It's been two months since I migrated to New York City. Since I was a teenager I dreamed of it and about three years ago, when all the doors began to close on me in Mexico, I began to decree it: every day, at a certain time - always the same - I repeated out loud that I was going to live in this city? until it happened.
The persecution that I suffered in my country ?and that accompanies me wherever I go? It forces me to be cautious and not reveal how everything came together to make this dream and another one for which my life is passing away possible: writing. I will only say now, when an impatient corniness takes over me, and there is no way I am going to let it out, that the stars aligned and here I am, two months after arriving, with a very heavy suitcase and little money, without knowing very well what I was going to face but with all the emotion that could fit in this small but well-given and well-lived body of mine.
I put the body, yes. I put body to my dream. At my age and with the uncertainty of not having savings to keep me afloat if something went wrong, to support my daughter there, in our country - to her, who says she doesn't want to emigrate. I did it because I felt that if I didn't I would be suffocated by regret. I did it because time passes, and the ungrateful person does it faster and faster when you're having fun - as the song says - but also, and above all, when you start to get older.
I came, then, and this body of mine - the physical one, but also the one of writing - found itself with a city in high contrast, like one of those dissident posters from the sixties: the skyscrapers, the brands, the cars. and the most luxurious stores in the world coexist in this densely populated space with the thousands of rats and cockroaches that walk happily and unpunished through its streets, with the garbage accumulated in plastic bags and with the homeless that they have lost connection with reality or perhaps they have just created another one in order to survive. New York smells like pot, garbage and pee, and these days like pumpkin. She is an elegant lady, who is always in fashion, wears designer clothes and the most expensive jewelry, but she does not bathe.
It's the city, too, where it doesn't matter how you're dressed, how old you are, who you hold hands with, or who you fuck with on a park bench, no one will stare at you. It is the city in which dancing with a girl 20 years younger than you is very normal. I want to believe that it is because of his cosmopolitan and liberal quality, but also "and my body feels it?" It's because no one cares, because we are all so absorbed in the screens of our phones or in the call we make while walking, that we no longer have time to stop and judge others.
It's the city where no one looks at you.
New York, with its five neighborhoods: Manhattan, The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, is the place where, if it rains in the morning you are already screwed because it will surely rain all day, where a coffee costs as much as a meal. bullfight in my country, where you can listen to four languages in a subway car (which, by the way, is called a train here), where the summer heat feels like in Mérida: you sweat until your eyeliner smears and It mixes with the salt that goes down between your breasts and where, on cold days, you feel that the icy wind coming from the river slaps you and takes your breath away.
My body is different in New York. It expands and contracts as the weather and loneliness hit it. The same thing happens to my writing. There are days when I write and reaffirm the reason for this migration, there are others in which the words simply get stuck in the head and do not reach the keyboard, they become cowards. And then I wonder what mess I'm doing here, unknotted, unkempt, unbroken.
Beer in hand, in a Caribbean bar on 50th Street, a friend from Guadalajara who has lived here for six years told me that this city is like a hurricane: it pulls you towards its center, towards its only eye, and you may stay there wrapped up. , in the middle of its maelstrom, or that it simply expels you with all the violence of which it is capable.
Until now - and I know it's very early, but What the hell!? He has not expelled me and I am grateful, because this city is also a city of solidarity, where today there was a march of university students against the genocide in Palestine; where there are booths with free food for whoever needs it; where dogs are treated like what they are: family; where the many accents of Spanish recognize and unite us and if Shakira plays at the party we go crazy; where, despite the usual rush, a young woman stops to help a man who was traveling in scooter and he was hit by a car, his bloody face smashed into the pavement.
If the children of Sabina's Madrid were given to chasing the sea in a glass of gin, the girls of the Bronx fall to the floor, unconscious, at the entrance to the subway: overdose, hunger or tiredness? It's impossible to know, but it doesn't take long for a group of people to surround her, get down on their knees and try to help her, no matter what. She, blonde, with almost transparent skin; them, brown men and women, Dominicans, Mexicans, Colombians, Puerto Ricans, Latinos, well.
I write New York, I write it with my body. With my migrant body.
More from the author: Salman Rushdie, a long struggle for freedom of expression
