This article was originally published on Domus 1074, December 2022.

I stopped writing in other people’s houses when I moved 9,000 kilometres away from home, to a place not far from the Gulf of Mexico. Or at least that’s what I believe as I tap out these lines on a keyboard at 5 a.m. in a kitchen in Texas.

I stopped going to other people’s houses when I felt able to consider my house, the one I live in, as someone else’s: foreign enough to keep me ever on the alert, yet enough of a home to think that at last, somewhere, I might truly find myself by writing.

Going to write in the apartments of friends, acquaintances or perfect strangers, on the other hand, had always been a sort of impossible move. It held together my twofold goal of getting rid of a house and finally feeling at home. But with hindsight it also condemned me to a twofold failure, seeing as the house I was setting out from was inevitably the house I would return to, while the one I was seeking refuge in would never belong to me, nor would I belong to it.

I spent all my years in that act of commuting, moving from real life to an existence experienced only in writing. To put it another way, after years of the twofold exile of feeling like a foreigner in the life I was living and a foreigner in the one I was living only in books, I opted for a single sort of exile.  

Seen from outside, the red-brick house where I live is the American Dream. It has a driveway, a front-and backyard, and squirrels that clamber up the countless live oaks, a sort of fairy-tale tree common in the South. There’s no basketball hoop like the ones our neighbours have, simply because our son is still too little for the sport. Parked on our road are SUVs and pickups, and the junior high school a few hundred metres away has a sign with a crossed- out pistol saying it’s forbidden to enter the place carrying guns. While by law it’s fine to walk past it armed.

Hanging in the kitchen inside the house, there’s a map of Italy where Trieste still appears outside the national borders, although I didn’t notice that when I was buying it from a wrapping-paper store. However imperfect, it seemed important that my son should have a sense of geography as well as a language. In our previous house, the map used to hang by the cooker, and it wasn’t rare for me to hold him in my arms while I cooked. And as I stirred the sauce in the pan, I’d show him Rome, Sicily and the Mediterranean. “We’re Italians,” I’d tell him, and it was only at that distance – the 9,150 kilometres between Houston and Rome
– that what I was saying to him seemed to make any sense. I told him the old jokes about the Italian, the Frenchman and the Englishman to 
reinforce the idea, building an Italy with what I had at hand, manageable and far from the truth.

I get up every morning at 4:30 a.m. to write. The coffee machine is set for 4:15 a.m. When I walk into the kitchen, I can immediately fill a mug with coffee, sit down at the table and start tapping on the keys. A picture of a truck is printed on the side of the mug, which I bought on eBay. It comes from a diner – who knows if it still exists – and someone must have bought or stolen it and then got fed up with it, or they must have moved house, or died, and sold it on. It has DYSART’S written on it, with Bangor, ME in smaller letters. From Maine to Texas via the internet. Underneath it says Made in China.

When I start work, my wife and son are still fast asleep. The squirrels haven’t started scrambling up and down the live oaks, and there are no cars on the roads. In Italy, meanwhile, it’s almost midday. If I wanted to speak to someone from my night-time, I could just call and I’d hear a voice in the light of day, in the sunshine, about to go to lunch. I could also place that voice in a context of landscapes and sounds. Every noise in the background would be familiar to me: the traffic, the bells, a door buzzer. I’d feel a sense of belonging to those noises, that landscape and that context. But I don’t make the call. I’d wake everyone up and shatter the habitat I’m building as I write, line by line. It’s enough for me to have the thought and the fiction that I belong to a place that belongs to me. 

My son will be up in a couple of hours and he’ll play with his mum in bed for a while, gradually shaking off his sleep. Then he’ll probably ask to see an episode of Peppa Pig, which he’ll watch in Italian to practice the language (one day the computer will show an episode in English, and he’ll turn to his mum and say, “How funny, Peppa Pig speaks English!”). Then I’ll urge him to get dressed and persuade him to go to school. We’ll jump in the car and he’ll want to hear a story or sing. Or make a list of all the words beginning with T, which is his thing at the moment. When we get to school, we’ll knock and say good morning to Ms Brandy, and she’ll happily say buongiorno in Italian. Then she’ll say, “Say bye to daddy,” and close the door.

After getting back into my car and setting off for the campus, I’ll likely call someone in Italy, where it’ll then be afternoon. If they ask about me and my day, I’ll say I’ve just left home, that I’ve dropped my son off at school, and now I’m on my way to classes. I’ll say “home” without thinking, and maybe for the first time, I’ll feel that it’s true. That I can feel at home here, in this elsewhere a stone’s throw from Mexico. Here, where I’ve chosen both to live and write, in other people’s lives, in someone else’s house. I’m a foreigner, and it’s my home.