Up (the hill) and Away

My excessive laziness in relation to blogposts can be explained by the fact that I have been preoccupied by a move to a new apartment. I am now installed in the dining-living room of said apartment, diligently ignoring the unpacking disaster directly behind my back.


That's not me. That's my roommate, who energetically unpacked yesterday, along with cooking dinner, organizing the kitchen, and setting the table with placemats. In between teaching classes today she rearranged the furniture and cleaned up a bit. As I understand it, at the moment she is baking pies at a friend's house.

Meanwhile, I've folded my clothing, stuck some photos to the wall, eaten cereal and leftovers, and broken my reading light that clips to the book (argh!).

It's difficult to stay focused though. I've fallen in love with a city; now I've finally found a place within it that I can feel is mine. I have also had several hours of uninterrupted alone time--something that has not happened since I arrived in this country seven months ago. I am finding myself walking around in circles, touching surfaces, rearranging my things slightly, then messing them up again, and staring staring staring out the window.

The apartment is a section of what once would have been a grand mansion for some shipping family. Now the building is seperated into different living spaces, but the house that it was and is still shows through. The front bedroom sports an intricately patterned paraquet floor; the ceilings througout the apartment are over 10 feet high. The window that I cannot stop staring out of is in fact a wall of windows, itself a good 8 feet in height. From where I sit at my table I can simply raise my eyes and look down the bay to Vina del Mar, Renaca, Concon and on. If I stand up and walk over to the edge of the room, I will see the hill edging down to the water. If I walk into the front bedroom and look out the bay window, I will also be able to see the hills stretching northeast away from me, hugging the bay.

In this city, changing one's position slightly can reveal a whole new image. It is impossible, here, to ever see an entire building from one part of the city. The houses crush up against each other, and the hillsides thrust them out at strange angles, obstructing but also shaping your vision. From here, I cannot see the bottom of what was once a bakery, so I cannot focus on the windows that I often look at. I can only see the domed roof, and so that is what draws me in. There are new buildings, too, although I have only moved farther up on the same hill that I have always lived on. All of a sudden an unyieldingly large rusted roof has given way to let through a burst of purple, the crow's nest of some jagged building. Church spires break out of hills behind the hills that have been my city.

From here I can see that just as the hills I know are falling over themselves to reach down into the water, there are others pulling from the other direction to run away and into the mountains.

And in the morning, in the fog, all I can see is that beyond the neighbor's garden the world disappears.

The house is a microcosm of the city itself. The stunning parquet floor is darker in spots where long-destroyed or sold furniture stood. The large and richly colored planks of the floors in the rest of the house have subtle depressions and rises. Strange windows are punched into the wall; I was not joking about the nearness of my mess, because if I turn my head I will be staring into the back bedroom and my gutted suitcases littering the rope rug. From the kitchen, I could serve you a plate of food without leaving the room. In the precipitious ceilings on the west end of the apartment, tiny, irregularly square skylights open at the end of small tunnels to the roof. And so the light from the wall of windows filters into the house in a makeshift but endearingly odd way. It falls short only of the murky fishbowl of the foyer and the unneccesarily wide hall (officially named the Pasaje, as of yesterday). To compensate, every room has a lightbulb hanging from the ceiling by its cord.

Out of all of these windows, only two open in the same manner as one another; we have windows that slide sideways, shedding paint chips; we have small dollhouse windows that are pulled in with a small handle; we have three-paned windows that slide up; and we have large, heavy windows that push upwards in a mammoth's impression of my childhood colonial-style windows.

None of this deters my attachment to this space, much as jackhammered sidewalks and rusting edifices have only made me feel closer to Valparaiso. An apartment, like a city, is an exterior space that folds over and becomes your internal space. Everything else in my life may be merely different renditions of what I would and will do elsewhere: work, worry, drink, eat, laugh, miss the bus and cry in the bathroom over nothing. It's all richer though for finding a space which echoes and expands through repetition the parts of my mind that draw me in and make me enjoy my thoughts. Beautiful, rusty, honest and unique, is my house, is my city.