I thought of this as he read his poems in that strange, lyrical voice that is only his, bright and buoyant as any poet in the world.
Applause and the reception awaiting Salinas the poet. Salinas slipping back into the other, the less eloquent, the shy one. But before we step out into the lobby and the many visitors anxious to speak to the poet, Salinas the man draws me aside next to the thick velvet curtains and confesses, beaming, “You know, this is a big deal for me.”
And you could tell, it was.
Falling in Love with Enamoramiento
Credit 4.1
The San Antonio Museum of Art invited me to be part of a visitor’s guide that would highlight favorite works in their collection. This was back in 2006. I don’t know what became of that project; I never saw my words in print. Maybe they thought what I wrote too scandalous. I never asked. I was just glad to have thrown a few rose petals at an artist whose work I’ve long admired, the sculptor José Luis Rivera-Barrera, a San Antonian originally from Kingsville, Texas. Although he worked in various materials, Rivera preferred working with wood, especially native mesquite.
When I first came to San Antonio in 1984, I remember being invited to José’s show at a gallery on Broadway about three or four miles from my garage apartment. It was a special feat for me to attend back then, because I had to take a bus, and it was Sunday, a day when they arrived only once an hour. Coming from Chicago, I had no idea it would’ve been faster if I’d walked. After what felt like a long, long trek, I was rewarded by the splendor of José’s work. I admired a giant cockroach out of Kafka, which the painter César Martínez would trade for later and display in his home for many years until he was foolish enough to sell it. I wanted more than anything to take home a torso of a pregnant woman whose belly begged to be rubbed. The sculptures seemed as alive as when they were trees fighting against the Texas heat to survive. I couldn’t afford to buy José Luis Rivera-Barrera’s work back then, and possibly can’t now either, but to this master craftsman, in gratitude for inspiration and excellence, I bow.
They’re nudes of a man and woman leaping to meet each other in a kiss. José Luis Rivera-Barrera carved them from a single block of mesquite, and it’s my favorite art piece in all the San Antonio Museum of Art. It’s called Enamoramiento— falling in love.
I wait till the guard wanders away, then crawl beneath the torso of the mesquite man. My friend Dr. Ellen Riojas Clark told me to do this. I don’t know why, and I don’t know why I do it.
“It’s anatomically correct,” a male voice says.
I turn my head and see a pair of polished black shoes, climb out sheepishly, and show the guard my authorization papers.
“The museum invited me to write about this piece,” I say, but the guard just smirks and walks away.
How do I explain? I came to admire at all angles a sculpture that speaks of the sacred, not of the mundane. Of that moment when two beings kiss and are infinite.
It’s as if the sculptor José made this with his eyes closed from the memory of the body of his beloved, from the memory of that native land, his own body. It’s as if he is remembering the force of love.
It’s a sculpture that draws us to it and draws us away, the way one might feel both fascinated and embarrassed to intrude on such a private moment. The dimples and hollows, las tetas with their wide Mexican areolas, the mexi/indio feet, square and fat as tamales. Tanto amor. The hollow of the belly button, el hueco del ombligo of the tree, so full of magic you want to leave your prayers here.
Something of the power and holiness of the mesquite is present still. The wood remembers the hardscrabble seasons struggling for life. A dynamic thrust, a thirst, a need, a push against all odds.
I know the artist only to say hello. But when I look at this work, I see in that tree, hoarded like rain, all the love a man could feel for a woman in one brief life.
Marguerite Duras
Credit 5.1
I remember the face of the young girl on the cover of Duras’s The Lover, and I remember liking that girl with Greta Garbo eyebrows. I didn’t know then it was the author in her youth. I was in the Librería Gandhi in Chimalistac, Elena Poniatowska’s neighborhood in Mexico City, before an appointment with Elena. To be more exact, it was Norma Alarcón who had an appointment with Elena; I was tagging along. So this was when I first met the great Elena and this was also when I first met Marguerite. I would later read Duras’s other books that retell the same story as in The Lover, books written before and after. And like Christopher Isherwood’s Christopher and His Kind, it would aim to tell again a story from youth, but with revisions, as if with age we come closer to the bull’s-eye of being admitted the truth. The science writer Jonah Lehrer claims we never revisit a memory without altering it. If this is true, then perhaps all memory is a chance at storytelling, and every story brings us closer to revealing ourselves to ourselves. I promise to revisit what goes unsaid here in my next collection. The critic and Washington Post Book World editor Marie Arana prompted my writing this for a February 2005 publication. I felt like I’d been waiting forever to tell this story; it leapt like a dolphin from my heart to the page.
I was thirty the summer I met Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. This was in Mexico City, 1985. I was supposed to be finishing my book of poetry. The truth, I was fleeing the man who had created and then destroyed me. In a few months Mexico City would be destroyed too, by earthquake. In a few years, Emiliano Zapata* would rise from the dead in Chiapas. But this was before. Without knowing what lay ahead I boarded a bus south to San Cristóbal and disappeared into the fury of jungle and fury of story that is Duras’s novel.
The story begins in a second-class bus just like the one I was riding that day, but in colonial French Vietnam. A young girl crosses a river, and then crosses color and class lines in love. I’d done much the same in my disastrous affair.
I read through several landscapes, and finally on the perilous mountain road beyond Tuxtla Gutiérrez I found myself at the book’s finale, when the lover, unlike my lover, declares his love for her. After all and everything. After their lives were almost over. He still loved her, he would always love her, he said.
Then it was as if I’d been poured back into the shell of my body. And I became aware of the heat of the bus seat sticking to my back and thighs, and the hoarse grinding of the bus gears as it lurched us forward, and the snoring of my bus companions, and the drowsy jungle scent.
To say I was overwhelmed at that moment wouldn’t be precise. At that moment with events quivering before and after me, and me in that nowhere and everywhere called my life, I was, as one would say in Spanish, “emotioned.” I had read the novel in Spanish, the language of my lover, the language of my father. And now the last sentence, in Spanish, reverberated inside me like a live thing. I wanted to slide the dusty bus windows down and shout in that language to all the savage beauty of the world—“He said he would love her until death, did you hear? ¡Hasta la muerte!”
* * *
* On New Year’s Eve, 1993, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, the Mayan Indians rose up under the name of Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata in defense of their land and rights.
Huipiles
When the San Antonio Smithsonian Museum in 2007 proposed featuring local collections of huipiles, indigenous tunics, I was invited to participate as well as write something for the catalog. It allowed me to think about a trip I took to Chiapas to finish my first collection of poetry. Any trip south to Mexico always brought me great surges of creativity. I thought I was going to rent a house and work alone while there, but instead my time in San Cristóbal was filled with anxiety and sadness.
Norma Alarcón and I were in a local tourist coffeehouse when we ran into a young Japanese tourist we’d recently met. She had a scratch on her face, but I didn’t think much of it until she told us her story. She said she had been visiting a church in the middle of the afternoon, and a man had raped her there. And just now in the crowded plaza, she had seen
her attacker again, but by the time she found a policeman, he was long gone. This is what had happened, and this is what she told us under the shade of a lamp over a coffeehouse table.
Her testimony filled me with dread. I can’t remove that anguish from my memory of San Cristóbal. It flooded me with a thread of despair I felt while there and which I still feel almost thirty years later, as if it had just happened. As if she were still telling and telling her story.
I started wearing huipiles the summer before the big earthquake hit Mexico City. 1985. I was traveling with Norma Alarcón, first to the Mexican capital, then on a bus ride to Oaxaca, and finally to Chiapas on mountain roads so reckless and wicked, they made you instantly devout.
Before this trip, I don’t think I’d ever traveled to Mexico without my familia. Usually I was accompanied by my mother and my father, even as an adult. This isn’t as strange as it sounds. Mexicans are clannish and accustomed to traveling with family until the day they die.
To tell you the truth, I’ve always been terrified of traveling alone in Mexico the way only pochas (American mexicanas) can be terrified. Not because we know too little about this country we are visiting, but because as Mexicans from the U.S. side, we know too much. But that’s another story.
Credit 6.1
One of my first huipiles
Norma was researching the feminist writer Rosario Castellanos, who was from Chiapas, and that was why we traveled so far south, almost to the Guatemalan border. Me, I had a small grant from the Illinois Arts Council and a book to finish. There was money in my jeans pockets, purpose in my heart, and my buddy Norma to travel with.
I was homesick for a house of my own. I’d rented one in Greece a few years before, and that was where I’d finished my first book. Now I had to finish a book of poetry, and Norma’s press, Third Woman, was impatient to publish it. So it was with this idea of renting a house and borrowing a typewriter that I tagged along with her.
But Chiapas isn’t Greece. It’s mountain cold and damp, even in the summer, and one of the poorest regions of Mexico. We entered not only another country, but another time. Founded in 1528, well before Plymouth Rock, San Cristóbal de las Casas is a town of stout churches, cobbled streets, and markets filled with the most humble members of humanity—the barefooted, the cross-eyed, the harelipped: citizens from another century.
When we got there the summer of 1985, I didn’t know about the community lands stolen in the previous centuries, nor that the people would rise up soon to reclaim those lands under Subcomandante Marcos. Or about the villages flooded after dams were built to power Mexico City. Or the destruction of the rain forest.
I only knew darkness imposed a curfew. That everyone watched the latest episode of a telenovela from the few televisions available at cafés or shops. That the town was divided among the Ladinos (the non-Indian Mexicans, or Indians who had forgotten their traditional dress and language and spoke only Spanish), the tourists, and the Mayan people themselves, who were at the bottom of the social ladder (Chontales, Tzotziles, Tzeltales, Tojolabales, Mames, and Lacandones). And that, except for a small portion of midday, the weather was foggy and cold.
After a lot of asking, I did find a house for rent, a stone cottage with thick walls and windows shuttered with wood, instead of glass, that opened to a misty garden. It was charming to my eyes, but Norma asked, “How are you going to heat this place?” In Chiapas, homes are heated with wood, and their inhabitants smell of leña, fire and smoke. I lost courage and returned to my cell at the zócalo, a hotel with doors like a medieval prison and the austerity of a nunnery with none of the charm.
Back then I wore my hair short like a boy. I dressed in the same clothes I’d worn in Europe—a denim jacket and jeans, or a denim mini; a long Greek scarf wrapped twice around my neck and knotted at the throat; and, because of the cold, a beret. It was on this trip, deep in Mexico, deep in Mayan country, that I realized I was una gringa.
In the village of Chamula I visited a Mayan Catholic church smoky with copal, the earthen floor carpeted with pine needles. Women wrapped in dark shawls swayed on their knees, kids huddled quietly beside them. The devout offered eggs and bottles of Coca-Cola, and lit thin tapers, the air buzzing with their murmured prayers. Community guards watched over us to make sure we didn’t take pictures. This was a church that seemed more pagan than Christian, without pews or kneelers, with statues of saints dressed in miniature huipiles, the tunics native women have worn since before Columbus, layers and layers, one atop the other, and each wearing over all this a necklace of mirrors.
To make myself less conspicuous, less an intruder, and to be more respectful, I pulled my Greek scarf over my head and knelt too. Something holy was shimmering in the smoky air. Of this I was sure. It was one of the most sacred places I’ve ever visited, then or since.
I typed my poetry manuscript on the only typewriter-for-hire I could find—at the typing school, a storefront like any other local business with a corrugated metal curtain for a door and nothing separating the outdoors from the indoors but a high stone step. Dogs and flies wandered in freely. Lechers and enamorados lingered past and made ojitos. All the world was welcome to watch the jovencitas, girls practically, type-type-typing to earn a certificate, a ticket out of their miseria.
I typed, too. In my jean jacket and mini. I typed love poems, poems about being dumped, poems about sex and passion. If anyone knew what I was writing, I thought, they would drag me to the authorities, put me in stocks, and stone me to death. I sniffed, wiped away my tears with my Greek scarf, and typed my dirty poems among the chaste virgins, wondering under the bare lightbulbs how Destiny had brought me here to a town called San Cristóbal de las Casas, to a room noisy with typewriters, full of women, all of us young, dreaming our foolish escape.
This was when I first started buying huipiles, my first from the women’s collective of Mayan weavers, who created work of fine craftsmanship, not the cheesy stuff for sale on the U.S.-Mexico border.
I still own this first huipil, a simple cotton tunic with multicolored weavings on the neckline and red bands along the center, as beautiful as the day I bought it. Its price was the equivalent of forty U.S. dollars, and I waited a day before buying it. Forty dollars was a big bite from my arts council grant.
While in San Cristóbal, I met a Mayan woman whose name I never knew, but in my notes I called her Madame Butterfly. She sold butterflies in front of the one café where all the tourists hung out. She and her children caught the butterflies I sent home to my brother Lolo.
She was dressed in the traditional Tzotzil huipil, a heavy blouse embroidered with red, yellow, and black wool, over a wraparound skirt of indigo. And though I was wearing woolen socks and thick shoes, she was barefoot, her feet caked with mud.
Up on the mountain is where she said she lived. She pointed behind a gauzy cloud. “Up there,” she said, the fog already descending for the night. She said she had to walk and walk, tugging her little ones who were standing before me, and lugging on her back the sleeping baby.
She said they often left home in the dark and often got home in the dark. She told me all these things, and I felt sad I couldn’t invite her inside to have dinner. They wouldn’t have served her. So I bought all her butterflies, stiff and fragile as dried flowers, even the mangled ones with broken wings.
Then I found the used huipiles in shops all along the typing school street. As the daughter of an upholsterer, I know how to look at the seams and at the reverse to measure quality. By pulling the garments inside out, I could read their history.
Here was a little patch of polka-dot fabric; here a collar of embroidered flowers salvaged from some older garment; here the neckhole so narrow, I wondered how a woman ever managed to pull it over her head.
Some were finely woven with birds and flowers and animals in tight, perfect stitches. Some stitches did not look handmade, but, as the Mexicans like to say when a job is badly done, as if she had made it with her feet; no doubt a young girl in a
hurry to be doing something else. Some still gave off a scent of leña. Who wore this, and why did she have to give it up? How much was she paid? And where was she now? Would a woman give up her most prized possessions unless she was desperate?
Did she have to work like Madame Butterfly because of a husband who left her with little ones? Did the civil wars of Central America force her to sell her clothes? Where did a woman like this pee when she had to relieve herself in the city? Who looked after her and her kids when she was sick? I thought all these things as I bought my first huipiles, guilty that I could afford a dozen, even with my small arts grant, and sad and sorry for the women who had to let them go.
When I got back to the hotel and showed Norma my splendors, she asked gruffly, “What are you going to do with all those?”
“I thought I could wear them,” I said without conviction. “Or maybe hang them on the walls.”
Once I got back I did hang some on walls. Then, poco a poco, little by little, I started to take them down and wear them. Only in the United States at first. Not in Mexico. Because I didn’t wish to appear disrespectful to the women who made them.
Since that trip, I’ve added to my textile collection over time, and included items from across Mexico. I’ve met other women who collect and wear these “poor women’s clothes,” because that’s what they are, clothes of the most humble segment of society.
I know it astonishes my Mexico City relatives that I dress like their servants, indígenas who come in from their villages and who wear their Indian clothes at first until they’re shamed into dressing like city folk. But on the U.S. side of the border, we take up these garments without the class and cultural restrictions of Mexico. I like to mix the Mexican garments in nontraditional ways, maybe a Tehuana huipil with a Tahitian sarong, or a Oaxacan skirt with a man’s Chiapaneco vest, to create something new, something no one in Mexico would do.*1