Altar para los hombres, by Terry Ybáñez
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.
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 triangle 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.
A house decides its own name. Once I thought of baptizing my home “Rancho Ahí Te Wacho,” but no matter how hard I imagine it, she’s no rancho. Community and local scandal have dubbed her “the Purple House.” “The Purple House” is fine by me, though she’s more lavender than purple, a morning glory in the morning glory, a faded workshirt blue in the hard Texas midday light, a throbbing ultraviolet when day dissolves into dusk.
I think of the Purple House, and it makes me think of that other house, la Casa Azul, the Blue House of Frida and Diego. And though I admire Frida’s house, and Frida’s paintings, and Frida’s clothes and furniture and toys, though not Frida the martyr, the Blue House is too serious a comparison. My house is more Pee-wee’s Playhouse than Frida’s Blue House. I love the Playhouse’s craziness; say the secret word and everyone jumps up and down yelling—yayyy! I like its joy, its whimsy and inventiveness. I don’t realize how much it’s inspired me until after I take a good look at my house with its niches and cupboards peopled with plaster saints and clay putas, its shelves of Mexican toys, its sense of humor juxtaposing high and low art, its operatic over-the-top drama and tongue-in-cheek camp.
I say my style of home decorating is inspired by the intense still lifes of Terry Ybáñez, who in turn says she is inspired by my altars. Virgen de Guadalupes huddled with Buddhas. A pre-Columbian Coatlicue next to a Cantinflas toy. Mango walls next to a Veracruz pink.
“Let’s imagine a literary salon, in Mexico, in the thirties,” Franco Mondini-Ruiz says. “Let’s imagine this is the house of someone who was once rich during the Porfiriato, but lost it all in the revolution and has survived with only a few family heirlooms. Let’s imagine the living room of artist Chucho Reyes, the bedroom of Dolores del Río, the dining room chairs of Emiliano Zapata’s cuartel.” We laugh and have a good time inventing vignettes, arranging furniture to tell a story, reminding each other how the cluttered houses of our mothers both inspire and haunt us. “My mother saves everything!” “No, my mother saves everything; did I ever tell you about my mother and the thousand Cool Whip containers?”
Something of my mother and my father seeps into my way of seeing a house. My mother’s excellent thrift-store finds that she hid from my snobby Mexico City father. My father’s designer fabrics he brought home from his upholstery shop, elegant leftovers from his fancy North Shore clients. With these we redid our thrift-store furniture, we reinvented our lives, though sometimes there wasn’t enough fabric to go around. Father fixed it; covered the front in one fabric, the back in a coordinating other; he was ahead of his times.
You can tell I’ve been poor; I over-glamorize my body, my house. I take my house personally. I take my art collection personally, too. Overcompensation perhaps. I recognize it in some houses, in some people who are like me. A house for me is a space to reinvent oneself, like putting on a new dress.
Once there really was a nun who passed by the Chicago brownstone we lived in and couldn’t believe I lived in the ugly three-flat I was playing in front of. The place was a dump. A faded “Drink Fox Head Beer” advertisement was flaking off one side. You could tell the building had once been grand, grand enough to warrant renovation, but that would require so much money, and we lived in neighborhoods destined for the urban expansion of the University of Illinois. It made me realize forever after that people would mistake the landlord’s neglect for our own sense of self-worth, and would allow me to see, forever after, how even the poorest of houses, the most beat up and scruffy and fregadas, the ones families rent but don’t own, are sometimes the ones with the most pride. A tin of flowers in a lard can. A window full of cheerful Halloween decorations. A ton of Christmas lights even if the screen door is hanging like a broken jaw. “We may be poor, but you can bet we’re proud.”
I have lived such exaggerated pride. Been forced to mop stairwells with Pine-Sol, and can understand why the hole-in-the-wall taco joints also reek of Pine-Sol. “We may be poor, but you can bet at least we’re clean.”
Poverty has always had the stigma of dirtiness. That’s why I couldn’t wait to move into my own home, where the walls didn’t shimmer at night with the lacquered bodies of cockroaches, shadows didn’t scuttle along the floorboards. Imagine my surprise when I inherited cockroaches in my new house! And rats in the attic. Nobody told me. I didn’t know. I associated cockroaches and rats with poverty. Just goes to show the democracy of cucarachas y ratones. Isn’t the world amazing?
Across a table of sopa de conchitas at Torres Taco Haven, this question: “What is the Mexican American aesthetic?” A San Antonio architect is asking. He’s trying to translate the private Mexican housescape to the public building. What is the Mexican American aesthetic? I think and then respond: “More is more.”
My friend the late Danny López Lozano, once owner of Tienda Guadalupe, inspired an entire community of artists with this “more is more” aesthetic. Talk about style. More is more was not only Danny’s way of decorating, but his way of living, of someone who had grown up poor and had to reinvent himself in a high-glam way. But it wasn’t only about excess, it was about the juxtaposition of this excess. Like our mothers’ china cabinets that house both prize English teacups and a porcelain Dumbo the elephant. A house like a layer cake, like the nine excavations of Troy. All the things one had gotten and been given in a lifetime.
I sometimes am overwhelmed at how much I’ve collected, and only can see the clutter when I’ve gone on a trip and come back after a long absence. Immediately, I vow to not buy more, to start selling things or store them away. I pull back only to replace the things I’ve stored with more cositas. More is more. Más es más. “¡Qué bonito! Regálamelo.” Yours.
I did not plan to become an art collector. I have more art than I have walls. But how can one stop from acquiring happiness, especially when happiness is so within reach? In San Antonio art is very cheap, several times cheaper than a framed poster, especially if one has the eye, as Danny López Lozano did, for seeing art where most people don’t—a bouquet of aluminum foil roses, a grandmother’s antique rosary, a little aluminum airplane made out of a Bud Lite beer can.
Art exists in the houses of the very poor, in the essence of their sense of color and life in creating with what they have, in the tire flower planters, and the chipped San Martín de Porres statue blurred from the kisses of the devout. We don’t need to be a Rockefeller to see it. Or maybe we do need a Rockefeller, a mighty white man to hold it up, for all of us to wondrously look up from the dust of our lives and say, “¡Qué bonito! Regálamelo.” Yours.
For a long time I couldn’t afford to collect anything, not even unemployment. But in 1982 I won a fellowship, and with this I was able to travel. I lived in Provincetown for a summer working on The House on Mango Street. There were exhibits of art all summer in every shop, it seemed. One featured a series of striking woodcuts. I kept looking and looking at them. They reminded me of something familiar. The artist’s biographical note stated she had studied with the Mexican artists, and here is where I found that point of connection. I was especially moved by a print called Woman in the Moon. It was seventy-five dollars. Seventy-five dollars! I had seventy-five dollars. “Should I buy it?” I remember asking my roommate and best buddy Dennis Mathis. “Buy it,” Dennis said. It was my first art purchase, and I still love that Woman in the Moon as much as I did the first time I saw her, and as she is small, she has traveled with me to most of the cities I’ve lived in.
Woman in the Moon, woodcut by Tina Dickey
Not all my purchases have been good matches. I once went to a gallery here in San Antonio with a poet friend. She talked me into buying something I later gave away. I’ve since learned to trust my own instincts when it comes to love, whether it’s a painting or a person. You can’t fall in love because someone tells you to. If you love to look at something, and it keeps drawing you back, then follow that hunch. That’s how it was when Terry Ybáñez sold me her first still life. She wasn’t trying to sell it; I remember asking how much she was intending to ask for it. She thought for a little while, her paintbrush held in midair, and then said, “Two hundred and fifty,” not realizing I was making mental calculations. “Two hundred and fifty! Do you have layaway?” Lucky for me, she did.
I’ve since met many artists, most of them are my friends, and all of them have layaway. Sometimes they have trouble paying the rent, and I buy a piece of art before they even make it. Sometimes buying a piece of art is preferable to lending them money, because if you lend them money, you may never see it again. But a piece of art is something wonderful that they can give you in exchange for helping them out. A lot of times this has been how I’ve been able to share some of my success. I win an award and I spend it here locally with local artists, and this enables them to continue living in San Antonio, to buy more art supplies and make more art, to buy a breakfast taco and keep on living. And so it goes and goes. It’s simple.
And I’m grateful for having the artists around. They improve the quality of my life. Danny López Lozano used to say, “We live like millionaires.” And he was right. We do live like millionaires, even when we don’t have five bucks in our pockets. The artists realize it’s as important to feed one’s spirit as to feed one’s belly. That’s why sometimes Danny would dress the table with the finest china, with the Lalique crystal, with the linen tablecloth and napkins, with branches filched from the flowering tree in the empty lot across the street, even if we were just eating Church’s fried chicken. We live like millionaires!
And I find it curious to see here in this gallery an art installation of a messy living room juxtaposed with the installation of my living room, which attempts to be very froufrou. The rich like to live like they’re poor. The poor wish to live like kings.
The used furniture I’ve bought at Franco’s Infinito Botánica store and reupholstered in French fabrics reminds me of the furniture showrooms in the barrio with the imitation Marie Antoinette couches, the couches of my tías, reupholstered with leftover fabric and covered with plastic covers against the exuberance of kids.
That sense of having been poor allows me to understand the artists who are poor too, poor but educated, and therefore with tastes better, in my opinion, than the rich, who often only have their wealth, but are poor when it comes to imagination.
My artist friends are poor but talented, and therefore blessed or doomed to live like millionaires, with a joie de vivre and a grief that is a passion. They live hand to mouth, most without health insurance, most without a regular paycheck, doing what they do after having made great personal sacrifices, serving on committees and boards, volunteering at the community fairs, donating their art for good causes, generous to the point of foolishness.
The other night at the Purple House victory party, listening to Janis De Lara singing a cappella at the Acapulco Drive Inn, I realized our lives are very rich indeed. A life blessed with beauty and things of the spirit. “We live like millionaires!” Danny would say. No, Danny, we live mejor. We live like artists.
Thanksgiving at Danny López Lozano’s high-glam apartment, 309 Madison Street, San Antonio
