In more ways that I am willing to admit, or that she is aware, M. is one of my last connections with home. As it happens, today I joined one of her seasonal rituals, the going home for christmas. I dropped at her house, ready to go together to the airport, and saw her filling the last absurd bureaucratic form that travelers are forced to ask in these years of us, normal people wanting to go home, still at the whims of viruses and autocratic governments.
The weird thing is the deja vu. We are in the last throes of 2021. M. is the scion of a well established Caracas’ family, and she is flying to there from The Netherlands. Tomorrow her daughter will fly too, and in the coming days more family will fly to Caracas from all over, as they do, more or less, every year. In this figure, in this painting, there is nothing that can compare to my life, present or past. None of the lines of my family were established anywhere, we are all migrants when looking at one or two generations back. My parents took my sister and me away from Buenos Aires in the late seventies, and I took myself away from Caracas twenty years later. I never went back to Buenos Aires with my sister or both of my parents. Those displacements made that even if I deeply love my cousins and my aunts and uncles, they are hardly part of my life, since we have seen each other perhaps ten times in the last thirty years. Since I left I have been in Caracas two times, for couple of weeks each. Nowadays I wouldn’t even know what to do with myself if I would be in a christmas party with my family.
And yet any of the moments I did expend with M. today were deeply familiar.
I must say that it is true that I have not travelled much to Buenos Aires or Caracas, but my family have travelled to us in different moments. Both my grandmothers were shipped several times to Caracas, in principle to take care of my sister and me. I did ask my mother to come visit us in Utrecht at the moment I was writing my doctoral thesis and Ayden my son required lots of attention and care, and she came. Then my aunt J. has visited us both in Caracas and in Utrecht, and so have done her son M and her daughter A, my beloved cousin. I suppose that is where the deja vu comes from, from those trips.
Because the one thing that we all migrants recognize, no matter how established, how rich or how poor we are, is that fear. The fear that one or another officer will stop you at the border, at the entry of the plane, at coming down from the bus. That your visum will miss the last stamp, that the COVID certificate will not be valid, that you will miss the right amount of cash at the right moment. M. today described me the prominence of lists in the Caracas of today, the right lists in which you should be and the wrong list in which you shouldn’t. The lists that will be controlled by one or another officer at one or another moment and will allow you to enter, or not. I remembered the many times that I gave a passport to an officer, knowing for sure that this will be the time I would be finally detained. Or the times, pretty much every single one of them, that I walked towards the plane with the feeling of having passed the last hurdle, a feeling of relief… that is never complete, because I know that even the plane could be stopped and I can be asked to step out.
And I wonder, of course I wonder. Why do they do this to us? Why do we all allow them, why do we all think it is ok to be controlled to travel, even to travel home?
Why do we hurt ourselves so?