WINDOWS AND BALCONIES

When primitive men built stilt houses, it wasn’t to escape wild animals, as some storyteller later sold to the public. There was another reason: women were already there, and height determined importance. The higher the house, the higher the respect — much like today, where caretakers occupy the ground floor and the people who own the building occupy the top.

Just when it seemed everything had been settled, women raised a new demand: windows, to talk to their friends and exchange criticism, and balconies, to talk to their friends’ husbands and be seen. Publishers are the windows. Television is the balcony. When it came time to buy a house, the choice of floor became non-negotiable, and when circumstances forced people onto a lower one, the truth was usually replaced with a more elegant explanation: fear of heights.

But this excursion into architecture is only a pretext. What I’m really talking about is the architecture of the human soul, particularly the version built inside a family — the place where everything should be permitted and nothing should be surprising. And yet the first critics are often the children, who seek a second opinion from their friends, as if to say: we love him, but we honestly have no idea what the hell he’s doing. Him, of all people? But he’s only my father.

And I, possessing neither balconies nor television, continue to stand at the window. And I continue to write the things nobody expects. Because, in the end, it’s everything I own.