Randulin

A house, a swallow, and the question of belonging

I'm playing my electric drum kit in the living room of the Engadine house that I currently call home. A thunderstorm breaks outside, sending streaks of rain across the parched landscape.

In the periphery of my vision, I see something moving. I'm focused on playing, but a double take reveals two men standing outside my front door. Pointing upwards, marvelling at the sgraffito as if they were in a museum. I'm watching them, confused by this strange lack of boundaries. He makes eye contact and waves.

I feel a sense of anger burning in my chest for some reason. I recognise this man: he came to a house viewing a couple of weeks ago and seems to have decided to revisit unannounced.

What is the source of this anger? I realise that, despite his respectable admiration towards the architecture, it feels like I am inhabiting a museum, and perhaps am even part of it.

Granted, I have not lived in this place very long— but it has been and still is my home, for now. I travel many kilometres to work from here and have stayed in all seasons: when the snow was knee-deep, when the slush was melting, the grass was brown and the tourists were gone, but we were still here in the supposed "low-season”.

Is this how the locals might feel? It is not my place to say. But I can imagine that to have one’s home become an object of desire, something to be acquired, is an uncomfortable reality. For the people born and raised here, whose families toiled to survive in an unforgiving terrain, perhaps it feels strange when wealthy outsiders come to acquire their homes for vast sums of money that they themselves can no longer afford—turning the living landscape into their playground, a backdrop.

A memory resurfaces. Serra da Estrela, two years ago, when I called that place home. I was meeting with the director of tourism in Guarda, and she was telling me about the elderly widows from the remote villages, who still work the land at 90 years of age, cut their own firewood in full-black attire, and how outsiders would marvel at them as if they were exotic creatures to be studied on a colonial-era anthropological field trip.

But for these folk, it isn't ill-intended. I can see that they have a genuine appreciation for this house, its beauty, its character—in the same way that I did when I arrived, and when I similarly dreamed of owning this house.

Saudade comes to mind: a Portuguese phrase for melancholic longing. A yearning for something absent—a place, a person, something held dear. Carrying a bittersweet acceptance that the subject of longing may never return.

Ironic, since the estate agent selling this house is himself Portuguese, one of many who came here to build a life that wasn’t possible in their homeland. He grew up in St Moritz and his parents worked in the hotels. He told me that he might move to the other side of the mountains, since he himself cannot afford the houses which he is tasked with selling.

Outside, the clouds are breaking. It’s the day after the storm, the humidity is rising towards the clearing sky and the beams of sunlight are stretching over the larch forests. Swallows swoop over the village.

In Portuguese culture, the swallow has a particular symbolism: the migratory bird that always returns home. We had a swallow nest above our door of the farmhouse in Serra da Estrela. In Romansh, the Randulin shares similar meaning, with specific reference in the past: the locals who left the valley, to work as pastry chefs in European capitals, to earn their fortune before returning to their place of origin. Often, I’ve been told, to build very big, sgraffito-adorned houses.

And where does that leave me now? Inhabiting some strange liminal space, I suppose. Neither from here nor there, belonging and not belonging. I watch the swallows circle overhead.

Bound for somewhere, but for now, here.