My grandfather was a cavalry captain. People that knew him living in the city remembers his silence, a sort of intense way of being. Present, impossible to miss, silent. I do wonder if the remembered silence was a sublimated vacuum, a kind of absence. It is being said that the house where I was born was paid by the work of my grandmother and my father himself, both high school teachers. Yet I to wonder about the tale. Didn’t my grandfather put anything into it? He did separe from my grandma early on, and went to live by the argentinian border with Brazil. Some anecdotes of his hunting survive, hunting that he seems to have done on his own. In our imagination there is his figure, the man alone at the argentinian primeval jungle, at last free from the concerns of the army, its bureaucracy, the city. The question remains. To whom really was owed the house were I was born? Did my grandfather abandon it as he left my family, following his true self in nature? Or was he as responsible of it as his exwife and his son were?
When I was eight years old, we went to Venezuela, to escape from the argentinian dirty war, that threatened my father and was about to generate thousands of desaparecidos. In Caracas we settled in a house in a more or less middle class neighborhood, where I grew up. The marriage of my parents was far from ideal, and many ongoing tensions took concrete form in financial quarrels. There were times when my parents could have bought that house and decided otherwise, even thought more frequently they were behind the rent. In all this process, the house of Buenos Aires was there, hanging in the air as the unresolved big question. Should it be sold and the proceedings used to stay in Caracas, as my father seems to have wanted? Or should it stay rented, and kept as a place to go back some day, as my mother said she wanted? These two houses were mirrors to their countries: Argentina as an unsolved problem and Venezuela always unstable. Anyhow, ownership did play a role in the protracted battle between my parents, and finally, when my father decided to sell and did, without consulting my mother, the quarrel was suddenly of another dimension. I realized that people could really divorce on the ownership of a thing. The only solution that my mother accepted was to split the proceedings between my sister and me, 50/50. I did buy a second hand VW beetle with it, and my sister paid herself a holiday trip to visit our people in Buenos Aires. So much for the acquisitive power of many years of hard work.
Time passed and wounds were not healed. Ten years and a few months later, after I left Venezuela for Switzerland, my parents did separe. With my wife I rented a student flat, where a whole new life seemed possible. Yet she did leave me, and so I moved through few flatmates, before going to The Netherlands with C., still today my wife and life companion. One day she called to the lab in Basel, to tell me that she had found our house. I took the train, arrived to her -shared- living quarters in Utrecht in the evening and went to see our new house in the next morning. We walked into a street with a row of small and equally ugly houses, like a movie of Ken Loach. We entered one, me thinking how to say no without being pretentious. But the garden did it. Utrecht, the whole Netherlands actually, is a place where humans have -long time ago- consumed all pristine nature. Yet behind our house there were trees, the big trees of a public park planted hundred years ago. I realized that nowhere in Utrecht we could have so much green behind us, and we staid. This is the house in which I write now, twenty plus years later. It is a rented house though. Is not ours, nor it will ever be.
When I think about it, I realize that we have escaped one trap of our people. Ownership of the house you live has been important for many generations. House ownership has never been a given for the people of my kind, only earned by many years of hard work. So it has driven love and quarrel, stability and fears of eviction, social status and economical safety. My mother stopped talking with her beloved sister, after quarreling over the destiny of the flat owned by their deceased mother. Many of my friends are trapped in unsatisfying work, in order to pay mortgages. Others have build, or bought, fantastic places, only to sell them few years after, when divorces or changes of fortune have struck. We paid a price, though. The stigma for two young, well educated, and potentially earners of two full professional salaries that decide not to buy a house is still alive and strong. It took quite a few years to be able to look straight in the eye of the person inquiring and say, happy with ourselves, that we preferred to spend our time in other enterprises than working to pay a house. Given how the housing market has evolved, certainly in Utrecht, it is hard to say that the decision of not buying a house twenty years ago was economically sound. But would have we been happier if the roof that cover us also belonged to us?
I don’t know. But I do think that the these houses providers of refugee, and love and so much more, tells something that I only begin to comprehend.
Perhaps.