For our Marginalia web feature, we ask writers to introduce us to one of their favorite works of literature by way of a short piece of prose. This week, Mariah Rigg—whose story "The All of It" appears in our Fall 2024 issue—considers a story from Woman Hollering Creek by Sandra Cisneros.
I’ve yet to meet or read a writer who does not practice yearning. Perhaps this is because to create is to reach through space and time—cutting, as bell hooks states, “across boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexual practice.” To yearn is to fill. To yearn is to sooth. To yearn is to dream. To yearn is to create.
In her story collection Woman Hollering Creek and especially in “Eyes of Zapata,” Sandra Cisneros abides by yearning. Here, Cisneros’s narrator, Inés, speaks to the sleeping form of her lover and the father of her children, Emiliano Zapata, leader of the Mexican Zapatista movement in the early twentieth century. Though Miliano, as Inés calls him, cannot hear her, Inés assures him of his safety. She tells him of her love.
I slow-circle and glide into the house, bringing the night-wind smell with me, fold myself back into my body. I haven’t left you. I don’t leave you, not ever. Do you know why? Because when you are gone I re-create you from memory. The scent of your skin, the mole above the broom of your mustache, how you fit in my palms. Your skin dark and rich as piloncillo. This face in my hands. I miss you. I miss you even now as you lie next to me.
The staccato succession of sentences—in this passage and throughout the story—spiral between the here/now and what is absent/past, always remaining centered around Inés’s yearning. The story Inés unfolds becomes a testimony which Miliano’s sleeping body must bear witness to. She tells him of her father’s life. She reminds Miliano of the promises he made and broke. She remembers their world before war, before nine years of famine and sickness and federales, and before Miliano’s betrayal hardened her and their love. She tells him of her mother’s passing, her dead body discovered beneath a man who was not Inés’s father. She foretells the future—Miliano’s, and beyond—how one day their son will betray his father’s legacy. And she reveals how she first came to fly, her heart leaving her body in Miliano’s absence. How she searched for Miliano only to find him in bed with another woman, sleeping as he did with her: “your foot in the hollow of her foot.”
In this story and the chosen paragraph, love and yearning spin into jealousy, bitterness, betrayal, and back again. Cisneros asks us to reckon with time as a landscape, moving between past, present, and future even as Inés assures the sleeping Miliano that he cannot change fate, that each of their lives is “one single thread already lived and nothing to be done about it.” Because Inés’s testimony occurs as Emiliano sleeps, she protects him from the man he is and will become. At the same time, Cisneros requires that we, as readers, hold all of it.
“Eyes of Zapata” ends with a rooster’s crow and the threat of Miliano’s waking. In this moment, Inés reaches again into the past, anchoring herself in a time where their love had not yet been tainted. She asks Miliano’s sleeping form to wait. She needs him to stay—in her bed and with her in memory. Cisneros’s ability to traverse time and space humanizes the historic figure of Emiliano Zapata. She weaves together the threads of two lives through the questions and obsessions to which Inés continually returns, resulting in a narrative fabric that is deeply rooted not just in yearning, but love, which is, perhaps, the center of all the best stories.