NOT ALL HOMES ARE PRIVATE

With my “pinta de burgués” as an adult, many people I met thought I had been one all my life or that my values were bourgeoisie ones. Those who know me well, can tell that is not how I think or even act, though I love good food, wines and traveling, but staying at minus-stars hotels. When it comes to homes, the worse comes back again and again in the smallest details: a letter from the Coop. Board before being opened will trigger unbearable anxieties: are they going to find reason to expel me from my house, are the neighbors complaining about me, all kinds of fears come back. Once the content is read, indicating that the hallways will be painted in such a such a date, I feel relaxed and sad for having gone thru such a disturbing moment. Growing up in several homes that were either owned by the farmers where my parents lived as land helpers (“agregados” in the language of Puerto Rican pre 1950s) or rented ones when they moved to Guayama, where my father went to work in the sugar cane plantations, provided the foundations for the “pathological” relationship I have with homes. Extreme poverty accompanied by violent alcoholic parents, the non-stopped complaining that we were going to be thrown out of the house, my mother threatening that she would leave all of us, my father disappearing for days did not provide for a good relationship with homes. So when the true “burgueses” talk or write about the comfortable privacy of the home, I wonder how did they get there, to those homes.