Once in a great while, I get into a conversation that leads to the question, “Where are you from?” I answer with the name of the city in which this block is located. It’s probably the most untrue, or at least the most inaccurate, thing I say to anybody.
I only know this block. As for the city, it’s one everybody in the world’s heard about and quite a few’ve vistited. Unless you come from this block, you know more of this city, or at least what people think about when they hear its name, than I do. Or ever will.
No one who began or ended up on this block has any interest in seeing all of the famous edifices, monuments or other preserved specimens outsiders see through the windows of buses and the viewfinders of cameras. Some might say it’s like having no interest in the house once you’ve been in the boiler room.
You don’t swear off or hate the city the rest of the world knows. You just never see it, unless work or have some other reason to venture into it. Knowing that the city has the biggest or most famous anything in the world doesn’t mean much when you’re living or dying on this block. Especially if you’re a woman, or among women.
Someone once said there’re deception, theft and death behind every great fortune. Someone else said that to make omelets, you have to break eggs. To build the bridge that connects this city to the rest of the world, a whole series of blocks—like this one, I’ve been told—were destroyed, edited off maps: obliterated from the face of the earth.
And what of those plazas and towers that stretch across and above the narrow, shadowy blocks of the city? Or of this block—the name of this street? Behind every name there is at least one death. And more often than not, there’s bloodshed, intrigue, chicanery or some other rupture in what people call “the social contract,” whatever that is.
None of the violence ends when the death certificate, the checks or the documents that certify possession are signed. The generations born and unborn continue to give, willingly or not, their voices to the others that roil in the cauldron of unending death. The ones who escape this fate—and I’m not sure that I have—do so only because they had no other choice.
Nothing’s been named for anybody who’s ever lived on this block. Yet they—we—die in the name of those who leave monuments to themselves. And those landmarks, like the pyramids or the cathedrals in European towns, cast shadows over their communities from which nobody escapes. Everybody in those towns or nations gives his or her life to build the church or palace or to win a battle. And nothing and nobody’s the same again, ever.
So, while I know nothing about the city in which this block is located, this block is the one thing I haven’t been able to go without thinking about since I left it. I know the lives that were lost or destroyed while I was living here—including my own.
Memories And Those Who Stayed 