Getting ready for the house’s close-up; I’m seated far right.
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.
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.
At any moment bliss might be interrupted by the last word sent through the window in a ball of fire. The flick of a light switch could trigger an electrical-short explosion, a reminder never to hire the cousin studying to be an electrician. How much truth exists in a drunk man’s gossip; during Franco’s last fiesta, an artist claimed he’d seen real fur, alive, four-footed, footloose among the faux. And what of the handsome gardeners circling about—hyenas waiting for the lion to falter? Santa María Virgen Purísima, soy la más miedosa de toditos los pobres infelices del mundo de la misericordia. Cover me with your faux-fur mantle, Virgencita, keep me in the dark. Pray for me, keep me safe. Bless this humble home.