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Irene Reti
from COMADRE I. House of Nepantla In 1992 I moved into the upstairs of Gloria Anzaldúa’s house in Santa Cruz, California, a writer’s dream—a loft, woodstove, skylights, a deck, and best of all a view of Monterey Bay. Anzaldúa’s books This Bridge Called My Back and Borderlands had shaped my feminism. My parents, Holocaust refugees, kept their pasts and their Jewish heritage a secret, and her writing also helped me comprehend these struggles with assimilation. Carrying all this admiration for her books intensified my usual shyness. For the first week I almost avoided her. Some of this shyness ebbed a few afternoons later, when she walked out of her house carrying a dozen seed packets. “Can you use some of these?” she asked. I was about to plant a garden. “My mother gave these to me and I’ve been saving them.” She shuffled the seed packets like a pack of cards. “Here’s corn, and squash and beans, and tomatoes. Oh, and here are some sunflowers . . .” I laughed and accepted. Soon we were ambling along the ocean, discussing our writing, our lives. We journeyed into memory and history on parallel paths for over ten years: me, upstairs researching and composing a memoir; Gloria writing stories and essays. Heirs to divergent histories, what defined the border between us, Chicana and Jew? Her concepts of nepantla and borderlands offered the perfect metaphor for our house. She wrote, “Living between cultures results in ‘seeing’ double, first from the perspective of one culture, then from the perspective of another.” But what happens when two women from different cultures inhabit the same space? Perhaps our house itself began to see double, generate a vortex of creativity, or, as she wrote, “a zone of possibility.” Nepantla shimmered between our cups of decaf as we wrote at the local coffeehouse, resided in the floorboards that separated my feet from her head. These separations were not trivial; they defined our house. I am the light-skinned one in my family; she the dark one in hers, la prieta. I grew up middle-class in Los Angeles, the daughter of a civil engineer; she picked cotton in rural South Texas. Eighteen years separated us, yet our mothers were the same age, and equally tough. I wondered whether our neighbors knew what transpired within the walls of this wood-shingled house with blue trim. Two women writers in a house by the sea, a house laden with books. Sometimes I thought that structure would explode from the power of us. I am not only a writer, but also the publisher of HerBooks lesbian feminist press, my closet a stockroom of published titles. But those walls were more than material. They contained our tears, our breathing, our dreams, our isolation. They contained our spirits. And they spoke the common language of writing. Here we flourished, two women who cared more about writing than home maintenance. The rose bushes and blueberries wilted; the decks rotted like an old ship. So? We would not be remembered for our housekeeping. Our hands tended keyboards, while the weeds grew ever higher, wove a playground for my cats. When I went on vacation she became Cat Mama. Two black cats made cameo appearances in her writing. Here we thrived, two women who spoke the language of writing, respected the privacy writing demands. We never dropped by unannounced, but instead called each other on the phone, or even used email. I wondered what I should call her. Certainly not landlady, but she wasn’t quite a housemate either. Gloria called me her comadre in writing. She was a key editor of my memoir. I read drafts of her stories, helped her strategize about contracts, editors, and publishers. We journeyed to the same writing colonies. For my birthday she gave me special blank journals. One year her inscription read, “Para mi comadre Irene. Otro librito para otro projecto.” Next to the inscription she drew a bird woman with open arms like wings. I looked at this drawing and saw it was her. I have many writing companions, but there was no one else with whom I shared such a rich cultural and political context. Since her death, somehow, I’ve found myself talking to Gloria as I walk along the ocean, or writing to her with a new intimacy. Once a week we made the short trip downtown to our favorite coffeehouse, where we rushed to a table as soon as a student left, and wrote, Gloria relishing a decaf while I ate the sweets that she, as a diabetic, could not enjoy. Sometimes before we worked she read the astrology column to me in a voice full of portent and drama, accompanied by many significant looks. Sometimes we talked before we wrote. We told each other when we were lonely, when our bodies hurt, when the writing was not going well. Sometimes we arrived ecstatic over the publication of a book, or simply shared our satisfaction in the writing itself. I knew the diabetes wore at Gloria’s strength and spirit. When I didn’t hear her voice below my bedroom talking on the phone, or when I noticed her mail still sitting in the mailbox, I worried. I tried to push away visions of her passed out on the floor of her house from a hypo. But she was also strong and determined, damn stubborn. One day I looked out my window and watched her hack the bamboo plant that always threatened to take over the backyard. When we cleaned out the garage I tired after a few hours and went inside to rest. She told me she was going to go inside and take her insulin and rest, but a little while later I heard her downstairs, still working. We both struggled to take care of ourselves, to slow down. Diabetes became her spiritual teacher. The borders of history and personal life crossed and criss-crossed, propelled us deeper into nepantla. [...] |
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