Crying in the Bathroom, page 7
There was the little person who cheerfully sold lottery tickets in front of the grocery store; the Romani women with their long skirts; and young African men all gathered in the square. There were a smattering of art galleries, one of which had a painting of a vagina dentata displayed in the window. Bars welcomed both dogs and children. There was so much to see it was almost dizzying, and my eyes were always greedy.
One of my favorite places in my neighborhood, and in the city, was Café Barbieri, a dimly lit place with tarnished mirrors and worn upholstery. I liked to sit there and write in my journal while drinking bitter coffee, because it made me feel like Ernest Hemingway—though I wasn’t a misogynist asshole.
Cafés like this were alluring to me in Madrid. I have always loved old places and things. Spaces that are shiny and new make me a bit nervous; there is a certain expectation that they express, and I’m afraid I will disappoint. When a place has history, however, I like to think that I’m adding to it with my presence and that my body is occupying a space where so much has already happened—somewhere people have loved, cried, laughed, and experienced profound joys and disappointments. It’s comforting to belong to an endless chain of stories.
Lavapiés had so much charisma and provided constant inspiration for my writing. I was in perpetual awe, always searching for something strange and beautiful. My responsibilities as a teaching assistant were minimal, so my evenings and weekends, and also Fridays, were free. Not to mention the daily siestas and the innumerable religious holidays. I spent so much time loafing that there were moments when guilt crept over me. How was I here on a bench people-watching in Spain while my parents were working in factories?
The Museo del Prado and Museo Reina Sofía were both within walking distance of my apartment, so I would spend many afternoons there luxuriating in the art and taking notes. I remember the moment I first saw The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch. I had studied the painting in college and now here it was before me. I was giddy. People copulating! Strange mythical creatures! Naked figures gorging on ripe fruits! Birds pecking at stuff!
Was it greed, though? Or was it, like the title suggested, simply delight? Was it judgment? A celebration of being human? Regardless, I thought it was beautiful and it filled me with a lush wonder.
When I didn’t have plans with friends, which was often, I’d roam the city gawking at people, exploring shops, peering into windows, drinking coffee, writing in my journal, reading books, eating tapas, and simply daydreaming. The aimless days let my imagination stretch in all directions. It wasn’t until years later that I understood what a rare gift this was, particularly for a woman. The gift of solitude with few responsibilities. My life was mine and mine alone.
My first friend was a woman named Judy, a Jewish girl from Pennsylvania who had also received the Fulbright. She immediately made me cackle when she made a joke about MacGyver. We often traveled together and got into ridiculous situations. We were always pissing off bus drivers when we’d run onto the bus late as hell. We went dancing with all kinds of odd people. And once we got swindled by a person we assumed was a drug dealer. We deserved it for racially profiling him like that. When I think of that year I often think of Judy. Man, we would go out and party until some ungodly hour then go back to her apartment, where we would eat toasted ham sandwiches in her bed and fall asleep in our party clothes. In the morning I’d ride the train back to my neighborhood, looking disheveled in my crumpled jean jacket, feeling like someone had scooped my brain out.
There were many cultural events throughout the city that were free or affordable. Every Thursday I’d buy the city’s leisure guide and circle all the events I wanted to attend.
Judy and I watched an Edward Albee play in which a man literally fell in love with a goat, which was as hilarious as it was horrifying. We held each other as the curtains fell. I saw a theatrical adaptation of The Metamorphosis that haunted me for days. I watched artsy movies by myself at the theater. I went to a modern dance performance in which they filled the stage with water and dancers elegantly rippled through it.
I also traveled to other cities to explore their art scenes. In Barcelona the architecture of Antoni Gaudí left me speechless. At the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Jenny Holzer LED signs flashed messages about the AIDS crisis: “I say your name,” “I keep your clothes.” In Paris I nearly lost my fucking mind at the Louvre. I couldn’t conceive of the magnitude and the opulence. So many of the world’s most iconic pieces all housed in the same space . . . it was surreal. When I saw Manet’s Olympia at Musée d’Orsay, a painting I had seen in art books and adored, I could hardly believe my life. In Amsterdam, hallucinating on mushrooms, I stood in front of van Gogh’s Almond Blossoms and my chest hurt because it was so beautiful. On spring break my roommate and I traveled to Morocco to a village painted almost entirely blue. At night we gathered in a café near the river, where young people sang and played the laud.
I was always bewildered. And I cried everywhere. A lot. It was not always the sad kind of crying, though. Sometimes it was a deluge of unidentifiable feelings that came out through my eyes.
The poetry of Federico García Lorca was one of the reasons Spain was so alluring to me. I didn’t read his lecture on duende until years later, but I had an innate idea of what it was. All I knew is that Lorca’s poetry gripped me by the throat.
I know I experienced duende when watching flamenco dancing. I couldn’t tell you what it was, but I could see it, feel it in my organs. I loved the anguished look on the dancers’ faces, the elegant stomping. It looked as if the music were killing them, and in that proximity to death they were most alive.
I found that the less conventionally attractive the dancers were, the greater their talent, and I didn’t think this was a coincidence. Pretty, of course, is a privilege, and those who don’t possess what the world deems desirable don’t have the luxury of depending on their looks.
It was as if some of them were purging themselves of a spiritual malaise, as if they were casting out all their demons. The women weren’t pretty, but they were beautiful.
In his lecture on duende, Lorca states: “We have said that the duende loves the edge, the wound, and draws close to places where forms fuse in a yearning beyond visible expression.” The wound never heals. To me these women were dancing on that metaphorical blade, and now, many years later, they remind me of a myth I once read about a girl who danced until she couldn’t stop, until her feet bled. Maybe she, too, was trying to heal the wound that never heals. Maybe that’s what we’re all doing. Maybe that’s what it means to be alive.
* * *
• • •
I began taking a poetry class at a local literary organization, which turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life. Every Thursday night I would take the train to meet my class in a small conference room downtown. Our teacher, Jesus, was a big fat dude who always wore silly hats and smoked unfiltered cigarettes in class. He was funny and brilliant and gave us the most bizarre writing exercises to awaken our subconscious. One of them was a prompt in which we had to write the word “lamp” on a sheet of paper and place it on our bed as we slept. When we awakened, we were to write whatever came to mind without letting our rational selves get in the way. The poem I wrote in response to this exercise was about the man who consumed my thoughts that year. Part of it came to me as I walked alone one night. I stopped in the middle of the street to write an image of lucid semen trailing down a white sheet.
There were so many moments like these. I found inspiration at every turn, and there were times I could hardly stand it.
My class built a camaraderie I had always dreamt about. After each session, most of us would head to a nearby bar to drink beer, eat tapas, and continue our discussions about poetry. I loved these nights. We were all so different—a Goth girl, a teenager, a businessman in his forties, a posh woman in her twenties exploring her angst. And then there was María, “the one with the difficult name,” who was my favorite of the group, and who years later became one of the most important feminist writers in the country. I was known as the American, or La Gringa, as they affectionately called me. I was the one who wrote the poem about a lynx eating her own young.
I had always been a loner, and at last I had found my people.
* * *
• • •
I was an ill-behaved child, which I’m sure is a surprise to no one. I often got low marks on “exercises self-control” because neither my mind nor my ass could ever keep still. Not surprisingly, I’m also a terrible planner. When traveling, I always have a handful of goals and no real agenda. All I want to do is eat, get lost, and people-watch. Rigid schedules depress me. This is why I’ve never been able to hold down a regular-person job without spiraling into misery. I prefer to be surprised, to show up to a place with few expectations and see where the day takes me. Sometimes I have an idea come to me as I’m performing a mundane task and I have to stop what I’m doing to write it down. I’m easily distracted and my moods can be unpredictable. The world is not built for people with this kind of temperament. Throughout my life, I’ve struggled to keep a semblance of normalcy so I can make a living and simply exist, but my mind is often a swirl of daydreams.
In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, a memoir by Rebecca Solnit, she describes the pleasure of submitting to the unknown. Of Virginia Woolf, she writes: “For [her], getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.” This desire to abandon the self—perhaps, more accurately, the ego—is also why I love poetry and other forms of art. I want to bask in what I don’t understand.
I have felt a kinship with Virginia Woolf ever since I read Mrs. Dalloway in my freshman English class when I was fourteen. The restlessness that the protagonist embodied felt so familiar to me. After finishing the book, I watched the film The Hours, based on the book by Michael Cunningham. I adored the movie, particularly the scene in which Woolf lies on the ground to stare at a dead bird. (I can’t count how many times in my life a dead bird has made me lose my marbles.) In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf wrote, “The beauty of the world . . . has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.” She, too, recognized duende, so much that she walked into a river and drowned herself.
* * *
• • •
My teaching assistantship was at a junior high in a nearby suburb, a commute that involved two trains and a hell of a walk. I soon realized that I didn’t love teaching. The kids were out of control and they didn’t like me or my accent. How did I know? They told me. They were used to British English and believed the American version was inferior. One of them said that it sounded as if I were speaking with something in my mouth. He never specified what, but I used my deductive reasoning skills, because I am smart! I did the work because it was my job, but I didn’t enjoy it. It was obvious they didn’t respect me, and I often felt like a curiosity.
For the most part, I refused to speak Castilian Spanish during my year in Madrid. Sometimes I did adjust my diction for the sake of clarity, but as I mentioned previously, I was determined to be true to my Mexican identity. I never used the “vosotros” form, for instance. I insisted on “tu” and “usted,” figuring that everyone would understand me just fine. They mostly did, but some took offense to my formal use of “usted” when referring to them. I did it out of respect, particularly for strangers, authority figures, and those who were significantly older than I was, but to some, it felt like I was being distant and unfriendly.
Some of the other Americans I knew spoke with the Spanish accent and lisp. I tried my best to avoid it, but it was inevitable that it would seep into my speech at some point. Once, on the phone with my mother, I heard myself say “grathias” instead of “gracias,” and I was mortified. I hoped that she hadn’t heard because I felt like a fucking prig. My mom is a humble woman, and I didn’t want her to think I was putting on airs.
People sometimes ask me if I experienced racism while I was in Spain, and the answer is complicated. My racial ambiguity allowed me to blend in most of the time. I’m a light to medium brown, depending on the season, and most Spaniards didn’t know what to make of me. Some strangers spoke to me in Arabic and I had to kindly let them know I didn’t speak their language. Sometimes the locals laughed at my Spanish as if I were some sort of yokel. When I explained that I was Mexican American, Spaniards were often perplexed. How could I be both? they wondered. And why did I have a strange accent? I had trouble understanding what was so hard to understand. What I wanted to say was, “Your people savagely colonized the New World, thus birthing mestizos in the land that became Mexico; then, hundreds of years later, thanks to neoliberalism and corruption, these Mexicans, searching for work, immigrated to the United States, where they are exploited for their labor and treated like animals. I am the daughter of these immigrants, which is why my accent is not entirely Mexican. I struggled my way through college and now here I am on a fancy scholarship.”
I belonged nowhere and everywhere all at once. I still live in this contradiction. I think we forget that people are composed of multitudes, contain many selves. I was never fully Mexican or American, and in Spain I was even more disoriented, so, in a sense, I became my own home. Virginia Woolf once said: “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”
When you don’t belong, you learn to make a nest in the unknown.
* * *
• • •
Sometimes I wonder who we would be without the conquest of the New World. I likely wouldn’t exist, or perhaps a version of me would. What would our culture look like? How would women fare in a place like this? Sometimes I’m so angry at what feels like unending misogyny, and I want to point the finger at someone, but the truth is that what has led us here is a very complicated tapestry of hate. That’s why I try not to romanticize Indigenous civilizations in this context or any. There are some who like to pretend that pre-Colombian times were the halcyon days. I once got into a futile argument with a Mexican man who insisted that machismo was imported from Spain, as if all the native women of the New World were living in some sort of feminist utopia. I don’t deny that the Old World’s version of patriarchy was imported to the colonies, but I don’t think we should fool ourselves into thinking anyone, especially women, was better off. There are times I morbidly wonder how many women were raped for me to exist. According to one anthropologist, the typical Aztec man expected his woman to be “tied to her metate, the comal, and the preparation of the tortilla.” The women existed to make babies, serve men, and pass down their culture and traditions. Men valued virginity, were polygamists, and often had concubines. I find it delusional to think that Europeans—or anyone, for that matter—have a monopoly on misogyny.
* * *
• • •
It’s funny to me to think back on how much of a feminist I believed myself to be while simultaneously being someone’s side piece. I believed Abdul loved me in his own fucked-up way, and he called me nearly every day, but he was still married and emotionally abusive. I had a hell of a time reconciling all that. I guess it’s more accurate to say that I repressed a lot of my conflicting feelings. I was so desperate to be seen, to be loved, to be acknowledged, that I would have done anything to keep whatever semblance of those things our relationship gave me. It was like an illness—one that too many women succumb to. I allowed Abdul to manipulate me until I was so twisted and confused I couldn’t reason. One day I was the love of his life, the next day he wanted nothing to do with me. It was an endless and excruciating back-and-forth that I felt like I couldn’t escape.
I can blame him for all that happened, but it wouldn’t be fair or accurate. Yes, he was older; yes, he was a man and therefore more powerful; but I had so many opportunities to leave him—I was halfway across the world, for fuck’s sake—and I chose not to. I chose to stay. I had agency and chose my own oppression. But is it that much of a choice considering the life I had lived? I was basically a child, and who had ever taught me how to love myself? I live with that tangle of truths.
For months, I obsessed about Abdul’s prospective visit. I hadn’t seen him since September, and the plan was that he’d visit sometime in January. As the date approached, both of us worried he wouldn’t be granted a visitor’s visa because the world was so anti-Muslim at the time (still is!). It was 2007, in the thick of the Iraq War, and 9/11 was still fresh. We were both elated when he was given permission to travel, and at the start of the New Year, he told his wife some lie about visiting his family in Britain and came to see me in Madrid.
I thought I would burst out of my skin that week; none of it felt real. All the longing I had nursed those few months was at last being satiated. To be in the same place at the same time felt like a hallucination.
The day after he arrived we took a bus to Granada to see the Alhambra. Our timing was bad and the palace was on the verge of closing, so we could only race through the immaculate lawns and magical courtyards. The sun was about to set and the light was perfect. We took tacky pictures of us kissing. We held hands and looked into each other’s eyes.
We left for Córdoba the next morning. I got motion sickness on the bus, and after we got off, I thought I might throw up. I expected Abdul to coddle me and treat me like a fragile little princess, but instead he lit a cigarette, which only worsened my nausea. I told him so, and he pretended not to hear me.
