Feature Story
Travels around the Apartment
Reflections on World Book Day
Frenchman Xavier de Maistre was sentenced to 47 days of house arrest for dueling, illegal at the time, 1789. He occupied solitude chronicling his journeys around the bedroom, for which he used travel writing techniques. The English version of the book, Voyage Around My Room, appeared two centuries later in 2004. I read the book from cover to cover in one go and selected it when facing the murderous challenge of reducing my library to a fraction before moving to Miami.
I forgot about it until the COVID-19 Pandemic subjected the country to isolation. A recluse for more than four weeks, I found the book. This time around, I managed to read only the introduction by Alain de Botton, the delightful philosopher, and started wondering around my own apartment with the eyes of a traveler, that is, with the humble disposition to discover.
At first, the task seemed to demand far more humbleness that I could muster. We are talking about an open space of merely one thousand square feet with cement floor and ceiling. The voice of reason intervened: Mathematically, in one thousand square feet, the possibilities between point A and point B are infinite. In effect, infinite possibilities exist between any two finite points given the infinitesimal small and infinitesimal large nature of numbers.
But for the sake of brevity, I will focus on my apartment’s scenic passages. And must confess to having no experience with travelogues except for a series covering a road-trip I took after college from New York to Ecuador during the Central American wars. The editor titled the series Tourism in Time of War. Contrary to the adventure across the continent, which required a Volkswagen, two dozen jazz cassettes, a good compass, jungle boots, and binoculars to spot the rebels — teenagers armed with hand-grenades and machineguns — , for my travels around the apartment a pair of boxers and T-shirt sufficed. The editor back then kept insisting to include the coordinates of the places portrayed. Following that advise, let me establish that the apartment is located at 25.7 degrees latitude North, and 80.1 degrees longitude.
Mirrors
The journey starts early in the morning, going north to south from the bed to the bathroom. First thing I find is the reflection on the mirror, and the first reaction is to expel the impostor staring at me. That image reflected does not correspond to my idea of me. The voice of reason intervenes wielding a definition taken directly from Cambridge Dictionary: “Mirrors are simple pieces of glass with a shiny, metal-covered back that reflects light, producing an image of whatever is in front of it.” And adds sarcastic, “unfortunately, a common mirror such as this has no photoshop capabilities.”
More vital human functions bring forth the state of sanitary technology. What a distance from the outhouse of yesteryear to the porcelain commode, or what late Victorians euphemized as water closet! If prudish Victorians institutionalized a repulsion for corporal functions, the pandemic makes it hard to negate them, with death, the ultimate physical act, lurking around like an uninvited and inevitable guest.
I keep a small stack of reading materials in my bathroom, mostly magazines and newspapers — now dated, and a few philosophy treatises such as Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and a 1978 little black book, Histoire de la merde, by the French psychoanalyst Dominique Laporte. In 2000, MIT Press published an English version translated by Rodolphe el-Khoury, the current Dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture. According to the official description, management of human waste is crucial to our identities as modern individuals — including the organization of the city, the rise of the nation-state, the development of capitalism, and the mandate for clean and proper language. One blurb reads: “History of Shit” is emblematic of a wild and adventurous strain of 1970s’ theoretical writing that attempted to marry theory, politics, sexuality, pleasure, experimentation, and humor.”
The Kitchen
Heading east to the kitchen to grind coffee beans, can’t avoid pondering the importance of agriculture in the evolution of humanity. Agriculture freed the mind of our ancestors to idle a bit and conceptualize complex designs to raid the tribe down the road and kidnap the wives, or modify words to explain time precisely, what we call now moods. The most celebrated linguist of the 20th century, Noam Chomsky, would dismiss my ponderings with his Universal Grammar theory — humans come equipped with language software, and agriculture has nothing to do with it.
I take a detour to the Garden of Ideas, AKA, library. One clarification: my library is not much of a library, less than one thousand books. One thousand is a compromise I reached with my wife, one book per square foot. Like most personal collections, mine is idiosyncratic in its predominance of history and language, two subjects I have taught and thought about for decades.
Scenic Road
The sunrise outside is in full splendor dominated by reds and yellows. I can stay watching in awe the full spectacle of the sun rising over Biscayne Bay but it’s pressing that I consult a book to determine if social isolation has shrunken my cognitive faculties, turning me into a bag of nonsense — the hypothesis of agriculture and the subjunctive mood, for example.
The precise moment I reach up to get a book by Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker, the Language Instinct, my wife calls: “Is coffee ready?” I drop the book, a paperback, and realize the tremendous advantage books exercise over I-Pads or a laptop. Last week, I dropped my laptop on the kitchen floor and saw in despair how it disintegrated, the screen cracked open, the battery flew freed, etc.
Hearing Voices
Again, the call for coffee traverses the geography of the apartment. The wife has her own corner connected to the world; she works for an international corporation. I bring her an espresso, toast with cream cheese and a pealed orange. At 7:58 she waves me good-bye for the morning, and for a fleeting moment I imagine her sailing off aboard one of the gigantic cruise ships visible from the balcony. More alarming, I think I detect in her gesture mixed feelings: love, yes, but also an urgency to flee from the excessive closeness, to escape from me.
Before the commute to work (19 steps), I stop by the dining table for a second cup of coffee and contemplate the turquoise waters, the port of Miami, and farther still, a squad of clouds laying siege. At 8:15 the voice of reason returns, this time sounding eerily like grandfather’s baritone to suggest a reflection on solitude for this article.
Psychologists say that solitude brought about by quarantines has unleashed a strange freedom and many reasonable adults, unaccustomed to being alone, are engaging cats, dogs and plants in colorful conversation. In the absence of a proper interlocutor, people are talking to themselves, more so after downing the battle of chardonnay.
Memories of a Plague
I keep grandfather’s photo on a shelf above a photo of my kids. Grandfather’s photo was taken short before his self-exile. Grandfather lived alone in a remote Andean city for nearly half of his 94-years existence. (Alone is a state of mind, he would say. Here is a figure of speech as the old man had a dozen people satisfying his every wish.)
In his youth he had owned a pharmacy and created medications and poisons, a skill that saved many a life during an outbreak of the Bubonic plague. In 1916, in Panama, a rat from a European ship infested with fleas carrying the plague found its way to a cargo boat returning home to Ecuador. The stowaway rat infected other rats and the plague traveled up the Andes in freight trains and devastated various cities, including grandfather’s.
The president of Ecuador decreed miraculous measures to eradicate the plague but as usually is the case, easier said than done. Help never arrived to affected places. Grandfather prepared formidable poisons to kill rodents, and since he was founder and president of the city’s marksmanship club, he formed a brigade to shoot the remaining rodents and other furry creatures capable of carrying the pest. People applauded that he shot down bats, crows, but pleaded, please, Don Ricardo, don’t shoot the baby lamb, spare the donkey. Grandfather was implacable.
Curiously enough, the Latin word venom once embraced both poison and medication, making it necessary to qualify, good or bad. Venom derives from Venus, the Roman Goddess of Love, and originally denoted an aphrodisiac potion.
Don Quixote
The World celebrates Book Day on April 23 because on April 23, 1616, two of the greatest literary minds, William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, died.
Grandfather introduced me to dictionaries at age six. Finding the word recluse, I asked him, “Grandfather, why you live in solitude?” He gave me an etymological answer, but I found out much later the truth. He had proposed a steep fine for every unnecessary word pronounced in City Councils and Congress to teach by example to think before speaking.
“The word parliament derives from parole, Latin for word, for talking,” argued a senator, and belittled Grandfather as a retrograde apologist of silence. Grandfather called him obtuse and bovine (a term denoting cow-like demeanor.) The senator challenged grandfather to a duel not knowing he presided a marksmanship club. At the last moment, the bovine senator chickened out. The world had become intolerable for Grandfather, said the family, and he closed the door for good.
I would spend hours every Sunday in his library. He would make me read long passages of Don Quixote, the knight errant given to fighting windmills and seeing beauty where only swamps existed. Don Quixote has accompanied me ever since. Now I have five editions, one dating to the 18th century, one annotated, a famous forgery, one chapter in Spanglish, the fusion of Spanish and English, and a fabulous translation to English by Edith Grossman.
Lunch Time
A dilemma: which road to take back to the refrigerator? I follow what I pompously call for the occasion Gallery Passage, where Don Quixote towers imperial and his words resonate: “The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.”
My wife joins me for lunch — leftovers from a the night before — and sitting on the sofa pronounces: “The truth, the truth is I can’t take this isolation any longer. You might have inherited from your grandfather the gene for solitude, but I am from the Caribbean… I need to go out, see people…”
I notice her eyes turning to the cabinet where bottles of bourbon, gin and wine stand on guard, our armada against insanity. Then her eyes turn to the oven’s digital clock to conclude religiously: “Cocktail hour is just around the corner, thank God!”
