by Audre Lorde
We walked east across town holding hands, my tears and her sympathetic silence both mute memorials for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. I began to feel eased. It was obvious to both of us that in the past year we had each moved beyond investigative discussions about loving women. I felt this – something in the frankness with which we held each other as we walked.
That night, I invited Bea to stay over. The rest was surprisingly easy. I made love to a woman for the first time in my very own bed. This was home, feeling the physical tensions of the last months of hope and despair loosen inside of me, as if a long fast had broken. The sense of relief was only lessened by Bea’s unresponsiveness. The quiet stillness of her sculptured body was disappointing beside the remembered passion of Ginger.
For the next few months, outside of work, I concentrated my energies on preparations to go to Mexico and being long-distance lovers with Bea. We saw each other every other weekend, on the average, alternating between the YMCA in Philadelphia and New York. Bea had roommates and I had Rhea, who determinedly knew nothing of my sexual life. More often than not, I went to Philadelphia since the Y there was cheaper and had better beds.
Meeting other lesbians was very difficult, except for the bars which I did not go to because I did not drink. One read The Ladder and the Daughters of Bilitis newsletter and wondered where all the other gay-girls were. Often, just finding out another woman was gay was enough of a reason to attempt a relationship, to attempt some connection in the name of love without first regard to how ill-matched the two of you might really be. Such were the results of loneliness, and this was certainly the case between Bea and me. For starters, our backgrounds and outlooks on important issues could not have been more different. Her family was old, mainline, white, and monied. Psychologically, she had left very little of them behind. Most importantly, our attitudes toward sex were totally different.
Sexual expression with Bea was a largely theoretical satisfaction, a very pleasant pastime, and one to which she had great intellectual commitment but apparently little visceral response. It was hard to believe her protestations and assurances that this had nothing to do with me. Whatever fears of reprisal from her upper-class family had turned her off, they had been quite successful. Despite our hours of love-making, our most impassioned shared connections were our love of guitars and old music.
I would take the night train to Philly and then a bus to the Arch Street YWCA, where Bea would have rented a room for us for the weekend. The rooms were small and plain and all alike, with single beds.
Bea’s face was square and rosy-cheeked, with a rosebud mouth whose corners always pointed down. She had wide, light blue eyes and strong beautiful teeth. Her blonde body was smooth and without fault – small-breasted, long-waisted, with sturdy hips and long smooth legs. It was a body not unlike the ivory statues I used to buy in Oriental import stores when I was in high school, with the money that I stole from my father’s pants pockets.
At first, I looked forward to our weekends with wild anticipation. The hope that this time it was going to be different. Bea’s acknowledged gayness was some connection, some living reality within the emotional desert around which I existed. And she was always quite honest about what she didn’t feel.
So weekend after weekend, in YWCA bed after YWCA bed, I ran my hot searching mouth over her as against a carved mound of smooth stone, until lip-bruised and panting with frustration, I fell back for a brief rest.
‘That was really nice,’ she would say. ‘I think I almost felt something.’
The scenario was always depressingly the same. We were both strong, physically healthy young women with lots of energies. Starting Friday night, I would make almost non-stop love to Bea for two days on our single bed while she sighed sadly. By Sunday noon, distraught and ravenous, I would come up for air, raving like a maniac, a sex fiend, a debaucher of virgins. We would dress to music – Bea had perfect pitch – and then essay forth, blinking, into daylight. Companionable in our spent frustrations, hand in hand, we would go to the Rodin Museum and then get something to eat in a diner before I caught my train back to New York. I grew fond of her forthrightness and her wit. And in a way, we even grew to love each other.
Sometimes to this day, whenever I think of Philadelphia, which is as infrequently as possible, I think of it as a boring grey-stone backdrop to a well-worn triangle, circumscribing the Arch Street YWCA, the Rodin Museum, and the 30th Street Station.
Across the table from me, Bea chewed each mouthful thirty-two times and told me how much she looked forward to our being together again. I was beside myself. Every Sunday night, I got onto the train vowing to myself that I would never see her again. That’s the way it would be for about a week. Then she would call me or I would call her, and one of us would be on the next Friday train to or from Philly. The prospect of breaching that insurmountable calm endlessly sparked my desire.
By Thanksgiving, we were planning to go to Mexico together. I knew this was a mistake, but I did not have the strength to say no. Finally, two weeks before we were planning to leave, on the way to the station one Sunday evening, I told Bea we had to stop seeing each other. That I was going to Mexico alone. No explanations, no preliminaries. It was self-preservation on my part, and I was horrified at my own cruelty. But I did not know any other way to do it. Bea stood in the gateway of the 30th Street station and wept as I ran for my train.
When I got home I sent her a telegram. It said, ‘I’M SORRY.’
I had believed that if I could bring myself to say it, harsh as it was, that would be the end of it, and I could go off and be guilty in private, as I made last-minute arrangements for my trip. But I had reckoned without Bea’s thoroughness and determination.
The whole disastrous affair terminated with Bea coming to New York the following day and camping on the steps of our seventh-floor landing outside the apartment, trying to catch hold of me. I was hiding out at Jean and Alf’s place, having been warned by an incredulous Rhea that a weeping girl was trying to find me. Rhea ran interference, making excuses to Bea as she went in and out of the apartment to work. Luckily, I had already quit my job at the Health Center, for Bea had gone there first.
Bea sat on the landing for two days, with quick forays downstairs to the corner foodshop for Cokes and trips to the john. She finally gave up and went back to Philadelphia.
She left me a note saying that what she really wanted to know was why, this way. I couldn’t tell her; I didn’t know why myself. But I felt like a monster. I had made a desperate bid for self-preservation – or what felt like self-preservation – in the only way I knew how. I hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone. But I had. I promised myself never to get involved like that again.
Guilt can be very useful.
For the three days this went on in the hallway, Rhea was her usual quizzical and accepting self. I had to tell her about the affair, couched in the fact that it was now over. What she thought about Bea I never stopped long enough to ask, but what she said made good sense to me.
‘Just because you’re strong doesn’t mean you can let other people depend on you too much. It’s not fair to them, because when you can’t be what they want they’re disappointed, and you feel bad.’ Rhea was sometimes very wise, just not for herself.
I never forgot that conversation, and we never discussed Bea again. I left for Mexico a week later.
It was eleven months after I had come back from Stamford, and two weeks before my nineteenth birthday.
I leaned back in my airplane seat, in the first skirt I’d bought in two years. The Air France night flight to Mexico City was half-empty. Rhea had made a surprise going-away party for me the night before, but even so I had been hounded by nightmares of arriving at the airport with no clothes on, or having forgotten my suitcases, or my passport, or neglected to buy a ticket. Not until I looked down and saw the lights of the city spread like electric lace across the night, did I actually believe I had gotten out of New York in one piece and under my own steam. Alive.
In the back of my head, I could hear Bea sobbing disconsolately in the stairwell. I felt like I was fleeing New York with the hounds of hell at my heels.
The stewardess was very solicitous of me. She said it was because this was my first flight, and I was so young to be traveling so far alone.
21
From the Palace of Fine Arts to El Angel de la Reforma, along the broad Avenida Insurgentes, lay the central hub of the Districto Federal, Mexico City. It was a sea of strange sounds and smells and experiences that I swam into with delight daily. It took me two days to adjust to the high altitude of the city, and to the realization that I was in a foreign country, alone, with only rudimentary language skills.
The first day I explored tentatively. By the second day, alight with the bustle and easy warmth of the streets, I felt filled with the excitement of curiosity and more and more at home. I walked miles and miles through the city, past modern stores and old museums, and families eating beans and tortillas over a brazier between two buildings.
Moving through street after street filled with people with brown faces had a profound and exhilarating effect upon me, unlike any other experience I had ever known.
Friendly strangers, passing smiles, admiring and questioning glances, the sense of being somewhere I wanted to be and had chosen. Being noticed, and accepted without being known, gave me a social contour and surety as I moved through the city sightseeing, and I felt bold and adventurous and special. I reveled in the attention of the shopkeepers around the hotel, from whom I bought my modest provisions.
‘¡Ah, la Señorita Moreña! [moreña means dark] buenas dias!’ The woman from whom I bought my newspaper on the corner of Reforma reached up and patted my short natural hair. ‘¡Ay, que bonita! ¿Está la Cubana?’
I smiled in return. Because of my coloring and my haircut, I was frequently asked if I was Cuban. ‘Gracias, señora,’ I replied, settling the bright rebozo I had bought the day before around my shoulders. ‘No, yo estoy de Nueva York.’
Her bright dark eyes widened in amazement and she patted the back of my hand with her dry wrinkled fingers, still holding the coin I had just given her. ‘Ay, con Dios, niña,’ she called after me, as I moved on up the street.
By noon, it amazed me that the streets of a city could be so busy and so friendly at the same time. Even with all the new building going on there was a feeling of color and light, made more festive by the colorful murals decorating the sides of high buildings, public and private. Even the university buildings were covered with mosaic murals in dazzling colors.
Lottery-sellers at every corner, and strolling through Chapultepec Park, with strings of gaily colored tickets pinned to their shirts. Children in uniforms coming home from school in groups, and other children, equally bright-eyed, too poor to go to school, sitting crosslegged with their parents on a blanket in the shadow of a building, cutting out soles for cheap sandals from the worn-out treads of discarded tires.
The National Pawn Shop across from the Seguro Social on Friday at noon, long lines of young government workers redeeming guitars and dancing shoes for the weekend ahead. Wide-eyed toddlers who took my hand and led me over to their mothers’ wares, set out upon tables shielded by blankets from the sun. People in the street who smiled without knowing me, just because that was what you did with strangers.
There was a beautiful park called the Alameda which ran for blocks through the middle of the district, from Nezahualcóyotl down behind the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Some mornings, I left my hotel as soon as it was light, taking a bus to the center of the city to walk in the Alameda. I would have loved to walk there in the astonishing moonlight, but I had heard that single women did not go out alone after dark in Mexico City, so I spent my evenings those early days in Mexico reading War and Peace, which I had never been able to get into before.
I got down from the bus in front of the Fine Arts Museum, breathing in the clean smells of wet bushes and morning blossoms and the beautiful delicate trees. Before I entered the park, I bought a pan dulce from a delivery boy pedaling past, his huge sombrero with the upturned brim carefully balanced upon his head and piled high with the tasty little buns, still warm from his mother’s ovens.
Marble statues dotted the paths throughout the park, where later on in the day workers from the buildings across the street would take their lunchtime paseo. My favorite statue was one of a young naked girl in beige stone, kneeling, closely folded in upon herself, head bent, greeting the dawn. As I walked through the fragrant morning quiet in the Alameda, the nearby sounds of traffic increasing yet dimming, I felt myself unfolding like some large flower, as if the statue of the kneeling girl had come alive, raising her head to look full-faced into the sun. As I stepped out into the early morning flow of the avenida I felt the light and beauty of the park shining out of me, and the woman lighting her coals in a brazier on the corner smiled back at it in my face.
It was in Mexico City those first few weeks that I started to break my life-long habit of looking down at my feet as I walked along the street. There was always so much to see, and so many interesting and open faces to read, that I practiced holding my head up as I walked, and the sun felt hot and good on my face. Wherever I went, there were brown faces of every hue meeting mine, and seeing my own color reflected upon the streets in such great numbers was an affirmation for me that was brand-new and very exciting. I had never felt visible before, nor even known I lacked it.
I had not made any friends in Mexico City, although I existed quite happily on part-English, part-Spanish conversations with the chambermaid about the weather, my clothes, and the bidet; with the señora from whom I bought my daily evening meal of two hot tamales wrapped in cornhusks and a bottle of blue-labeled milk; and with the day clerk of the small second-class hotel where I had my tiny room.
At the end of my first week, I went out to the new bemuraled University City and registered for two courses in the history and ethnology of Mexico, and in folklore. I began to think of looking around for cheaper and more permanent living accommodations. Even with eating inexpensive foods bought from street vendors, not being able to cook was cutting into my small store of money. It also restricted my diet greatly, since I ate only those foods I could be sure would not give me the diarrhea which was the visitors’ downfall in Mexico City.
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 café that occupied one whole corner of the town square. Strolling m
usicians 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 pato-ganso, 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.
