I love to stand on my windowsill when it is raining. It is almost like being outdoors in the rain, yet I do not get wet. I breathe in the pure, fresh smells of the downpour washing away the dust outside, until the grownups come rushing upstairs to close the window, so that I will not catch a cold.
Read moreOUTSIDER
Perhaps I can speak of a sense of self-exile, as I did not find my place in the complex colonial society of the island, with its racial, class and gender segmentation and hierarchy, its strict internal borders, where everyone had their place, and knew it.
Read moreBULA PIPA
Jumping over the pipes - bula pipa in my native language. It sounds very athletic, doesn’t it? I always envisioned a game of jumping over those long pipelines that brought the oil from the tankers at the Caracas Bay harbor to the refinery.
Read moreSKARLO
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
Read moreTOURIST
My island was a tourist destination before most other places on earth were inundated with tourists. And so, my image of tourists was formed at an early age, with a father, grandfather and uncles whose businesses catered to the tourists, who descended on the island from their cruise ships for just a few hours – only to shop.
Read morePORTA DI HERU
IN PREPARATION
WITH HER HAIR PAINTED GREY
As a child I did not dare to ask direct questions about things that were whispered about by the grownups. Things like who used to be married to whom, who is the father of that girl, this boy, who got divorced, then married another woman? I tried to figure out by myself about the world, attentive to all the little clues, a word dropped here or there, a photograph in the sala, the inscription on a tombstone. I was a good detective.
IN CUBA
My grandfather left Curaçao around 1911 for Cuba, to become a partner in running a sugarcane plantation in the province of Camaguey, in the central part of the island. Apparently, it was good a good business deal at the time, when his financial prospects were poor in Curaçao's failing economy.
Read moreBABALU
As a child, I loved to dance in our living room to the record collection that my parents used for the soundtrack of their films. One day my ballet teacher came for a visit and liked my improvisations to the Cuckoo's Waltz so much that she asked me to perform my self-composed solo at the year-end's show of her dance students at the Roxy Theater. I was only seven, and too shy to be alone on stage, and so she asked some other girls to act as flowers, so that the little butterfly would overcome her stage fright.
Read moreABOUT PAITO'S PHOTOGRAPHS
in preparation