hawthorns, a rabbit warren, and a cave in the hillside—and though I had only one thing that I could show him, he seemed to find it just as mysterious and absorbing as I did.
Each time he came to see me, we would first go over to my blueprint, where I had added another room or increased the size of my study. There were always changes to show him, because I was never done improving my plan and worked on it almost every hour. Sometimes, now, he would pick up my pencil and awkwardly sketch in something that would not have occurred to me: a smokehouse or a root cellar.
But the excitement of the plan as well as the pleasure of having a friend were blinding me to a dreadful fact: the longer I lived on my land, letting the time slip by, the more the possibility of building the house faded. My money was trickling away and my dream was going with it. In the village, far from any marketplace, the price of food was double what it had been in the city. Thin as I was, I could not eat any less. Good masons and carpenters, even poor ones, were rare and expensive here: to hire a pair of them for a few months would leave me too little to live on afterwards. I did not give up when I learned this, but I had no answers to the questions that plagued me.
In the beginning, my blueprint had absorbed all my time and attention because I was going to build the house from it. Gradually, the blueprint became more vivid to me than the actual house: in my imagination, I spent more and more time among the penciled lines that shifted at my will. Yet if I had openly admitted that there was no longer any possibility of building this house, the blueprint would have lost its meaning. So I continued to believe in the house, while all the time the possibility of building it eroded steadily from under my belief.
What made the situation all the more frustrating was that on the outskirts of the village new houses were springing up every few months. When I had bought the land, the only structures in the valley were stone field huts—squatting in the middle of each plowed field, they were as black as caves inside, with floors of earth. After signing the deed, I had returned home and stood, well satisfied, looking across the acres of abandoned vineyards and overgrown farmland to the horizon where the village sat piled up on a small hill, like a castle, with its church steeples clustered at the top. Now, here and there on the landscape, there was a wound of raw red earth and in a few weeks a new house would rise like a scab above it. There was no time for the landscape to absorb these changes: hardly had one house been finished before the live oaks were felled right and left for another.
I watched the progress of one house with particular horror and misgiving, because it was within a few minutes’ walk of my own. The deliberate speed with which it went up shook me and seemed a mockery of my own situation. It was an ugly house, with pink walls and cheap iron grillwork over the windows. Once it was finished, and the last young tree planted in the dust beside it, the owners drove up from the city and spent All Saints’ Day there, sitting on the terrace and looking out over the valley as though they had box seats at the opera. After that, as long as the weather held, they drove up to the house every weekend, filling the countryside with the noise of their radio. I watched them gloomily from my window.
The worst of it was that my friend immediately stopped visiting me on the weekends. I knew he had been drawn away from me by my neighbors. From a distance I saw him standing quietly among them in their yard. I felt utterly miserable. At last I had to admit how bleak my position was. It occurred to me then to sell my land and begin all over again somewhere else.
I thought I might get a good price for the land from other city people. But when I went to see the real estate agent, he told me flatly that because there was a sewage yard in the next field and because my
Each time he came to see me, we would first go over to my blueprint, where I had added another room or increased the size of my study. There were always changes to show him, because I was never done improving my plan and worked on it almost every hour. Sometimes, now, he would pick up my pencil and awkwardly sketch in something that would not have occurred to me: a smokehouse or a root cellar.
But the excitement of the plan as well as the pleasure of having a friend were blinding me to a dreadful fact: the longer I lived on my land, letting the time slip by, the more the possibility of building the house faded. My money was trickling away and my dream was going with it. In the village, far from any marketplace, the price of food was double what it had been in the city. Thin as I was, I could not eat any less. Good masons and carpenters, even poor ones, were rare and expensive here: to hire a pair of them for a few months would leave me too little to live on afterwards. I did not give up when I learned this, but I had no answers to the questions that plagued me.
In the beginning, my blueprint had absorbed all my time and attention because I was going to build the house from it. Gradually, the blueprint became more vivid to me than the actual house: in my imagination, I spent more and more time among the penciled lines that shifted at my will. Yet if I had openly admitted that there was no longer any possibility of building this house, the blueprint would have lost its meaning. So I continued to believe in the house, while all the time the possibility of building it eroded steadily from under my belief.
What made the situation all the more frustrating was that on the outskirts of the village new houses were springing up every few months. When I had bought the land, the only structures in the valley were stone field huts—squatting in the middle of each plowed field, they were as black as caves inside, with floors of earth. After signing the deed, I had returned home and stood, well satisfied, looking across the acres of abandoned vineyards and overgrown farmland to the horizon where the village sat piled up on a small hill, like a castle, with its church steeples clustered at the top. Now, here and there on the landscape, there was a wound of raw red earth and in a few weeks a new house would rise like a scab above it. There was no time for the landscape to absorb these changes: hardly had one house been finished before the live oaks were felled right and left for another.
I watched the progress of one house with particular horror and misgiving, because it was within a few minutes’ walk of my own. The deliberate speed with which it went up shook me and seemed a mockery of my own situation. It was an ugly house, with pink walls and cheap iron grillwork over the windows. Once it was finished, and the last young tree planted in the dust beside it, the owners drove up from the city and spent All Saints’ Day there, sitting on the terrace and looking out over the valley as though they had box seats at the opera. After that, as long as the weather held, they drove up to the house every weekend, filling the countryside with the noise of their radio. I watched them gloomily from my window.
The worst of it was that my friend immediately stopped visiting me on the weekends. I knew he had been drawn away from me by my neighbors. From a distance I saw him standing quietly among them in their yard. I felt utterly miserable. At last I had to admit how bleak my position was. It occurred to me then to sell my land and begin all over again somewhere else.
I thought I might get a good price for the land from other city people. But when I went to see the real estate agent, he told me flatly that because there was a sewage yard in the next field and because my
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