SKARLO
I park the car near the stately mansion in Skarlo where my grandparents lived when I was a child, sharing the house with my grandfather’s sister and two or three of my mother’s cousins who were at the time still unmarried or perhaps already divorced. These large mansions in Skarlo were built in the nineteenth century, mostly by Sephardic Jews who started to settle on the island after the Dutch conquered it from the Spaniards in 1634. Today not one Jewish family is left there.
The last time I saw that the house from the inside, it had been turned into a prosaic office building with large storage spaces of the business established by my uncle, who had already died some time before. Nothing was kept but the outer shell of the old house I remember so well.
I do not care to photograph the house from the outside - it is too fixed up, too clean, its front yard, now a paved parking lot, and the tall, shady barba di yonkuman, in the front corner near the street, is no longer there. This is where we used to sit in the afternoons, with the dry pods in the tree rustling in the wind, and where our Yaya would read us stories from a Papiamentu newspaper.
When I was a little girl and we still lived in town, my mother and I would walk every afternoon along the Waaigat to visit my grandparents and Yaya in Skarlo. At that time my mother did not drive, she only got her license in her mid-fifties, after my father had a heart attack and could no longer drive our car. It was after I had already left the island to attend college in the US.
Perhaps it is the walk to Skarlo that has laid the basis of my love of walking - not just as a means to an end, or something that takes place in a vacuum, such as in a gym or a stadium, but through changing scenery, with its own stories and associations, through a time-space in which things happen. I learned to see the walk itself like a story that unfolds, as we walked from our home to that of my grandparents.
photo by my grandfather, Benjamin Gomes Casseres, of the house, Skarlo 17, where my grandparents lived after they returned from Cuba
But now I am parked near my grandparents’ house and start to walk along the Skarloweg, hoping to capture the feel of the street to bring it back with me to Jerusalem. It is a hot morning; the light is strong and not very inspiring. Only a few years ago most of the buildings were falling apart. It used to be that my grandparents’ house was one of the few houses that had been fixed up, but now many of the old buildings, which have been declared a UNESCO national heritage, have been restored in the last few years – or are in the process of restoration – being turned in to banks, large business or government offices, the National Archive and various museums. I find myself drawn to the few remaining ruins.
What is it, to want to photograph the ruins, the broken down, the process of decay. Not the neat and clean and well kept. There is a romantic tradition of painting and photographing ruins that my grandfather the photographer was also attracted to. There were no ruins in Skarlo in his time, it was still well lived in by the original families. But there were plenty of ruins in the countryside and he loved to take us to the old, abandoned plantation houses on his frequent photo excursions.
Why am I more interested in the houses that still retain the aura of the past, that show the ravages of time? Does it have to do with my own search for the past, my past on this island, and so anything renovated seems to negate it? Is it the mystery that I searched for, as a child, in the large forbidden rooms, the attics, and especially, the cellars under the wooden floors?
Walking down the street, I notice a building that is surrounded by scaffolding, the house is in the intermediate stage of restoration - between the ruin it once was, and the finished office building that it will become. I am too self-conscious to trespass and do not dare to get closer to photograph. Just then I notice two men carrying papers, coming down the steps who turn out to be the architects. I ask permission to enter the property and photograph..
I search for the cellar - the bodega – the place of fantasy of my childhood, the dark spaces under the wooden planks of the ground floor, where we would go on adventures. Here I imagined were hidden the dark secrets of the society that people would whisper about, as well as the anger and resentment of those who were kept in their place.
But the space I see here is used for the air-conditioning ducts and other pipes and wiring, a clean space, without all the magic of my childhood.
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