I leave the doors open—the pantry door and the closet door. It doesn’t bother me. I close them because I was taught that everything must have order, but I could leave them open. If I open the windows to let the air in, what happens if I want to air out the pantry and the closet? If I want what is hidden to breathe and murmur. Leaving the doors open is like putting deodorant on the house’s armpits, to disguise that something has already begun to rot.
The house learns from you. It copies my gestures, my habits, my quirks. On the street people move in a hurry, bumping into each other without looking. I wonder if they also leave their doors open, or if they scratch their testicles or pick their noses when they’re idle. If someone waits for them at home, or if they only return out of inertia. When I come back, I feel like I carry fragments of those gazes stuck to my clothes, like dust and the smell of other people’s habits.
Waking up in bed is not the same as lying down in it. When I wake there is calm, a certain innocence, but when I lie down there is the weight of the entire city: the noises, the voices, the cigarette smoke of strangers clinging to my second-hand leather jacket. Like when you eat something and it gets stuck between your teeth—annoying, impossible to ignore—until you push it out with your tongue to free yourself. I understand the house as the body that receives us when the world gets too far inside us. Other times I feel the house inhabits me, and I don’t know if it is me or it that breathes.
Do houses get headaches?
I think so. The house has cells, membranes, a bloodstream: the insects, me, the ghosts, the dust, the furniture… we are part of a whole that needs itself to stay alive. Sometimes I am the parasite. The house has organs: the kitchen is the stomach, the windows are lungs, the drain is the intestines, the wires are the nerves. We share vital functions. If I neglect it, it gets sick. If I neglect myself, I get sick with it.
One day, while waiting for a route taxi, two women were talking near me. One said that, a few years ago, she had received a call from an unknown number. It was her ex-husband. She had had no contact with him since she learned he was involved in drug trafficking. She said they sent her a photo where he was dismembered. A photo with a lot of red—or at least that’s how I imagined it, like when you close your eyes and turn toward the sun. She said she answered and asked who was speaking, but they never gave her an answer. We got into the taxi, and she leaned her head against the window as if it were a pillow.
That story got stuck between my teeth. I lay down on the couch, rested my head on a cushion as if it were a window, while remembering that typical butcher-shop smell: the smell of a knife buried in flesh.
My tired body loses its shape. In exhaustion there is a beautiful deception: it seems like rest, but it is only the body giving in, dying a little. The body endures more than we do. Sometimes I stay sprawled out watching how the wind enters through a poorly closed window, making a black curtain move slowly. I could close it, I could open it all the way, but I leave it like that.
The couch is the navel of the house, and in the house we think things we don’t say out loud. On the couch, things happen without anything happening. Well—until something does: a date, an excuse to clean. That moment is curious, when you invite someone to come in. That tension: maybe today we’ll see each other without pants, or maybe we’ll only exchange saliva and nerves. I don’t understand why humans like kissing mouths; it’s strange. Why does it feel so good to put your tongue in a warm place full of bacteria? If I think about it, it disgusts me. If I do it, it doesn’t. Some people kiss strangely, others mold to your mouth as if they were part of you, as if tongues had muscle memory. Or maybe we kiss only so we don’t have to talk, so silence won’t feel awkward, or so we don’t have to admit that we feel alone.
We get closer. Still nothing. “Make yourself comfortable, take off your shoes if you want. Another glass of wine?” It feels similar to when someone sings Las Mañanitas to you and you stay quiet, not knowing what to do, or when you walk barefoot through the house and suddenly your sock gets wet. Everything is ridiculous, absurd, and yet fascinating. That tension is funny; it’s a little embarrassing to see it from the outside. The walls laugh quietly, as if they understood, as if they were saying: “just fuck already.”
Then there are the neighbors’ noises, or the shouting from another house when someone is doing repairs. I imagine it like plastic surgery: new bars, fresh paint, a house that wants to look prettier. It’s like giving the house liposuction: tools banging, sanding, drilling. A sound that slips in and reaches me from behind my head. Sometimes I wish for a lobotomy; maybe without a small piece of brain I would feel lighter.
Some houses remain half-built, frozen in time, like interrupted stories that are never resumed. When I clean the windows, I remove the cobwebs—except one. I like that corner. There are corpses of flies there, and I see the same spider as always eating them. I should probably give it a name; I guess it’s my roomie. It gives me the illusion of having control over something: that small ecosystem where there is victim and perpetrator, and me, the observer, a perverted voyeur. But that spider would keep eating the flies even if no one were watching. Sometimes I think the house knows more about me than it should.
Photography by Jerónimo Andrade
Mexican multidisciplinary artist. His work begins from the personal in order to tension the everyday and respond, from a critical perspective, to the concerns that run through his surroundings. The body and text function as conceptual triggers in his visual practice.