I write at home in a room that doubles as the dining room, on a large modern table of vaguely Danish design. The exposure is southwest, and in winter the room can be as bright as a countryside. The sun pours in from early morning till late in the afternoon. It is my favorite room in the apartment. During the day, I often go up to the windows and look out past the fire escape onto the row of houses across from mine. What I see is not the fronts of these houses but their backs; their backs face the backs of the houses in the row on which I live. This arrangement makes me think of canal-side houses, as though the space between the houses were now no longer ordinary New York City backyards, as though we were now in Amsterdam and we were facing each other, and there was water below. And each day when the sun goes down and my room darkens and my neighbors’ lights begin to twinkle on one by one, I leave the page and begin to imagine their lives and their imaginations, in all those foreign languages, and the shortage of bridges between them and me.
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
2014
Lysley Tenorio
From room 1006 at the Standard, East Village, you see a white-faced clock overlooking a small triangular park. To the right is a sea-green dome ringed with small arched windows, partly blocked by a boxy rectangular building, faded and plain except for the cross on its south-facing wall, and on the rooftop hangs a single line of laundry. Straight ahead is a building, wide and blank as a wall, that nobody seems to enter or exit.
If you don’t live in New York, you might not know the names or histories of these buildings, how they function in the city, what they mean to its people. But this is the gift of being somewhere new, in a place that will never be home—everything within is defined by your first impressions. For instance: That sea-green dome, so out of place and time, might house things both ancient and futuristic—rusted astrolabes on the shelves, side by side with next-generation iPads. The crucifix could be the final remnant of a failed church, the original cathedral demolished decades ago, replaced by a building full of a thousand cubicles. That white-faced clock, the brightest thing at night, may very well be the front of a crimefighter’s headquarters or a supervillain’s lair. That line of laundry, winter-damp and flapping—those are the clothes of a dead man who left no loved ones behind to gather them. And directly across, that building is lifeless as ever, but someone is inside, waiting to be glimpsed, you’re sure of it. All you need to do is wait.
NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
2013
John Jeremiah Sullivan
This is the back view from my office. It’s raining. You can see a wall of the old garage (which still has a deep oil pit inside, from when more people worked on their own cars). The magnolia that hangs over the backyard is blooming. When it does, we open the door to the sleeping porch upstairs, and the whole house fills with the smell. My wife will cut one of the flowers and let it float in a bowl of water on the kitchen table. Magnolias drop hundreds of large seedpods once a year—they come crashing down from the tree. I’m always worried one of them is going to land on somebody’s head (they’re heavy enough to hurt). We spend about a month just picking them up. They look like brown-green grenades but are bursting all over with bright red seeds. The leaves, when they turn brown and fall, are hard and brittle. That’s a problem down here, because tiny pools of water form on them, and the mosquitoes lay eggs there. You have to pick them up fast. In short, a big magnolia is a lot of work, but I would never get rid of this one. The week or so of blossoming is worth everything. Also, the branches cover the whole brick path from the back door to the driveway. Even in a heavy storm, you can just walk along dry. Sometimes I pat the tree’s trunk and thank it for that, or just to say hello. Once, when we first got home from a trip of two months, my daughter—who was four at the time—hugged the tree long and fiercely, saying nothing, before she ran inside. I think it’s sort of the guardian of the house.
WILMINGTON, NORTH CAROLINA, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
2012
Edwidge Danticat
I can’t see outside my office window unless I’m standing up. My desk sits beneath the window ledge, like a footstool for some escaping giant. This seems fitting because I live on the edge of two very different neighborhoods: one a trendy design hub and the other a gentrifying working-class enclave. The fact that when I look up from my desk I see only curtains and glass is both comforting and distancing. And when I do stand up and look out, I see hedges surrounded by a little gate, something that looks like another kind of window, a floor-to-ceiling one, except there is no actual ceiling.
I work at home, which means there is no ceiling on my home or work life either. They run into each other the way nights run into days when the work is going really well. I purposely choose to work on the side of the house with the simplest view. The plain scenery reminds me of a theater curtain in a minimalist high school play. The trees, electric wires, and even the church steeple in the distance all look like they’ve been drawn by the same giant who would use my desk as a footstool, perhaps to wave to the people talking loudly as they walk by. For every person the hedge blocks from my view, I hear four voices, sometimes whispering, sometimes arguing, and sometimes even singing late into the night. And rather than disturb me this makes me feel like I am on a journey with kin and strangers alike. As my loved ones walk, or sleep, on one side of the wall, others roam the world, the way the characters in my stories roam beyond my window, and even beyond my imagination. Finally, when I open that little metal gate and step outside, the world feels both foreign and familiar. Like I have been gone, but not too long.
MIAMI, FLORIDA, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
2013
T. C. Boyle
I’ve never felt the need to slip off to a writers’ colony in order to get a dose of nature and tranquility, my satire of such places in East Is East notwithstanding. What I’m looking at in this view out the window from my desk is a big oak tree just beyond the roofline, and beyond that—oh, maybe three miles off—the high buff ridge of the Santa Ynez Mountains. In between is a whole lot of vegetation, a big scoop of sky, and the hawks that hang there like mobiles. The mullion that frames the view is unique to this house, Frank Lloyd Wright’s first California design, and its T-shape is meant to depict a tree. This is because the house is surrounded by forest, a forest that once welcomed overwintering monarchs in great numbers (which are now, alas, greatly reduced), and so was known as “Butterfly Woods” at its inception more than a century ago.
What do I get out of all this? Distraction and lack of distraction both. I can pause, look up from my work, and see the way the light sits in the trees or observe the woodpeckers and squirrels raiding acorns from the oak, and yet there are no larger distractions in the form of traffic, noise, and big-ape bustle. When I’m done with work I go out into those woods and maintain things in a proprietary way, gathering firewood, applying precious water where necessary, meditating over the fish in the pond in back. It’s all very semi-rural, semi-natural and fully relaxing. Unlike the architect who designed the house and seemed to require chaos in his life in order to create, I need peace and tranquility. I look out my window here and that’s just what I’ve got. What can I say but Hallelujah!
MONTECITO, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
2014
2014
Michelle Huneven
My office is a small hut in the backyard about fifty feet from the house, which is on a large flag lot deep inside a suburban block. It’s very private, I see only our neighbor’s trees—there’s not a power line, a street, or even a roof in sight; it’s like working in a park or another century.
Formerly, this land was part of the West India Gardens, a nursery owned by Frederick Popenoe, the man who brought dates and the fuerte avocado to Southern California. The gardens were mostly gone by the time I moved in, but from my desk, I see the three anci
ent, enormous eucalyptus trees that preside over the yard. We call them the King, the Queen, and the Prince. We worship them, and keep them trimmed (so they won’t blow down in the Santa Ana winds and flatten the house), and rake up the fantastical quantities of acorns, sticks, leaves, and bark they perenially shed.
I live a mile east of where I grew up, and where my father grew up before me (a succession rare in California). When he was eight, my father ran away from home with a friend and the two spent the night on this very property tussling over one thin blanket beneath the royal family—which is how Dad recognized the place eighty years later when he came to see my new home.
I have replanted with citrus, olives, cacti, roses, and vegetables, and hedged the yard into a series of outdoor rooms. Between the King and the Queen, we trained a vine over an old metal gazebo to create a shade house; our electrician dubbed it “the creepy clubhouse,” and the name stuck. Then, across the yard from my desk, partly obscured by a pomegranate hedge, we’ve installed a large outfitters tent as a spare bedroom; it reminds some people of safari, some of high mountain camps, some of Lincoln visiting his generals during the Civil War.
I like to think a runaway boy would find much to his liking here today.
For years now this has been what I see when I work; not surprising, it’s what I visualize whenever I so much as think of getting down to it. This setting has become the base camp, the portal of my imagination; from here, day after day, I begin.
ALTADENA, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
2012
Francisco Goldman
My desk is snugly ensconced in a front corner of the living room, facing wall and bookshelves, a wide window overlooking a park in Colonia Roma to the right and, on my left, the narrow side window drawn by Matteo. I’m sharing the apartment with my friend Jon Lee, who is almost always traveling, but he needed a Latin American base for his work. We only moved in a month ago. It’s the biggest apartment I’ve ever lived in. The living room is so immense that I bought a football (not a futbol) just to prove you can play catch in it, and now I am looking for a Wiffle ball batting machine, which I think would be a great way to manage the persistent physical restlessness that often makes it so hard for me to sit still at a desk. In the mornings I go down to a café facing the park for breakfast. They have terrific coffee. I usually have the waitress tell me about the chilaquiles, the enfrijoladas, molletes, and omelettes just so that I can savor her descriptions, and then I order the fruit and granola, and she makes fun of me for that. I work in the café for two or three hours and then go back to the desk in my apartment. Apart from a break for lunch, I try to work until seven in the evening, and then usually head to the gym. We’re right around the corner from one of Mexico City’s greatest cantinas, one I’d been coming to for years from more distant neighborhoods. They have a funny ritual there. A waiter will ring a bell to catch everyone’s attention, shout out a name, and then the cavernous room will resound with raucous shouts of “¡Pendejo!” (it means, more or less, “Asshole!”). You have to pay the waiter to do that. Once a good friend, a writer from Ireland, was visiting, and he paid the waiter to shout out the name of another Irish writer who’d given him a nasty review, and the waiter, though he could barely pronounce the name, shouted it out, and everyone in the cantina, the old men playing dominoes, the Mexican and foreign hipsters, and literary types who also hang out there, et cetera, joyously shouted, “¡Pendejo!”
MEXICO CITY, MEXICO
2013
Rodrigo Rey Rosa
What seems from here a pleasant view could one of these days become a show of pyrotechnics. At present the volcanoes, active or not, are covered by haze. In the afternoon the wind that rises from the nearby sea, hidden by the mountain range and the volcanoes, will disperse the mist and reveal: the Pacaya (the most active, and the closest), the Agua, the Fuego (capable of spraying ash all the way to Tapachula, Mexico), the Acatenango, and, almost invisible to the west, the Tolimán and the Atitlán. Another thing that cannot be seen from here: Beyond the tall buildings that have sprung up over the last ten years in the southern part of the city lies a deep ravine that hides a limonada—the local name for the slums that house the garbage dumps. There ends the city.
Sometimes the noises of the limonada reach me here: an evangelical hymn, a party (woofers, norteñas, reggaetón), firecrackers, bombs, occasionally a shootout.
Buildings aside, the view behind me as I write—the sky, the changing clouds, the volcanoes—is practically the same one I could see as a child from the roof of my parents’ house, which sits behind the bamboo bushes down there, in the foreground—and beyond that, the unseen too remains unchanged: the ravine and the limonada, now denser by way of gentrification, more populous due to the waves of peasants displaced either by the civil war that ended not too long ago or by chronic poverty, turned into proletarians or gang members, often out of control.
Very little history—the remains of a colonial aqueduct built on a pre-Columbian mound that passes through here, under the balcony, spanning half the city from east to west—and plenty of meteorology can be viewed from this south-facing window, in a multistory condo with surveillance cameras, security gates, and armed guards, just in case.
What an illustrious traveler wrote more than half a century ago—“The provincial capital was saved from ugliness only by its trees”—still seems accurate, at least from this window.
These sorts of things often come to mind here, as I write.
(Translated from the Spanish by Jessica Henderson.)
GUATEMALA CITY, GUATEMALA
Alejandro Zambra
I’m not sure that my little studio is the best place in the house to write. It’s too hot in summer and too cold in winter. But I like this window. I like those trees crossed by power lines and that slice of available sky. The silence is never absolute, or maybe it is—maybe my idea of silence now includes the constant barking of dogs and the uneven roar of motors. I take enormous pleasure in watching passersby, the odd cyclist, the cars.
When the writing isn’t happening I just sit there, absorbing the scenery, adoring it. I’m sure those minutes, those apparently lost hours, are useful in some way, that they’re essential for writing: that my books would be very different if I had written them in another room, looking out another window.
(Translated from the Spanish by Harry Backlund.)
SANTIAGO, CHILE
2013
Tatiana Salem Levy
Although I have an office in my apartment, every day I wake up and take my laptop to the dining room table. The view from my dining room has an amplitude that takes me away, and when I write I need the feeling that space and time have no end. I can’t stand writing in enclosed places, nor having just an hour to work.
When I sit at the table, the morning is still quiet; I hear one or another child leaving for school and the birds that often come to visit me at the window. That’s when I write best, inspired by the imbalance and the irregularity of the buildings in front of me. Then, throughout the day, inspiration will fail. I get up and lean on the window to see what I can’t see while seated: a huge mountain to the right with a statue of Christ on top. In silence, I start talking to the man with open arms until my thoughts get lost and I decide to go back to the chair. And so my days elapse, between the table and the window.
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL
2013
Daniel Galera
The large window facing the small square, showing the short residential buildings and the treetops, is one of the main reasons I moved to this apartment. Some kind of open view really helps my mood in order to work, but there’s a special kind I prefer. A wide and beautiful natural landscape is distracting to me: I feel like going outside and must close the window. A window facing a wall is worse, I feel oppressed. This is just what I need: a square with some trees, people, and noise. Even the traffic noise is
somewhat stimulating to me—that way I am connected with my urban environment, with city life, I am aware of people living and doing other stuff around me, and that breaks the continual isolation often required to write, softening the solitude. While facing the mostly unchanging picture at my window, I listen to dogs and birds, a girl practicing the flute, the roar of buses and trucks, ambulance sirens, wind and rain, the rants of the crazy and the homeless, the loud music and fistfights of late hours, and sometimes even silence, prolonged silence. Some windows are an escape for daydreaming, but this one kind of keeps me company.
PORTO ALEGRE, BRAZIL
2014
Maria Kodama
A certain house in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Recoleta has a window that is doubly privileged. It overlooks a courtyard garden of the kind known here as a pulmón de manzana—literally, the lung of a block—which affords it a view of the sky and an expanse of plants, trees, and vines that meander along the walls of neighboring houses, marking the passage of the seasons with their colors. In addition, the window shelters the library of my late husband, Jorge Luis Borges. It is a real Library of Babel, full of old books, their endpapers scribbled with notes in his tiny hand.
Windows on the World Page 5