The Stone-Cutters
They were all poor, more or less miserably according to each man�s character. Stone cutting is the lowest work imaginable in a country where all work was despised. It is hard, filthy work that ends, after not many years, in broken health, often silicosis, but always early aging from exposure.
Many of them were frail to start with. Their inheritance from a poor family was congenital infirmity and a vision of life that made it impossible for them to help themselves. It is hard to see them as free beings, even in the modern sense of the word. �Algunos nacen con estrella y otros estrellados�: some are born under the aegis of a star, and others, under its curse.
In a rigidly unjust world, where you are at the bottom, you may try to lift yourself up by actively doing wrong. Or you may do as they did: go on a perpetual huelga de celo or zeal strike, which is to give grudging obedience to the forms of duty only, like patriots in a country occupied by the enemy. A prisoner, yes, but not a slave!
They came to work in simple, clean clothes, the best they had. They walked into the workshop with straight backs and impassive faces.
Then they changed into the worst rags, the filthiest pieces of clothing anyone ever wore willingly. That was their opinion of their job. They didn�t mind looking ridiculous. They were resigned to giving over their bodies like prostitutes.
They put on one shredded shirt and sweater over another. They got into any other man�s discarded trousers and shoes. They put on gloves with fingers missing and sweaters with only part of a sleeve left. They covered their heads with paper, with a handkerchief, with a plastic bag. They looked like a troupe of clowns.
Once on the job, they looked for a way off again. Never were there more pretexts for putting down a hammer. There was regular nose-cleaning, rearranging of gloves, and, in winter, of sweaters and trousers; trips to the brandy bottle (never near at hand); trips to the grinding wheel with a whole fist of chisels; visits to the other workmen (I wonder how Pepe is coming); long sessions with the boss (the most licit of things), getting instructions clear; toilet trips (number two, out in the field under cover of high grass, number one, somewhere around the compressor�later someone had the idea to hammer a hole in the wall there).
The boss himself was negligent when it came to decking out the shop with comforts. In view of the attitude workmen displayed on the job he would have been a fool to spend good money on accommodating them.
My best teachers were Angel, Luis, and Pepe.
Angel
Angel was one of the estrellados. What I knew about him came from his pal Luis. Angel hardly spoke.
Though once I heard him talk with deep hate of General Franco. And now and then during the day, usually after his drink of brandy, there were a few sarcasms and remarks in a wry, backward humor I could never get. But otherwise Angel was like a mute.
He was no bigger than a boy and as lively as an elf, which he reminded you of in other ways, like his up-turned nose. Coming back to his stone after drink he would jump and skip around and crack the joke that was too fast for me to understand and almost to hear. But the others picked it up above the compressor chugging and would look up from their work with an alert, ready-to-smile look on their faces.
Angel talked with his eyes�his mouth just did not move and even seemed sad even when his eyes were alive and happy.
His childhood and youth�all his life till now, and he was over forty�must have been miserable. Once it came out that Luis knew about cats, about eating cats, and when he saw my disbelief, kept calling over to Angel to corroborate what he said. Angel would nod and say yes very clearly with his eyes. He and Luis must have been nearly starved at times. Before work, in spring, they came early and, after an old habit, combed the field outside the workshop for mushrooms. I would meet them coming in with a bagful each. At other times Luis reminisced on frog hunting and told me I should get over my prejudice against snails, snakes, and other pond food.
�Eugenio says he wouldn�t care for frogs,� Luis called over to Angel. After understanding, he gave the chef�s gesture for �excellent�.
He was full of scars. Part of an ear was gone. He had a scar with an unprofessional sewing job between his eyes and down his nose. A finger was missing. And as with an animal that shows up one day bleeding, there is no way to find out what fight there had been and where, because it doesn�t speak.
Like the others, Angel was alcoholic. But he was weaker than they, drank more, and suffered more after the bottle was empty. He lifted the bottle and let the brandy go straight down into his stomach. Then, after a drink, he got as happy as he ever was, he danced across the shop and threw off a joke. He attacked his stone and got done prodigies of work until the alcohol was burned up. Then he put down his hammer and started paying visits around the shop, offering everyone a smoke.
Angel was one of the men roving the shop when I saw it the first time. He was wearing a newspaper ship on his head. His impish appearance and quick little eye movements made me think the ship was a joke. It looked as though I had caught the men partying. They actually were partying, though not in the way I thought. They partied every day.
His Newspaper Cap
Angel�s ship was no good as a cap. It missed half his head. It was protection against nothing. How could even he take it seriously? He didn�t. He knew it was a parody of a cap. He liked precisely the way it stuck its tongue out at caps and at the need for caps. He was damneded if he was going to buy a cap only because it was necessary. Did they pay you to buy a cap? He would rather let the stone dust come down on him as it liked. Angel would not give his boss or the others the satisfaction of seeing him take his work so seriously�a question of pride. You think a cap would be in order? Here�s a cap, he said, folding the newspaper.
Just as someone caught in the rain gives up the fight to stay dry and simply lets the rain drench him��the hell with it!��so Angel and his friends had renounced solving any of the problems that bothered them every day. The whole lot were alcoholics. Each man made a dozen or more trips a day to the brandy bottle, which was a present from one of them to the others. You could say they did this by turns but it was not so strictly organized. No man wanted the others to believe he was stingy, and so pride made each man regularly bring along a bottle.
Yet some days there were two bottles on the flat stone shelf, and other days there were...none. One of the most remarkable traits of the poor�why not call it a virtue?�is their ability to go without. I know that an alcoholic must have his daily ration. But there were days when there was no bottle on that stone shelf, and no one got a drink. There was no complaining and no suffering you could see. I wondered whether I had been wrong about their dependency.
The same happened with cigarettes. You have to be generous. No one simply pulls a cigarette out of his pocket and lights up. You must first pass the pack around to everyone; and when it comes back to you it feels very loose. More than half the cigarettes any man smoked were gifts.
So just as with the brandy there were days when only one man or none took the trouble to pick up cigarettes on his way to work. They were days without smoking, and the men got through them without a whimper. Well, maybe a joke. There was deep instant resignation and disdain even for themselves in these men, not just long familiarity with want. They never complained. They either protested (a bark and a growl) or kept their mouths very tightly closed.
Luis
Luis was the strange case of a man who looked like a leader but was not one. Everyone who came to the shop for the first time walked straight to him. They thought he was the boss. Yet he knew no more than the rest, was duller than several of them, and had nothing but ordinary power over others. There was a moment while talking to him the first time when you realized he was not your man, that you were mistaken. Then you turned and looked around the shop again for a sign of authority in someone else.
I saw this happen dozens of times. Sculptors, other customers, even the man with the light-bill, hesitated for a moment after coming through the gate to understand the workshop, which was nearly unintelligible. Then they would walk right past Jacinto and Angel even though they had put down their hammers and showed their disposition to help.
They walked up to Luis and spoke their business. Luis listened with a frown that anyone would take for discretion and judgment. But then he spoke and let them see not understanding but confusion and a kind of withdrawal. If you were watching them then you saw them suddenly look at him, look into his eyes, with an expression of doubt and defensiveness. Sometimes they used a different voice�a louder voice�and asked, �Pero, �Vd. no es el encargado?� �Aren�t you in charge here?�
�I thought you were the foreman when I came here the first time,� I told Luis.
�You and everybody,� he said, looking very wise. �Except the boss. I get exactly the same pay as everybody else.�
�It�s true,� said Angel in one of his rare interventions. �It�s the same everywhere. In the Valle de los Ca�dos they had him over twenty-five of us.�
�But there they paid you more, didn�t they?� I asked Luis.
He huffed. �They paid me with a kick in the ass. But somebody ought to tell Fernando a foreman gets more.�
Unwilling Leader
This looking like a leader had had its effect on him. He was forced into leading though like the rest he wanted to follow. Some men obeyed him on the strength of that look alone and, like other superiors Luis had had during his life, Fernando relied on him to see that the work got done right�that the others did their job. He explained to Luis the projects as a whole and the task of each of the others. It became impossible for Luis to mind his own business. Looking up from his own work he would see Pepe thoughtlessly chipping away too much stone, or Angel�s block listing oddly.
His knowledge of the plan as a whole made him responsible for seeing that it was carried out in all its parts. This responsibility, which Luis was not up to, made him irritable and deepened the frown on his face, which had caused the misunderstanding in the first place. But under the frown his little blue eyes were confused and shy.
The men got used to consulting him when Fernando was absent. They thought of him as second-in-command. Having an officer in the shop was comforting. At the least trouble they put down their hammer, disengaged their mind, and called him over. Man doesn�t really want to be Man. Being his own governor is too hard.
Fernando explained to each man no more than his job. They often did not understand what would become of their block, why it should have the shape that they were giving it. Only Luis got a more comprehensive explanation; he alone was allowed to see the Big Picture�a privilege he did not want any more than the others did. These global explanations took from Luis his freedom. The others, happy in their little assignments (shaving off to this line, chipping down to this point) could sing and daydream. It was left to Luis to watch their work and worry: to rush over to Pepe when he saw him pounding on the T-square; to Nicanor when he noticed him whipping up some glue; to Angel when he saw he had reached a delicate phase of the work and was reckless after a swig of brandy.
Pepe
Pepe was Sancho Panza�that brilliant shirker, the flatterer, the whiner, earth-wise. Like Sancho he was also good-humored. This made him liked in spite of all his considerable defects. He didn�t mind being the butt of jokes. He laughed at himself along with the rest.
His great enemies were discipline, seriousness, anger. These he constantly tried to undermine. Between horrible-to-hear blasphemies after someone had hurt his hand or broken a block Pepe fit in a little remark like, �Oh that smarts, doggone it!� (For some reason his language was free of profanity. He was one of those people who use substitutes for all the bad words), wincing and chuckling with a kind of paternal or avuncular sympathy, as though the incident were not taking place at that moment but were rather being recalled over a beer. In this way with his humor he called the man back to the healthier world of frivolity.
When he saw you in bad humor from heat or cold he would shout over, �What, is it hot enough for you?� When you looked up through the sweat you saw Pepe chuckling with raised eyebrows and a wag of his head.
No one took him seriously. He would make terrible mistakes. �Look what happened to me,� he would say with mock pity, showing a broken piece of casing.
In Spain there is great understanding for error, for weakness, even for crime. Spaniards smile on them as adults smile on the antics of children. When anything goes wrong a thousand shouts of censure and indignation go up. They work themselves up to a pitch with gestures and rhetoric. But nothing genuinely surprises. Too much goes wrong too often and for the same well-known reasons. Some workman somewhere who sees that through glaring carelessness he has destroyed the piece he is responsible for, might feel ashamed of himself. Pepe, to whom this happened frequently, would call Luis and whine, �Mira, Luis, que me he colado,� in the tone of self-pity a beggar uses.
Once or twice when his guard was down Pepe let show signs of real intelligence. For a long time I wondered whether it was all an act; whether he played the clown and effaced his own personality as an extreme resort of laziness. I am still not sure. For a grown man there was too little initiative in him to be believable. He was like those men nearing retirement who go slowly and good-naturedly through the workday as they have for years: they keep a detached cheerfulness because they are only playing at duty. They will soon be free and they don�t give a damn anymore.
