Chapter 9: Painting in exile
Painting seems like a big deal until you sit down to do it.
The nights when I had the entire flat to myself were rare. That Wednesday evening was one of them. Since the kitchen was all clean and void of roommates, I thought I’d try to cook something, a long-lost activity I used to love. Lately, making a pot of coffee was the most I’d busy myself with in there. I had a piece of chicken breast about to go bad in the fridge, so I decided on that plus some sautéed green beans.
The plastic cutting board was propped behind the sink faucet. I picked up its bright green handle and placed it on the countertop to chop the onions for the sauté. If this were my place, I would have chosen a wooden cutting board, like the one I had left somewhere in my past life. I opened the cupboard to look for a pan. Wrong cupboard. It took three tries to find out where the pans were in my own kitchen of almost two months.
Onions chopped and thrown into the pan with a bit of butter, I cut open the plastic tray to pull out the chicken breast. A thin twirl of nausea raised up in my throat, but then I always felt a bit nauseous when handling raw meat. I didn’t pay much attention to it. The onions got tender so I looked for my favorite fork to pull out the green beans from the jar and throw them on top. The fork was missing from the cutlery drawer; I rummaged more, and then deeper. Finally seeing it at the bottom of the pile, I grabbed it like a baby holding on to their favorite toy before sleep.
I couldn’t use other forks not because they were dirty or old and chipped, but because they were imbued with strangeness. If I tried to use them, I’d constantly feel nauseated. No one knew that of course, and my roommates probably used the same fork during my absence. But I needed to have something that I had just claimed as mine in that kitchen.
As the green beans heated up in the pan together with the sweet-smelling onions, nausea came back unannounced. The scent of cooked food that comes out of a well-used kitchen is like an invisible thread that turns four walls into a home. And when you cannot produce delicious smells that thread is broken. The walls remain cold and inhuman.
Remembering my own former kitchen made me feel like a trespasser in there. None of the cookware was mine. None of the pots and pans were mine. Neither the dishes nor the unmatched cutlery. Not even the coffee machine I used every morning. I hadn’t unpacked my own coffee machine when I moved in, there was no more space in the kitchen for a second one.
I dumped the half-cooked steaming vegetables in the trash can and added the raw chicken breast to the pile too. I’d rather be handed food by a stranger in a carton box than continue to cook nauseated. I pulled up my phone and ordered a pizza.
The doorbell didn’t ring to announce the pizza delivery, but I heard the key turn in the door and my roommate entered holding my dinner. She and the delivery guy arrived at the door at once and my roommate finished the culinary errand. As she handed it to me she scolded me with the tone of her voice: ‘Pizza night, again?!’.
‘Sorry I didn’t wait for you, we can split it if you’d like half of it’, I offered.
She didn’t. She noted that I indulged in my laziness and would rather spend money on ‘plastic food’, as she had called it, than cook something.
‘No, it’s just that…’, I wanted to share how I felt and that I really tried to cook that evening, but then I realized I didn’t have an acceptable word for it makes me sick to my stomach to cook in your kitchen. I couldn’t even explain it to myself, how could I explain that to her without offending her.
She was starving, she said. She stepped right into the kitchen and started pulling out a plate, a few tomatoes, the wet bright green cutting board I had just cleaned and started preparing a salad. She had no problem doing it and I watched her part jealous, part feeling like a voyeur into someone else’s intimate life.
We ate together in front of the evening news but then I retreated into my bedroom, the only place in the flat where I felt as exclusively mine. I spent many evenings secluded in that personal shelter.
One evening, after a couple of hours in there, I tried to get out for some water, but the door handle seemed jammed. I pressed it several times, forcing it upwards and downwards, sometimes harder, other times lighter, jiggling the door to unhook it, but I just couldn’t open it. A shelter is fine when you can get out of it whenever you want to.
My other roommate, the one I rarely saw around, came to the other side of the door to ask if I was fine. I explained I got locked in and he tried to open the door from the hallway. After more jiggling and pushing, he finally managed to let me out. The shelter had become a cage for a few minutes. With the handle now partially damaged, we agreed I wouldn’t close the door all the way anymore to avoid getting blocked again. I smiled at the irony. The only room in that flat that I felt was just mine was now open to the public. Homelessness can be felt in many ways, most of them inside a house of one’s own.
I started spending more time on the balcony giving out from the living room. Facing west, on the fifth floor and surrounded by lower buildings, it was the perfect place to watch the sunset.
One evening, I was enjoying a rare moment of silence in a noisy Spanish neighborhood. My roommate stepped out holding a canvas, eyes wide and crinkled from a smile. When she turned it around I realized it was one of my old paintings. Anticipating my question, she told me she found it in the bookcase on top of a row of books. I had forgotten I had left some of those old canvases up there.
‘I mean, I just copied it from a tutorial book one day’. It was an Italian village scene, an ochre house, some Mediterranean plants, a table and a few chairs.
‘Oh, it’s so pretty’, she continued to marvel.
Everybody says that when they see a piece of art made by someone they know. Being in the proximity of art makes people softer, regardless if it’s good or not. Painting seems like a big deal until you sit down to do it.
My roommate told me she used to paint as well. She knew how it felt to hold a brush between your fingers and feel the paint slide on the canvas thread. She knew that sinking feeling when you realized you ended up with a giant head next to a minion house if you didn’t have your dimensions well planned.
She started laughing when remembering some of her proportion blunders. ‘At least with oil paints you can paint right on top of it and fix it, but with a piece of watercolor paper, forget about it.’ ‘Olvídalo’, she repeated in Spanish, shaking her head. The spark in both of our eyes was a thin thread between us that zipped us together in a brief moment of connection.
She encouraged me to start painting again. But in order to paint, one had to have the space for it. Where would I spread out all my paints, brushes, sponges and canvases? She suggested the living room table. It was big enough for the three of us roommates to use.
She had to rush out, and I was left alone once again, the last rays of the summer sun still reaching me on the balcony, the unusual silence on the street below returning to my ears.
After getting my fill of light and quiet, I stood up and went inside, to the bookcase where my roommate had found the painting. I moved some books from a lower shelf and I found my bag with oil paint tubes and brushes stashed behind them. I pulled them out and looked at them, an old abandoned bag from a long time ago. I passed my index finger over the tip of the longest brush that came out of the bag. Feeling the coarse bristles I got carried to another time and space in which I held that brush, filled with ochre paint, sliding it across a square canvas.
As if someone else was puppeteering my hands from behind, I pulled out the entire bag and a white canvas stashed in the back of the bookcase. I went and set everything on the dining table, after covering it up with a roll of plastic sheet found in the kitchen pantry. I sat down and started squashing out a drop of cobalt blue on my old wooden board and adding a drop of oil from a small bottle. My hands had a life of their own and movements I couldn’t control. I was the kid who had discovered her favorite doll hadn’t actually disappeared under the bed, but was sitting right there, in a different corner of the room.
The cobalt blue became a purply grey under my brush, with the help of drops of black and white. There was no doubt what I would paint. An illustration I had seen recently was stuck in my memory. It showed the female reproductive system, the ovaries, tubes and the uterus filled with colorful spring flowers. I used the purply grey shade to sketch loosely the shape. Then I pulled out more colors, some bright yellow for the flowers, some green that I’d mix in with black to make it darker. Time got suspended, I wasn’t sure how long I had been on the chair playing with colors recreating the shapes that lived inside my body.
My chest was easing up in relaxation, my mind was blank, a momentary bliss. I was carving a small space just for me in the roommates’ living room. If one were to judge the artistic quality of my paintings, I would probably fail tremendously. But it wasn’t about the result. It was about that new softness in my chest, that freezing of the clock, that balmy blankness of the mind.
That evening I went to bed in bliss, despite having to sleep with my bedroom door slightly open.
I woke up feeling less pain in my neck than usual. Getting out of my already open room to go to the bathroom, I spotted my colorful bag of paints, the rolled-up plastic sheet topped by the uterus canvas, all exiled on a tall chest in the hallway. The space I had carved the previous evening in that flat seemed to fill back up with grey cement. My throat felt blocked and I could only manage a shallow breath. I had neither the strength nor the desire to have an argument with the nasty roommate over that.
From that moment, my roommates received nicknames. The one who exiled my painting stuff in the hallway became the nasty roommate. And the one with whom I had a spark talking about old paintings - she became the nice roommate. I lived between nasty and nice.
Once again pushed back into my bedroom, I set up shop on the small desk in there and painted night after night, my appetite for art open. “When the ache comes, feed it poetry and flowers”, said an Instagram quote I had saved.
After finishing painting all the spring flowers in the purply grey uterus, I started on another copy of an illustration. That one was an anatomical heart from which tulips sprung out. The tulips were blood-red, the result of the heart’s arteries bursting out into flowers. Next, I wanted to paint the brain, but it turned out to be too difficult. Also, I wouldn’t have known where to fit the flowers in it.
At night, I had to leave the window open, to let the toxins of the oil paints get out, so I wouldn’t accidentally suffocate in my sleep. And to avoid the draft it created with the broken door, I propped a heavy doorstop on the inside.
When circumstances force you to share your daily life with strangers, you feel the air you breathe has been stolen from you. The minutes of your life, stolen and shared with strangers. The silence you crave, stolen and replaced by the various noises they feel like making. And if you dare to think, just for a moment, that the physical space belongs to you, then the surprises start. A woman sits on your own toilet. A man lounges on your couch, eating out of your plate, using your own fork. The daughter of the woman, an even more remote stranger, takes a shower in your own bathtub, she glances in your own mirror, she walks through your hallway, drops of water falling from her long hair on the ceramic floor. When strangers inhabit your own space, you start feeling exiled. The roof over your life disintegrates tile by tile, making you a little more homeless by the day.
Read next: Chapter 10 - Parallel universes
