When I met the photographer Mariana Yampolsky, I was looking for a way to be an artist and to love someone. Now at fifty-nine I feel quite content and whole just as I am. I love writing, I live alone—if one can call five dogs alone—and I am perfectly at ease as a pond of water. I desire nothing. Except a house. And, on a regular basis, a box of salted French caramels.
I need to mention that I began this piece well before Mariana’s death in 2002, but was prompted to resurrect and finish it on April 1, 2003, for a San Francisco exhibit in Mariana’s honor.
During the New Year of 1985, a snowstorm arrived in South Texas that fell so hard all of San Antonio shut down and pipes burst. I was away for the holidays and came back to the city and my apartment to find my books had been soaked with water. At that time I couldn’t afford bookshelves, and my books sat on the floor. To add grief to sorrow, I remember finding my finest treasure, a Mariana Yampolsky book, destroyed by the flood. It was La Casa Que Canta, the house that sings, its pages as wavy as if someone had cried a thousand tears upon them.
I spent the rest of the night ironing my books, the apartment steamy as a dry cleaners, as determined to save my treasures as any art historian saving Florence. It wasn’t the best restoration job, but it would have to do. La Casa Que Canta had been published in a limited edition and was already out of print.
I have often returned to that book, to draw inspiration, to remind myself what it is that captivates me about Mariana, about Mariana’s houses, about Mexican houses in particular. To Mariana, the more humble the house, the more splendid, something to be looked at with respect and awe. She documented the homes that would never be featured in the glossy pages of House & Garden. These were houses where floors were pounded silky by bare feet, architecture where everything had the unmistakable air of being made by hand, homes forgotten in the countryside and dusty towns, full of duende. The arabesque of a hinge. A door made of dried organ cacti. Deep-set windows like eyes. A porch with two flowered chairs snoozing in the half-sun. A kitchen wall splendid with enamel pots and dishes. A hammock, a hat, a crib hanging from a house beam. A tortilla toasting on a comal.
Mariana and Arjen, at my house
Several years later, I finally replaced that ripply La Casa Que Canta with a clean copy found in a rare bookstore in downtown Mexico City. By then I had acquired a house of my own finally, and, at long last, bookshelves.
Mariana Yampolsky and her husband, Arjen van de Sluis, came to San Antonio just at this point in my life. I immediately invited them to my house, seated them on my couch for a photo portrait, and admired them shamelessly. I entertained Mariana with the story of my original La Casa Que Canta and made her sign my new copy. She wrote—“¡tu casa es muy muy bonita! ¡tú eres bonita! ¡y lo que escribes más!”
Whenever Mariana spoke, Arjen looked at her with the sincere adoration of a man made foolish by love. For her part, Mariana treated him with the diffidence and annoyance of an only child or a pampered Pekingese.
The photo I took of them is somewhere, who knows where, but I remember it looked like this: two leaning into each other like houses slouched with time, and, like it or not, in love, after everything and always.
It occurred to me that this couple had the secret to what I was looking for. I asked how was it they had remained together so successfully for so many years when all my own loves had never lasted as long as my toaster. What was the secret of being an artist—I meant, of course, a woman artist—and keeping a man?
“Respect,” Arjen replied. “For what you each do.”
“Ah, is that it?”
“Yes,” he said, and I seem to remember Mariana nodding.
They rose to leave, and Mariana invited me to their house in Tlalpan, on the southern edge of Mexico City. “Soon,” I said, without knowing that the book I was writing would delay that “soon” to “nunca.”
“Hasta pronto,” Mariana said, which translates literally as “until soon,” but means “until later.”
“Goodbye,” we each said. “Goodbye, goodbye.” As lazily and luxuriously as if we were in control of our own destinies.
