Zami

by Geraldine Audre Lorde

  One day, after two weeks in and around the District, I traveled south to Cuernavaca by bus to see Frieda Mathews and her young daughter Tammy. Frieda’s name had been given to me by a friend of Rhea’s who had been a nurse with Frieda in the Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. I had been visiting museums and pyramids, wandering the streets of the city, and generally satisfying my hunger and curiosity for the feel of this new place. Although I was feeling more and more at home, I began to feel the need for someone to talk to in English. Classes at Ciudad Universitaria began the following week.

  Cuernavaca was a garden spot south of the District and closer to sea level, in the Morelos Valley about forty-five miles from Mexico City.

  When I telephoned, Frieda greeted me warmly and immediately invited me down to Cuernavaca to spend the day. She and Tammy met me at the bus. The weather was warmer and sunnier than in the District, and there was a much more relaxed air about the town square.

  As soon as the bus pulled into the square, I recognized the tall blond american woman and the tanned smiling young girl beside her. Frieda looked like she sounded over the phone, a calm, intelligent, and forthright woman in her early forties. Frieda and Tammy had lived in Cuernavaca for nine years, and Frieda was always hungry for news from New York, her original home. “Is the Essex Street Market still open, and what are the writers doing?”

  We spent the morning talking about mutual acquaintances and then wandered through the markets on Guerrero buying foodstuffs for dinner, which Tammy brought back to their housekeeper to cook. Later, we sat drinking foamy café con leche at a table in the open-air cafe that occupied one whole corner of the town square. Strolling musicians were tuning their guitars in the afternoon sun, and the chamaquitos, street urchins, descended upon us begging for pennies, then ran away laughing as Tammy engaged them in rapid spanish. In short order, other americans, all of them white and most of them women, strolled over to our table to see who was this new face in town. Frieda introduced me to a host of cordial welcomes.

  After the day spent in the easy beauty of Cuernavaca and easy-going company of Frieda and her friends, it took little urging on Frieda’s part to persuade me to consider moving down to Cuernavaca. I was still anxious to find cheaper lodgings than the Hotel Fortin. I could commute to the District for classes, she assured me. Many people in Cuernavaca worked in Mexico City, and transportation by bus or group taximetro was very inexpensive.

  “I think you’ll be happier living here than in Mexico City,” Frieda offered. “It’s a lot quieter. You can probably get one of the small houses in the compound over at Humboldt Number Twenty-four, which is a pretty place to live.”

  Tammy, who was twelve, was delighted to have somebody come to town who was closer to her age than Frieda and her friends.

  “And Jesús can help you with your things from the District,” Frieda added. With her divorce settlement, Frieda had bought a small farm in Tepotzlán, a tiny village further up the mountain. Jesús managed the farm, she explained. They had once been lovers. “But that’s all quite different now,” Frieda said brusquely, as Tammy called to us from the patio to come see her patoganso, a duck so big it could have been a goose.

  I went to see about the little house in the compound that same afternoon.

  I was open to anything. Cuernavaca felt like a gift. The house consisted of one large room, with huge windows facing the mountains, and a bathroom, kitchen, and tiny dining alcove; my own little house with trees and flowers and bushes around a path that led to my own front door, where no one else would enter except by my invitation. The one-and-a-half hour trip over the mountains to make my 8:00 A.M. class in the mornings seemed a minor inconvenience. On the bus back to Mexico City, I made up my mind to move.

  Jesús came to pick me up with my bags and my typewriter one afternoon after school. It was late afternoon as we drove around and around the mountain on the new autopiso from the Federal District to Cuernavaca. The top of his old Chrysler convertible was down. Mariachi music twanged out of the turned-up radio as we careened around curve after curve, each one revealing a brand-new vista, a new landscape. (And I had once thought of Stamford, Conn., as “the country!”) The thunder-heads on the horizon as we came around the crest of Morelos mountain shone purple-edged and brilliant in the lowering sun, and I was happier than I’d been in what seemed like a very long time. What was even better, I was wholly conscious that I was.

  I settled back against the worn upholstery of the capacious seat. As we rode down into the valley toward Cuernavaca that March evening, with a mañanitas blaring from the radio, the back seat full of my bags and typewriter, the screech of Jesús’s tires around the curves and his ready reassuring guffaw, I knew I was quite glad to be exactly where I was.

  …la luna se oculto,

  Levantate, Amiga mía,

  mira que le amanaceo.

  La Señora. La Periodista. La Morenita. La Alta Rubia. La Chica. The people who worked in the compound at Humboldt No. 24 had names for most of the norteamericanas who lived and visited there. A bit nickname, a bit designation, a bit endearment. Nobody who was disliked had one. They were never used in anger or displeasure. The Lady. The Newspaperwoman. The Dark One. The Tall Blond. The Little One.

  By 1954, Cuernavaca had earned a name as a haven for political and spiritual refugees from the north, a place where american middle-class non-conformists could live more simply, cheaply, and quietly than in Acapulco or Taxco, where all the movie stars went. A small beautiful town, largely supported by the expatriates from many different countries who lived there.

  Along Cuernavaca’s sleepy streets were iron gates and high adobe walls bright with sun, and with brilliant jacaranda trees dripping their flowers over the walls from inside.

  Beside the walls, little boys sat napping with their burros, taking a rest halfway up the hilly packed-mud streets. Behind the iron gates, american Cuernavaca led a complex and sophisticated life.

  A high percentage of single women of moderate means, mostly from California and New York, owned shares in the little tourist shops that lined the Plaza; others supplemented whatever income they had by working in those shops, or teaching and nursing a few days a week in Mexico City. Some of these women were divorced and living on alimony; others were nurses like Frieda who had served in the Lincoln Brigade and run into trouble with the american government because of it. Members of the brigade had been granted citizenship by Mexico. There were members of the red-baited Hollywood Ten and their families, whitelisted out of work in the movie industry, and eking out a living in less-expensive Mexico by editing and ghostwriting. There were victims of other McCarthyist purges, still going on in full swing. We had in common many of Rhea’s friends, and many of the people I had met while working on the Rosenberg committee in the years before.

  For the american colony in Cuernavaca, the political atmosphere was one of guarded alertness. There was not the stench of terror and political repression so present in New York; we were 3,500 miles away. But any idea that immunity from McCarthyism might be conferred by borders had been shattered two years before in the minds of anyone who had ever been the least bit politically active. FBI agents had descended upon Mexico and hustled Morton Sobell, alleged co-conspirator of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, out of Mexico and right back across the border to stand trial for treason.

  Caution and fear of newcomers was everywhere, mixed up with a welcoming excitement at any new face. Expectation of some new political disaster from the north, as yet unspecified, was also everywhere. So were the ripe luscious bougainvillea with their flame-red voluptuous flowers, and the delicate and persistent showers of jacaranda blossoms, with their small white and pink and purple petals, behind which all of these anxieties flourished.

  It was here in the breathtaking dawns and quick hill-twilights of Cuernavaca that I learned it really is easier to be quiet in the woods. One morning I came down the hill toward the square at dawn to catch my ride to the District. The birds suddenly cut loose
all around me in the unbelievable sweet warm air. I had never heard anything so beautiful and unexpected before. I felt shaken by the waves of song. For the first time in my life, I had an insight into what poetry could be. I could use words to recreate that feeling, rather than to create a dream, which was what so much of my writing had been before.

  The little blind bird-boy, Jeroméo, slept on a stone bench next to the bandstand in the center of the square, near his cages of brightly-colored birds for sale. In the pre-dawn darkness, the birds high in the trees sensed the coming of the sun, and as the moist fragrant air filled with an orchestra of song from the birds in the trees surrounding the Plaza, the caged birds filled the square with their singing answer.

  Jeroméo went on sleeping.

  In the afternoons when I came home from the District I went sightseeing in the Morelos Valley, or sat with Frieda and her friends in the square over coffee. Sometimes I went swimming with them in Ellen Perl’s pool.

  The women I met through Frieda were older and far more experienced than I. I learned later that they speculated at length in private as to whether or not I was gay, and whether or not I knew it. It never occurred to me that they were gay, or at least bisexual, themselves. I never suspected because a large part of their existence was devoted toward concealing that fact. These women pretended to be straight in a way they never would have pretended to be conservative. Their political courage was far greater than their sexual openness. To my provincially New York and naïve eyes, “gay-girls” were just that—young, obvious, and definitely bohemian. Certainly not progressive, comfortable, matronly, and over forty, with swimming pools, dyed hair, and young second husbands. As far as I knew all the american women in the Plaza were straight, just emancipated.

  Weeks later, I mentioned as much to Eudora on our way to the pyramids at Teotíhuacan, and she almost laughed us off the road into a ditch.

  22

  Eudora. Mexico. Color and light and Cuernavaca and Eudora.

  At the compound, Easter Saturday, she was just coming out of a week’s drinking binge which started with the firing of Robert Oppenheimer, the atomic scientist, in the states. I was full of the Good Friday festivities in Mexico City, which I had attended with Frieda and Tammy the day before. They had gone to Tepotzlán. I was sunning myself on my front lawn.

  “Hello, down there! Aren’t you overdoing it?” I looked up at the woman whom I had noticed observing me from an upper window in the two-story dwelling at the edge of the compound. She was the only woman I’d seen wearing pants in Mexico except at the pool.

  I was pleased that she had spoken. The two women who lived separately in the double house at that end of the compound never appeared at tables in the Plaza. They never spoke as they passed my house on their way to the cars or the pool. I knew one of them had a shop in town called La Señora, which had the most interesting clothes on the Square.

  “Haven’t you heard, only mad dogs and englishmen go out in the noonday sun?” I shaded my eyes so I could see her better. I was more curious than I had realized.

  “I don’t burn that easily,” I called back. She was framed in the large casement window, a crooked smile on her half-shaded face. Her voice was strong and pleasant, but with a crack in it that sounded like a cold, or too many cigarettes.

  “I’m just going to have some coffee. Would you like some?”

  I stood, picked up the blanket upon which I’d been lying, and accepted her invitation.

  She was waiting in her doorway. I recognized her as the tall grey-haired woman called La Periodista.

  “My name’s Eudora,” she said, extending her hand and holding mine firmly for a moment. “And they call you La Chica, you’re here from New York, and you go to the new university.”

  “Where did you find all that out?” I asked, taken aback. We stepped inside.

  “It’s my business to find out what goes on,” she laughed easily. “That’s what reporters do. Legitimate gossip.”

  Eudora’s bright spacious room was comfortable and disheveled. A large easy chair faced the bed upon which she now perched crosslegged, in shorts and polo shirt, smoking, and surrounded by books and newspapers.

  Maybe it was her direct manner. Maybe it was the openness with which she appraised me as she motioned me towards the chair. Maybe it was the pants, or the informed freedom and authority with which she moved. But from the moment I walked into her house, I knew Eudora was gay, and that was an unexpected and welcome surprise. It made me feel much more at home and relaxed, even though I was still feeling sore and guilty from my fiasco with Bea, but it was refreshing to know I wasn’t alone.

  “I’ve been drinking for a week,” she said, “and I’m still a little hung-over, so you’ll have to excuse the mess.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  Eudora wanted to know what I was doing in Mexico, young, Black, and with an eye for the ladies, as she put it. That was the second surprise. We shared a good laugh over the elusive cues for mutual recognition among lesbians. Eudora was the first woman I’d met who spoke about herself as a lesbian rather than as “gay,” which was a word she hated. Eudora said it was a north american east-coast term that didn’t mean anything to her, and what’s more most of the lesbians she had known were anything but gay.

  When I went to the market that afternoon, I brought back milk and eggs and fruit for her. I invited her to dinner, but she wasn’t feeling much like eating, she said, so I fixed my dinner and brought it over and ate with her. Eudora was an insomniac, and we sat talking late late into the night.

  She was the most fascinating woman I had ever met.

  Born in Texas forty-eight years before, Eudora was the youngest child in an oil-worker’s family. She had seven older brothers. Polio as a child had kept her in bed for three years, “so I had a lot of catchin’ up to do, and I never knew when to stop.”

  In 1925, she became the first woman to attend the University of Texas, integrating it by camping out on the university grounds for four years in a tent with her rifle and a dog. Her brothers had studied there, and she was determined to also. “They said they didn’t have living accommodations for women,” Eudora said, “and I couldn’t afford a place in town.”

  She’d worked in news all her life, both print and radio, and had followed her lover, Franz, to Chicago, where they both worked for the same paper. “She and I were quite a team, all right. Had a lot of high times together, did a lot of foolishness, believed a lot of things.

  “Then Franz married a foreign correspondent in Istanbul,” Eudora continued, drily, “and I lost my job over a byline on the Scottsboro case.” She worked for a while in Texas for a Mexican paper, then moved into Mexico City for them.

  When she and Karen, who owned La Señora, were lovers, they had started a bookstore together in Cuernavaca in the more liberal forties. For a while it was a rallying place for disaffected americans. This was how she knew Frieda.

  “It was where people came to find out what was really going on in the states. Everybody passed through.” She paused. “But it got to be a little too radical for Karen’s tastes,” Eudora said carefully. “The dress shop suits her better. But that’s a whole other mess, and she still owes me money.”

  “What happened to the bookstore?” I asked, not wanting to pry, but fascinated by her story.

  “Oh, lots of things, in very short order. I’ve always been a hard drinker, and she never liked that. Then when I had to speak my mind in the column about the whole Sobell business, and the newspaper started getting itchy, Karen thought I was going to lose that job. I didn’t, but my immigration status was changed, which meant I could still work in Mexico, but after all these years I could no longer own property. That’s the one way of getting uppity americans to keep their mouths shut. Don’t rock big brother’s boat, and we’ll let you stay. That was right up Karen’s alley. She bought me out and opened the dress shop.”

  “Is that why you broke up?”

  Eudora laughed. “That sounds l
ike New York talk.” She was silent for a minute, busying herself with the overflowing ashtray.

  “Actually, no,” she said finally. “I had an operation, and it was pretty rough for both of us. Radical surgery, for cancer. I lost a breast.” Eudora’s head was bent over the ashtray, hair falling forward, and I could not see her face. I reached out and touched her hand.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “Yeah, so am I,” she said, matter-of-factly, placing the polished ashtray carefully back on the table beside her bed. She looked up, smiled, and pushed the hair back from her face with the heels of her hands. “There’s never enough time to begin with, and still so damn much I want to do.”

  “How are you feeling now, Eudora?” I remembered my nights on the female surgery floor at Beth David. “Did you have radiation?”

  “Yes I did. It’s almost two years since the last one, and I’m fine now. The scars are hard to take, though. Not dashing or romantic. I don’t much like to look at them myself.” She got up, took down her guitar from the wall, and started to tune it. “What folksongs are they teaching you in that fine new university up the mountain?”

  Eudora had translated a number of texts on the history and ethnology of Mexico, one of which was a textbook assigned for my history class. She was witty and funny and sharp and insightful, and knew a lot about an enormous number of things. She had written poetry when she was younger, and Walt Whitman was her favorite poet. She showed me some clippings of articles she had written for a memorial-documentary of Whitman. One sentence in particular caught my eye.

  I met a man who’d spent his life in thinking, and could understand me no matter what I said. And I followed him to Harleigh in the snow.

  The next week was Easter holidays, and I spent part of each afternoon or evening at Eudora’s house, reading poetry, learning to play the guitar, talking. I told her about Ginger, and about Bea, and she talked about her and Franz’s life together. We even had a game of dirty-word Scrabble, and although I warned her I was a declared champion, Eudora won, thereby increasing my vocabulary no end. She showed me the column she was finishing about the Olmec stone heads, and we talked about the research she was planning to do on African and Asian influences in Mexican art. Her eyes twinkled and her long graceful hands flashed as she talked, and by midweek, when we were not together, I could feel the curves of her cheekbone under my lips as I gave her a quick goodbye kiss. I thought about making love to her, and ruined a whole pot of curry in my confusion. This was not what I had come to Mexico to do.