Zami

by Audre Lorde

  My hair was still damp from the shower, and my bare feet itched from the dew-wet grass between our houses. I was suddenly aware that it was 3:30 in the morning.

  ‘Would you like some more coffee?’ I offered.

  She regarded me at length, unsmiling, almost wearily.

  ‘Is that what you came back for, more coffee?’

  All through waiting for the calendador to heat, all through showering and washing my hair and brushing my teeth, until that very moment, I had thought of nothing but wanting to hold Eudora in my arms, so much that I didn’t care that I was also terrified. Somehow, if I could manage to get myself back up those steps in the moonlight, and if Eudora was not already asleep, then I would have done my utmost. That would be my piece of the bargain, and then what I wanted would somehow magically fall into my lap.

  Eudora’s grey head moved against the bright serape-covered wall behind her, still regarding me as I stood over her. Her eyes wrinkled and she slowly smiled her lopsided smile, and I could feel the warm night air between us collapse as if to draw us together.

  I knew then that she had been hoping I would return. Out of wisdom or fear, Eudora waited for me to speak.

  Night after night we had talked until dawn in this room about language and poetry and love and the good conduct of living. Yet we were strangers. As I stood there looking at Eudora, the impossible became easier, almost simple. Desire gave me courage, where it had once made me speechless. With almost no thought I heard myself saying,

  ‘I want to sleep with you.’

  Eudora straightened slowly, pushed the books from her bed with a sweep of her arm, and held out her hand to me.

  ‘Come.’

  I sat down on the edge of the bed, facing her, our thighs touching. Our eyes were on a level now, looking deeply into each other. I could feel my heart pounding in my ears, and the high steady sound of the crickets.

  ‘Do you know what you’re saying?’ Eudora asked softly, searching my face. I could smell her like the sharp breath of wildflowers.

  ‘I know,’ I said, not understanding her question. Did she think I was a child?

  ‘I don’t know if I can,’ she said, still softly, touching the sunken place on her nightshirt where her left breast should have been. ‘And you don’t mind this?’

  I had wondered so often how it would feel under my hands, my lips, this different part of her. Mind? I felt my love spread like a shower of light surrounding me and this woman before me. I reached over and touched Eudora’s face with my hands.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Her eyes were still on my face.

  ‘Yes, Eudora.’ My breath caught in my throat as if I’d been running. ‘I’m very sure.’ If I did not put my mouth upon hers and inhale the spicy smell of her breath my lungs would burst.

  As I spoke the words, I felt them touch and give life to a new reality within me, some half-known self come of age, moving out to meet her.

  I stood, and in two quick movements slid out of my dress and underclothes. I held my hand down to Eudora. Delight. Anticipation. A slow smile mirroring my own softened her face. Eudora reached over and passed the back of her hand along my thigh. Goose-flesh followed in the path of her fingers.

  ‘How beautiful and brown you are.’

  She rose slowly. I unbuttoned her shirt and she shrugged it off her shoulders till it lay heaped at our feet. In the circle of lamplight I looked from her round firm breast with its rosy nipple erect to her scarred chest. The pale keloids of radiation burn lay in the hollow under her shoulder and arm down across her ribs. I raised my eyes and found hers again, speaking a tenderness my mouth had no words yet for. She took my hand and placed it there, squarely, lightly, upon her chest. Our hands fell. I bent and kissed her softly upon the scar where our hands had rested. I felt her heart strong and fast against my lips. We fell back together upon her bed. My lungs expanded and my breath deepened with the touch of her warm dry skin. My mouth finally against hers, quick-breathed, fragrant, searching, her hand entwined in my hair. My body took charge from her flesh. Shifting slightly, Eudora reached past my head toward the lamp above us. I caught her wrist. Her bones felt like velvet and quicksilver between my tingling fingers.

  ‘No,’ I whispered against the hollow of her ear. ‘In the light.’

  Sun poured through the jacarandas outside Eudora’s window. I heard the faint and rhythmical whirr-whoosh of Tomas’s scythe as he cut back the wild banana bushes from the walk down by the pool.

  I came fully awake with a start, seeing the impossible. The june-bug I had squashed with a newspaper at twilight, so long before, seemed to be moving slowly up the white-painted wall. It would move a few feet up from the floor, fall back, and then start up again. I grabbed for my glasses from the floor where I had dropped them the night before. With my glasses on, I could see that there was a feather-thin line of ants descending from the adobe ceiling down the wall to the floor where the junebug was lying. The ants, in concert, were trying to hoist the carcass straight up the vertical wall on their backs, up to their hole on the ceiling. I watched in fascination as the tiny ants lifted their huge load, moved, lost it, then lifted again.

  I half-turned and reached over to touch Eudora lying against my back, one arm curved over our shared pillow. The pleasure of our night flushed over me like sun on the walls of the light-washed colorful room. Her light brown eyes opened, studying me as she came slowly out of sleep, her sculptured lips smiling, a little bit open, revealing the gap beside her front teeth. I traced her mouth with my finger. For a moment I felt exposed, unsure, suddenly wanting reassurance that I had not been found wanting. The morning air was still dew-damp, and the smell of our loving lay upon us.

  As if reading my thoughts, Eudora’s arm came down around my shoulders, drawing me around and to her, tightly, and we lay holding each other in the Mexican morning sunlight that flooded through her uncovered casement windows. Tomas, the caretaker, sang in soft Spanish, keeping time with his scythe, and the sounds drifted in to us from the compound below.

  ‘What an ungodly hour,’ Eudora laughed, kissing the top of my head and jumping over me with a long stride. ‘Aren’t you hungry?’ With her towel around her neck, Eudora made huevos, scrambled eggs Mexican-style, and real café con leche for our breakfast. We ate at the gaily painted orange table between the tiny kitchen and her bedroom, smiling and talking and feeding each other from our common plate.

  There was room for only one of us at the square shallow sink in the kitchen. As I washed dishes to insure an ant-free afternoon, Eudora leaned on the doorpost, smoking lazily. Her hipbones flared like wings over her long legs. I could feel her quick breath on the side of my neck as she watched me. She dried the dishes, and hung the towel over a tin mask on the kitchen cabinet.

  ‘Now let’s go back to bed,’ she muttered, reaching for me through the Mexican shirt I had borrowed to throw over myself. ‘There’s more.’

  By this time the sun was passing overhead. The room was full of reflected light and the heat from the flat adobe over us, but the wide windows and the lazy ceiling fan above kept the sweet air moving. We sat in bed sipping iced coffee from a pewter mug.

  When I told Eudora I didn’t like to be made love to, she raised her eyebrows. ‘How do you know?’ she said, and smiled as she reached out and put down our coffee cup. ‘That’s probably because no one has ever really made love to you before,’ she said softly, her eyes wrinkling at the corners, intense, desiring.

  Eudora knew many things about loving women that I had not yet learned. Day into dusk. A brief shower. Freshness. The comfort and delight of her body against mine. The ways my body came to life in the curve of her arms, her tender mouth, her sure body – gentle, persistent, complete.

  We run up the steep outside steps to her roof, and the almost full moon flickers in the dark center wells of her eyes. Kneeling, I pass my hands over her body, along the now-familiar place below her left shoulder, down along her ribs. A part of her. The mark of the Amazon. For a woman wh
o seems spare, almost lean, in her clothing, her body is ripe and smooth to the touch. Beloved. Warm to my coolness, cool to my heat. I bend, moving my lips over her flat gentle stomach to the firm rising mound beneath.

  On Monday, I went back to school. In the next month, Eudora and I spent many afternoons together, but her life held complications about which she would say little.

  Eudora had been all over Mexico. She regaled me with tales of her adventures. She seemed always to have lived her life as if it were a story, a little grander than ordinary. Her love of Mexico, her adopted land, was deep and compelling, like an answer to my grade-school fantasies. She knew a great deal about the folkways and beliefs of the different peoples who had swept across the country in waves long ago, leaving their languages and a small group of descendants to carry on the old ways.

  We went for long rides through the mountains in her Hudson convertible. We went to the Brincas, the traditional Moorish dances in Tepotzlán. She told me about the Olmec stone heads of African people that were being found in Tabasco, and the ancient contacts between Mexico and Africa and Asia that were just now coming to light. We talked about the legend of the China Poblana, the Asian-looking patron saint of Puebla. Eudora could savor what was Zapotec, Toltec, Mixtec, Aztec in the culture, and how much had been so terribly destroyed by Europeans.

  ‘That genocide rivals the Holocaust of World War II,’ she asserted.

  She talked about the nomadic Lacondonian Indians, who were slowly disappearing from the land near Comitán in Chiapas, because the forests were going. She told me how the women in San Cristobál de las Casas give the names of catholic saints to their goddesses, so that they and their daughters can pray and make offerings in peace at the forest shrines without offending the catholic church.

  She helped me plan a trip south, to Oaxaca and beyond, through San Cristobál to Guatemala, and gave me the names of people with whom I could stay right through to the border. I planned to leave when school was over, and secretly, more and more, hoped she could come with me.

  Despite all the sightseeing I had done, and all the museums and ruins I had visited, and the books I had read, it was Eudora who opened those doors for me leading to the heart of this country and its people. It was Eudora who showed me the way to the Mexico I had come looking for, that nourishing land of light and color where I was somehow at home.

  ‘I’d like to come back here and work for a while,’ I said, as Eudora and I watched women dying wool in great vats around the market. ‘If I can get papers.’

  ‘Chica, you can’t run away to this country or it will never let you go. It’s too beautiful. That’s what the café con leche crowd can never admit to themselves. I thought it’d be easier here, myself, to live like I wanted to, say what I wanted to say, but it isn’t. It’s just easier not to, that’s all. Sometimes I think I should have stayed and fought it out in Chicago. But the winters were too damned cold. And gin was too damned expensive.’ She laughed and pushed back her hair.

  As we got back into the car to drive home, Eudora was unusually quiet. Finally, as we came over the tip of Morelos, she said, as if we’d continued our earlier conversation, ‘But it would be good if you came back here to work. Just don’t plan on staying too long.’

  Eudora and I only went to the Plaza once together. Although she knew the people who hung out there, she disliked most of them. She said it was because they had sided with Karen. ‘Frieda’s all right,’ she said, ‘but the rest of them don’t deserve a pit to hiss in.’

  We sat at a small table for two, and Jeroméo ambled over with his bird cages to show his wares to the newcomers. The ever-present chamaquitos came to beg centavos and errands. Even the strolling mariachi players passed by to see if we were a likely prospect for serenading. But only Tammy, irrepressible and pre-adolescent, bounded over to our table and leaned possessively against it, eager for conversation.

  ‘Are you coming shopping with me tomorrow?’ she inquired. We were going to buy a turtle to keep her duck company.

  I told her yes, hugged her, and then patted her fanny. ‘See you tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘Now the tongues can wag again,’ Eudora said, bitterly. I looked at her questioningly.

  ‘Nobody knows anything about us,’ I said, lightly. ‘And besides, everybody minds their own business around here.’

  Eudora looked at me for a moment as if she was wondering who I was.

  The sun went down and Jeroméo covered his birds. The lights on the bandstand came on, and Maria went around, lighting candles on the tables. Eudora and I paid our bill and left, walking around the closed market and down Guerrero hill toward Humboldt No. 24. The air was heavy with the smell of flowers and woodfire, and the crackle of frying grasshoppers from the vendors’ carts lining Guerrero hill.

  The next afternoon when Tammy and I came from the market, we joined Frieda and her friends at their table. Ellen was there, with her cat, and Agnes with her young husband Sam, who was always having to go to the border for something or other.

  ‘Did we interrupt something?’ I asked, since they had stopped talking.

  ‘No, dear, just old gossip,’ Frieda said, drily.

  ‘I see you’re getting to know everybody in town,’ Agnes said brightly, sitting forward with a preliminary smile. I looked up to see Frieda frowning at her.

  ‘We were just saying how much better Eudora looks these days,’ Frieda said, with finality, and changed the subject. ‘Do you kids want café or helada?’

  It bothered me that Frieda sometimes treated me like her peer and confidante, and at other times like Tammy’s contemporary.

  Later, I walked Frieda and Tammy home, and just before I turned off, Frieda said off-handedly, ‘Don’t let them razz you about Eudora, she’s a good woman. But she can be trouble.’

  I pondered her words all the way up to the compound.

  That spring, McCarthy was censured. The Supreme Court decision on the desegregation of schools was announced in the english newspaper, and for a while all of us seemed to go crazy with hope for another kind of america. Some of the café con leche crowd even talked about going home.

  SUPREME COURT OF US DECIDES AGAINST SEPARATE EDUCATION FOR NEGROES. I clutched the Saturday paper and read again. It wasn’t even a headline. Just a box on the lower front page.

  I hurried down the hill towards the compound. It all felt monumental and confusing. The Rosenbergs were dead. But this case which I had only been dimly aware of through the NAACP’s Crisis, could alter the whole racial climate in the states. The supreme court had spoken. For me. It had spoken in the last century, and I had learned its ‘separate but equal’ decision in school. Now something had actually changed, might actually change. Eating ice cream in Washington, DC was not the point; kids in the south being able to go to school was.

  Could there possibly, after all, be some real and fruitful relationship between me and that malevolent force to the north of this place?

  The court decision in the paper in my hand felt like a private promise, some message of vindication particular to me. Yet everybody in the Plaza this morning had also been talking about it, and the change this could make in american life.

  For me, walking hurriedly back to my own little house in this land of color and dark people who said negro and meant something beautiful, who noticed me as I moved among them – this decision felt like a promise of some kind that I half-believed in, in spite of myself, a possible validation.

  Hope. It was not that I expected it to alter radically the nature of my living, but rather that it put me actively into a context that felt like progress, and seemed part and parcel of the wakening that I called Mexico.

  It was in Mexico that I stopped feeling invisible. In the streets, in the buses, in the markets, in the Plaza, in the particular attention within Eudora’s eyes. Sometimes, half-smiling, she would scan my face without speaking. It made me feel like she was the first person who had ever looked at me, ever seen who I was. And not only did she see me, she
loved me, thought me beautiful. This was no accidental collision.

  I never saw Eudora actually drinking, and it was easy for me to forget that she was an alcoholic. The word itself meant very little to me besides derelicts on the Bowery. I had never known anyone with a drinking problem before. We never discussed it, and for weeks she would be fine while we went exploring together.

  Then something, I never knew what, would set her off. Sometimes she’d disappear for a few days, and the carport would be empty when I came from school.

  I hung around the compound in those afternoons, waiting to see her car drive in the back gate. Once I asked her afterwards where she’d been.

  ‘In every cantina in Tepotzlán,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘They know me.’ Her eyes narrowed as she waited for me to speak.

  I did not dare to question her further.

  She would be sad and quiet for a few days. And then we would make love.

  Wildly. Beautifully. But it only happened three times.

  Classes at the university ended. I made my plans to go south – Guatemala. I soon realized that Eudora was not coming with me. She had developed bursitis, and was often in a lot of pain. Sometimes in the early morning I heard furious voices coming through Eudora’s open windows. Hers and La Señora’s.

  I gave up my little house with its simple, cheerful long-windowed room, and stored my typewriter and extra suitcase at Frieda’s house. I was going to spend my last evening with Eudora, then take the second-class bus at dawn south to Oaxaca. It was a fifteen-hour trip.

  Tomás’s burro at the gate. Loud voices beneath the birdsong in the compound. La Señora almost knocking me over as she swept past me down Eudora’s steps. Tomás standing in Eudora’s entryway. On the orange table an unopened bottle of pale liquor with no label.

  ‘Eudora! What happened?’ I cried. She ignored me, speaking to Tomás in spanish, ‘And don’t give La Señora anything of mine again, understand? Here!’ She handed him two pesos from the wallet on the table.