On the Difficulty of Opening Doors // Marlena Petra Cravens

As part of our guest edited month looking at the theme of Urban Ephemera, Marlena Petra Cravens examines the various boundaries and entryways to her various homes.

“...There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet…”

-“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot

Listen: the knob, right in the middle of the door and even with the bottom of your ribcage, cannot turn. It has never turned. The doors protect their secrets in Barcelona.To open this door you must have the key, silvered with strange craters, and turn it with all the strength you possess. Hopefully someone warned you before you came here to visit me: without the key, you will not open this door. The knob will not let you in, because it has never turned and will never turn. The red door to my home is proudly polished to a high sheen and its inscrutable brass knob glimmers in the dark hallway. It is only the first layer to reaching my apartment. Maria—la portera vieja—waits downstairs in the hallway, smoking in the shade by the front door. You should say hi to her. To get to my red door after shuffling up two flights of stairs to the primer piso, you have to pass Maria. And she might know your face; she knows all the faces that pass through her hallway. You should always greet Maria, so that she can know your face. Or she might not let you in.In Texas, my door is not secret, and my Maria is not there to know your face. There is nobody to say hi to at my door, which is unremarkable and white-gray with peeling paint. It’s kind of dusty. But I’m not mad; my landlord installed it himself to save money. It doesn’t even have a deadbolt that works.But listen: The doors here are strange, as you’ll see when you come to visit. So many of these doors are open, and there are no secret spaces. You do not need to be strong or a friend to open these doors. Instead, you only need to run—or learn the skill of walking very slowly.It’s because here the doors are open, and everyone will open the door for you and hold it open expectantly. Yes, please do come in. But sometimes you are too far away when the door opens and hospitality dazzles you, leaving you blind, and so you must run. It’s the demand of meeting their hospitality with the appropriate politeness of your jog to the door. At other times, you are too close to the door and so you must look like you are walking up and just arriving, though you’ve already arrived.The trick is not actually in the size of your gait, it’s in the expression on your face. That’s really how you show how far away you are. In Austin, you might never need to touch a door.Look: In Toronto, prepare your face, because you are not a tourist. You’d better not be. When you visit me in Toronto, you had better walk with a mission and not gape up at the glass and stone that closes you in. And you had better not block my sidewalk with your tourist mosey. Maybe, when you get off the subway at Donlands, make sure you drop by the bakery and bring jalebi or some pouro from the places down the way. I’ll have the tea ready, but it’s always Red Rose. I won’t apologize for that. I live in a duplex off of the Danforth. My door is white with glass panels, and I can always see visitors and their expressions a block away. That is important to me.Once, I lived on Carlton, in a behemoth of glass: an apartment I couldn’t afford. I was on the 21st floor and I couldn’t see you coming to visit, because you were a speck of black and white and blue-brown on the sidewalk. Honestly, I couldn’t tell the difference between you and the dirty snow. I split the rent with my cousin who pretended he was Drake. Sometimes it worked. Whether you were a face on the ground or my cousin, it didn’t matter because you could be anybody.I used to relax on my balcony and watch the drug dealer in the neighboring glass tower. He committed suicide in 2012, because he was so lonely. When his body hit the ground, he broke the concrete and it had to be replaced. On Carlton, I can’t remember what my door looked like.

Marlena Petra Cravens is an award-winning Spanish translation scholar, public historian, and language educator at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature. Her writing appears in Pterodáctilo and UT Austin’s Thinking in Public, and her public history work appears at the Benson Museum and the Bryan Museum. She has lived in Toronto, Cobourg, Spain, Texas, and, soon, Washington, D.C.