An apartment by the clouds.

Human beings that have the fortune to see are very responsive to the splendor of color. After a while and for our own detriment we get used to see in color and take the colors of life for granted. However, when we are transported to a new place, away from our routinary habitat, we recover the wonder of appreciating colors and we realize that colors change their tonality according to our state of mind, our interior determination to live something exciting, and our curiosity. Around the world, colors are symbols of the light that impacts our existence, good or bad. Artists, poets, and writers eagerly try to be alchemists trying to imitate colors through paintings and words, but they are never close to create neither the perfection of the colors we find in nature nor the perception of the same in the moment when they simultaneously pass through the refraction of the microscope of our eyes and soul. We have the color in our blood because it is part of life and affects our insights. We all react to colors.

On my first morning in New York, I woke up a little disoriented but with a good feeling, a feeling that was enhanced by the light coming through the window of the room where I slept, a light that trespassed the glass and mirrored in the entire area creating a magical ambiance while silently sounding like the notes of a xylophone. The light was also dancing in the bedroom and as the sun hit the glass the colors of the rainbow were reflected on the wall giving the sensation of a divine favor sent from heaven. I stopped fixing my attention on the colors when I heard the screams of children happily playing in the swimming pool and the enthusiastic noise brought me back to reality and made me remember that this light was a new light belonging to an unknown day, a new place, and a new life.

I took a shower and got dressed rapidly and I did not put any makeup on because in those days in the past I looked very attractive without mascara and blush; I noiselessly went down the stairs and got to the kitchen following the smell of fresh Colombian coffee which made me feel hungry with that kind of hunger that you get at ten in the morning during the holidays. As soon as I arrived in the kitchen, I found Billy and Liliana drinking coffee and eating fried eggs with buttered toasts and felt happy that I would also eat a hearty breakfast without bothering my guest’s mother. While I was eating, I noticed that there were several newspapers on the table. Billy had gone to buy them very early to help us find an apartment as soon as possible according to the promise he had made to his mother.

We looked for the section of apartments for rent in Manhattan and started to search for a pretty place to live that would be situated in the exclusive area where all the people shown in the films produced in New York used to live. We were so foolish and naïve! Little by little we would realize that if in Colombia we were privileged women, in this new country we were nobody, zero, zippo, niente, and with not enough zeros in our bank account. We knew that the vicinity along the fifth avenue was prohibited for us. Soon we also discovered that there were also other famous avenues in upper and lower Manhattan whose homes we could not afford. Finding an apartment became a very frustrating experience because nothing fit our budget. By the end of the third day, Liliana and I sadly realized that if we wanted to live in Manhattan, the only alternative we had was to go camping in the Central Park or to sleep on a bench of the park like many homeless people did.

Billy felt relieved when he saw that his two Colombians friends had started to understand that exclusivity and privilege would cost an arm and a leg in New York. We were forced to turn from “rich Colombians” into two poor individuals without influences or references as most immigrants are. The rent for a studio in our preferred borough was five times the lease of a beautiful apartment in one of the exclusive buildings in the North of Bogota. Besides, the property owners, who did not like our accent, wanted a two-month security deposit and two-month rent in advance to the signing of the contract since we were renting the apartment only for six months. Such amount of money was a fortune for two women whose savings in Colombian pesos were not enough to afford the luxury of living in downtown Manhattan and needed money to eat and have fun. Our dreams vanished and we had to start breathing and living with humility. I remembered the famous Escalona’s song «I’ll make you a house in the air» that could adapt to our implausibility of living in a glass building in the air and near the clouds.

Days before traveling to the United States, Gloria, a great friend, and co-worker at Sony Music International had told me that her cousin Ana Maria lived in the district of Queens in New York and had a nice old house, built in the fifties, whose basement had been remodeled recently and that we could rent if we did not find anything we liked. «I have recommended you as my best friends and told my cousin that you come from good families and are honorable people without any problems», Gloria said.

I had written down the number and name of my friend’s relative just in case. On the fourth day of our unsuccessful search, I called her and made an appointment at five o’clock in the afternoon to go see the place she offered for rent. The trip from Long Island to Queens was stressful; it was rush hour and traffic was moving at a snail’s pace. I noticed that the architectural style of the houses on the island was totally different from the architecture of the old neighborhoods in Queens. When we arrived Ana Maria opened the door of her house built after the Second World War and although she behaved kindly, she kept her distance and never laughed at the jokes that Billy, Liliana, and I made about coming down from the clouds and putting our feet on the ground.

The owner of the house, a very young pretty Colombian widow with blond hair and blue eyes led us to the basement. We went down some old wooden stairs to reach the ground floor where the laundry section was illuminated by a squalid light that made the area very dark and produced sadness. I didn’t say anything, but I thought we were not going to like what we were about to see. When Ana Maria opened the basement’s door a luminosity embellished by the contrast with the previous darkness took over the space and pleasantly surprised us. From the melancholy we passed to a very charming chromatic sensation produced by the beige paint on the walls and the light that filtered sweetly through a strategically placed rectangular window and a beautiful glass and wooden door that communicated to a backyard decorated with colorful flowers. The tonalities of pastels beautified by the exterior light and the flowers of strong and cheerful colors that could be seen from the inside made us fall in love with the flat.

The negotiation was favorable to both sides. The owner and future friend won two honest and harmless tenants living in the basement of her house and Liliana and I got a reasonably priced place that had a big closet embedded in the wall, new bathroom and kitchen, and open space large enough to comfortably accommodate two people.

At six o’clock we blissfully closed the deal. The happiest of all was Billy who was no longer going to listen to his mom’s sermons about us. Our new basement apartment would reflect the light and colors of life differently in each season of the year and despite it did not touch the clouds of Manhattan it became our haven full of positive vibration and peace.