If a home is a place you’ve lived for more than a year, I’ve had five of them: Bloomington, Indiana; Princeton, New Jersey; Brooklyn; Chicago; and Sucre, Bolivia. I’m in the latter city now and left Brooklyn three days ago, so I’ve been reflecting on cities and home.
We rented an apartment in Ridgewood, Queens, two blocks from the Brooklyn border; the block of row houses was in Bushwick, Brooklyn, until the 1970s, and we only slept there, so we were essentially in Brooklyn for four days, spending some time in Manhattan too. Bushwick is home to a mix of Hispanic immigrants and young artistic types, a far cry from what it was twenty-five years ago: dangerous and poverty-stricken (a friend who lived there got stabbed in the chest outside his front door, if memory serves; he survived, but the knife got pretty close to his heart). The best meal we had there was at a restaurant called Balcon de Quito, an Ecuadorian place in which we were the only gringos. We also spent time elsewhere in Brooklyn: Park Slope, where we visited my cousin and her family; Dumbo, where we attended a wedding; downtown, where we ate cheesecake at Junior’s; and my son Jacky and I also bicycled across the Brooklyn Bridge and through Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant to Bushwick.
But could I live in Brooklyn now? I don’t know. For a long time Brooklyn was the only place I ever really felt at home. The people were so friendly, so diverse. Brooklyn was a refuge for people from all over the country and the world; now it feels more like a destination, a place one aspires to. Karen says that Park Slope is like the Upper West Side now. The two communities who live in Bushwick probably barely mix. The best places in Brooklyn are now some of the most inconvenient to get to: while it takes half an hour to bicycle from our part of Bushwick to Brooklyn Heights, it takes close to an hour by train or bus. And the amount of money we spent in New York was astronomical.
As for Sucre, things haven’t changed much since I lived here four years ago (for a year). Bolivia is still quite close to paradise in many ways: safe and beautiful with perfect weather and the warmest, gentlest, kindest people I’ve ever met, with fantastic traditions, excellent food, and a large number of jaw-dropping places to visit. There are some drawbacks, though: no postal service or English-language bookstores, few city parks, occasional water shortages and general strikes, dangerous roads—it’s hard to bicycle here because of the road conditions, the drivers, and the hills. In addition, I always get sick here, no matter how carefully I eat and drink: when I lived here I got sick about once a month. I was sick last night, trembling like a broken washing machine.
As for Chicago, I’ve become attached to the city, despite its horrors. I love our neighborhood, Hyde Park: Jackson Park and the lakeshore are splendid, as is the Victorian architecture. I like the diversity there, and it’s a great place to bicycle and, in the summer, swim. And I love the Oriental Institute and the bookstores.
Yet I still don’t feel quite at home, even though we’ve lived there for over twenty years. The University of Chicago dominates the neighborhood, and it’s an institution I’ve never felt the least fondness for. Racial tensions may be lower in Hyde Park than in other neighborhoods, but they’re still there, because the power structure in Chicago is so racist at its core. The social, political, and economic splintering in Chicago—and all over the US—makes me want to flee.
In The Book of Questions, Pablo Neruda wrote,
A quién le puedo preguntar
qué vine hacer en este mundo?Por qué me muevo sin querer,
por qué no puedo estar inmóvil?Por qué voy rodando sin ruedas,
volando sin alas ni plumas,y qué me dio por transmigrar
si viven en Chile mis huesos?(Whom can I ask what I came to do in this world? Why do I move without wanting to, why can’t I sit still? Why do I go rolling without wheels, flying without wings or feathers, and what moved me to emigrate when my bones live in Chile?)
Where do my bones live? I’ve been asking myself that for years, and I haven’t been able to answer.
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