The Z-Hen House

Z-hen. Artist, Photographer, Writer, Child at Heart. All contents original unless otherwise referenced.

[z-hen]

She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else’s eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things.

- the Sun Also Rises

[z-hen]

May 15

The hardest thing to do, in this world, is to love and be loved in return, to choose doing this with the same person, over and over again, while both of you evolve and inevitably change while bobbing inside the tides of life.

[z-hen]

May 11 2021

I have not written anything in a long time. I am not sure what I want to type here but I’m going to ramble on. 

This is a secret. I don’t like watching sunsets. They make me feel lonely. My city has miles of beautiful beaches that are full of lovers at sun-down, people old and young holding hands and leaning into each other. I am happy for them but all it reminds me is how alone I am. 

I was until recently holding someone’s hand and watching the sunset while drinking from a mug of home-made Old Fashioned. It was one of my happiest moments of 2021. When it got dark, we walked back to his small one bedroom apartment and made dinner. I was wearing a dress as red as the pizza sauce. A week later, my hand was suddenly forlorn again. I had to end it because I was falling too deep for him while he remained adamant in leaving the country by end of year. “I made my decision. I need to do this for myself” he said, repeatedly, when I asked about his decision to move back to Europe. “I don’t want to die here”. Weeks later, his exasperated voice still echoes in my ears, in a space as hollow as the distance I felt between us when we were not spending time together. I felt him holding up this space with all his might as an entire weekend would go by without an invite to spend time together, and as he rushed back to his car after having dinner/relaxing at my place. I gave myself a timeline - end of month three - to sort out how I feel about the arm’s length. But alas, I couldn’t hold it together until then. When I heard myself bringing up the topic of intentional distance vs. personal space again, I knew it was time to end it 

On the eve of my birthday, I am wallowing. Life is heartbreakingly frustrating on some days and pages, but it is still mysterious. The sun that I am afraid to see setting into the ocean (as witnessed by lovers) also rises, mostly by itself, with no one to bear witness. The part of my personality that seeks a silver lining in every black cloud drudges on with bright smiles for all the world to see. But this part is always at war with the other part that smells of first-generation practicalism - the part that is proactive and constantly championing and shaping and seeking the path that is logical and righteous and deserving of the energy/intentions I put in. 

[z-hen]

THE BEST YEARS OF HIS LIFE: AN INTERVIEW WITH GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

By Marlise Simons

April 10, 1988

FOR Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the pleasure and turmoil of writing change from novel to novel. In the case of ''One Hundred Years of Solitude,'' he thought so long and hard about the story that when he finally sat down to commit it to paper, it came in a great burst. But he had difficulty writing ''The Autumn of the Patriarch,'' a novel he published seven years before he won the Nobel Prize in 1982. With that book, he recently recalled, ''I was doing well when I could finish four lines a day''; the whole project occupied him, off and on, for seven years.

By contrast, the years when he worked on ''Love in the Time of Cholera'' were among the happiest of his life. Nostalgically, he wrote about the courtship of his parents and his own journeys by riverboat, both of which were important sources for the book. In Mexico City, his longtime home base, we talked about what writing the novel had been like:

This book was a pleasure. It could have been much longer, but I had to control it. There is so much to say about the life of two people who love each other. It's infinite.

Also, I had the advantage of knowing the end beforehand. Because in this book, the end was a problem. It would have been in poor taste if one or even both of the characters died. The most wonderful thing would be if they could go on loving forever. So the reader is given the consolation that the boat with the lovers will keep on with its journey, coming and going. Not only for the rest of their lives, but forever.

A kind of Flying Dutchman of love. Have you done a lot of traveling on boats yourself?

I've known that boat for a long time. I traveled a lot on it, beginning when I was 12. I lived on the coast [ in Colombia ] but I got a scholarship to study in Bogota. So I would take the boat from Baranquilla to La Dorada and then the train to Bogota. That was about the time the river began to deteriorate. Between my first trips and my final ones, I saw the decay in the river that appears in the book.

I had to have two river journeys in the book. The first was that of Florentino Ariza, when he is named telegraphist in the interior. There is no purpose to this one because he arrives, regrets it and turns back. But I had to invent it to be able to describe the river and the landscape. If not, that whole description would have had to come at the end of the book, when the two old people go on their journey. And that would have overshadowed the relationship between the two, which is what mattered there. So that device helped me also to show how the river changed from a fresh and thriving stream and fell into decadence. I must have taken the last trip when I was at the university, when I was about 22. Then the boats stopped running.

All these things for me are part of a nostalgia. Nostalgia is a great source for literary inspiration, for poetic inspiration.

You wrote most of the book in Cartagena?

Yes, and those two years when I was writing it was a time when I was almost completely happy. Everything went well for me. People spend a lifetime thinking about how they would really like to live. I asked my friends and no one seems to know very clearly. To me it's very clear now. I wish my life could have been like the years when I was writing ''Love in the Time of Cholera.''

I would get up at 5:30 or 6 in the morning. I need only six hours of sleep. Then I quickly listened to the news. I would read from 6 to 8, because if I don't read at that time I won't get around to it anymore. I lose my rhythm. Someone would arrive at the house with fresh fish or lobster or shrimp caught nearby. Then I would write from 8 till 1. By midday, Mercedes [ his wife ] would go to the beach and wait for me with friends. I never quite knew who to expect; there were always people coming and going. After lunch I had a little siesta. And when the sun started going down I would go out on the street to look for places where my characters would go, to talk to people and pick up language and atmosphere. So the next morning I would have fresh material I had brought from the streets.

I also had one of the most curious and enjoyable literary experiences I've ever had. One of the characters was Fermina, an 18-year-old girl living in a Caribbean town in the late 19th century. She lived with her father, a Spanish immigrant, and with her mother, who I could not figure out. And there was an aunt, her father's sister, who I saw very clearly and who had the same name. I just could not grasp the mother. I would seat them around the table and I could see how they all behaved - except for the mother. At first I thought the aunt was in the way. And I took her out and put her back again. But the mother was the problem. I could not see her: not the face, the name or anything about her. And then one day I woke up and realized what had happened. The mother had died while the girl was still young. And when I saw that the mother was dead, she became alive and real. She grew and had a great presence -in the house, in everyone's memory. It made me so happy to resolve this. I had been stretching the logic of the book. I had been trying to put a dead person among the living, and that was not possible.

And the men? How did you feel about Florentino?

I don't really like him. I think he is very selfish, like all men are. And as for Fermina, I think she became more bourgeois than she realized. That changed her a lot and made her very pretentious. She only understood that by the time she was very old, when she agreed to go on the boat. To do that, she had to break with her whole life.

But there is another important character, one that has no name - and that is the society of the Caribbean coast, its prejudice and superstitions, its old-fashioned ways. This is what really drives the whole story.

You have said that the thwarted early courtship of your parents served in part as a model for this book. Has your mother read it?

I don't know if she's read it all the way through. She's 84 years old now. I think they have read parts to her. Anyway, she knows what's in it. When I first started writing it in Cartagena, I would go to her house every afternoon and I would question my mother and my father separately. He was still alive then.

Have you read the English translation?

My English translator is [ Gregory ] Rabassa. I always trusted him so much; I never had to pay attention. But this time he had other commitments, and another translator was sought. I can read English, but not well enough to judge the way I dare judge a text in French or Italian. But anyhow, there were all sorts of test translations. Of the three sample translations, I read only the first chapter of this one and it was the best, without a doubt. The editors at Knopf agreed. Anyhow, what can I do? I can't worry. There is also the Japanese and the Swedish and the Dutch and so on.

Do the translators contact you and consult you?

Sometimes it's an editor who sends notes asking little things. Sometimes translators send a list of things they have doubts about. The strange thing is that, regardless of the language, the list of doubts is almost always the same.

I know you get a lot of mail from your readers. What sort of things do they write to you?

The letters I find most interesting are from people who ask me where I got this theme or that passage or such and such a character. Because they feel it is about something or someone they know. They will say: So and so is just like my aunt. Or: I have an uncle just like him. And: that episode happened exactly like that in my village. How did you know about it? People from all over Latin America wrote such things, especially after ''One Hundred Years of Solitude.'' They felt it was part of their lives.

That's why you still refuse to let the book be filmed? Because that identification will be lost?

It will be destroyed. Because film does not allow for that. The face of the actor, of Gregory Peck, becomes the face of the character. It cannot be your uncle, unless your uncle looks like Gregory Peck.

Will ''Love in the Time of Cholera'' be filmed?

Maybe. I don't mind as long as it's a Latin American movie. By that I mean one that is directed by a Latin American, that exudes the atmosphere of Latin America, that shows our character, our way of being, our society, because those are the things that define this drama. Anyway it's a problem. But the answer is for me not to get involved. It has already happened with Francesco Rossi, who made ''Chronicle of a Death Foretold.'' He showed me the screenplay and I said, ''Don't show it to me because if I read it the film will probably never be made. I am thinking of my book and you are thinking of your film. I wrote the book alone, you make the film alone.'' And that's how it happened and he thanked me.

[z-hen]

Nightstroll

I haven’t written in a very long time. I feel like I have become an anonymous face to this already anonymous blog. I suppose it isn’t really an anonymous blog since my freaking face is plastered on the home page.  

Yet still I feel like I need to pick the writing back up, if just to log where I have threaded to in 2019, after the bleak year that was 2018.

Life has moved forward, sweeping me into a foamy tumble of waves. I have a new job that pays much better than the old and seems to be more meaningful work and lower stress. I have a new apartment; it’s big and airy and far more expensive than anything I have ever rented. There is a basketball court outside my window. In the late afternoons, children and adults share the court by splitting the two baskets. For a few hours, I hear the sounds of screaming and yelling that transport me to many of the Latin countries I have visited in my travels, where parents and their small children spilled onto the town square after work/school and let themselves be carried into the night by a glorious setting sun.

*   *   *

After a rough day at the office, having a package stolen, and receiving some other unpleasant news, I decided to take a walk on the beach, after the sun was long gone. It took me two + years of living in San Diego to finally take this long stroll (unintentionally). Everything comes alive at night; everything inanimate grows spiny shadowy legs and crawl out of the dense darkness. I walked about 2 miles each way in my hoodie and flip flops, listening to some tango songs, passing a few couples and families looking for small crabs with a flashlight.

Then I went home and I cried - it’s been a while. I guess I needed it. For the vast majority of my adult life, I have been lonely but I was so very good at it, even while surrounded by friends and families, my thoughts and my sentiments were hiding deep in their high towers, sleeping in the nest of their tangled hair. I have been lonely, perhaps all the way back to that day in 2nd grade when I found inexplicable joy in the way the sun shone on broken bricks after a rainstorm. I ran home to get my colored pencils and paper, but I couldn’t capture it exactly right and I remember being very frustrated by my inability to convey this unique brand of beauty that nobody else I knew shared an understanding of. I was lonely then and I am lonely now, and maybe I will always be lonely. On most days I am okay with that. But on some days like today it brings me such grief to be wired differently and needing so much more than what the next person does to be...truly happy, beneath it all, to feel connected and supported and understood -> All the shit that one doesn’t need in order to have a satisfactory life yet I do because they make up such a significant part of me.

It’s exhausting. I am exhausting. I am exhausted.  

[z-hen]

10:45 PM April 12th, 2019

It’s Friday night at 10:45 PM. I just watched multiple youtube videos on “how to cook artichoke perfectly”. Old age is creeping up on me. 

[z-hen]

Rhode Island, also known as the Ocean State, had a permanent effect on her imagination. Beaches in general, and the New England coastline in particular, often show up in her work. "The part of the earth that I've always felt most at ease with," she says, "is not the ground, but sort of the water's edge." During her childhood, trips to the seaside also represented "a cleansing and an absence of so many of the things that came to bring me down in the everyday world: people's behaviour, people's attitudes, people's looks, people's curiosity about us and my parents. The sea's . . . everyone's equal in the face of something like that." From early on, she was conscious of her family's distance from the American life that was claiming her. "I felt intense pressure to be two things," she wrote in 2006, "loyal to the old world and fluent in the new . . . But my perception as a young girl was that I fell short at both ends." Speaking Bengali, eating rice with her fingers: these "seemed part of a secret, utterly alien way of life, and I took pains to hide them from my American friends".

Jhumpa Lahiri

[z-hen]

Day Five

Of the flu that is showing no sign of slowing down. I just logged off work after making up four hours of backed up requests while sitting in my winter coat and boots with heat blasting. Somehow I was still shivering.

I had two small bowls of white rice with salt. I lost all my appetite for anything else, even the salami from Trader Joe's that I had picked up as a special treat. Even though I know this shall pass, I must admit that I'm sad and lonely and out of sorts with what my purpose is in life while laying with my jacket still on, under two blankets, staring up at the ceiling.

What of these days will I remember six months from now? And perhaps nothing much will change at all then. Or a year later. Or even more.

[z-hen]

Colombian Dream(ing)

I met Esteban at midnight under the clock tower in Cartagena. I regretted saying yes to the location instantly the moment I walked into the plaza. It was full of prostitutes, incredibly cute (or made-up) women in tight dresses, standing in stilettos while dangling small purses and looking demurely at every passerby. “This is going to be a challenge” I Instagram-messaged. “Why” He shot a reply back immediately.

I was looking down at my phone typing out a response when he was already walking towards me. “I said I was under the tower and I was. See? It’s easy” he smiled. He was in khaki pants and trainers, a black open-front shirt worn over a white tee; his curly long hair pulled into a high pony tail; He had dark, wide-set eyes, a dainty mouth, and walked as if he was floating under a halo of energy. He is a 21 years old journalism student from Medellin. I met him on the boat to Rosario Islands earlier in the day. I was accidentally hijacked by the boat tour he and his parents went on. Of the 50 something people on the boat, he was the only one who could translate for me to the boat captain. Before getting off the boat he said he needed to get away from his parents for a bit and asked if I wanted to later drink a beer and talk. I think he wanted to practice his English. He seemed sincere and I wanted to catch a glimpse of the real Colombian life so I said yes. 

“Do you smoke?” He looked at me expectantly and was disappointed by the answer until I assured him that I don’t mind if he does. For the rest of the night, I watched him smoke two entire packs of cheap cigarettes. “My parents would kill me if they find out” He confessed between long drags. “How do you get rid of the smell then?” I asked, curious about the logistics of his concealment. “I wait 40 minutes before going home. And if I really need to go home immediately, I splash some beer onto my shirt”.

We walked for ten minutes to a small square in Getsemaní, a historically rough neighborhood that is quickly gentrifying. During the day. tourists from the cruise ships come in hordes with their DSLRs dangling from their necks, taking snaps of the colorful graffiti on the walls. On this Saturday night, the square was full of mostly locals, sitting cross-legged on dirty tiles, on the church steps, against the yellow walls, next to food vendors and sculptures; there were dogs and pigeons roaming between the limbs and feet. Abrupt barks mingled with squeals of delight from teenagers and the singing and guitar-strumming of the homeless hippies. The incandescent lights around the church yard cast a yellow veil over everything, as it they were stage lighting and this was a live production. We bought four beers from the convenience store around the block and took our little plastic bag of bottles into the thick circle of people. There were nowhere to sit in the layers of crowds all around. Finally we saw a pocket of space against the church wall, next to empty fruit cups and cigarette butts. It looked dirty and a little damp. A drunk hobo passed out in the space to the right, snoring loudly, his legs splayed out in an unnatural position. We sat down, me carefully in my dress so to not flash anyone. Esteban took out another cigarette from his pack and blew smoke like a wolf upwards into the night sky. A young women sitting at edge of the step in-front of us turned around to study us.

Esteban is an only child and still lived with his parents. He has seven marijuana plants in the hill behind the house. “Why seven? Is that a lucky number?” I asked him. “Because I planted twenty and only seven survived” He laughed. I learned that in Colombia you could plant marijuana plants for your own consumption, but you can’t “transport” them for that is the equivalent of “dealing”. His father is an anthropology professor. His mother a social worker. He grew up in what he called a “typical Middle-class South American household”. He has an uncle living in New Jersey whom he had visited many times, in the summers, practicing his English in the neighborhood. But he really learned his English from playing Call of Duty. “I needed to curse the players in English when they insult me. So I had to learn what they said to me and how to reply” He explained.

“What is the Colombian Dream?” I asked him.

“For my parents’ generation, it is a steady well-paying job, a house with no walls touching the neighbor’s, a yard with two trees, and healthy children”.

“What kind of trees?”

“Fruit-bearing trees” He explained “What is the point of having trees if they don’t bear fruits?”

I laughed out loud.

“What is your generation’s “Colombian Dream”?” I asked him.

“To live a happy life, in a way that makes sense to us” He explained.

“What way is that?”

“For me, it is to be in nature. I walk for miles and camp, for days, with my friends, in the woods in Antioquia. We have a bonfire and talk about...how do you say it in English? reasons for the living...”

“Meaning of life?”

“Ah yes! That” He snapped his fingers, “and sometimes we do fungus”

“Fungus? Oh....mushrooms?”

“YES! Mushrooms!” He laughed at himself wholeheartedly for half a minute. “I also deal LSD at school” He added.

Esteban has a girlfriend who couldn’t come to vacation with the family. “Where is she this weekend?” “She is making models for her class. She is a last year architecture student”. He tells me he is going to marry her. She is perfect. She is not so serious all the time. Sometimes, they take hits of LSD together.

At 2:30 AM, Esteban walked me back to the clock tower. We hugged goodbye and before he turned to go, he asked “I almost forget to ask you. What did you learn from all your traveling?”

I put my head down and really thought about it. No one has asked me that question before. Ten years and thirty-five countries later, what did I really learn? Then the words came out before I could even process them through my mind “I learned that life and changes are in details. I learned we are more similar than we are different and that the most memorable parts of a journey are the unexpected and often unplanned moments”.

He nodded and gave me a big, soulful smile, and then we were off into the night, hurrying down two separate cobblestone paths. I wondered what kind of man he was to become, in the decade to come that I had over him; I wondered if he was also going to one day feel the earth shaking beneath his feet from the shipwreck of his plans, the way it did for me in 2018.

[z-hen]

Bogota

It was 12:30 AM when I found Fabian outside Bogota airport’s arrival hall. We had exchanged a few confusing Whatssup messages, him in broken English and me in broken Spanish. Finally I found him waiting in an unmarked gray Chevy down a pedestrian sidewalk to the side of the building. He was maybe 19 years old and drove with his headphones in.

Bogota at 1 AM was eerily dark and quiet. Silhouettes of low residential buildings with twisted knots of clothes and electricity lines flew by outside my window. A few cramped neighborhood grocery stores were still awake in the feeble glows of colorful low wattage bulbs. Always there would be a man or a teenage boy sitting on a stool outside of a store, looking at the sporadic car on the road. My room has a large iron-clapped window. It was cold and pitch dark outside. “Calor?” I gestured the shape of a heater box to the nice check-in lady, laughing to myself that I had no idea what a heater looks like in Colombia. “No. No” She gestured back, waving her hands and shaking her head. “It is warm in the days” (so I guess no need for heating). I brushed my teeth with water from a turn knob faucet that dripped a little, next to light blue shower curtains that reminded me instantly of hospital bed curtains in the late 80s in China. I wiped my face on a piece of scratchy puke green towel, doubled up on the matching green blanket on my squeaky floorboard bed, and passed out at 2 AM. I think I dreamed…of my childhood, looking out a phantom car window at the same low level residential buildings in various shades of tan and gray or white that has never been white since they were first painted. There were always flowerpots and tangles of clothes lines dangling over them. 

The next morning, lights peeked out from around the four corners of the gray window shade. I pulled it open to see a bright blue sky with drifting white clouds. Dark purple mountains hung like movie set props in the backdrop, behind multi-leveled red terracotta roofs. I logged onto VPN and got onto two work calls. While my coworkers bickered on the phone, I looked out the window and thought of Roma, a movie I just watched two days ago in a small theater close to my apartment. I flashed back to the moments of ordinary lives that were truly extraordinary to a person and to that person alone. I thought to myself that I was living in one of those moments, right then, looking out the window. I thought, life is as long as fate allows, and it is like a leaf. Ants with names unknown to the leaf put their small feet on its waxy green surface. Some stay for a long time and others crawl quickly to the next leaf down the vine. There will be rain and sunshine and sunsets, and hails and bitter freezes, all unbeknown to the leaf, some lasting longer than it knows how to bear.

It is noon on Jan 25th, 2019 in Bogota. I thought about a person moving a toe, any toe, then moving the other four toes on the same foot. Then put that foot down on some ground, concrete or dirt or wooden; then inch that foot forward. Now do the same with a toe on the other foot. It can be so easy, you see? One toe first…one foot in front of the other

[z-hen]

2018

I spent 2018 watching my life as if it's a jar of pasta sauce, sliding out of my hand and crashing onto white-carpeted floor. I watched it in excruciatingly slow motion, while standing in a room I do not recognize, surrounded by people who could not pronounce my name.

At 11 pm I hid my crying eyes behind a glass of wine while everyone else sunk into the sofa in the living room. Braveheart was on. Maybe Mel Gibson could rub off on me a bit?

At 1:30 am I snuck downstairs and took a spoon from the drawer. I have an early meeting and I have been crying. My eyes are going to look puffy and red. I tell myself "Whenever I stop crying I could press my eyes with the back of a cold spoon to make them look more normal in the morning".

So it sat unused, all night, on the floor, listening to me quietly.

[z-hen]

Loyal to the old world and fluent in the new

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/21/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview5

A wonderful interview with Jhumpa Lahiri 

"Rhode Island, also known as the Ocean State, had a permanent effect on her imagination. Beaches in general, and the New England coastline in particular, often show up in her work. "The part of the earth that I've always felt most at ease with," she says, "is not the ground, but sort of the water's edge." 

[z-hen]

November 17, 2018

This too shall pass

This too shall pass!

This too shall pass?

This too shall pass??

This too shall pass

[z-hen]

At the Tim Shaw exhibit

[z-hen]

After being sick nearly all week, I might actually leave the house today for some fresh air. I hope I don't get hit by a bus.

[z-hen]

[z-hen]