mink blanket spread over me. And it’s then it comes.
The fear I always live with, gone. A sense of remembered well-being. As if I’m no longer in my woman’s body and am pure spirit. A comfort and security surrounded by the overflow of lives and voices and shouting and footsteps of those I love, those who love me, that overcome all the dangers and terrors of the outside world.
Because I’ve lived alone for too long, I want to savor this. I’m floating among the sounds of the wooden churn whirling against the pot, the murmur of voices from the kitchen receding and then increasing now and again as sleep comes in like the tide and takes me.
In Turkish there’s a word for when you’re blessed and know you’re blessed: kanaat. I feel this now in Franco’s living room, lying on the narrow bed covered in fake mink. Once on a beach off the coast of Quintana Roo, I felt this same joy, as if I was connected to everything in the universe. A sense of belonging, unity, peace.
Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk! Someone pummels the front door like he means to bring it down with his fists. When I open it, standing on the porch is a carnival strongman in a Spurs T-shirt.
“Franco here?”
“I’ll get him. Want to come in?”
“Naw, I’ll wait.”
Franco attends to the door, and I climb back into bed and try to recapture that state of rapture before the door thumped me awake, but it’s hard to find nirvana with Franco and Hercules arguing on the front porch. I try to ignore them, but their voices grow louder.
“No, you didn’t,” Franco says. “No. You. Did. Not! Do you want me to call the police? Because if you don’t get off my porch, I’m calling 911, and you don’t want to go back to jail.”
The door slams.
“Who was that, Franco?”
“Just one of my ex-employees who stole from me. Don’t worry about it.”
“Franco, he was pretty mad! Aren’t you afraid he’ll come back with a gun?”
“Oh, I’m not scared. I have this really butch new assistant, Peppermint Patty. She can handle him.”
Franco goes back to pour the chocolate and lay out the donuts. A coward, I slink after him to the kitchen, the room farthest away from the front window, remembering how I spent the New Year’s Eves of my youth. My mother herding us into the basement before midnight to protect us from the passion of neighbors. A rock, a word, a bullet, a bomb. Overflow
from the Vesuvius called the heart.
Is home the place where you feel safe? What about those whose home isn’t safe? Are they homeless, or is home an ideal just out of reach, like heaven? Is home something you move toward instead of going back? Homesickness, then, would be a malaise not for a place left behind in memory, but one remembered in the future.
Immigrants and exiles know this art of mental acrobatics for a lost home. Their homesickness causes them to storytell until they’ve created an “imaginary homeland,” as Salman Rushdie named it, where sweets are sweeter than any reality.
Even the Chicago neighborhood of my youth, with its self-imposed curfew at dusk, drunks crashing their cars on our curb, abandoned vehicles set on fire in our alley, rats scurrying under Mother’s hibiscus bushes after garbage collection was cut from twice a week to once a week despite the fact that the neighborhood population doubled. But we were people of color and thus didn’t need our garbage collected twice a week like the white folks who, once gentrification occurred, had their garbage reverted to twice-a-week collection. That’s my Chicago! Even with all this, there was safety in numbers, among your own, a tribe who might not understand or know you. But you were theirs; you felt safe belonging. A feeling hard to re-create once you left home.
Now, under fake mink, I’m suffering from comezón; roughly translated, the heebie-jeebies. Along with familiarity comes the deluge of doubts. Life is as tenuous as the coat-hanger television antenna, the light fixture repaired with electrical tape and aluminum foil, the kitchen cabinets lacquered a Coca-Cola color to better ignore the amber-shelled nightlife.