










































Nadia Villafuerte
Casas

Translated from Spanish by Pennell Somsen

Fantasy and representation. The first thought on seeing 
certain places sometimes comes from a previous image: 
stories read or seen in films can evoke a detached 

response. I have been a devoted reader of Raymond Carver, 
Richard Ford, Richard Yates, and John Cheever, writers who 
have delved into specific American landscapes to give them 
their own character, miniatures in a parallel universe, that 
of fiction, where the tranquility and longed-for perfection of 
suburban life topples little by little when a keen look at the 
interior of the houses with porches and gardens captures small 
but decisive domestic ruptures (the cracked linoleum, the 
wallpaper, a light bulb in a bedroom, the noise of a sprinkler in 
the yard. It’s possible to travel the world by examining its objects 
and their qualities, and discovering the intrinsic relationship 
between them and the attitudes and feelings of those who own 
them).

Because space is a physical projection of human intention, 
a house becomes a map of life. To what degree do we 
subdue nature to create a building? How does a house, a 
neighborhood, and then the sum of many neighborhoods that 
make a city, speak of where and how we live?  There is an 
unbreakable connection between a physical space and the 
person who occupies it. It isn’t necessary to be very perceptive 
to see that life plays out differently in a dark space where 
nylon curtains hung on rods separate makeshift rooms, than 
in moss-covered brownstones or in a garden apartment in an 
ordinary neighborhood—sometimes dismal, sometimes humid, 
sometimes burdened by the monotony of the running water 
infinitely multiplying its endless grayness. All buildings change 
their images according to who passes through them.

At the Brooklyn Museum an exhibit presents various types 
of nineteenth-century houses from different parts of the United 
States. “Since eternity was out of stock, ten thousand aging 
things have been amassed instead” (Wislawa Szymborska).1 
The exhibit is called “Playing House” and although it’s 

1   Szymborska, “Museum,” in View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems (New 
York: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 11 (translator’s note).



162    Nadia Villafuerte

technically perfect, a sense of desertion exists in the living 
rooms, the bedrooms, the kitchens, the great rooms, which 
all seem to be frozen in a remote age and at the same time 
disappearing into a sort of temporal limbo, where no human 
touch can disturb them. Nothing moves, and beauty for the sake 
of beauty is a bit intimidating. “Playing House” is domestic life 
suspended in time, a time that doesn’t know the disruption of 
a porcelain dish breaking, the dust in the rugs, the noise of a 
ceiling fan in the corridor.

The houses that caught my attention were those of the south 
(Georgia or Alabama), with their pottery vases, bookshelves of 
rustic wood, matted photos on the wall, rugs of bland colors, 
formal placement of furniture (the chair against the window, the 
polished parquet of the living room, and the different textures 
of fabrics for beds and curtains.) Before seeing the replicas in 
the museums, I had, in a way, known these houses through the 
stories of Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers and Tennessee 
Williams. (Have you ever lain under an opening in the roof from 
which it’s possible to see the stars? Crickets and frogs singing 
and a great blackness surrounding you, and fireflies flickering 
far away over the cotton fields or in the cypresses?) Their words 
have painted a picture in my head of clouds of cigar smoke 
drifting to the ceiling, the sound of the midnight train, and the 
100 degrees of summer heat burning in the distance as if it 
were a mirage. I recognize these things neither by the buildings, 
nor by the odor of wood and mothballs in the closets, but by the 
people who live there and give meaning to the objects. This type 
of house—screened windows, hallways painted cobalt blue or 
pistachio green, a handmade chair of canary yellow—makes me 
think of small towns: people hardened in the fields, apparently 
placid people whose apathetic interiors burst forth only to yield 
simple stories: here where merely the whistle of a teapot on the 
stove tells you that something trivial or disastrous is about to 
happen.

Every place is political: on every corner you can see the 
economic, social, and cultural differences of any community. 
A place that is irrefutable proof of the feats of what we call 
progress and civilization also reveals the inequalities that 
so-called progress brings with it, the enormous rupture that 
civilization creates. I know that what I say is obvious, but 
I suspect that the boundaries we establish between the 
hierarchies of places are such that often we are incapable of 



Pennell Somsen    163

seeing past the edges of our own corners. To counterbalance 
this separation that limits us we seek out multiple experiences, 
to break up our routine and transform it, to elicit the search for 
an internal truth or a display of symbols that we impose on the 
place where we sleep and eat every day.  We crowd together 
over the earth planting our flags in our own territories with such 
determination that we believe that all the odysseys have already 
been completed, that there is nothing left to conquer.

We make it so that we don’t see our surroundings as vibrant, 
not until the eyes of strangers help us peel away the layers 
and see more clearly. The lethargy that accompanies this static 
way of being trivializes our daily life, the magnitude of all that 
surrounds us, and suddenly we have lost the old practice of 
exchanging stories, of telling anecdotes, of being affected by 
the daily routines that reveal to us the oddness of that other who 
travels by our side.

(Here, I’m putting a parenthesis, as I interrupt my journey. I 
have left lower Manhattan and boarded the ferry. I should make 
clear that the visual perspective when you arrive in Manhattan 
is the opposite of what it is when you leave it. You feel raised 
up like a flag while you’re on the sea, but the lightness is gone 
as soon as you set foot in Manhattan and are cast into the 
streets that take you to Wall Street with its fanatical scream 
of triumphant capitalism. Landing there I try to imagine the 
motivations of those who threw concrete and glass up into the 
sky: maybe they didn’t do it because the buildings appeared 
magnificent, daring, triumphant, but because the act itself 
was something absolutely useless for everyone, including the 
thousands of people who built it. Once on land it’s likely that 
excitement will burst inside us and dissipate  as soon as we 
get lost in the gleaming streets. The shadow of the skyscrapers 
is so vain and humiliating that its message is clear: it is better 
not to have ambitions in a city that can never be yours. On the 
return trip, going from Manhattan to Staten Island, even your 
soul will take a seat to lose itself in the sensation of the water, 
sometimes green, other times grey or brown, always cold. In 
the boat, you’re free from the urban shores. On one side is 
New Jersey, its buildings much less ostentatious and more 
industrial: on the other side is Brooklyn, its hodgepodge of old 
brick buildings staring at the port. And, in this parenthesis that 
is the ferry, without a floor to cling to, at least I can’t think about 
anything. The craziness of people comes to a halt in this in-



164    Nadia Villafuerte

between place and allows me to rest. The spray of salt water, 
the stumbling, the leaving and arriving from one piece of land to 
another create an illusion of a different type of understanding, 
one that is empty and silent, a silence that embodies my lungs, 
my liver.  It is as if within me an impression in the form of an A 
opens until I can hear the faint creaking of the ferry landing, like 
the sound of a wooden crate breaking. Without walls other than 
the shell of the ferry I am left to focus on the faces of the other 
travelers or to get lost in thought, abandoning the serviceable 
seat to let loose a vague idea in my subconscious. The murmur 
of different languages, those wild languages in which even 
curse words sound beautiful, the stink of contaminated water 
that wafts through the open partitions, whatever people are 
doing, reading magazines and newspapers, listening to music, 
checking their cellphones or walking or talking in the hallways, 
is eclipsed by this mist that surrounds our faces, faces of brick, 
legs like the sidewalks of hot granite where you can throw 
yourself into the crowd if you have the courage to do so. All of 
us in the ferry share the feeling of the common danger of being 
in the elements, of losing our way. Past, present and future are 
mental states. There, in the ferry, even the things most real, 
most solid, the most loved and the most hated, aren’t more than 
shadows on the surface of the water that opens and at the same 
time sustains us.)

Much has been said regarding the influence of our 
surroundings on how we feel, but little of how they influence 
our ethical codes, of whether the eyes should or shouldn’t 
open and question what they see, because all that is outside, 
whether we like it or not, affects us. Once you gloss over what 
makes you uncomfortable your vision becomes limited and 
you find it necessary to judge although you are judging only by 
appearances.

After the ferry I need to take a bus. The types of people 
that get on and off vary depending on the neighborhoods. In 
St. George you see the multiracial bustle of the working class, 
most of them Black, Indian, or Latino, and standing apart from 
them the angry white laborers. Gallician construction workers, 
plumbers from Veracruz, cashiers from Madurai: citizens of 
colonized nations laboring in this thick substance we call destiny 
that doesn’t depend on an individual’s efforts, as we have 
claimed ad nauseam, but rather on other factors (mainly the 
ferocious economic system and good tips; at the end of the day 
this continues to be the richest country in the world.) 



Pennell Somsen    165

In the first stretch from St. George to Richmond Town 
Road the houses are modest, unpretentious brick buildings, 
unadorned by gardens. The businesses announce themselves 
on their awnings, a Hispanic restaurant, delis full of a mix of 
Africans and Dominicans, a laundry, a center for making and 
receiving phone calls and sending money to and from other 
countries. There are posters that not only decorate the walls 
but also defiantly claim the right to occupy public space. Some 
closed-off streets serve as playgrounds for the children who 
kick balls and play after school in the dangerous light where 
everything is seen and, later, in the twilight where almost 
everything is hidden. Then the sweaty children go to their 
warm houses with kitchens vibrant with disorder. I dare to 
guess that those who live in these houses express themselves 
in an uninhibited way, following their natural impulses. I also 
know that I have more prejudices than principles, and that the 
exercise of speculation is unreliable.

Halfway along the bus route going into Historic Richmond 
Town, the view changes. This district of Staten Island is 
mostly white and very conservative. Here, the upper middle 
class seem to have bestowed upon themselves the right to 
consider picturesque the surrounding neighborhoods inhabited 
by working people. Between their skirts, the old Victorians 
begin to display glimpses of their green gardens, with formal 
flower plots in colors both subtle and brilliant. In some gardens 
people have inscribed biblical quotations in stone; one psalm 
makes me wonder why on occasion people associate wealth 
with religion, and why these religious phrases engraved in the 
borders between one house and another inspire this thought:  in 
the United States the most important religion is that of private 
property. As for the rest, the grand display of large porches, 
the facades of two stories with their airtight picture windows 
that provide protection from street noise,—they  allow me to 
understand the unvarnished realism of American exteriors that 
Edward Hopper captured so well, as a means of looking at 
the emotional landscape, there where the cushioned sound of 
nothingness remains exposed thanks to the harshness of the 
light, the interiors and exteriors which in their abandonment or 
alienation appear sinister, disturbing. 

I get off at Corbin Street and walk toward Elkhart. Because 
it isn’t fully spring yet the trees are bare: showing their intricate 
branches, some are already beginning to bud. On walking 



166    Nadia Villafuerte

below the trees decorated by the whiteness of the sun, I think of 
the dry weeds on the high plateaus of Ciudad Juarez, where it is 
possible to find a spare part for a car next to the severed hand 
of a worker. The well-cut grass of the lawns in this middle-class 
neighborhood makes me think of the poorly paid undocumented 
workers who maintain them.

Then, those houses, the ones on Arthur Kill Avenue, bring 
to mind the stories of Yates and Cheever: stories of employees 
of Ford and Chrysler with dreams that gradually faded because 
of the hideous imbalance hidden behind the efficiency of 
electricity. Something in the way the houses are built makes 
me think of underground rumblings making them shudder from 
the weightiness of their importance. Their sameness invites 
disaster. Their order, their refinement, is also their mystery: 
there is in them a perception of peace that begs to be broken 
abruptly. It intrigues me to wander around the fronts of the 
houses, to feel the quiet that surrounds them, and to see what 
is revealed behind the curtains. They aren’t like the buildings of 
multihued red brick in the urban center, where the ceiling of one 
home is the floor of another, where the bedrooms back up to 
the next-door neighbor like open eyelids breaking the feeling of 
privacy. No. The houses of the suburbs, made like illustrations 
of children’s stories, have a glazed and hallucinatory quality 
because it’s difficult to enter them except in the imagination. 
A house is the most private place that exists. There could be 
something rotting on the patio that threatens the peace (there 
is the ear covered with ants in the first scene of David Lynch’s 
Blue Velvet). Or it could be that the washing machine sounds 
in the calm afternoon, without whoever dries the clothes ever 
having an epiphany.

Cars and bicycles are in the garages. Here, very few people 
use public transportation and when they do they maintain 
control of it. There is something that seems bizarre about this 
way of living, with so much technology at our service. Here, they 
use their cell phones to find out when the bus will arrive at the 
next stop. We press a button and begin to rely on our electronic 
gadgets to think for us, to remember for us. They are both our 
servants and our masters as we are theirs. It’s interesting to 
see the collective impatience at a bus stop. The GPS is now the 
oracle that denies drivers and walkers the possibility of going in 
the wrong direction, and taking a journey during which instead 
of losing your way you learn something you didn’t know about 



Pennell Somsen    167

yourself, about others, or about what you carry with you. I’m 
not saying that I prefer a compass or an hourglass but I like the 
idea that taking the wrong road might lead me to tangled streets 
that cross and change in a barely noticeable way and surprise 
me with a shortcut, and I sometimes enjoy the adventure I’m 
led on when people give me wrong directions as a joke. The 
impossibility of controlling the clock so as not to be late seems 
like the best example that the physical world still has ways 
to impose its own rules on us. Wandering without purpose 
continues to be, at least for me, a way to learn. (I’m lying a little. 
Today I waited for a bus and was annoyed that I didn’t have 
the app that tells the time of arrival at the closest station: the 
delay was thirty minutes.) But I understand the following: the 
efficiency that the transit service attempts in this country isn’t for 
convenience but to avoid frustration at all costs. 

Of course this perspective is one of a Latin American woman 
who is becoming accustomed to the habits of the first world 
and modern life that have coined with desperation the words 
efficiency and control. I have forgotten to say that in whatever 
part of the world I identify much more with record players than 
with Internet radio. My image of a country woman is full of pity 
and tenderness. I know, nevertheless, she has the quality of 
a person who is astonished by something she has never seen 
before, like someone who sees the ocean for the first time or 
who learns how to use an escalator at fifty years of age.

There is a lot that is senseless about how dwellings fill up 
with things. Things for everything, to put together and to take 
apart, objects to fill certainties and to alleviate fears that come 
more from beliefs than from emotions. Objects that end up 
drugging our minds. Little by little we lose our quiet inner life 
and agitate it so that it resembles the things that move outside 
of us. Then life becomes less dangerous and more predictable, 
but that feeling of safety will never last too long. Soon the 
sound of glass breaking behind the room you live in will disrupt 
everything. Nobody guarantees us that behind these houses 
identical in form, different only for the type of flowers in the 
garden, so fragile that they can be uprooted by a hurricane, 
these unlikely houses of cards that appear to be Superglued to 
the surface of a model—no one guarantees us that inside these 
houses there is no neurotic icepick, no depressed stove, no 
demented washing machine: up close no house is normal. And 
even more serious: if, as they say, things say more about us 



168    Nadia Villafuerte

than a confession, we have to take into account that our privacy 
is not safe, that our objects betray us in that place we call home; 
they are more than our effort to decorate the house to our 
liking. Sliding back the bolt of a door, you can explore a sordid 
situation, a racist speculation, the insane discussion of why we 
hurt each others’ feelings, the lullaby of a licensed revolver, or a 
strange murmur longing to escape confinement, all demanding 
their quota of exposure to the elements. 

*****

The Mexican author Nadia Villafuerte (b. 1978) has published 
two collections of short stories, Barcos en Houston (2005) and 
¿Te gusta el látex, cielo? (2008), and one novel Por el lado salvaje 
(2011). Her work has been included in the anthologies México 20, 
New Voices, Old Traditions (Pushkin Press, 2015) and Palabras 
mayores, nueva narrativa mexicana (Malpaso Ediciones, 2015), 
among others. Her essay “Casas” was originally published in 
the Revista de la Universidad de México 119 (January 2014), 
available online at http://www.revistadelauniversidad.unam.mx/
articulo.php?publicacion=86&art=2486.

Nadia Villafuerte will receive her Masters in Creative Writing in 
Spanish at New York University in May, 2017. 

P. S.

http://www.revistadelauniversidad.unam.mx/articulo.php?publicacion=86&art=2486
http://www.revistadelauniversidad.unam.mx/articulo.php?publicacion=86&art=2486

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