A white white place

Every move provokes anxiety. I mean, quite literally, that every change of place, whether country, city or room, generates an empty feeling inside me, a kind of dark, deep well that is slowly and terrifyingly flooded with contradictory emotions. It always has the potential of becoming a pleasant, enjoyable anxiety. It is an anxiety that sits at the very bottom of my self and shapes my world continuously. It is is the anxiety of the new. It is an anxiety that I seek feverishly, that is pleasure and pain. An anxiety the absence of which leads to tedium, an itchy feeling inside.

I should know. According to my latest count, I have moved 24 times in my life, from the moment I was born til now. I´m not counting 3-month hotel stays, long summer camp holidays, backpacking hostels and lonely temporary rented rooms. I´m talking about homes. 24 places with my own bed, closet overcrowded with clothes and shoes and bags, kitchen with my favorite absurdly exotic food.

So the difference now, the marker, is that I OWN the place where I live. And I don't know how much the flutter in my breast, and the slight lack of air in my lungs, is related to this ownership. I bought a one-bedroom apartment in Liberdade, Japantown in Sao Paulo. I had been looking for a flat for weeks, and was disappointed with all my visits. Then one day, when I was walking out of a music venue after a mildly satisfying samba concert, I looked up and saw what would be my future home. I knew immediately. I trust my intuition infinitely more than I trust my extremely logical reason. It was a hospital-looking building, almost a sanatorium; it appeared to belong to another place, another time: the familiarity of European lines. The six-floor cream building reminded me of Paris, Geneva. Run-down proletariat housing in a vaguely French place, a vaguely French São Paulo, if that were possible. This 1930s building stood out clearly against a dark, dark sky, illuminating the night. And it sat in the middle of a poorly-looked-after Japanese garden, with Japanese street lamps, Japanese cedars and a Japanese rock garden, and Japanese carp ponds drained of water and carps.

The rest was quick. I went back to the place the following Sunday and talked to the doorman. By chance, there happened to be an apartment for sale. No, not by chance. I had known, somehow. An apartment on the last floor, looking over the city, watching over the old, decrepit center of town. This was five months ago. The space became a pile of rubble before it could actually become the very white and airy home it is now. Four months of remodelling. And still, after all the work, the walls are curvy, the walls look pregnant. The plaster guy may have been an amateur, or not. No matter, I am stuck with beautiful, tall, white, not-straight walls.

(As an aside, I would like, just for once, for someone to actually try to imagine what it´s like to be on a perpetual pilgrimage, always seeking to stay put in one place, yet always hearing the call of the sirens, the call from other shores or other voices, the blinking of distant lighthouses beckoning me to a place that will more intimately root me to my own self. Strangely, practically everyone I have most cared about has been a whole lot more sedentary than I have. Yes, opposites attract. Someone will appear, someone will help me find the ground I need to root myself to. Someone will explain my self-imposed exile to me, someone will make all my previous flights very evidently point to this one final resting point).

So, the anxiety became clear to me when I realized, lying on my bed today peering out at the silver skyline and blue sky outside my window, that this apartment was exactly like the one I had when I lived alone in Geneva. The bedroom had the exact same dimensions. It was the same rectangle, I had put the bed and the dresser in the same exact spots. There was an equally warm wooden floor. And huge, huge windows looking out on a similarly sublime view. In Geneva, it was the meeting of the two rivers, the greenish Rhône and the much whiter Arve, joining into one flood of water that passed through the huge arches of a rail bridge. From my Geneva window I saw the river and its forrested banks, and the white-peaked Jura mountains behind which the sun set gloriously. And from my São Paulo window, I had an urban spectacle: 60s highrises and dilapidated office buildings, and in the distance an Empire-State-looking tower with a flag flapping in the wind. And even the arches were there, the coral red arches of the viaduto across from the big Radial Leste, arches that were lit up at night like some industrial, 3rd world Arc de Triomphe.

All the apartments I´ve lived in have looked very similar. But now the ressemblance struck me dumb, filled me with a sensation of deja-vu, of return, of repetition that made me, for a few moments, lose track of where I was and when I was. And the crazy thing was that I was starting to feel a bit like the self I was back then, seven or eight years ago. I was that self and the present one, and all the other ones in between, at the same time. I remembered the satisfaction of my loneliness, the intimacy of my losses. I peered at the objects on my dresser, the grey vase with pink painted flowers that my grandmother had given me, the porcelain bowl my nona had given me, and also the red and gold matchbox with a silver Franc nestled inside; and the white candle-holder my musician boyfriend had given me. All these reminders of my nomad childhood and adolescence and adulthood.

I savoured the memories of my readings in bed, the poetry and the Nabokov, the Perec and the Woolf. I tasted the sleepless, burning nights with the men I had loved or simply desired. And I recalled the sleepless nights, empty, white white nights after my father had died. And this is when I struck that hard little pebble inside, that small white rock lodged forever between my ribs, that discomfort that returns no matter where I am. It is the little terrible stone of my biggest loss, the one that came as if to punctuate the long, endless series of smaller losses. The one that came to confirm that all those things that had been abandoned and left behind merely existed to prepare me, in minuscule increments, for the only loss that really mattered. That cruel white white stone.