Deborah Levy - Real Estate

Ophelia and the Great Idea

Beautiful Mutants

Swallowing Geography

The Unloved

Diary of a Steak

Billy & Girl

Pillow Talk in Europe and Other Places

Swimming Home

Black Vodka

Things I Dont Want to Know

Hot Milk

The Cost of Living

The Man Who Saw Everything

In the winter of January 2018, I bought a small banana tree from a flower stall outside Shoreditch High Street station. It seduced me with its shivering, wide green leaves, also with the new leaves that were furled up, waiting to stretch out into the world. The woman who sold it to me had long fake eyelashes, blue-black and luscious. In my minds eye her lashes stretched all the way from the bagel shops and grey cobblestones of East London to the deserts and mountains of New Mexico. The delicate winter blooms at her stall had me thinking about the artist Georgia OKeeffe and the way she painted flowers. It was as if she were introducing each one of them to us for the first time. In OKeeffes hands they became peculiar, sexual, uncanny. Sometimes her flowers looked as if they had stopped breathing under the scrutiny of her gaze.

When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, its your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.

Georgia OKeeffe, quoted in the New York Post, 16 May 1946

She had found her final house in New Mexico, a place to live and work at her own pace. As she insisted, it was something she had to have. She had spent years restoring this low-slung adobe house in the desert before she finally moved into it. A while back, when I made the journey to Santa Fe, New Mexico, partly to see OKeeffes house, I remember feeling dizzy when I arrived at Albuquerque airport. My driver told me it was because we were 6,000 feet above sea level. The dining room in my hotel, owned by a Native American family, had a tall adobe fireplace built into the wall in the shape of an ostrich egg. I had never seen an oval fireplace before. It was October and it was snowing, so I pulled up a chair in front of the glowing logs and sipped a cup of smoky clear mescal, which was apparently good for above-sea-level sickness. The curved fireplace made me feel welcome and calm. It pulled me into its centre. Yes, I loved this burning egg. That fireplace was something I had to have.

I was also searching for a house in which I could live and work and make a world at my own pace, but even in my imagination this home was blurred, undefined, not real, or not realistic, or lacked realism. I yearned for a grand old house (I had now added an oval fireplace to its architecture) and a pomegranate tree in the garden. It had fountains and wells, remarkable circular stairways, mosaic floors, traces of the rituals of all who had lived there before me. That is to say the house was lively, it had enjoyed a life. It was a loving house.

The wish for this home was intense, yet I could not place it geographically, nor did I know how to achieve such a spectacular house with my precarious income. All the same, I added it to my imagined property portfolio, along with a few other imagined minor properties. The house with the pomegranate tree was my major acquisition. In this sense, I owned some unreal estate. The odd thing was that every time I tried to see myself inside this grand old house, I felt sad. It was as if the search for home was the point, and now that I had acquired it and the chase was over, there were no more branches to put in the fire.

In the meanwhile I had to get my new banana tree home from Shoreditch on a bus and a train to my crumbling apartment block on the hill. It was growing in a pot, about one foot high. The flower seller with long, luscious fake eyelashes told me she reckoned it wanted to live a more humid life. It had been a cold winter in the UK so far and we agreed we were also yearning for a more humid life.

While I was on the train to Highbury and Islington, I added a few more details to my unreal estate. Despite the egg-shaped fireplace my major house was obviously situated in a hot climate, near a lake or the sea. A life without swimming every day was not a life I wanted. It was hard to admit this to myself, but the ocean and the lake were more important to me than the house. In fact I would be content to live in a humble wooden cabin on the edge of an ocean or a lake, but somehow I looked down on myself for not having a bigger dream.

It seemed that acquiring a house was not the same thing as acquiring a home. And connected to home was a question I swatted away every time it landed too near me. Who else was living with me in the grand old house with the pomegranate tree? Was I alone with the melancholy fountain for company? No. There was definitely someone else there with me, perhaps even cooling their feet in that fountain. Who was this person?