The House Within

Mireya Vargas
7/1/20

THE HOUSE WITHIN

One day in August they left the lifeless houses (...) In that hot and deaf midday, 

Ortiz's barren desolation felt deeper than ever; anyone could perceive the overwhelming 

message of its spoils. No human being passed through its streets, nor did he take 

refuge within the torn walls of the houses; it was as if everyone had escaped

 terrified at the outbreak of a cataclysm or from the curse of a cruel god.

From a miserable shanty house, one could hardly smell the death of a feverish 

sweating man rattled in the dirty threads of his hammock. Around him flies 

–green, fat, gleaming flies— calmly flew as the only flash of action, 

as the single revelation of life among the clods of the dead houses.

Miguel Otero Silva – Casas muertas.

House # 3

I was waiting for a cab in my home office. My house was divided into three: the actual living space, Centro Lyra’s headquarters, and two psychoanalyst’s rooms –one was my husband’s office and the other was rented to one of his colleagues for a while. I was with Nallibi, the housekeeper who had accompanied me in my different homes for more than 30 years –an adorable woman of bustling character from Sincelejo (Colombia) who was always singing. Also, with Yelitza, the faithful and loyal administrator of Centro Lyra, every inch a Caracas native. The three of us shared, without knowing it, my last coffee at House #3. Right before the taxi arrived, I felt the urge to make a desperate farewell tour of my home.

I entered through the main door –the one that is now completely covered with bars after the many assaults that violated #3— that lead to an intimate corridor that greeted those who arrived with an enormous oil painting of palm trees from the region of Paria by Adrián Pujol, the Venezuelan painter. Seeing that painting always transported me to the trips I made with the Fundación Proyecto Paria. That day was no exception. I crossed to where the sculpture by Miguel Sanoja, the Venezuelan sculptor, was hanging, which separated the hall from the living room. This was a strategic point of the house because, though you were inside, you could perceive the light that entered from the garden – that clear, clean and technicolor lighting, so characteristic of Caracas. I stood there and paused for a moment in the living room, while my gaze got lost in the garden. I stared at the orchids hanging to the right on a wall, the dwarf Rain Tree in the background, the miniature orchids on the ground, the Totumo tree to the left with its giant round green fruits…

Then I went to the kitchen. Its center piece, the core, is a huge window overlooking the imposing Ávila that brings everything together. As if it were a Cabré painting –the Venezuelan painter—, that window framed an endless study of the mountain: you could watch the dark outline that separates the mountain from the sky, the green tones and shadows that change according to the hour of the day and the passage of the clouds. That view was the inspiration for so many dishes from Caracas and from other parts of the world that I cooked in that splendid kitchen. Its modern looks made it seem like a showroom for kitchen appliance prodigies. Next to it was a bookshelf with selected cookbooks, and in the background, separated by a glass door, was a fern garden with my stone water filter and my turtle, Buendía, protecting the house.

Everyday everything would start there, in that kitchen, facing the Ávila ...

... In the morning, a good espresso coffee marked the beginning of the day, followed by breakfast with arepas –the bread of Venezuelan people— and a second coffee, in my case, to organize my workday. After breakfast Pablo would usually go to his office, which was very private. It had an interior garden, full of raffia and dwarf orchids, to which the light entered softly from a corner. There was a comfortable black leather sofa that welcomed and almost lulled the patients, López Pedraza’s bookshelf with all of Jung’s books and other bibliographic jewels stood in front like a Totem; his desk and chair were placed to one side and on the other wall was a giant picture that summarizes the entire genealogy of the Greek Gods. One could say that Pablo and his patients were accompanied and protected by Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite, Hermes, Artemis, Athena, and especially by Hestia, the goddess protector of all houses.

While walking to his office, I inevitably began remembering Pablo's routines: when he would go to meet his patients, he would always take a quick glance at his small herbal garden next to the private corridor, in which he had delicately planted thyme, basil, rosemary, parsley, coriander –all scents that  pleasantly filled his office at all times…

After breakfast, I would return to my study. That was my real workspace, different from the office I had in the other part of the house, in Lyra’s Center headquarters, which I used mostly for meetings with my co-workers or clients. Since I married Pablo, I have always worked in my own study at home, with my laptop as my sole companion and the support of my Eams chair for reading hours. In my study, there was a large desk and a beautiful bookshelf designed by the French-born artist from Lara, Marc Flayo. It stretched wall-to-wall and was filled with a rich selection of titles I had acquired over the years of analytical psychology; Latin American, Spanish and English literature; sociology and anthropology titles; and a collection on Venezuelan history –many of which I treasured during my years as a professor at the University, my professional life, and as a researcher…

That day, my last day at home, I took another look at that “laboratory” of projects and writing that was my study. I also saw for the last time the garden and walked through its corridors until I got to the interior patio of our room, which also led to Pablo's sauna and an external shower to bathe naked in the light of the moon or in broad daylight, protected by the fern curtain. Our room didn’t face the Ávila - on the recommendation of a Feng Shui expert- but instead was open to an interior patio full of ferns, raffia bushes planted in a row, and orchids. 

After doing the whole tour, I walked back to the office. 

“Would you like another little coffee, Mrs. Mireya?” –asked Nallibi, affectionately. I said yes to her guayoyo (our version of a light American Coffee), and to myself I said: “yes to our shared life, I said yes to that last Christmas in Caracas”, as if I were raising my cup to make an important and heart-felt toast. That day was when I saw Ávila for the last time. As soon as we left the gate, the house closed behind us.

***

My little corner in the world

To think of my private life is to think of my house. It’s the inner place that collects all my lived experience. It’s in the memories of the houses where I lived that I can reconstruct the history of my life, be it with memories that give me shelter or those difficult to inhabit. “The house is our corner of the world”, said Gaston Bachelard. According to him, it is our first universe, which allows us to discover the differences between the interior world and the exterior. The house is the interior space where our emotions, memories, complexes, images, shadows inhabit and, ultimately, where our psychic life occurs.

When I started my psychotherapy with Dr. Rafael López Pedraza, the first dream I told him was, in a way, a tour of my paternal grandfather's house:

I go to my grandfather's house and walk to the backyard where the dog, Luci, is playing. I walk through the garage door and then reach a door that leads to a basement where there are portraits of my family from several generations, stored food over a sideboard and piled up furniture. I keep going down the stairs and arrive at another basement that has damp earth on the floor, people from other countries who spoke different languages, mythological figures, and some prehistoric animals. I keep going down the stairs, now a spiral staircase, and reach the last basement. There I find a magnificent library of thousands of titles, beautiful leather-bound books of different colors, old books, real jewels. At the far end of this library is my paternal grandfather, sitting with his glasses and khaki pants, reading, holding a pipe in his hand. I look at myself.

The psyche is like that house with different rooms, floors, basements and attic, full of levels that contain more and more older memories –some even in hidden and unexpected places. Its foundations are built on universal experiences and from an immaterial time, which is not measured in hours and is conveyed in images. The house is like the geology of the psyche. It symbolically represents and displays memories and allows the characters that were in their creation to interact; the synchronic and the diachronic merge in an almost mythical time. The space of the house is everything; it’s the space of the soul.

For this reason, knowing myself continues to be the task that occupies my life. In my quest for self-knowledge I revisit the long history of houses where I lived; the houses that I lost; the houses that I sold, the houses that I rented, the houses that I long for, the houses I forgot and the houses that I desire. All of them are aspects of my life that intertwine; they are different dwellings, different emotions.

My grandmother and my mother always insisted that one of my priorities should be to have my own house –for both of them that was the main goal in life. I took this advice seriously. I acquired my first home very soon, just after I graduated as a sociologist. I bought it on blueprints, then I sold it and bought a second bigger one, where I built my adult life. After an emotional landslide, I left that house and moved to the one that I had on the beach. Then I moved into my third house, where my new married life settled, which incidentally was named #3. I lost that last house in Venezuela prematurely due to the national circumstances. Since I left it, I have spent several years as a foreigner. Now I have a new apartment (an unwanted one) and I live in another people’s land trying to inhabit myself, to recover my house, to rediscover my corner in the world.

Each new house in Venezuela was a new source of enthusiasm, of excitement. First there was the negotiation process. It was a thrill for my hermetic nature that would only come to an end when we could arrive at a price that felt right for the both parties. Then came the stage of renovation, arranging things, the decoration, discovering the spaces, the corners, the light in the passing of the day, the shadows at night and the silences. And, finally, came the true establishing of territory, making the house a living place: locating, clustering, and knowing the spaces, making the house mine by turning it into the stage of my emotional life, a place to create memories that I could later remember.

I sold house # 3 virtually, as if anticipating what my life would become. My sister Gilda –the eldest, the loyal, the unconditional one— took care of everything. Dismantling the house from a distance was an act that verged on madness for me. I was torn apart with pain. Deciding what I was going to give away from a distance made me feel that the looting of my life continued. Especially because not knowing consciously what the thieves had left in the looting during my absence, what my two sisters, my brother, and nieces inherited, not being entirely clear what they shared, made me feel that I didn’t have any control; I felt unable to bring order to my house. I hated and loved my sisters for taking care of this terrible process that deep down was nothing else but taking my life apart and moving it. It was hard for me to endure the pain of selling the house and to make the arrangements to hand it to the next owners. It still sickens me to know that a lifetime is piled up in Pablo's brother's house, which is now everyone's deposit; it is not house but an attic, a cellar, the least lively part of the house. It is there where the few things that I decided to keep are stacked –books, art, some designer furniture— the rest was taken away by the country’s emotional and moral landslide.

I feel as if I have lost the ability to inhabit myself. Inhabiting implies being able to settle (a house, the property par excellence, is a property that does not move, with solid bases) and I have moved four times in the United States since I left. First Washington DC, passing through New York, Miami, now California and in a few weeks I will back to Miami. I have been a tenant and I am tired of not being able to live within myself. The houses I have lived in are strange to me. This unsettled feeling is shared by my loved ones in Venezuela, whose houses have mutated in such a way that it is very difficult to recognize them. The deterioration of the interiors of the houses of many of them is a fact. 

“Housing”, living in the real house and inhabiting the house within has become a poor, dilapidated, experience. Venezuelan houses more than inhabited are taken, deteriorated, dead. I would like to delve into that experience and think about it and try to inhabit myself by looking into how I myself, my friends, loved ones, and acquaintances live in their houses and that way I hope to make myself a new home from these images and inhabit my house once more.

***

Río Lama, Apt. 3

The WhatsApp rings and a I receive a message from Luisa, my soulmate. I call her back. It takes her almost a minute to pick up. I see her toothless, she lost her front teeth some time ago because of a problem with her gums. She was only able to do half of her treatment; she never managed to raise the two thousand dollars for the dental prosthesis. I try to look without seeing. It pains me so much to see her like this. I remember her Venusian halo, her feminine coquetry, her need to always be perfectly groomed, impeccably dressed, always as if in her Sunday best. She speaks with shame, covering her mouth with her hand, trying to avoid the vision of the dark hole in her mouth.

Luisa spends the day secluded in her apartment. Practically, she hasn’t left home since the gas shortage began. The last time she was able to fill the tank was a couple of months ago. During all this time she used each liter wisely and carefully calculated when to stop using her car to leave enough gas for a possible emergency.

During our last video conference, she told me about her hero’s journey in the underdevelopment. Her first attempt to refill her car’s tank was a few days ago. She stood in line for twenty-four hours and was number two hundred and fifty, in a cue of nearly three kilometers. Next to her there were about four hundred people set to do the same feat, some of them in the subsidized queue and some in the queue of those who pay in dollars. In that first attempt she did not succeed. The 18-wheeler didn’t arrive with the fuel. She returned to the house and began to cry, until her brothers encouraged her to make a second attempt. 

That second attempt, she spent two days sleeping in her car, with a folding chair and a face mask, urinating into a plastic container and eating her “camping menu”: soda crackers, a can of sardines, buns and water. Once more her attempt was unsuccessful. Her reserve for emergencies was compromised. 

As in a fairy tales, it was on the third attempt that she was able to achieve the feat: she was able to put in twenty liters. Nonetheless, she didn’t return home victorious or feeling that she had grown with all the tribulations of her unpleasant journey. If anything, she felt diminished, humiliated, and to some extent stateless. How can there be a homeland when the territory and even what is under the ground has been lost? 

While we were talking, Luisa moved around several time. First to find a place to avoid the noise from the street, then to find the charger for her laptop and finally to be closer to the router because the internet was failing. While moving from one point to another I was able to verify what I had already seen in another virtual tour. She has converted her house into a kind of warehouse for food and furniture. The apartment was packed with furniture from her sister who went abroad, objects from her mother’s house, who died seven years ago. In a way, she is almost a refugee in her own home. The house is no longer her home but a shack made from scraps of the ghost houses of others. Living in that apartment is like living in a camp with very precarious conditions. The power goes out daily from four to eight hours. Many times, she spends whole nights without electricity. She describes what it’s like and it’s really depressing: “I lie in bed without a fan and the heat is suffocating… I take off my clothes and stay only in my panties ... and even so I can’t take the heat, I’m all sweaty and sticky. I stare at the ceiling and I wait ... most of the times I end up sitting in the dining room waiting for dawn.”

Luisa has been equipping herself with artefacts and gadgets she never thought she would be interested in: manual fans with solar batteries, with protectors for household appliances, with rechargeable lamps… “sooner or later, they all break down and I put them in the corners of the apartment to see if I can repair them somehow or if I can use them to repair something else... we have become like Cubans who make a replacement of any unlikely part and can even manage to repair a car engine with dental floss ...” Her house is now a cemetery of refrigerators, televisions, appliances and there are rooms where she no longer enters to avoid seeing "the corpses ..." "The refrigerator with two vertical doors stopped working and I changed it first for a smaller one, but eventually both of them melted down, now I only have the one from office but lately it’s not cooling much."

Luisa alternates cooking on an electric stove with a gas cooker. But there is no direct gas service in her building so she always has to “hunt down” the service of the truck that brings the gas cylinders, which is near to extinction. "You never know when it will arrive ... sometimes we have to wait up to a month to buy a cylinder. Meanwhile, I do what I can: if there is power, I cook on the stove, if there is no electricity but I still have gas I use the cooker, but most of the time I have manage with cold bread ..." Luisa is a great cook, especially of Italian cuisine; since she was married to an Italian aviator she learned to make fabulous recipes. Now that she doesn’t have an engineering job nor is working as project monitor, she has tried to be a culinary entrepreneur, but the business has been as erratic as the utilities on which she depends. Her kitchen has been transformed into a food laboratory, where she incessantly tries new recipes, practices bakery, but ends up not selling much so she keeps gaining weight.

Luisa is very close to me. The image of her deterioration is an impossible image for me, perhaps because it’s precisely an image of impossibility.

What happened to that life that used to be so similar to mine? What made the difference? Was it because I left and I moved from the impossible? Is it that she remained anchored to an idealized country and she can’t detach herself? Is it the result of the economic limitations or is it the consequence of preferring to deal with what is known, with the familiar? Is it perhaps an attachment to home to avoid being uprooted? It can be all of the above or none of them, maybe it's just destiny.

During the last conversation we had, --we speak almost on a daily basis— she shared, as always, her longing for the past. She spoke about her memories of her mother and grandmother, of the daily episodes with her siblings, about her house as it was before, but she also shared her fears. She dreamt that she was very ill but that she didn’t die in spite of it; the feeling of agony was similar to the one she lives on a daily basis. The power, the gas, the fear of getting sick, the almost non-existent insurance coverage, the insecurity in the streets, the shortage, the not having how to get around due to the gas, the shortages, not having savings, not having a job to produce money, living locked up… the deterioration of her house, the loss of the love ones who left… all of this, together and at the same time, little by little making everyday life agonizing during twenty long years... Seeing her life plunge into deterioration, seeing her house become a rat-hole, a prison where she lives alone, frightens her very much.

That same night I dreamt that:

I was at an artist's house and they were going to interview me. The interview began and suddenly they stopped because the reporter’s device was missing. I was waiting distracted, I saw the artist´s daughter´s painting, and suddenly I noticed that the pause was taking a long time. I went to look for her in the next room and I realized that she is with my husband, lying on his chest ... I got mad and pulled her hair out, but since she didn't react, I grabbed a stick and knocked her down. I was angry and took off the disposable gloves I had on for the coronavirus and left.

Luisa and I talk about her anger and fear as two overwhelming emotions present in our lives. Despite everything, Luisa is still standing, taking care of herself, living at home, struggling with life. Perhaps it is fear that keeps us attached to life. It is as if that fear –understood as a kind of suffering or disturbance derived from the impression of an ill-future, destructive and painful—, became flesh, became consciousness, is here to transform us. Luisa is afraid and does not run away from home. Curiously enough, it’s the same fear that allows you to preserve your family and your inner home.

***

Alta Florida, Apt. 2

In the time before I left my house and country, I was terribly afraid when I had to wait for the garage gate to close or open to park the car inside. I imposed my own curfew (increasingly early and strict) and I had the perfectly choreographed routine to do it in the least amount of time: remote control and keys in one hand a couple of kilometers before, obsessive glances at the rearview mirror, a message to Pablo saying “I’m on my way” ... My street was not closed with a surveillance booth like many of them were in the neighborhood. Since my friend Antonia had been kidnapped, I felt that I was less than a degree away from this tragedy of ours. 

I would constantly relive Antonia’s story in my head.

Lying on the floor of a car, with a gun to her head, Antonia was in a life and death situation that began one afternoon while she was waiting for her gate to open. Two armed men approached her and pulled her into a van that drove her to the old road to La Guaira. “Get in there, you whore ...” they told her. They covered her with a black cloth with a scent of death. That Venus, who is Antonia, had to be covered at all costs. A cold barrel pressed against her temple. Antonia had shrunken to fit in the narrow space. She felt a suffocating fear and was breathless.

She has no idea how long they drove round in the van, it seemed like days. An incessant litany of insults and profanity accompanied that horrid journey. At a certain point they changed to a car. A different guy was waiting for her inside. He felt up her breasts, with his foot he touched up her buttocks while his partner, who held her at gun point all the way, let his wicked imagination flow out loud, telling her the terrible thing that they could do to her. Antonia trembled with dread, her hands and feet were frozen. It got dark. Suddenly, she overheard a call to the eldest of her children. One of the thugs said: “It seems like they don’t love you very much, honey. That son of yours is freaking out and doesn’t want to let go of the dough ... we have to go to the hideout”. They arrived at a shabby house in a place she did not recognize. The hours went by in which the groping, the insults, and all kinds of acts of cruelty and sadism happened without her –or anyone else— being able to stop them. A cold chill ran down her spine. Her legs were numb from the trip. She felt very thirsty, but she couldn’t even drink the water they gave her. She prayed as much as she could. Her prayers were like mantras without order or sequence.

One of the members of the gang was so high that he wanted to take advantage of her. I never knew if they raped her. It was too painful to talk about it. After a few more hours they told her that her son “had released the papers” and that they would return her immediately. The “express kidnapping” ended after eleven hours. They released her at the entrance of Catia, right at the junction of the Caracas, La Guaira and Cútira highway. It was half past four in the morning and being at that place at that hour was as dangerous as being in the hideout with the gorillas. She was so dazed and paralyzed that she couldn’t even walk. After fifteen minutes that felt eternal, her older son’s bodyguard picked her up in his armored truck, and they returned to her house. They induced her a sleep cure. So much reality was impossible to bear. The freight of those eleven hours remained in her skin for a long time.

***

“Antonia, I’m here, open the door, please” –I tell her after I manage to enter the building where she now has her apartment, in Altamira, at the foot of Ávila. She lives there with her husband. Since she moved there, three years ago, she has made it her fortress. It has been more than two years since she left Ávila Residence.

Before she moved, we lived nearby. Her house was the most pleasant and tranquil oasis that you can imagine. A thirteen-thousand-square-foot apartment that accommodated Antonia and her husband’s “empty nest” lifestyle after their two children left. The house was especially well decorated: a wall of stones and ferns with a soft waterfall that slid down the stones “to move the energies” was at the entrance. Next to it was an old console and family photos that would greet you upon your arrival. Then followed several rooms that opened onto the garden with different lighting and colors.

The terrace overlooking the garden was our favorite place. We would have coffee there, gather or have a meal with friends at a well-served table where all the cutlery, tablecloths, glassware, and even the flowers were always harmoniously arranged. The garden was huge and well kept: a collection of ferns, flowers of all kinds, small colorful bushes, and an extraordinary variety of trees grew. Antonia was passionate about ornamentation and had an excellent gardener, Jesús, who we shared, who took care of our respective gardens. Her house overlooked El Ávila, like mine, and it was a peaceful place to contemplate the afternoon light, which was the moment of the day Antonia enjoyed the most.

When I bought my house, Antonia devoted herself completely to the gardens’ arrangements. She gave me many of the ferns from her house and I filled mine with Venezuelan species of orchids and other types of orchids, with scented bushes and tropical plants. Her dedication to decorating each room filled them psychic value, brought them to life and gave them harmony. I will always cherish those moments that I can’t allow myself to forget.

One day her younger son told her that they had sold their house because it was a millionaire business exchange (literally millions of dollars), perhaps due to the money laundering that occurs frequently in the country. She and her husband, like puppets, were subjected to the horror of not participating in anything. They weren’t part of the negotiation, nor were given a choice if they wanted to stay or go, nor were they able to pick a new home. Everything was decided for them. She was a hostage once more. They sold their beloved house, which they had decorated and organized with such pleasure, with everything that was inside it. Antonia depart alone with just her suitcases, stripped of all the things she would have wanted to keep, even if she was going to a smaller house. It was as if all of a sudden everything vanished; as if a new express kidnapping was taking place. The snatching of the objects was also the abduction of memories. The loss of the house was the loss of her home. She lost that place of protection, her center.

Her sisters, like those of Psyche in mythology, full of envy, plundered her clothes, her shoes, her cosmetics, her lingerie. Antonia couldn’t figure out what to choose, nor how to stop them. Their insidious comments stunned her greatly. She again was like in a dark nightmare from which she didn’t know how (and perhaps didn’t want) to wake up. All her kitchen appliances, everything that was in the pantry, her table linen, her silverware, and works of art were stolen either by the new owners or by her sisters. In a way, it reminded me what I went through when I had to take my house apart from a distance.

It was a long move because they had to do some remodeling at the new apartment. The days passed by drying and annihilating everything in its path. Moving represented losing the colors of her house, the joy of the meetings on the terrace, losing the excitement of the preparation of meals with friends and family during the weekends, losing the selective shopping that she would do at the Chacao Market, losing the ritual of putting flowers on the table and ferns at the entrance. Antonia was losing enthusiasm for life as she was losing her house, until she moved. Her husband was lost in his memories and secluded himself in his little routines, barely noticing the landslide Antonia was experiencing.

I have dreamed many times of Antonia. The dreams are full of emotionality and a lot of hermetic connection –of great communication and soul connection. In one of them, we are in a hair salon and she is getting a manicure and her hair done. I am getting a pedicure and we are all having a glass of sparkling wine. We are all naked and at the back of the room there is a snake biting its tail. I think of totality, wholeness, and I take a glance at Antonia. She looks back at me and we both smile.

A new house, a new confusion. A new drama loomed over her head. Nothing that was there looked like her style, nothing was chosen by her. She inherited a fully equipped apartment, just like it looked in the real estate agency’s webpage. The furniture was not at all of her taste or style, the atmosphere was strange and the exterior gardens were depressing and lacked any charm. However, Antonia, in a vote for life, decided to continue living. However, now she raised the walls the walls of her psyche and decided she would never leave “her bubble” again.

She began by inhabiting her house, she tailored everything to her liking. She began filling and remaking the spaces, organizing them in a new way. The house was beautifully transformed but she never went out again. She arranged everything so she wouldn’t have to leave it anymore. She gave up her mundane pleasures: her new year trips to Los Roques, the birthdays of her only grandson, the visits to her mother, the family gatherings with her sisters,  dining out in restaurants, going to the gym, for tea at the club, her cooking lessons with her friends, to her meditation and yoga sessions, her visits to the Chacao market, the trips to the nursery of Sartenejas to choose her ferns... Everything arrives at her house, which she hopes not to leave until she or her husband dies.

Inhabiting herself became a great literalization; a regression that has brought her to almost an embryonic state in the womb of her home. Her contact with the world is now a click away, despite her enormous difficulty in managing technology. 

I stay parked in the elevator that leads to her house and wait a while. “Antonia open for me, please, it’s me” and she appears pale, but with her beautiful smile and the brightness in her eyes intact.

***

Manantial, Apt 4

My soul weeps for the recent death of Carlos. A heart attack that ended his life forever. Carlos was a friend during the university years, with whom I set up strategies and carried out political battles to transform reality. Maybe he was the only one of our group of friends who was really convinced that we could change the world and that didn't abandon this idea in maturity. He sought to generate this change through political fighting, and I was looking for other paths to overcome poverty. We didn't see each other so often, but there was always a connection, one that became stronger after our exile, and by sharing that experience that costs people so much to understand unless they live it.

There is something uncanny in the journeys of those of us who leave the country and our houses behind. It contains something of an unknown (mis-)adventure. It involves losing the familiar or at the very least suspending it, as the misfortune of pursuing one's life among the unrecognizable involves. Abandoning the home can mean leaving the house empty forever and this looms over the immigrant like a curse (at least some of us feel this way about it). For some, like Carlos, the waiting to discover if this abandonment is temporary or permanent is resolved by death. For others, like me, it is by means of moving and by getting rid of this burden, that you find a way to live with yourself and live in another house. 

Carlos had to flee from the country. His only crime was to have been an exemplary public functionary and a loving father. "The only thing that I brought with me was my backpack. My house and my whole life were left buried by my escape…", he told me in one of our conversations. "I am staying in Colombia because it is closer. I hope to go back home, I miss my family, my house, and my life in it". 

He told me more than once how he had to throw himself out into the unsheltered world, the non-place, all of a sudden. Although I wasn't there when it happened, I have gone over it in my mind so often that I have built it up as a memory of my own.

It was nine o'clock at night and a telephone call warned Carlos that the government security forces were going to arrest him in his house. A chill ran down his spine, that fear that all Venezuelans feel when we see members of the state organisms approaching. Instinctive fear, fear about possible imminent death or disappearance. It is like that basic fear that you imagine primitive men felt at the darkness of night which they couldn't explain. How much fear have I felt since this regime installed itself! It has become a daily feeling that affects everything we know. Suffering it every day doesn't make it lighter to bear, nor easier to express, maybe because it leaves you alone with irrational emotions and although one becomes a little hardened, this doesn't mean you are stronger, nor able to domesticate this uninhabitable void. 

Carlos was alone in the house when the warning came (his wife and children lived in Argentina once he became a public functionary). He ran to the closet and grabbed what he could: a pair of pants, two t-shirts, two pairs of underpants, a pair of socks, a book and photos of his daughters. That was all the capital he could take to meet his destiny. He ran around all the corners of his house: a large living room with a window opening onto the Avila, that giant welcoming mountain that embraces the city. Those enormous windows that are open to the breeze blowing down from the peaks, and to the nighttime twinkling lights of the city at 1.000 meters above sea level, and to the golden daytime light that illuminates works of art that Carlos had beautifully arranged over his desk, with his computer, and the bookcase full of books he had devoured all his life. That corner, so much his, that was his home, just as much as Venezuela, was all being left behind. He lost his dwelling place. 

Outside the car was waiting that would take him on a journey that lasted various days and involved changing various vehicles. He couldn't see the city because the darkness of the trunk blocked it, he didn't say goodbye to Caracas. During the journey and until he reached San Antonio de Táchira on the Venezuelan side of the Colombian border, he was almost always hidden in the trunk of the car: sometimes he sat in front, disguised, as a passenger. Those who were taking him would leave him in a spot where he could meet up with others who were also fleeing from Venezuela. "But I am not fleeing from Venezuela, but from the dictatorship", he thought. 

He walked hours and hours to reach the border. His white skin burnt red with the sun and he sweated oceans, because of the humidity. While walking, he totted up his life and wondered in amazement why he was going through this. 

He grew up in Lara in a traditional, highly religious family, devoted to The Divine Shepherdess, with a father who taught in the Lisandro Alvarado University. His house was the center of his life and the family the vital reference. In the streets of Nueva Segovia he grew up playing with neighbors, at marbles, at baseball using bottle tops, riding bikes, and slipping into political meetings. At home they always talked about the suffering of the people, about how bad the government was, about the church's commitment. His parents' house forged his inner home. 

He studied Economics in the Central University of Venezuela, where he was a university representative in the Council. His interest in politics developed along with his university life and later in his political participation inside the party. From early on he understood the social angle because he worked in development organizations, working on the social-political formation of community leaders. 

… And now this dark jungle, where did we lose our way as a country? he wondered. Maybe because we thought we had reached the promised land –although my psychotherapist would say "the promised land is when you are riding a donkey and you hang a carrot on a stick in front of him so he walks". 

Carlos told me how that night they slept in a kind of camp on the outskirts of the city. It was cold, the cold of the outdoors when you know what is coming is night, silence and more cold. Leaning against a banana tree, covered with his eternal denim jacket, he spent the first night. Everyone was silent, waiting for the sign to cross. A trail near the Puente Las Tienditas (The Bridge of the Little Stalls), was the path to the other side, to Cucuta, in Colombia. The next night nothing happened. There was an inspection on the Colombian side and it wasn't possible to approach the border. There were already people caught trying to cross and they were detained on the Venezuelan side. Desperation, anxiety marked the hours, one after another: for three days. There was little to eat, a "cold bullet", once a day. More waiting. No one washed, no one changed clothes, beards began to itch and Carlos was worried about the cough of one of the travelers.

They began to walk on the fourth day. It was in the early hours and they divided into two groups. Three on one side, four on the other. They followed the bank of the river along a broken path. They hurried, taking advantage of the dark, tripping over roots, all sounds magnified by fear, when suddenly they heard the shots of a machine gun and ran terrified at the imminent danger. At the second attempt they finally managed to sleep nearer the river, each time further from home. 

Of course, I can imagine Carlos' fear. This contagious fear borders on panic. "Will they catch me? Will I be able to cross the river? Will I be able to get far enough away so as not to come back? Will I see my house again? How will my house be without me? Abandoned, empty, silent? Should I go on fleeing this omen of a bad future? This sensation of imminent danger and the fear that goes with it must have filled his hours of watching and waiting. As Garcia Lorca said, " The spirit doesn't come if it sees no hope of death, if it doesn't know that death has to circle the house, if it isn't sure that those branches, we all carry have to shake, and that there is, and will be, no consolation".

These questions that I attribute to Carlos are the same I ask myself. Each time less often, but when I had to leave my house in Caracas and little by little the thieves and the homeless looted it, during the nights I repeated them like an infernal rosary of the beads of fear.

First, they broke into House # 3 and took all the clothes that were left, they drank all the alcohol and tried on the clothes. They took Pablo's clothes and his shoes; they ate all the food in the cupboard. I felt violated, indignant, desperate, far away and unable to do anything. This was repeated twice, and I had bars set all around the house in the vain hope that I could prevent this looting of my life. Then came the episode with thieves of a dimension that destroyed that illusion. They came in armed, gagged and beat Yelitza - my assistant - and my niece. They struck at the soul. They destroyed things for the sake of it, wanting to finish with everything, to show their power, their resentment. That was the final episode, and we ended the torment by selling the house. A house we had remodeled to live in it, a true home. I was afraid of losing the house, until I lost it. The fear hasn't completely disappeared because now it is more abstract; I am afraid as to whether I can re-inhabit myself. 

During the time between the last break-in and the sale, I had a dream:

Three queens: one of England, one of Scotland, one of Spain, with their long red tresses, wearing long orange silk robes threaded with gold. They are making war on a bridge, defending the castle, trying to eliminate psychopathy. They display their beauty, their warrior stance, their ferocity and one by one they kill the enemy.

What would Carlos have dreamt that day before crossing the border? I never managed to ask him.

When they finally crossed the river and reached Colombia, the emptiness was so great that Carlos felt he no longer had a soul. He had the intuition, very deep down, that this was a journey of no return and he cried. For one moment, one single moment, he saw himself sitting at the desk in his house, talking to his people from the local council, organizing a vaccination campaign. Why such a strange memory at that moment? He saw the light coming through the window that fell on his desk in the mornings, his study full of his favorite books, his mandatory reading, his CDs. At that single moment he looked at the blue sky of Caracas, clear and intense and glimpsed the Avila, embracing the city.

***

No house, no property papers

One day we were in the house of a friend when I had a clear picture of the resentment felt by those who never had a house. Maria, the woman who worked there, first disturbed me by the hate reflected in her black eyes, dark as a dead-end alley, and then with the stunning phrase that she threw out straight in my face : “I don’t care about having nothing, what I want is that no one else has anything either. Screw them!” 

I had to ask, “Why do you say that?”

She answered with a deafening silence, as if to annoy me. After a while, when she brought me coffee, she said, “Because I want us all to sink together, that’s what the Comandante came for..”

I decided to interview her.

That night I dreamt: 

the “Comandante” was a clown, dressed in a suit of green and yellow lozenges, wearing a hat with two peaks that ended in bells; he was a dwarf. He was sitting at the foot of the king’s throne, jumping and miming but nobody laughed. 

Maria was the third of nine siblings. She remembers how all the older ones slept in the same room, in a Workers’ Bank house in the outskirts of Calabozo, Guarico State. In that small house, of only two bedrooms, the younger siblings piled up and slept heaped in with the mother and the occasional father. Life took place in the small kitchen inside the house with a great wood fire outside. She was the oldest of the girls and only went to school until third grade because she had to help at home. Her daily routine began with breakfast: she prepared the food very early with her mother. She remembers: “as soon as I reached the fire, I had to make fifteen arepas and the coffee for my mother and brothers”. 

The maternal home was full of routines:

“The time for going to the sink, to wash the clothes with a soap substitute, or on good days with that blue soap; a pot for getting out the dirt and then bringing water from the barrel to rinse (...) I don’t remember being a child and that hardened my heart, just cooking and washing...so when I was offered a job in Caracas to clean in a school I said yes without thinking twice, and my mom let me go, as I sent everything I earned to her so she could bring up the little ones”

She came to Paradise, literally, as that was the name of the neighborhood. It was 1980. As soon as she arrived, she got pregnant. Only just 16, but as she said, in the city “women grow up quickly”. 

“I fell in love with a piece of garbage like me, only 16 and no one had explained that when someone screws you without protection, you get pregnant”. In the end “the only thing that fellow wanted was to screw me and I only saw him once, but that was enough”. 

She had a boy she baptized Andres, and decided to keep him. She spent her days cleaning the school corridors, the bathrooms, the offices. She ran up “to nurse Andres at specific times and then went back to work”.

“I saw how girls my age were finishing their classes and it made me mad, but I also didn’t think that would be real for me”.

She worked 10 hours a day, slept in a little room on the roof and ate in the school dining room with the rest of the workers.

“I left the school when my son was 8. They said it was because they had to cut down on their costs. I went to a room in San Agustin del Norte, near Parque Central, but there was trouble all the time... not a safe area, a lot of drugs. Then I got a job in another school in Catia, with nuns who slept in the school and one of them was the Principal. I slept in a room in Perez Bonalde, but I went to work every day in the school and Andres still slept with me... I never had my own house, although I wanted one…”

Maybe that is why the rooms of her inner house were full of resentment, of hate towards others, of resentment for what she could not be.

Maria’s story is like that of many Venezuelan women who work unceasingly, bringing up children, without their own houses, at the edge of other houses, other families. But Maria has a feeling curdling in her soul for too long. The resentment that eats her peeps out in little phrases that she drops now and then. She admitted that she goes out specially with a key in her hand to scratch the parked cars. Once my friend, her boss, told me that a neighbor complained that her water barrels were constantly uncovered and filled with trash. Who was the giver of this bitter present? Maria and her need to hurt others. It was as if the “good life” or even just the life of other people, better than her own, with their houses and families, was something impossible for her to bear.

“When Chavez arrived, I knew he came to screw those who have stuff”, and her eyes light up with a rare gleam. Like many others, Maria put her faith in the “Comandante”, in his fiery rhetoric, that promised to re-found the fatherland after sweeping it clean with the fires of resentment. She didn’t think or didn’t care that from the instinct for destruction comes death, the hecatomb. 

The promise of the “Comandante” was to make poverty visible to combat it. However, he legitimized it in an unexpected way: poverty was democratized, popularized, misfortune was possible for everyone. The maxim has been that we all live unprotected, that our houses are no longer ours and were destroyed, that the services don’t work; that we all feel we are taking refuge in our homes. It doesn’t matter about your origins or social class; we all live the same way to a greater or lesser degree. Uncertainty and instability are persistent, a daily battle. Along with this, resentment was also democratized. It was installed like another of those electric home appliances that are no use but take up an important place in our kitchens where we talk every day about this new way of all being the same, with a mix of anger, desolation, and the awareness of the impossibility of repairing this piece of garbage. 

Maria spoke from her corner of the kitchen, as if mumbling her thoughts, speaking low as if telling secrets, as if an autonomous voice spoke from the depths of her feeling of resentment. “I wish I had had enough to have my own house...I even registered for the government houses but they never gave me one...what I want is that everyone lives in a room so they can see how it hurts not to have your own roof...”

Maria is used to scarcity, absence, anger. That emotion has molded her life and that of so many others. The government has managed to make this everyone’s duty: misery, the maximum level to be reached by all. I have seen repeated among many people this disturbing feeling, close to me and far away; I can also identify it in me when I want the criminals who took away my house and my country to get screwed.

***

Chamita # 5 

Gloria, Rosa, and Carmen are three sisters who grew up under the protection of their grandmother. I know them because they were distant cousins, of a daughter taken in by my grandmother. With different and unknown fathers, the three enjoyed the opportunities offered by a country in full-scale development. All had a complete education. Each took a different path in life. Nevertheless, the lives of all three were marked by a dependence on someone else, always under the shadow of someone, in the house of someone, counting on the help of someone, someone of the moment only. Loved for that sensation of solidarity in the face of abandonment, all shared a certain level of submission which helped them to adapt to the circumstances of life.

Gloria's story is the one that moves me most. Although she is a referential person in my life, the image of her non-house stirs me and I need to put into words why. Gloria is the oldest of the three sisters and she set up twice with two men between twenty and twenty-five years older than her, who were also - both - partners of her mother. With the first she had two daughters and with the second she had a daughter who has now moved to Colombia. 

Gloria always wanted her own house. Her first husband, who left her a widow, gave her a house where her two daughters were born. The older one turned to drugs and was lost in that world and in the world of prostitution. The second, who became a "santera" in the times of Chavez, gave her older daughter to a "master santero" so that he would "put a saint in her belly" - make her pregnant - at barely 13 years old. When Gloria's first husband died, she was left without a house, as his wife claimed it and threw them into the street. That was the first loss she suffered: in one stroke she lost her husband, "el gordo", and her house, a double-edged grief that left her devastated and shorn of hope. We found out that over those few days she slept in the street with the two girls, sheltering in shop doorways or public squares. While she washed dishes in a kitchen, the girls spent the day in the street, exposed to all the risks to be expected for girls of that age. 

Brought up by a grandmother and an aunt who promoted "a safe roof of your own" to guarantee stability, the chance to once more have her own house finally appeared when, graduated from the Venezuelan Bolivarian University under a national program of rapid formation, she became a community lawyer. "What would that be?" I wondered.

Although she never practiced, this changed her situation. She went to Escuque, in Merida, where her partner came from, and being a member of a Communal Council "Patria Libre" and after many years battling, she was assigned two houses, one for her and one for her daughter.

She never got the property deeds that would make her the legal owner of her house. She never had the freedom to decide what to do in her own house as the iron-hold supervision of the political party and the members of the communal council didn't let her decide even about planting a flower. Once she told me that they watched her every moment, she had to report and say what she was doing and not only that, they even controlled the hours she watched television, listened to the radio, and even the days she went out. There was a permanent stimulus towards denunciation among the neighbors. This became a kind of "Big Brother is watching you"; everything was being reported.  They accused her of listening to imperialist music when all she did was listen to songs from the llanos, of not watching all the "Comandante's" television broadcasts, of eating imperialist food if she ate a sandwich, of dressing like a gringo if her daughter wore tights. To the point that her habits and her house became a prison where there was no space for anything authentic, anything your own, anything individual, anything that distinguished you. 

Inside the communal council envy ruled the emotions and a kind of psychopathy prevailed that tried to reduce the others to nothing, because they were always to blame for everything. The house roused a lot of envy and the fact that she had two was unbearable for the comrades of the community. In the end they took away the daughter's house as they couldn't have two even though they were different homes. They put intense pressure on Gloria so that she would give up and go.

The house lost its charm for her; the very thing that had been the motive for so much illusion sooner rather than later became a real nightmare. The title of community lawyer, that she could never practice – for lack of legal backing and the money needed to register the title— was no use at all to legalize her ownership. 

"I have a house but it is not mine", is the drama for Gloria whose house is just the place she sleeps but where she feels no security.

"They have hijacked my life", is the last thing she said to me after I asked how she was doing.

When she said that to me, I thought of the words of Naguib Mafouz: "Your home is not where you were born; it is where all your attempts to run away cease". But I didn't say that to her, as I didn't want to be cruel.

***

The house within

The unknown has taken our interior house and has darkened its corners. That dreadful, sinister thing that affects what is within the home, the soul, has highjacked all the spaces of our houses until we become strangers to our own life, true strangers.

Some of us have lost the comfortable calm and the safe shelter of a warm and protective house. Others desperately cling to the houses so as not to lose that feeling of stability it should provide and they have turned their homes into true fortresses of impenetrable walls that become oases of protection but also of isolation. For some, the house is the ballast they cannot get rid of, for others the loss of the investment made with years of sacrifice. There are also expropriated houses, houses that await the return of their owners, of those who wait abroad –with hopes and faith— for the betterment of the country. And the years go by and there is no return.

For the past years I felt that my inner house had little resemblance with the house of the dream I told López Pedraza more than two decades ago. It was more a haunted house than a lively one, although there is always a room with beautiful light and a view to the Ávila’s skirts where I could refuge. The study was full of books that no one reads anymore and felt cold; I could barely bring myself to look at it from the doorway because of the fear it made me feel. The garden was close, secret, and somewhat gloomy in spite of its beauty; behind its guarded entrance and the tall walls that surround, grow ferns, orchids and all sorts of topical plants but only the mourning Venus has the key to come in. In the kitchen there was a shadow cooking a stew of resentment. In the living room the once splendid furniture is almost unrecognizable, they are stained with shame and pilled up in way that they make a tiring, unappealing, labyrinth. In the cellar there was a room to receive with compassion the penitent homeless… 

…However, last night I had a dream. Hopefully it’s a possibility, a premonition: 

July 22, 2020 - I live in the bell tower of a small and modest chapel. My house is full of light and in a lighted room there is a wall with photographs of my family, my grandmother, my mother, my brothers and friends. In the room there is Turkish rug and a cozy sofa in which sit with a cup of coffee in my hand and a blanket that covers me warmly. I let my gaze go while the bell starts ringing.

Back to Memoir