Hearing Sandra Cisneros

Sitting ten feet from Sandra Cisneros, tears in my eyes, as she read a portion from her award winning first novel, House on Mango Street, I thought of the many little girls (and boys) now in US border detention facilities.

Friday afternoon in San Miguel de Allende, most of the audience is older expats, present at the salon to hear her, a Chicago native who now lives in SMA read. Derek Bermel, the clarinetist, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Bermel has joined her as they discuss the developing opera based on House on Mango Street. He is the composer, she the librettist.

The little girl in House on Mango Street wants little more than a house. She wants one that is not her daddy’s, not another man’s house, but one that is hers, with a porch and a swing and a place for both her shoes. I lived in the same house my first seventeen years and have always had a house, living usually in one I owned, yet these lyrics touched me to the core. I was not alone with those feelings as I heard sniffles throughout the audience while Derek sang the lyrics.

Cisneros’s childhood, not filled with the sadness that consumes many children of immigrant parents, was close enough to the sorrow to internalize it, to incorporate it in her DNA.

Years ago, I read House on Mango Street, but I confess I didn’t like it very much. Too sad for me. Too much a reminder of the sadness so many children, even adults, carry with them each day. Friends waxed on about how great a writer Cisneros was, but I was not ready to hear it. I wasn’t ready to acknowledge that much of her or anyone else’s pain. Now, less than twenty-four hours after hearing her read from the book, I’ve checked out two other books of her poems and two novels, devouring them on my Kindle app.

I had to share with a friend one of my favorites as shown below.

A Man in My Bed Like Cracker Crumbs

I’ve stripped the bed.

Shaken the sheets and slumped

those fat pillows like tired tongues

out the window for air and sun

to get to. I’ve let

the mattress lounge

in its blue-striped dressing gown.

I’ve punched and fluffed.

All morning. I’ve billowed and snapped.

Said my prayers to la Virgen de la Soledad

and now I can sit down.

to my typewriter and cup

because she’s answered me.

Coffee’s good.

Dust motes somersault and spin.

House clean.

I’m alone again.

Amen.

My question, the last of the day, asked her if she would do anything differently if she were starting her writing career again. As she answered negatively, that she had always followed her heart with her writing, the audience cooed in appreciation of her life affirming statement. Earlier, she had shared how she never married, saying focus on such a relationship would consume too much energy from her writing.

Chicago librarians would have been honored to hear Cisneros recount how her mother took her and her siblings to the library, checking out operas for them to listen to, encouraging her to do what she wanted as long as it involved reading, writing, and staying in school.

By the time we left the salon where British turned Mexican cookbook writer Diana Kennedy’s books are best sellers, I was thankful for yet another wonderful SMA experience. We walked toward Centro, stopped in a new-to-us restaurant to be greeted by folk we knew. From a corner window while Ceasar, the server, prepared a tableside Ceasar salad as he might have decades ago, we watched two callejoneadaspass. These wedding parades whereby the bridal party moves through the streets in an informal procession are crowd stoppers, regardless of how many times one sees them. Mojiangas, or large puppets http://www.smapenzi.com/blog/2017/07/mojiangas-who-are-they-and-where-do-they-come-from/are a main picturesque attraction.

Before we returned back up the hill and home, we sat in the San Francisco Church park, watching tourists and locals enjoy the perfect Friday evening. Life felt good but it did not leave me that somewhere in those dreadful detention centers are little readers and writers, if only they can gain access to the materials, who will have incredible stories to tell. Likely there is a Sandra Cisneros among them and oh, the stories that will be told.