From the window

This heat that suffocates and weakens us is, as it could not be otherwise, a great generator of conversation topics this summer. What about climate change, what about adapting to it, what about air conditioners doing us more harm than good. In many of these exchanges of ideas and experiences, I have detected a common element.

Many mixed couples confess that the way to fight the heat has ended up being a cause of dispute, one more, in their coexistence. Forgive me for generalizing: in most cases I know, men are in favor of insulating the house, that is, hermetically sealing the windows, pulling the curtains and lowering awnings and blinds. Women, from what I have been able to ascertain, tend to resist this confinement and, despite understanding the male reasons, we resist losing the light, the little air that might enter from the street and, even in some cases, admitting that outside there is a furnace on, we want to keep a window open, even if just a little, because the mere fact of seeing this opening, or noticing how the curtain flutters slightly, consoles us.

Looking for a reason for this, I remembered the writer Carmen Martín Gaite, who made the window a central resource in all her work, for example in the novel Entre visillos, in the short story De su ventana a la mía or, especially, in the essay titled Desde la ventana.

Martín Gaite elaborates a theory according to which the window is the place where the woman waits and observes, but also the possibility of a point of escape, whether real or in the realm of desires. Women – in the era the writer speaks of – were still predominantly confined to the home, to the domestic and family world, and the window was the symbol of their desire to explore the world.

Read this fragment from the short story De su ventana a la mía, which the author dedicates to her mother: “La ventana de mi madre estaba iluminada por el sol poniente y vibraba con destellos de todos los colores cuando mis palabras llegaban a tocar el cristal; era grande y resplandecía como un brillante irisado entre el humo, el acero y el cemento. Pero de la habitación a que pertenecía esa ventana nada podría decirse con certidumbre, sino que tal vez era una mezcla de muchas habitaciones, de todas en las que ella se sentó alguna vez a mirar por la ventana”.

In the essay Desde la ventana, Martín Gaite analyzes how women interact with public space, in contrast to how men do, and specifically, how women writers have done so, often criticized for the scarce weight of the social, political, or economic context in their works. 

But the question is: do women still need this vanishing point that is a window for fear of feeling trapped, almost forty years later? Is it a legacy we carry without being aware of it, or is it a personal feeling we keep alive despite having theoretically joined, in full right, the world outside?

Please, men convinced of the scientifically proven benefits of isolation in hot weather, be understanding of the need to breathe and look outside that many of us have.