A House of My Own: Stories from My Life

by Sandra Cisneros

We find ourselves at home, or homing, in books that allow us to become more ourselves. Home “is not just the place where you were born,” as the travel writer Pico Iyer once noted. “It’s the place where you become yourself.”

At that moment with events quivering before and after me, and me in that nowhere and everywhere called my life, I was, as one would say in Spanish, “emotioned.”

on mountain roads so reckless and wicked, they made you instantly devout.

Sometimes the silence frightened me. Sometimes the silence blessed me. It would come get me. Late at night. Open like a window, hungry for my life.

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.

“Goodbye,” we each said. “Goodbye, goodbye.” As lazily and luxuriously as if we were in control of our own destinies.

I have a theory—one’s most charming trait is also one’s fatal flaw; the one thing you like about somebody is usually their worst defect as well. So too with communities.

And frankly I don’t want to hear about your kids. We make choices. I’m not going to blame you because I’m childless; true, there is no one to get in my way, but there is also no one there to hug me when I need to be hugged. We must spin our own straw, not our neighbor’s. “Tell the truth. Your truth,” the writer Dorothy Allison has written. There is power in your work if you come at it from that place uniquely yours, not your sister’s, but yours. Otherwise we risk creating stereotypes. If I see another work of art that glorifies la abuelita, I’m going to throw a berrinche. Aren’t our grandmothers worth portraying with all of their sins, and, frankly, women with sins are more interesting than santas.

Unlike his fellow Chicanos, Mexicans born in the United States, Father thought he was better than everybody. I think this was because he was un chilango—that is, a citizen from Mexico City. People from Mexico City always think they’re better than everybody else, because in their eyes Mexico City is the center of the universe.

No es desgracia ser pobre, pero es muy inconveniente. (It’s no disgrace to be poor, but it’s very inconvenient.)

I want to close with a quote from Jorge Luis Borges’s Seven Nights: “Beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of a judgment. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don’t.”

“In my opinion,” one little girl wrote in formal Spanish, “you should leave your house purple because San Antonio was once Mexico.”

Or “tocayo/a,” your name twin, and, therefore, your friend. Or the beautiful “estrenar,” which means to wear something for the first time. There is no word in English for the thrill and pride of wearing something new.

“I’ve known few people who have survived the tests of pain and violence—a rare feat—with their capacity for tenderness intact.”

It’s because I know the worst thing in the world isn’t having someone leave you by death. That, after all, is not their fault. But to have someone leave of their own volition, to have someone you love alive, existing on the planet, but choosing not to share any part of that living with you.

We don’t agree with being classified as “Hispanics,” that slave name I connect with presidents who never even bothered to ask us what we call ourselves. What’s in a name? Everything. If it doesn’t really matter, why won’t “wetback” do?

As a girl, she dreamt about having a silent home, just to herself, the way other women dreamt of their weddings. Instead of collecting lace and linen for her trousseau, the young woman buys old things from the thrift stores on grimy Milwaukee Avenue for her future house-of-her-own—faded quilts, cracked vases, chipped saucers, lamps in need of love.

I’m especially proud of the spiral staircase to the rooftop. I’d always dreamt of having one, just like the houses in Mexico. Even the words for them in Spanish are wonderful—una escalera de caracol, a snail ladder.

There is no getting over death, only learning how to travel alongside it. It knows no linear time. Sometimes the pain is as fresh as if it just happened. Sometimes it’s a space I tap with my tongue daily like a missing molar.

She lived there and fell in love with all island things, even though she was Dutch and not of the island. But as the saying goes, “¿Si los gatitos nacen en el horno, son gatitos o son bizcochos?” Just because the kittens are born in the oven doesn’t mean they’re biscuits.*1

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.

And I felt something that has come and gone in my life at odd times without my asking. A sense of detaching from myself, of sliding out of myself and connecting with everything in the universe. Of being empty so I could fill up with everything.

He said: “If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” He forgot to add: but only if one lives alone and can afford to have someone else clean it.

He’s popular among the hotel guests because he shows them deep deference, and therefore confirms in their eyes their feeling of racial and economic superiority. His Don Quixote subservience is typical of Mexican hospitality and often misunderstood by foreigners, who see it as the propriety of a servant and not the generosity and good breeding of a social equal.

The wealthy Mexicans like to live in houses that resemble the future. The expats who live here like to live in houses that resemble the past, or houses that are the Mexico of their imagination.

I think about what my Mexican friends and employees said recently when I told them I was traveling north to the United States: “Aren’t you afraid?”*2 This is exactly what U.S. friends said to me when I told them I was moving to Mexico. “Aren’t you afraid?”

When I remind Mexicans of the abductions and disappearances in their own country, the political corruption, human rights violations, and drug wars, they counter, “Yes, but we don’t have to send our children to school with fear they will be assassinated by other children.”

This house she painted violet because of her overwhelming love, and oh, what an uproar this caused. Who would think violet would cause so much pain to others? But people who have no life of their own like to meddle in the lives of those who do.